CHAPTER 4
She awoke the next morning when he gently disentangled from her.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said.
He proceeded to the door and thence to the bathroom, still in his boxers and t-shirt. Melody realized, as she watched him go, that she had never felt truly, sexually attracted to a man before him. It was a powerful feeling. It made her hot from head to toe, among other strange sensations. That is, not strange in the sense that she had never felt sexual arousal before; just strange in that suddenly it had all this context. Strange in that she had never had the hots for her own boyfriend before. This was the sort of thing those terrible shows were always depicting, that some part of her had assumed never happened in real life.
Melody sat bolt upright as memory of the night before came flooding back. Her hair fell over her face, and she pushed it back out of the way. She stood, hugged her pillow and blanket to her, and shuffled bleary-eyed back toward her bedroom. Passing the bathroom door, she could hear the sound of him urinating, and it occurred to her that men pee standing up. Again, it was not that she had not known it before. Of course she knew that they did. Just, this was the first time she had ever thought about it in a real, material context. A personal context. It was strange to think about her boyfriend—
Melody slapped herself on the face with both hands and then shut the door. “Get a grip, girlfriend. God.”
What remained of their visit passed in peace and uneventfully. Nothing more was heard over those remaining two days of who, or what, it might have been that haunted their property that night, and they all concluded that it must have been some sicko playing a sick sicko joke on them. Who, and why, they could hardly guess, but that was the only explanation.
If Doran noticed, during those two days, Melody acting toward him just a bit more coyly than normal, or caught her eyeing him a bit more often or somewhat differently than she might have in the past, he never let on. When he dropped her off at her apartment, he said, “I had a great time. You know, aside from that one thing.”
“Yeah. I did too,” she replied. “I’m glad you were able to come. My parents loved you.”
“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment. And, hopefully, a, uh… wha’d’ya call it. An endorsement.”
“Yeah. Consider it an endorsement.”
“Good. When do you want to get together again?”
That was the question. “Uh, I think we should stick to the plan. You find us a gym, and I’ll find us a drone.”
“It’s a deal. Talk to you tonight!”
“Okay!”
“Bye, lover,” he said.
She gaped, and he laughed and peeled away. “We didn’t even do anything!” she wanted to shout, and it was true. Neither that night, nor the following nights. Except in her imagination, a few times. Melody felt herself blushing furiously and stormed inside. There was work to do. She had what was left of this weekend to catch up on homework, plus there was the project, which had been running for two weeks and should now have gathered significant data—both the for-credit school-project aspect and the… other… aspect. She needed to talk to Cookie about that other aspect. And on that note, she had not managed to get into the game once during her visit to her parents, even though her laptop was perfectly capable of gaming. There had been no opportunity. She had seen some email traffic about a team meeting online which she had not attended, so she would have to find out what that was about.
The remains of that day and the better part of the next Melody spent catching up on school material. Her homework was relatively minor, and the distributed neural net project was ticking along. With everyone on holiday, they had left it to process some preset batches of training and test data, which it had long ago completed, and automated scripts in conjunction with her “Consciousness Layer” had recorded the results and saved them for analysis. Most of the team would not be back to work until Monday morning, so Melody gave that data collection the barest skimming over. It could wait. What interested her far more was the other stream of data her Consciousness Layer had been recording, and what people made of it. However, to see where stood that side of the project she needed a dark web browser, which she had recently downloaded but didn’t know the first thing about using, and a username and password, which she did not yet have. Cookie had set all that up for her. She had no emails from him, but it was Saturday night, so with any luck he would be online.
