Circuit Board Snow White
Chapter 1: Darcy Was Here
"Darcy," the girl heard her mother call from downstairs. "What are you doing?"
"Cracking a satellite!" she shouted back.
There was a pause during which Darcy Lewis worried her mother might finally start enforcing the court-ordered ban on any and all electronics, but the moment passed and her mother shouted up the stairs. "Okay, just don't get caught this time!"
The girl smiled at her computer, an ancient boxy thing in a yellowing case that had once been a pristine ivory color. It was The Monster, and she was its creator. Her parents had been sneaking her odd components since the day they left court. Her father, Milton J. Lewis, was not a man to put up with heavy-handed decrees from small-minded authoritarians, and he wasn't about to teach his children to roll over and take them either. Her mother, Sarah, simply didn't like being told what to do. Darcy still remembered when a random woman at the grocery store had the audacity to suggest she try a cereal with less sugar to help prevent Ben and Bing from being so hyper; Sarah Lewis had flown not into a rage but into a lecture, a thirty-minute education on neuroscience and nutrition and all the delicate chemical balances that linked the two and how sugar played little to no part in her sons' behavior, which, by the way, was none of her damned business.
So when the court ruled that Darcy wasn't to touch a computer until she turned eighteen, neither of her parents would stand for it. They didn't bother with appeals. They simply ignored the ruling, bringing their daughter whatever she needed to make a computer of her own.
The Monster was ugly, but it worked. And with it, she saw the world.
One ear listening for her mother's call to the table, she typed her way back through the commands she had used, erasing any evidence of her tampering.
The judge meant well. He had wanted her to learn a lesson, and she had: Don't get caught.
It was her new mantra, not that she knew what a mantra was at ten years old.
"Dinner in five minutes!" her mother called. "Go wash your hands!"
"Okay!" she said and deleted the last command, making it look as if she had never sent her signal into that station at all save the addition of a short line of nonsense coding spread across three separate commands. It's all she ever left. It was her 'Darcy was here'.
She hurried from her room and did as her mother said, washing up and joining her family at the table. Her brothers were fourteen and sixteen now, four years removed from that incident in the grocery store and considerably calmer. Sarah, a researcher in neuroscience, had studied her sons and experimented with foods until she found the ones that made them act out, removing any and all products with the suspect ingredients until her boys were no more rambunctious than any others of their age. She had published a study and been awarded a grant to continue her research in a University setting. Culver had offered the best package, so the whole Lewis family had picked up their lives and moved to West Virginia.
Darcy really didn't mind; her interest in computers and programming made her very odd among the pre-teen crowd. Really there was no one who she could talk to about it, not even in her own family.
"What's the plan for after dinner?" her father inquired.
Darcy mumbled around her mashed potatoes, "I dunno."
"Have you looked into the university servers?"
"Milton," her mother huffed. "You shouldn't openly encourage her. Give her what she needs, but don't make suggestions!"
The man nodded. "Yes, of course. You're right. I should not tell you to look into the university servers or to try to see what that new professor is researching or why it involved several large men with concealed weapons under their black suits. I would never make such a suggestion."
Her brothers snorted as their mother sighed her disapproval.
"I'm sorry, I wasn't listening," Darcy managed through a giggle. "What was that you did not suggest?"
"You know, I've quite forgotten," he said, scratching his head and frowning.
"Alzheimer's," Ben said solemnly.
"Mom, you better get him to your lab," Bing agreed.
"Don't think I wouldn't like to. There's got to be some medical explanation for how thick your father's skull is," she said. "And let's not even joke about that."
"Why not? You're like five minutes from curing it," Bing shrugged unapologetically.
"Be that as it may, forgetting oneself is never a thing to joke about. Imagine slowly losing every memory, every piece of information that made you who you are. Who would you be? Patients who have responded favorably to my treatment still aren't the people they were. How can they relearn a lifetime of experiences?" She shook her head, wiping away the tear that always came when she started talking about her latest project.
"Sorry, mom," the boys chorused.
"Enough of this depressing talk," Milton insisted. "We're going to leave this table happy. So… There once was a man from Nantucket—"
"No!" Sarah cried, hurling a dinner roll across the table at him. "There will be no limericks at this table. Not ever!"
"Oh, but, honey."
"I set the rule when we were married. Nothing has changed. No. Limericks."
It was enough to break the tension and sent them from the table with smiles on their faces. Ben and Bing were charged with dishes, Darcy with sweeping, their parents settled into the sofa to watch the show their daughter had set to playing on the TV.
After she had done her chore, she ran up the stairs and started cracking the codes for Culver. Anything that involved suspicious men in black suits and guns was worth looking into. She typed away furiously, finding holes and slipping through them. She didn't know the professor's name, his department or what he was researching, but she knew what to look for. Heavy firewalls and certain key phrases and codes. The government was nothing if not predictable. She found it before bedtime.
In the morning, she managed to squeeze through one of the firewalls, but then it was time for school.
School was difficult. It wasn't that she was too smart. When it came to regular class work, she was pretty average. Where she excelled was computers, and it was her inability to touch them that made school so tough. The teachers had been informed of her restriction, so whenever the class had computer lab, Darcy was sent to language class instead. She didn't get to research topics on the desktop in the back of the room with the other kids. She couldn't bond with anyone over a group project when she was stuck alone in the library with the encyclopedias. Most of her classmates didn't even notice. Those that did were told that her parents were extreme Luddites and refused to let her use electronics. This, plus her whole wheat sandwiches and carrot sticks, made her the weird hippy girl. Whatever.
She hurried from school and broke through three more barriers before dinner.
