Текст книги "Stories Of An Awkward Size. A Slipstream And Hard SF Anthology"

Автор книги: Jonathan Swords-Holdsworth

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 3 страниц)

He opened the movie file.

It was Rufus in somebody’s arms again, being patted. There was background noise, a hint of traffic. But he heard no voices, and the movie was only a few seconds long.

No, wait.

He rewound the last two seconds. Just before it cut out, he could hear a woman speaking; was it in German …? He replayed the clip several times, and invoked a translator program. The woman was saying “Gib mir die Kamera” – “Give me the camera”, indeed in German – but nothing else. She didn’t sound angry or demanding, more like she was joking.

When Henri tried to move the files to another folder, something strange happened. His system popped up a window.

Override Read-Only status?

He cancelled the move and examined the properties of the files. Sure enough, they were all read-only: unchangeable and un deletable. He realised they must have carried that status with them, from the storage device behind the data vine.

He wondered, was it possible to write back to the device? Was that a way, perhaps, to talk to the system of Rufus?

He dragged himself out to the wall and plugged back in, but soon his question was answered: though the files swam in a vast expanse of empty data, neither it nor they could be altered.

Like the wall, these things too were indelible.

* * *

Over the next few days, Henri had no further luck in getting Rufus out of his thoughts. Thinking about the cat was interfering with his work, to the extent that he had to lie to one of his clients, blaming his lack of progress on a sub-contractor.

On the Wednesday he found himself sitting in his back yard, with a beer, his tablet neglected on the table inside.

He had come to a new conclusion. The storage he’d found – Rufus’s “shrine” – was just a ruse. It was a decoy, to stop raiding thieves from entering the Pharaoh’s tomb; giving them false but pithy baubles to satisfy their curiosity.

He lacked the necessary technical knowledge, but he was wondering: could two different communication systems live on that one data port? Surely they could? He went back inside, and began searching online. It was late afternoon when he started, but by the time he had found the answers he needed it was dark. Rufus will be around, he thought, but pressed himself forward.

Following instructions, he downloaded a program for analysing equipment communications-protocols, then installed it onto his tablet. It took him another hour of reading, and trial-and-error, before he got the hang of using it. As a test subject, he used the screen of the entertainment system in his living room. A few seconds after being hooked up to the display’s cable, the software correctly identified all the video, sound and other data signals present on the wire. He was ready.

The alley was empty, as usual. It was fortunate, Henri thought, that it joined two corners that, generally, nobody needed to walk between. The party of three from the other night had taken him by surprise. But he reasoned that this did make Rufus all the more mysterious – why build something that hardly anyone would ever see?

He plugged the tablet into the data vine, and waited. Rufus appeared, and hung around near the bottom right corner of the Graf, watching him.

The tablet found the storage system. Henri told it to reject the device, then activated his protocol analyser program. It chugged away without any immediate result; he carefully checked the slack in the cable, and sat down cross-legged on the cobblestones. Rufus was directly in front of him, so he engaged in a “staring” competition with the silhouette to pass the time.

He was feeling nearly depressed when the program found something, startling him out of his reverie with a small beep.

He expanded the details of the detected signal, but learned little, so he reached into the manual. It was now quite an old protocol, he discovered, used in the past mainly by those desperate to connect two machines together in an emergency:

SSH over USB

It didn’t mean much to him. “Security through obscurity …?” he whispered. The cat started at the hissing consonants.

The protocol analyser had a terminal program built in, so a human could interact with what it had identified. As quickly as he could find the relevant commands, he told it to bind itself to the found signal. The terminal appeared, with a white background. There was a burst of nonsense symbols, in black; then Henri’s heart skipped a beat –

The last few characters were “… sword:”

He hit Enter.

Password:

He repeated, three more times.

Password:

Password:

Password:

There was no user name, just the password prompt. He knew that systems could be set up this way, with an assumed user name; he would only have to guess one thing, not two. But with the Pharaoh’s loyal guardians at work, he was sure the guessing would not be simple. Puzzles, he mused, one upon another.

