Viral Attack

by beb

Tucker's friend, T'Keisha, is viciously attacked by a ghost calling itself "Technus 0.7." Where did this primitive version of Technus come from, how did get transmitted as a computer virus. Why is someone trying to infect computers with ghosts?

1. Chapter 1

Viral Attack - Chapter One

"Thanks for babysitting for us, T'keisha," he said, opening out his wallet and pulling out the twenty dollars agreed on. Then he pulled out an extra five and handed it to her. "This is for doing it on such short notice," he added.

"Thanks, Mr. Albright," the girl replied, popped out of his car and ran up to her doorstep and let herself in with her key. Mr. Albright waited in the car until she had closed the door before driving off.

He was a good man that way. Thoughtful. East Gratiot, Illinois was a middle-class black community, better than a lot of communities south of Chicago but hardly crime-free. And his kids, four boys, while rambunctious, were well behaved. Of course she played with them for an hour or more after she arrived so that when bedtime came around at 9:00 they were always ready. From the grateful look Mrs. Albright had on their occasional nights out, T'keisha Fulton gathered that the boys tended to be a handful.

T'keisha closed the door softly and found her way upstairs. A small nightlight at the top of the stairs showed her the way. Even though it was only 10:30 her parents had already gone to bed. She entered her room, turned on a small desk lamp, then fall across her bed in a weary plop. She kicked off her sneakers, then started guiltily when they hit the floor with a loud klunk! Her father got up in the middle of the night for his shift at the Coleman Manufacturing Co. as a maintenance engineer. He hated being awaken in the middle of, what was for him, the night. After a minute with not stirrings from across the hall, she relaxed and let out her breath.

Then awoke with a start, having fallen asleep where she lay.

T'keisha considered just sleeping in her clothes, but with a shake of her head got up and peeled off her T-shirt and jeans. She sat down at her desk and turned on a small fan before opening her laptop. The fan wasn't so much for her, though the August night was warm and the room a little stuffy. The fan was for her laptop whose own fan had conked out some while back and tended to overheat otherwise.

She was pretty sure there was an E-Mail from Tucker Foley. He had been writing to her most every night since they'd met at summer camp. Tucker was a nice kid; liked computers like she did and didn't think she was some kind of mutant because of that. He had a fun sense of humor, shared her love of manga and karate flicks. The pity was that he lived so far away in Amity Park. While the laptop was waking up she checked to make sure the baseball cap was still stuck over the webcam. It wouldn't do to accidently active the cam while she was in her underwear, though Tucker had seen her naked during that horrible ghost attack at summer camp. As she had seen him naked.

She blushed at the memory. The ghost thing absolutely terrified her. She hoped she'd never see another ghost ever again. But what she's seen of Tucker .... was kind of nice. T'keisha hoped that Tucker thought of her as well, though she was a tall skinny beanpole without any hips or boobs to speak of, darker skinned than he was with hair in tight cornrows.

As expected there was a letter from Tucker in her inbox. With an attachment.

She wondered what it was. It was big, nearly a megabyte. "Technus 0.7" Maybe it was a game he thought she'd be interested in. Before opening it, though, she started an anti-virus program and set it to scan the attachment. Her mail program had already scanned it for viruses but she always kept a second program handy in just case. It pronounced the attachment clean so she clicked on it.

The screen went blank then slowly a pointy green face began to resolve. It was oddly grainy, like a low resolution picture blown up too much. T'keisha could almost see the polygons the face was composed of. It didn't look like the start of any game she's ever seen before. With apprehension she waited for the face to speak.

"I am Technus 0.7!" it declared in a shrill, irritating voice, "Master of all things mechanical! I have taken over your computer! Soon I will take over all the computers of the world!" It began to laughing maniacally.

With a curse, T'keisha snapped the laptop shut and reached to pull the internet connect out of the back of the computer. Green hands oozed out of the crack between the halves of the laptop and wrestled with her. She pulled the laptop off the desk and flung it across the room. It landed with a loud clatter and sprang open. The green face was still there, laughing at her. "Foolish child! Did you really think you could thwart Technus 0.7, master of all things technological?" The face started pulling itself away from the laptop's screen and emerge into her room.

T'keisha scrambled across the room, picking up one of her shoes on the way. She slammed the laptop close again and hammered with her shoe on the parts of the weird ghost that was trying to crawl out of her computer. Each time she hit a finger or amorphous pseudopod there would be a yelp from inside. But the ghost kept trying to get free.

Desperately, the girl flipped the laptop over and pulled the battery pack out.

There was a strangled "Arrgh!" from the laptop as the hard drive braked to a stop. There was a click as the monitor lost power.

T'keisha slumped where she was, sitting on the floor. The laptop slide out of lax fingers. She could hear stirrings across the hall. Snap! She'd awaken her father. She was trying to think what to tell him when green hands erupted from the laptop,yanking the lip open. "Little girl, did you think Technus 0.7 could be stopped by a little thing like that. I control this computer. I decide when it will run and what it will run. I do not need your puny batteries to survive for I, Technus 0.7, am master of all things mechanical!"

T'keisha smashed the lip back down on the ghost trying to get out of her laptop. Grasping it in both hands she ran to the old ladder-back chair in front of her desk and brought the laptop down on one of the rails. Again and again she smashed it all the while the ghost was taunting her. Finally the portable bent in two and the ghost, with a wail of "I'll be back" evaporated into thin air.

By that time her father was pounding on her door, demanding to know what was going on in there. T'keisha grabbed a robe hanging on her closet door and opened the door.

"Child, what's the matter with you? Don't you know I gotta get my rest?"

"Sorry, Poppa. I didn't mean to wake you up."

