by Ryan Schow
I almost ask who August is before normal me says, “I’m staying.”
“So am I,” skinny me retorts.
I raise my hand, make the time-honored signal for time-out, then say, “So both of you are staying here? In this timeline?”
They look at each other with eyes enough to say this is the difficult continuation of a previous argument, then nod. Like it kills them both.
“So there will be three of us, then?” I ask.
“Apparently.”
We all kind of sit in silence. Is it crazy that I’m thinking we’re now the non-triplets? I almost want to laugh. But then the calmer more nurturing version of me gets up and puts on some water for tea. She’s been crawling my mind. All I’ve been able to think about is Chamomile tea with honey and she’s getting it for me.
“We need names,” I say. “To separate us.”
“We already have names,” skinny me replies, almost in a shitty way.
There’s a lot of silence and tea sipping. There’s a lot of deep thought. Finally the skinny version of me who supposedly endured a much longer run in the future apocalypse, she looks at the other version of me and says, “You introduced yourself to Sebastian as Elizabeth Vanderbilt, so I’ll take that.”
The other me takes a sip of her tea, her hostility beyond obvious, then she says, “Why do you get to have him?”
“I was about to when you dropped like a fire-blackened hot pepper right into our love scene, the one we were almost acting out. I mean seriously, you already got to have him. And so did she. The way I see it, the two of you had your most recent takes with him, so now it’s my turn.”
“Well then I should be Savannah if I go back home,” I say. “What I guess I’m saying is, I want to go home.”
“So I’ll be Raven then, I guess,” the final, unnamed version of me says.
“You’ll be Raven Swann?” the Elizabeth Vanderbilt version of me asks. “Like two animals? A crow and a duck?”
The sigh she makes is one of extreme frustration. “Fine, I’ll be Raven Crawford,” she says, solemn, unwilling to crack even a smile. “I’ll take mom’s maiden name.”
We all look at each other and no one seems to object.
So it’s settled.
The next day, Elizabeth takes a taxi to the airport where she’ll catch a flight to LAX, meet back up with Sebastian, finally get the D she’s been so desperate for, then live happily ever after. Well, maybe not happily ever after. There’s a good chance they’ll at least have the next seven years, and only if he’s not too freaked out by our supernatural situation to keep her.
Me and Raven head out for dinner, (me taking a moment’s delight in all the attention we’re getting as “twins”) then head back to our Manhattan home, veg out in front of the TV, start and finish off an amazing Cabernet Sauvignon then turn in for the night.
We share the bed.
While we’re laying there, me with another version of me in some surreal mind bender that hits levels I’ve never even thought to imagine before, I say, “I miss Brayden,” and she says, “I do, too. And our friends. Especially Georgia.”
“You should go see her,” I say. It’s a fantasy, I’ll admit. Last time we saw her, it was not the same—we wiped her brain of any memories of us.
Of her memories of me.
“After telling Sebastian the truth about us, after he got over the initial shock of it, he still wants to be with us. Which to me is unthinkable, but whatever. And Elizabeth, she wouldn’t stop talking about how she hasn’t been laid since she left for the future.”
“What a bitch,” I say, yawning.
I feel Raven perking up into a grin, “I know, right?!”
We both fall into a giggle-fit, and I savor this odd, enchanting moment. She says, “This is fun, being with you. Better than dealing with her. Elizabeth, I mean.”
“She rode the apocalypse like a barely healing corpse,” I tell her. “So I understand her being a little extra…weird, or whatever.”
Yeah, I crawled their brains shifting through the memories this version of me never had. They knew it, but they didn’t seem to care.
“I guess,” she says.
I’m looking out the window at the falling snow, thinking how peaceful things feel now that I’m not in a German/Russian war zone. When I try to shut my eyes, as I drift off, my head is a thousand moths in flight, then it’s one hundred percent war.
I jolt awake, sweating, panting.
