Spyware

by V. B. Larson

  Spyware

  V. B. Larson

  V. B. Larson

  Spyware

  Wednesday Afternoon, April 12th

  … 100 Hours and Counting…

  The gray van rolled up to the school crosswalk. Justin, who was just three days shy of his seventh birthday, didn’t look at it. He didn’t have to because he knew it was there. He had been watching it for a couple of days now. He was hoping the stranger inside wouldn’t offer him any candy or anything, because he would have to say no, and he didn’t want the stranger to get mad.

  It was a warm spring afternoon in the college town of Davis, California. The hot, dusty days of summer were just around the corner. The sun burned in the blue sky, splattering white glare over the cars in the teachers’ parking lot of Birchlane Elementary School. As Justin left the school grounds, the sidewalks sprouted guardian ash trees that reminded him of marching soldiers. A breeze up from the Sacramento Delta softly pushed and pulled at the trees. Green leaves fluttered and insects buzzed. Justin reached out and ran one finger over the rough bark of each of the trees as he passed them.

  He watched an orange-yellow bus pull out of the parking lot and rev up its smoky diesel engine. The kids inside all seemed to be yelling at once, their noise rising and falling with its own rhythm, completely apart from that of the engine. Justin wished he lived far enough away to take the bus home instead of walking. If he had been on the bus now like those other kids, he wouldn’t have to worry about the gray van.

  He knew the van was probably no big deal. There were lots of other kids around, and the gray van was probably here every day to pick up some other kid. Despite this, down deep he felt that the van was watching him. He knew that none of the grown-ups would listen to him, because he had told too many fibs. He felt a pang of regret for having gone too far with his stories the past, like the ones about the alligator at school. After that, he was sure they wouldn’t buy anything he said. He had sworn off telling fibs now, and the van sounded too much like a fib. So he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

  Justin reached the corner when something big rumbled up behind him. The brakes squealed, and the sound made the back of his neck feel hot and prickly. He couldn’t resist twisting around to take a look.

  There was the gray van. It was one of the old, fat-looking ones with hardly any windows on the sides. He couldn’t see much of the driver-just his arm poked out into the sunlight from the dark depths of the cab. There were a lot of thick, ropy veins on the arm, and a silver ring on the thumb.

  Then Justin was falling. For a panicky moment, he thought the gray van had gotten him somehow, maybe zapped him like the Super Smash-Brothers guys did on his Nintendo all the time. He pitched over and fell sprawling. His lunch box with the square yellow sponge character on it sprang open and sent a plastic baggie containing a half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie skittering across the sidewalk. He realized with hot embarrassment that he had not been looking where he was going and had tripped over his own feet. He scrambled up and looked back, breathing through his open mouth.

  He half-expected to find the van had magically vanished, but it hadn’t. Instead it was closer. He watched with bulging eyes as it hopped the curb with a groaning noise of old, protesting shocks. It paused there-its big engine chugging-as if it wanted to roll forward and crush him while he was down and helpless.

  The driver turned his thumb up. The silver ring glinted in the sunlight. “Good one, klutz,” the driver said with a gravelly chuckle. Then the front tires angled away from him and the van nosed back down into the street where it belonged, like the shark in Jaws reluctantly giving up on the men in the boat. Justin hadn’t liked that movie. His dad had let him watch it, calling it a “classic”, until his mom had chased him to bed. But not even Jaws hadn’t scared him as much as the van did. He watched as the van executed a sloppy U-turn, nudging up on the opposite curb as it labored in the narrow confines of the street.

  Justin grabbed up his lunch box and ran. He didn’t stop until he had reached home. The half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie in the plastic baggie lay behind, forgotten.

  … 88 Hours and Counting…

  Computer networks and those who maintain them rarely sleep. The world’s largest network, the Internet, has many thousands of hubs, and many thousands of sleepless operators attend them. In the early morning hours of Thursday, two such people still worked on the main campus server for U. C. Davis.

  “Who’s eating eleven gigs of my bandwidth?” demanded Brenda Hastings, the sysop. “It’s three fucking A.M.! We need to shut down the internet link for maintenance.”