"What you doing in here, anyway?"

Holding her robe closed, T'keisha tried to think what to tell her father. "A mouse ran across my room and I was trying to kill it." she stammered.

"A mouse! There are no mice in this house." her father declared with certainty.

"Maybe it came in through the window." T'keisha pointed to where one window was open a couple inches.

"Next time just chase it back out the window!" her father declared. He was turning to leave when he suddenly asked, "what the matter with your laptop. Why's it all in pieces. I paid good money for that thing."

"It had a virus..."

"Is that how you usually treat viruses?" he asked.

"It was a pretty obnoxious virus."

"Just have it working when I get home from work," he ordered and shuffled back to his bedroom.

T'keisha closed her door and sat on the foot of her bed and wept. She had never been so frightened in her life. Not even when that horrible ghost at summer camp had come boiling over the lake towards her had she felt this frightened. Of course, then she had Tucker and his friends there to protect her.

Tucker!

How dare he send her a virus! She was going to ream him out good. T'keisha reached for her wi-fi PDA and touched the "on" button.

"Foolish mortal!" a whinny voice booked from her PDA, "did you think it would be that easy to get rid of Technus 0.7?"

With a scream she threw the PDA out the window.

The tall black girl sat on her bed for ten minutes afraid to move, afraid to touch any of her other gadgets for fear that the weird, creepy ghost had somehow infected them as well. Eventually she recalled that there was an all-night convenience store three blocks away that still had a pay phone.

She pulled on her jeans and T-shirt, wiggled her feet back into her shoes and crept downstairs and let herself out of the house. She walked quickly towards the convenience store.

Danny Fenton was having The Dream.

He was at the local water park. Paulina, wearing a small bikini of nebulous color, had just asked him to spread suntan lotion on her back. Danny could feel the soft, warm skin glide through his fingers, smooth like butter. As he worked his way down the small of her back she whispered, "don't forget my legs" in that exotic lisp of hers. Forget her legs! He couldn't keep his eyes of them, long and lean and.....

b-l-a-a-a-a-a-a-t!

Danny sat up with a start, heart pounding from the sudden alarm. Was it the Fenton House Defenses? Or the Ghost Zone Portal? Civil Defense? The Coast Guard... Danny shook his head. It couldn't be the coast guard, they didn't live anywhere near water.

b-l-a-a-a-a-a-a-t!

"Oh!" Danny sighed in relief. It was his cellphone. But who would be calling him at -- he looked at his screen on the phone -- midnight?

"Tucker, figures." he groaned and flipped the phone open.

"This had better be good, Tuck. I was having The Dream."

"The one with Paulina and..."

"Yes. So what's so important that you had to call me in the middle of the night?"

"I got a call from T'keisha."

"Good for you. Now can I go back to sleep? I think if hurry I can still dream about oiling her toes."

"Danny, this is important."

"So is The Dream."

"T'keisha was attacked by a ghost."

"So what do you want me to do, fly down there and chase it away?" Danny asked crossly, his dreams of Paulina fading away.

Tucker hesitated for a moment before saying "Sort of."

Something about his answer troubled Danny. "Tucker, are we alone?" he asked.

"I - uh - have T'keisha on two-way..."

"Hi, Danny" a faraway voice called.

"Tucker, warn me when you do stuff like that. I almost ...you know." Danny had a secret that only Tucker and one other knew about, that Danny Fenton was also Danny Phantom, the ghost boy hero.

"Sorry, man. You never gave me a chance to explain."

Danny grunted into the phone "So what's going on?" he finished.

T'keisha recounted her attack, Tucker filling in details he's obviously heard before.

Danny was sitting on the edge of his bed by the time she finished. He stifled a yawn then asked. "Let me see if I've got this straight. Tucker sent you an E-Mail..."

"No," Tucker interrupted, "she got what she thought was an email from me. But I hadn't sent her one today."

"T'keisha?" Danny prompted.

"It looked like an letter from Tucker. I didn't really look at the routing information but it had the right starting server."

"And you checked it with two different anti-virus programs and it passed both of them?"

"Uh-uh."

"But when you opened it a ghost tried to come out of your computer/"

"My laptop, right."

"Green, skin, angular face, high, grating voice, calling itself 'Technus'?"

"Right. It liked to speak of itself in the third person."

"That sounds like Technus all right. Are you sure it called itself Technus 0.7?" Danny asked

"Yes. That was weird because who would send a beta version of a program?"

"More like an alpha version," Tucker interjected.

"Either way, this is wrong. Technus is running version 2.0 and the last I heard he was behind bars at Walker's Prison in the Ghost Zone."

"You've heard of this ghost before?" T'keisha asked, incredulously.

"Um, uh, yeah," Danny answered. "We've run into it a couple times." Danny didn't like letting people know that he fought ghosts like his parents did, for a number of reasons, the chief of which was that he didn't want people thinking Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom in the same sentence too often. The other reason was that his parent's approach to ghost hunting was so psychotic that he didn't want to be associated with them.

"But it's gone now?"

"Uh-uh," T'keisha confirmed. "I guess. It tried getting out of my PDA but I threw that in the yard before calling you."

"Tuck, what do you want to me do?" Danny asked. "She's like a hundred miles away and I don't have a car."

"92.3 miles as the crow flies," Tucker corrected.

"The crow ain't flying and neither of us are old enough to drive."

"I thought we could borrow the Specter Speeder. It would be like, what, a half hour down. We could get back in plenty of time so you're parents wouldn't even know it was gone."

"No can do. We've borrowed the Specter Speeder so many times Dad's put a lock on it. "

"Oh." Tucker thought for a moment. "Let's call Sam, maybe she has some ideas."

