Notes [Initially released December 12, 2015, last revised October 22, 2016]:
- All characters are the product of the authors' imaginations and are over eighteen.
- This is a relatively short story/vignette, and we recommend reading the previous chapters.
Thanks to Skye4Life for editing this.
Standing inside the doorway to my office, I'm looking over the pieces of my computer scattered across my desk with disbelief. I can feel my mouth hanging open but I don't quite know what to say. The curiously calm guilt I'd felt this morning is gone, replaced now by worry and anxiety.
"It's going to be okay, Ryan. I just need to get to the bottom of this."
"Who are you, Page?"
"I'm your sister," she says, smiling sheepishly.
"This is starting to get pretty - um - out there... What are you doing?"
"Okay, well - let me see. I'm virtualizing your computer from your hard drive onto this laptop, so we can isolate your system from the malware that's been installed. I'm attempting to track the installation vectors of this attack..."
It's total geek-speak to my nontechnical ears and I don't really hear everything she's saying. I'm seeing that Page doesn't even understand my anxiety while she continues talking past me. I can tell she's concerned and I know I should be listening but -
"Wait, say that again - what's fishing got to do with this? I took a fishing trip to Alaska for silvers in August -"
"No, Ryan, phishing with a 'ph'. It was probably some type of e-mail or website that delivered a Trojan. I'm going to figure it out but it's fairly sophisticated."
"Who were you talking to?"
"Can you come around here and sit with me?" she asks.
I hesitate because Page seems to have cast an enchantment on me. Thinking that somehow sitting next to her might weaken my resolve to get some answers, I delay.
"Are you going to explain what's going on?"
"Yeah, some."
I pull around the straight back chair and sit beside her as I stare at the two nearly identical laptops on my desk. I see the duffel bag at her feet, it is open and I can see several items, she's just purchased, jammed inside it and anxiously wonder if she's going to leave me now as quickly as she came.
"Okay, look, I'm sorry I won't be able to tell you everything. Right now, we need to make sure this isn't about me."
"Make sure this isn't about you?"
"The hack on your PC. I started to wonder about your phone yesterday and then again this morning after - um - well, after I - after we..."
"Yeah, okay. I'm glad you don't have words for it either," I say, as I feel myself blushing.
"Anyway - I was poking around on your PC to see if there were any issues. You know you haven't updated your anti-virus in almost a year?"
"I probably haven't since you left." I say, with my heart sinking.
"Yeah..." she says. She's looking at me and I feel like an idiot, especially when I compare myself to her. "So, I found some tracking software and a key-logger."
"Shit!" I wince.
"It looks like the logger goes back at least to October while the tracker started in January, if we can believe the dates on the files, I need to do some more forensics..."
"How do you know how to do all this stuff, Page?"
"I've been doing it since I was like eleven."
"A couple years after Mom and Dad split, you became some kind of elite hacker?"
"Sort of, but not really. Dad was working lots and I wanted something to do, but he wouldn't let me go out with my friends much. So I talked him into letting me play an online game. I got really good, but the game got boring and so I wrote some mods to make the boring parts go faster."
"Like the video game you were playing yesterday?"
"It was similar to that one. Anyway, people started cheating and hacking it to get advantages... I got pissed at those guys and started building tools to block what they were doing, track them down and report them... Then hacking became a side activity I enjoyed and I just kept getting better at it."
"So after you - uh - 'virtualize' my PC, I can have it back or -"
"No, we're going to have to wipe most of it. Several of the firmware components are overwritten in such a way that we can't fix them without doing so. They might even have come that way; it could be that's just how they got in to start."
"So first my phone is gone and now..."
"I took care of the phone, Ry."
"Yeah, you did... How'd you remember all that stuff though?" I ask, as I think about how quickly she'd typed in technical details about my phone.
"I - it's a little embarrassing."
"What?"
"I have eidetic memory."
"Is that related to your IQ?" I ask.
I'm suddenly remembering Mom and Dad discussing her IQ test results. Some teacher had called the house the year before they'd divorced to tell them that Page's was too high to measure accurately and they should probably put her in a special program.
"No one knows if there's any correlation and I really don't like talking about how smart everyone thinks I am."
"Page, there's no shame in being smart."
"Smart, no, there's no shame in that. But being called a genius ALL the time and being expected to live up to that shit..."