  Dr. Raymond Vance smiled to himself, his fingers clittering rapidly over the keyboard. Brenda always spoke to him (and everyone else) in a very informal fashion. People often assumed that she was his boss, not the other way around. He never made a big deal out of her cursing and her loud “suggestions” that often sounded like orders. That was just… Brenda.

  A bluish light bathed his face, flashing in time with the screen. He used a net-sniffer utility to learn who the user was, although he already had a pretty good idea. “Just a sec,” he said.

  Brenda pointed toward her monitor accusingly. “Twelve! They just cranked it up! Twelve gigs! Who’s sucking up all of my resources?”

  The answer swam into being on Ray’s screen. “It’s Nog,” he said simply. “He’s probably just surfing.”

  “Of course-surfing with twelve sessions at once. He’s probably running full audio on all of them and mixing it into his headphones too,” muttered Brenda, suddenly deflated. She flopped her bulky body back into her chair, which creaked in protest. She rubbed her forehead and made a wry face. “I’m sorry, Ray. I shouldn’t be yelling. Well, I suppose we could hold off on maintenance until four. Send him a warning note,” she told Ray with a sigh. She sucked in a breath and paused a moment. “Make it a polite note,” she added.

  Ray nodded and smiled discreetly at his screen. His keyboard clicked and rattled as he e-mailed the note. No one wanted to screw with Nog unnecessarily. Not even Brenda, famous ass-chewer that she was. Nog was a self-made multi-millionaire that was heavily connected to the college and donated generously for research projects. Sure, he was a nerd and still in his twenties, but that didn’t mean anything. He didn’t talk much, but his money spoke volumes.

  Ray’s smile faded as he recalled that he had “screwed with” Nog just last year. But he had deemed it necessary. Nog had taken his AI (Artificial Intelligence) class in the spring term and had never turned in his final project. Despite his acing the tests, Ray had seen fit to give him a B for the class.

  Nog had been quietly furious with him ever since. To Ray’s knowledge, he had never gotten a B before. Never.

  “Eighty-Seven percent is still a B,” Ray muttered to himself, “Money or not.”

  “Are you talking to the keyboard again, Ray?” chuckled Brenda. “Maybe you should go home. There’s not much more you can do tonight.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” sighed Ray, rubbing his eyes. “Lecturing tomorrow is going to be rough.”

  “Balls!” shouted Brenda suddenly.

  “I have to ask…” said Ray, smiling again. Brenda always made him smile.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I was just queuing up the overnight and noticed that the anti-virus sweep tested positive again. Second time this week that the server caught a bug.”

  “Nothing that the anti-virus program can’t handle, I hope.”

  “Nah. If it can detect it, it can clean it. I just hope it hasn’t ‘done it’s thing’ yet, whatever that might be.”

  “I’m off, then,” Ray said, standing and stretching. The swivel chair groaned tiredly and bounced against the back of his knees. On the way home he yawned at least six times before he managed to steer his Ford Explor
er into his driveway.

  … 84 Hours and Counting…

  6:30 A.M. glowed in electric blue on the clock radio. There was no buzzer, only sappy music and overly energetic deejays that laughed too much at their own weak jokes and hokey sound-effects. It was a family tradition to awaken to the most annoying morning show that could be found on the radio. The annoying ones kept you from going back to sleep.

  Sarah groaned beside Ray, rustling the covers. Ray cracked his eyes open, feeling the mind-numbing shock of awakening long before the body is ready. Further shocking him, he found that his son was sitting on the bed beside him, quietly pushing a plastic bulldozer around, making white mounds of the ruffled sheets.

  On the radio, the music shifted into high-gear-something with a lot of guitars and what sounded almost like yodeling.

