Part 1: Character Creation / Chapter 3

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The way I figure it, it was around this time that the beeping started.

I’m talking, of course, about the beeping in Darla Cunningham’s attic. Let’s do some background on Darla.

She was only twenty-three-years-old when she became a billionaire. She didn’t even have a college degree. Sure, plenty of billionaires are ironic college drop-outs, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. But Darla was a non-ironic college drop out. She didn’t have a world-changing idea to birth. She’d just had some issues in her coconut.

In the two years after quitting school, she mostly volunteered for PETA and a few other non-profits. For money, she worked various coffee shop jobs, served a hellish tour of duty in sales at a local gym chain, and logged more than fifty thousand miles as a rideshare driver. The latter gig had been far preferable to the rest, but ended abruptly when she’d had her license suspended after an unfortunate incident at a fast food drive-thru.

Things weren’t looking great. And then she’d gotten word about her great uncle Cyril. The reading of his will was big news. Of course, there was the bit about the money, and the associated gig as caretaker for his house and attic. But the part that was most unexpected to Darla was that her uncle’s will had referred to her as his “favorite niece.” She wasn’t his only niece. She wasn’t even his only great niece. There was a cousin named Gracie, whom Darla had never liked because she’d called Darla “Metal Mouth” for the three years that Darla had worn braces. Of course, Darla didn’t think her uncle knew about that. So it probably wasn’t the reason he’d passed Gracie over. The only rationale she could find in his choice rested in a vague kinship she’d never truly acknowledged.

When she was in sixth grade, she’d had to do a report on a relative, and she’d picked her uncle out of curiosity. She and her mother had spent the afternoon in his living room asking him about his life.

“He really seems to like you,” her mother had remarked in amazement. “And he doesn’t like anybody.”

Even Darla had the sense that he’d been strangely—even mysteriously—welcoming.

Mind you, she’d only been able to extract fractured details from him about his life. There was a heavy emphasis on Ridley Merrick forcing him out of the company—and a bit about his other partner, Grant Morsely, being too much of a “horse’s ass” to stop it. She’d received a C+ on the report.

But after that afternoon, she’d seen him for a few minutes here and there and felt a strange, outsider-y connection with him. She’d tried to deny it—and as she got older and faced her own challenges, she’d only worked harder at that denial. But was it possible that her uncle had felt the same sense of connection? After the reading of the will, she’d begun to suspect so.

All in all, she’d had mixed feelings about the inheritance. But she’d gotten on board because that’s what you do when somebody says you’re their favorite and hands over billions of dollars to take care of their pile of TRS-80s, Commodore 64s and dot matrix printers.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

However, there was gray area. Her family, and even the lawyer who did the reading of her uncle’s will, questioned whether the proviso really required anything of her personally. Yes, the will stipulated that her assets would be frozen and eventually donated to causes of her uncle’s choosing if the equipment were to fail. And yes, the wording of the will sure made it sound like she should be personally responsible for the equipment. But that wording could be creatively interpreted to allow her to pawn off the responsibility to a well-compensated team of techs. Her uncle’s will had even provided a list of trusted experts upon whom she could rely to address major issues. So it was tempting to just put them at the helm for every issue—big or small—and be done with it. But she knew she couldn’t do that. She just didn’t know why. She told herself that it was about the money. She told herself it was about honor. But deep down she didn’t think it was about any of that. It was a feeling she couldn’t explain, a feeling she wasn’t entirely comfortable with—but a feeling that wouldn’t be denied.

As for taking up residence in the house, the will didn’t state that Darla needed to live on the premises. So, in theory, she could have hired security to work in shifts and alert her to equipment issues. But, at least for the time being, she decided she should be onsite at all times. So she moved into the crusty old mansion and got to work.

That work was easier said than done. She didn’t know anything about regular computers, much less a dozen antiques networked to run like some ancient, digital hive mind. So she leaned on her uncle’s list of experts to teach her enough about the hardware to diagnose and troubleshoot the more common problems herself. And, true to her uncle’s wishes, she managed to cobble together a methodology for minimizing downtime for each component and keeping the nonsensical code slowly scrolling up the monochrome monitors day and night.

For about a year, things were pretty uneventful. Then the beeping started.

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Darla heard the beeping coming from the attic at four in the afternoon—a persistent, portentous remnant from an analog age. It echoed through the house, accentuating just how large the house was and how alone Darla was in it. As she scaled the stairs to the attic, an irrational fear took hold—a fear that the sound was a precursor to a fiery explosion. The equipment was old, and a part of her thought it was only a matter of time before it went boom. Heck, another part of her thought blowing her up might have been her uncle’s plan all along. He was a madman after all. The tone seemed to grow more urgent with each step she took and by the time she reached the attic she’d broken into a sweat.

But as she entered the room, she found nothing amiss. The beeping was coming from an antique Realistic speaker set up beside the central monitor. She turned that off and the room fell quiet.

Then she noticed it.

Most of the stuff on the central monitor was the same as always: a weird code salad that leaned heavily on punctuation and emojis that no one had ever seen. But at the very end of the string of gibberish, she could make out two words: “Assessment initiated.”

She scanned up the screen a bit and saw two more words: “System anomaly.” That struck her as somewhat foreboding. If anything had triggered the beeping, she suspected that was it.

She sent the cursor climbing up the screen, revealing earlier entries. Generally, a new line had appeared every day or two. So there were a couple hundred pages of the stuff. While none of it had ever been comprehensible, she now found a few entries nestled amidst the nonsense were suddenly snapping into English.

After a time, the occurrences seemed to slow to a crawl and stop. But this felt important. It felt like the reason she’d been placed in her post.

She started studying the feed.