Stef stared out the window at the pre-dawn light, in front of her, code cycled and ran through theoretical permutations.
Code she could barely read, but still made sense. The cipher wasn’t important, at least not yet, only the ability to manipulate it.
She picked up her coffee cup and huffed the leftover smell. The jug was only twenty feet away – she wasn’t quite sure she was able to make it. She reached over to the next computer – whose operator was safely asleep down the hall – and stole a bar of chocolate. The sugar somewhat roused her, not as good as coffee would have, but good enough for the moment.
A few keystrokes removed the UI and let the code cycle without the interference of any interface. It looked better that way. Her mind drowned in the overflow of data, but it felt good.
‘Beautiful,’ rasped an old voice.
She turned and saw an old man in the doorway. ‘I never realised how beautiful it was...’
Straightening herself, she stood and walked over to him. ‘It’s…’ she began.
The old man laughed patted her on the head. ‘No child, I’m not the one who hired you. Just letting him use the house.’
‘So you’re financing this for your…son?’ she guessed.
‘All of my family is long gone,’ he slapped his frail chest, ‘I’m the only one left. It’s a sad thing to outlive everyone, to stand by so many graves…not something I recommend. Go when it’s your time.’ He tapped a pipe on the back of his hand. ‘So many graves. I just want someone to stand over mine.’
She shifted uncomfortably, unsure as to what to say to that.
‘If he finds her, he promised to be that person standing there.’
‘Finds who?’
The old man made a vague gesture at the banks of computers and cycling code. ‘Her. That’s what you’re doing. You’re looking for her.’
Disapproval scrunched up her face. ‘All of this is…’
He held up a hand to silence her. ‘In the war, I made love to a beautiful girl. Real beautiful, not like the clothes-peg-dolls they call women these days. I lost her. I traveled the five corners of the earth to find her, and the child…Sometimes you just know there’s going to be a child. I traveled to find her, to see her, to make her my wife, to live out our days. I found her. I just want to give him the same chance. It would be…I can’t say inhuman, but unfair if I didn’t.’
‘Not sure what all of this,’ she said with a wild gestures to the bank of computers, ‘has to do with it, but I approve.’
He pointed a bony finger at the cycling code on her monitor. ‘That’s how we find her. That, that’s everything…and I mean everything. Find your way through that beautiful mess, and you’ll find her.’
‘…Google Earth would be easier,’ she said.
‘Think of it as all the telemetry of a journey, along with the memories of the pilot who flew the trip.’
‘Simplified data would make the job simpler.’
‘Anyone who accepted Mr Gray’s invitation was not after simple.’ He smiled. ‘Goodnight.’ He patted her on the head again, and she fought an urge to bark. He tottered off, leaving her alone once again. Only once alone, she realised what he’d said. ‘Dorian…?’ She reached down to the desk, blindly groped for the chocolate then chewed on it while staring at the early morning light.
Once she began to chew on foil, she sat and started to type again.
Dawn came and went and the dutiful cooks brought in trays of food once the others began to rise. They stood by as the eggs and bacon were ignored for waffles and pancakes. She snagged a lonely-looking piece of bacon and added it to her short stack. She would have felt sorry for the cooks, but if it was one thing she’d learned in her youth was that in a house this size, food never went astray. The uneaten breakfast foods wouldn’t go astray, neither would the pate and occasional tray of caviar or other delicacy.
She went back to her computer – determined this time not to spill maple syrup on the keyboard – it was terrible to work with delicate code only to have the letter “j” stick and turn the whole thing into nothing but a mess.
There was a wolf-whistle from one of the tables across from her. Currently being the only female residing the mansion, and obviously not the one the whistle was aimed at, she turned to look at the double doors leading into the room.
Dorian was escorting a pair of breasts wrapped in a tight red blouse and tighter black jeans. Perfectly permed hair fell across the face belonging to the breasts in that “messy, but not too messy” way. Several of the code monkeys fell over themselves getting up to walk over and great the new member.
‘-Harvard graduate,’ she heard Dorian say over the rush of greetings. ‘Currently working for...sorry, classified, let’s just say she’s on loan from Silicon Valley.’
She spat pancake all over her monitor and dissolved into giggles, and desperately tried to cover up by faking a coughing fit. A passing code monkey slapped her on the back before joining the crowd around the new arrival.
A glass of water was passed to her. ‘Don’t want you choking Spyder,’ Dorian said, his expression telling her that he wasn’t buying the story. ‘They’re real, by the way,’ he said, keeping his voice low.
‘I don’t even-’
‘Had enough experience to tell.’ He looked over her shoulder at the screen. ‘Any luck? I have the feeling that a pretty girl was all that they needed to take them away from not achieving anything.’
‘I’ve only been here-’
‘So, no progress?’
‘If I were sane, I’d be afraid to say this but...I’d stake someone else’s fortune that it wasn’t...’
‘Say it,’ he said, sliding into the seat beside her.
‘Not-’ she shook her head and turned back to her pancakes. ‘Not human,’ she said, a blush rising over her face. ‘Looking at it, it’s old, but it’s not, it’s so much more complex, I don’t even recognise half of this.’
‘Keep going with that line of thinking.’
She grinned at him. ‘Was this was salvaged at Roswell?’
‘Oh come on Spyder, no one believes in Roswell.’
‘I wasn’t-’
He held up a finger and shushed her. ‘You were on the right track, don’t go off onto a tangent.’
‘How can it be-?’
‘Don’t ask “how”, just keep it as a mindset.’
‘Well, I guess I should listen to what Dorian Gray says...’
He winked and went back to the pair of breasts in red.
She chewed on the pancake and watched the code attempt to compile in front of her.
‘So,’ she mumbled, ‘should I try and give you a cold?’