hard-soled slippers, which weren’t quite the shoes I’d asked for, but were several thousand times better than the socks I’d been wearing since I woke up.
Better yet—best of all—they brought me a computer. A sleek, hard-shelled little laptop, which Gregory set in front of me with the top closed. I reached for it. He pulled it back. Only a few inches, but far enough to make it clear that I needed to listen before I was going to get my hands on the machine.
“You have a connection, and a guest log-in routed through one of the administrative offices,” he said. “We can’t spoof it forever, but we should be able to get you about twenty minutes without raising any red flags. Please don’t run any open searches on phrases that might get the attention of our firewall.”
“Like what?” I asked. “Governmental corruption? Conspiracy to defraud the American people? Cloning?”
“Yes,” he said, without a trace of irony. “That’s a good initial list of things to avoid. Don’t log into any e-mail accounts with your name on them. Don’t—”
“I promise I’ve used other people’s networks before, and I’ve never managed to get anyone arrested when I wasn’t trying to,” I said, and reached for the laptop again. “We’re all trying to trust each other here. For me, the last step to trusting you is seeing that I have a clear connection. For you, the last step to trusting me is seeing that I won’t abuse it. So I guess we both start getting what we want when you let me have that computer, huh?”
Gregory chuckled and pushed the laptop toward me. “You’re definitely feeling better if you’re trying to use logic against me.”
“That’s me. Only rational when I’m not being cut open and dissected for the amusement of others.” I took the laptop, breathing slowly through my nose to keep my hands from shaking as I opened it. The screen sprang to life, displaying a stark white background with the CDC logo in the center. I let my fingers rest against the keys, breathing unsteadily out. “Oh, wow.”
“Maybe we only trust you because we don’t have any other choice, but we
I nodded. “I’ll do my best,” I said. And then I bent my head and started to type, and Gregory didn’t matter anymore.
His warning about avoiding my e-mail was smart, if unnecessary: Anyone who’s never worked professionally in Internet news would probably assume the first thing a journalist would do was go for their inbox. He was right, in a way. He was also wrong. All the public-facing e-mail addresses—the ones that fed into the customary webmail interfaces—were basically dummy accounts, feeding their contents into the true inboxes behind the After the End Times firewall system that Buffy had designed. The only time we ever needed to use those boxes directly was when we were somewhere that didn’t allow for logging all the way into the system. Even if I only had twenty minutes, I had plenty of time to make it that far.
The first place I went was an online game site, the sort of thing that’s been killing productivity in offices everywhere since the first computer was invented. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised when the browser autofilled the URL after I’d entered only the first three letters. Not even the CDC is immune to the lure of brightly colored graphics and simplistic puzzles. The site presented a list of options, all with cute, easily marketed names and icons designed to catch the eye. I scrolled to the bottom.
“What are you doing?” asked Gregory.
“Not all computers have shell access these days, and any site that’s obviously designed to be secure might as well have a big red label on it, flashing ‘Oh, hey, look over here; people do things they don’t want you to know about when they’re over here,’ ” I said. The last icon on the list of games was a comparatively drab cartoon atom. I clicked on it. “So we have back doors, for those times when we need to get in, but don’t have access to the normal equipment.”
“And one of your back doors involves a game site?”
“Buffy designed their security.” I smiled as the “loading” bar appeared on my browser. “Buffy designed a lot of people’s security. She hid things all over the damn Internet.”
“Well, I wish she were here,” said Gregory.
“Yeah. So do I.” The menu appeared, giving a list of options. I clicked a set of five that would have resulted in an unplayable game if I’d actually been trying to play, and hit START. The screen froze.
“Did it crash?” asked Gregory.
“Are you going to watch over my shoulder the whole time I’m online?”
“Yes. We’re still in the ‘earning trust’ phase, remember?”
“Right. No, it didn’t crash. This is what’s supposed to happen.” I tapped the space bar twice. “If I were a casual player who’d just chosen a bad set of options, this is where I’d reload and try again. Since I’m not, this is where we wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“Wait for that.” The browser flickered and vanished, replaced by blackness. A log-in window appeared, floating in the middle of the screen.
USER NAME? it prompted.
NANCY, I typed.
“Nancy?” asked Gregory.
“Remember how I said Buffy did our security programming? Well, Buffy was a pre-Rising media nut.”
ADDRESS? prompted the window.
1428 ELM STREET.
There was a longer pause this time as the program controlling this particular back door checked my responses against the list. The pause wasn’t necessary. It was one more trick programmed by our former professional paranoid. If I touched the keyboard before I was prompted, it would not only kick me out, it would lock this door until someone who was already inside the firewall decided it was safe to open it again.
Finally, the prompt asked, WHY DID YOU MOVE OUT?
Of the eight possible questions it could have asked, that was the one I’d been hoping for. I wasn’t sure I remembered the answers to any of the others. I typed, BECAUSE A DEAD SERIAL KILLER WITH KNIVES FOR HANDS MURDERED MY BOYFRIEND.
The pause this time lasted less than a second. WELCOME, GEORGIA MASON appeared on the screen, and vanished, replaced by the After the End Times logo.
“That log-in won’t work again for six months,” I said, trying to make the comment sound casual. I probably failed, but it didn’t matter as much as making sure I got my point across. “Buffy knew her business.”
“Remind me—why wasn’t she working for the CIA? Or better yet, for us?” Gregory dragged a chair over and sat down where he could watch my screen. Oddly, it made me feel more at ease, rather than making me feel spied on. There’s almost always been someone watching over my shoulder while I worked. It was usually Shaun, but that didn’t change the way Gregory’s presence calmed me down.
“You guys didn’t offer her enough opportunities for bad poetry, porn, or bad poetry about porn.” I clicked the link that should have taken me to the staff directories. Instead of opening, it flashed a red “restricted” warning at me. “Crap.”
Gregory frowned. “You’re kidding, right?”
“About the poetry and porn? No. She was a genius. We all knew she’d been scouted by at least one of the alphabet soup agencies. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she’d been scouted by all of them.” I glared at the screen. “I’m not kidding about this stupid firewall, either. They didn’t close the loopholes into the system, but they locked down the staff directory. Who does that? Purge it all, or allow for the occasional spontaneous resurrection!”
“Most people who come back from the dead can’t type, you know.”
“Right now, I don’t
“David Novakowski?” asked Gregory, sounding suddenly hesitant.
I glanced toward him. “Yeah. Why?”
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but…”
Something in the way his voice trailed off told me what he didn’t want to finish his sentence. My eyes
