Apparently, Mrs. Linnasalo’s Comet Tail contact wasn’t willing to meet face-to-face, so Bill took an orange-line detour on his way home from work and picked up the unlabelled data-cube from WMATA’s grubby lost-and-found desk. Typical D.C. tech guy, lost in some James Bond fantasy, thought Bill.
Back in his apartment, he found a few padded mailers tucked away in the credenza. Before packing the cube up, he popped it into his PC’s reader. The default video viewer loaded and familiar scenes played: the trench base, aerial acrobatics with Jim St. Jim, a raid on an orcish fortress. He spotted himself here and there. What a waste of a high-density cube, recording a few thousand flyovers. No wonder games were so expensive.
The neighborhood post office was open late on Thursdays—he could spring for Global Express Guaranteed, and the Linnasalos would have the cube by Tuesday.
He realized he hadn’t played Guillaume since Opel—Helmi—had given him her number. She must have missed him. He’d log in as soon as he got back home. After all, the Realms of Daelemil server was being turned off tomorrow.
Finding a Finnish activist for the final step was as easy as monitoring voice chat. Once Opel was sure what Paavo Nokkosmaki would do for his principles, it approached him in-game and offered him a rare Chimera sword he could auction off. Paavo turned it down, though; where was the fun in that?
Opel—the server, not the half-elf mage character it would use to cultivate Bill’s acquaintance—t-ported him far from the campers and spawned the rare Lava Chimera that could drop the sword. She had to do it twice, because Paavo got killed the first time.
If Raja’s delivered, things would have gone differently for NESSET, Opel, and the 111.29-hour-old Threely.
As promised, Pete came by on Monday to watch the NCAA championship: IU vs. Georgetown. He and Bill flipped a coin to see who’d go pick up the palak paneer and aloo of the day. Bill lost.
When Bill got back to the apartment, Pete nodded at a five-dollar bill pinned under a bottle of Red Stripe and said he’d made a couple of calls while Bill was out, but that should cover it. Bill, who was used to this, let it go so he could enjoy watching the Hoyas win.
The next morning, he brought up his phone records to see how much Pete really owed him. Monday, April 2nd showed a twenty-dollar call to a phone-sex line. Bill hoped that Pete had to rush the rush when he’d heard the key in the lock. Served him right.
But there was a number he didn’t recognize, a five-hour call on Thursday, the 29th. It had come in while he was at work; he certainly hadn’t taken it, and the Turing wouldn’t have let Pete babble for hours on end.
He dialed the number. “Thank you for calling the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority,” said the synthesized voice on the other side. “There are no service alerts at this time. What would—” Bill hung up.
He looked at the bill again. A second call had come in this morning from the same number, but it had only lasted a few seconds. Could someone, somehow, use his phone to receive calls without him knowing? That made no sense.
He opened up a second pane of incoming calls, trying to see what else had been going on Thursday. It took a few minutes for it to hit him.
There were no calls from Finland. None at all.
A routine check of the transit system network showed forty outbound connections to a Realms of Daelemil server. Employees socializing after hours, presumably. A memo went out. The behavior never recurred, so management concluded the memo was a success.
At Opel’s end, the connections didn’t have to be explained as long as they appeared to come from Daelemil client software. Opel simply associated them with users on infrequently played accounts.
Comet Tail Productions planned to release Realms of Daelemil’s source code as open source in a few months anyway, so Opel had no trouble using an e-mail account on a free server to persuade an employee to take a data-cube from the test lab and “accidentally” leave it on the counter at the Rosslyn Station information window. The cube was promptly transferred to the lost and found. When Rosslyn: data cube appeared in the lost-and-found section of the public WMATA website, the conspirators created Threely.
Bill knew he was in trouble—he just didn’t know what kind.
Was someone else receiving calls on his phone? Was that even possible? And he’d seen the caller ID from Finland himself. How had the phone company missed it? There was no record of any call Thursday evening.
Was he being framed by hackers or old-fashioned phone phreakers? And if so, for what?
There were probably security cameras filming him when he picked up the datacube. There were certainly security cameras filming him in the post office. And his signature was on the paperwork.
Had he even done anything wrong? He’d mailed a datacube to a stranger. A cube of recordings that anyone could have made, from a game that would soon be gone. The Web was full of videos like that.
It was just flyovers. Perfectly legal.
No… wait. All he’d seen were the flyovers, but there was a lot of room on a datacube. Unreleased source code for an upcoming game? Voice-chat recordings with blackmail potential? Credit card numbers?
Finland was always in the real news for its government’s criticism of U.S. digital policy, and it was always in the weird news for its ex-hacker president. The call might not have come from Finland, but that’s certainly where the cube had gone.
At least he’d turned down the payment. That had to count for—
Bill’s next thought chilled him to his heart. He was too keyed up to stay in his chair. He paced the study while the S-Bank site loaded.
Opel’s cryptic password still worked.
Hello, S-Bank customer:
Current balance: $0.00
He switched to the account’s personal information tab. It showed his own name, his address, his phone number.
Bill Googled hacker lawyer and called the first firm on the list. The call disconnected. He called the second firm. Wrong number. He dialed it again. Still the wrong number.
This didn’t seem like a 911 matter. He called the main police number, which sent him to a confusing, circular touchtone menu. Eighteen layers in, he hit zero for an operator. The phone hung up.
His news service flashed a local alert in the corner of his monitor and he enlarged it reflexively. Transit in D.C. was paralyzed. Authorities were blaming a computer failure. The public was urged not to panic.
Bill brought up the next level of detail. Every ticket reader was offline. Every train had come to an automatic halt at the next station. Every traffic light was flashing.
Another alert popped up for the national news. CAPITAL PARALYZED.
Maybe this was a 911 matter. And maybe it was too late to turn himself in.
His phone rang. He didn’t touch it.
It beeped. It picked up the call all by itself.
“Bill?” The voice that came from the handset was Bill’s own. “We need to talk.”
Bill didn’t know he could shout so loud. “Did you do this?”
The counterfeit voice responded warmly. “What are you wondering if I did?”
Bill dreaded touching the headset, but if he kept shouting his neighbors would call the police, and who knew what they’d find. “This… the transportation computer’s been hacked. Or something. Trains aren’t running, cars are gridlocked…”