JoshuaCole374
patreon
Chapter 37: Security Check
🕑 Added 2023-10-05 14:00:04 +0000 UTCMiguel popped his trunk. He reached in and handed me an object. “Help me with this, yeah?”
I turned the thing over. It looked a little like a router or an old radio. “What is it?”
“Equipment.” He grabbed two more pieces, handed me one, tucked the other under his arm, and grabbed his laptop.
He started to maneuver his elbow to shut his trunk, using the arm that held his laptop. The sight of the trunk lid’s edge so close to an expensive computer made me shudder, so I shifted Miguel’s gear to one arm and caught it. “I’ll get the trunk.”
“Thanks.” He grinned and I felt conned.
He scurried up the stairs after Lena, and I had to – ugh – jog to keep pace. Even with all the exercise I’d gotten lately, I ended up gasping in the thin air. It blew my mind to think Zhizhi, and about five hundred thousand other people, jogged around the Denver area for leisure. Madness.
Hypoxia and meditations thereon dominated my mind while we climbed the stairs, so it didn’t hit me until I saw Miguel step through the open door:
Our apartment was a goddamn mess.
In theory, Lena and I traded off chores. The system worked, sort of. On the one hand, neither of us got too annoyed at the other for putting off a chore. If one of us hesitated to vacuum, it delayed the other being on the clock. On the other hand, if one of us procrastinated too much, the chores would pile up on our side, so we had an incentive to make an effort. We didn’t keep house like real-ass adults, but we didn’t live like frat boys, either.
Normally.
Trouble was, we’d spent the last week running around, either doing Third Eye shit or exhausted from it.
Lena should’ve vacuumed and wiped down the kitchen. I should’ve dusted and cleaned the bathroom. We both should’ve picked boxes up off the floor, especially Sunday’s little cartons of mostly-emptied Chinese food. And, like, made our beds.
I staggered to a stop next to Miguel and stared at the horrors within the apartment.
“We’ve both been going a mile a minute,” I tried to say, but, having gone a mile a minute, it mostly came out as a wheeze.
Miguel gave me an infuriatingly sympathetic glance. “And they say I should be the one with reduced lung capacity.”
Lena stood in the center of the squalor, hands on her hips. “About time you guys decided to join me.”
She either hadn’t noticed the apartment was in no condition to receive guests or, more likely, didn’t give a shit.
“If you two decide to stop and make out,” she continued, like someone not standing over a carton of yesterday’s takeout, “you’ve gotta let me watch.”
“Alas,” Miguel said, “I’ve already said I don’t mix business with pleasure.”
“Your loss.” I shrugged. “Where should I put your shit?”
Wrong question. He swept his gaze over the apartment, the last thing I wanted. He didn’t look bothered, but when he saw me wince, he grinned to let me know he knew I was. Dick. “We can make room on the kitchen counter. If you have enough three-prong plugs over there?”
“I’ll run an extension cord and a power strip.” A true statement, as far as it went. Did I suggest it because most of the techies I knew were hung up on not overloading power strips? The world may never know.
Lena started loading plates into the sink. I dropped Miguel’s equipment off in the space she opened and went to the bedroom to hunt down the cord and strip combo.
By the time I got the cord plugged in and snaked around our desks, Miguel had set his laptop up. He started arranging the rest of his equipment.
“You’re really going all out for this, huh?” Lena leaned across the counter and peered at the router-looking device. “I figured what you did would be all software.”
He shook his head. “Most of the problems I deal with are physical. Equipment problems or, especially, human error.”
“Meaning us,” Lena said.
“You did bring an extremely suspicious object into your apartment, yes.” He offered a softer smile. “I don’t judge. Seriously. Compared to some of the things I’ve seen people do, yours is the height of paranoia.”
She laughed shrilly. Something about her manner had struck me as off since we got back to the apartment, and now it clicked. She was forcing herself to seem cheerful in spite of her worry about Albie. Overdoing it.
Faking it till she made it.
Hey, as long as it worked. Maybe I should try the same. Better than letting myself catastrophize.
“Your amulet, please,” Miguel said.
“Right.” Lena took a deep breath. “On it.”
While she darted into the bedroom, I asked, “What are you checking?”
“Most importantly, whether the amulet broadcasts. Then, if I can determine, if it receives.” He adjusted something on his laptop. “How many devices do you have hooked up to your wifi?”
“Our phones, our PCs, the Switch, the PS3, although that’s turned off...” I scratched my chin. “We’ve got a Roku but we’re off all our subscriptions so it’s not hooked up. Would it still connect?”
Miguel winced at this like I had at the mess. “Unless it’s unplugged, yes. Please make sure you don’t have any old machines connecting, and let me have your wifi password.”
“Let me grab it,” I said. “I’ll look around but I’m pretty sure that’s all our devices.”
By the time I returned with our printout of passwords, Lena was back with the amulet.
Wearing it. It clashed with her tee, but somehow, seeing her in it still seemed right. Like a little piece of her avatar manifested in the real world. She pointed to it and did a little twirl. “What do you think?”
For a moment, neither of us answered.
Miguel shook his head first and said, “Fantastic.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty great.” She smiled, but briefly. She pulled the amulet off and thrust it at Miguel.
He took it just long enough to set it on the counter. “It’s heavier than I expected. Real metal.”
“It doesn’t feel like costume jewelry,” I said. “We figured it had to at least be cheap metal, but let’s be honest. The distribution is so crazy, it could be just about anything.”
“You didn’t see it delivered?” he asked.
“No, it just showed up.” Lena sat down. She ran her finger along the runes on the amulet. “Really fast.”
“Faster than a pizza,” I said. “We ordered before we signed up and it was already out there when Raul showed up with our food.”