"At this hour of the night, you call her." Danny said.

"Whatever, but she won't get as mad at you as she would at me."

"No!"

Tucker plead for another couple minutes. Then Danny heard him pressing keys and after a moment a sleepy voice said "hello?"

Tucker quickly began telling her T'keisha's story, never pausing long enough to Sam for get in any questions. Danny was falling asleep during all this so it was with a jolt when someone asked "key or password?"

"What?"

"The Specter Speeder: key or password?" It was Sam. She sounded wide awake. Danny wondered how she did it.

"Why?"

"If it's a key then there's a spare under one of the fenders. If it's a password, the password is either 'Maddie' or 'Vladdie.' "

"How do you know these things?" Danny asked, astonished that Sam could guess his father's passwords so easily.

"Your father's many things, but subtle he's not." She continued. "You pick up Tucker and meet me on your front doorstep in - ah - twenty minutes." Sam hung up before Danny could object.

Danny got up, turned on the light. He looked around to make sure the room was presentable. Threw some old underpants in the hamper in the closet then reached inside himself somewhere and exerted the force that turned him from human to ghost. A band of light encircled his waist, split in two and quickly moved to head and toes. As the band passed his body twisted through fourth dimensional space, turning his flesh and blood and DNA inward while bringing out the ectoplasma fused to those molecules. His dark hair turned snow white, his eyes began glowing green. A black jumpsuit with white details covered his body. His legs faded away into a smoky tail.

Danny Phantom leaped through the wall of his bedroom and soared off towards Tucker's house. Only to return a moment later and revert back to human form. He dragged on his jeans and a shirt. While Danny Phantom was always dressed for business, Danny Fenton had been sleeping in his underwear!

Sam was waiting for them at the front of the Fentonworks building when Danny got back with Tucker. She was a slender, attractive girl with long black hair tied up in a ponytail. She was wearing a dark colored cropped T-Shirt and a green and black plaid skirt over purple tights. Heavy Doc Marten boots were on her feet, a small moped leaned against the handrail.

As long as he was touching them Danny could extend his invisibility or intangibility or weightlessness to other people. He had Tucker gripped in one hand and took Sam's hand in the other and floated them all through the wall of the building and down into the Fenton's laboratory.

The lab was a large, messy, cluttered room, dominated on the far wall by an eight-sided gate, sealed with heavy metal doors. To the left was a vehicle about the side of a full size van, but streamlined somewhat like an Airstream trailer. It sat on rails facing a long, dark tunnel.

Danny landed by the passenger door and pointed to the lock. It was a nine-button keypad. There was no printing on the keys but it was easy enough to guess the keys corresponded to the same three letter groups as on a telephone dial.

Sam looked at the keys for a moment, then tried opening the door. A digitized voice said "password required." Slowly and thinking carefully she typed in 8-5-1-3-3-4-3, which spelled out "Vladdie." "Incorrect password" the digitized voice announced. "Actually I'm, relieved by that," she said when she explained when she had just typed in. I'd hate to think that your Dad so likes Vlad Masters as to use his name for a password.

Sam then typed in 6-2-3-3-4-3, which spelled out "Maddie," Danny's mother's name. "Password accepted." the voice announced and the door popped open of its own accord.

Danny set about turning on circuits and warming up the engines.

"Hey, Danny," Tucker asked, "what kind of stuff you got that we can take along?"

Danny got out of the pilot's seat and joined his friend looking at the piles of gadgets on the work bench.

"Well....." Danny drawled. "We've got a couple blasters here. A Jack-o-Nine Tails.... Oh, here's theFenton Net'apult. Let's take that since Sam's not big on frying ghosts. Oh, and a thermos."

"I was thinking more along the lines of analyzers, actually." Tucker said even as he was picked up the various weapons Danny had pointed out.

"Oh.... uh...Here's a Fenton-Finder. I think I fixed this one to not find me. And . . . .and . . . .oh, here's just the thing. The Fenton Multicorder. It does twenty different forms of spectral analysis."

"Does it play MP3s?"

"No."

"Not much of a 'corder is it? Know how to operate it?"

"Not really."

"You really should take more of an interest in this stuff Danny, since you're using it more than your parents."

Danny just grunted irritatedly.

They carried the pile of gear into the Specter Speeder where they found that Sam had finished the pre-flight checklist and had turned on the tunnel lights. She was sitting in the pilot's seat and didn't get up when Danny moved to take her place.

"Come on, let me flight it." She pleaded. "You and Tucker are always grabbing the pilots seat. I never get a turn."

"You don't know how to fly it," Tucker unwisely blurted out. He gained a long cold glare for Sam.

Danny, a bit more cautious, asked, "Know where we're going?"

"I've got East Gratiot locked in on the GPS. Tucker will have to direct us from there."

Unable to think of any other objections, Danny said, "OK, let's do this thing."

He cringed as Sam, spun the Speeder on the launching carriage so that it faced into the tunnel and pressed forward on the steering yoke. The Speeder rolled down the tunnel accelerating at a fast but smooth pace. Abruptly their were hurled into the air as the Speeder exited from the tunnel in the Fenton's back yard. The above ground swimming pool that covered the exit swung out of the way as they left and sank back down covering up the tunnel made as soon as they were clear. The water in the pool splashed on the grass and fresh water was being pumped back in by the time they cleared the top of the Fentonwork's building and turned east. Sam pushed the throttles forward and the Speeder leaped forward. Danny had to admit she was operating the Speeder as well as he did. Seeing the smile on her face he wondered if she would ever let him drive again!

