Her brother lowered the cellphone for just a moment and nodded. “It’s all good,” he said. “I we can handle this from here, I’ll toss you a line if we run into trouble.”

She stopped briefly at the minifridge in front of the lab and grabbed a Mountain Dew on her way out.

Results had already come back from the program. She prioritized the student with no next class because she couldn’t easily predict where he would go next—he would be exiting the Farmer Education building in less than two minutes. Heads turned when she bolted from the elevator as if it were on fire and sprinted through the Computing Commons. Papers flew from the front table in her wake, she skidded with her momentum as she opened the door and threw apologies to the staff; but she didn’t have the time to stop and deal with it.

Within moments, she’d loaded an augmented reality program into her goggles that would feed her crowd topology for best speed to the Farmer building. After she exited the Commons and she found an open causeway, she triggered an icon in her HUD that looked like a .22 bullet and read “Bullet Time” beneath. Time seemed to slow as if in a Six Million Dollar Man episode—sans the weird techno sound effect—when the Astral spellcode began to execute and a tiny diminishing pie chart began to count down the seconds she could safely remain under inertial acceleration. Now the topology and crowd dodging visual augment became extremely important: an impact at her new celerity-level speed could inflict quite an injury.

To the average ASU students going about their day, Elaine sped past them as if on extra-oiled rollerblades as she tore past. She could feel the wind whipping through her hair and burning her ears as she went, but even with the celerity-inertia spellcode running, she’d be cutting it close.

ASU campus became a well-defined lattice of lines, angles, and aperture dimensions as Elaine pushed her gamer sharpened reflex-eye coordination to its full extent. She dodged past students who looked like they were standing still, jumped over someone leaning to pick up a stack of fallen papers (suspended in the air as they started to blow away), and rebounded from a cement protrusion to avoid a particularly thick crowd.

Within thirty six seconds she’d crossed the campus between the Computing Commons and the Farmer Education building. Upon arrival, she killed the inertial acceleration—a loud pop and a billow of air followed a spike in temperature as her displaced momentum bled back into the proper inertial frame. The Enoch began spinning up and buffering and compressing the remaining bullet-time to prepare for when she wanted to trigger it again. “194 seconds remaining until critical inertial aperture failure.”

With a gesture, Elaine brought Hadaly’s image up in a small window near the bottom of her vision.

“Load me a picture of subject alpha one,” she said.

A portrait appeared in her vision and she scanned it for a moment. None of the students gathered outside the door matched.

“Good news, boss,” Hadaly said. “The phone number with Josh Hugo is a cellular phone and he’s broadcasting his GPS location to FourSquare. I’ve uploaded his position. He’s around the corner.”

“Thanks.”

Josh Hugo had tucked himself into a shadow at the corner of the building where he was tapping away at his smartphone texting someone. He looked about her age, dressed for the warm weather in shorts and a T-shirt, and carried few books. She pulled out her phone and pointed the camera at him—which also included the more sophisticated directional sensing equipment like a Fermi-Bohr array, which could detect the minor field fluctuations caused by the improbability engine.

He noticed her and looked up.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

For a moment, Elaine stood transfixed. “No. I’m good. Calibrating my camera. Thank you for asking.”

With her goggles still pulled down over her eyes she probably looked like a bug-eyed-monster from Zeta Aquilae and that didn’t sit well with Mr. Hugo. He shrugged, stuffed his phone into his pocket and walked away stiffly. As he left, he glanced over his shoulder several times at her to check if she was still there—or at least to make sure she hadn’t followed him. She didn’t, but she did keep the Fermi-Bohr detector pointed at him.

The readout displayed flatlines and background noise across the board: No anomalous fields detected.

“Subject alpha one is clean,” she said into the pickup for Hadaly. Perhaps it was the case that the field was too diminished to be detectable, so she let the Enoch record for a few seconds. “I am moving onto alpha two.”

Elaine triggered bullet-time again and blitzed after her next target.

“I’ll try that,” Frog said.

The satellite picture resolved on the screen into a very familiar set of buildings: the Student Recreation Center. Right smack on the edge of Arizona State University. In fact, not so far away from the Computing Commons. The overhead view from the mapping program brought the pool and the sandstone colored buildings out in sharp relief to the green of the playing fields and the black asphalt roads running nearby like rivers. Little people could even be seen walking along the edges of the pool.

“Well, at least we know where that is,” Zane said. “Let’s see the other location.”

Moments and another browser tab later, another bird’s eye view displayed a spot on the opposite side of campus immediately south of Wilson Hall near Forest Mall. The palm trees looked like weeds against the brute brick of the buildings and the concrete walkways stretched like thin paths between them.

“Okay,” Zane said. “Red Leader, you, David, and Susan head out to the Student Recreation center—I expect that’ll have a lot more area to cover—and Blue Leader, you take Adam and head to Wilson Hall. All of you remain in radio contact and we’ll figure this thing out. I think our phones are equipped with GPS so enter your coordinates now. Maybe we’ll be able to figure out what the #B233 means.”

The group broke up into their respective teams as the two lieutenants—Russell, Red Leader and Benjamin, Blue Leader—stopped to ask Elaine to show them how to use the cryptophone’s GPS features. She consulted with them briefly; the UI provided a very simplistic interface and a view mode that didn’t take her much time to instruct them to use. After entering the coordinates, a little globe symbol appeared in the side of the viewscreen that they could access with the side buttons and that would switch between the standard view (the time on most of the phones) and an updated map view showing them how far away from their target coordinates the phone thought it was.