Deep down, I hear him. No I feel him. The Operator. He’s this blight on my soul, the darkness squelching the light. As I’m laying here, I’m thinking, shouldn’t he not be here? I mean, if he hunted Raven from the future, but that version of Raven was never born, then why is he here? Why do I still have his soul locked down inside me.
Because I do what Raven does. It’s the only explanation.
You can change the body…
“I think I’m going to see Netty, and Sensei,” Raven says, startling me out of my introspection. “Both of them need us, whether they want to admit it or not.”
“She’d like that,” I hear myself say. “Sensei? Maybe not so much.”
“You should go back home, Savannah. Find Brayden. Maybe finish school.”
Rolling over, looking at her, I ask, “What’s the point? Of school, I mean?”
Lying on her back in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling, she doesn’t answer. A few minutes later, her breathing changes, grows heavier. Then I hear the soft snoring next to me and realize she’s back to sleep.
The more I think about it, the more her suggestion makes sense. I miss my father, and I miss what Orianna and I are creating as mother and daughter.
Then next day we call a cab and head to the airport where we catch a direct flight to San Francisco. After we land, we hug each other on the curb in front of a line of taxis and promise to exchange phone numbers. I’m the one keeping the phone. It makes most sense.
Looking at her, at future me, I heave a heavy sigh, feel the weight of my heart.
“I’m going to miss you,” I say.
“Me, too,” she says, taking my hand in a loving squeeze.
For whatever reason, I’ve come to see these other versions of myself as my sisters, even though they are each a different me working on a different timeline that managed to intersect here. We all kind of like it. Makes us not feel so alone. Plus, we’re stronger as three than we are as one and that’s a reassurance we’ve never really had.
She leans in and kisses my cheek, then hops into a cab and waves good-bye. I grab my own cab and ask the cabbie, “How do you feel about going to Palo Alto?”
The driver, a nice Iranian man with kind eyes and a good air about him says, “For you, my dear, we can go anywhere you like.”
Smiling, the burden on my heart waning a bit, I say, “Looks like I picked the right cab.”
“You picked the right man,” he says.
And he’s right.
The first thing I’m going to do in the morning is call Brayden. Not calling him is just silly. I’m certain I want to be with him. I told the Reptilian as much while I sat on the beach in Florida. Deep down, I know I love him and he loves me. I also know we’re both best together, but that apart we’re sort of a wet mess. At first blush I’d say more him than me, but my God, I’d be wrong!
If there’s anyone up to her tits in problems, it’s me.
I give the driver my address; he eases the cab out into traffic. After a short ride out of the city and into Palo Alto, we’re slowing at the curb in front of my house and I’m anxious to breeze through the front door and join my family. I don’t have my house keys, but there’s no such thing as locked doors in my world. I unlock the door with my mind and stroll inside. The smell of a home cooked meal hits me first, but it’s the sounds of a family talking around the dinner table that makes me smile.
My family, I think to myself.
My heart is officially crashing around in my chest. Which is weird. I left for Huntingto
n Beach a little over a month ago in this timeline. But damn, so much has happened since then! My kill count is up, I’ve lost another person important to me—Daria, future Netty’s granddaughter—I’ve learned there are now three of me, I’ve both time traveled and I realized I have a gorgeous condo in Manhattan. So yeah, I’m a bit nervous. Oh yeah, and I was killed a few times, so there’s that.
The truth is, how long I’ve been gone doesn’t really matter; it’s how much flat out insanity I’ve packed into the last few weeks that has my head feeling like a hundred mice stuffed in a cage meant for ten. I feel like a different person.
No, I am a different person.
DeepBallin’
1
DeepBallin’, those clowns. Four of them. Brayden back-traced the despised hacker group to a rental house in an upscale Vegas neighborhood using GPS coordinates off a hacked phone the group thought was already ghosted.
It wasn’t. Not from him.
That’s how Brayden eventually tracked them down. That’s how he lifted the veil off at least one of those four douchey-McDouchebags.
