“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.

Elaine set the Enoch to the task of trading the numbers with her server cloud in the Computing Commons and let the machines there start the simulation crunching. Without a context for what it expected to fall out and a broad breadth of data to mine, she let the screen just spin with numbers and interaction totals rather than a time-remaining display. The simulation would take as long as it would take and she could study the conclusions once it finished.

Frog had engaged Casey in a light conversation about why she’d gone in with the cheating clique her Freshman year, Elaine listened in.

“My father’s an aerospace engineer who graduated from National Polytechnic in Mexico City,” she said. “He’s a first generation immigrant to the United States. The government rushed his citizenship when he applied to work for Lockheed-Martin and that’s where he met my mother. I’m the fourth child in a family of all boys and all three of them have already graduated with engineering degrees. So, of course, I am expected to get a college degree also. My mother, bless her heart, couldn’t bear to have me leave home now that my brothers are all out of state so I got in at ASU.”

“But you’re really not into engineering?” Frog asked.

“No,” she said. Casey rubbed her fingers against her wrist where she had a discoloration on her skin. “No, no, don’t take me wrong, engineering is interesting and it’s got some good jobs attached to it, but it’s not really my thing. I like working with my hands and the program here at ASU doesn’t give me a lot of that. So I’ve been taking classes in mechanics and materials engineering.”

“How did you get tangled up in this mess with Brad and Larry? You don’t sound like the sort who’d go for this kind of thing.”

“Wright and I found it by accident,” she said, “but he can explain it a lot better than I can. It reminded me of something superstitious more than something I actually thought might work. You know. Like, who expects a rabbit’s foot to actually be lucky? It wasn’t lucky for the rabbit. Like that.”

Elaine cut in. “Now’s a good time to go over how the cheating system works,” she said. “The data is crunching right now and we’ve probably got an hour or so before it comes back with anything useful. Can you demonstrate?”

“As I said, ask Wright,” Casey Vargas said.

Brad moved around the table and started sifting through the journals scattered around it. Now that she’d completed and collected the tests, Elaine took a moment to examine their titles. All of them were journals and serial publications about German Language and Literature, all published by the same imprint—a small press at Yale University. After a minute of searching, Brad found what he was looking for: Issue 271, Volume 1. He set that aside and next grabbed Issue 828, followed by Issue 182, then Issue 845.

He moved to hand the second issue he’d grabbed to Elaine and said, “You probably haven’t noticed the pattern but—”

“It’s Euler’s Number,” Elaine cut him off as she took the journal. “Two-point-seven-one, eight-two-eight, one-eight-two, eight-four five. The next issue will be nine-oh-four. I suspect that this is significant to the effect, the natural log. Did you know that Google used the first ten-digit prime in e as a web page to invite candidates to apply for a job? No doubt the people who wrote this algorithm hid their function using a similar intelligence test.”

“Oookay,” Brad said. “Remind me never to try to pull one past you. Anyway, yes, it’s e. We didn’t even realize that until after we’d discovered the pattern. If you look at the inside back cover of each of the journals you’ll find the formula for a sort of mathematical trick that the writers suggest can be used to influence statistical analysis of any survey. Specifically it’s for tests.”

He flipped one of the journals open, pointed to neatly handwritten text along the inside-back cover and handed it to Elaine.

She cocked her head slightly to one side. “If you didn’t solve the problem using e originally, how did you discover enough of the algorithm to do anything?”

Casey Vargas spoke up. “Wear patterns,” she said. “I know very little about the number but I did notice that only certain issues had been touched, and touched a lot. That’s when we found the manuscript in back. Wright noticed the number and then used that to discover the seventeen total volumes and put them in proper order.”

Elaine looked at what appeared to be the clean lines of an expertly drawn scientific diagram. It had been done in blue ink with a fine-tipped pen wielded by a steady hand. Upon first glance she spotted symbols that appeared to be from chemical notation alongside architectural notation—except what she saw diagrammed didn’t incorporate designs from either. It ran across the page in intersecting outlines that connected Greek and astrological symbols with a haphazard notation that she figured must have been written in German. As she ran her fingers along one line, Brad Wright handed her the next journal and it immediately became clear where it would sit. Just like a jigsaw puzzle with all the edge pieces completed.