After a bit of discussion and cheerful noises the teams funneled out of the room and began trekking to their respective locations. Zane held his cryptophone up to his ear in constant conversation as he poked around the lab looking for a working headset. (Otherwise he’d be forever lacking one hand to hold the phone.) Elaine recalled she had several back in her dorm room, but couldn’t remember if any of the headsets in the lab worked any longer—most of them she held onto for parts: speakers, wires, and 2.5mm jacks.

“Hey, boss,” Hadaly’s voice emanated from the projector speakers and the light in the room changed as her bust appeared superimposed over the field of green and it’s hexadecimal encoded GPS coordinates.

“Hasn’t Elaine told you not to do that where other people might seen you?” Zane said. “Oh, there you are. For a moment I thought you were using your ionizing holographic projection.”

“She’s fine,” Elaine said scanning the room for other people. Only Frog and Zane had remained behind and both of them knew Hadaly rather intimately. “Just like a teleconference. We could have included her in the meeting like this, if we’d thought about it.”

Zane shrugged and went back to his conversation on the cryptophone and resumed rummaging through the lab’s bins of exposed equipment.

The image of Hadaly on the projection screen beamed. She extended her arms and twirled to show off her newest creation of an outfit. Today she had startlingly blue eyes to go with straight blonde hair and her usual lab coat had pastel Hawaiian flowers falling over it—falling being the operative term as the fabric of the coat animated them twirling and fluttering across its white surface. Frog voiced her approval before returning to casually perusing a website on the terminal she’d taken over earlier.

“What do you have for me?” Elaine asked.

“Nine of the target students are getting out of classes right now,” Hadaly said. “If you wanted to scan them, you wouldn’t find a better time.”

“Load their class schedule and relative locations to the Enoch, please,” Elaine said and waited while her phone updated.

As she watched the points light up on her map of ASU she pulled down her goggles and ignited a programing HUD. With the map in the center and symbolic entities representing the data about the nine students to the side, she began to link them together with an optimization program that she quickly trained to run the famous Travelling Salesman algorithm in a Hamiltonian space. Judging by where the students had exited and the locations of their next classes, she’d have exactly ten minutes to traverse the campus and pass by each of them. The programming would also include a great deal of fudge factor with tarry time and multiple routes between buildings. However, most people kept to the major thoroughfares and tended to take the most direct routes, so Elaine figured only minimal deviation would be needed.

One student had no next class, the other eight had classes immediately afterwards.

Warning: Mission dispenser device is tamper resistant; attempts to breach internal firewall will result in destruction and mission failure.

“Really?” Elaine said. She withdrew a Firewire connector from a recess in her goggles and poked at the tablet with her fingers looking for another port. “Challenge accepted!”

Zane’s hand flashed out like a cobra and caught her a moment before she plugged it into the tablet. “Hold up there, sis,” he said.

“It’s taunting me,” she said.

“You can play with the toy as much as you want after the missions,” he said. “Not that I don’t think you couldn’t competently bypass anything they put on it without them knowing—it’d rather keep the cheating to a minimum.”

“Looks like this one’s for the math brains,” Benjamin Miller staring at the alphanumeric code being projected by the tablet onto the screen.

A waving field of green undulated beneath the brilliant white letters and numbers with motes of light that exploded time to time into firework displays of more numbers. Elaine surmised that the background animation had nothing to do with the foreground; it made much more sense as decoration than it did a clue of any sort. The entire design of this page directed the eyes towards the “#B233” in the center and suggested that it had some relation to the numbers above and below.

“Alright people,” Zane said. “Ideas?”

“It’s hexadecimal,” Elaine said.

“I can see that…” Zane said.

“Okay. There’s one 128 bit number per row, or two 64 bit numbers, or—” She paused for a moment when Zane made face, pulled out a piece of raspberry pocky and munched on the tip for a moment. “The 4040B5 and 405BFB each repeat in alternation; therefore it is most likely four 64 bit numbers concatenated.”

“I get it,” Zane said. “I’ll render it into decimal and see what falls out of the sieve at each level of resolution.”

Susan Pilgrim tapped at one of the computers nearby for a moment. “Well, if we convert the 64 bit hexadecimal to decimal the first number is…extremely large.”

She walked over to one of the dozens of whiteboards that wallpapered the room, popped the cap off a Magic Marker and began to write. After a bit of tapping at the board with the marker she managed: 4629899646895710000.

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” Adam Roach said.

“Google it?” Zane suggested.

Frog slid into Susan’s seat and after a bit of typing she shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.

Benjamin squinted at the board, then back at the glowing hexadecimal numbers on the projection screen.

“Maybe it’s just me, but to us computer science geeks, couldn’t a 64-bit hexadecimal number be used to express a double precision floating point number?”

“Yes. IEEE-754.” Elaine said. She hadn’t forgotten he was in fact a computer science major like her; his dismal attitude simply tended to cover it up. Zane didn’t construct his team with dullards. She pulled out the Enoch and twiddled the numbers into a converter switching it into the proper mode. “Going on IEEE-754 and 32 bits, we get: 33.415614, 111.932102, 33.418192, and 111.936039.”

