Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 27: The Ides of March
SITTING ON THE COUCH sharing a bowl of popcorn as they watched the game was peaceful and, in some ways, more intimate than going out on a date. In fact, once the popcorn was out of the way, they cuddled together and shared small kisses during interruptions in play. At halftime, they muted the television and the kisses became more intense. For the first time, Henry found his hand pressed against Lisa’s breast and she was happily rubbing his chest as well.
Then she pulled away.
“Uh ... Wow! Uh ... This isn’t good ... to be making out in our common area. It’s too easy to start considering it, like, a free zone. With the office on the fourth floor and both of us having separate spaces, we shouldn’t do this here,” she said.
Henry saw the sense in what she was saying, but was disappointed nonetheless.
“Would you walk me home, Henry?” she asked.
“Sure. We should put away our dishes first,” he said.
They agreed and cleaned up the bowl, pop cans, and the air popper. Then Henry took Lisa’s hand and they walked upstairs to her door on the second floor.
“This has been a really great evening after a stressful day,” he said. “Thank you for going out with me.”
“I really liked it. Henry ... the second half of the game has probably started. Would you like to come in and watch it with me? I’ve got a pretty good TV in my sitting room,” she said.
It suddenly became clear to Henry that Lisa was no more eager to end their date sitting on the couch together than he was. He smiled.
“I’d love to.”
Lisa unlocked her door and led Henry into her suite, turning on the TV in her sitting room and then going to a nice reclining loveseat. Henry hadn’t been in her apartment since she moved in back in September. It was very nicely decorated and he could see a few touches he identified as her mother’s. Lisa’s mother had been up to visit the last couple of days of their winter break when Lisa came back from Louisiana.
They sat in the loveseat and put their footrests up as Lisa tuned in the game, which was already halfway through the third quarter. They’d soon returned to kissing and petting while they pretended to pay attention to the game.
When the game ended, both were panting.
“I should go home now,” Henry said. “This has been a great evening, but I don’t want to outstay my welcome—especially since we’re both so tired.”
“Yeah. Thank you,” Lisa answered. “I didn’t want to just kick you out.”
They walked to the door and once it was open and Henry was about to step out, they paused again to kiss deeply.
“I’ll see you soon,” Henry gasped, giving her one more squeeze.
“Soon,” she answered.
He left and she quickly closed the door.
Henry was in the office early Saturday morning with coffee in hand. He focused on scouring the company servers for any sign remaining from the attack. He trusted his optimization software, but there was nothing he trusted more than his own eyes. After several hours sifting through every directory on the server, he was satisfied nothing remained of the attack, including any record that he’d tracked it and countered it.
Then he shifted his attention to the Pythia Speaks server. There wasn’t as much to search on this server, as it was not directly attacked. He guessed that the attack starting when he took Pythia live was a coincidence. There was no sign of the attack on that server but he installed the counterattack software on it anyway.
He was amused to see a fair amount of activity. Over a hundred questions had been asked that day. Pythia was serving up answers in seconds, even with the traffic. Each hit on the page launched an instance of the AI that functioned independently, so the server could handle an unknown number of hits at the same time. Henry estimated the computing power of the server and wondered if he would need to add capacity.
The hits were largely coming from various social media services, where Henry discovered his partners’ threads were suggesting people try the new oracular sayings site. He hadn’t expressly forbidden going public with the site and they needed test data. The AI training method patent had been filed before the site went live. The app itself could be copyrighted within thirty days. He might have some changes to code before then.
His phone chimed and Luke sent him a message.
“We’re all going to the Hound and Ale this evening. Bring Lisa.”
He got the time and sent a message to Lisa, whom he had not seen all day.
“I’m out with friends,” was her reply. “I’ll see you at the restaurant.”
She often came up to the office on the weekend, since that was when the most time was available. But after the previous day, he could easily understand her taking a break. He should have done so himself.
He closed up the office and went to his suite to shower and get ready to go out.
The rest of the weekend raced past. Henry visited his parents and spent most of Sunday studying. He decided to do some of his reading in the living room in hopes that he’d see Lisa happen by, but she didn’t appear. He wondered if she’d gone out again, but didn’t worry about it. He tried to focus on his reading and eventually made himself noodles and went to his room.
Monday morning, Lisa met him over coffee at the breakfast table. They checked in on the rest of their weekend and then headed to the university. That was when things got interesting. Students in the department were discussing the news, something they normally ignored.
“Hey, did you catch what happened?” Josh asked when he saw Henry in the student lounge. He’d been gone all through the spring break, so hadn’t been in to the office.
“No. Did you find a girlfriend?” Henry asked.
“I wish. No. The news from China. There was a bulletin about it on network news last night.”
“I missed that. I haven’t watched TV since Friday night.”
“Beijing says they repelled a US-based cyberattack that threatened its internet integrity. Claims it was an act of US terrorists upset about the tariffs on Chinese imports to the US,” Josh said.
“You think there’s a chance it’s true?” Henry asked.
“Don’t know. I asked Dr. Ionescu about it this morning and he said there would be a department-wide meeting called this afternoon to discuss the claim.”
“I suppose that means we won’t get out until dinner,” Henry said. “Did you try out the new oracle, Pythia Speaks?”
“Yeah. It’s cool. Chastity notified the entire testing network and everyone’s been pounding at it. Only there isn’t really much to test. An input and an output. I think it needs a clock that counts down the time until it answers the question. At the moment, you enter the question, then there’s a wait with just silence.”
“How long does that last?” Henry asked. He thought the answers came pretty quickly when he tried it.
“Ten to fifteen seconds,” Josh said.
“That’s not so bad. I thought you were going to tell me it took ten minutes,” Henry laughed.
“At thirty seconds, I’d have shut it down as unresponsive. Dude, you can’t expect people to wait that long with no response.”
Henry nodded. He’d probably do the same thing. He needed to get with Lisa and have her put a timer in the interface indicating how long it would be before the answer was displayed. At four o’clock, he joined the rest of the AI department in the large lecture hall to find out what was up. Each professor in the department had announced the event in class and told students to share it with others. Over 150 students gathered.
“Students and fellow computer scientists,” Dr. Hendon said when he stepped on the stage, “the news from China that many of you have been discussing since it broke last night is disturbing. I was engaged in the event, and am here to tell you all exactly what happened.”
Henry cringed a little at those words and hoped the department chair was planning to keep his word and not allude to Henry or Open Cloak being involved. He’d dropped the memory chip off on Dr. Hendon’s desk before his first class.
“I was in my office on Friday morning, back early to meet with those advisees I’d been unable to discuss fall registration with. While in a meeting, I was alerted to an attempt to break into the AI lab servers. My examination of the network showed that in addition to being an attack at our research, the lab was also used as a gateway to attack several personal computers and other networks that were connected to ours. Some of you may have noticed an abrupt disconnect from our network Friday a little before noon.”
There were some murmurs in the lecture hall that confirmed students who had been disconnected.
“You should all run a thorough test and examination of your computers to be sure no damage was done or trojan horses slipped in.”
A few students opened laptops right then and began tapping the keys.
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