The back covers lined up side-by-side five across the table as Brad continued to hand opened journals to her. As the intersections increased, so did the complexity of the diagram. Upon the fifth, the next journal went below instead of to the right and the pattern continued. Once the entire seventeen journals had been placed on the table, they spiraled inwards, culminating in a final journal with a nautilus shell of overlapping lines.

The German writing interlocked into five different paragraphs across the entire schematic. Looking at it, Elaine could make several educated guesses at its function: (1) it was a probability circuit; (2) this meant that the central diagram (the nautilus shell) was a probability engine; (3) it would power itself on a deep meta-linguistic similar to what she ran the Enoch on; (4) this meant it required a simulation space, much like the Enoch did when running Astral code.

“Which one of you speaks German,” Elaine asked. She held the Enoch up and started to take photographs of the completed diagram. It hummed as it scanned in the diagram, OCRed the German into memory, and began to track out the myriad lines of the probability engine.

“Do you really think that I’m behind the fact this is still going on?”

Casey leaned forward. “Give me a reason why I shouldn’t think you’d keep trying to cheat?” she said. “You started this whole thing, after all. I wouldn’t have gone along with you the first time if I wasn’t so desperate not to fail Professor Heinrich’s class.”

“Mr. Wright hasn’t been lying when he said he’s not doing it,” Elaine said from where she tapped away at the laptop. “I believe that once I’m able to model your cheat, he will be vindicated. All evidence is pointing to it being an independent effect.”

“How do you know?”

Frog rapped on the table. “She’s got a truth detector on her phone,” she said. “It’s been running ever since we cornered Larry back in the stairwell. If Elaine says Brad isn’t lying, chances are he’s not, her system is very hard to beat.”

Casey leaned back. She still looked unconvinced but for the moment seemed content to stay her objections.

“Do you have the materials with you still?” Elaine asked Frog.

“But of course,” her friend said, pulling a folder out of her backpack. It bulged with the number of papers in it, which had been separated by dividers with colored tabs protruding from them. She handed the folder over to Elaine, who took it, pulled it open, and began to collate the papers within into distinct piles in front of her on the table. When she finished, she topped each stack with a differently colored separator.

Larry slid into the room weighted down by a towering stack of heavy-looking journals. He staggered the short distance from the door to the table and they splashed down onto the surface amidst a thundering wash of pages. Casey shook her head and Brad sighed as Larry apologized profusely and rushed to pull them back into some semblance of order.

As Larry went about collecting the crashed remains, Elaine started placing the papers on the table.

“In order to determine the effect, I am going to have to model it,” she said. “That means I’m going to have to test you. I have complied a series of quizzes based on the classes each of you are taking into six tests that will take you approximately twenty three minutes each to complete. With each subsequent round of tests I will have certain people leave the room. For control, Frog and I will also take the test along with you in several iterations.”

Brad frowned and thumped his finger on the table. “I hope this will prove to everyone that I’m not behind this. I don’t want to get anyone into trouble again. If it’s true that it still looks like we’re cheating, it could reflect very badly on me as well.”

“I can do you one better,” Elaine said. “I have a relationship with the Dean of Engineering now. As I am tasked with investigating cheating across the different colleges, I will be able to add to my report that I investigated the ongoing anomaly of your grades and report that it doesn’t involve any actual cheating. That should get all three of you off the hook. Is that sufficient to establish your cooperation?”

“As if we have anything to do in the next three hours anyway,” Brad said.

“Attaboy,” Frog said.

Larry sat at the far side of the table and resumed looking confused.

Casey just shrugged. “Bring it on.”

“Excellent,” Elaine said. “Frog will now give each of you two No. 2 pencils to record your test data with…” She paused for a moment and furrowed her brow. “Unless any of you have a talisman writing utensil or something else you always take with you to tests? As that would be good information to know now.”