The numbers went up on the whiteboard with rapid strokes of the marker as she spoke them aloud.

“That still doesn’t make much sense,” Benjamin said, looking dejected.

“Perhaps we can move to a simpler solution? We haven’t addressed the B233 part yet,” Susan said, tapping the Magic Marker against her cheek. “We might be overthinking this. I mean, look at our team. We’re a bunch of scholastic overachievers looking for high tech careers—well, except for maybe Russell.” She winked at Russell Murphy who’s chosen major put him in the School of Culinary Arts—but one would have to ignore his Bachelors of Chemistry to think he wasn’t an overachiever.

He just smiled at her. He’d been silent for most of the presentation so far, sitting with his arms folded in his chair with one leg crossed over the other. Normally he saw fit to let Zane run the show. As old friends, Zane often invited him onto his teams because he was a level headed, clear thinker who let him get the last word on everything.

“Wait,” Adam Roach said, he pressed on his Bluetooth headset—extinguishing the blue light that lit his ear for the first time Elaine has ever seen—and his fingers ran along the four numbers written on the keyboard. “They’re GPS coordinates! I’ve been seeing this a lot on a product my Information Systems class is doing in mock development.”

The entire group crowded around Frog as she tapped the coordinates into a mapping website and—

“What the hell?” she said. “No, I don’t think they’re GPS coordinates… Unless we’re going to the middle of China.”

“I love this thing,” Russell said, gesturing with his phone. “It’s nice being able to talk to everyone else on the team and the spy versus spy part really makes me feel like you said: Mission Impossible. Do you know, I had someone from another DarkNet team grilling me. He wanted to take a look at it, but I slid out of there like a bandit.”

His handsome, tanned face broke into a smug smile as he recollected the encounter and he puffed up his chest. Benjamin chuckled at him and leaned closer to Elaine, the constant cloud of too-strong cologne that he wore spilled from him into her nose and she took an instinctive step back. He smiled snidely.

“You probably already know that nobody asked me about my phone,” he said pulling it out of his pack and turning it in the light. The white and pink sequins adorning its surface glittered under the harsh light of the CFLs dotting the ceiling. “I wouldn’t get caught dead speaking on this thing in public. Thank you again. Obscurity may not be security, but anyone going through my bag wouldn’t for a moment think I was storing sensitive information on this.”

It made sense that Russell and Benjamin would be the first two here—they were Zane’s lieutenants and had taken up special responsibilities on the team. Ben Miller, for all his abrasive attitude, made his grade as lieutenant by having rich parents, connections to ASU campus staff, and the amoral wherewithal to get the job done. He’d been on Zane’s team in the pervious year and manage to win them the game through some devious chicanery. As an undergraduate member of the senior class, he wouldn’t be part of next year’s DarkNet so Zane decided to tolerate his presence for the benefit of his talents and assets.

Elaine would have argued otherwise. With her on board, there would be no need for individuals such as Benjamin Miller.

“He’s in the building,” Susan said abruptly. She blinked a few times, clicked off her phone, and crammed it back into her pocket. She gestured to Zane with exasperation. “I mean, Adam and David are in the building. They should be on the elevator in a moment. Nothing forthcoming about why they’re late.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Zane said. “They’ll be here just in time for us to unlock the tablet. I’ll start.”

He grabbed the tablet from the table, clicked through the interface to select his username from the list and entered his passcode. After it connected to the Internet—presumably via wireless or 4G—and verified his information, it fell back to the idle screen and greened-out his cartoony portrait on the face. With that process done, he handed it to Susan, who started entering her information.

The tablet made its rounds through the group in the room and finally reached Benjamin Miller as Adam Roach and David Dalton bustled into the room. Adam shouldered in first, arm hanging limply under his backpack; he looked very hot in his business suit and his tie hung wilted against his chest, with smudges of sweat around the collar. David slipped in nonchalantly, not even a sheen of sweat along his brow, for all the world he looked like the heat outside didn’t touch him—an iced drink dripped beads of condensation as he set it on the table to unlimber his own backpack.

“David got caught up ordering a cappuccino,” Adam said dismissively, taking the tablet from Benjamin as he shrugged his backpack off onto the table. His Bluetooth headset illuminated the glossy pad of the tablet as he tapped his info in with a ghostly azure glow. “

Adam took the tablet from David with a shrug and he began inputting his own information. “I’m telling you, with these temperatures nothing’s better than an iced mocha. You should have tried one yourself.”

“The caffeine,” Adam said. “It gives me stomach aches. I’ll pass.”

After David completed logging into the tablet the screen faded out the portraits of each of the DarkNet team and expanded the countdown timer to take up the entire screen. It ticked down the last few seconds and then swapped itself out for a gigantic button that looked like it had been fashioned from galvanized steel reading: “UNLOCK.”

“Everybody ready?” asked Zane.

Nods and murmurs went all around.

He grabbed an HDMI cable extending from a nearby workbench and plugged it into the tablet. The screen blanked and the giant, riveted button resolved in mammoth HD proportions on the projector screen. Zane pressed it.

