“What the fuck is this?”

Samson rolled his eyes. It had been weeks since he’d spoken to Ibrahim, and he’d been hoping to keep it that way.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” Samson said. He got up to leave, but unfortunately could not do so before Ibrahim intercepted him.

“Your friends are starting a company now?”

“Yes, apparently,” Samson said. He’d been made privy to their plans for Harlan Industries, which at this point consisted of “start planning”.

“We were going to start a company,” Ibrahim protested. “That was going to be our thing!”

“Ibrahim, it’s not ‘our thing’,” Samson said. “Half the people in this fucking school start their own companies.”

Due to the inherent good reputation of having graduated from the world’s most prestigious academy, and their own inherent genius, students of the Einstein-Odinson started new companies at a much higher rate than graduates of many other universities. A large percentage of said ventures failed, and those that didn’t were usually bought up by a larger corporation in a few years, exactly as their founders had intended. Selling out was more profitable and easier to do than committing for the long haul.

“Those other people didn’t involve you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not involved in Harlan whatevers either,” Samson said. Lee had told him of their plans, but not extended any official invitation to join. Since he wasn’t graduating for another three years, neither saw any reason to get ahead of themselves in planning his future. “And hey, while we’re planning for the future, how are your grades?”

Ibrahim said nothing.

“Well? Do you even know?”

“They’re...better,” Ibrahim mumbled.

“How much better? Good enough that you’re not getting expelled?”

“I- I’m still improving.”

“You don’t have long left to go, pal, better get to it,” Samson said. “And leave me alone.”

Samson shouldered his book bag and pushed past Ibrahim, hoping to leave his twin behind. The other half of the pair would not be ditched that easily.

“No, look, come on man,” Ibrahim said. “Let me show you- what the hell.”

Ibrahim’s declaration of surprise was followed by a soft whack and a grunt of pain. Historically speaking, that never ended well. Samson rolled his eyes and turned around.

“What happened?”

“My fucking phone jumped out of my hand,” Ibrahim said. He had a small purple bruise on his cheek at the site of the surprisingly strong impact, and his phone was on the ground, lending credence to his claim. “I know that sounds dumb, but-”

“I never said I didn’t believe you,” Samson said. “One second.”

He pulled out his own phone and made three quick observations. First, that several apps he had previously deleted had reappeared on his home screen. Second, that his text window opened on its own and entered in several angry face emojis. Third, that his phone forcibly flung itself from his hands and launched towards his face. Samson tried to block it, but his reflexes weren’t quite fast enough. The edge of the phone caught him right in the middle of the forehead, then bounced off and fell to the ground.

“Ow, damn it.”

Once on the ground, the phone started to shake rapidly and then launched itself upwards again, this time towards Samson’s ankles. It bounced away from his heel once before Samson caught the phone underfoot and stomped down hard enough to crack it.

“Hey, mom paid a lot of money for that.”

“She paid a lot of money for yours too.”

Ibrahim’s phone, which was still thrashing violently on the ground, was the next to get stomped. Samson brought his heel down hard enough to break the phone in two.

“Hey!”

“No one cares,” Samson said. It was still the first loop, so all this damage would be temporary. Samson paused long enough to watch a student sprint across the quad with a bouncing smartphone hot on his heels, and then reluctantly turned back to Ibrahim. “Go hide in your dorm or something.”

“Why?”

“Well, half because you’ll get hurt,” Samson said. For all his anger, he still didn’t like the thought of Ibrahim getting beaten to death by angry phones. But he was still angry. “The other half is just because I don’t want to deal with you right now.”

Samson headed for the lair. With his phone destroyed, Samson needed to regroup with the other loopers the old fashioned way, and he headed out, leaving his very confused twin brother behind.

----------------------------------------

“Anybody home?”

“Not anybody smart,” Harley said. She, Hawke, and Kim had already gathered in the lair, but Lee and Vell were still absent. Hawke was helping Harley keep her phone strapped to the table while Kim stood on the other side of the room.