With a few clicks, Melody launched the stand-alone VOIP client and logged into the team’s server, noting that only Nailoo and Beetle were connected. Then she launched the game—of course, one did not just launch a game, anymore. One launched a “digital distribution and rights-management platform,” a piece of software like an app-store app provided by the game’s publisher (in this case DigitalArts Corporation’s “GameSource”), through which one could then purchase games, manage one’s library of purchased games, receive lots of advertisements for new games and premium downloadable content, and—if one was very clever—launch and play a game one had already purchased. Melody’s primary gaming system was a carefully designed chipper-shredder, built not only to consume the complex code of the day’s most advanced and demanding videogames and spit forth smooth, pure streams of entertainment joy, but also to reduce corporate inconveniences to inoffensive pulp through its sheer excess of power. Multiple solid-state hard disk drives flicked the “GameSource” software into existence, and an elite-tier fiber-optic Internet connection made quick work of mandatory software updates—first a mandatory update to GameSource itself, which then had to be restarted before it would allow her to download and install updates to her games which were also required before those games would launch. She noticed something peculiar during this process, but so minor that it did not more than register subconsciously before she had clicked on the relevant button and her lightning-fast machine had made the idea of DigitalArts Corporation’s massively successful hero-based online first-person-shooter, “Guardians,” a reality upon her screen and through her speakers. She put on her headphones as the game loaded its main menu.
“Anyone on?” she transmitted.
“Hey, Mal,” said Beetle’s barely pubescent voice. She noted immediately that his tone was subdued.
“Mal,” said Nailoo.
“What’s up, guys?”
“Mal, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
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Melody furrowed her brow. This was strange, to say the least. She did not associate her online gaming friends with bad news. She associated them with her escape from bad news. Videogames didn’t have bad news.
“Okay. What’s wrong?”
“Cookie passed away.”
Melody stared at her screen. A cheerful looking Midge posed with her flame-thrower while a text box pulsed, “Waiting for invite…”
“What?” she said at last.
“He passed away this week. Tuesday, I guess. I talked to his family. Apparently he overdosed on insulin.”
Melody sat back in her chair, her mouth hanging open. It didn’t even compute. In the way that videogames did not have bad news, Internet friends did not die of insulin overdoses. She had been vaguely aware that Cookie was diabetic, but she had never met any of these people “IRL”—In Real Life—and she had to admit that in a way she did not think of them as real people.
That was a terrible way to say it. Obviously they were real people. But they were not people whose Real Lives were a present reality in her own Real Life. They were distant and remote. She interacted with them solely in the context of Guardians. Beetle was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, so she forgave his immaturity. Ninjas was an undergrad. Daitetsu was quiet, and she didn’t know much about him but that he was a bit older and had some kind of job during the week. M was her age, but lived with his parents. Nailoo was the eldest and a long-time gamer. He was married with children and a career, but his hobby was being the leader of their little Guardians team. And Cookie was an adult, just out of college if her memory served, and he was diabetic. Had been. And apparently he had died on Tuesday of a mismanaged insulin application.
“They held the funeral today,” Nailoo continued. “I ordered flowers from all of us, with our handles. I hope that’s okay.”
“Yeah,” said Melody. “Yeah, that’s fine. Good. I’m glad you did. I can’t believe this is real.”
“I know. It’s hard to believe he’s really gone.”
She sat forward in her chair, elbows on her knees and her hands at her mouth, staring at her screen but not really seeing it. A clutching sensation built in her chest, and her eyes began to feel hot. “Is everyone okay?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. This isn’t the first friend I’ve lost. It’s just sad.”
“Beetle? How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“It’s okay if you want to talk about it,” said Nailoo. “Any time.”
“I’m really okay. I didn’t even know him that much.”
Melody wondered how that would feel, to be fifteen years old and find out that one of your online friends had died of diabetes. She was not even sure how she felt. Sad, yes, but also bewildered and shocked. It occurred to her that while they were having their scare Wednesday night at her parents’ house, Cookie had already been dead for a day. Surreal was the word for it.
“The others have already heard. I got them on Thursday night for a meeting. They’re not on tonight, but they’ve been in and out. The team’s not going anywhere.”
“Okay,” she said. Processing… Processing… said her inner mental hardware, a little circle on her inner monitor going ‘round and ‘round and ‘round….
After several long, quiet seconds, Nailoo said, “Beetle and I have been poaning newbs in his memory. You want to join us for a few rounds, Mal? I think he’d like that.”
“Yeah, all right. I could shoot some people in the face.”
