Chapter 17 – It’s All About the Quasars, Baby (Part II)

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Frog grabbed her safari hat and snugged it atop her head. She flung the door to the hallway—she paused a moment there, a silhouette framed by the sudden brightness of the Computing Commons flooding into the dimly lit room.

“I’ll tell Zane we’re going, I think he’s downstairs doing homework on the atrium computers,” she said. Before she vanished from sight, she added, “Downstairs is on the way outside—you know: towards Fedora’s office. Catch up with me.”

Elaine frowned at the door. She glanced at where Hadaly’s ion-hologram had been only a moment before—the last image she saw of the AI’s projection was the computerized girl shrugging her virtual shoulders.

You should probably go with her,” Hadaly said. Her voice emanated loud and clear from the point where her now-invisible projection would have been. As the AI spoke, Elaine noted that she’d changed her audio dynamics subtly, adding a secondary lower-harmonic to her vocalization that gave it an almost sultry sound. She pursed her lips; it reminded her of Frog’s flirtatious voice.  “She doesn’t give up when she gets like this, you know that. It’s for your own good anyway. I have three hundred different transformations to run on this data and twelve other sources to raid—it’s going to take me about two hours to crunch all of it.

“I concede your point,” Elaine said.

I’ll ping you should I find anything interesting.”

“Coming?” Frog said from out in the hallway. “Don’t make me come in there and get you.”

“On my way,” Elaine said. As she pulled the door shut behind her and listened for the lock to latch, she slid some pocky—raspberry flavored today—out of her pocket and munched on it.

* * *

“So, can I see the message now?” Frog asked.

Elaine punched a few buttons on the Enoch and turned the screen towards her friend as they walked

We have altered your grades. This is only a warning shot. Only a taste of what we’re capable of. If you continue to poke your nose into our work we can destroy your academic career. Do not underestimate us. Expect us.

“Let me guess, it’s anonymous?” Frog said as she looked down at the text message displayed on the Enoch’s screen.

“From what I can tell the e-mail was placed directly into my inbox on the ASU servers by someone with direct access to the mail server sometime yesterday. Sendmail then delay delivered it to the IMAP server which took several more hours to finally queue it up to my regular e-mail inbox. A rather convoluted approach to hiding the fact that someone wrote it in situ on the server.”

“Can you check the server logs to see who did it?” Frog asked.

Elaine munched on a stick of pocky thoughtfully for a moment. “I could, but that would involve hacking into the ASU mail server and I have too much to do already. Furthermore, it’s unlikely to reveal anything. There are too many people with access and if it was sent during the day it’s not a short list.”

“I guess it lets us know one thing about the investigation,” Frog said.

“What’s that?”

“If someone just hacked your grades, we must be on the right track.”

Elaine nodded. “I would tend to agree with you on that account.”

“So,” Frog glanced over at her friend. “If you’ve already come to this conclusion, why are we still going to see your academic advisor? If this really is a hack, it’s going to be revealed one way or another and like you said, you have a lot of work to do. Shouldn’t we head back and see what Zane is up to?”

“No, I think we should. I need access to all the grades in my classes and my classmates,” Elaine said as she walked briskly past the door to her academic advisor’s office and rolled to a stop in front of the next one. At that door—an unremarkable unmarked grey slab—she hesitated. “Not good. She’s communing with the stars.”

“You’re not going to knock?” Frog asked.

“I would be intruding.”

“Nonsense, it’s her office hours,” Frog said as she opened the door and peered into the darkness filled with the flickering candlelight luminescence of operating computers.

Elaine and Frog found Doctor Ursula Fedora in her favorite place: surrounded by the monitor screens fed by the Very Long Baseline Array deep space radio telescope. Her office sat immediately adjacent to a room retrofitted to be a conference room and wallpapered with monitors and computer keyboards. From here, a rather large team of scientists could collaborate with the operations center for the VLBA in Socorro, New Mexico. However, on most days, Fedora’s held her own lonely vigil beneath the vast sea of updating data scrolling incandescently over the OLED flat panel displays.

When Frog ushered Elaine into the room, Fedora flashed a grin that about split her face and she rose from her chair to greet them.

“Elaine Mercer and Francine Kermit!” she exclaimed, tapping a command onto the keyboard in front of her to dismiss a console window floating atop a spinning false-color schema depicting a latticework of lines and dots affixed with long numbers. A forgotten cup of coffee steamed weakly atop a pile of papers strewn on the table near her left hand. “I’m glad you came. Please, take a seat.”

She was a slight woman, just a hair shorter than Elaine and probably twenty pounds lighter; her head and shoulders swam amid her shapeless knit-shirt as she gestured for the pair to take seats across the table. During her years as an astrophysics researcher, she’d taken on a similarly ephemeral quality to the electromagnetic phenomena that she studied—Fedora’s ectomorphic build combined with her paper-thin skin made her look frail and ghostly, as if a person should be able to see the chair through her. When she moved, she seemed to float from place to place and her hands glowed like pale spiders emerging from her dark sleeves. Her hair—once a deep chestnut; now streaked with silver—lay in tightly cultivated cornrows across her scalp; the braids spilled down her back and shoulders tipped with flourishing turquoise beads that twinkled like wind chimes when she moved.

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