The button recessed into the screen with an audible clunk, followed by the whrr of heavy machinery and the harsh tones of the Metal theme of the DarkNet Project theme song. As the button fell away into darkness, the black space surrounding it boiled away to reveal fields of circuit boards portraying further impossible circuitry traced with green leads. Fat, white words began to fly onto the screen from both sides and scrolled upwards to make room for a developing paragraph.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” a voice boomed from the ceiling speakers sporting a cheesy Russian accent. “Will be to intercept enemy communication at three strategic points across your campus and decipher the information before the other teams. You may use any tools at your disposal. This is a free-for-all match.

“Each communication point will consist of three parts: the comm. data, a clue to the next comms location, and the key to deciphering one of the other comm signals.

“To respect the class schedules of students who may be playing this game throughout the day. The third and final comm intercept will occur afterfive p.m.at your local time.

“The first comm location will be unique to your team. The second comm location will put you up against two other teams on your campus; you can work together or against one another. The final comm location will become available to all five teams on your campus. You will need the clues from the other two comms in order to find it and decipher it.

“Good luck, DarkNet team. The world is depending on you.

“DarkNet Metropolis Central Command Authority out.”

Elaine stared him down. “I am operating within established system parameters,” she said. “You can letBlaineknow that everything is fine. His assistance will not be required at this juncture—nor would yours. As you are currently blocking my egress, could you move out of the way? Otherwise I may be forced to walk around you.”

Her eyes darted side to side in a show of her intent. To the casual Halo: Combat Evolved video gamer, Zach did seem wider than an M12 FAV Warthog, but the Computing Commons atrium thoroughfare could accommodate three Zach’s shoulder-to-shoulder. She didn’t welcome these little verbal sparring matches but as they were inescapable, she figured that she could make the best out of them.

“Haha, very funny,” he said. “When it comes to your brother, it’s my ass in a sling if something were to happen to you. The last time the dean wanted you in his office it was for a very good reason. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay in his good graces. I’m just looking out for you here. You don’t need to be so hostile.”

“I’m not hostile,” she said. “I’m in a hurry.”

Like a mountain grinding against the tectonic fault that lifted it, Zach heaved a sigh and grated as he turned on his heel to allow her to pass. He uncrossed his arms and made a “by your leave” gesture with an open hand, motioning towards the path she’d originally taken.

Elaine strode past with purpose to her step and did not look back down at the Enoch’s display again until she was safely ensconced in the elevator and he was out of sight.

Zane and most of hisARGteam had taken up stations in her lab on the second floor of the Commons. They clustered around the single table on the near side of the room with any open area and had taken some of the chairs from the rest of the room.

Most of the room was dominated with soldier rows of hardcased PCs, their monitors, mice and keyboards sitting at the ready—thick networking cables ran like sinew and neurons through the room, dripping over tables, racing along the floor, and winding up PVC poles into the overhead ceiling. Even up there, a technician would find further computers, set in smaller form-factor cases with fans whirring day and night.

As Zane had helped her architect the room and all of its hidden features; he’d already activated a concealed projection screen and activated the projector. In the middle of the table sat a single, lone tablet PC. From the artwork and design, Elaine could tell that it was related to the DarkNet property—a sleek, black machine with a neon-green symbol carved from a circuit board in the form of a biohazard symbol that seemed to dissolve into bubbles near its edges. The yellow-gold lines of the circuitry tugged at her eyes as she looked at it, the first time she saw it she wondered if the artist knew that they had developed an impossible printed circuit that couldn’t possibly have acted as a proper electrical device even if the symbol had been cut out of an actual board.

Zane checked his watch when Elaine entered the room.

“The event starts in about three minutes,” he said, “and we can’t unlock the tablet until everyone on the team is present. We’re still missing Adam and David.” Susan Pilgrim, Benjamin Miller, and Russell Murphy all stood nearby in various poses of anxious anticipation. All of them shrugged when Zane looked at them in turn. “Go ahead and try calling them again.”

Susan nodded and held down a speed dial button on her cryptophone. As they waited while the phone on the other side rang, Elaine walked over to Zane.

“After this, I’d like to talk to you about using your team for an investigation I’m working on,” she said. “I have a lot of ground to cover soon and I think they and the crypto-handsets I developed would be ideal for what I need to do.”

Zane nodded absently. “Sure,” he said. “I don’t see why we can’t help you out.”

Elaine had seen her before. She was a middle-aged woman with a conservative haircut wearing a green silk outfit that made her look a little more dressed-up than she needed to be. Everything about the Dean of Engineering’s office seemed formal—the windows, desk, and chairs all focused attention on the secretary in the center, whose emerald green dress made her feel like a jeweled fitting amidst the mahogany furniture. From her accent, and previous encounters, Elaine surmised that she was an Arizona native. A faded, white line on her right ring-finger suggested she’d once worn a band there. Sheila Blake, read the nameplate on her desk.

“Do you know when the dean will be back today?” Elaine asked.

“He does have a meeting with the department heads at one,” she said. “Those generally only last about forty-five minutes, so if you came back just before two, you might catch up with him then.”

“I’ll do that,” Elaine said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” the receptionist said.

When she passed back out of the Engineering building, Elaine found herself once again in the cold dry of the desert air, embraced in the warm sunlight. It sparked a notable difference from the frigid air-conditioned indoors that lacked the sunlight; but inside also didn’t smell prominently of dust and car exhaust.