That night, being a party of only three and matched with four random strangers to make a team, and thus having no hope of coordinating sophisticated team tactics, they just played for kills. That night, 0x00_Malady alternated with b33tle53x for top kill-count game to game, Melody demonstrating such a bloodletting that even Beetle spoke profanities of appreciation when the post-match “Play of the Game” replays highlighted the ruthless efficiency of her killstreaks. (Raiza’s “ult,” or ultimate power, was particularly vicious: Once fully charged, which as with most ults occurred only once or twice per round, it could be activated, allowing her for the next few seconds to teleport through enemies in her path, killing them instantly. Melody’s aim and timing were on, and more than once she managed to obliterate the majority of an opposing team with three perfectly aligned transits.) Nailoo, his heart not quite in it, still routinely occupied the third spot on the boards, and together they cut a swath of carnage across public servers far and wide.
When she finally bade them good night—“Good night, Mal. Good game,” said Beetle, a rare token of acknowledgement from the youngster—and closed Guardians, she found herself looking at the GameSource window still open in the background. It was then that she noticed properly the oddity she had registered only subconsciously before: She had a message in her GameSource inbox. GameSource, like other digital distribution apps, had built-in contact list and messaging functions to encourage users to make themselves at home in that publisher’s product network. Most gamers ignored these features, using the distro app as necessary to buy the game but using other platforms to manage contacts, form teams, and communicate with their friends. As such, Melody could not remember ever receiving a message from another user through GameSource. She clicked on the envelope icon, which took her to her inbox.
New message from ##OneTrueCookie##, it said.
Melody felt herself choking up as she clicked on it.
It contained only a URL (a web address)—https://m1hgs75lsc0p0trse26me.onion/i8ht3mr012— and two long strings of apparently random characters.
She blinked.
Well, if this was what she thought it was, then he expected her to be able to make it work with just this information, so she decided she might as well give it a try. She closed the VOIP app and a few other programs and then installed and ran the Tor browser he had recommended to her (which was hilariously called NoLeek). Lo and behold, it appeared as a normal web browser. Melody copied the address into it and struck her Enter key. After a brief moment, it loaded a page that was blank aside from two text entry boxes, one labeled “User” and the other labeled “Token,” and a button labeled “Go.” She pasted in the two seemingly random strings of text from Cookie’s message in order and clicked the button.
After another moment, she was shown a file repository, with several compressed folder archives awaiting download along with a text file called README.
It was her habit to read README files, so she read it.
“Mal,” it said. “It looks like we may have got onto something big. Someone wiped our .onion site, but I was taking regular backups, and I uploaded the latest snapshot of our take and the community’s comments here. I’m going to take some steps to cover our tracks, just in case. You should be fine, but be careful with this info. We haven’t done anything illegal, but if it’s some kind of corporate project, or a government thing, ours or someone else’s, they could make trouble for you. If you’re reading this, you’re using a Tor browser, so you should be fine. The token is single-use, so download everything. I only skimmed over the data, but it’s pretty mind-blowing. You’ll see.”
Melody sat before her computer, breathing hard, her body shaking. The claws of terror pierced her chest like a raptor’s talons, closing in on her heart. Only for the barest second did she consider that this could all be coincidence. It could be. She wanted it to be. But no part of her believed it was, because she had already seen a piece of what the virtual mind had collected, and that had been astounding enough to incite her and her team to put together this anonymous project with Cookie’s help, something of which she would never have envisioned herself being a part. Now Cookie was dead—from a catastrophic insulin overdose—and creepy figures were skulking around her parents’ back yard—just when she happened to be staying over.
The monstrous aspect of that nighttime visitation had mostly faded in her mind. Certainly an illusion it had been, a misperception heightened by the hour, the light, and the unexpectedness of the encounter. But that determination only made a conspiracy all the more likely. A ghost would have nothing to do with this stuff with Cookie and the neural net project, but a man? A man could be part of a conspiracy.
Three ordinary events occurring in proximity was a coincidence. That was apophenia, the clustering illusion, the bias of the human mind toward the presumption of patterns. Three extraordinary events, though? An extraordinarily rare and tragic death, a stalking, and a computer science discovery of historic proportions, all occurring within a week? No, four events: There was also the mysterious deletion of their crowd-sourced analysis site, just before Cookie’s death. It could be a coincidence, but it wasn’t. This was a conspiracy. And someone had killed Cookie over it, already.