Sam swung the Speeder around so it pointed in the right direction. She and Tucker talked in low voices about distances, air speed, ETAs and where to land. With nothing to offer to the conversation Danny sat down in one of the back seat and flipped the back rest down. Sleepiness washed over him. He tried to re-enter his dream about Paulina but for some reason her delicate little, pink toes kept turning into hairy, callused things with ugly, twisted yellow toenails that somehow he knew belonged to Mr. Lancer, his high school home room teacher. Not that he had ever seen Mr. Lancer's bare feet, but that's how it is with dreams.

Danny half-opened his eyes and glanced around the inside of the Speeder. Everything was as before. Sam was flying low to the ground so as not to appear on FAA radar. It was pitch dark outside so the large windshield was more like a curved mirror. Danny drifted back to sleep thinking about Technus.

The self-proclaimed Master of all Things Technical was big on boasting about his accomplishments and plans but most of the time wasn't very clever with his schemes. He could possess machinery and make it do things that ordinarily it couldn't, like attack people. He could reform lots of machinery into giant robotic bodies and he could reside in electronic devices, even leap from one to another if there was the potential for an electrical current. But it had never traveled as an E-mail before or acted like some kind of spectral spam.

Then there was the weird way he kept calling out that he was version 0.7. Danny had learn enough from Tucker to know that incomplete versions of a program were often zero-point-something, indicating that they were still in development, released in alpha version to get feedback from users. But ghosts, even Technus, were unique beings -- entities. They didn't come in versions or duplicates, multiple copies, whatever. The last time he had fought with the ghost, Technus had been calling himself Technus 2.0, claiming to have learned from his earlier battles with Danny. How could there be a beta version of Technus when he was already at 2.0? Danny would really like to have a long, uninterrupted talk with Technus. The Technus he knew to be locked away in Walker's Ghost Zone prison. Walker was the ghost of all prison wardens and he had "issues" with Danny, had even invaded the human world once to try to capture him. Trying to sneak into Walker's prison to talk to Technus did not seem like a healthy idea. Danny hoped they could solve this problem without having to go into the Ghost Zone.

Danny was finally falling asleep when Tucker shouted out "There it is! That has to be T'keisha's house."

Chapter Two

Danny got up and walked into the cockpit and looked out through the large windshield. A half moon aided a few weak streetlights to illuminate a dingy street of worn out older houses, mostly three stories high and so crowded together that only a couple feet separated them. There were large stoops in the front and an alley along the back with small garages. Danny was used to streets lined with three and four story brownstone apartment buildings. Even the FentonWorks had been one until his parents had converted it into their laboratory. Danny wasn't sure what to make of this. It wasn't the picket-fenced TV-world of Mayberry, RFD and not quite the urbanity he was used to.

Tucker pointed to a pocket-size playground on the corner a block over from T'keisha's house. Sam swooped in under some tall oaks and parked the Spector Speeder in the shadows behind a small toolshed.

They were still a half block from her house when T'keisha, sitting on her stoop, saw them She leaped up and rushed up to Tucker grabbing him in an embrace that nearly bowled him over. She seemed to be saying "oh, god" over and over but perhaps Danny was mis-hearing her.

After a minute, when it didn't appear that T'keisha was going to let go, Danny leaned over to Sam and said, a bit loudly, "I think we're going to need the 'jaws of life' to extract Tuck."

She slapped him hard on the shoulder in reply.

"Make yourself useful and haul that gear to the back of their house and sweep it for ecto-traces," Sam suggested after a moment.

Danny looked peevishly as Tucker and T'keisha and picked up the knapsacks of instruments Tucker had been carrying and stamped down the street. He had barely left when T'keisha finally let go of Tuck and turned to hug Sam. "No hugs for the ghost boy," Danny growled, walking between houses to the dark square of grass and barbeque equipment that constituted T'keisha's backyard.

Danny liked to think that his ghost sense could tell him if a ghost was anywhere near, though technically it only warned him when he was about to be attacked by a ghost. Since he rarely met a ghost who wasn't trying to kill him, his confusion on this point it was understandable. His ghost sense told him there was no ghosts around.

There was a small light over the back door offering the only illumination in the yard. It revealed a small patio of cement paving blocks, a wood picnic table and a barbeque grill covered in a tarp weighed down with a couple bricks. Danny dumped his armload on the picnic table and sorted through them until he found the Fenton Finder. He flipped it on, and changed a couple setting for a high response reading. Waving the Fenton Finder around the yard produced no response.

Danny smiled -- his senses had been proved "right" again -- then frowned. If the ghost wasn't here -- where was it?

The Fenton Finder was rudely snatched out of his hands, followed by a couple clicks as the instrument was reset and then a loud yelp!

"Sorry, dude," Tucker said. "I thought you said you'd fixed this?"

"I did, you leave the Alpha channel on 3 so you won't detect m-- oh, hi, T'keisha."

The tall girl was still holding on to one of Tucker's arms as if her life depended on it.

"But I've got to go to 4 for the high gain sensitivity!" Tucker insisted.

"No, no, don't use 4. I couldn't 'fix' that. Stay on 3 and shift the epsilon to 8."

"But 8 degrades the readings. That's why I need to switch Alpha to 4..."

"Tucker, you're not listening to me. You can't use 4! Look, tell you what. I'll go back to the Specter Speeder and get a couple flashlights because it kind of dark out here. You can use 4 while I'm gone."

He sprinted away.

Sam came up to Tucker and T'keisha. "What was that all about?" she asked.

"Danny didn't fix the Fenton Finder," Tucker complained.

"Yes he did. I helped him test it."

"It yelped when I switched it to Alpha 4."

