by Lisa Bunker
One of the candles had a bouncy-flame flicker going, making the walls pulse. Arli seemed to want a response, so Zen said, “Okay? I mean, thanks for telling me. For trusting me enough to tell me. But I guess I don’t have much to say.”
Arli nodded.
“Except, I guess, I’m sad you have to deal with that. Because you’re my friend.”
Arli nodded again, and then turned away and swiped at an eye-corner. Could that tough, edgy face crumple into tears? Zen couldn’t picture it. When vo faced her again, eyes dry, mouth firm. But still, the swipe.
“I mention it,” Arli went on, “because I just wanted to tell you. Because, yeah, you are my friend, too.” Zen nodded. “But I also mention it,” Arli went on, “because I thought of something.”
“What?”
“Sometimes for the panic attacks I take a pill. A serious pill, from a doctor. And it knocks me right out. I sleep without dreams and feel like I just blinked for a second and then it’s morning.”
“Okay.”
“So what I thought was, well . . . my brother, Lynx, you remember him? If there’s anyone I know who would actually do a thing like those website memes, it would be him.” Zen’s eyes went sharp. “I mean, he spends all this time on these message boards, and sometimes he leaves his door open when he goes to the bathroom or whatever, and I’ve seen images on his screen. Really gross stuff. Not just about Arab people or Muslims or whatever. Stuff about Jewish people and black and gay, too.”
Zen said, “So you think maybe he’s coming into your room when you’re knocked out, and using your computer to hack?”
“Maybe? It’s a laptop. He wouldn’t even have to stay. He could take it and bring it back later.”
“Hmm,” Zen said. “For that to be what happened, he’d have to know when you took your pills. Would he know that?”
Arli’s face had brightened some with the pleasure of speaking veir theory. Now it clouded again. “Well . . . to be honest, not usually, no.”
Zen’s face had gone intense. For the first time, she was really thinking about the possibility of someone besides Arli being the hacker. “There are other ways, though,” she said. “Tricks and tools. Maybe we should go and have a look at your machine.”
Looking at each other in the candle-wavery air, they both began to smile. Arli said, “You know, you’re like a cyber-detective. You’re like a young Sherlock Holmes of the Internet.”
Zen blushed.
Arli said, “Can I be your Watson?”
“My what?”
“Haven’t you read Sherlock Holmes? Doctor Watson. The chima detective’s faithful companion and helper. I totally want to be your Watson.”
Zen flapped her mouth for a moment and then managed to say, “Okay, sure. I would be honored.”
“Good.”
They both looked away. Zen fiddled with her hoodie strings. Her face felt hot. Something moving now inside her, some big shift. Here was a real friend. Someone she trusted. And carrying such a secret was so hard. Not just hard. Lonely. So lonely. It felt like maybe she was about to speak. Was she? She couldn’t tell. She drew a breath. Yes, it seemed she was.
“I have something I’d like to tell you too.”
FIFTY
CONCENTRATING ON THE two little soft knots between her fingers, rolling and squeezing them, Zen said, “Remember that time when you told me I needed to learn more about . . .” She stopped. “And just now, when I said I know, too . . .” This wasn’t coming out right. She glanced up.
Patient listening face. Open and kind.
Zen looked down again and said, “I’m going to start over. Because none of that stuff matters. And actually, it’s pretty simple. It’s very simple, when you come right out and say it. Which I’m totally avoiding doing. But, it’s time. So.” One last breathing pause. Then, a straight look, eye to eye, holding the gaze, and: “I’m trans.”
Arli blinked.
“My old life . . . it was bad before. But when my dad died, I got to move here, and the Aunties helped me, and I finally get to be who I am.”
