After they built the chat server, Bridge almost suggested they should meet in person. But something had stopped her — perhaps an instinct for self-preservation — and she never did. He never did either, and so they never had, and wasn’t it maybe better that way? After years of chatting, bitching, and laughing, could either of them live up to the others’ expectations? In Bridge’s mind, Tenebrae_Z was a six-foot-tall young David Bowie with long jet-black hair and a penchant for tight leather trousers. She knew it was ridiculous, of course. But she was self-aware enough to know that if what she actually found was a five-eight guy with his roots showing, and a perfectly normal middle-aged belly that would stop any sane man considering leather trousers, it would inevitably feel like a let down. The only thing she knew about Ten’s appearance was an upside-down Celtic cross that he wore, as some kind of private joke, that he’d once taken a photo of for the newsgroup. But it would take more than an almost-funny necklace to get over the inevitable disappointment of reality.
Likewise, while Bridge was by no means unattractive, it had been a long time since she backcombed her hair to within an inch of its life, caked herself in white foundation and black eyeliner, and pulled on a pair of spike-heeled boots. SIS insisted even technical analysts stay in shape, so she could probably still fit into her trusty old buckled leather corset, but it hadn’t left the back of her wardrobe for years. Dyed black hair and the occasional silk choker were the only concessions to her younger days that Bridge could still get away with, and it was all a far cry from the image of Patricia Morrison’s younger sister Ten was doubtless hoping for.
P > be careful, OK
T > My dear Ponty, the game is afoot! How irresistible to a man of my character!
P > jfc
T > I☺ll tell you all about it when I get back tomorrow night, promise. Signing off now.
P > cyal8r
She logged out and closed her laptop. For the last few weeks she and Ten had been following these seemingly random pieces of ASCII art — impressionist images made up of regular text characters arranged in a way that, when you squinted at them, they looked like a picture of something.
Someone was posting them, one every couple of weeks or so, to an obscure French newsgroup. Who? And why? They didn’t know. There was never any follow-up, never an explanation. But now, somehow, Ten had figured it out. Found more pieces of art that had been posted in other newsgroups, and decoded one of them to find a phone number. Now he was going to meet the man behind them.
Bridge’s mind drifted back to something her mother had told her as a child, about a treasure hunt, where an artist had made a solid gold hare brooch covered in gems and buried it somewhere in England… Masquerade, that was it. The artist then made a puzzle book of surreal paintings, which contained a hidden code leading to the brooch’s location. Bridge’s mother had shaken her head at the silly eccentric English as she recounted how the whole country went quite mad for a while, trying to solve the mystery and find the treasure. But Bridge was so fascinated by the idea that her father bought her a second-hand copy of the book during a work trip to London, and she spent a happy summer trying in vain to solve the puzzle.
Thinking of it now, it seemed like an old-world geocaching puzzle. Maybe this was something similar for the online age? Posting random pieces of ASCII art in obscure places, in the hope that someone tenacious enough would be compelled to dig into them, and figure out the code? It had been done before in the form of Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs. But ARGs were normally big PR operations linked to movies or videogames, and neither Bridge nor Ten had been able to find any announcements about it here, in France, or in fact anywhere else online.
They’d only stumbled across the images themselves because she was still subscribed to france.misc.binaries-random. Once it had been a good source of French jokes, memes, and photoshops, and was a comfort blanket for the small part of Bridge that remained nostalgic for her childhood, growing up in Lyon, and even the infuriating habits of her French mother. But traffic had slowly dropped off as spambot posts took over, and for years now the group had been an endless stream of garbage. She wasn’t sure why she was still subscribed, but she was, and looked in every so often to see if there was anything interesting. There wasn’t — until these strange, random posts of ASCII art began to appear.
Bridge finished her tea, yawned, and headed for bed. Tomorrow night was dinner with her sister and the girls, and she was looking forward to it. But she knew she’d spend the whole evening impatient to get back online, and find out if Ten had dug up their very own golden hare.
4
“Adrian!”
Bridge couldn’t breathe. She stared at Adrian’s body as his jacket slowly, ever so slowly, changed colour from desert camo to a dark, rusty crimson, spreading out from the bubbling wound. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t look away.
“Yop tvoyu mat!”
The guard’s surprised shout wrenched her back into the cold, dry room, but things seemed to be moving at half speed. Slow enough for Bridge to finally take a breath, her survival instincts kicking in, and move. She raised her pistol, turned one-quarter into the sight line, squeezed once, twice. The guard fell, his trigger finger spasming, spraying semi-automatic three-shot pulses into the surrounding racks. Servers exploded in showers of electric colour.
The other guard was still shouting, firing indiscriminately.
“Stupid fucking doorkicker,” she muttered, and fumbled inside Adrian’s jacket for