She’d cleared her entire day’s schedule for assisting Zane’s DarkNet team with a “Black Ops” job today (basically a mid-term mission theARGgroups had to commit forces to in order to earn points) and she’d hoped that she could update the dean on her progress before making her way to mission control. His absence from the office puzzled her. Elaine reached into her backpack to withdraw two sticks of pocky and munched them as she walked through a slab of sunlight towards the Computing Commons. Two students gestured and spoke her name as she passed, she acknowledged them with a nod—members of Zane’sARGteam, Russell Murphy and Susan Pilgrim—they waved their burner crypto-phones at her in a show of solidarity. She’d be seeing them shortly.

Zane’s communiqué about theARGblack ops mission had suggested that it would begin early in the day and that the organizers had permitted outside help. As a result, he tapped her for expert assistance and asked if the team could use her lab as a base of operations. He left her an invitation on her calendar by dropping an e-mail with the tag on it. The event might run all day, he’d mentioned, so she’d have to duck out sometime around 2 p.m. in order to hook up with the dean. She’d just have to let Zane know.

She shouldered the double door of the Computing Commons open, buried her nose in the display of the Enoch, and headed to her lab on autopilot. Her feelers set out the day before into the hacker community had resulted in some interesting speculation as to the nature of the improbability engine and how it might have affected the historical and present test scores of the students the dean hired. Also, the residual splash that Frog received when they erased the spellcode from Brad Wright and friends had given her some extra data in regards to the phenomenon that she thought could be used to detect it in situ.

Elaine’s mental autopilot dumped her to manual and hit the brakes when a shadow occluded the lights and a body blocked her path.

“You’re up early.”

A wild Zach Rooke appears!

The voice and hulking shape belonged to none other than Zach “the Attack” Rooke—close friend of her older brother and a constant source of noise in her social equation. For some reason he’d decided it was up to him to become her brother’s proxy in absentia. Her brother had graduated from ASU four years earlier and now worked at the Large Hadron Collider preparing the world’s destruction by way of black hole or Black Mesa—whichever conceivably could come first.

“I have work to do,” Elaine said without looking up. “Unless, of course, you’re here to tell me that the campus police have raided my lab again.”

The only interesting thing he’d done all day involved sending several obviously coded messages from his personal account to an e-mail address inJapanthat seemed to be connected to an inbox that went nowhere.

Agent Warren sighed into his coffee and savored the taste.

“Anything new from the tap?” his partner asked. “The techs tell me that it hasn’t checked in at its usual interval. Do you think he found it?”

“It’s much more likely it fried,” Warren said. “Either that or Mercer found it. I wouldn’t put it past her. After looking at her dossier, I’d say that she probably knows more about counter-surveillance than most of the Bureau knows about surveillance. For example, take that batch of burner phones that we have the blanket tap on. I call the techs today for an update on what they’re being used for, and you know what they tell me?”

“What?”

“They’re using some sort of distributed encryption with a ‘rolling-cipher’ that they’ve never even seen before. These are college students and they’ve got a more sophisticated communication network than the United States government. If these kids are conspiring to commit terrorism we won’t know until after the fact at this rate.”

“We could still tap Mercer’s phone,” Agent Toller said, taking a long drought from her cup. “As long as you don’t want to do it my way, we could come at her sideways.”

Agent Warren watched the dean for a moment through the binoculars again as the man shuffled papers around his desk into neat piles, reached up and turned off his lamp, and then went about the long process of putting on his coat to leave his office. The agent checked his watch—nearing themidnighthour. He wondered for a moment if the man slowly vacating the office had any social life outside of his job.

The dean was probably a dead end. There was some connection to Mercer that he couldn’t quite put his thumb on.

“You think she doesn’t know already?” Agent Toller said. “It’s not like we’ve been that discreet questioning people directly related to her. What’s the point of beating around the bushes? I say we go head on and see which way she runs.”

The steam from the coffee fogged the glass of the window in front of him as Agent Warren mulled over his partner’s position. She always was the get-out-and-get-them type and this sort of operative surveillance that involved bugs, wiretaps, and a lot of talking to people who only had tangential association with the target operation didn’t sit well with her. It didn’t sit well with him either, he concluded. However, the psych profile on Mercer suggested a cold, analytical mind that created corridors of contingency everywhere she went. She also had powerful political allies spanning an entire spectrum of social strata from the kids of well-to-do politicians to a parent who worked with the US Department of Defense.

“If there’s anything we’ve learned about this girl is that she’s well entrenched and extremely smart,” Agent Warren said. “I’d like to take a page from Machiavelli and undermine her support before we try to take her head on. Something tells me she’s not the type who we’d learn anything from if we sweat her under a bright light.”

The chuckle that floated back from the other seat cancelled itself in a snort as Agent Toller almost did a spit-take with her coffee. Even the Phoenix FBI field office didn’t have any small brick interrogation rooms with a single bright light. All of them were carpeted and beige—the two agents had checked upon arrival. In fact, there’d be soon little room in the field office they couldn’t get their own desk in the bullpen. The local agents had been kind enough to set them up in one of those unused rooms. Right there with the blue carpets, beige walls, and one-way-glass.

“Alright, alright,” she said. “Well do it your way. The long, drawn-out, boring way.”