“Good enough for me,” Samson said. He headed for Kim, gravitating towards the safety of the strongest fighter in the room. “What’s the situation?”

“Well, as I’m sure you figured out, tech is getting punchy,” Harley said. “What we don’t know is- Don’t get close to Kim!”

“Wh-”

The question that was half-formed on Samson’s lips got answered by a sharp punch to the gut that knocked Samson off his feet and sent him flying a few feet back.

“Ow.”

“Shit, sorry, sorry,” Kim said, as she rapidly backed away. Samson let out a loud groan of pain. It felt like most of his organs were trying to flee his body.

“Why did you do that?”

“Sorry! I’m a little on the fritz too,” Kim said. “I managed to sequester all the rogue programs in my arm, but, well-”

“Why not put them in your leg or something?”

“Samson, you have seen me jump this entire heavy metal body twenty feet in the air,” Kim said. “If I had kicked you, you’d be dead.”

“Hm. Yeah, okay, fair play. Can we unplug the arm at least?”

“Only after we figure out what’s going on,” Kim said. Her rogue arm was still flailing in Samson’s direction, but she got it under control. “I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on with all this code. It’s simple, but...aggressive.”

The programs that had hijacked everyone’s phones, and part of her mind, behaved in a borderline inexplicable way. They had more in common with Kim’s enigmatic programming than anything else. Despite the apparent similarities, Kim was struggling to decipher how and why the rogue programs were doing what they were doing.

“Okay, cool, I’ll just crawl further away, then,” Samson grunted. “Very cool. Let me know how I can help. Once I can stand up again.”

That took quite a while, so Samson didn’t help much. Harley and Kim were coming to their shared conclusions long before he managed to stand on his own two feet again.

“I think I might have a ruptured kidney,” Samson groaned. “Tell me you’ve figured this shit out.”

“Mostly, I think,” Harley said. The phone she had strapped to the table was almost motionless now, though it still struggled against the bonds occasionally. “A lot of apps and files I deleted on my phone are back.”

“And they’re doing a lot of shit they’re not supposed to do,” Hawke said. A puzzle game was currently thrashing around the screen, bouncing off the corners of the phone as if it was trying to break free.

“And they’re all very mad,” Kim said. She wasn’t sure “mad” was quite the right word, but she didn’t know a better way to describe it.

“Okay, well, in keeping with how stupid things generally are around here, can I take a guess?”

“Go for it, Samson.”

“It sounds like we have a case of computer ghosts.”

Harley flinched reflexively, but nothing happened. Hawke took an expectant look around.

“Well, guess it can’t be ghosts.”

“What?” Samson said. “How can you rule it out that quickly?”

“One of my exes is a ghost hunter,” Harley said. “Garret Geist, Ghost Getter. He shows up whenever there are ghosts around me.”

“Every time?”

“Every time,” Harley said. “He’s not like, stalking me or anything, it just happens. One of those things, you know.”

“One of those things,” Samson said. He’d run into a lot of “those things” over the past year. “Well, I don’t know, maybe that Garrett guy knows the difference between ghosts and whatever is happening to our phones?”

“Well, I’ve been wanting to try a phone call anyway, so can’t hurt,” Harley said. “Tighten those straps, Hawke, I feel like this is going to make the phone real mad.”

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

Hawke strapped in and held the phone down while Harley tried to navigate the touchscreen long enough to make a call. Rogue icons tried to bounce in front of her fingers at every step, but she managed to dodge their interference long enough to get to her contacts list and dial up Garrett. The part of her phone that actually made phone calls had obviously never been deleted, so it was behaving completely normally, and connected the call in spite of the other chaos happening in her phone.

“Harley?”

“Hey Garret, weird question,” Harley said. “Is your phone trying to kill you right now?”

“No. Is yours?”

The phone vibrated wildly, trying to pry itself free from its bonds and lunge at Harley.

“Yes. It sort of seems like our phones are haunted here on the island, but- Well, it can’t be that right?”

“I don’t know. If it looks like a phone ghost and sounds like a phone ghost, it’s probably a phone ghost,” Garrett said.

