CHAPTER 12

“You seem like a different person,” said Doran.

Melody gave him a sidelong look. “Good or bad?”

“Good!” he said. “It’s like you already have more confidence. Your whole…”

“Posture?”

“Pos-uh… Yeah. I guess that’s a part of it, yeah.”

“I’m trying to have better posture.”

“Well, it’s not just that. I kind of…” He paused, searching for the right approach. “I would have expected, you know, after what happened, that you’d be more… y’know…”

“Afraid? Hiding in my hole?”

“Well…” She could tell he did not want to say it out loud.

“Well, you’re not wrong. I could do that. But I don’t want to.”

He chuckled at the simplicity of her explanation, but that was because he did not see the whole picture.

“I could hide. Or I could be one of those women who is, like, ‘I refuse to be scared,’ ‘I refuse to be a victim,’ so she just keeps walking around like an idiot until she gets shot again.”

“TV character.”

“Yeah. So I’m not going to do that. Either one. If I want to not be afraid, I need to make myself not need to be afraid, right? I need to learn to defend myself and take care of myself.”

“Well,” said Doran, “you hear that a lot in shows too. ‘I can take care of myself.’”

“Yeah, but that’s just it! They say it, but can they? The people who say that are always the people—women, usually—who can’t do anything! And don’t do anything! They don’t go take self-defense classes, or learn to actually deal with whatever kind of bad guy there is in the show. It’s all talk—and it’s so stupid. So I’m not going to do that.”

“Well, good. I like it. Just… don’t take unnecessary risks, okay? Don’t, like, start walking down dark alleys just because.”

Melody gave him a look that was more than a little accusatory. “Come on.”

“I’m just saying.”

“You really think I would be that dumb?”

“Well, no, of course not. I just… care, you know.”

She let out a dramatic sigh and rolled her eyes. How could she be upset with him when he said things like that? “Fine, but I’m serious about this. I’m not talking about being stupid, or being some kind of superhero. I’m talking about being smart and being able to take care of myself—really take care of myself—when you’re not there to protect me.”

He nodded. “Well, I’m all for that, for sure. Are you still doing the bike?”

“Yup.”

“And eating right?”

“Mostly,” she replied. There had been a couple of lapses, but mostly she had succeeded, at least for the past few weeks.

He grinned at her. “It’s not easy. But you know, if there’s anything I can do to help, or if you ever need support, you know where to find me, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. Mushy mushy mushy, but it was so nice, too.

“All right,” he said. “Well, I have to get back to work. Talk later?”

“Yes.”

“When is our baby due?”

Melody choked back her laughter, as she was in the middle of drinking the last of her tea.

“Tuesday,” she said. He was referring to their new bouncing baby quadrotor, which they had purchased online and which was now in transit.

“Cool. All right,” he said, standing and taking up his belongings. “Talk later.” He bent down to kiss her on the lips, which she welcomed. “Love you.”

“I love you, too!” she said.

“Bye!”

He left, and she left shortly after. Good posture felt strange at first, but it also felt good. Or, perhaps, life in general felt good. How could that be, after she had endured such a horrifying experience? Had it taught her to appreciate life? Or had it inspired her to turn her life around in a few key ways, and was it that process which was making her feel good? Whatever the case, it left her with a bounce in her step. Melody was quite certain that she had never before experienced an actual, physical bounce in her step. She felt light on her feet. She understood why happy girls skipped and danced in old movies.

That night, she played Guardians with her Internet friends, and they virtually slew many virtual foes while capturing and holding virtual locations, delivering virtual packages to virtual destinations, and completing other team-oriented virtual objectives.

“Remember that last-man-standing mode they had for a while?” she asked as they goofed around in the rally location while waiting for the next match to begin.

“The one where it was, like, twenty teams on one map? Last team standing wins? Battleground Mode, or whatever?”

“Yeah. Why wasn’t that more popular? I thought it was fun.”

“I dunno. Maybe it just came out at the wrong time.”

“Well, hopefully someone tries that idea again someday.”