He tried every password he could think of … rufus, blackcat, blackrufus, flatcat, zhonggarden443, whitewall …

The prompt had the standard backoff-procedure of most password protected terminals. Each login attempt took a significantly longer time, making a naïve guessing attempt impossible. Several minutes later he had tried close to a hundred combinations, and still the system replied with nothing but the prompt.

Password:

It flashed across Henri’s mind that maybe this was all the thing did – a device merely to waste the time of a would-be intruder. But, he thought, that didn’t suit the style of the creator. There would be a reward, he was sure of it, but it would have to be earned.

Henri sighed.

“Time to enlist the help of the younger generation.”

He stood up, unplugged the cable, and went to ring Viktor’s door bell.

* * *

The Jorgensson’s back door opened into their kitchen, where Viktor introduced Henri to his wife, Sonya. Henri explained to her his interest in the Graf wall, and his desire to speak with Erik. She looked him up and down, but seemed to decide he wasn’t a threat. Perhaps, Henri wondered, character analysis ran in her bloodline too. Before he knew it, he had been insistently ushered to a seat at the kitchen table. A ground-brew coffee and a plate of biscuits appeared in front of him.

Sonya went and called Erik from upstairs. In the distance above, Henri could hear what sounded like teenage siblings; at war as usual. Viktor sat down with Henri, while Sonya returned and leaned across the kitchen bench towards them. They engaged him in small-talk while they waited for the boy, but Henri held off mentioning the shrine or the login terminal. That could wait.

When Erik appeared, he was more or less as Henri expected. A tall boy – which was common in youth now – blonde like his father, and carrying a tablet (also common) tucked under his arm like a teddy bear.

Henri stood up and shook Erik’s hand, then they both sat back at the table. Henri felt socially obliged, so he set about warming up the encounter. He spoke encouragingly to Erik about the boy wanting to study Computer Science, at university (his parents had filled Henri in). When Erik asked what Henri did, he explained he was a Systems Architect. “That’s really a tossy name for somebody who recommends off-the-shelf software to a company, and charges them a fortune for doing it,” Henri clarified.

“Henri wants to ask you some stuff about Rufus,” Viktor said to his son.

Erik perked up, looking straight at Henri.

“Sure. What do you want to know?”

Henri formulated his thoughts, realising he hadn’t actually planned the order he was going to broach the subjects in.

“The Graf, that installation …” he began.

“Best one in the city, by far,” said Erik, making an emphatic gesture. “It’s not the flashiest one around, and it’s monochrome, but it’s just so clever.”

Henri homed in on the point. “My first question then … that seems to be a complex piece of Graf. How quickly could it be laid down?”

“If you have the right gear, and you’ve planned it and prepared, ten minutes. I’m not joking.”

Henri blinked, wordless for a moment. “Ok … next question. Can Graf alone actually do what it does? All of that?”

Erik was already smiling and shaking his head.

“You’d be amazed what Graf can be made to do,” said Erik, and pointed out the window, “but that is special. There has to be a little server somewhere, looking after it.”

“So, with the server … has it never occurred to you to take a look in that garage?” He’d blurted it out before he realised he might get Erik into trouble. My gods, he thought, I’m so over-focussed on this! But Erik’s parents’ reaction was more humorous than stern.

“Hmm. I think I’ll go and play with the media centre,” said Viktor, pushing himself up from the table. He marched off in the direction of the living room.

“Ahem, oh yes, I had to do … this!” said Sonya, grabbing a pen and immediately becoming intent on an item of paperwork at the bench.

Erik stared at Henri in helpless embarrassment, but answered him directly. “Apart from …” He looked at his ignoring mother. “Trespass,” he said loudly, then looked back to Henri. “The thing is, if you accidentally pull the control ribbon away from the Graf —” He made a parting gesture with both hands. “– you’re completely stuffed. You can’t re-implant it without specialist gear, and it’s a complicated process. Most of the time you’d just junk the entire Graf surface and start again. We’ve all been way too scared to go in there.”

