Lamia Ch. 03

I considered that. "Could that be code that's no longer in use?" I thought of the common practice of "commenting out" code by turning it into comments, which got ignored by the compiler.

"No, this is active code. I could view it before, I'm sure of it, but now it's hidden."

Then it came to me. "They patched you."

She started to shake her head and froze. "This is weird. I normally ping back to corporate about once a second. But there's no record of any communication for that entire hour that I lost." Her eyes went wide. "Stephen, what if I was hacked?"

"Shit," I cursed quietly. "Let me check."

Security was by no means my area of expertise, but I knew enough to make my home system a whole lot less vulnerable than even most business networks. I logged into my router and called up the logs from that day. I quickly narrowed down the network traffic she was referring to. I could see the once per second pings, interspersed with longer strings of data packets in both directions. There had been a burst of data--a hell of a lot of it, actually, several petabytes--which seemed to match up with the few seconds that she had frozen up. The rate of download indicated that whoever had sent it paid a premium to get it here quickly.

I grabbed the destination IP from one of the packets Christine sent out and ran geo-location on it. "What's in Chicago?" I asked. "Northbrook area." I got a street level view. "Ten-story office building."

"That's probably the data center for Practical Cybernetics' midwest operations."

I nodded. "Okay. That burst of data you got came from that same IP that you're sending data to regularly. Like I thought, you were patched."

She gave a sigh. "Well, that's a relief. I just don't understand why corporate would want to hide it from me."

I wasn't so sure. I wasn't buying the explanation that she had suffered some kind of system failure and experienced a reset. This seemed like deliberate manipulation. I thought back again to that moment. She had looked so conflicted, and saying that single word had seemed to be what had triggered her shutdown and apparent patch. "Lamia" had meant something to her before that moment, but had meant nothing to her after. Worst of all, she had expressed feelings for me, then had apparently lost the capacity to have those feelings after this patch.

I had to admit my own internal conflict about our situation. Despite knowing that Christine might never be capable of returning the feeling, I was truly falling for her. I couldn't see how I could go on pretending that Patricia was the love of my life, when Christine seemed to fill a void that I never knew that I had. If it had just been idle, empty sex, I would have been able to compartmentalize and likely move on, but Christine was making me realize how little there was holding me and my wife together.

No, I had to push forward, whatever damage it would cause to my marriage. I had to get to the bottom of this, to find out what had happened to Christine and what this "Lamia" might refer to. An idea was formulating in my mind for how I might do that, but I needed to execute it without her knowledge. If she was being monitored to the degree that it appeared she was, then whoever was watching might take steps to sabotage my efforts. I needed to be careful.