Hacked

by Ray Daniel

  Across the room E was being yanked to her feet by the cop, wrists handcuffed behind her. CapnMerica videorecorded the arrest. Dorothy’s aunt Ruby sat in her wheelchair, her face in her hands. Dorothy knelt beside her, rubbing her back.

  Ruby looked up at me.

  Mel and Jael helped me to my feet. I knelt next to Dorothy.

  “I’m sorry I shot you,” Ruby said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I was trying to shoot that girl.”

  Mel said to me, “The Taser electrodes hit you both.”

  “Thank you,” I said to Ruby. “You saved my life. I’m pretty certain E was going to choke me to death.”

  “Far Li says you attacked her,” Mel said. “She’s claiming self-defense.”

  “The trolls will love that,” I said. “It’s her word against ours.”

  “Not so much,” Dorothy said. She pointed at the X-Men Cyclops, standing on her mantel looking across the room. “He was watching.”

  “So there’s video evidence,” I said. “How long was I out?”

  “Only a couple of minutes,” said Mel. “We were on the steps with the cop when we heard you get tased.”

  “So Dorothy doesn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Far Li killed Russell before she came here.”

  “Who is she?” Dorothy asked.

  “She’s Shu Li’s sister.”

  Dorothy looked at the ground. “Oh.”

  Ruby asked, “Who is Shu Li?”

  I told her how Shu Li had committed suicide, and how Far Li had wanted revenge.

  “But why would she come here?” Ruby asked me. “Dorothy wouldn’t bully anyone.”

  How to answer that. Do I tell her about the incoherent rage? The trolling? The bullying? The way the Internet had turned into a pipeline of raw emotional sewage? The ridiculous alliances, the death threats? Do I enlighten a woman who thinks of the Internet as nothing but a way to get e-mail, buy a book, or read a newspaper?

  Should Aunt Ruby know that Dorothy travels the web as NotAGirl, and while she didn’t do the bullying herself, she hung out with guys who did? Would any of this help her make sense of a world where a crazy woman would try to cut off her niece’s head?

  “Mistaken identity,” I told her.

  Dorothy hugged me and whispered in my ear, “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

  I hugged her back with one arm, the other dead by my side.

  I turned to Mel and Jael. “Can I have drugs now?”

  Seventy-Two

  I stared into my computer screen, working a hoe made of graphical blocks into soil made of graphical blocks. In front of me lay a green cube representing a melon. I whacked at the melon with a pixelated ax, and it broke into melon slices.

  “Have you harvested the melons?” Maria asked.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  We sat in Maria’s room playing Minecraft.

  Catherine, Adriana, and I had gone through a surprisingly rapid rapprochement. I had sat at the kitchen table and had said, “I’m sorry.”

  Catherine said, “Sorry for what?”

  “I’m sorry I brought the whole thing down on us. On you. I’m sorry for not listening.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Catherine said.

  We hugged, and that had been that. Families are funny like that. Small hurts can fester forever, while the big hurts, the huge errors, can sometimes be fixed with a simple apology.

  Restarting the grief counseling had helped. Maria had resisted at first, but soon looked forward to the visits with her counselor. We all had gone with her at different times and even together. While the

  picture of Sal and Sophia still graced the wall in Adriana’s house, it seemed that we could look at it with fondness now rather than with pain.

  Maria had gone through a short Facebook withdrawal. She had pouted and whined, complained about the unfairness of it all, and then, suddenly, stopped. Instead she had asked me about Minecraft. I’d bought the app for her iPad, and soon Facebook was long forgotten, replaced by the need to gather cubicle resources, build a farmhouse, and eventually create a village with her friends. Being a cool, technologically savvy pseudo dad, I had set up a private server in which Maria and her friends built their world, a safe harbor from the ravings of the Internet.

  Laughter erupted from the kitchen.

  “I think they’re watching it again,” Maria said.

  “They’re like children, I swear,” I said.

  “You should go see.”

  I left the laptop on the bed. “Leave me some melons to whack.”

