V. Larson - Spyware

Sarah leaned with her back against the door, and closed her eyes. What had it been? Perhaps twenty minutes? She felt as if she had been drained by a pack of vampires.

“Ray?” she said, rolling open her eyelids again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He shook his head and hugged her. “I thought you had enough to worry about.”

She nodded in agreement and collapsed on the couch.

Ray got them both a can of root beer from the fridge and they sat in front of the TV again. The phone began to ring again, and they let the machine get it. It was Ed Samuels from Valley Life, a Sacramento magazine, requesting an interview.

The news was just wrapping up the local report when they realized that they were the wrap-up story. The story was vague, but included two snippets of Sarah, holding up Justin’s picture and sobbing, and one of Ray, looking haggard and besieged. Sarah noticed that they had cut out his techie speech and replaced it with a voiceover that explained viruses in layman’s terms. She smiled grimly.

“They cut out your voice, but left me in because I sounded emotional,” said Sarah. “Dear God, I only hope that someone sees the picture and finds our baby.”

Then she began to cry, and Ray held her. His face was wet as well. At the end of the broadcast she was gratified and horrified to see her son’s face in a clear still on the news. Somehow, seeing that made it all certain, her baby was truly gone.

… 70 Hours and Counting…

CNN broke the story at 9:00 PM. It caught Ray and Sarah by surprise as they were in the middle of chewing their way through dinner. The white cartons of microwaved Chinese takeout had been haunting the fridge for three or four days now. Somehow, it still tasted good, if a bit soggy. Ray didn’t really feel much like eating, but knew that they should keep up their strength and alertness. He felt he wanted to be ready for anything. They couldn’t be much use to Justin if they were exhausted and starved. As he ate, however, he couldn’t help but wonder if Justin were hungry right now, and what, if anything, he might be eating. The thought made the almond chicken stick in his throat.

The CNN story began with a damage report concerning the virus. It was worse than Ray had feared. Far worse.

An attractive black anchorwoman with carefully coiffed hair gazed into the camera and read to the world with great seriousness. “Google, Apple and even the all-powerful Microsoft have reported that their servers are currently infected with the worst virus to hit the internet in history. The FBI reports that the virus first struck at around six AM. Eastern Standard Time at the University of California Campus in Davis, California. Since then it has moved with lightning speed throughout the internet, infecting millions of computers and slowing the world’s greatest network with a traffic jam. Net response times are sixty percent slower and dropping.

“Some critical servers, such as public online banking systems, are staying off-line for fear that they might be infected. This means that the internet has been effectively disrupted world-wide. Slowing down the recovery effort, investigators say, are those servers that are still up and running without countermeasures. Those servers are providing a refuge for the virus, as they continually spread the virus to any fixed system as soon as it comes back online. It has proven very difficult to alert each of the internet’s two billion users.”

The image flashed to a clip of a governmental briefing room. An NSA representative addressed a crowd of reporters. “An emergency communication path for a disaster of this kind simply doesn’t exist across international borders,” she explained. She was a blocky woman with glasses and a haircut that suggested that whenever a lock grew long enough bother her, she lopped it off with the kitchen scissors. “This virus seems to only be slowed down a few minutes by a firewall, and is definitely one of the most sophisticated we’ve ever seen. It makes many copies of itself all over every system it infects and the filenames, sizes and behaviors all seem to change frequently. It’s hard to put into words, but it almost seems to react somehow to our efforts at stopping it.”

He leaned forward, his mind churning. “That’s what I saw. It seemed very smart. A new kind of beast entirely.”

He glanced at his wife, who was looking at him from two sunken eyes of worry. “Sarah,” he said. “I had nothing to do with releasing it, if that’s what you’re wondering. Unless, of course, I unwittingly taught its creator.”

“I know you didn’t do it, Babe,” she said, taking his hand. “I just hope that they don’t try to pin it on you because it’s an easy out for them.”

“Well, right now it might be helping us. It gave us a chance to put Justin’s face and name on every TV very quickly.”

She nodded and they turned back to the broadcast. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that she frequently glanced out the front window and at the phone. Every time it rang it was a reporter, but he could see her tense-up each time anyway. Would it be the police? Would they tell her they had found Justin? Would he be dead when they found him?

The camera was on the pretty anchorwoman again. “Internet-related stocks are expected to take a beating tomorrow morning when the exchange opens. Investors and economists both believe that this slump could possibly signal the beginning of a new recession, given the shaky reports from the high-tech industry in general that has been a leading profit area for investors in recent years. Claiming that many of these stocks have long been overrated against their real records of performance, economists predict a drop in stock prices across all the hi-tech industries.”

“And some bastard did this for fun,” he snorted. “Unbelievable.”

The story finally got around to their family. There he was, shouting his technical explanations to the crowd, except his words were unintelligible under the narration. He was described as a suspect and then Sarah was shown, sobbing with Justin’s picture held aloft. The anchor reported that whether or not there was any connection between the virus and the boy’s disappearance was unknown.

“We look like a couple of freaks caught up in some tabloid tragedy,” said Sarah. “Who would kidnap Justin because you released a virus?”

He shot her a glance and pondered her words. He had been so deep in shock today that he hadn’t considered the possibility of a connection between his two fantastic strokes of misfortune. He recalled that Arthur Conan Doyle had once written about fantastic coincidences in the guise of Sherlock Holmes. The gist had been that uncommon events occurred fairly often, but rarely did chance play two unusual cards at the same time-unless the dealer was a card shark.

He turned that over in his mind. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that there had to be a connection of some kind. He stood accused of a crime he did not commit, and his son had been kidnapped. All of this had happened in a single day. Assuming that the same party was responsible, who could it be? He simply couldn’t come up with anyone who wanted to destroy him. He had a few people that were enemies, he supposed, such as Abrams. But the furthest he could imagine Abrams going would be to attempt to block his tenure approval. Criminal frame-ups and felony kidnapping seemed far beyond his scope. Still, there had to be something. He felt sure of it.

He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. His fingers slowly gripped his hair and pulled. The sensation on his scalp felt good somehow. He needed to figure this out. He had to get Justin back, and he had to do it fast. But how?

She put a reassuring hand on the back of his neck. He didn’t move. He decided a good first move would be to replay the events of the day carefully through his mind.