With a stuffy, broken nose swollen almost shut and stitches in his face that itched (he was sure the one above his eyebrow was infected), he dreamt of ending these four buttholes and gaining his freedom in one fell swoop.
He was tired of taking Ibuprofen. Tired of mixing it with sleeping pills that didn’t work. Tired of laying in bed with his eyes open and his body pleading for rest it wouldn’t get.
Sabrina slept next to him most nights. She slept about as poorly as he did. It wasn’t just the hackers keeping him up. He thought about Aniela, and how she couldn’t seem to grasp his explanations about Sabrina. Why she needed to stay in his room. What had happened to her.
“Human sacrifice?” she’d said over the phone. “Are you serious right now?”
“I’m not sure I believe it myself,” he’d whispered into the phone, “but she’s got some frightening details.”
“It says on the news she lost her mind, that she checked herself into rehab.”
“They’ve been trying to find her.”
“Who’s been trying to find her, Brayden?”
“Garrison Rich. Her stupid boyfriend, Lennox. A bunch of other names and numbers I don’t recognize. The texts changed when the media put out that fake story about rehab. It’s all consolation texts now.”
“Maybe you should, I don’t know, do something with her other than sleep in bed with her.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he’d said.
That was two days ago. They hadn’t ended their conversation poorly, but it wasn’t sunshine and daisies either. Then Becky called. The hot redheaded bartender. She called to tell him her daughter was talking to her again, that she was coming to Vegas to stay with her. Brayden was so happy for her he wanted to see her, but he couldn’t. There was no way he’d drag her into his messes, of which there were too many.
“What’s wrong with you?” Becky asked about three minutes into their conversation. He loved her voice. How he remembered it a few octaves lower from too much drinking, how it hummed along his skin. For a woman who had sex with guys half her age and snorted lines of coke of his…unmentionables…she was pretty damn happy to be a mom.
“I’m working with the FBI to stop a bunch of rogue hackers from taking down various FBI networks. The Director feels like if the field offices are that vulnerable, then the entire network could be compromised any day now.”
“Sounds stressful.”
“I found them, but they found me, too. Beat the ever-loving shit out of me in my bed a few nights back.”
“What?!”
“Broken nose, stitches above my eyebrow and on my cheek. I look like a deranged raccoon.”
“Wow. How are you doing other than that?”
“Have you read the news on that actress, Sabrina Baldridge?”
“Yeah…?”
“Well, she’s staying with me.”
“What?”
“She escaped an executive party in Henderson, but only barely. There was…allegedly…I guess, well damn…this is going to sound insane. God, I don’t even know how to begin.”
“Just spit it out,” she said, breathless with anticipation.
“They were all naked and getting ready to sacrifice an infant when she called me. I almost had to shoot the guards to get her out.”
After that it was a little bit of this and a little bit of that, then the promise to call her when it was all over, maybe stop by for coffee.
As he lay in bed, night after night with Sabrina thrashing around beside him, crying in her sleep, and whimpering with fright, Brayden thought about everything she’d survived, how he was ruining Aniela’s faith in him again, how Becky sounded super sexy on the phone and he wanted to see her, but he’d probably never see her again.
Then he thought of Raven.
There was a hole inside him so wide he was sure it would never close. Here he was, in Sin City, deviating from the moral life he wanted to live, caught up in all this mayhem. What an absolute shit-show! Around three A.M. the night before they were set to take down DeepBallin’, he took his cell phone downstairs and into the garage, and then he hammered it to death.
The way he found DeepBallin’ was the same way they found him. They locked down an IP address, got his name, found his cell phone, pinged it, then looked at his pictures and determined which one he was. After that it was easy.
How could he be so stupid? But he wasn’t stupid. There were apparently ways to back trace him in the deep web to the entry point, that place where he was logged into Tor with a blind IP address, and then he wasn’t. They found him in the Clearnet.
From there it was no problemo.