All three of her subjects shook their heads in the negative. Frog set the pencils next to each of the participants—including Elaine and herself—and then sat down holding them like a knife-and-fork at a dinner.

She nodded. “Then we shall begin,” she said, spinning her finger along the surface of the Enoch’s screen. “The room is about to feel very stuffy, like there’s several hundred people in here with you. Please ignore the sensation—it’s part of the simulation process.”

Her finger turned a wheel on the screen from unlocked to locked and algorithms within the phone sprang into action. The phone detected each person in the room and generated thousands of varied astral reflections of them sitting only dimensions away. The reflections actuated carefully crafted echoes of their personalities and behaviors cast off by every thought in their minds. Just as Elaine had warned, the room suddenly felt as if it were spilling over with people as the constellation of minds became aware of the tests in front of them and began to get to work.

Elaine cracked open her own test, read the first question, and went to work.

Casey Vargas walked at Elaine’s other elbow. From the stiffness in her gait and the expression on her face, a casual observer could have guessed someone had deleted her favorite video game save file. During the initial leg of the journey, Larry tried to converse with her as well—but he quickly moved onto talking at Elaine after Casey returned his overtures with openly hostile glares. Only Frog and Brad seemed to be getting along to any extent. Walking three paces behind, they managed an animated, but insubstantial dialogue. Every time Elaine caught a snip or phrase from their conversation, she filed it away as another linguistic-nothing said to fill the quiet or some sort of subtle flirtation.

When she looked up from the Enoch for a moment to check her sight lines to the library, she found that Larry had paused and was waiting for her to reply.

It took her a few moments to find an appropriate expression and she set her face to “raised eyebrow.”

“Why do you wear the goggles? They’re a little bit tacky,” Larry repeated.

“They’re interface goggles,” Elaine explained. “Part of my work for the University has been in miniaturization and vision augmentation tech. They’re my first prototype of a transparent OLED-and-prism overlay that uses dynamic depth phosphors with transparent electrical conductors and density changing liquid crystals to change focal ranges. They also each have nineteen transparent cameras inset into the lenses themselves in hexagonal artifact transposition with overlapping fields of view. They’re a second generation model, would you like to see them in action?”

By the time she finished speaking, Elaine could see that Larry’s had gone into dummy-mode. He snapped out of it when she reached up to remove her goggles and shook his head.

“It’s okay. I don’t need to see them,” Larry said. “I’m a civil engineering major. Well, now I am. Maybe a year ago I would have understood what you’re taking about… They sound really cool.”

Elaine nodded. “I agree. They are ‘really cool.’”

Larry smiled at her sheepishly as they passed into the shade of the Law Library and he darted forward to grab the door for her. A gust of cold, conditioned air cut through her shirt—it was freezing in there, and it smelled like books. Lots of books. Inside, brown carpet covered large floors and sunlight streamed through bay windows that cast shadows across numerous shelves. Most of the lower level had been set aside for tables and chairs separated by short shelves that rose to waist height filled with extremely massive periodicals. The gentle clatter of laptops and the shuffle of feet registered only barely above the murmur of voices and turning of pages.

Casey took the opportunity to brush past both of them and enter the building. Without pause, she stalked directly up to the front desk where two young men sat plugging away at small black desktop computers. A few seconds later, she greeted everyone gathered with the jingle of keys.

“I got room 206,” she said. “We should take the stairs. The elevators in here smelled like dried piss yesterday and that means they smell like Pinesol today and I’m allergic.”

“Please, lead the way,” Frog said.

Casey lent a long, drawn out look to Brad, sighed, and then turned on her heel—her hair flipping over her shoulders as she did—then set off at a brisk lope towards one of the side stairwells. Elaine and Frog fell in side-by-side, putting Larry and Brad together behind them as they followed.

The room was rectangular with a wide conference table in the center, comfortable black chairs set all around the outside. Due to more than half the lights being dead or dim, the lighting in the room could have been described as far less than sufficient. This, Casey and Larry explained, would be why the room was often free and few people used it. The lighting made reading a real chore on the best of days.