This seemed to be the explanation for Rufus’s subtleties, but Henri pressed the point: “So, you’re sure that there’s a control box in there somewhere? Graf on its own couldn’t hold the computing power?”

“Oh yeah,” said Erik, “that cat does a heap more than just Graf can do. But back when I was about fifteen it was just a Graf installation. Then Alley Ellie or somebody – had to be her, I’m sure of it – did something to him, and now he’s the full cat like you’ve seen him.”

“Elly Elly?”

Erik spelled out the name for him.

“That’s this artist from Berlin, right?”

Erik nodded vigorously. “She’s amazing, some of her work …” He looked up and shook his head. “In fact, I’ll show you!” He played with his tablet for a moment (Henri’s ancient model lay neglected at the end of the table), then spun it around towards Henri. “That’s one she did for a bank in Milan, in Italy.”

Henri was watching a short, looping movie. In the huge, glass foyer of a building, a riot of shapes danced on a great wall. As people walked past, the wall made echoing, coloured shadows of them, many times their size. Where the shadows collided, complicated interactions occurred. The end of the loop captured the impact of two people’s echoes, bursting into a shower of multihued birds, as they walked on oblivious.

“That’s gorgeous,” said Henri. He looked up at Erik. “Is she contactable at all?”

“Nope,” said Erik, without hesitation, “she appears on forums sometimes, but she never interacts, just posts. Sometimes she gives notice of things she’s working on, but that’s rare. She is contactable by a couple of agents, but they say they just announce what’s required for the job, and if she’s interested she just appears. She turns up, bombs something brilliant onto a wall – ‛cos the sponsors always give her whatever she needs – and disappears again. She’s made a heap of money over the years, but she’s really, really unfindable. Oh and yeah, she was living here for a while. We only know that because she announced it after she got back to Germany.”

Henri had absorbed enough. He thought now was a good time to ask the Jorgensson’s for a big favour.

“Ok, well if your parents don’t mind a strange man, they’ve only just met, taking their seventeen year old son into a dark alley —”

Sonya looked up, one eyebrow raised.

“– I’d like to show you a Rufus thing.”

Erik looked blank.

“I gotta tell you I spent a lot of time with that cat,” said the boy, “I think I’ve seen just about everything he can do. Do you know he grows a winter coat in the cold months?”

Henri blinked afresh, out of words for the second time, then pressed on. He’d decided being mysterious was sometimes a very fun thing, if appallingly self-indulgent:

“I have a feeling you haven’t seen him do this one.”

Erik showed stirrings of interest. “Um – Mum, is that Ok?”

Sonya nodded. “Just take your pok, leave your tablet here.” Henri noted her use of the current vernacular. Nobody called hand-held devices “phones” any more, since they no more “telephoned” now than a recording device “taped” something. “And put your jacket on for once, it’s getting chilly at night – and if Henri does anything strange, kick him in the bollocks and run.”

Henri nodded, sagely.

“Yup, that’s fair,” he said.

* * *

When they reached the wall, Rufus appeared. Henri felt a sense of camaraderie. They were both locals, at least in Rufus’s invisible eyes.

“Check this out,” said Henri, and used his own pok to illuminate the brickwork where the data vine was.

Erik couldn’t see anything, but when Henri exposed the data port he gasped.

“How … how did we miss that?” the boy exclaimed. “Is it a Dead Drop or something connected to Rufus?” Dead Drop, Henri knew, was slang for a data device implanted in a street wall. They were used for underground file sharing networks – and occasionally as art installations.

“Hidden in plain sight,” said Henri. “I wasted a day looking for a Wi-Fi connection before I guessed it was something, ah … ‘Low Fi’, like this. And as to your second question …”

He plugged the cable in and unlocked his tablet. He angled the screen so Erik could see. When the storage icon appeared, he clicked on the text file and showed the boy the eulogy. He thought Erik was going to wet himself.

“Ohmygod ohmygod …”

“Yeah. It’s just a little shrine to Rufus, the original,” said Henri, showing Erik the other files. “These are all read-only, and so is the drive, you can’t change any of it.”