The delay between each small success was torturous, not to mention dangerous. The longer it took, the more likely it was that someone would notice and bring the weight of the Feds down on their house again.
Luckily, it was Friday, and Darcy was allowed to stay up as late as she wanted on Friday nights. She sat, back hunched and eyes narrowed, typing feverishly, setting up proxies and rerouting paths to keep herself safe from detection. It was nearly midnight when she finally found her way through.
Darcy had hacked countless computers at CalTech, MIT and Georgia Tech. She had seen so many research papers, experiment notes and student reports that, even at her age, she knew what everything academic looked like. The information filling her screen that dark night was different, unlike anything she had ever seen. The files were not arranged in a simple, analytical pattern that a computer would understand; these were branching curves that looked like the tentacles of a jellyfish spread wide as it drifted through the ocean. It was beautiful.
Normally, once she hacked a system, reading through the information contained within was unnecessary. In part, because she knew she would not have understood it, but mainly Darcy cared about the challenge of cracking the system and not the content of that system.
Not this time.
This system she wanted to explore, to understand, to save.
With no clear beginning, she clicked a file at random.
Her computer screen filled with a film, a home movie by the look of it. The person holding the camera was walking down a street, looking around at the cars as they passed, eyeing the girls in their pretty dresses. The clothes were wrong, old. The women were in dresses with shoulder pads, their hair pulled up into weird tube curls around their foreheads. The men were in huge suits, their pants hiked high on their waists. It was an old movie, but the clarity of the picture was better than anything she had ever seen from her grandmother's home movie collections. And, unlike Grama Lewis's movies, this was in color.
She moved to another file, which turned out to be much like the first. Each file in that cluster was the same, a first-person look at a time long ago. There were videos where the camera operator stopped and interacted with people passing on the street or chatted up a girl he knew – she knew it was a man from his voice and when his large hands would come into view. It took eight files before she found the man's name.
He was walking down a street, looking down at his polished shoes, adjusting the fit of his olive jacket when he looked up, the camera moving so fast it almost made her dizzy. Then he was running down a side street into an alley.
"Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" the camera man said. A ragged young man turned on him and made to throw a punch, but camera man got his shot in first, clocking the other in the face and kicking him in the butt to send him running.
The camera man turned, looked down at a skinny guy wiping blood from his face and commented, "Sometimes I think you like getting punched."
"I had him on the ropes," the skinny guy said, his eyes taking in the cameraman. "You get your orders?"
"Sergeant James Barnes reporting for duty."
Darcy scrambled to find a notebook to write down the name. It was the first time she had heard him use it, first time she had heard him use anything but the silly moniker of 'Bucky'. This was a name she could research. She watched as the man guided his friend, Steve, through an awkward meeting with a girl. Darcy couldn't really blame Steve for being less than interested in the girl with her long face and stringy blond hair.
As she watched, the film cut to Steve and Bucky arguing. She understood it was about Steve wanting to join the army, but the file was corrupted. It skipped and the audio was out of sync; she could see by the reflection in a glass-framed poster that Bucky wasn't speaking, but his voice shouted over Steve, ordering him to leave the recruitment center, to go home, to stay out of the war. She waited for the file to correct itself, as they sometimes did, but Bucky was leaving with his date.
Other files, she found, were equally as corrupted. Always the same issue of the real dialogue being replaced by Bucky shouting. With each error, she got the impression it was a bad dubbing more than anything else.
Her fingers clacked out the commands to return to the previous page with its tendrils of interconnected files. It was different. The spaces between files seemed larger.
"What?" she muttered, confused.
As she watched, she saw what was wrong. The files were being deleted.
"Shit," she cursed, too worried for the system to get any real thrill from using the word. "No, no, no!"
She knew the danger she was in. The server operators at Culver might have noticed her presence, might have notified to authorities. If she were smart, she would tear the cord from the back of the tower and sever her connection immediately. Darcy never claimed to be smart. She slammed her fingers against The Monster's keyboard, typing the command to copy the files almost as fast as the files were being removed.
Soon, far too soon, the interconnecting web was gone. There were only three files left, arrayed in a neat row, as precise and orderly as any computer system she had ever hacked.
She guided her mouse over the first file with a shaking hand. Clicking it open, a line of code filled her screen. It took her a moment to recognize it as a dictionary from English to some foreign alphabet she didn't know. She scribbled down a few words in the odd letters to figure out what she was looking at later.
The second was a cache of more files, each one apparently a combat technique.
The last was strangest of all. It held words in that odd alphabet, each attached to a file with a picture or video. The sequence made no sense to her. It showed a picture of a sad little boy all alone in the cold, a rusted tool, a fire blazing in a big heater, dawn, and so on for ten separate words.
Her father was right to be concerned about this professor and whatever it was he was researching. This computer system was terrifying for reasons she couldn't comprehend.
Still, as was her custom, she opened the base code of that third file and scrawled her signature across it.
"Darcy was here," she muttered and began the meticulous task of retracing her steps to hide her presence in this odd computer system.
A/N: The early chapters of this are heavily influenced by Hackers (1995), a film I love beyond sense and reason.
The rest came about while reading Captainwittyoneliner's A Tourist in the Waking World over at AO3, which has sadly gone un-updated for over a year. I loved the idea **SPOILER ALERT** of Bucky's consciousness haunting Darcy, but I found myself wondering how I could change it to be where Bucky was physically appearing in her life. Enter Hackers.
Go read A Tourist... and watch Hackers ($2.99 on YouTube) if you can and if you want a seriously dated but inexplicably awesome computer-based film to entertain you.
Oh, and tell me what you think of this thing!