“Wouldn’t you be showing up about now, if that were the case?”

“Oh, no, I only handle people ghosts,” Garrett said. “Cyber ghosts are a different guy. You’ll want Spencer Spectre, Cyber Exorcisor.”

“Oh. Is he cool?”

“No, honestly, he’s kind of a huge dick.”

“Well then I think we’ll manage without him,” Harley said. “Thanks Garrett, good talk.”

“No problem. And hey, congrats on your graduation, that’s coming up quick, right?”

“Thanks Garret bye,” Harley said. She didn’t want to think about graduation on top of everything else right now. “Alright, we got cyber ghosts.”

“Makes sense,” Kim said. “All the files we’ve ever deleted are back for vengeance.”

“Oh man, my laptop must be in hell right now,” Harley said. “I have deleted so much stuff.”

Years worth of non-functioning codes and experimental schematics were probably choking every major computer on campus by now. It was no surprise they were all so angry. Samson thought about his laptop back in his dorm, and all the things he’d deleted from it over the years. The schoolwork alone would drive anyone mad, and that wasn’t even getting into the porn.

“Alright, Samson, your time to shine,” Harley said.

“What?”

“You’re a computer engineer,” Harley said. She pointed at the phone. “Engineer the computer.”

“Our curriculum doesn’t really cover phone ghosts!”

“Really? Not even here?”

“No!”

“Man, you’d think that this school of all places would teach about that,” Harley said.

“It does feel like an oversight,” Hawke said.

“Especially considering they taught us about phone demons,” Samson said.

“Oh that’s a different league,” Hawke said. “Obviously you teach about the phone demons.”

“Everyone knows about the phone demons, yeah,” Harley said. “Related note, do you think we can get the phone demons to fight the phone ghosts?”

“Maybe,” Samson said. “But I feel like that wouldn’t actually solve anything.”

“True. Damn it, where are Vell and Lee? We need someone who can come up with an actually good idea.”

“Hey.”

“I’m including myself in that group,” Harley said. “Feel free to prove me wrong, Kim.”

“I- I can- Fuck,” Kim grumbled. Her brain worked fast, but not necessarily well. Ten thousand ideas a second didn’t matter if all of them were bad.

The speeding supercomputer that was Kim’s brain never got a chance to redeem itself, as Lee stormed through the door and slammed it shut behind her. She scanned the room and eyed Kim warily for a second.

“I’m good,” Kim said. Her left arm extended and flipped Lee off. “Except the arm. All the bad stuff’s in the left arm.”

“Noted, I’ll avoid your left,” Lee said. “Any progress?’

“Yeah, we got a case of digital ghosts,” Harley said. “You seen Vell at all?”

“Unfortunately, he didn’t make it?”

“Vell got killed by an angry phone?”

“Not at all,” Lee said. “Kim do you recall that stockpile of spare body parts you keep?”

“Y- oh.”

A metal fist punched its way through the lair’s fortified door, just about where Lee’s head had been seconds ago. Another followed it, and soon the heavy metal hands latched on to the broken metal and started peeling it apart.

“Really wish I’d finished the fortifications before I lost all my money,” Lee said.

“Did you at least finish the escape tunnel?”

“Yes-”

Hawke opened the hidden hatched and started scrambling away as fast as he could.

“-but not the door on the other end,” Lee said. They had dug their way out of the basement and into the wall of a classroom above, but not actually broken through the wall.

“Knowing Hawke, he’ll bash his way through,” Harley said. Hawke was decently strong, and even stronger when inspired by mortal terror.

“You guys get going,” Kim said. With her left arm still going rogue, Kim was more of a liability than an asset. “I’ll slow them down.”

The metal door groaned loudly as two of the possessed mechanical bodies tore through it.

“I feel like you’ve been dying for us a lot this year, dear,” Lee said.

“Well yeah, I don’t feel pain,” Kim said. “It’s only fair.”

One of the possessed headless bodies jumped through the ruined door and punched Kim hard enough to leave a massive dent in her chest.

