Blackout

Gregory frowned. “You’re kidding, right?”

 

 

“About the poetry and porn? No. She was a genius. We all knew she’d been scouted by at least one of the alphabet soup agencies. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she’d been scouted by all of them.” I glared at the screen. “I’m not kidding about this stupid firewall, either. They didn’t close the loopholes into the system, but they locked down the staff directory. Who does that? Purge it all, or allow for the occasional spontaneous resurrection!”

 

“Most people who come back from the dead can’t type, you know.”

 

“Right now, I don’t care. Let me try something else.” I moved my mouse to the administrative panel for the forums. If anything was going to stop me, it would have done so on the first layer, when I accessed the full member list. Nothing pinged. “Oh, jeez. They let Dave do the purge, didn’t they? He never finishes everything on the first go.”

 

“David Novakowski?” asked Gregory, sounding suddenly hesitant.

 

I glanced toward him. “Yeah. Why?”

 

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but…”

 

Something in the way his voice trailed off told me what he didn’t want to finish his sentence. My eyes widened. “Dave’s dead? How the hell is Dave dead? He was the most careful Irwin I ever met!”

 

“There was an outbreak in the location of your team’s new headquarters. It’s unclear exactly why he did what he did, but he chose to remain behind after the quarantine sirens began ringing. He was still inside the building when it was sterilized.”

 

“By ‘sterilized,’ do you by any chance mean ‘carpet-bombed’?”

 

Gregory looked away.

 

Pressing my lips into a thin line, I looked back to the computer. The After the End Times forums were open in front of me like some sort of a miracle, with their threads and board titles looking so familiar that it was like I’d never left. It didn’t matter that I didn’t recognize even a quarter of them—that could happen when I spent a weekend in bed with a migraine and let Mahir take forum duty for me. What mattered was that they were there. I scrolled to the bottom of the screen, and closed my eyes for a moment from sheer relief.

 

The moderator’s forum was listed. If there had been any changes to my profile following the purge of my core system access, the forum would have turned invisible, marking me as one more end user. I crossed my fingers, opened my eyes, moved the mouse to the appropriate icon, and clicked.

 

The forum opened without a pause. I started scrolling down, barely aware that I was crying. According to the admin script at the bottom of the page, only two users with mod privileges were currently online. One was me. The other was Alaric.

 

“What are you doing?” asked Gregory.

 

“Sending up a flare,” I said. I opened a private message window and tapped out, ALARIC ARE YOU THERE? NEED TO CHAT ASAP, DO NOT HAVE MUCH TIME.

 

I hit enter.

 

“Georgia—”

 

“Just give it a second.”

 

A message appeared in my inbox less than fifteen seconds later. HOW DID YOU GET THIS LOG-IN? THIS IS NOT FUNNY. LOG OFF RIGHT NOW OR I WILL CONTACT THE AUTHORITIES.

 

I grinned. “Oh, good. He’s pissed.”

 

“That’s good?”

 

“Yeah, that’s good. If he’s pissed, he’ll want to know who I am so he can have someone to be pissed at. That means he’ll talk.” I hit REPLY, typing, BUFFY GAVE ME THIS LOG-IN THE DAY WE WENT LIVE. ALARIC, IT’S ME. IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, OPEN A CHAT. I CAN PROVE IT.

 

Gregory looked dubiously at my screen. “Let me guess. The goal here is to make him really mad.”

 

“Kind of, yes. Alaric thinks better when he’s mad—he doesn’t second-guess himself nearly as much.” I was speaking from a flawed model and I knew it: Not only had Alaric been alive while I wasn’t, giving him time to adapt and change, but I was working off memories extracted from a dead woman’s mind and implanted in my own. Even the way I thought about myself—half “me,” half “her”—told me I couldn’t trust my own judgment where the reactions of others were concerned. And that didn’t matter, because my judgment was the only thing I had.

 

That was a depressing thought. I was trying not to dwell on it when a light blinked at the bottom of my window, signaling an incoming chat request.

 

“I don’t want to sound like I’m rushing you, Georgia, but we can keep this window active for another ten minutes at best.”

 

“That should be all I need.” I opened the chat window. THANKS FOR TALKING TO ME, ALARIC. I APPRECIATE IT. HOW HAVE YOU BEEN?