"Well, of course it did. There was nothing Danny could do about that. You just have to stay off Alpha 4."

"But I need to use Alpha 4 to find any ghosts that might be lingering around here."

"You can't! Stay on Alpha 3." Sam insisted.

"What's the problem?" T'keisha asked.

"Nothing," said Sam

"Nothing," said Tucker.

"Do you guys always act this weird around ghost?" T'keisha asked.

"We're not acting weird," Tucker answered.

"Danny's not here so I think we can use channel 4 for a moment," Sam observed.

A small video screen lit up on the scanner. The display looked like a compact weather map with multiple contour lines, each with compass headings and value reading marked off in multiple colors, +3 on one line -7 on another. There looked to be a high pressure region off to the west, assuming this was a weather map. West was the park there the Specter Speeder and Danny Fenton/Phantom was. Closer in, the field seemed to be flat.

Tucker changed another switch. The display seemed to swell in close and the seeming flat field surrounding the house erupted into a patchy turbulence. One patch 'hotter' than the others centered on an upstair room with an open window. Tucker was slowly sweeping the Finder along the length of the house and every time he came to that room the readings for whatever it was that the finder was sensing went up.

"That's my bedroom," T'keisha whispered, confused.

"Where you were attacked by a ghost," Tucker said. "Those readings are ecto-plasmic residue. A ghost was there but the readings now never go beyond green -6. That means there's no ghost there now."

Tucker turned and waved the Finder around the backyard. "You said you threw a PDA out here?"

"Yeah. That creepy ghost was trying to strangle me from it. How can a ghost get into a machine? I thought they only haunted people and houses?"

"I don't know," Tucker said. "Maybe Mr. Fenton, Danny's father, does; he's the ghost expert. Maybe he has a theory about this. All I know is that Technus does and can invade machinery and use them to attack people. But, really I don't see any evidence of him still being around. Wait! what's that?"

A small flicker of yellow had appeared on the screen. Tucker moved into the darkness, following the indications on the Finder. After a minute, "I found your PDA!" he shouted.

"Leave it. Just leave it! I'll throw it away in the morning!"

"And waste a perfectly good machine?"

"It's got a ghost in it."

"Not any more," Tucker explained. "See, it's a minus-one yellow, meaning a strong former ecto-trace but if there was still a ghost in there it would have been a plus-one or higher."

"I don't ever want to see it again."

"But T'keisha...."

"Why don't you hold on it for a while, Tucker," Sam suggested, "and if nothing more happens then you can give it back."

"Sure. T'keisha?"

"I guess that would be OK. You're not afraid of being attacked by a ghost?"

"Happens all the time," Tucker boasted, 'but I know how to take care of them."

Sam got something caught in her throat. After a moment she asked, "what about your laptop?"

"I threw it out here, too. Papa said I had to get it fixed by tomorrow but I, like, broke it in half to stop that ghost. I don't want that machine in my house ever again.

"I want to see the email T'keisha got. There may be a clue where it came from or who sent it." Tucker said, adjusting the Finder again and sweeping it around the back yard.

"Hurry up," Sam whispered to Tucker. "Danny won't stay away much longer, find that laptop and switch off Alpha-4 becfore he comes back and sets it off."

Tucker found the laptop by tripping over it. He looked at the fragments speculatively. "Now why didn't the Finder pick this up? It had far greater exposure to ectoplasm than the PDA?" He noticed a swelling pink hue entered the edge of the Finder's display. A contour line read +23. Hastily he switched the Finder to Alpha channel 3 just as Danny rounded the corner of the house, holding a couple flashlights in his hands.

"I got the flashlights," Danny called out loudly.

"Shhhh!" T'keisha hissed. Don't wake up my parents!"

"Sorry." But he wasn't. He had meant to alert Tucker that he was returning and had done so the only way how. He didn't like being yelled at, even if it was in a harsh whisper. More and more he was disliking this mission.

"So what did I miss?" Danny asked.

"We found her PDA and laptop," Sam filled him in. Tucker had brought the pieces of the laptop over to the picnic table and laid it out in the dim glow of the back door light.

"Wow. You really did a number on it," Danny observed. "I didn't think you could bent a laptop case in half like that."

"We might be able to straighten the case," Tucker said, "but the motherboard is split and there's no way we can fix that. Too many broken circuits."

"I don't want it back," T'keisha insisted.

"But your father said..."

"I know..." she wailed.

"Let's worry about that later," Sam offered. She gave T'keisha a quick hug.

Tucker reached into one of the many pockets on the leg of his pants and pulled out a thick, oblong device. It had the word "Fenton" printed along the side. From one of its many slots Tucker extracted a tiny philips head screwdriver and attacked the back of the laptop. Danny aimed his flashlight on where Tucker was working without being asked. After removing a half dozen screws Tucker flipped the screwdriver back into the body of the Fenton Multi-Tool then pulled out a small chisel. He placed this along the seam between upper and lower halves of the case and gave it a resolute smack. The case split in two. Tucker set the upper section with the keyboard aside and began unscrewing a insulating board over some lower pieces. He took the flashlight from Danny and shone it into certain crannies.

"What do you see?" T'keisha asked over Tucker's shoulder. She was still holding Sam hand but curiosity was overriding her fear of ghosts.

"Doesn't look like there was any electric arcing or fire damage," Tucker replied. "Any idea where Technus got his power, Danny?"

"Nope. But then I've never figured out where I -- ghosts -- get their powers. It just seems to be there."