After a few more rounds, she bade them good night and closed the game and the Voxo channel, and then, for a last few minutes before bed, she turned her attention to her truly most scandalous new online habit, the one temptation to which she had succumbed since her ordeal: She opened her Tor browser and began skimming over message boards and online fora, reading the latest replies to the discussions threads in which she was participating. Most of these anonymous online conversations were populated by crazies, who believed everything was a ghost or an alien in disguise, because they had been told as much by their pets or by the transmissions resonating in their teeth. However, where old Melody might have dismissed them to the last as batty and delusional, new Melody thought that maybe, just maybe, a few of them might not be entirely off their respective rockers. A few of them told stories that were more believable than hers. Of course, they had no evidence they could present—but then, what had Melody, at this point? The government had taken everything. (The first time she had realized that, it had surprised her. The process had been entirely natural and innocent, and yet the end result had been exactly what the conspiracy theorists all described: she was left with no material evidence in her own possession of any of the wild things she might claim to have witnessed.)

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

“My neighbor is totally an alien—” Skip.

“There’s totally a ghost in my apartment. My TV keeps turning—” Moving on.

“They told me they needed my DNA to repopu—” Yeah, no.

It felt like an illicit business, trafficking in such sites, and in a sense it was. Most of her peers would have considered it more normal to consume pornography than this nonsense. (What a sad state of affairs that was, she noted.) However, nothing in her non-disclosure agreements forbade her from researching ghosts and aliens and unexplained phenomena, and the anonymous dark-web was the perfect place to do that without exposing herself to the worst Internet pitfalls associated with fringe content. The sort of people who went through the trouble of finding and using sites like these, through a Tor browser, were the genuinely crazy and the genuine believers—at least, those who cared about keeping their sane lives separate from their wilder theories and beliefs.

“The military is totally experimenting with supernatural powers at Loxley Airbase.” Interesting. She read on. But no, it turned out to be a wild-eyed report, rich on tabloid media citations and slim on evidence. It seemed to be a well-trafficked thread, though, so she appended to it a post of her own.

“What I saw,” she wrote, “looked like a ghost or a demon, but it was definitely physical. All black, and light just seemed to soak into it, or sometimes kind of invisible, like you could see through it. It was very fast, but quiet. And tall, like, seven or eight feet. Maybe taller. Strong enough to break a car window with its bare hand. Does this sound like anything anyone else has seen?”

She submitted it and reviewed it, her message, sitting at the end of a long thread of nonsense. That was okay. It would blend in with the crazies, but anyone who had seen what she had seen would surely recognize what she was describing without question.

Melody slid her mouse cursor toward the button that would close the browser, and as she did she noticed that she had a new private message.

All too well she remembered the last time she had received an unexpected private message by an unexpected channel. With some hesitance she clicked on it.

“You need to be careful,” the message said. The sender’s username was “Frell.”

Melody was suddenly shivering. Adrenaline coursed through her. After a moment’s thought, she opened a second browser tab and began sifting back through the three threads on that site to which she had posted replies. “Frell” was not a respondent to any of them. In the original tab, still open to the private message, she clicked on the text of Frell’s name, which took her to his (or her) profile page. The profile was mostly blank, and only two days old, meaning Frell had created an account on this forum only two days previously. Frell’s current status was “offline,” according to the page.

She rubbed her lips for a moment, and then she returned to Frell’s message and clicked on the Reply button.

“About what?” she typed. Nothing more. She clicked Send.

For another half of a minute or so, Melody sat with her hands folded in front of her mouth, staring at her computer screen. Then she stood and proceeded to make her evening ablutions and ready for bed. When she was done, she returned to her computer and refreshed her browsers. There was no reply, and Frell was still offline.

She went to bed, but she had some trouble sleeping that night. The next morning, a reply was waiting for her.

“They can trace you,” it read.

Melody’s mind raced. Who was this? Someone else who had seen what she had seen? Someone who knew about her situation? Someone who knew who she was? That was easy to imagine, in this world wherein conspiracies had recently become real for her, but she had to admit it was unlikely. The government had kept things quiet. She had made her original statement to the police, and beyond that she had spoken only to Sing’s committee and to the cyber-warfare team which had been commissioned to rebuild her Consciousness Layer system. To the media, the police had described the attack on her as a gang shoot-out, during which she had been caught in the crossfire, and Melody had refused all media requests for comment, as required by the NDAs which she had signed. Local news agencies seemed satisfied with that description, and in the absence of any public statement from her they had somewhat breathlessly reported it as a school shooting. To Melody that seemed a little disingenuous, but it had occurred very close to the campus, and it had involved a student, and those apparently were the requisite criteria. She wondered how many other “school shootings” they reported were of this sort—in the sense of neither occurring on the grounds of nor being in any way related to a nearby school. Drug deals, other petty crimes. Certainly not what she had always thought when she heard the phrase “school shooting.”

