XYZT by Kristen Alvanson & Kristen Alvanson

Author:Kristen Alvanson & Kristen Alvanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Urbanomic Media Ltd.
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

When Estella awoke, confused and exhausted from her dream, the hard drive sat on her dresser taunting her, as if aware that she had tossed and turned all night without knowing why. Bleary-eyed, she munched on a stale muffin washed down with soymilk, forcing herself to eat even though she wasn’t hungry. The black box is calling.

It was time to plug into the thing. She rummaged through a drawer full of cords until she came to a connector that fit snugly in the socket, and attached the other end to her laptop.

A blue screen of death would have been predictably annoying, but instead, when the drive finally span up, it plunged the entire screen into unillumined blackness. The light on the drive glowed, but nothing happened. Ready for the challenge of hacking her way in, she pulled her wavy strawberry-blonde hair back, not bothering to get up to find something to tie it with. This would take skills, and skills she had.

Minutes turned to hours as she laboriously recovered all of the files from the hidden partition she had located. A feast for the eyes: documents, images, archived emails. She couldn’t open them fast enough…. One folder full of incomprehensible circuit plans. Specs for what…? GPUs? Okay, processing power. Then flash memory, GPS locator, standard microelectronic components, but what’s the controller for…? Another containing JPEGs of city locations, aerial view plans, and text files with long lists of surnames, both American and Middle Eastern looking. Why would they need all of this? Then cut and pasted bank transfers detailing payments made throughout the first part of last year, and archives of what seemed to be long email exchanges in the same Arabic script.

Sure enough, many of the documents featured Kade’s name. But Estella still couldn’t make this unlikely pair add up: preppy Kade and his imaginary billions, his ‘cribs’ and ‘rides’, always working on something big, and the gentle Amir, apparently so disinterested, so committed to his work above all else, keen to make his way in the US and help out his parents back in Iran? Amir, who had now ‘gone away’ as he warned her he might—with Kade?

Estella continued to scan the drive item by item. Amir had definitely been working overtime. The technical documents referred to hardware she had never even heard of, and the code used a bewildering array of libraries and APIs he had evidently hacked together himself. ‘Tests’, ‘deployment location’, ‘device activation’. What the hell has Amir gotten himself involved in? Horrified, she reluctantly googled bits of information that she had found. Strings of words, names, component IDs, anything that would give her more to go on.

An hour later her phone vibrated and a fluorescent green Android robot came on screen locking the phone. A geek for hi-tech, she had the latest phone which, as a student, she couldn’t really afford. Must be updating. She connected the charger and forgot about it, engrossed in the plot unfolding before her.

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