Chapter 10: Faltering steps

After I finished with all my lectures and a little sandwich I bought at a café, I decided to go to the library. I didn't intend to study, though, or at least not mathematics: I intended to learn enough about computer security to begin tackling my personal problems. I had less than 24 hours to read, at least if I wanted to do something about the upcoming Skype session, and I really did. I was tired of being passive, no matter how much it excited me sexually. I had been waiting, hoping really, that the stranger would make a mistake, but it looked less and less likely: the bastard had things well thought out. Well, at least so he thought, and it was my job to prove him wrong.

I didn't think Chris was the stranger, but there was no way to be sure. He could have been baiting me, to see what I would do. That's why I decided to use the library computers instead of my own. Chris had as much as told me that he could intercept most of our network traffic with that box of his, and I had no intention of making it that easy. Moreover, it was simply more relaxing to work on something like this unobserved. It avoided that hand in the jar feeling, that knowing that you were doing something if not wrong, at least unauthorised.

It soon became apparent that it wasn't going to be as easy as I thought. Everything was written in that infuriating computer jargon, infested with unexplained acronyms, and seemed to assume the reader had been bestowed with the patience, attention to detail, and arcane knowledge of a bearded wizard. Progress was slow, to say the least, though I was getting a handle on the basic terms: an IP address, a port, a packet ... And then there were the weird bits: NAT, DHCP, dynamic allocation, and other nonsense of the sort.

I did manage to get some practical knowledge out of it, though. It was possible, even under Windows, which was everywhere referred to with derision, to get a list of the computers one is connected to by a persistent socket, whatever that was. You just had to launch the right incantation on the command prompt, and you got an obscure jumble of stuff which seemed to be written with the explicit purpose of being unreadable. Among all the junk, though, you could find both your IP address and that of the computer you were connected to. Quite what I would do with an IP address was still not very clear to me, but at least it was a beginning.

I also did some reading on the stuff Chris had been saying about e-mail, and found out he was completely right. There seemed to be a lot of paranoid people on the net willing to build all sorts of complicated programs to obscure their activities, but hopefully my stranger wouldn't be familiar with TOR or similar tools. Everything I read added layers and layers of complexity, and I realised, a little humbled, that I couldn't expect to understand the way the Internet works in a couple of hours. And I thought it was all so simple. Perhaps the stranger's IP was already available in one of the mails I had from him. I'd have to take a look at the headers, and try to make sense of them, something which wasn't all that easy. Mail seemed to accumulate lots of crap on the headers, from the examples I'd been looking at.

At some point I realised I wasn't understanding much of what I was reading anymore, so it hardly seemed worth continuing. The library was about to close, anyway, so before it did I wondered whether to take out some computer security primers. Chances were they'd be fairly incomprehensible, but at least they were books, so presumably someone had tried to make them legible and error-free. Still, if I took books out I'd have to keep them in my room, which didn't seem like a good idea. If I only knew someone whom I could trust to keep them for me ... then it hit me.

I rushed to query the library system about the sort of thing I was looking for, and marched to get the books before it was too late. I ended up getting three which had titles that sounded introductory. I checked them out, knowing if my plan didn't work I could bring them back, even after office hours, but I didn't think there would be any problem.

As I got out of the library with the books in my backpack, I got my phone and called Clara.

"Hi, Dave. I'm glad to hear from you", she said.

"Surely you don't miss me yet?" I asked.

"Hmmm, maybe a little bit?" I could hear her smile in her words.

"Well, I wanted to ask you something. Are you home?"

"Yes, I'm home. Where are you now? I can hear traffic in the background."

"I'm right by the library. What if I just drop by?"

I waited for her to answer, as the silence stretched, uncomfortable.

"Right", she said at last. "You may have to get introduced to my flatmates, but if you don't mind, neither do I. I can't say I had any plans, but I didn't really expect to have you around this evening, so..."

"Oh, don't worry. If you want we can do something together, or if you are not up to it, well, we can have a little chat and then I could go."

"Right, see you in a bit then", she said. I couldn't work out why she didn't sound entirely convinced, but perhaps it would come up as we talked.

In a matter of minutes I was back at Clara's. I rang and she opened, wearing her biking clothes. In fact, she looked like she had been exercising.

"I hope it's not annoying to have me drop like this", I said.

"Oh, don't worry. If it were I'd have told you. You're still getting to know me but I can be quite blunt." We went in, and she led me to her common room.

There were two girls there. One of them was a little plump, not very tall, and her hair was dark. She was sitting at the kitchen table, eating her dinner, which looked like a pre-cooked lasagna. The other was just sitting on the sofa, reading the University magazine. She must have been planning to go out, judging by her clothes, but she was still wearing her house slippers, one of which was dangling from her foot.

