An Apple for the Creature Read online

  Behind the desk, sitting like a heathen king among his spoils, was Alexi Davidoff, professor of folklore, professor of anthropology, department chair and master of all he surveyed. Davidoff was a bear of a man with Einstein hair, mad-scientist eyebrows, black-framed glasses and a suit that cost more than Trey’s education.

  The others in the team looked at Trey. Anthem and Jonesy on his left—a cabal of girl power; Bird and Kidd on his right, representing two ends of the evolutionary bell curve—evolved human and moneyed Neanderthal.

  “Well, sir,” began Trey, “we’re hitting a few little speed bumps.”

  The professor arched an eyebrow. “‘Speed bumps’?”

  Trey cleared his throat. “There have been a few anomalies in the data and—”

  Davidoff raised a finger. It was as sure a command to stop as if he’d raised a scepter. “No,” he said, “don’t take the long way around. Come right out and say it. Own it, Mr. LaSalle.”

  Kidd coughed but it sounded suspiciously like, “Nut up.”

  Trey pretended not to have heard. To Davidoff, he said, “Someone has hacked into the Spellcaster data files on Anthem’s computer.”

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

  “Explain,” he said gruffly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Absolutely.”

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

  “You’re sure?” Davidoff persisted.

  “Positive,” lied Trey.

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

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

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

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

  “No.”

  “But—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Trey ignored Kidd. “We have some leeway—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It’s not Anthem’s fault,” said Trey, coming quickly to her defense. “Her data entry is—”

  Davidoff made an ugly, dismissive noise and his eyes were locked on Anthem’s. “There are plenty of good typists in the world,” he said unkindly. “Being one of them does not confer upon you nearly as much importance as you would like to believe.”

  Trey quietly cleared his throat. “Sir, since Anthem first alerted me to the problem I’ve been checking her work, and some of the anomalies occurred after I verified the accuracy of her entries. This isn’t Anthem’s fault. I changed her username and password after each event.”

  Davidoff considered this, then gave a dismissive snort. It was as close to an apology as his massive personal planet ever orbited.

  “Then . . . we’re safe?” ventured Bird hopefully.

  Trey licked his lips, then nodded.

  Davidoff’s vein was no longer throbbing quite as aggressively. “Then we proceed as planned. Real test, real time.” He raised his finger of doom. “Be warned, Mr. LaSalle, this is your neck on the line. You are the team leader. It’s your responsibility. I don’t want to hear excuses after something else happens. All I ever want to hear is that Spellcaster is secure. I don’t care who you have to kill to protect the integrity of that data, but you keep it safe. Do I make myself clear?”

  Trey leaned forward and put his hands on the edge of Davidoff’s desk. “Believe me, Professor, when I find out who’s doing this I swear to God I will rip his goddamn heart out.”

  He could feel everyone’s eyes on him.

  The professor sat back and pursed his lips, studying Trey with narrowed, calculating eyes. “See that you do,” he said quietly. “Now all of you . . . get out.”

  --4--

  Trey spent the next few hours walking the windy streets of University City. He was deeply depressed and his stomach was a puddle of acid tension. As he walked, he heard car horns and a few shouts, laughter from the open doors of sports bars on the side streets. A few sirens wailed with ghostly insistence in the distance. He heard those things, but he didn’t register any of it.

  Trey’s mind churned on it. Not on why this was happening, but who was doing it?

  After leaving Davidoff, Trey had gone to see his friend Herschel and the crew of geeks at the computer lab. These were the kinds of uber-nerds who once would have never gotten laid and never moved out of their mothers’ basements—stereotypes all the way down to the Gears of War T-shirts and cheap sneakers. Now, guys like that were rock stars. They got laid. They all had jobs waiting for them after graduation. Most of them wouldn’t bother with school after they had a bachelor’s because the industry wanted them young and raw and they wanted them now. These were the guys who hacked ultra-secret corporate computer systems just because they were bored. Guys who made some quick cash on the side writing viruses that they sold to the companies who sold anti-virus software.

  Trey explained the situation to them.

  They thought it was funny.

  They thought it was cool.

  They told him half a dozen ways they could do it.

  “Even Word docs on a laptop that’s turned off?” demanded Trey. “I thought that was impossible.”

  Herschel laughed. “Impossible isn’t a word, brah, it’s a challenge.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the Titanic,” said Herschel.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The Titanic. The unsinkable ship. You got to understand the mindset.” Herschel was an emaciated runt with nine-inch hips and glasses you could fry ants with. At nineteen he already held three patents and his girlfriend was a spokesmodel at gaming shows. “Computers—hardware and software—are incredibly sophisticated idiots, feel me? They can only do what they’re programmed to do. Even A.I. isn’t really independent thinking. It’s not intuitive.”

