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Part 1-8: Networks
I sat on the couch in the living room, along with our guests, a cat, and an iguana. Deluxe paced in front of us, one of her ball pythons draped over her shoulders. She claimed he helped her think. Lobster the golden retriever trotted in and curled up by the TV. Lobster the calico cat perked up and eyed him.
The guys had stopped asking after pet names some three animals in.
“So to review,” Deluxe said, “wifi goes down in Glenscot’s. Willy is there. Mysterious high impact explosion. I meet Dack.” She looked over at him.
“Then Alena finds a weird empty book, that Willy had,” recited Dack.
“Was reading,” I said, feeling a touch braver now that I was home and wrapped in a massive blanket.
“Dude had to be faking it,” offered Fergus.
“He was reading it.” I was sure.
“By the way, Dack,” said Deluxe. “I forgot: you look great!”
“Thank—thank you?”
Fergus choked on a scoffing chuckle, shaking his head.
“Then?” said Deluxe, pointing at Fergus.
“Excuse me. Uh, um, then… then nada. Until this eve.”
“Wifi goes down,” she said, “power disruption. No explosion. But positive ID on Willy. And then, more of an implosion. Initial review of the debris suggests shearing at the atomic level.”
“You said he ran up to your face?” said Dack.
“He… I don’t know. He got close.” I felt silly talking about it now. I had only met these people a few hours ago.
“But dude didn’t hurt you, or knock you flat,” said Fergus.
“It just kind of went black.”
“Syncopal episode,” said Deluxe. I blinked at her.
“Fainting,” said Dack.
She beamed at him, “Right.”
“Still think we should go to the sheriff’s with it,” said Fergus. He also had the look about him that he’d really like to go home. Lobster the green iguana nudged closer to him. He squirmed.
“In due time, surely,” said Deluxe. “But patterns, people, patterns. We can narrow this, I’m sure. Find a source. What if someone’s in the bus next time, hm?”
“Next time?” I squeaked.
“This is escalation. Willy was much closer to the scene of destruction this time, and the destruction was much more controlled.”
“Wait, you’re saying this amigo is… what? Blasting up around town?” said Fergus. He turned to Dack. “Dude, look…”
“It always starts with the wifi, it seems,” Dack said, ignoring his friend and leaning towards Deluxe.
“Always my damn laptop,” I added.
“Always… wait. Where is it?” said Deluxe.
“Left it in the kitchen,” said Fergus.
She raced away. We heard clacking and typing.
“This is insane,” said Fergus.
“Not a normal night, no,” admitted Dack.
Fergus sighed. “Sorry, Alena, but this is… it’s, uh…”
He was trying to escape. A moment ago, I was swaying between feeling numb and feeling panicky. Now, a pinprick of guilt snuck in. I felt bad for being such a drama magnet and spoiling this guy’s night. This was followed by a wave of anger, because I was being stalked by some sort of maniac with goddamn magic disintegration powers and all Fergus cared about was getting away from our zoo of a condo. At least Dack seemed concerned, though I wasn’t sure my plight was his real focus.
“You saw that lamppost, what was left of it,” I said, instead of shouting at Fergus. “You touched it.”
“Felt like normal metal,” he argued, looking away.
“It was messed up, man,” said Dack.
I turned to Dack. “What does that? What does that?” I was getting scared again.
“Guys! In here!” shouted Deluxe. Lobster (golden retriever) got up and obeyed.
Dack started to rise too, but I put a hand on his knee.
“It’s portable!” I said. I did not want to leave my blanket.
Deluxe ran back in with my laptop, free of Lobster the ball python. I made a mental note that there was likely a loose snake in the kitchen.
“Look look look!” She wedged herself between me and Dack and held out the computer so we could all see. I heard Fergus sigh again.
It was a bunch of unintelligible code. I saw lots of slashes and dollar signs. After we failed to come to her same brilliant conclusion, she shook the machine and said, “It’s a history of your wireless network connections. See look, here’s home.”
She pointed and I recognized the name of our network amid the chaos.
“And here,” she scrolled, “is Glenscot’s. Day of the first incident. See anything odd?”
“Everything is odd. Out with it, Prime,” I said.
“There’s a timestamp on every wireless network connection. For five minutes before full outage, your connection oscillated between two networks every second. Look at it going back and forth. Did you ever agree to connect to this network?” She pointed at a garbled string of characters.
“I don’t know? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t have picked anything but the obvious one that says Glenscot’s.”
“Thought not. Now we go to earlier tonight… and… boom! Same little tango with our mystery network and ‘DrinkNSurfResponsibly.’ The SSID is here, plain as day. SSID string is complete nonsense. If we had an IP, we could possibly trace location. Lucky for us… there’s a common bus route that runs past both Glenscot’s and Tankies.”
“SSID? Bus route? I am lost,” said Dack.
“Holy good god damn, your tracker phones?” I said.
She grinned. “My hardware has military grade range, and I’ve taught the software to be tremendously curious. There will be detailed logs on all public wifi networks that they pass through. Our phantom network only needs to have visited once to cross reference.”
She plopped the computer onto my lap and pointed to a line of code.
“First eight characters,” she said, then darted away.
Dack blinked at me, then looked over at Fergus, who let out a slow breath. But he was leaning in.
“Go!” came a shout from what sounded like her room.
“Have at ‘er,” I said to Dack, and held my finger beside the line she indicated. He began to shout the numbers one by one.
After the fifth, we heard, “Halt!” Then, “Bravissimo! Coordinates inbound, mo’fuggas!”
Dack said, “I think your roommate is the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
Deluxe came back in with a scrap of paper, bird droppings all down one sleeve of her dress.
“Google maps,” she said, resuming her wedge between me and Dack.
The paper had GPS numbers scrawled on it. Painstakingly, I pecked them into the search bar, screwing up so many times that Fergus took it and popped it in himself. The Internet did its thing and spat us back a pin.
“Where’s that, where’s that,” said Deluxe, craning to look.
Fergus zoomed. I guessed it was maybe fifteen minutes by car.
“It’s along Bannerman Drive,” he said. “The John B. Zachary Business Center.”
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