Arli continued to stare back, unspeaking. Zen watched veir expression flicker. Wrinkled brow. Eyes widening, then looking up and away, maybe going along with brain remembering stuff. The start of nodding. Then, startling, a burst of goofy smile-laugh. And then suddenly Arli launched up out of veir beanbag chair and across the space between them, threw veir arms around Zen’s neck, squeezed, and said, “Omigod, I must have sounded so stupid to you when I . . . but, like you said, that doesn’t matter now. And I’m just so incredibly glad!”
Zen returned the hug uncertainly, patting with a hand, and surprised herself by sob-laughing. Her body, she realized, was shaking. She had been braced for . . . what? Rejection? Anger? Attack? Suddenly dropping dead because she had dared to tell her secret at last? It had felt that strong. Really. Arli rocked her back and forth a couple of times, then pulled away again. Veir face was red, veir eyes moist. They both laughed again.
Arli returned to veir beanbag, taking time to settle, getting composure back. When vo looked up again, veir face was calmer. “Thank you,” vo said.
“You’re welcome. Um, for what?”
“For telling me. For trusting me. Too.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And, I’m sorry. That time when I said I was going to send you 101 stuff. That must have seemed so . . .”
“It’s okay. Really. I get why you did.”
Breathing slowed. Candles flickered. The air was getting uncomfortably warm. Were nine candles enough to overheat a room? Felt like.
Arli put veir face down and said, “Um, I want to say something, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”
“Okay?”
“Because I’m not . . . I don’t care . . . I’m not a romantic or dating or whatever sort of person. At all, really, I don’t think. But.”
“But . . . what?”
“Well, I just wanted to say, I love you.”
Zen blushed and dropped her eyes.
“You are such a wonderful, amazing human, and I just really like being your friend. So, maybe better is, I friendlove you.”
Zen made herself look up. “Thank you,” she said. “I friendlove you too.” They grinned at each other, awkward but so warm. Zen said, “If you spell it L-U-V, there’re no repeats.”
Arli laughed with pure delight. “Friendluv! Yes! It’s perfect! I friendluv you!”
“Me too.”
How to get back to regular life and talk, after such feels? Arli found a way. “You know what? I really need to pee. Let’s go back to my house and do some detecting.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
FIFTY-ONE
IT WAS CLOSE to midnight by the time they got back to the Kedum house. In the backyard, Arli whispered, “My dad’s away on business, so my brother is the only one here.”
“Okay,” Zen said.
“And he generally stays up most of the night gaming, which the music confirms is what’s happening.” The manic thumping of heavy metal drums was not as loud as during Zen’s first visit, but still plainly audible.
“Okay.”
“Follow me.”
The living room was a bleak cave of gray-yellow murk. Arli led the way through to veir room, which turned out to be small and messy. It included an unmade bed, books and fan-art drawings scattered all over, various action figures, some ornately printed cloths thumbtacked to the ceiling, and, on what looked to be a desk left over from little-kid days, a laptop computer.
Before getting down to sleuthing they took turns slipping across the hall into the bathroom. During her crossing, Zen peered through the gloom down to Lynx’s door at the end of the hall. It was festooned with stickers mostly in black and silver. The drums banged relentlessly behind it. Nothing to see or guess from that closed portal.
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nbsp; In the room again, Zen asked with a touch of formality, “May I examine your computer?”
Arli looked puzzled. “Of course. That’s why we’re here.”
“I mean, dig into files and stuff. Anything private in there?”
“Oh. I see what you mean. No, it’s okay. Nothing I’d be embarrassed to have you see, except some bad fan fic.”
“We won’t need to go there,” Zen said, sitting down.
She had a routine with new machines: check out hardware and operating system, review running background processes and executable files in a few key lists and folders. It all looked completely normal on first scan, if out-of-date. “You’re going to need a new computer soon,” she said, her voice rather robotic. Already sinking into the Cyberlandium-spell. “If you want to keep playing all your favorite games.”
“I so wish,” said Arli. “Not likely, though, anytime soon.”
