Circuit Board Snow White
Chapter 2: Lost Connection
Darcy spent the better part of her summer vacation clacking away at her computer, scouring every inch of every server Culver had at their three campuses. It was time wasted. That amazing computer system was gone.
"What's that face for?" Ben asked, sticking his head into her room late one July afternoon.
"I can't find it," she whined.
"Have you tried doing it the non-dorky way?"
"Huh?"
"You sound so smart when you say that," he snorted and walked away, leaving her to wonder what on earth he meant. To Ben, the only things involving a computer that wouldn't be considered dorky were things that blew up or things that went fast. She knew he didn't mean for her to play a computer game, so he must have meant that she ought to search without a computer. The girl scowled as she sat back, trying to sort out what real world method she could use to figure out what happened to her computer system.
Unlike a typical code, it had no maker's mark. Most programs had something – even something as small as the code she left as a signature of her hacks – something that she could decipher and use to find the originator of the system. The firewalls had been impressive but, again, not so unique to clue her into who might have had a hand in making it.
In a flash, it came to her.
"Dad!" she shouted, jumping up and racing down the stairs to find her father.
Milton was in the living room, feet up on the coffee table and a book resting on his chest. That ended when Darcy careened toward him and leapt into his lap.
"Dad!" she shouted again. "Dad, that professor with the men in black suits, where'd he go?"
"Go?" her father wheezed. "What do you mean?"
"His computer is gone."
"You found it?"
"Yeah, hacked it months ago," she said. "But it was erased. I can't find it anymore. Did he leave the school?"
He considered her question a moment. "You know, I'm not sure."
"If he left, were would he go?"
"Never talked to the man directly, but I can ask around."
"Thanks, dad," she said and started running back toward her room.
"Where do you think you're going?" her mother demanded, halting her daughter's progress.
"To my room?" the girl said.
"No."
"Huh?"
"Don't say 'huh', Darcy. It makes you sound illiterate," her father shouted from the couch.
"You are going outside," her mother informed her.
"What? Why?" she groaned.
"To get some exercise, to make friends, to avoid the destruction of your corneas at so early an age. Pick a reason," the woman said and gestured to the front door. "The park is just down the street. Don't get into any fights. Don't talk to strangers. Come back when the streetlights turn on."
Darcy grumbled and complained all the way to the park, taking her annoyance out on the sidewalk as she stomped her red sneakers down with all her might. She threw herself onto a swing and scowled for an hour.
"It's Dorky Darcy!" a voice cried from behind her.
"I didn't think she could stand the sunlight," another added.
Darcy rolled her eyes and started pumping her legs to get the swing moving. Her taunters came around the playground; they were two girls a year ahead of her in school, Karli and Chloe. The pair weren't twins but could easily have passed for it; they were tan and blond and did tumbling… whatever that was.
"Are you allowed outside without supervision?" Karli asked. "I thought people like you needed to be watched at all times."
"I'm ten not a senile octogenarian," Darcy retorted, happy to throw in one of the words from Bing's summer study list.
The two glanced at each other, thrown by the eleventh grade word. Darcy kept swinging while they decided what to do. She didn't think they would try to attack her. They were mean, but as far as she knew they had never done anything more savage than tuck a rude note into someone's book bag. Even if they did try something, she had enough experience scrapping with Ben and Bing to break their noses. She has some pretty pointy elbows, and she knew how to use them to her advantage.
Karli turned to her, smug smile on her glossy lips. Whatever she had planned to say never came because the girl's face turned ashen and her eyes huge. Darcy assumed it was the old 'made you look' ploy Bing still loved to use even at sixteen. She wasn't going to fall for it.
She kept her face carefully posed in angelic innocence and continued to swing as the girls screamed and ran away.
"Lame," she muttered.
She pumped her legs hard, gaining enough altitude to lift off the seat. With a final kick, she launched herself up and out of the swing, flying through the air and landing some distance from the swing set.
"New record!" she announced. "Ten points to Darcy!"
She spun around to measure in sneaker-lengths just how far from the swing she had gone but froze at the shadow looming on the far end of the playground. It wasn't just the shade of the trees that lined the park. It was a man. He was tall, wide-shouldered and wearing a heavy coat and long pants even in the heat and humidity of a West Virginia July. She studied him thoroughly in case she needed to report him to the police, but he stayed where he was, half in the shadow of the huge poplar that only the tallest boys were able to climb.
