Freya floated as they left the diner. She didn’t realize they were going to Hiidenkirnu until Lynn’s Mercedes pulled into the gated visitor lot. In a panic, Freya realized she’d brought the Starball right to the lab. What if all their equipment started flaking out like the whiteboards at Grayson?
“It’ll be okay,” Lynn said, noticing she was tense. “I’ll do all the talking. Freya wondered if she could leave the Starball in the car, but it seemed wrong to her. She was deeply averse to being separated from the orb. She took a deep breath and went inside, knowing all the while she was a fool.
They’d remodeled the lobby since the last time Freya was at Hiidenkirnu, and it smelled different than she remembered. Before, it had been like a hospital in here, the lingering scent of bleach, shoes squeaking against linoleum floors. Now, everything had been redone in cedar, stacked slate, and blue-green glass. There was a distant scent of varnish. It barely felt like a laboratory anymore.
Hiidenkirnu’s CTO waited for them in a conference room that was a triangle of blue-green glass jutting from the side of the Hiidenkirnu building. There was an impressive view of the rising hills dotted with evergreens.
Freya had expected to see the old systems administrator, a big fat man named Karl who was perpetually clad in Birkenstocks and a ratty Dimmu Borgir T-shirt. They’d remodeled their staff, too.
Oliver Karhu was a slight blond man with wire-framed glasses and a fashionable gray suit. He had an air of distraction, as if he badly needed a cigarette and only needed to get this interrogation out of the way first. His phone constantly buzzed with alerts, and he had to pause often to check on them. He’d apologized about the first interruption but, after that, it was just understood this was how it was going to be.
As she’d promised, Lynn Harris did most of the talking, and Oliver listened intently. A few times, he politely asked her to hold on so he could answer a pressing message. Freya saw a distorted reflection of his phone’s screen in the glass behind him, but she couldn’t make out much. There were at least five people demanding his attention at once. It was like he was in a collapsing building, rushing from room to room trying to shore it up.
The Starball grew warmer and warmer in her pocket, and she wondered what the hell it was doing. She looked at the reflection of Karhu’s phone, expecting everything to start glitching out any moment.
“What can you tell us?” Lynn Harris asked when she’d finished with her account.
“Well, first, Freya, may I see your phone?”
Freya looked to Lynn, who nodded at her. Freya slid her phone across the table to Oliver, who had set his laptop on the table. Connected to it was a black plastic box the size of a deck of cards.
“Okay. Do you need to keep it?” Freya asked.
“I don’t think so. I’d just like to see if there’s anything running on it that shouldn’t be. I’m going to take a forensic image of your phone first. That way if anything happens, we can still recover the data.”
“Okay. All my pictures and stuff are on iCloud anyway,” she said. Freya and Lynn had already gone through all her texts, and there was nothing she couldn’t explain.
She didn’t like the thought of Lassa’s work snooping through her photos, but there was nothing to be done now. At least she didn’t have anything too risqué. There were pictures of the Starball and the meteorite, but Freya doubted Karhu would know what he looked at. The embarrassing things were all her sad little declining e-mail chains with her former friends, the slow dissolution of all her relationships, but they wouldn’t care about that either. There would be almost nothing from her mother. Lassa didn’t text and seldom called.
Karhu performed some arcane combination of button presses and shut the phone off, when it booted back up, it displayed a black and white terminal. He asked Freya to enter her password, and it took a few tries for her to get it. The little cursor didn’t move as she typed, and it tripped her up. When she managed to unlock it, Karhu got a cable from his case and plugged her phone into the imager.
“It will take a little bit to make the image. It’s backing up everything,” Karhu explained.
“What can you tell us? We’re happy to cooperate but we’re in the dark here,” Lynn said, impatience already snaking into her voice.
“We’re worried about Lassa. I was unaware of the issue with her home internet. She should have notified me at once. I’m going to take a very close look at her machine and find out if it was compromised. At some point, I would like to take a look at the router and see if there’s any issue with it. I don’t expect to find anything there as cross-platform malware is very uncommon. Does Lassa have a personal phone?”
“No, she only has the Hiidenkirnu one,” Freya said.