  Three hours, he thought. Three hours sleep and two technical lectures to give. He knew that he would burn today. His eyes would burn and his muscles would burn and the blood would seem to pound in his temples and cheeks and behind his eyes. He could fake it though. He was an old hand at that. He wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t function. He realized vaguely that he was exercising an old habit he had of calculating how much sleep he had gotten and then estimating what kind of shape he would be in for the day. He did it automatically, the way you might calculate how far you had to drive and how much gas you had left. Today, he didn’t have much gas, but it would have to do.

  The music had cut out now and the deejays were playing kazoos to intro the helicopter-based traffic report.

  “Turn it off,” croaked Sarah, her normally sweet voice sounding like the speech of the dead. No one moved toward the radio, but Justin, realizing that they were awake, lost all signs of mercy. He revved up his bulldozer, his lips buzzing for sound effects, and began ramming the orange plastic blade into Ray’s ribs.

  Ray was too stunned by lingering sleep to respond at first. Disappointed, Justin stepped up the assault a notch, rolling the treads up his father’s side and over his bare chest. A hair or two was pulled.

  “Is that your bulldozer?” asked Ray, his voice croaking with sleep.

  “Nope. It’s a gray van daddy, and it’s commin’ to get you.”

  “Whatever it is kid, knock it off,” rumbled Ray, closing his hand over his son’s small hand and the offending toy. He resisted the flash of anger that urged him to toss the toy across the room. He sighed and relaxed. It wasn’t Justin’s fault that his dad had had only three hours sleep.

  Justin giggled and struggled free. He went back to lightly nudging Ray’s ribs. “I’m gettin’ you Daddy,” he said.

  Ray knew what was expected. He grabbed his son in a bear hug and squeezed him, rubbing his knuckles in his blond hair and tickling him while he growled in his ear. “Outta here, kid.”

  “No!”

  “Go watch TV,” said Ray, feeling the instant pang of guilt all parents feel when they utter those words.

  “No!”

  Sarah mumbled something into her pillow. Ray slapped her rear lightly.

  “What did you say?”

  “Spongebob is on!” she said more intelligibly, raising her head from the pillow for a moment.

  “All right!” said Justin, and he was gone in a flash.

  Ray struggled out of bed. The bulldozer tumbled off the sheets and he found it again with his feet. “Ouch.”

  He smiled at the shapely form of his wife in the sheets. Her dark hair flowed over her pillow in disarray. He thought of climbing back into bed and curling up to her, but there wasn’t time. With a sigh, he touched the snooze button on top of the clock radio to silence it for ten precious minutes as he headed for the shower.

  Thursday had begun.

  Sarah filled a bowl of cereal for Justin and managed to get most of his clothes on. His shoes were still off, however. Shoes were never easy to get onto Justin, it was always a careful negotiation. That was Ray’s job, as he didn’t have to be to work until nine for his office hours, while Sarah had to be in by eight.

  “You’ve got to drop him off at school today,” said

  Sarah, passing him in the hall on her way to shower. “I don’t think he should be walking this early, it looks like rain.”

  “Yeah, daddy. I don’t want to walk,” chimed in Justin.

  “No problem,” mumbled Ray, forcing a smile. He was determined not to let his true state show through. Sarah had been asleep when he came in last night and didn’t know just how late he had stayed at the lab. In truth, the shower had made him feel almost human, but now he was fading again fast. He knew he needed to eat, that would keep him going for awhile.

  Sarah halted in the hallway and turned to look at him. She narrowed her eyes. “You sound like a toad in a well,” she remarked. “Are you sick?”

  He shook his head, grinning weakly.

  Her suspicions grew, and she came up to him, looking up at her tall husband critically. She laid a hand on his chest. “Just how late were you out last night?”

  Ray shrugged, feeling like he’d been caught at something. “Uh, maybe midnight or so.”

  “Or so? Maybe one-or two?”

  Ray shrugged again, but made no denial.

  “Hmm…” said Sarah, frowning now. “You don’t need to kill yourself to run that lab, you know, Ray. They only give you twenty percent release time for it and you spend eighty percent of your time there.”

  “We had a problem. There was some weird activity on the net. We couldn’t shut down for maintenance,” said Ray. He kissed her on the top of the head and escaped to the refrigerator, where he got out the milk and poured himself some cereal in a paper bowl.