The far wall had a white stain on it about the size and shape of a giant plasma-TV—recently removed and replaced with a pull-down canvas for a projector system. The table had several insets with power, video, Ethernet, and audio cables and recesses for placing laptops. Casey used her key to unlock one of the cupboards and withdrew a last-gen laptop and set it up for Elaine—who paired the Enoch with it and took over its screen and keyboard, bypassing the motherboard entirely.

The dim lighting made her eyes water, so Elaine had Frog cut the lights and pull the screen, then she powered up the projection system. She loaded up a dataset diagram that displayed a topology graph of the statistical curve expected from a normal distribution and threw it up onto the screen as backdrop. She then programmed the Enoch to use the light from the projection system to raise the ambient light in the room to levels suitable to read by without eye strain.

“That’s new, these lights always sucked before,” Larry said after glancing up at the lights quizzically. “I should go, uh, get the books. I’ll be right back. Nobody ever touches them.”

Hitting a stud on the side of the Enoch, Elaine triggered a small projector behind a slit in her goggles. An oscillating beam of light issued forth and reflected off the inside of her goggles—dates and text spilled across her vision and she waited a moment for the system to gauge her current focal field. Hadaly had finished her fact-finding mission only a minute before and came back with some extremely potent results. She’d highlight the relevant data and promoted it to the top of the information stream being send to the Enoch handset.

“October 22^nd and 23^rd this year and November 1^st last year,” Elaine said, reading from the data points. “Do those dates ring any bells? Perhaps I could go on… I’ve got five more, dating back three years.”

Smartbomb: deployed.

“Why are those dates familiar?” Casey said, looking at Elaine with a deep suspicion.

Elaine continued to read, “Urban Environmental Planning 190, Engineering Technology Core 201, triple-E 201…and triple-E 211…”

Smartbomb: detonated.

Brad choked. “Stop! I don’t know what you’re getting at but it’s not going to work.”

“Those dates and classes they don’t mean anything to you?” Elaine said. “Should I go on?”

“Not if you value your brother’s future in the DarkNet game, you shouldn’t,” Brad said.

Elaine took a deep breath and used the thumb-scroll on the Enoch to bring up the rest of the list.

Then, in the next moment, Casey’s face went slack, her shoulders came up, and she looked to Brad. Larry’s expression followed a similar course, he looked defeated, eyes pleading with Brad not to continue baiting Elaine.

Brad swallowed. “I—” He expression froze for a moment as if confused. Casey growled and flung her arms up and her outburst shocked him out of his stun long enough for him to step away as she almost lunged for him.

“You didn’t, you puta!” she said. Coming down the stairs she brushed Larry aside when he tried to stop her. Her Chicana accent darkened as her face reddened and she clenched her fists into balls. “You told me that mierda would stop. You told us it would sto—”

“Shut up, Casey,” Brad said. “This isn’t the time or the place. Let’s just.”

Casey raised a single finger and pressed her lips together. “Ben! Al! Please take everyone else and get out of here. Larry, Brad, and I must have words together.” She snatched the recorder-pen from Brad and tossed it back up the stairs to Ben, who caught it. She cracked her knuckles as the rest of the DarkNet team filtered wordlessly out of the stairwell.

The sound of footfalls fell into the distance; nobody moved or spoke until well long after both doors closed the final time.

Casey and Brad seemed trapped together in a battle of wills, one staring at the other, waiting for someone to blink.

“What’s that all about?” Frog asked.

“Cheating,” Elaine said.

Frog raised an eyebrow at her friend, but relaxed herself. Expecting a long go at this, she removed her safari hat and rubbed her forehead. Small beads of sweat had formed on her brow from the intensity. With many fewer people in the room—and among those who were had their attention directed at one another—she could stand down and let Elaine do her work. Whatever strange work that meant doing.

“She doesn’t know anything,” Brad said.

“Pfaw,” Casey spat. “If she figured it out so easily, then wouldn’t someone else figure it out? It could lead right back to us. Did you think of that? I can’t believe this!”