Oliver nodded. “I really wouldn’t expect to see anything on Freya’s phone then. Most likely either Lassa’s phone or workstation is compromised. Did you bring her computer?”
“Yes,” Lynn Harris said, and she passed him the leather laptop bag she’d brought from Lassa’s room.
“That’s great, thank you. As to what’s going on, I’ll tell you what I can. This is still an active intrusion, and we’re working to secure it.”
“Can you tell us when it started?” Freya asked.
“We noticed something strange on our network about a week before Lassa took a week of PTO. When she was absent, we noticed a correlation between her being in the office and the unauthorized transfers. Then we investigated her account and saw work orders being generated for testing that made no sense, things totally unrelated to her department. At first, we wondered if this was intentional sabotage. We are very concerned about her mental state. I understand she was involved in an altercation at your school.”
Freya nodded, the day of the fight, where this had all begun. It seemed so long ago.
“She’s going through a tough time, but I don’t think she’s gone crazy or anything,” Freya said. “I’m trying to get her to see a therapist.”
“We need to talk with her as soon as possible. The idea of her machine being compromised makes the most sense. A lot of the data that was transferred is from projects Lassa would have no knowledge of, and there was simply too much taken for one person to parse it all. It’s all quite puzzling.”
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Freya wasn’t puzzled, and the desire to know what the hell the Starball was up to burned in her mind hotter than the orb in her pocket.
“What kind of stuff was taken?” Freya asked, and Lynn’s eyes flashed with warning. “I mean, I understand you can’t be specific, I’m just curious,” Freya amended, hoping she hadn’t gone too far.
“Like I said, a huge volume of material. Not only from Hiidenkirnu but from our CRADA network. Lassa’s division is RH, most of the work that was errantly ordered, and the material taken was NPP.”
Freya and Lynn’s eyes met. Neither understood. They turned back to Karhu, waiting for him to translate the jargon to English.
“Oh, of course. CRADA are research agreements we have to share data with government entities. They’re one of the reasons we must get to the bottom of this quickly. We need to inform these institutions of the breach. RH is reproductive health.”
“What’s NPP?”
“Neuropsychopharmacology. Antidepressants, anxiolytics, that type of thing.”
Keenly, Freya remembered Lassa angrily saying Dr. Garbuglio didn’t know a tenth of what she did about Lunesta. She was racking her mind. Could Lassa have been involved in some kind of espionage? The Starball was uncomfortably hot, but she didn’t want to take it out of her pocket.
When had the Starball started working on her? Had it been tearing around in the Hiidenkirnu system trying to figure out how to pacify her? She remembered it struggling to calm Dan down, the layer of frost at the edges while his mind was on fire.
As she whirled with ideas, the imaging of her phone completed. Karhu took one of the data cards out of the imager and flipped the tab to read-only, then put it in a little plastic case and wrote on the label in pen.
“Okay. Now that we have a backup, let’s see what’s happening on your phone.” Karhu said. He had long fingers with neatly trimmed nails. She looked for calluses to see if he was a guitar player, but there were none. She remembered Karl had been a bass player and idly wished he were here instead. There had been something comforting about how disheveled he was.
Karhu rapidly tapped through pages of text, looking through lists of processes and services. He gave a little running commentary about what each process did. Freya and Lynn paid close attention.
“There it is,” he announced, seeming almost disappointed. “They didn’t even try to hide it. Unusual.”
Karhu turned the phone around so they could see it, pressing a fingertip at the top of the list. Most of the processes had names like MEMOSRV, but the top one’s name was just Ø. Next to it were columns indicating memory and processor use. Ø was close to eighty percent on both.
“Is that why my battery life has been awful?” Freya asked.
“Almost certainly, though this is an older phone. You’re probably near end-of-life on your battery, too. I’m going to have to ask if we can keep your phone after all, I’m sorry.”
“That’s fine. Is it something like Stuxnet?” Freya asked.
“Really unlikely to be something on that scale. That kind of state level malware is very difficult to detect. This almost seems amateur, but I won’t know until I can examine it.”
“Do you think our router is infected, too?”
“I don’t think so, but I’d like to take a look at all the computers in your home. Lassa’s phone is android, so maybe this is a cross-platform threat after all.”