"Is that your boyfriend? the girl on the sofa asked Clara as she looked at me, setting her magazine aside.

"Yes, this is Dave", Clara said. "She's Anne," she said looking back at her, "and that's Rita."

I greeted them both, briefly considered shaking their hands, and decided it would be too formal and awkward. We sat by Anne, Clara in between me and her, and made some small talk.

I found out Anne was a 3rd year history student, so she'd be finishing her degree that year, and Rita studied, of all things, fashion and design. I was a little taken aback, since she seemed rather homely to me, though thinking about it further I realised assuming fashion students would themselves be stylish and beautiful would be like expecting mathematicians to be neat, or psychologists to be a bit deranged. Perhaps there was something to the latter thought, but I'd seen plenty of offices at the maths department which couldn't have been formalised by any known or knowable logic.

"Are you going out tonight?" I asked.

"Yes, it's Friday", Rita said. "Yu?"

"Probably not", I said. "I have some things to do for uni."

"I'm going to have fun tonight", Anne said. "There will be enough time to be locked in studying, and the winter won't be much fun either. Carpe diem, I say. If not now, when?"

"What about you?", I asked my girlfriend. Goodness, how I loved the sound of that, even in my own head.

"I don't feel much like it tonight", she said. "Maybe if you wanted to ... we could go somewhere, but if it depends on me I'll just stay in. I've been training and I'm rather tired, to be honest."

I thought of asking her what sort of training she was doing, but, silly as it may sound, I didn't want to betray how little I knew of her in front of her flatmates, so I kept quiet.

"You shouldn't train so much", said Rita. "Your muscles will be bigger than your boyfriend's if you keep it up."

"Oh," I said, "I'm sure I could handle her anyway."

"In your dreams", Clara said. "You know I could kick your arse any time I wanted to." She was making me blush a little.

"Yes, maybe," I said, "but I'm cute and adorable, so why would you? You're too soft to resist my charm." I tried to make it into a joke, but I hoped it was true, too. At least Anne and Rita laughed.

"You know?" Clara said. "It wouldn't be such a bad notion if you got some physical training. You're clearly fit enough, but still. It can come handy in all sorts of odd circumstances." Anne and Rita giggled at her obvious double entendre, but the way she looked at me suggested she was referring to something other than sex. At least, other than consensual sex.

"Well, if you insist," I said, going along with the joke, "I'll see what I can do. One of my flatmates is going to play football, but I'm not all that much into team sports myself."

"Well, now I've introduced you to my lovely flatmates," Clara said, "and they've seen you're no danger for me," she showed off her muscles, or pretended to, since her clothes covered them pretty effectively, "what if we go to my room for a bit?"

"Of course", I said. ""You see, girls? I better behave or she'll beat me up!" We all laughed.

Once we got to her room and she closed the door, she hugged me and gave me a little kiss on the cheek.

"You're cool", she said. "Few guys can joke like that about themselves. That shows how self-confident you are."

I had a good sense of humour, and I knew how to laugh at myself, but that didn't make me self-confident. If she wanted to believe that, though, I wasn't going to argue. It was a better light than I deserved.

Clara took off her trainers and lay on the bed, and I sat at her feet. I took off my backpack, got out the books, and passed them to her. She looked at the titles quizzically.

"Hmm. I think I start to see", she said. She moved a bit to make herself more comfortable, and her socked feet brushed my leg. Since I had found the stranger's socks on my pillow I'd noticed I had become more observant about people's feet. Perhaps it had awakened something already present in me. I wouldn't have minded rubbing hers. I wouldn't have minded at all.

"So this is part of your plan?" she asked.

"Got it. However, I need to ask you a favour."

"Shoot."

"Would you mind keeping them here for me while I'm not using them?"

"Mind explaining why?"

"I think you already know why. I can't let it be known that I'm planning something."

"You really are serious. You know, in a way I was still hoping that you were screwing with me about this and that you'd simply been with someone else. This is actually worse."

"I know." I stroked her feet, wondering if she'd take them away or find it awkward. I just wanted her to feel better. "If I had been with someone, I might have some signs of it, but not the sort you've seen."

"Oh, I don't know. People like all sorts of fifferent things." She didn't seem to mind my stroking. At least she wasn't moving. "I haven't been with lots of guys, but if I've learned something, it's that people can like basically anything, and what some like some will hate. Nothing wrong with any of that either. If you liked getting your arse nice and warm I'd do my best to oblige, though I don't think I have it in me to go as far as someone seems to."