“Why are you complaining?” Agent Warren asked. He turned the key in the ignition and brought the car’s tinny engine to life. “Manny signed off on all the overtime we need. What, you late for a dance or something?”

Agent Toller shook her head. “Just drive me back to the hotel. I need some good old fashioned boring TV time.”

His hand hung over the key in the ignition for a moment when Agent Warren felt the blood drain from his face.

“Where’s Harwood?” he asked.

Agent Toller sipped at her coffee and made a waving motion towards the now-dark office. “He headed out the front door and started locking up, I didn’t see where—” she paused a moment, grabbed the binoculars from the dash, and leaned forward. “Well that’s not on the menu.”

“I don’t see him.”

“Dark red van, two-o’clock,” Agent Toller said. Squinting, she adjusted the focal length trying to get a better view of what was going on amid the dimly lit buildings. “He seems to be arguing with someone inside the van. Now he’s getting in.” With her free hand, she reached up and grabbed her seatbelt. “No, the person inside the van grabbed him and pulled him in.”

“I’m on it,”Warren said.

The engine buzzed to life and he kicked the vehicle into gear. Agent Warren kept the lights off as they followed the van towards the edge of campus. The van sped casually down Terrace and made a hastily signaled right turn onto Rural Road. Warren carefully dogged its tail and turned on the lights of the car when he felt there was enough other traffic to hide them.

“Well, this is an unexpected turn,” Agent Toller said.

“No kidding. After this, when we get back to the room, I need to change my pants.”

Agent Toller suppressed a smile. “It couldn’t have surprised you that much.”

“No, not that,” Agent Warren said. “I spilled my coffee.”

“Still have your mind on that bug we found in his office?” Frog caught the pillow, set it to the side, and tapped idly at the tablet.

“Yes,” she said. “By now, the people who left it are probably aware that it’s been compromised. None of the e-mails from the dean suggest that the FBI agents have returned. It’s too late to contact him anyway.”

Elaine felt weary from the long day and a yawn crept up on her. She stretched her aching muscles and gently shook an empty can of Mountain Dew that rested next to her keyboard. She’d spent the last two hours debugging a spellcode application for the Enoch that would enable her to detect the presence of improbability engine magical programming in other people. The quick compile within the virtual Enoch ran fine the last three times and it was ready for a dry run. However, a fully linked, optimized compile that would fit on the Enoch would take several hours.

She decided to make the best of it and catch some sleep.

“Mind if I played some WoW?” Frog asked, gesturing to the looming hulk of Elaine’s gaming rig sitting on the desk next to her programming workstations. “The guild has been wondering where I’ve been for the past few days.”

“Sure,” Elaine said sleepily. She pulled her spectacles and goggles off—her glasses fit snugly within the goggles and a plastic cover clipped over to hold them fast. She slid one arm under her Han Solo pillow and clutched the other, with her goggles in grasp, against her chest. “You don’t really need to ask.”

“Just checking,” her friend said. “I’ll catch some Z’s of my own in a bit on the other bed. See you in the morning.”

As she started the launcher for World of Warcraft, Frog noticed a familiar handle appear in one of Elaine’s chatrooms in the background. The name read “Tagger444” and Frog recollected her friend’s mention that her stalker, Tango, had a penchant for handles that started with the letter ‘T’. Elaine’s chat software flagged the nickname as well based on the IP address it came from as a possible Tango sockpuppet as higher than fifty percent probability. The person behind Tagger444’s keyboard decided to break lurker mode and entered into the discussion of cheating, databases, and statistics.

Tagger444 submitted his own ideas to the conversation but did so amidst asking questions about how people came to the subject. She watched him (or her) skillfully manipulate the conversation towards asking questions about Elaine’s handle, Carmina, without giving much information about himself. It seemed pretty bold. He’d wandered directly into the lion’s den, with one of Elaine’s chatbots watching, and started casting his net.

Frog made sure the bot had started recording the conversation before she clicked Warcraft into full screen and plugged her headphones in.

* * *

Special Agent Ellis Warren rubbed at the ache that had settled directly above his left eyebrow as he adjusted the focus on his binoculars for the umpteenth time since he’d taken up position in the car to watch the Dean of Engineering in his office. ASU campus didn’t make it easy to see into offices near the middle, like the Engineering complexes, but a few surveillance points existed that matched little-known parking lots. At this time of night, so few students left their cars behind that it made it trivial for him to slide into one of those vacancies and use it as a cramped base of operation.

The passenger-side door of his Bureau assigned Prius opened and the smell of a mint latte blew in with the dry desert air as his partner slid into the seat next to him. He winced as the cheap plastic upholstery scraped against her sidearm holster—she quickly adjusted herself and let her suit coat catch up to buffer between it and the seat. Special Agent Kathy Toller went out for coffee and doughnuts over an hour before on a run that shouldn’t have taken her more than twenty minutes.

She patted her coat to check the jingle of her keys as she pulled the door closed and then turned in the seat towards him. The weirdly contoured seats came too small for him, he mused, but they fit her tight fame extremely well. In fact, she was so compact that she could rotate in the seat legs and torso. If Ellis Warren attempted the same maneuver he would get his feet tangled together. It was he curse, he surmised, a little bit on the tall side, with a lot of legs and very little torso.