Tucker handed back the flashlight and unscrewed another thin metal plate and fished out a small rectangular box maybe two inches by three inches by a quarter inch high. A couple cables hooked it to the laptop. Tucker pulled the cables free and pushed the gutted laptop out of the way. From another pocket on his trousers Tucker pulled his PDA and from another pocket a couple of jumpers. He started attaching them to the object on the table.

"What are you do?" T'keisha cried in a harsh whisper.

"I'm hooking up your hard drive to my PDA. I want to read that e-mail."

"Are you crazy? It's got a virus. It'll infect your machine!" T'keisha screamed, then clamped her hand over her mouth and turned to see if a light came on in her parent's bedroom.

"It'll be alright, T." Tucker answered. I'm just going to read the drive with a hexeditor. A virus is a computer program. It can't do anything unless it gets executed, and just reading the characters in the email won't execute anything."

"What kind of program creates a ghost?" T'keisha whispered back. "This is supernatural stuff, the rules we're familiar with don't apply."

"Deja vu." Danny whispered to Sam. She was standing the other side of T'Keshia and couldn't reach to smack Danny like she was tempted.

"Hey, power," Tucker said, reading some response off his PDA. " 'Contact has been made.' " He quoted from an SF show. "Cool, Linux. T, you're a geeks, geek."

"Thanks, I think"

"What's your mail program?"

"Pine"

"An oldie but a goodie."

"You're not going to read all my old e-mails are you?"

"Not unless you want me to.

Danny was filled with rude sarcastic quips he was dying to try out but when he saw T'keisha slide her arm over Tucker's shoulder he swallowed hard and said nothing.

"Here we are, last e-mail in the queue. Header looks properly formed. That is my IP address. Wonder how they got that...."

"Whois." T'keisha said in reply. Danny and Sam looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

"Oh, look here," Tucker said pointing to a string of number amid a stack of number strings. "That's an anonymizer site."

"There's another," T'keisha added, pointing to another string of numbers.

"Someone wanted to make sure no one could trace this e-mail back to them."

"Technus?" Danny asked.

"He's never been this devious," Sam pointed out.

"I don't think you can call anyone who sends an e-mail through two different anonymizer sites and still fails to scrub his backtrail very smart." Tucker scoffed.

"So you can find out where this e-mail was sent from?" Danny asked.

"Boucou Bucks at Boucou Bucks dot Gee Aitch Zee. What's GHZ, Ghana?"

"Nah, that's GH. Greenland?

"Greater Holy Zeeland?" Danny offered.

"Get serious, Danny."

"What so important about 'dot Gee Aitch Zee' anyway?" Danny asked.

"Internet addresses outside the US generally use a two letter abbreviation for the country of origin." T'keisha explained. "So whoever this Boucou Bucks is, he resides in GHZ."

"But there's no nation abbreviated GHZ and a three letter abbreviation is all wrong," Tucker finished.

"What about Boucou Bucks? Ever hear of him?" Danny asked. "Tuck, Sam, T'keisha?"

They all shook their heads. "Never heard of either," Danny continued. "I can query the Fenton mainframe when we get back but I'm guessing we'll turn up a blank, too. I don't recalled Technus ever mentioning a Boucou Bucks during any of the times we're fought him."

"I was hoping we could find a clue in the header," Tucker groused. Maybe there'll be a clue in the programming code." He tapped a part of the screen of his PDA, causing the text displayed to scroll down.

"Do you think this is wise?" Danny asked.

"Sure, what could go wr----"

"Foolish mortals, I, Technus, Master of all Things Technological......" A grainy image of the ghost appeared on the screen of Tucker's PDA. "Am here to take over all your computers. Alll your Base Are Belong to us. Surrender now. Resistance is futile." Slowly his faced squeezed its way out of the screen of Tucker's PDA into the real world."

"Not again," T'keisha gasped, and fainted.

A bright ring of light sprang from around Danny's waist, split into two and rapidly raced towards his head and feet. As it passed Danny changed from jeans and T-shirt into a black jump-suit with a large stylized "D" on the chest, his hair turned pure white, his eyes became glowing green. He leaped to wrestle with the ghost as it crawled out of Tucker's PDA. The ghost broke free of the device and the two combatants soared into the sky.

Tucker had jumped to catch T'keisha as she fell and was pulled down on top her. Now Sam was jabbing him in the side yelling (in a whisper) "Get Off! Get Off Get Off! You're suffocating her." Tucker rolled onto the grass and sat up. "What'll we do?"

"Help me pull her under this picnic table. She'll be safest there."

After they had pushed and shoved her under the table as best they could, Sam reached for the knapsack of weapons they'd brought along. Tucker paused to pull down T'keisha's T-shirt which had ridden up.

"Shouldn't we stay here and try to protect her?" he asked.

Sam was busily assembling the Fenton Net'apult. "The best thing we can do for her is go help Danny keep Technus from coming back here"

"But shouldn't --"

"Come on! Grab something and lets go." Sam took off running around the house. Tucker grabbed the first thing he could find in the knapsack and followed. He caught up with Sam on the sidewalk in front of T'keisha's house. "Which way did Danny go?" she asked.

Sparks flying up in the night sky from an exploding transformer caught Tucker's eye. "There!" he pointed.

The battle was a couple blocks over, near the convenience store where T'keisha had first called them. The area was in total darkness now as powerlines torn free from the transform whipped through the air trying to snag Danny. But the phantom ghost boy maneuvered easily around the slow wires.

Technus was dressed in a pale blue trenchcoat with a green belt. He face was blue, his hair a vast mane of white, long green gloves covered his hands. All seemed made up of angular blocky planes, as if he was, indeed, some kind of preliminary Technus design. And like the early Technus, the one Danny fought before he came back as Technus 2.0, Technus was loudly announcing his plans before doing them.