Zen had already moved on. First stop: Arli’s browser of choice. This might be super-simple. A quick check of browsing history could do it. But, no—the oldest entry was only a few days old. Zen said, “Do you ever clear your history?”
Arli said, “No. I don’t know how. Should I?”
“Maybe? From time to time? But that’s not the point. Your history has been cleared, so someone else has been using your machine.”
“So, like I said? My brother, sneaking in?”
“No, not necessarily. Doesn’t have to be him. And doesn’t mean whoever it was actually used the computer in person. Could be a RAT.”
“A rat?”
“R-A-T—remote access trojan. A program to control one machine from another one.”
“As in, I smell a rat? Or, you dirty rat?” Zen, jostled out of her trance, gave her friend an annoyed look. Vo was grinning a hard grin. “Should we put out some rat traps? Call the ratcatcher?”
“Could you please stop?”
“Well, excuse me.”
Already reentering trance, Zen said sternly, “I need you to be quiet now. I have to work.” Arli, abashed, subsided. Zen turned back to the machine and began a systematic deep search.
The minutes ticked by. The loudest sounds were the thudding of Lynx’s music and the clicking of keys and mouse. Arli fidgeted but stayed quiet. Then Zen said, “Ha. Got you now.”
“What?”
“What I thought. Remote access program. One of the more clever ones. Hard to find.” A note of pride in her voice.
“So, is it Lynx? Because, now that I think about it, if it is him, he’s framing me. That is so not cool.”
“The only way I can tell is by going the other way through the pipe and seeing where it leads.”
“And if it is him, would he know we were looking?”
“Probably not? I should be able to check without him noticing.”
“But he might.”
“Yeah, he might.”
Zen waited. Arli began beating a hand on a knee, frown deepening. At last vo said, “Do it. I need to know.”
More minutes of intent typing and clicking. Arli plucked a random rubber band from a bedside crate, lay back on the bed, and started softly shooting it toward the ceiling and catching it again.
At length Zen said, “I’m in.”
“And?”
“Well, what I can do now is, I can bring what’s on the other screen up on our screen. Maybe we could tell from that.”
Arli swung around so vo could see. “Do it.”
Zen clicked. The screen switched. Whoever it was was playing a game. It appeared to be set in a prison. “I know this game,” Zen said. “It’s on Lukematon.”
“What is it?”
“Prison planet game. You can play a prisoner plotting to escape with other prisoners, or you can play one of the guards. It’s really violent and bloody. Yuck.”
Arli had frozen. In a tight voice vo said, “It’s him.”
“It is? How can you tell?”
“Username. That’s his username.” Vo pointed. Under the side picture of a particularly hulking bruiser of an avatar, all distorted veiny muscles, it said, “EliteStormTrooper666.”
“Really?” said Zen.
“Really.”
“Jeezum.”
FIFTY-TWO
ZEN SAT BACK away from the machine. She tipped her head and quirked her mouth: So, what do you want to do about it?
Arli scrunched veir face and shook veir head: I don’t know.
“Turn him in?” Zen said out loud.
“Ehhh . . .” Arli said. “Not the best choice for me. It’s already seriously no fun in this house most of the time, what with my gender thing, and just general sibling stuff. Unless they’d, like, throw him in jail for five or six years, until I was old enough to leave home?”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
They pondered together. Zen asked, “Would talking to him directly be a good idea?”
“No.” Flat and final.
“Okay,” Zen said. She turned back to the computer and stared at it. She said, “What if he turned himself in?”
“Right,” Arli said. “Like that’s ever going to happen.”
“No, I can probably arrange it.” Not bragging. Just saying.
“You can?”
“Yes. You’re not the only one with a key to secret tunnels.” Arli looked puzzled and unconvinced. Zen said, “Wanna see?”
“Okay.”
Zen returned the display to their own computer. Click. Click click. Password one. Password two. Secret key. They were in. Second set of low murky mysterious passages of the evening. Arli scooched a little closer. “So cool . . .” vo breathed.