“It’s a big drive …” said Erik, which impressed Henri – observant.

“Yes, it is. Ok, you’ve seen that. Now this is the bit you are really going to flip over …”

Henri had a feeling this was going to be a defining memory for one of the Jorgensson offspring. He fired up the protocol analyser (he’d bookmarked the hidden protocol, earlier). The terminal activated and bound itself. He pressed Enter once, then showed Erik the screen. This time he wondered if the boy was having a seizure.

“This is … my god. Dude!” Erik just managed to keep his voice down, remembering where they were.

“Yup,” said Henri, unable to hide his smile, and handed the tablet to Erik. “But I’ve tried every password I can think of. Nada. I was hoping you might have a clue?”

Erik paused his histrionics, raising an eyebrow at Henri. Strikingly like his mother, Henri noted.

“So, you got me out here in an alley, in the cold, because you needed me to help you guess a password?”

Henri thought for a moment. “Um, yeah, I guess so!”

Erik looked philosophical, then shrugged. “Yeah, that’s fair. Ok what have you tried?”

* * *

The two of them ran through everything that came to mind, and became increasingly frantic as half an hour ticked by. They were like advertising creatives, desperately seeking a tag line for an unsellable product: they got nowhere. Finally Erik took the tablet and carefully sat down on the cobblestones, as Henri had done earlier.

“We have to be looking in the wrong direction,” Erik said. “It’s something … left of centre.” He cradled his head in his hands, staring at the tablet screen.

Henri stood back from the wall.

Rufus was giving them their full attention – he realised that was unusual: by now the cat should have gotten bored and started pacing. Was it the fact they were talking to the terminal?

Hint or not, it hit him.

“You are spot-on, we’ve been going about this the wrong way,” said Henri, and Erik looked up.

Henri cleared his throat, looking at Rufus.

“Rufus. What’s your password?”

The cat walked to the centre of the Graf’s bottom edge, and lay down. After a moment he stretched his front paws and lifted his head up, with his tail straight out behind him. He held the pose for a few seconds, then relaxed and went back to sitting and watching them.

“Sphinx!” Henri almost yelled. “Try ‘sphinx’!”

Erik typed it.

“Nothing.”

“Combinations …” Henri moved and stood over Erik, staring at the terminal.

They worked their way through several … blacksphinx, rufussphinx, sphinxrufus, blackrufussphinx … the list rapidly spiralled, as before. Henri knew the list of potential sequences was still huge.

He started pacing in circles. There was no way he was going to give up tonight, not when they were hammering on the antechamber door …

“I dunno … ‘blacksphinx443’ …?” he suggested, without enthusiasm.

Erik stiffened.

“Dude …”

Henri walked over and looked. Text had appeared in the terminal.

Well hello, it seems you have found Rufus.

Please be careful with him, and don’t tell anyone about him.

By the way, he likes grapes.

– AE

“So it was her, I knew it, she must have come back,” said Erik. “Dude, this is major … this is so major …” He cocked his head, looking at the message. “Wish she’d left more clues though.”

“We’re lucky it’s not in German,” said Henri.

Erik hit Enter again.

Type ‛help’ for help.

He typed “help”.

No help at this time.

“Dammit,” said Erik, nearly spitting, “she must have used an out-of-the-box script, no help defined.”

Henri wasn’t convinced. “No. Doesn’t fit her style so far. Everything about this cat —” He wagged a finger at Rufus. “– has been a puzzle box. If she’d used something standard it would either not offer any help at all, or it would have some help – trivial stuff, like setting the size of the terminal, something …” He walked around the seated Erik and stood in the centre of the alley. “But at this time …? No way. It’s one more puzzle to solve.”

“You sure?”

“Damn sure.”

Henri leant down and shadow-patted Rufus, while Erik played with the terminal some more. To everything he entered, except “help”, all he got was the same rejection.

Command not recognised.

