Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

They all watched Davidoff’s complexion undergo a prismatic change from its normal never-go-outside pallor to a shade approximating a boiled lobster.

“Explain,” he said gruffly.

Trey took a breath and plunged in. In the month since Anthem sought his help with the sabotage of the data files her computer had been hacked five times. Each time it was the same kind of problem, with minor changes being made to conjuring spells. With each passing week Trey became more convinced that Kidd was the culprit. Kidd was in charge of research for the team, which meant that he was uniquely positioned to obtain translations of the spells, and to arrange the rewording of them, since he was in direct contact with the various experts who were providing translations in return for footnotes. Only Jonesy had as much contact with the translators, and Trey didn’t for a moment think that she would want to harm Anthem, or the project. However, he dared not risk saying any of this here and now. Not in front of everyone, and not without proof. Davidoff was rarely sympathetic and by no means an ally.

On the other hand, Trey knew that the professor had the typical academic’s fear and loathing of scandal. Research data and drafts of papers were sacrosanct, and until it was published even the slightest blemish or question could ruin years of work and divert grants aimed at Davidoff’s tiny department.

“Has anything been stolen?” Davidoff asked, his voice low and deadly.

“There’s . . . um . . . no way to tell, but if they’ve been into Anthem’s computer then nothing would have prevented them from copying everything.”

“What about the bulk data on the department mainframe?” growled Davidoff.

“No way,” said Bird doubtfully. “Has that been breached?”

Trey dialed some soothing tones into his voice. “No. I check it every day and the security software tracks every log-in. It’s all clean. Whatever’s happening is confined to Anthem’s laptop.”

“Have all the changes been corrected before uploading to the mainframe?” asked Davidoff.

“Absolutely.”

That was a lie. There were two hundred gigabytes of documents that had been copied from Anthem’s computer. It would take anyone months to read through it all, and probably years to compare every line to the photocopies of source data.

“You’re sure?” Davidoff persisted.

“Positive,” lied Trey.

“Are we still on schedule? We’re running this in four days. We have guests coming. We have press coming. I’ve invested a lot of the department’s resources into this.”

He wasn’t joking and Trey knew it. Davidoff had booked the university’s celebrated Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and hired a professional event coordinator to run things. There was even a bit of “fun” planned for the evening. Davidoff had had a bunch of filmmakers from nearby Drexel University do some slick animation that would be projected as a hologram onto tendrils of smoke rising from vents in the floor around a realistic mock-up of a conjuring circle. The effect would be the sudden “appearance” of a demon. Davidoff would then interact with the demon, following a script that Trey himself had drafted. In their banter, the demon would extol the virtues of Spellcaster and discuss the benefits of the research to the worldwide body of historical and folkloric knowledge, and do everything to praise the project, short of dropping to his knees and giving Davidoff some oral love.

There were so many ways it could go wrong that he almost wished he could pray for divine providence, but not even a potential disaster was going to put Trey on his knees.

“Sir,” Trey said, “while I believe we’re safe and in good shape, we really should run Spellcaster 2.0 ourselves before the actual show.”

“No.”

“But—”

“You do realize, Mr. LaSalle, that the reason the press and the dignitaries will all be there is that we’re running this in real time. They get to share in it. That’s occurred to you, hasn’t it?”

Yes, you grandstanding shithead, Trey thought. It occurred to me for all of the reasons that I recommended that we not go that route. He wanted to play it safe, to run the program several times and verify the results rather than go for the insane risk of what might amount to a carnival stunt.

Trey held his tongue and gave a single nod of acquiescence.

“Then we run it on schedule,” the professor declared. “Now—how did this happen? By magic ?”

A couple of the others laughed at this, but the laughs were brief and uncertain, because clearly this wasn’t a funny moment. Davidoff glared them into silence.

Trey said, “I don’t know, but we’re doing everything we can to make sure that it doesn’t affect the project.”

The Spellcaster project was vital to all of them, but for different reasons. For personal glory, for a degree, for the opportunities it would offer and the doors it would open. So, Trey could understand why the vein on the professor’s forehead throbbed so mightily.

“I’ve done extensive online searches,” Trey said, using his most businesslike voice, “and there’s nothing. Not a sentence of what we’ve recorded, not a whiff of our thesis, nothing.”

“That doesn’t mean they won’t publish it,” grumbled Jonesy, speaking up for the first time since the meeting began.

“I don’t think so,” said Trey. “The stuff on Anthem’s laptop is just the spell catalog. None of the translations are there and none of the bulk research and annotations are there. At worst they can publish a partial catalog.”

“That would still hurt us,” said Bird. “If we lost control of that, license money would spill all over the place.”

Trey shook his head. “The shine on that candy is its completeness. All of the spells, all of the methods of conjuration and evocation, every single binding spell. There’s no catalog like it anywhere, and what’s on the laptop now is at most fifty percent, and that’s nice, but it’s not the Holy Grail.”

“I think Trey’s right, Professor,” said Jonesy. “We should do a test run. I mean, what if one or more of those rewritten errors made it to the mainframe? If that happened and we run Spellcaster 2.0, how could we trust our findings?”

“No way we could,” said Kidd, intending it to be mean and scoring nicely. The big vein on the professor’s forehead throbbed visibly.

Trey ignored Kidd. “We have some leeway—”

Jonesy shook her head. “The 2.0 software is configured to factor in accidental or missed keystrokes, not sabotage.”

Shut up, you cow, thought Trey, but Jonesy plowed ahead.

“Deliberate alteration of the data will look like what it is. Rewording doesn’t look like bad typing. If it’s there, then all our hacker has to do is let us miss one of the changes he made and wait for us to publish. Then he steps forward and tells everyone that our data management is polluted . . .”

“. . . and he’d be able to point to specific flaws,” finished Bird. “We not only wouldn’t have reliable results, we wouldn’t have the perfect generic spell that would be the signpost we’re looking for. We’d have nothing. Oh, man . . . we’d be so cooked.”

One by one they turned to face Professor Davidoff. His accusing eye shifted away from Trey and landed on Anthem, who withered like an orchid in a cold wind. “So, this is a matter of you being stupid and clumsy, is that what I’m hearing?”

Anthem was totally unable to respond. She went a whiter shade of pale, and she looked like a six-year-old who was caught out of bed. Her pretty lips formed a lot of different words but Trey did not hear her make as much as a squeak. Tiny tears began to wobble in the corners of her eyes. The others kept themselves absolutely still. Kidd chuckled very quietly, and Trey wanted to kill him.