"Your flying is good, foolish mortal, but my technology is better! Technology will always triumph over natural abilities!"

Danny blasted one of the menacing powerlines, cutting it off from the electric pole it was attached to. The wire withered like a snake with its head cut off until it touched the ground. Suddenly it became just an ordinary coil of copper wire. "Less talk, more fighting!" Danny taunted, sending a blast of ectoplasm his way. With a squawk Technus awkwardly dodged the blast.

Sam and Tucker skidded to a halt and tried to find an opening with which to help, but Danny was moving around so fast that it was hard to something to blast without hitting him.

"Wow, Technus really is primitive," Tucker noted. I've seen better graphic on a Coleco game console."

"And he isn't doing the sorts of things he done before, like turning cars into robots or forming a giant robot body around himself." Sam added.

"Don't give him ideas!" Tucker hissed.

"We've got to do something to help Danny. What did you bring?"

Tucker held up a small, stylish tube of lipstick. The word "Fenton" was printed down the side.

"It's not your color," Sam dead panned.

"Hey, this is a very powerful blaster!"

"I know but it's disturbing how proficient you've become with lipstick. Don't let Dash Baxter see you using it or you'll never live it down."

"At least I'm doing something. What're you going to do with that Net'apult? This is Technus, he'll just use it to attack us." The Fenton Net'apult was a bazooka like device that launched a weighted net to capture fleeing ghosts. As a technological device Technus would be able to manipulate the net teleknetically.

"Not after I dose it with Fenton Ghost-Be-Gone. I figure he'll be unable to touch it with his techno ghost powers." The Goth girl had pulled an aerosol can out of her back pocket and was spaying goop into the mouth of her bulky weapon.

Sam left Tucker firing at other waving powerlines and snuck from one place of concealment to another, trying to get in close enough to Technus to use the Net'apult. She was beginning to reconsider her dislike for lethal, long-distance weapons when she saw an opening. Danny Phantom had acquired Technus's full attention through a series of close spaced blaster fire. The master of all things technical and mechanical was trying to levitate some trash cans to shield himself from the fire. Sam stepped out into the open, took careful aim and fired.

There was a loud thump! as compressed gas shot four heavy balls out of four separate barrels. The light-weight ghost-proof net was pulled along, spreading open as the balls traveled diverging paths. Technus was just beginning to turn around at the sound when the net struck him, the balls whipping around, wrapping the net tightly about him.

The ghost seemed to flicker for a moment then disappeared, the net collapsed to the ground. Danny swopped in and unstrapped the Fenton Thermos strapped to his back but when he pointed it at where Technus 0.7 had been there was nothing for the Thermos to suck in.

"What happened? Where did Technus go?" He asked.

"Gone, man," Tucker muttered. "He just kind of derezzed and popped out."

"He died? Ghosts don't die, they're already dead." Danny was having trouble accepting what his friend was saying.

"It was like someone turned off a TV set, Danny," Sam contributed.

"Yeah, it was like this Technus was a hologram or something," Tucker said. "He wasn't really here and once he was caught in the ecto-net shorted out or something."

"You're saying I was fighting a hologram? I nearly got killed by a picture of a ghost?"

"Dude, I don't know what just happened. All I know is that Technus was here but he ain't here now."

Danny shook his head and slung the Fenton Thermos back over his shoulder. He looked at Sam who shrugged her shoulders.

"Then I guess our work here is done," Danny mused. "So lets get the heck away before someone comes around asking questions. -- Where's T'keisha?"

Tucker refused to met Danny's eye.

"She fainted," Sam filled in. "We left her under the picnic table in her back yard."

"Don't sneer like that, Danny," Tucker suddenly spoke up. "She's had a long night. Not everyone is used to ghosts like you are."

"I didn't say anything!"

"Yeah, but I know that look of yours."

"What! What?"

They found T'keisha just beginning to stir when they returned. Tucker helped her get up and sit down on the picnic table bench while Danny busied himself with picking up their gear and stuffing it back into knapsacks.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Tucker's messing around spawned another Technus ghost. We killed it. It's gone." Danny snapped.

"You apparently fainted when the ghost appeared," Sam put in. Tucker was glaring at Danny but unsure what to say. "We figured you'd be safest under the table then went to help Danny, who had chased it out of your yard.

"Did it..."

"Cause damage and destruction?" Danny jumped in. "Oh yeah. The power's out for blocks around here."

"The electric company will say it was a transformer exploding that caused all the damage," Sam put in softly. "People are pretty good about refusing to believe in ghosts -- or ghost related damage." She was glaring at Danny, too, who seemed indifferent to her expression.

"We should be going," he said, picking up one of the packed bags of Fenton equipment. "We gotta get back before anymore notices that we took the Specter Speeder out."

"We've been here less than an hour," Sam objected. "We have plenty of time before your parents get up."

"I'd rather not take chances."

"What's your problem, dude," Tucker suddenly asked. "It's T'keisha, isn't it?"

"No it's not that at all."

"Then what is it?"

Danny had no answer.

"Look, I'm sorry," T'keisha apologized, "I shouldn't have called you in to this. I should have handled this on my own."

"Don't be sorry," Sam said. "You were in over your head, as some butthead--" she glanced at Danny -- "would admit if he wasn't being such a jerk. We were glad to help. You're our friend. You can call us anytime, day or night--"

"Day would be better," Danny interrupted.

"Ignore him."

"T'keisha," Tucker put in, holding out a PDA to her. "This is my back-up PDA, it's never had contact with a ghost or anything, so it should be safe to use. If I had a back-up laptop I'd lend you it. This is the best I can do. I'm going to take that hard drive from your computer back with us and play around with it some more in Danny's parent's lab. They've got some specter isolation chambers that will prevent any more break-outs like tonight's. I'll dub everything off it I can that tests 100% ghost-free and send you a new hard drive."