“You mean it didn’t stop?” Larry said.

“I’m not following,” Frog said.

Elaine gestured to Brad, Casey, and Larry. “Each of the dates and classed I named are midterms,” she said. “In every case they were classes which all three of them were in attendance. The grades in each of the classes showed a distinct statistical skew that the other classes they were in alone did not display.

“I had Hadaly collate all their classes together and compare the statistics from their Freshman year when they were accused of cheating. The analysis should have been pretty easy, but the effect is extremely subtle. When they’re together in a class, they always have a better grade-to-peer ratio than their classmates which causes them to have higher grades.”

She flipped the projection off; the data and all the statistical mapping that went into the visualization vanished from her view.

“They were cheating,” Elaine said.

“He.” Casey stabbed a finger at Brad. “I didn’t cheat anything. He must have been cheating. I studied for those classes! I worked hard and I earned those grades. I just wanted to forget what we did Freshman year. Almost getting caught. That wasn’t enough for you? You just had to keep going. Didn’t you? Why did I agree to be part of this game with you! I don’t believe you!”

“I didn’t do this,” Brad said. He walked away from Casey woodenly and sat down on the second step, shoulders tight, jaw working. “It should have stopped when we all stopped.”

“My mom almost cut me off, Brad,” Larry said. His wrist must have miraculously healed itself because he was wringing his hands with a nervous urgency. “I know that they didn’t find anything on us. Heh, how could they, after all, but we promised each other that we’d stop. How could this happen?”

“How many times do I have to say I didn’t do this?” Brad said.

Casey raised a hand. “Fine,” she said. “Then tell me who did?”

“What if it’s working autonomously?” Elaine said.

“What?” Casey said.

“She means it’s running by itself,” Frog said.

“I know what autonomous means,” Casey said. “What makes you think one of us isn’t doing it?”

“Maybe we can work together, after all,” Elaine said. “I want to know how you did it—which is useful, because otherwise I can’t fix whatever’s happening. Obviously, you found some sort of a trick to help your grades. Let’s be clear: I do not care that you cheated. This has nothing to do with my brother’s team. I need the information for a case I’m on.”

“I promise you, I did not use the manuscript to cheat in those classes,” Brad said. “It must be something else.”

Casey sniffed at him and scuffed her shoe against the ground.

“Fine,” she said. “Just… Not here. This place is giving me the creeps. I know a place in the Law Library that’s always quiet and we won’t be disturbed. Plus, that’s where we got the books that taught us how to do this in the first place. You game?”

“I’m game,” Elaine said.

“Not going to open the door?” Larry asked, he shrugged his shoulders as he walked to it. His eyes lingered on Frog for a long moment before he reached for the handle. “Fine, I can do the gentlemanly thing and open it for you.”

Brad Wright emerged from the open doorway followed by two other members of his DarkNetARGteam. By Elaine’s count, that meant the entire team had come to Larry’s rescue. They had much better comms than she’d anticipated. In fact, it seemed statistically probable that several of them had classes about this time and had to skip them in order to in order to make this sort of raid. It had taken them mere minutes to coordinate and mobilize. An impressive feat, no wonder Zane felt the need to tap her for assistance against them.

“Sinking to a new level, aren’t you, Frog?” Brad said as he rolled to a stop in front of them. “And you,” he looked directly at Elaine, “blackmailing one of my people so that you can get an edge for your brother? You have a reputation, but not for that.”

Elaine didn’t reply. She had come to several conclusions about how she could use this to her advantage. Glancing at the data stream from Hadaly’s analysis of ASU grades related to the cheating suspects, Elaine wondered if she had enough to rattle someone like Brad. A few key presses later and she sent Hadaly on a fact-finding mission to give her everything she needed just in case.

Frog seemed interesting in handling the situation, so Elaine waited on deploying that particular “smartbomb.”

Having the three targets of the cheating research in the same room gave her an opportunity to gather observational data on them in person. She lifted her phone and switched on the video camera and pointed it at Brad and tried to get Larry and Casey also in frame. A difficult task to start with, especially with Frog’s hat blocking part of her view.