“See, if that had happened to you, it would’ve really hurt,” Kim said. She used her one good arm to punch a hole right through the rogue body’s chest and rip out its power core. “Move!”

Any lingering guilt over Kim’s sacrifice Lee felt got negated by the reminder that Kim, unlike her, could not feel pain. Lee executed her well-practiced skedaddle to get as far away from the potential pain as possible and fled up the tunnel. True to Harley’s prediction, Hawke had slammed his prodigious body right through the brick wall of the classroom, which was thankfully abandoned. As soon as Lee was through, Samson and Hawke started to push a heavy cabinet over the hole.

“Those robots can lift like five-hundred fucking pounds, guys, a shelf isn’t going to do shit,” Harley scolded. The two of them stopped pushing, looking a little embarrassed. “Run!”

The four redaddled their skedaddle and headed for Harley and Lee’s shared dorm. Other than Kim’s spare body parts and a few mangled experiments from the robotics lab, the bulk of the tech ghosts on campus were flopping around in phones or occasionally snapping laptops shut, making for relatively few dangers as the loopers booked it to the dorm. Harley slammed the door shut behind her, though she did not activate any of her usual defenses, knowing they’d likely just go rogue right away. She did, however, snatch Botley off a table and stare him directly in the beady eyes.

“You evil, Bottles?”

Botley shrugged and pointed back at the piece of scrap paper he’d been drawing on. He hadn’t finished his sketch of a mug Harley had left on the table.

“Oh, I knew you were too dumb to be haunted,” Harley said, as she gave her mechanical familiar a big hug. Botley wasn’t mechanically complex enough to warrant any programs beyond those which kept him functioning, so he had no deleted files to come back to haunt him. He also had no idea what was going on, but he did know he was getting hugged, and he liked getting hugged.

“Okay, wait, Botley’s cool,” Samson said. “Can we somehow use Botley to like, backdoor non-evilness into all the ghost tech?”

“Even I don’t know how we’d go about that,” Harley said. She only mostly understood how Botley’s brain worked, and had no idea how to go about cloning his code, or if the rogue hardware would even support it.

“Can’t we just plug him into something with wifi and send out a signal?”

“What signal?”

“I don’t know, Harls,” Samson said. “I’m trying to do what you do, just say shit and see if someone runs with it.”

“Well, can’t scold you for that.”

“I can,” Hawke said. “It’s kind of dumb when either of you do it.”

“Hey,” said both Harley and Samson.

“What? It just makes a lot of noise and distracts people who are actually thinking.”

“And your screaming doesn’t?”

“I don’t control that!”

A nascent argument was interrupted by Lee removing an arcane tome from a nearby bookshelf and slamming it on Harley’s workbench.

“Please, people, everyone is stupid sometimes,” Lee said. “Just try to put stupidity on hold long enough to help me with this.”

“No promises,” Harley said. She knew the best way to contain stupidity was to keep her mouth shut, so Harley put forth the herculean effort required to stop herself from talking and just listen to Lee. Their esteemed leader cracked her dusty tome open to a bookmarked page and pointed out some ritual diagrams.

“Now, I’ve done exorcisms dozens of times,” Lee said. “But the element of the undead being digital rather than physical lifeforms does complicate things significantly. I don’t believe a typical exorcism would solve the problem.”

“What’s the plan, then?”

“Well, I’m going to try a normal exorcism anyway,” Lee said. “And while I do that, the three of you are going to split up and go to different computer-related labs to look for any documents on how one would do a cyber-exorcism, if such a thing exists, and investigate possible sources of the haunting while you’re at it.”

“Do we have to split up?”

Every bad situation was made worse by being alone, and Hawke was already in a very bad situation.

“Unfortunately, dear, we’re short on manpower and leads right now,” Lee said. “We need as much of both as fast as possible.”

“Don’t worry man, there’s only a few robots that are actually threatening,” Harley said. “They can’t possibly kill all three of us.”