Titan wandered into the garage, rubbing the sleep in his eyes, boxers off kilter but thankfully on, and said, “Bro, it’s three in the morning. What the shit?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, chest heaving up and down, his breath coming fast from destroying his cell phone.
“So you thought destroying things would help?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, well are you done yet?”
“You on the couch?” Brayden asked. It was the only explanation.
“Yeah. This broad I’m with, she’s not bedroom worthy. She’s a six, but honestly, I’m kind of done with eights, nines and tens for a minute. I needed someone—”
“You don’t need to explain,” he said, holding up his hands like he was under arrest, “I’m done here.”
Titan turned, went back inside where there was a sort of cute chubby girl mostly curled into a fur lined throw blanket. Mostly. Titan laid down on the floor beside the couch, dropped his head onto his pillow, pulled a blanket on him from neck to ankles and went back to sleep.
Back upstairs.
Sabrina, Aniela, Becky, Raven—all of them were on his mind, all occupying the most precious of space. Sabrina had pulled the blankets on her side, but he didn’t care. He was now thinking about work. About DeepBallin’.
What a pack of troglodytes.
Three of these douchebags grew up together; the fourth was the step-brother of one of the more popular members. He closed his eyes, but sleep evaded him.
DeepBallin’ specialized in SQL injection, which is a form of attack on websites, small business networks and online retailers. The step-brother wrote a code that would crawl the web looking for vulnerable websites, then he found Google Dorking, which was a better program that used a search query called a “dork” to find websites that fit their potential vulnerability parameters. Based on a recovered internet history, Brayden found things got easier for them after that.
It’s pretty easy to hack a website that’s vulnerable, which is most PHP based websites. Think of a WordPress format and you’ve got a PHP based site. They’re not all vulnerable, though. You just have to run a test to see which ones are. You basically open up the website, navigate to one of its internal pages and put an apostrophe at the end of the URL; if it come
s back with an SQL error, then it’s vulnerable to SQL injection.
Easy peasy.
Something a space monkey could do.
After these buttholes hacked a bunch of sites using variations on standard SQL injection techniques, they moved into creating their own botnets, which is basically a network of malware-infected computers which can be remote-controlled by a specified command server.
DeepBallin’ jumped on the map there.
Beside him, Sabrina twitched, shook her head back and forth, started mewling with fear. He smoothed her hair off her head and she fell silent. He tried to focus on her breathing, the steady rhythm of it, hoped she might lull him to sleep, but he was wide awake.
Too nervous about what he had to do. What was coming next.
DeepBallin’.
They eventually used their botnets to turn a network of zombie computers into the launch mechanism for a host of very nasty distributed denial-of-service attacks, a.k.a. DDOS attacks. Harvesting passwords was cool at first, but then apparently that got boring, so they ghosted their way deeper inside entire networks, both private and corporate, and what they discovered only caused them to escalate their attacks, and the pedigree of their victims.
They hit their treasure trove in 2013 when they stole two hundred thousand dollars from a federal credit union based in Nevada. Although they were never caught, a guy like Brayden saw the breadcrumbs they left behind.
With some money in their pockets, they suddenly got pseudo-political, running DDOS hacks on websites hosted by mainstream media outlets, and slamming pro-Liberal activists and people they didn’t like on Facebook with massive amounts of malware. They got cocky. It’s when they went after fellow 4Chan members that the anonymous group of hackers and cyber-dissidents grabbed their torches, their stakes and their pitch-forks and called in a cyber assassin.
Enter Brayden…
2
From his own blind IP address in the Clearnet inside the FBI offices, Brayden basically copied DeepBallin’s recovered search history, their secured emails, their passwords and their computer files to his own files stored in the cloud. After that he constructed a psychological profile on each of the four members, tracking them through social media, both above and below the zero-elevation net. When he gathered all he could, he created a master file, then turned that file over to Agent Clark who analyzed it, put other eyes on it, then ran it up the judicial ladder looking to expedite the necessary search warrants.
