If he finds out the ID is fake or it expires, we are so screwed, Karl thought.
“If that were the case, he would know it already,” the I.I. said. “He’s already scanned you with his C.C., no doubt.”
“Sorry,” Karl said aloud, blushing a bit. He did his best to seem bashful, maybe even a little ashamed.
The officer’s eyebrows raised as he waited for Karl to explain himself.
“I just… I dunno what happened,” Karl continued. “I started to get really nauseous and dizzy and—and scared.”
The other man said nothing.
“I just really needed a moment to recollect myself. I think it could have been a panic attack. Too much coffee, maybe?”
He gave a weak chuckle.
The officer’s face seemed to lighten up and he laughed a little as well.
“Man, I know how that can be,” he said. “You gotta moderate that stuff. Panic attacks are the absolute worst.”
“You’re tellin’ me,” Karl replied.
The officer seemed to be in good humor. “Well alright, get back to your post. I won’t tell anyone about this.”
Karl smiled. “Thank you, that means a lot to me,” he said.
“Go on, now,” the officer replied.
The psychologist spun around and walked for a bit before letting out an enormous sigh of relief.
That was close, Karl thought.
“Well look at you, DeNiro. Where’d you learn to act like that?” Maynard asked.
I’m a psychologist, Karl reminded him.
“Oh, right,” Maynard said. “By the way, one minute left.”
Encrypted
Thompson had an ecstatic expression on his face when Karl climbed into his vehicle. He didn’t pull off into traffic just yet, however, instead grabbing the psychologist by the shoulders and shaking him with excitement.
“Ha ha! You did it, buddy!” he exclaimed. “That was some top-notch lying, if I say so myself.”
“Thanks,” Karl said. His face was devoid of emotion. Part of him felt surreal, like he was only in a dream.
“Aw, come on, give yourself a pat on the back,” Maynard insisted from within his head.
We’re not out of the woods just yet, Karl reminded him.
The I.I. called him a stick in the mud and remained silent for the rest of the drive home.
Right after opening the front door of his apartment, Thompson went straight for his computer desk. He gave the old-fashioned mouse a shake to wake up the displays before starting right in with a program search. A window loaded for a minute before he turned to his friend.
“How do we get those files over to me?” the hacker asked.
Karl knew the question was for Maynard rather than himself, so he didn’t provide an answer of his own.
“I can send it anonymously,” the I.I. said. “Tell him to set up a throwaway email account.”
“Oh, I have hundreds of those,” Thompson replied when Karl conveyed the message. “Lemme write one of them down for you.”
It took only about seven seconds from when Karl saw the email address to when Thompson received the file in his inbox. He seemed a little taken aback by Maynard’s efficiency, but didn’t pause for even a second before opening the file into his program.
A wall of text appeared on the screen, filling the document with so much content that the scrollbar turned into a miniscule blip on the side of the screen.
“Dear God,” Thompson mumbled to himself as the text went on and on and on.
To Karl, all the symbols looked like hieroglyphics. There were plenty that he recognized—the occasional letter or number—but most of them seemed unorthodox. It was like one of those old fonts that replaced each letter with some kind of symbol or picture. He found it peculiar and a bit childish, like writing “top secret” on a journal.
Thompson seemed to be just as confused, if not a bit more so. He looked over the symbols with the same frightened eyes a dentist might have if he’d accidentally scrubbed up for a brain surgery. His lips moved as he tried to interpret the text, but Karl could sense the frustration.
“What the hell is all that?” the psychologist asked.
“I have no idea,” Thompson said. “I’ve never seen this typeset before, so I don’t have the faintest clue how to translate it.”
Karl’s brain started racing over ideas. If it were a human being, he’d be afraid of it tripping as he made it work at a sloppily fast pace.
“There’s a way to decipher it,” Maynard said.
The psychologist ignored the obvious comment and watched the code grow even larger as they stood there.
“It keeps outputting,” Thompson said. The symbols seemed to zip past the hacker’s cornea like an infinite highway, lighting up his eyes as he stared.
“What?”
“It’s self-replicating,” Thompson explained, starting to type something into his keyboard. He seemed agitated when nothing happened.
“What does that mean?” Karl asked. He felt like a tourist constantly asking for translations.
“It means that the text goes on forever. Some might guess that it’s a glitch, but I suspect someone has a stop password that freezes the code in place.”
“Who could have something like that?” Karl wanted to know.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Thompson replied.
“Guys,” Maynard said.
“Could you try restarting the program?” Karl asked his friend.
“You don’t think I’ve tried that?” Thompson replied. “It’s gone through three complete cycles just since we’ve been talking.”
“But have you changed your launch protocols?”
“Of course I did all that, do you think I’m an amateur?” Thompson asked.
“Guys!” Maynard screamed.
“What?” Karl asked, once he could take no more of Maynard’s harsh screeching.
“I know how to decipher this code,” Maynard said.
How? Karl asked.
“Just you watch,” Maynard conveyed through the psychologist.
Thompson seemed lost. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Maynard says he can break the code,” Karl explained.
“He can?” Thompson inquired. “How?”
“He said to just trust him,” Karl replied.
It took an entire forty-three minutes for the I.I. to work before the silence was broken.
“All done,” Maynard replied. “Thompson should be receiving it on his device now.”
The hacker jolted upright when his monitor lit up. Karl didn’t have to relay Maynard’s