Zen typed a few more commands, and they found themselves in the virtual prison cell, this time as invisible admins, watching the guard played by Arli’s brother as he beat a prisoner. Zen did the finger-interlace-reverse-hand knuckle crack, looked at Arli, and said, “Okay, watch.”
In another moment, she had an empty dialog box open. “This guard is about to get a radio call,” Zen said. “From a commanding officer. I’m just going to say”—she leaned forward and typed—“‘Urgent. EliteStormTrooper666, report to the warden’s office immediately.’” She pressed Enter.
On the screen, the guard’s radio squawked. They watched the uniformed gorilla-man stop whaling on the prostrate body before him and put the radio to his ear. He listened. Then he let himself out of the cell and headed in the direction of the warden’s office. Invisibly, Zen and Arli followed.
The warden had a secretary. Finding her rhythm now, Zen slipped virtually inside him as Lynx entered the room. Time for face-to-face dialog.
Lynx’s avatar spoke. “The warden wanted to see me.”
“Yes,” Zen had the secretary say. “Please have a seat.”
Arli snickered. “You’re gonna make him wait?”
“Yes.”
They watched Lynx’s guard fidget in the too-small seat. Arli said, “What else can you do?”
“Pretty much anything, within the architecture of the game.”
“Like, could you, I don’t know . . . turn off the lights?”
“Sure.” Arli was doing expectant-face, and Zen wanted Lynx to wait a bit longer, so she brought up the controls for the room and turned off the light. She turned it back on. Lynx’s guard looked up at the fixture. Zen clicked several times with the mouse and the lights flicked off-on-off-on-off-on. Lynx’s guard jumped to his feet, and Arli laughed.
“Could you make something random appear in the room?”
“I could.”
“Like, say, a bunny?”
Zen knew that she was showing off, but what the heck. A bunny was trickier than the lights, but in another minute a rabbit borrowed from another world popped into being on the secretary’s desk. A
voice balloon appeared over Lynx’s guard’s head: “What the hell is going on?” Zen clicked again and another bunny joined the first. She clicked several more times, until the desk overflowed with bunnies. “I love it!” Arli crowed.
Lynx’s character looked plenty agitated now. Zen deleted the bunnies, then brought the dialog box back up and had the secretary say, “The warden will see you now.” Into the office they all trooped.
The warden was a fearsome-looking man, muscles just as absurdly over-rendered as Lynx’s, plus crew cut, scowl, and cigar. He wore a huge handgun on his hip. He stood up as Lynx came in.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Zen looked at Arli. “Last chance to not do this,” she said.
“Do it. Oh please please, do it.”
“Yes,” Zen typed. “EliteStormTrooper666, or should I say, Lynx Kedum, something troubling has come to my attention.” One more glance at Arli before pressing Enter. Arli nodded eagerly. Enter.
A long silence. Then, “How do you know my name?”
“I know all about you, Kedum.”
“Who the hell is this?”
“I know what you did.”
“Who the hell is this?? What are you talking about?”
“And even on this planet, we have standards of decency, Kedum.”
Lynx was apparently stunned into wordlessness.
“Putting those memes on the school website. What were you thinking, you scum?”
The avatar just swayed and stared.
Zen began to type another line. The door banged open. Not the virtual door. The real door. Arli shrieked and jerked back on the bed. Lynx’s music suddenly louder. Lynx himself standing in the doorway. He did a double take at Zen. Then he demanded, “Are you snowflakes spying on me?”
FIFTY-THREE
ZEN LUNGED TO close the Lukematon window, but it was too late. The warden’s office scene was clearly visible from where Arli’s brother stood. “What the hell is this?” Lynx said. “Some weird rabbit glitch, and then I see the RAT link is active, and . . . and who are you, anyway?” This last addressed to Zen. “Wait, I’ve seen you before. Yeah, the ride I gave, right?”