“Harley, dear, I think you need to consider whether what you’re saying is helpful,” Lee said. Hawke was starting to hyperventilate.

“Oops.”

“Harley, head for the programming lab,” Lee said. “Samson, the computer engineering department is your home turf, you look there. I’ll send Hawke to scout the communications department once he’s breathing normally again.”

“I’m getting there,” Hawke said. “Give me a minute.”

While he recovered, Samson and Harley set out in different directions, looking for a solution to their cyber ghost problem.

----------------------------------------

“Ow!”

Samson had underestimated the threat of the possessed phones, and paid the price. Not a high price, as he had not underestimated them by that much, but still a price. The pinch hurt.

“Who uses flip phones anymore?”

Samson pried the flip phone that had snapped shut on his hand off and tossed it aside, breaking it against a nearby wall. He then kicked a nearby smart phone into the same wall, and the rest of the hopping horde got the picture and started fumbling away.

“Fuck out of here,” Samson said to the retreating phones. After doing a little more taunting to reinforce his morale, Samson got back to work and headed for the professor’s office. His teacher was always quoting from esoteric textbooks and obscure studies he had stockpiled in his office, and hopefully one of them would contain information on cyber ghosts. Samson’s hunch was correct, but he was not the only one who’d come up with the idea. Samson froze as soon as he opened the door. Ibrahim waved hello.

“Ibs?’

“Hey bro.”

“What the fuck are you doing here? I thought I told you to hide.”

“And since when do I listen to you?”

The snippy statement had been meant as a joke, but Samson was not amused. He stepped in and brushed aside some loose papers Ibrahim had been drawing on.

“Either get out or just stay out of my way, Ibrahim,” Samson said. “I got shit to do.”

“Studying cyber-exorcisms, right?” Ibrahim said. “For the cyber ghosts.”

“How do you know about that?”

“This is a campus full of geniuses, Samson, you and your wei- your friends aren’t the only people who can figure things out,” Ibrahim said. “I helped some friends from class kill their phones and we started working things out.”

Samson looked at the diagrams Ibrahim had scattered around the room. They did all look very similar to the magic circles in Lee’s textbook, though most of them had bright red X’s drawn through them, marking them as failures.

“How the hell are you researching this stuff? You don’t know magic.”

“No, but Goldie does.”

“Goldie’s not here.”

Ibrahim pointed at a nearby cabinet.

“Goldie?”

“Hi Samson,” Goldie’s muffled voice said.

“She’s been helping me complete the rituals,” Ibrahim said. “And hiding in the cabinet whenever I don’t need her.”

“Phones can’t open doors,” Goldie said.

“I knew she helped you guys out a lot too, so I grabbed her and we got to work.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s why you went right to her,” Samson said. “You know she’s a lesbian, right?”

“He certainly does now,” Goldie said.

“I just wanted help. Mostly,” Ibrahim said. A potential in with a pretty girl was just a fringe benefit. “Speaking of, Goldie, come do the thing, I think I got it this time.”

Goldie cautiously emerged from the cabinet to appraise Ibrahim’s work. Samson just rolled his eyes and started looking through documents to find his own info. Ibrahim could barely handle conventional schoolwork, so Samson had no faith in his twin’s ability to solve a uniquely convoluted scenario such as this.

“Oh hey, it works.”

“What?’

Samson got his nose out of a book and looked up. An inert magical sigil was just fading away, and a dead silent phone sat in the center of it.

“Great! Now how do we do that on the whole island?”

“Woah woah woah hold on,” Samson said. “Tell me everything you did, right now.”

“Yeah, give me a second,” Ibrahim said. “I’ve been running out of paper, so I didn’t write things down. Frankly I’m surprised this worked.”

“Well it worked,” Goldie said. She was tabbing through her phone without incident. “Let me take a picture of the ritual circle…”

“Wait, let me see that,” Samson said. He could hear noises outside the office, and wanted to be sure he got a good look at the diagram before anything happened. He snatched the drawing of the magic circle and looked at it for exactly half a second before something heavy hit him in the back of the head.