Sandro left, and Marisa relocked the door, altering the log to make it look like it had never been opened. Her father might ask some questions when he saw her replaced arm, but he’d almost certainly leave the house before she even woke up in the morning, so she’d have plenty of room to concoct an excuse. She sat at her desk, tapping her clunky metal fingers on the plastic, thinking. She got why her family was upset, but they were wrong. She wasn’t Chuy, and going to a club wasn’t the same thing as running with a gang. Helping a friend who’d taken a drug wasn’t the same as taking one.
She found her purse, discarded on the floor, and dug inside of it for the tiny plastic drive: the second dose of Bluescreen Saif had sold Anja at the club. Marisa had taken it from Anja on the freeway, waiting for the emergency nulis, because she didn’t trust Anja not to use it, even after everything that had happened—she was the one Sandro should be worried about, not her. Now that Marisa had it, she couldn’t help but think: what was it, really? How did it work? The blackouts were an intentional effect of the code, obviously, but what about the sleepwalking? Was that an unintended error, like Saif insisted, or was it something they had written into the program? Saif didn’t know anything about the code, he was just a dealer. Who made these things, and how? Were they just in it for the money, or was something else going on here?
She knew how to find out.
She looked at the clock: nearly one a.m. She should be asleep, or practicing in Overworld with Fang and Jaya. Anything but looking deeper into the drug that almost killed her friend.
She tapped the Bluescreen drive on the desk. She didn’t want to put it down.
“Screw it.”
She reached across the desk and dug her hotbox out of the back corner. It was an old computer, the kind of desktop model that was obsolete outside of the most traditional corporate offices, but she’d kept it upgraded, and it was every bit as fast as the newer, fancier machines that littered the desk around it. Most importantly, the hotbox was completely isolated, with no wired or wireless connections to any other computers or networks. It was the ideal environment for observing a suspicious piece of software without the threat of that software infecting any other systems. She used it often to examine various viruses she ran across in the wild. She connected a monitor and dug up her djinni adaptor, finding the short black cord that would allow a headjack drive to interface with a larger computer. She turned on the hotbox, let it boot, and plugged in the Bluescreen.
Marisa had designed the hotbox to watch everything that happened on itself, and report on it in real time. She tapped the screen, and watched the Bluescreen’s small downloader program reach out, searching for a djinni operating system, eventually settling for the hotbox’s own shell program. It offered to connect, and when the hotbox answered, the downloader responded with a massive dump of data—a hundred petabytes or more, all within the space of a few seconds. The hotbox hadn’t even agreed to a download, just the digital equivalent of a handshake, but instead of a friendly hand, it found itself holding, metaphorically, a thousand tons of unprocessed ore. The data poured through the connection protocol in an overwhelming flood, and Marisa’s fingers raced across the screen as she struggled to understand it.
Anja had said the Bluescreen was mostly junk data, and what Marisa was seeing seemed to be exactly that. None of it was organized or shaped in any way—no clips or fragments of larger data. It was the digital equivalent of gravel. The Bluescreen wasn’t even trying to store it, just shove it in the hotbox’s active memory. She wondered if maybe the speed was part of the purpose—a slower trickle probably wouldn’t overload a djinni properly, which explained why they had to sell the program in thumb drives instead of pushing it across the internet. She pored through the downloader code, looking for anything she might have missed—
—and then her monitor blinked off, just for a second, and came back on.
She tapped the screen, frowning. She’d built this hotbox herself, and knew it like the back of her own hand. She kept it scrubbed and ready for flawless performance in situations just like this. This sort of glitch could only have come from the Bluescreen. Was this the overload from the massive dump of junk data—what Anja said happened with human users—or was it something more? She disconnected the Bluescreen drive, and started a deep-level diagnostic of the hotbox operating files. After nearly an hour she found a possible culprit—a handful of unknown files in the root directory that she had never seen before. They didn’t seem to have altered the hotbox in any way she could detect, aside from just copying themselves onto the drive in the first place. How had they gotten there? How had they gotten past the firewall? The hotbox was equipped with some of the best antivirus software in the world; there was no way the Bluescreen could have gotten these files in. Yet there they sat.
Completely inert and, as near as she could tell, useless.