Karhu inhaled deeply and sighed, rolling his thumb and index finger against his temples. His phone kept chirping against the table. He looked down at it as if it were making him seasick.
“Can I see your phone as well?” he asked Lynn, she shook her head.
“There’s privileged data on it. I can’t let you make an image without a court order,” Lynn said. Freya wondered how much of that privileged data was sexting with Lassa. But Lynn did have other clients after all.
“That’s totally fine. Can I just check the running processes like I did on Freya’s phone?”
“I wasn’t on their wireless network ever. I use my data plan.” Lynn sounded a little defensive.
“Do you mind if I look anyway?” Karhu pressed. ”It should only take a second.”
Reluctantly, Lynn Harris surrendered her phone, hovering at his side as he worked through it. Lynn’s phone was an android. Karhu didn’t need to reboot the phone to get to the list of running applications. Freya couldn’t see the screen but, from their faces, she could guess what they were seeing. Looking upset, Karhu turned over his own phone, tabbed away from all the angry notifications, and pulled up his own process manager.
The Ø process was at the top of the list.
“Oh, fuck,” Karhu groaned. “You have no idea how much worse my day just got.” He shoved the phone away in disgust. It spun at the center of the table and rattled against it with a notification.
“We have to get the authorities involved now. This is way too big,” Karhu said, clearly daunted.
Lynn and Karhu spoke about Hiidenkirnu’s lawyers, and which agencies would need to be notified of the breach.
Forgotten, Freya hung her head in silent despair. It was all about to slip away from her. The government would swarm in and find out everything. They would take the Starball, they would lock her up, she would never see Dan again. Wild thoughts of escape flashed through her mind, taking Randall’s truck, and running for it, trying to escape to Canada.
Please, stop. Just let me make it through today. PLEASE. She clenched her fist around the Starball in her pocket, wishing for the millionth time it could just talk to her. She felt the cool clarity of its efforts to calm her, and then her eyes focused on Karhu’s phone as another flashing red notification set it buzzing angrily against the tabletop.
“Hey,” Freya interrupted. She pointed at Karhu’s phone. The Ø process had disappeared from the list. Karhu reached across the table and took the phone, scrutinizing the screen. They looked at Lynn’s next. The process was gone.
“Mitä vittu,” Karhu breathed.
In her fist, the Starball cooled.
* * *
As the morning dragged on, the conference room became a gyre of confusion. Hiidenkirnu’s lawyers got into a huddle with Lynn. Flustered-looking technicians arrived, and Karhu dispatched them to tasks around the building. There were missed buttons on dress shirts and mismatched socks, a ripe, hung-over musk in the air that said the emergency summons had been too urgent to even shower. Freya was left with nothing to do, wishing she’d brought a book.
Karhu and the lawyers tried to convince Lynn to surrender her phone, and Lynn dug in her heels. By the tone of her voice, they would have to take it from her by force.
A flurry of words passed between Karhu and the lawyers in Finnish, Freya could pick out only a little, but the words Tietokone pandemia clung to her as if barbed. She could not shake them loose. The argument grew increasingly heated. Finally, Karhu managed to convince Lynn to remove the battery from her phone and slide it into one of the signal-blocking sleeves. She promised not to turn it back on until she heard from the authorities.
With the compromise reached, Freya and Lynn found themselves politely banished to the lobby, watching more and more people streaming in. It was all about to be a fiasco. Freya had ignored all the warnings, let all the chances to tell someone slip away.
People rushed in every direction, looking distraught, like ants whose hive had been kicked to pieces. How much was this all going to cost? How big would it get? Everyone’s weekend was ruined, and it was all her fault.
Freya groped for the guilt she should have felt, but there was nothing. She could stop all this right how, rip the Starball from her pocket, and hold it into the air like a beacon. With all their eyes upon her, she could confess everything. The idea seemed as distant and fanciful as if she planned to levitate.
The nausea and aversion she’d felt before did not return. They were no longer necessary. She wanted to check her phone for the time, and then she remembered they’d taken it. Behind the reception desk was a blank clock face with no lines and no numbers. It was just after three. Two hours until she could see him. Nothing else mattered.