“Har, har,” Frog said. “So you caught us. We’ll leave your people alone. If you’ll just step aside we’ll be on our way.”

“No,” Brad said. “I think now that we have you outnumbered, we’re going to have a little chat.”

“We should get their phones,” Larry said moving towards Elaine. “They might call sec—ow!”

Frog moved in a blur. She caught his forward hand as he tried to walk past her, rotated it and grabbed on with her other hand locking his wrist. Larry yelped and struggled as she bent his elbow and continued to twist his arm.

“Hands off,” she said, “or next time you lose that arm.” She shoved him hard and he stumbled into Brad, who caught him before he fell into the other DarkNet players standing nearby. They shuffled uncomfortably but their leader quickly took the mantle of control back while helping Larry regain his balance.

“I take back my outnumbered comment,” Brad said. “Let’s just try to keep this civil. We’re not here to threaten anyone.”

“You seem pretty intent on being intimidating,” Frog said.

Brad handed Larry off to Casey who looked at his wrist as he rubbed it.

“I think it’s going to bruise,” Larry complained.

“Don’t be such a woman,” Casey barked at him. “You don’t go grabbing at people. Pull that sort of mierda with me and I’d break your wrist too.”

“It’s broken?”

A larger student, up the stairs behind Casey rumbled with laughter at that. “I’ve seen a broken wrist,” he said. Elaine recognized Bernard “Ben” Osborn from his picture she’d taken at Zane’s house—large, blonde, Nordic features, and sleepy eyes. He leaned over the railing of the stairs. “Nicely done. You a wrestler?”

“Good catch. Jiu-Jitsu, actually…” Frog leaned forward to grin up at him. “I’m not into wrestling anymore, I’ve always been more of a striker but—”

“You can hold your martial arts convention elsewhere,” Brad said, waving his hand between Frog and Ben. She shifted her gaze back to him and the smile fell from her face. Having recaptured her attention, Brad continued. “We’ve had our eye on you two for a while now. Your brother happens to be a difficult enough opponent without his genius sister giving him equipment and intelligence. I’d like to appeal to your sense of fairness, but here you are trying to blackmail one of my subordinates.

“Of course, until a few minutes ago Zane hadn’t broken any DarkNet rules. That you’re here threatening Pilgrim’s academic standing violates several of the principles of the game and I could use that to get Zane disqualified.”

Brad didn’t smile, he didn’t need to, the other members of hisARGteam did. They grinned on either side of him, showing teeth like a wolf pack of flunkies expecting that they were about to get a piece of the kill.

Frog took a slow breath and shrugged with one shoulder. “We were just having a casual conversation,” she said.

“Really?” Brad said and held out his hand. “Larry, the recorder please.”

Larry reached into his breast pocket with his non-bruised hand, withdrew a shiny silver pen, and handed it over.

Brad brandished the pen at Frog. “Are you sure you didn’t say anything that suggests you were talking about an old cheating scandal that he was cleared of? Sure, all by itself that sort of thing doesn’t sound that damning…but with this recording I think I can spin it so that DarkNet will be forced to suspend him for rules violations.” He paused a moment to roll the pen over his fingers. He shifted his gaze to Elaine and shook an admonishing finger at her. “And don’t get any ideas, this is connected to his cell phone and it was broadcasting the entire time you all had your ‘casual conversation.’ You won’t be able to find the recording fast enough to keep me from taking it to the gamekeepers.”

“What do you want?” Frog asked.

“I want you two off the case, stop assisting Zane, or I get her brother blacklisted. That will dissolve his team, by the way.”

“Now who’s blackmailing whom?”

“Not my problem,” Brad said.

Frog tensed and she turned slightly, she kept her voice very low and spoke through her teeth, but Elaine could just hear her over the echo in the stairwell. “If you have anything, now’s the time to use it,” she said.

Elaine raised a hand: smartbomb armed.

“Larry Pilgrim,” Frog said in a voice like police detective hooking a suspect. “We need a few questions answered.”