He lowered the binoculars to give her a piece of his mind but the headache above his eyebrow bit him sharply and settled for a grimace.

“Sorry that too so long,” she said as she withdrew one of the Starbucks cups from a Styrofoam holder and handed it to him. “I brought you a peace offering.”

“I hope you brought some Tylenol with that,” he said. “I might be the first agent to fall in the line of duty from sheer boredom.”

“Gah!” Frog yelped as she jumped from a particularly bright flash of static electricity.

“Sorry,” Hadaly said. “I’ve got the discharge magnitude as low as it will go for the projectors to still function properly. You’re covered in the stuff, you know.”

“It’s just electrostatic residuals taking residence in your body’s cells,” Elaine said. “I warned you not to stand so close to the degaussing coil. The astral energy of the spellcode that Vargas, Pilgrim, and Wright set in their brains had a diffusion radius along the field lines from the solenoid. You caught some of the backwash.”

Frog scrunched up her lips into a pout and blew a puff of air at an errant lock of green hair. “But I love the way it feels. We don’t often get to use that sort of heavy equipment.”

“And now for your front,” Hadaly said with a grin too big for her face—an effect only possible due to the projected nature of the ionizing hologram.

“Oh, Zane would kill to see this,” Frog said as she turned around to face Hadaly and raised her arms over her head. The AI’s luminous grin increased intensity by an erg as she brought her hands up and ran them along Frog’s shoulders. Frog’s face hardened in mock sternness. “One word about this and I’ll kick your virtual ass into the Singularity.”

“You could just take a shower, you know,” Elaine said, gesturing to the door. “Running water will disperse the ionizing phenomena. At this time of night, the communal bathroom will be entirely empty.”

“And pass up a chance to tease your brother about a little girl-on-android action?” Frog said. “You’re recording this, aren’t you?”

“Everything I experience is ‘recorded,’” Hadaly said.

“Maybe we can make a music video out of it.”

“Way ahead of you.”

“I get director’s cut privileges!”

“Can I get you two to focus for just a moment?” Elaine asked. She’d connected the Enoch to her workstation and let the device synchronize all the data it collected from her experimental series in the Law Library with what she’d streamed during the hours she’d spent with the otherARGteam members. Upon returning to her dorm room, she’d also logged into all of her usual hunts: favorite IM chat rooms, dark-side-of-the-web forums, and IRC networks.

The night seemed a little bit sluggish for talk; but she’d already managed to set a few of her confidants arguing over the best ways to use mid-stream SQL hijacking on a database to alter grades without making it obvious cheating had happened. The spellcode used by the Brad’s friends and he had been magical in process, but the underlying effect could still be modeled with computer code. Elaine relied on this fact to translate how the spell functioned into terms her hacker friends could parse.

“Yow!” Frog exclaimed. “…tell me you didn’t do that on purpose.”

“I didn’t do that on purpose,” the AI said. “Also, I’m done. You may now safely interact with equipment in the room without bricking it or toasting yourself.”

“Thank you, Hadaly,” Elaine said. “Frog, you’ve got free range of the room again now that I’m sure you’re not going to fry anything with random lingering ESD. Although cumbersome, this does give me some ideas on how we can track who in the dean’s cheater list could be using a similar effect to what Wright’s friends had encountered.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Hadaly said.

The silvery-blue outline of her projected self dissolved as the air-ionization effect dissapated when she killed the projectors in the room. Elaine watched her vanish with a certain amount of speculation. The AI had once again gone with a long-haired, almost-animé faced female avatar wearing a long lab coat. She’d gone through a long series of visible characters recently that deviated from her usual look (which seemed to template on a taller version of Elaine) but she’d settled back into her old standby: a projected model that looked like a less uncanny version of her android chassis.

She scrolled through her e-mail for the day.

The smart agent that guarded her inbox had chewed through all of the spam that flowed through, caught and parsed important-seeming e-mails and tagged them appropriately, and siphoned confidential mail into its own secure encrypted storage for her later perusal. Outstanding from today’s civilian messages lay one from the Dean of Engineering’s personal Gmail address asking her for an update on her progress. He’d sent the message to one of her dead-drop addresses so it would be unlikely anyone would intercept it, but he still gave away a lot in the text.

“I really need to talk to the dean about being more sensitive about his private e-mails,” she said to Frog. “He sent me three e-mails today through his personal address but the timestamps suggest that he did it at work.”

Frog lay on her bed, twirling a pillow with her hands and feet, one of the many tablet computers from the room on her stomach.

“You think we should leave him one of your burner crypto-phones that you passed out to Zane’s team?” Frog asked. “It might make sense for your future clients to have a safe way to contact you.”

Elaine put her hand on the page, covering the text before Larry could lean over and read.

“This is a language triggered spell,” she said. “You trigger the action of the probability engine by translating each of the paragraphs. Much like an electrical circuit, it requires not just an energy input but a substrate for the energy to flow along. Your brain would provide the media and energy.”

“I thought they were just instructions,” Larry said. “It’s what they read like.”

“A probability engine?” Casey asked.

Elaine paused for a moment, thinking it over. “A probability engine functions by doing work to imbalance two sides of a probability equation. It does so by relaxing error. What I see here would probably be better described as an improbability engine as described by Jacob Bernoulli in his Ars Conjectandi. When we model a system, we don’t model every variable but instead their end outcomes and from that we conjecture about the likely outcome. It will tend to fall into a curve as you’ve seen projected on the wall the entire time we’ve been here.