“Crazy.” Miguel typed something on his laptop and shook his head at the results. “I’ll check your router in a bit, but it doesn’t look like the amulet is connecting to your network. You actually have fewer IPs assigned than you counted.”
“I guess some of those devices are all the way off,” I said. “We certainly didn’t sign the amulet up or hit the wifi connect button for it.”
He frowned. “Your password’s good enough, too.”
“You really expected it to be hooking into our network?” Lena asked.
“I don’t know what to expect.” His fingers flew across the keyboard, scratching out notes. “It has to do something.”
She gripped the amulet’s chain. “Doesn’t have to be something bad.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t ‘have’ to be.”
Lena shot me a glance. I spread my hands.
Miguel started doing things with his devices. I could at least guess what he’d done on the PC – connected to our network and checked what IP the router dynamically assigned him – but these might as well have been figurative as well as literal black boxes.
“May I?” he asked, touching the amulet.
Lena pulled her hands back. “Might as well.”
Miguel nodded and dragged the amulet closer. He turned it over and felt along the edges of it. He rapped the back of it with his knuckles. “It really does feel solid.”
Lena and I leaned closer to watch.
It didn’t help.
Miguel unspooled some wires with bare copper ends from one device, laid the amulet on them and studied the results. He sucked air through his teeth.
He positioned his router-looking thing next to the amulet and messed with a dial. After several minutes, he shook his head.
He set the amulet on his final device.
I realized I finally knew what one did. “Jeweler’s scale?”
He nodded. He turned to his laptop, opened a browser tab, and entered more notes.
“Thanks for doing this, by the way,” I said.
“Are you joking?” He snorted. “You’d have to pay me not to inspect one of these.”
Lena chuckled, but the wait had sapped her forced cheer and she sort of sank onto the counter. “Doesn’t look like you’ve found anything.”
“It doesn’t seem to be broadcasting on any EM frequency I can track, nor does it seem to respond electrically to any I can broadcast.”
“So it’s not doing anything with our data,” Lena said.
Miguel took a cigarette out and stuck it in his lips, unlit. “Maybe. Would you mind if I took the amulet to my office for more tests?”
Lena narrowed her eyes. “What kind of tests?”
He hesitated.
“Destructive tests?” I suggested.
“I’d like very much to know its chemical composition,” he said. “And if it has something inside it.”
“Yeah, no.” Lena snatched the amulet away and draped it around her neck again. “Whatever it does in-game, it’s the nicest jewelry I own.”
Miguel spread his hands. “I had to ask. If not that... perhaps the trick is in how the app reacts to it? Can I install something on your phone?”
“It’s not going to screw anything up, is it?”
“It will run slower until I uninstall my program.”
“Eh.” She handed it over. “Ran like crap anyway.”
Miguel connected one of his devices to Lena’s phone, tapped through some kind of installation, then, without disconnecting it, slid it back to Lena. “All right. That monitors program activity. Run Third Eye now.”
She tapped the three-eyed icon.
Miguel watched Third Eye try to load. “My program slows it down this much?”
“It just runs terribly,” I said. “If you didn’t notice, you must have a way newer phone than us.”
“Likely.” He frowned. “I don’t know what you see in this game.”
“The AR stuff is really cool,” Lena said.
Miguel studied the readout on his device. I supposed it was some kind of secured Android environment. “It’s not hooking into anything you didn’t permit it, although I could of course quibble with the permissions.”
“I didn’t realize it was tweeting for us,” I said. “What else did we agree to?”
Instead of answering, he took the cigarette from his lips and inspected it. The implied sigh was so much worse than a voiced one.
Lena rolled her eyes. “We get it, all right? We’re terrible users who don’t secure our shit.”
“Your words,” Miguel said, “not mine.”
“Fuck this.” Lena pushed away from the counter.
I caught her arm. “Come on, Lena, he’s trying to help.”
“Bullshit. He’s just curious.” She jerked from my grasp, but she remained seated. “You admitted it, didn’t you, Miguel?”
“Guilty.” He folded his hands behind his head. “Although I’m not finding anything especially interesting.”
Third Eye finished loading. It displayed the icon for the cash shop, Lena’s Materials page, her 1,000 HP, 100 MP, and 0 Tickets, and however much XP she’d collected; I couldn’t see from where I sat.
Miguel looked back and forth between the phone and his device as he tapped the various options. He started off frowning and ended up shaking his head.
“What?” Lena demanded.
“Nothing,” Miguel said.
“C’mon, it’s my phone. Give it to me straight, Doc.”
“I mean it’s doing nothing. No background processes. No outgoing signals. It’s not even using the hooks you gave it.” He shook his head. “It boots slowly, as near as I can tell, because the programming is shit, but it’s doing no harm. That would require it to do something.”
“Try the camera filter,” I said. “That’s the part we’ve actually liked.”
“I guess.” He switched to Lena’s camera and raised the phone.
He pointed it at her and I got a look at how gormless I must’ve appeared when I first saw her avatar.
Lena’s reaction interested me more. With me, she’d preened. When Miguel stared at her, her eyes widened. Abruptly, she looked away. “Yeah, I look awesome. Now get your eyes on the prize. Business and pleasure, remember?”
“I...” Miguel started to lower her phone, but somehow he didn’t get around to finishing.
I reached over and pushed the phone to the counter.
“That,” I said, “is what we see in the game.”
Miguel blinked at me. “Do you...?”
“Yeah,” Lena said. “Cam looks super cool, too.”
I felt myself puff up. “Not as good as you.”
“Well, duh.” She tapped my arm with a punch.
“Well.” Miguel let go of the phone.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Such graphics.” He clasped his hands. “Extraordinary. Enough to make even my friends look good!”
We glared at him until he laughed.
“I think,” he said, “I’m a lot more confused, and a lot more intrigued.”
