Ryan Somma - The Spiraling Web

"Pervert," Zai spat.

As she dropped the phone into its cradle she could hear him yelling, enraged, "You listen to me Zai Reinhold! You listen to me! You listen to me only-!" Click .

Zai ground her teeth for a minute, contemplating her next move. Obviously the megalomaniac wasn't going to let her contact the authorities. Without phone or Internet service, her home base was completely incapacitated. This left her with only two options, starvation or going outside.

Maybe I can ride this out, she thought. After all, she had food, water, enough supplies to last her another month. She didn't have to go out just yet. She could put it off until there was no other choice. This computer geek would tire of tormenting her eventually.

Then she smelled the ozone, the distinct odor of electrical components working too hard for their own good. It was seeping into the air from the corner of the room, where her computer was located. She crouched beside the system, hearing the crackle and pop of melting plastic. The box was cooking inside. The acrid burning plastic stench seared her nostrils and burned her eyes, causing them to tear. Zai averted her head to take a clean breath before confronting the CPU again. Reaching behind the box, she began pulling cords out. She wiggled or unscrewed all the peripherals from their sockets.

She grabbed the CPU to lift it and yanked her hand back with a string of explicatives when her fingers sank into the melting plastic. Squeezing the hand, she tried to focus past her screaming nerves. She flung the sheets off her cot and over the burning electronics, dragged the smoldering mess into the bathroom, and swung it into the porcelain bathtub. There she turned the shower knobs on full blast, and sighed with the satisfying sizzle of water reacting with the burning materials.

She felt her scalded fingers tenderly. They were throbbing now, but she could tell the burn wasn't too bad. The skin would blister, but nothing more. She sprayed the hand with antiseptic and wrapped it in gauze stored under the sink ages ago. Only then did she sit down on the toilet seat beside the sink and try to calm down.

The phone rang.

She jumped at the sound. It rang again, rattling her nerves. Should she answer the phone and let the little punk gloat? It rang a third time. She stood up, turned off the shower, and walked to the living room, where she grabbed her purse and walking stick from the stand by the door. They were fuzzy with dust and she shivered uncomfortably at the sensation. The phone rang a fourth time and her answering machine clicked on.

"This is Zai. I'm checking the caller ID right now and I'm thinking I really don't feel like talking to you-" she heard the recording say as she slammed the door to her apartment shut.

Thirty-two steps down the hall she could still smell the burnt plastic. At sixty-four steps her walking stick hit the door at the end of the corridor. She pushed it open and descended four flights of stairs to the building's ground level. She came against the exit door to her apartment complex.

On the other side of it she was assaulted with the sounds of traffic, cold sweeping winds, and the smell of fresh air. She hesitated by the door, holding it open, not wanting to wade into this mess that was ordinary life for so many people.

She remembered the last time she had ventured into it, for a doctor's appointment. It took her the entire day to navigate the bus routes to find the office. When she missed one of her transfers on the journey back, she ended up on a wrong bus. It was late at night when she finally made it back to the safety of her apartment.

That was eight months ago.

It was because she never bothered to learn how to navigate their world. Her reality was on the Web, a world many saw as strictly imaginary. Now one of her imaginary friends was somewhere out in the real world, and in danger. She had to find Omni. Then she would thoroughly chew him out for being so stupid.

She had learned one thing from her previous experiences here. Stepping up to the curb's edge, she held up her bandaged hand, and yelled, "Taxi!"

Alice's skeleton of a body was hunched over her workbench as usual when Detective Summerall walked into the lab. A thick, acrid smoke rose slowly from where the technician carefully soldered electronic components to a motherboard, but it could have been a keyboard for all Dana knew about electronics. A pair of thick, black goggles covered Alice's eyes. Her face was smeared with oil and dirt where her tangled blonde hair did not obscure it, as were her denim overalls. Summerall could never make the connection between the woman's appearance and her line of work. She always imagined computer specialists wearing white lab coats in a sterile room, like those processor chip commercials where the engineers were always dancing around in biohazard suits.

While Alice was a detective in the lab, Dana was a detective in the field. She was a hefty woman, in her mid fifties, unlike Alice, who was a frail, bony wraith. Their statures matched their duties. Alice wrestled with malicious data, while Dana dealt with the human element-even if the criminals were mostly scrawny computer geeks like Alice. She occasionally got to take down one of the obese kind, which was a little more satisfying, but only in a sadistic sort of way.

Alice looked up at Summerall for a moment and set her focus back on the electronics, "Be right with you Dana. I'm just rigging a faster bus to the... this way... I'll be able... to..." she trailed off, immersed in the microscopy.

Summerall was used to this quirky behavior from her coworker. Alice was a true IT guru, meaning there were no resources left in her brain for understanding real people. Her world was entirely digitally informed and electronically engineered.

Dana looked over all the technology she did not understand. Electronic components littered two workbenches, and towering CPUs chugged away at various tasks with the computing power of several million hertz against the far wall. Mow Chein, Alice's assistant, sat in one corner tinkering with a VR helmet. He did not glance from his work as Dana strolled by. People were inconsequential to Mow also.

"Is this the hard drive?" Summerall asked leaning over to peer at a multi-layered cylinder jury-rigged into a soldered mess.

"Don't touch!" Mow shouted. His glaring eyes were magnified through his thick eyeglasses. "Very delicate!"

Alice took no notice, "Yeah, that's the little bugger. You can see the VR representation over there." She pointed without looking from her work.

Dana looked to her right and found a small monitor running several windows, Each one displayed various stats on the drive: processing power used, network traffic, and database transactions. It was incomprehensible to Dana, who stared at it blankly for a few moments before her eyes wandered elsewhere.

Alice pulled her goggles down around her neck and scrutinized the board she was working on. Getting up from the bench, she walked over to the component tower beside the hard drive and slid the board into one of the frame's many open slots. She connected it directly to the hard drive with a red and black striped wire and flipped a switch. Dana thought she saw a tiny flash of light on the board, but otherwise nothing changed.

Alice let out a whisper of a curse, removed the board, and squinted at a tiny burn mark on its surface, "Wrong jumper settings... Well, that was a $10,000 goof-up." She tossed the board into a nearby wastebasket and seemed to notice Dana for the first time.

Instead of greeting the detective, she waved her over to a nearby workstation. "You want to see the strangest program I've ever encountered?" she asked, sliding a keyboard out from under the workbench and turning to the monitor.