Chapter 2: Discovery

(Still five years ago)

She had stayed in the hospital for several days. Then she had gone to her dorm room, where she started to pick up the pieces of her life. She met, via teleconference, with her faculty advisor and several of her teachers. They were willing to allow her to complete the semester without attending classes, provided that she complete the work. She did that. She never left her room, and the door was always locked.

Alex was terrified by the message. 'I'll be back for you.' When she thought about that, she'd shake uncontrollably for long, long minutes. She had to escape, she knew that. She couldn't allow the terror to control her; she had to overcome it.

Two days after the end of the semester, she disappeared. She'd convinced her roommate to take her to Love Field where she could get on a Southwest flight to Houston. From Houston, she took a flight to Boston, with her laptop and a backpack. At Logan Airport, she called a friend. Just like on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire, ' she thought. At least she could laugh a little.

Derek attended MIT. He was a computer geek, too, and they'd met at a symposium in Orlando where she'd been giving a paper on 'Decrypting Machine Code' – she was only a sophomore at the time – well a sophomore-and-a-half, considering the course load she took and those she took over the summer. Already she was a noted expert in this small niche of computer science. Derek was safe; Derek was gay. She begged the use of his couch for a few days, until she could find something permanent.

Over Chinese takeout dinner, she met Jim, Derek's current man. 'Jungle Jim, ' Derek called him with a little laugh. Alex pored out her story. They thought it was horrible.

"And so, I had to get away from Texas," Alex said. "I'm here in Boston to get an abortion. They're barely legal at all in Texas. I don't want to get an abortion. But I have to. I don't have any way to take care of a baby, I can't even survive long enough to have a baby, and – " She was in tears again.

"Never you mind, girlie," said Derek in his deep voice. "You take my apartment for a while. I can bunk with my Jungle man." He reached over and gave Jim's hand a squeeze. "That's no problemo at all. And I'll go with you to Planned Parenthood. They'll go over everything with us. I'd even swear I was the father if you need that."

She laughed. "No, the story is gruesome enough without a gay father in the picture." And they all laughed. "Thank you so much," Alex said.

So Alex got her abortion. And she got to use Derek's account to gain access to MIT's computer archives.

She'd written a code decrypter which she hoped to sell to the government to pay down some of her student loans – well the first draft of a decrypter anyway. The next step was to see if it worked on something other than the test files she'd created. She was looking for old program code that was encrypted. She was browsing through some very old records (a decade! – practically prehistoric in the computer age) and stumbled across a program, on a floppy disk. Well, the digital equivalent of six floppies to be exact.

The program was written, probably, in C+ by a person whose initials were MPC. It was in encrypted machine code and it took Alex some three weeks to decrypt it, even with the help of her program. Eventually, she decrypted it and then decompiled it and looked at the pseudo source code. She couldn't believe the sophistication of the program. It seemed to issue commands to some equipment 'out there' in the internet. All she had was an IP address; it was an old address.

This program was producing numeric codes to instruct those machines, and codes to query some database. How did he know what codes to send to those mystery machines? Who knew?!

MPC had written a front end to produce the codes, and it had a very rudimentary password scheme. She eventually recompiled the decoded, ancient program and ran it on her laptop. It wasn't user friendly at all. It started with a title screen that read Master PC. MPC – clever. It ended there, with a command prompt.

She looked at the program code again, and she found how to activate the User Interface (UI). She hit upon a key combination that produced a blank silhouette of a human body, and a prompt for 'Name.' She entered her own name. The program said 'User or Subject'. She picked 'User.' It said, 'Registered.' Back to the command prompt.

This time she said 'Subject' and the program popped up an outline of her body shape, a description of her background, her looks, her statistics, and with a few more keystrokes, every salient detail of her current life. It included data that was not on file anywhere. If she was a virgin or not – she wasn't ... now. Her last sexual contact – thanks so much for reminding her of the details. Whether she masturbated – about four times per month. The state of her menstrual cycle, the condition of every internal organ, how may platelets she currently had in her, her red blood count, whether her arteries had plaque, and a seeming endless raft of other details of her physical self. She lifted a hand and the body outline showed her with lifted hand.

She couldn't believe it and started to look for clues about the kind of program, or machine, that was on the other end of this thing. Three years from now, after digging a lot, and a lot of blind alleys, she would eventually find that the equipment was in Area 51 – the secret place where the government supposedly has all its most secret stuff; stuff that you have to be from Alpha Centauri to get access to. The place where nobody knows what's there, and even the people who know what's there, don't understand it. So why would some random hacker have access to it? But that hadn't happened yet; it was years in the future.

In the here and now, at some point, she had the program's cursor on her waist and dragged the cursor to the other side of the body, moving to narrow the waist to zero. The program said, "Subject will die. Please confirm." She, naturally, did no such thing and then began experimenting. She could enhance her breasts, or reduce them. Make herself muscular. Tone the muscles of one leg and wither those of the other. She made herself immune to disease and maximized the efficiency of her organs. She 'tuned up' her DNA. Before she closed her profile, the program asked if she wanted to make these changes permanent. Alex hesitated a minute. She went back and made herself immune to the effects of chloroform and ether, and then made everything permanent.