  “You know,” said Sarah, following him. “If Brenda was more attractive, I’d be wondering about you two.”

  “Yup,” said Ray around his spoon. “You know me, I’m a chubby-chaser.”

  “Chubby-chaser! Ha!” shouted Justin, looking up from his half-eaten, half-spilled breakfast. Then the commercial ended and the cartoon pulled his attention back like a magnet.

  “What kind of weird activity?” asked Sarah.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting ready, Babe?”

  Sarah frowned and crossed her arms.

  Inwardly, Ray groaned. When Sarah felt protective, she turned into a detective. “It was Nog. He was eating up twelve gigabits at once and FTPing all over the place.”

  “ Twelve gigabits? You mean the Nog?”

  “Yup, the very one that followed you around after night-classes in college and sent you all that e-mail.”

  “Yuck,” said Sarah. “Does he still have a forked-tongue?”

  “I imagine so. Old snake-man, they used to call him.”

  “I never knew how that happened to him.”

  “No?” asked Ray, smiling. “It’s his braces. He worries at them with his tongue while he’s coding, sort of a nervous habit. After getting the tip cut a thousand times, he’s developed that V-shaped wedge of missing flesh. You know, I don’t think he’s even had those braces looked at for years. They should have been removed ages ago.”

  “Gross!” shouted Justin. Sarah made a face and shuddered. Walking fast, she headed down the hall to the bathroom. “Well, I don’t think you need to stay so late, not even for Brenda, and certainly not for Nog.”

  Ray smiled blearily into his paper bowl, quickly tipping it up to drink the remainder of the milk while his wife was out of sight. For some reason it upset her when he did that. He looked over and noticed that Justin was doing the same thing for the same reasons. They grinned at each other.

  Then he glanced at his watch. “Oh shit!” he whispered.

  “Daddy said a bad word! ” shouted Justin.

  They were all going to be late.

  … 83 Hours and Counting…

  John Nogatakei, known to most people as Nog, or The Nog, sat in the dark den of his apartment. The majority of the light in the apartment came from the combined screens of his four computers, all of which were running, even the notebook on his lap
. The room glowed from many soft sources of light. Odd shadows shimmered on the walls when Nog or one of his screens shifted. Only one sliver of clear white light could be found in the apartment, a sliver which filtered through the cracked-open refrigerator in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. Nog had been in such a hurry to get back to his computers the last time he had taken a brief break he had left the door hanging open. The fridge hummed quietly to itself, attempting in vain to cool the entire apartment.

  Nog didn’t like natural light. His pale skin was clear evidence of this. During the day, when Nog slept, offensive sunlight was kept at bay by layers of aluminum foil and duct tape, which covered every window, even the sliding glass doors.

  All activity in the apartment centered around the living room, which had evolved into a combination of office and bedroom. Shelves climbed every wall to the ceiling, each tier overflowing with software boxes, video disks, manuals and magazines. The forgotten bedrooms at the back of the apartment were used as further storage. The kitchen, besides the ajar fridge, contained only a microwave, paper plates and cups and plastic utensils. If food couldn’t be microwaved on a paper plate, Nog didn’t eat it.

  Unexpectedly, the largest of the monitors came to life. It spread over an entire wall and was paper-thin. The screen flickered wildly for a moment and somewhere a speaker chimed. The big screen paused, and then the notebook on his lap began to flicker. Someone was trying to get in touch with him using a chat utility over the net. Nog worked his tongue around in his mouth. Talking to unknown strangers, even over the net, made him nervous. He didn’t open a communications path right away, instead he got the userid of the person calling and checked it out. It was from a student account. Nog frowned and worried his tongue against his teeth. Why would a student contact him? Why tonight, of all nights?

  He checked further. Something flashed by on the screen that caught his eye. He scrolled it back up and learned that the student had not logged in for months, in fact, the account had never apparently been used before now. Nog wriggled his tongue. There was a familiar twinge of pain and a tiny amount of blood oozed into his mouth. It tasted salty.