“I shouldn’t be talking to you,” Larry said immediately, he glanced at his coworker who tried even harder to look busy.

“You’ve got a history, Larry,” Frog said. “We can talk here or we can take it someplace more…private.”

Elaine took that as her cue to step forward and put the manila envelope onto the table, she’s pushed the newspaper out slightly so that the headline announcing the cheating ring became prominent. Larry took one look at it and swallowed. He took a deep sigh and glanced between them. He tapped his fingers on the table a few times and worked his jaw.

Turned to his coworker he hooked his thumb under his apron. “Hey, John, can you take over for ten minutes? If that’s okay, I’m going on break.” The other student shrugged and mumbled something incoherent as Larry pulled his apron off and waved for Frog and Elaine to follow around the back side of the small structure.

They met him near the back where a door swung open and he hung his apron upon an inside hook. “This way,” he said, motioning for them to follow him around the front of Wexler Hall, and opened up the door into the hallway there. Tight lipped, he walked stiffly over to another door, which opened into a stairwell, and they followed him inside. He walked to the far wall, stopped and turned to them.

“What do you want to know?”

“Two years ago, you were implicated in a cheating scandal in your college of choice,” Frog said. She hadn’t removed her sunglasses; the dim light in the stairwell produced a haze around her face as stood making her seem to stand out against the grey walls.

“So you’re going to blackmail me?” Larry said. “We were cleared of those suspicions. I’m not going to turn on my team because you can read the newspaper.”

“You still changed colleges immediately after,” Frog pressed. “That’s not the action of an innocent man. You were involved in actual cheating, weren’t you?”

“No.”

The Enoch handset in Elaine’s hand chimed softly. “He’s lying,” she said. “Hesitation levels were high for his first two sentences were within norm, it spiked contrast with the terse answer.”

Larry frowned and glanced at Elaine, shaking his head. “You have a lie detector?”

“Better,” Elaine said. “I have a truth detector. Furthermore, I’m not here for my brother, this is completely unrelated, so you’d better answer our questions.”

Larry’s eyes narrowed. “But I thought—”

“So you were part of a cheating ring,” Frog said, stepping slightly closer. “Does your sister know? What did you tell her. I suspect she thinks rather highly of you.”

Larry took a step back, the back of his shoe struck the wall and he glanced back.

“I knew about a cheating ring, but I wasn’t part of it,” Larry said. “Some of the other students had something going on and—if you’re not doing this for your brother, why are you doing this?”

Chime. “Lie,” Elaine said.

Frog tilted her head slightly and adjusted her hat again. “Larry, Larry, Larry…”

“He’s nervous,” Elaine said, “but it’s not the questions making him nervous. His adrenaline is up, he’s anxious…it’s not because he’s lying, it’s because he’s waiting for something.”

“I’m not,” Larry said.

Chime.

“You’re stalling,” Frog said.

Larry just stared at her, without providing an answer.

Frog pulled her sunglasses off and pointed them at him; then she brushed past Elaine and went for the stairwell.

“Ah hell,” she said. “He’s stalling!”

A shadow passed over the frosted window at the door and the handle turned and the door began to open. Frog grabbed the handle and slammed the door closed once again. The person on the other side swore aloud.

“Elaine, the stairs!”

When she turned towards the stairs, she heard the sound of heavy footfalls thumping down from above. Several figures descended the stairs and clustered together a flight up. Amid them Elaine recognized several of the members of Larry’s Darknet team, Casey Vargas among them. Her dark eyes fixed on Elaine and she folded her arms; her brooding demeanor and tense body language formed a solid blockade.

“You might as well open the door,” Larry said, stepping out of the corner. “You’re both surrounded.”

Now, Elaine and Frog fell back into the corner that Larry just vacated.

“This wasn’t part of the plan,” Elaine said.