"I totally see you!" she shouted.
The man didn't run at her declaration. There was something about the slope of his shoulder that struck her as being amused by the comment, though, if asked why, she couldn't have given a reason.
She didn't know what to do. Running home would have been the smart thing, but the only path back to her house took her past the man. She wasn't even sure if running away would cause the man to chase her. So she stood, waiting for him to move one way or another. According to her SpongeBob SquarePants watch, it took twenty-three minutes before the man disappeared into the dark shadow under the nearby thicket of trees. For a few minutes, she could make out his shape, darker than the darkness around him, and then he was gone.
As she stood, waiting for her heart to stop hammering inside her chest, the streetlight came on.
Hoping the man wasn't waiting just out of sight, she ran. She ran as fast as she could past the poplar and all the way home, slamming and locking the door behind her.
"Darcy, really," her mother chided. "Did you have fun?"
She opened her mouth, ready to scream out her terror. Then she stopped. Would her mother believe her? She had no proof that the man had been there. She couldn't identify him, and he didn't do anything more than stand in a shadow. Her mother would most likely claim she was exaggerating or, worse still, making it up completely just to avoid having to go outside to play again.
"Yeah," she mumbled. "It was fine."
"See," she smiled and pointed the girl toward the bathroom. "Dinner in ten minutes. Wash your hands."
"Okay."
That was how the rest of summer went for Darcy. She spent her mornings scouring Culver's servers and the afternoons outside searching the shadows for that man. He never appeared again, but his presence that day did have one beneficial outcome. He had scared Karli and Chloe enough that they never returned to the playground.
Her father went back to work in August and reported that the professor he had mentioned was still there, leaving Darcy to hunt the Culver website for newsletters and press releases that might contain some announcement of some other professor's departure from the college around the time that system was erased.
By then, she had learned that the strange letters in the dictionary file were Cyrillic, specifically Russian, so she started by looking for names of Russian origin. It seemed weird hunting for a Russian operative as if she were a detective in one of those espionage novels her mother loved so much. Especially since she had just learned about the Cold War last school year, and how it had ended the same year she was born.
Listening to her parents talk about work, she knew politics and factions existed in academia; it stood to reason such things continued to exist on a global scale as well. Just because the USSR wasn't the USSR anymore, didn't make Russia and her satellite nations any less cloak and daggery. Who was she to insist the KGB – or whatever they called themselves now – wouldn't try to stick their fingers into American stuff like universities and cutting-edge computer software development? Perhaps that professor her father had mentioned was being guarded by those men in black suits. Or maybe he was a government contractor and those men in black were there to check on his progress. Maybe he had deleted his original coding when he found out about Russian sabotage, and the only thing left was what they had implanted to spy on his brilliant new system.
As summer drew closer to an end, Darcy lay awake in her bed wondering which of her wild theories was correct. A ten-year-old's grasp of realism was tenuous at best; the possibility of Russian sabotage seemed as likely as the inventor of the computer system being a Russian immigrant. Truthfully, she just worried that she would never see that beautiful and unique system whole and functional again. She had saved what files she could, but on their own they were nothing much to look at, just old home movies.
School started again in September. It was no different than the year before.
All her classmates were the same. She was just as average as before and still had to go to language class or the library whenever the rest of the class was in computer lab or doing research. Each evening, she did her homework, had dinner with her family and spent the rest of the night searching the internet. In sixth grade, she was still focused primarily on Culver, but as time moved on so did she. Texas A&M and Georgia Tech all gave her nothing. Some heavy firewalls and extremely high-level encryptions at CalTech offered her hope, but they were hiding secure codes for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She quickly backtracked out of there, knowing the JPL and NASA fell under government domain. Hunting through all the top-rated universities in China and Singapore only succeeded in teaching her some Mandarin and Malay. There were wisps of the program in a few ridiculously antiquated Russian systems, but it wasn't enough like the one she had encountered to raise her hopes.
By the time her eighteenth birthday drew near, she was fairly certain whoever removed those files had moved them into the realm of government agency.
It was one of the few things Darcy had never intentionally hacked while under the court order for fear of what the repercussions would be to her family. Now that she was just days away from her eighteenth birthday, however, she knew what she would buy with the money she had saved from Grama Lewis. She also knew exactly what she planned to do with it.