The girl wrapped him in her long arms and kissed him.

After a long time she let Tucker go and gave Sam a quick hug. "Thanks for everything," she said.

"Call if anything else weird happens."

'Come on," Danny called, walking away before T'keisha could hug him. Reluctantly Sam grabbed another of the knapsacks. Tucker picked up the last bag. "Wanna see the Specter Speeder?" he asked. They walked hand in hand down the street and into the park.

Danny already had the craft unlocked, the bag stored in a corner and was strapped into the pilot's seat running the pre-flight check when Tucker and T'keisha got there. Foley insisted on giving T'keisha a quick tour of the vehicle before another round of hugs and T'keisha left. Danny hit the "door close" button and pulled back on the yoke, levitating the speeder rapidly into the sky. Checking the bearing against the GPS system he eased the speeder forward, quickly leaving the darkened circle of city behind them.

For a time they traveled in silence, Sam in the co-pilot's seat and Tucker in one of the passenger seats. Finally Sam could restrain herself no longer. "You were a real jerk back there."

"No I wasn't."

"This isn't a debate Danny Fenton. You were a jerk and there's no excuse for it."

Danny said nothing. After a time Sam sighed and asked, "You're not even going to defend yourself?"

"You said it wasn't a debate."

"You owe Tucker an apology for your rude behavior tonight. You really owe T'keisha an apology but at least you could apologize to Tuck."

"For what? For getting up in the middle of the night, leaving the house without my parents permission, for stealing the Specter Speeder, for nearly getting killed by a crazy ghost, for putting my friend's lives in danger from said crazy ghost? Right, I need to apologize to Miss Faints-a-lot."

"O-o-o-o-o-o!" Sam growled. "That's it? You're being a jerk because T'keisha fainted? Lots of people faint."

"You've faced lots of ghosts worse than Technus and you've never fainted."

"This isn't about me, Danny. And don't think that just because I didn't faint doesn't mean I didn't feel like fainting. You know, if I didn't know better I'd think you're just jealous of Tucker having a girlfriend."

"What's that supposed to mean. I'm glad he has a girlfriend. I guess she's a girlfriend. More power to him ."

"Wow, you are jealous! That was a classic case of denial."

"I get enough of that psychology crap from Jazz, don't you go there as well."

"I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you, Danny. You're as transparent as...as...as a ghost. You're mad because Tucker has a girlfriend and you don't."

"I -- don't?"

"Well, uh..." Sam stopped speaking. She considered her words carefully, rejecting many things she could possible say here. There were so many things she could say here, any of which would be absolutely true and yet would lead off in directions she wasn't ready to face. In the end she decided to punt. "From all the jokes you make about Jazz's dates I sort of thought you were kind of down on all that stuff."

"Jazz--" Danny breathed, glad to talk about something else. "I do not see what she sees in those guys she goes out with. Sometimes I think she's just researching the mind-set of the adolescent neanderthal."

Sam let that ride for a while.

"Try to be happy for Tuck," she said finally.

"Yeah. I know." The lights of Amity Park were beginning to glow in the distance. "You do realize there were two instance of Technus 0.7 generated tonight. We destroyed only one. I wonder what happened to the other one. I'm afraid we're going to have to steal back there again to find it."

"What? Oh, lord, no!"

"And what's the deal with Technus 0.7. Technus is a ghost not a computer program. He may called himself Technus 2.0 but that's more of an advertising slogan. He may have chanced his costume but he hadn't really changed himself. There's no Technus 1.0 running around besides 2.0, so why is there a 0.7?"

"Maybe you should talk to Technus," Tucker offered from back of the speeder.

"You heard...."

"Everything."

"Damn!" Danny muttered.

"I don't much care to be discussed in the third person."

"I'm sorry Tucker," Sam said, "I really didn't think you could overhear back there."

"Well, I guess it's better than having you two talk about me behind my back. But, Danny I don't want you ever bad mouthing T'keisha ever again."

"I'm sorry, Tuck. It won't happen again." Danny was surprised by his friends anger, something new for him.

"Just because she doesn't react to ghosts the way you like doesn't mean she's a bad person."

"I never said that."

"Or is weak."

"Ok."

"Or ... or..." Tucker lapsed into silence, unable to finish his sentence.

After a while Sam said, "You know, talking to Technus does seem like a good idea."

"He's in Walker's Ghost Zone Prison, and you know Walker has it in for me," Danny said. "That would be a pretty big risk just to talk to a ghost who doesn't make much sense at the best of times."

"That's it!" Tucker exclaimed.

"What?"

" 'Gee Aitch Zee' -- 'Ghost Zone.' Boucou Bucks was sending from the Ghost Zone. No wonder he could send a ghost encrypted as an email attachment. Dude, you've got to talk to Technus. He'll either know this Boucou Bucks or know how he's able to send email between dimensions."

"Why? We stopped the ghost. We've secured the hard drive. What more can go wrong? I'm tired of fighting ghosts. I just want to sleep in till noon, do some skate boarding in the park and enjoy what's felt of the summer before we go back to school."

"We all do," Sam said. "But what if this was just a trial run? What's to say that Boucou Bucks isn't planning to spam the entire world. Six billion Technus 0.7s, I don't even want to think about it."

"A Spam ghost?" Danny echoed. "I get a hundred spams a day. I don't want to have to wrestle each one down before deleting it. Ok, we'll go see Technus, but not today. I'm bushed."

end.