  “Okay,” conceded Trey. “So?”

  “So, what man can invent, man can fuck up. Look at home security systems. As soon as the latest unbreakable, unshakeable, untouchable system goes on the market someone has to take it down. Not wants to . . . has to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s there, brah. Because it’s all about toppling the arrogant assholes in corporate America who make those kinds of claims. Can’t be opened, can’t be hacked, can’t be sunk. Titanic, man.”

  “Man didn’t throw an iceberg at the ship, Hersch.”

  “No, the universe did that because it’s a universal imperative to kick arrogant ass.”

  “Booyah,” agreed the other hackers, bumping fists.

  “So,” said Trey slowly, “you think someone’s hacking our research because he can?”

  Herschel shrugged. “Why else?”

  “Not to try to sell it?”

  Some of the computer geeks laughed. Herschel said, “Sell that magic hocus-pocus shit and you’re going to make—what? A few grand? Maybe a few hundred grand in the long run after ten years busting your ass?”

  “At least that much,” Trey said defensively.

  “Get a clue, dude. You got someone hacking a closed system on a laptop and changing unopened files in multiple languages. That’s real magic. A guy like that wouldn’t wipe his ass with a hundred grand. All he has to do is file a patent on how he did it and everyone in corporate R and D will be lining up to blow him. Guy like that wouldn’t answer the phone for any offer lower than the middle seven figures.”

  “Booyah!” agreed the geek chorus.

  “Sorry, brah,” said Herschel, clapping Trey on the shoulder, “but this might not even be about your magic spell bullshit. You could just be a friggin’ test drive.”

  Trey left, depressed and without a clue of where to go next. The profile of his unknown enemy did not seem to fit anyone on the project. Bird and Jonesy were as good with computers as serious students and researchers could be, but at the end of the day they were really only Internet savvy. They would never have fit in with Herschel’s crowd. Anthem knew everything about word processing software but beyond that she was in unknown territory. Kidd was no computer geek, either. Although, Trey mused, Kidd could afford to hire a geek. Maybe even a really good geek, one of Herschel’s crowd. Someone who could work the kind of sorcery required to break into Anthem’s computer.

  But . . . how to prove it?

  God, he wished he really could go and rip Kidd’s heart out. If the little snot even had one.

  The sirens were getting louder and the noise annoyed him. Every night it was the same. Football jocks and the frat boys with their perpetual parties, as if belly shots and beer pong genuinely mattered in the cosmic scheme of things. Neanderthals.

  Without even meaning to do it, Trey’s feet made a left instead of a right and carried him down Sansom Street toward Kidd’s apartment.

  He suddenly stopped walking and instantly knew that no confrontation with Kidd was going to happen that night.

  The entire street was clogged with people who stood in bunches and vehicles parked at odd angles.

  Police vehicles. And an ambulance.

  “Oh . . . shit,” he said.

  --5--

  Tearing out Kidd’s heart
was no longer an option.

  According to every reporter on the scene, someone had already beaten him to it.

  --6--

  The following afternoon they all met in Trey’s room. The girls perched on the side of his bed; Bird sprawled in a papasan chair with his knees up and his arms wrapped around them. Trey stood with his back to the door.

  All eyes were on him.

  “Cops talk to you?” asked Bird.

  “No. You?”

  Bird nodded. He looked as scared as Trey felt. “They asked me a few questions.”

  “Really? Why?”

  Bird didn’t answer.

  “They came around here, too,” said Jonesy. “This morning and again this afternoon.”

  “Why’d they want to see you guys?” asked Trey.

  Jonesy gave him a strange look.

  “What?” Trey asked.

  “They wanted to see you,” said Anthem.

  “Me? Why would they want to see me?”

  Nobody said a word. Nobody looked at him.

  Trey said, “Oh, come on. You guys have to be frigging kidding me here.”

  No one said a word.

  “You sons of bitches,” said Trey. “You think I did it, don’t you? You think I could actually kill someone and tear out their frigging heart? Are you all on crack?”

  “Cops said that whoever killed him must have gone apeshit on him,” murmured Bird.

  “So, out of seven billion people suddenly I’m America’s Most Wanted?”

  “They’re calling it a rage crime,” said Jonesy.

  “Rage,” echoed Anthem.

  “And you actually think that I could do that?”

  “Somebody did,” said Bird again. “Whoever did it must have hated Kidd because they beat him to a pulp and tore him open. Cops asked us if we knew anyone who hated Kidd that much.”

  “And you gave them my name?”

  “We didn’t have to,” said Anthem. “Everyone on campus knows what you thought of Kidd.”