Promissory Note by Tracy Cooper-Posey

Author:Tracy Cooper-Posey [Cooper-Posey, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction Romance
Publisher: Tracy Cooper-Posey
Published: 2016-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Laura didn’t see Micah at all the next day. He didn’t come out of his office at eight to make sure she stopped working and went home.

Nor did he appear the next day.

That left Laura free to contemplate the burning question in her mind. What happened to Micah, twenty years ago?

It was no longer simple curiosity driving her to find the answer. Something had changed, out there on that ladder. She had to know more about Micah. She had to know if she could trust him. In her gut, she knew she could. Only, she had learned the hard way she wasn’t always a good judge of people.

Her sleep became fractured. When she did sleep, her dreams were uneasy ones of dark shadows and threats she didn’t understand, yet seemed to be all around her.

The lack of sleep was a danger of its own, too. She became even more careful about who she spent time with and where she went, trying to minimize the risks. Mostly, she stayed at home and kept digging into the ship’s history, looking for more information about the 381 date that had been stripped of vital news.

One night, when she had fallen into a fitful, shallow sleep, she woke with a jerk. “It’s masked, not missing,” she breathed into the dark. Automatically, she reached out for her journal and with sleep-fogged eyes and an uncooperative hand, wrote it down.

Sleep grabbed her again, pulling her down.

The next morning, as she was reviewing her journal entries for the day before as usual, she came to the scribble at the end.

Masked, not missing.

Laura considered the cryptic note. She remembered writing it down, now that she had seen it. It was enough for her to recall the epiphany that had woken her.

The missing newsfeed items were still there. Micah had hidden them, not erased them, for the newsfeed manager was still counting all the items. It just wasn’t displaying them.

A tiny part of her was relieved he had not taken the irreversible step of deleting parts of the ship’s history. Hiding items was a lesser offence. It was almost understandable.

They were still there. She just had to figure out a way to retrieve them. She was a software engineer. She couldn’t code and she couldn’t read raw code as Micah and the others could. However, Laura handled finished code all day long. She could package it, install it and make it do what it was supposed to.

There was more than one way to render and execute code. The newsfeed was just a sophisticated layer over the top of the raw code, rendering it in a way that non-coders could use.

If she could find the raw code for the hidden items, she could render it another way, outside the newsfeed function.

It took her three days to match up the raw code with the missing items. She stashed a copy of the code, then built a crude application to read it, cobbling parts from a dozen different programs.

Finally, she was able to read the missing news items.

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