“Just because the dean doesn’t know how they’re doing it, doesn’t mean that they’re not cheating through conventional means,” she stabbed a finger at the page. “I’ll concede, though, that this sure seems similar…”

Elaine lifted and squared her shoulders and sketched a practiced furtive look at Frog. It seemed strangely serendipitous that the investigation into the dean’s problems would coincide so neatly with Zane’sARGgame. She could use what she learned from the other team, based on their involvement in the cheating scandal, to bolster her intel on the enemy team. Her research so far showed that Brad Wright’s team appeared to be the biggest threat to Zane’s team (through the sheer sum academic prowess of its members) and that meant any edge she could gain on them would help.

Of course, to make this lead work out she might need to compromise some of that edge in order to obtain the information she needed. That didn’t even cover the eventuality that the otherARGteam had direct connections to theCollegeofEngineeringcheating case. Then again, if they did, their unmasking would devastate their capabilities in theARGeffectively neutralizing the threat. Either way, the advantage would be hers.

“Are you in?”

“I’m in,” Frog said. “But you’ll need a plan. These guys know who we are and they’re not going to crack easy.”

“Can you help me with that?”

“Let’s go get some ice cream and I’ll think it over.”

 * * *

True to her promise the previous day, Frog had stowed a tan trench coat and a pair of wrap-around, dark sunglasses in her gym locker—she even brought a tan Trilby hat. Her green hair spilled out of the hat and across her shoulders with an animé flair. Looking at her friend when she twirled after dressing, Elaine found herself a genuine smile at how fetching the outfit made her look.

“You’re going to get hot in that,” Elaine said.

“What do you think the ice cream is for?” Frog replied, referring to the low-fat ice cream shake she’d bought inside the MU. Elaine grabbed herself a Mountain Dew float with a scoop of vanilla, which she had yet to touch; two sticks of strawberry pocky rose out of it like Martian antennae. “About your plan of attack,” she said slurping at her shake. “What you need is to determine who in the group could be considered the weakest link. I mean that both in the group of potential cheaters and the Darknet team. For all intents and purposes right now one is a subset of the other.”

Elaine pulled down her goggles and brought up a visualization of the group data—Frog’s hand on her shoulder gave her pause.

“What would you do without me?” her friend said. “You don’t need to run computations or any transformation on the information you’ve got to know who the weakest link here is. It’s Larry. Susan Pilgrim’s brother.”

“Susan was quite angry with me when we discovered he was a victim of the shock at Zane’s house,” Elaine said. “Won’t that factor in?”

“Doubtless. Still, he’s got the most to lose by talking to us. He’s already got a connection to your brother’s team and that might weaken his own team’s trust in him, his loyalties are split. Just showing up and talking to him will probably cause him enough concern for us to find some leverage. After that, it’s just a case of applying pressure.”

“You’re right, this is right out of a spy novel.”

Frog adjusted her hat so that the brim dipped slightly and she peeked over her sunglasses. Winking, she said, “Don’t you know it, babe.”

Elaine gobbled down globs of vanilla ice cream between gulps of coldMt.Dew as she and Frog made their way across campus to the Palm Walk, a stretch of sidewalk that passed in the open air bisecting the northern part of campus—and, of course, lined on both sides with palm trees. Official records mentioned that Larry worked near there as a cashier in the small concessions area called the Oasis Café near Wexler Hall (the A Wing of the Physical Sciences Center, named after Haskell Wexler—no relation to Haskell Curry, the inventor of his eponymous programming language.)

On their way, Frog laid out the attack plan to Elaine in exacting detail. Keeping her tone hushed and her eyes roving—especially when they happened to connect with the well toned abs or backside of a particularly handsome co-ed. Elaine nodded along with the details and listened as they moved, using her memory to guide them through the most shadows and the least sunlight. Even with the diminishing temperatures with the school season, she could still feel the heat in the air.

Palm trees stood in stands along with stunted desert trees against the tan brick side of the buildings as they passed. Exactly where indicated, in the shadow of Wexler Hall, the Oasis Café waited for them with a green awning protecting a small trailer with two bored students chatting at one another in the shade. The girl’s arrival stirred both of them to their posts as Larry moved to the register and his companion—a curly haired boy with a green cap—moved to look like he’d been busy stacking cups.