All well and good, as far as she was concerned, if it meant they left her alone. And that meant it was very unlikely that anyone out there on the World Wide Web could associate her anonymous post on an anonymous forum with those events or her true identity. That in turn implied to her that this person, this Frell, was responding solely to the description she had posted of the demon-like entity.

Possibilities, she thought, racking her brain.

Either her description of the entity struck a chord with him because he had knowledge—first hand?—of similar encounters, or he was just a random user trying to scare her. The latter seemed the most likely, but did it fit the facts? Would he have created a new account on that forum two days ago just to mess with her? If so, why here? Her own username, on this forum, was “true_witness421.” To each site on which she had posted descriptions of her experience she had registered with a different username, taking pains to ensure that each name was generic and fit in with the sorts of names used on each respective message board. Consciously, she had avoided names that might even imply her gender. If he was a “troll,” just trying to cause trouble, then why had he selected her out of all the nutty contributors to this forum? Would it not be more likely that a troll would have a long-established account, with which he would have trolled many before her? If he was a new troll, then he had—serendipitously or significantly—chosen as one of his first victims perhaps the only user here whose extraordinary claims were actually true. If he was an old troll, why was his account new? Did he create a new account for each new victim? Was he that dedicated to his craft? Or had his original account recently been banned, forcing him to create a new one for his trolling use?

It was all too convoluted. The other possibility was that he had seen something like she had seen. A part of her wanted to dismiss that possibility out of hand, the part that assumed any report of extraterrestrial or ectoplasmic phenomena was nonsense, but her own encounter had been real. If her encounter had been real, then this thing must really, physically exist. And if it really existed, then the likelihood was extremely low that she was the only person who had ever seen it. That, indeed, was the whole reason she was poking about this corner of the dark web, posting versions of her account. She wanted to find other witnesses. The hardest part was accepting that she might actually have been contacted by one.

Caution was the order of the day. Caution with a side of patience. She clicked the Reply button, and into the box she typed, “Who can trace me?”

That would do the trick. If he was a troll or a crazy, his response would show it. If his response was plausible—especially if it gave some indication of how they had identified Cookie—then she would have more of a reason to engage with this person. She clicked the Send button and then set about her day.

Just a few hours later, she checked again, and there was his reply. Moreover, his status showed as “Online.”

His message was not what she had expected. It consisted only of a number of URLs—web addresses, and of the ordinary, non-dark kind—leading to news articles. Melody opened a few. Here, a report of the invasion of a small southern-bloc country by its much larger neighbor. Here, another world power selling off its vast holdings of foreign treasury securities. Here, a tech titan introducing a new news-curating service. The list went on, but the reports did not seem to her to show any pattern. These were just examples of the many big events always going on in the world to which she paid little attention because she could not affect them and they did not really affect her. What did she know about foreign policy or big business, beyond what the news reported and her fellow students shouted at their rallies?

Big corporations were bad, unless they were good, and many of these countries were bad, but “who are we to judge?” Everyone seemed to be on both sides of every issue, so Melody generally opted out.

What, then, was the meaning of this disparate list of current events? Perhaps this person was just a troll after all, stringing her along.

“Are you saying these events are related?” she typed as her reply. Send. Melody would give him another chance or two. If he did not say anything of substance soon, she would simply block him. One could only be bothered to feed a troll for so long.

Apparently he was indeed “online,” because she had only to wait a few minutes for his reply.

“The enemy are making their move,” it read. “You will see soon, if you stay alive.”

Well, that was ominous. Melody gave it more credence than she might have in the past, given that someone had already made an attempt on her life, but this sort of vague, apocalyptic language made the mysterious Frell seem only less credible.

“You make it sound like there’s going to be a war,” she wrote and sent. She waited a minute and then refreshed the page, and a reply had come.

“If we are lucky,” it said.