“The improbability engine acts on a specific set of events by causing them to escape the curve by suppressing either the minimum or maximum outcomes. In your case, and the model data that is being crunched right now its suppressing minimum outcomes. I suspect that it only triggers when you make an arbitrary guess when you don’t believe you know an answer since then you introduce an inherent randomness to your answer.”

The simulations she’d set running on the Enoch earlier displayed that they had some preliminary results for her to review, so she selected them from a menu and threw them up onto the projector. There, a generally naturalBellcurve with a bulge in the center and sloping edges that lay near the right edge of the graph.

“Quite a few of those questions didn’t mean anything to me,” Brad said. “You put aerospace questions on my test. I don’t take any of those classes.”

“Same here,” Larry said. “I saw some questions involving Spanish.”

“I wondered about those too,” Casey said.

Elaine scanned through the results and picked a few analysis that might help her explain visually to those in the room.

“That should become clear in a moment,” she said. “I needed to trigger skewed error rates by throwing in questions that some of you should do well on and others should do very poorly on.” Her fingers played a couple spinners together that mapped scoring with different colors. She tossed them onto the screen as well.

“The two dashed lines you see are Frog and I,” she said. Both dashed lines displayed somewhat natural, but flat,Bellcurves further down the graph with three solid lines near the far end, one in particular stood extremely far to the right. “The black solid line is Casey. All three of you managed an ‘A’ on the Spanish portion.”

“But I don’t know Spanish,” Larry said. “In fact, I guessed on almost every one of those.”

“Same here,” Frog said. “My Spanish is crap. So, look at me, I made a… Gee, Elaine, you gave me a D-minus?”

“Just in Mexican and Brazilian Spanish,” Elaine said. “By the way, some of those questions were unfair and used a dialect of Spanish that Casey doesn’t know. As you can see even as a near Native speaker she didn’t get a maximum grade. That tells me the improbability engine doesn’t trigger when you believe you know the answer. However, Larry and Brad, who don’t know the answers, were carried.”

“So, it rewards guessing,” Casey said. “How does this help us get out of this mierda?”

“It does more than reward guessing,” Elaine said, “which is what tells me that chances are the problem is that your use of the spell is incomplete.”

“Incomplete?” Brad said gesturing to the journals laid out on the table. “This is all of it that we found. And it looks pretty complete to me.”

“This probability circuit diagrams a pretty basic algorithm,” Elaine said. “Yet it has no terminator. It’ll never stop running until it receives a signal telling it to stop. The reason why you haven’t noticed it in your scholastics is because its effects have been diminishing. That’s only because Larry and Brad are forgetting about it.”

“Wait,” Larry said, touching his head. “You said that our brains are the media earlier, didn’t you? So—my brain is what’s keeping this running?”

“Like a computer program,” Elaine said.

Larry looked at his hands, obvious distress crossing his face. “How do I get it out?”

“I have something for just this purpose,” she said. “If you’d all like to accompany me across campus for the second time today, I think that we can resolve your situation once and for all.”

“Across campus,” Frog said, flipping her ponytail over her shoulder. “You mean to the Computing Commons? But what do you have in there—?” She quickly pinched off a smirk and put a hand on Brad’s arm. She used her other hand to grab one of the discarded tests to hide her face. “Wait a sec, you don’t mean the industrial degausser?”

“I haven’t used it on human beings yet,” Elaine said as she started stacking the journals up. She didn’t need them any more, after all, the photograph has been taken and they could be returned to the shelves from whence they came.

“What do you use this machine for usually?” Larry said.

Brad shook his head and chuckled. “They’d use it for erasing mass storage magnetic media,” he said. “What? I’m an Electrical Engineering major. Degaussing can be used to erase all the data on a hard drive. It shouldn’t do anything to people. I don’t think.”

“You don’t think?” Larry said.

“If it’ll get rid of what’s happening, I’m all for it.” Casey said she walked over and offered her hand to Elaine. “For blasting us at your brother’s house… I forgive you. Thank you for all this… Even if this doesn’t work.”

She took Casey’s hand to shake it and the other girl pulled her close and hugged her. Elaine froze momentarily with the sudden, unexpected touch and did her best to mirror the girl’s squeeze against her ribs and abdomen. It took her a moment to decide on what an appropriate expression might be, but before she knew what happened Casey released her and nodded. The other girl wandered away to collect her own backpack and Elaine looked at Frog uncomfortably.

“It’s rare for one of her ideas not to work,” Frog said as she stuffed the tests into her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “Sometimes that’s a problem.”

The group slowly poured out of the room into the brightly lit corridor beyond.

“It’s not going to erase my memory, is it?” Larry asked as he killed the light. He stood for a moment and peered into the room with worry lines etched across his face. After closing the door and locking it, he suddenly noticed that not only had nobody heard him—but they’d already made it most of the way down the hall to the stairwell.

Brad had his arm around Frog’s shoulder, smiling and laughing; Elaine and Casey stood shoulder to shoulder as Elaine showed the other girl something on her smartphone.

Larry trotted after them as quickly as he could with the stack of journals under his arm.