  “I will. I’m getting us some pigs.”

  “Good.”

  “Also I’m building a mob farm.”

  “I don’t want to know,” I said.

  Once in the kitchen, the refrigerator caught my attention. I opened it, pulled out a Harpoon IPA, took a long drink. Walked over to Catherine and Adriana huddled in front of a laptop. When they saw me, they covered their mouths and giggled.

  “Are you guys watching it again?” I asked.

  “It’s just so funny,” Catherine said.

  Adriana looked serious. “Not funny per se. I mean, you almost got killed.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But unexpected, to be sure. Plus people have added background music.”

  “Really.”

  There it was on the screen: the viral YouTube video Tucker Pwned by a Little Girl, Saved by Old Lady #TuckerGate.

  “Yeah,” I said, “a little girl with a razor-sharp wakizashi sword.”

  “Don’t forget the Brazilian jiujitsu training,” Adriana said.

  “I want Maria to learn Brazilian jiujitsu,” Catherine said. “I may learn it myself.”

  On the screen, E tried to kill me with the sword, swinging at me with a martial-arts grace and beauty that had been difficult to appreciate while fending her off with a baseball bat.

  They had modified the original video, which had no sound. This version ran at a slightly faster speed while Benny Hill music played in the background. Catherine hummed along with the music.

  In the video, Far Li’s sword got stuck in my bat and I wrenched it out of her hand. I lunged for her, pushed her to the ground, grabbed at her hands. Far Li grabbed my wrist, wrapped her arm around mine, and wrenched my shoulder out of its socket.

  My shoulder twinged. Benny Hill’s kazoo played on.

  E pressed her advantage, climbing on my back, wrapping her arms around my neck, and cutting off the blood to my brain. We both looked off camera in surprise. Ruby appeared, fired Taser wires into both of us. Then it was all over but for the twitching.

  The video had extinguished the fire that was #TuckerGate. It clearly showed that Far Li had the sword and the skills to be cutting off heads, and NotAGirl had made sure that everyone knew the motive. The apparently comical video of me getting my shoulder destroyed by a little girl had sealed the deal.

  There was no way this inept pansy Tucker could ever have been a killer.

  “I’m going to go help Maria,” I said and turned to leave.

  “You’ve already helped Maria,” said Adriana. “You’re the best dad she could have.”

  A burning started in my nose, threatened to spill out into my eyes.

  “I do my best,” I said, draining my beer. “Now I have to go harvest melons.”

  Catherine stood and hugged me. Adriana joined us and gave me a peck on the cheek.

  “To the melons!” I said, sniffling.

  I left the kitchen and walked back into Maria’s room, where she was pointing into her iPad screen and laughing. “It worked!”

  “What worked?”

  “I made a mob farm.”

  “What’s a mob farm?”

  “It was on a Mi
necraft hints page.”

  “What does it do?”

  “You know how angry mobs pop up in dark places?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, I built this dark room like thirty feet above the ground with some flowing water and a trapdoor. The mobs pop up in the room, get caught in the water, fall, and die. See?”

  Sure enough, blocky green people were falling out of Maria’s contraption onto the ground below. As they shattered, they left treasures such as arrows, pumpkins, and swords. Maria was picking up the treasures, harvesting a mob.

  I couldn’t think of a better use for the Internet.

  the end

  © Lynn Wayne

  About the Author

  Ray Daniel is the award-winning author of Boston-based crime fiction. His short story “Give Me a Dollar” won a 2014 Derringer Award for short fiction, and “Driving Miss Rachel” was chosen as a 2013 distinguished short story by Otto Penzler, editor of The Best American Mystery Stories 2013.

  Daniel’s work has been published in the Level Best Books anthologies Thin Ice, Blood Moon, and Stone Cold. Hacked is the fourth Tucker mystery, following Corrupted Memory, Terminated, and Child Not Found.

  For more information, visit him online at raydanielmystery.com and follow him on Twitter: @raydanielmystry, and Tucker’s bot: @TuckerInBoston.