It took Erik a couple of minutes to notice the elephant in the room. He looked up at Henri, and said one word.

“Grapes.”

Henri looked blank for a moment, then …

“Grapes!” he cried, and bolted off into his house, leaving Erik staring after him. He got to the front room and looked up at the plastic fruit hanging on the window.

“Yes!” he shouted, seeing that among the tacky ornaments was a stylised bunch of grapes. He stood on a chair and with some satisfaction tore the fruit down, then with even more he ripped the grapes free.

He ran back outside to join Erik.

“This better be right,” Henri said, and dangled the grapes so that their shadow fell just above Rufus. He was delighted to see the Graf fill them in, black-upon-shadow.

Rufus looked up, and then stretched, standing on his hind legs. His fore-paws touched the shadow-grapes; resting on them, Henri noted with gratification. The cat chose one and bit it off, the Graf obediently making the freed grape into a separate object. The shadow fruit dropped to the bottom of the Graf and Rufus chased it, quickly running it to ground. He lay down and began chomping into it with obvious relish.

“That’s cool,” said Erik.

“Type ‘help’ again,” said Henri, walking over to look at the screen. Erik hit Enter, and they both gasped.

Four lines of text had appeared.

Test pattern

View folder

Push to storage

Safedance

Erik tried entering them, one by one.

Command not recognised.

Henri looked at Rufus, still finishing off the shadow grape.

“Rufus. Test pattern.”

The two men recoiled. In the blink of an eye a sequence of changes occurred, almost too rapidly to follow. Rufus’s body disappeared and his disembodied head floated up to the exact centre of the Graf. Then it expanded, and expanded. In a moment a giant black cat’s head filled the entire wall. Two enormous feline eyes appeared, and looked first “at” Erik, then “at” Henri, then closed again, returning the silhouette to solid black. The head shrank back to normal size and floated back to where it had been. Rufus’s body reappeared, and he resumed eating, apparently having noticed nothing.

“Ok,” said Henri, taking a deep breath and exhaling, “that’s the test pattern.” He stepped back to the centre of the wall. “Also I think we can safely assume that none of these will work without the cable plugged in. What’s the next one? – You do it.”

Erik looked across at Rufus, who had finished the grape and started preening himself.

“Rufus. View folder,” he commanded.

The cat stopped primping and rose, then walked to the left side of the wall. He turned back and sat down. Shapes appeared on the wall above him.

Erik slowly put the tablet down and stood up, moving to stand next to Henri. Both were silent.

The wall was covered in square icons, in orderly rows, and in the very centre of the grid was a small circle.

“Man, it’s even got a scroll bar,” said Erik, indicating a long rectangle at a height just above Rufus’s head.

Henri shook his head, already scanning across the icons. “As you say,” he said, “this is highly major.”

The streetlight provided good illumination. It occurred to Henri that the local streetlights must have been critical to the artist’s decision to install the Graf here (and the fact it received direct sunlight, he was willing to bet). But what if those lights moved one day, or became obscured? He mentally shrugged. Only time would tell, he supposed – artists were like that.

In the body of each icon was what looked like an individual charcoal sketch, and each of the squares had a date underneath. Some had a sub-icon in their corner.

Erik got there first. “They’re pictures. And some of them are movies.”

Henri leaned in and squinted at a few of the pictograms. “My gods …”

Erik paced slowly along the wall, to the last icon. “Hey! That’s us!”

Henri stood next to him and stared at the image. Erik was right, it was clearly the two of them, where they had stood moments before. Henri could make out Erik as the slightly shorter figure, holding what must have been Henri’s tablet, with the cable snaking up and out of frame.

“Still Life Of Two Idiots Computing In An Alley? – that was only a few minutes ago,” observed Henri.

“I wonder if he’s videoing us now. Yeah?” said Erik.

They continued their aimless wanders across the icon scape. Rufus sat patiently in his corner, twitching the end of his tail occasionally.

Henri was amazed by the selection of images. A woman pushing a pram. A man with a walking frame. What looked like two small children, running with balloons.

“It must be … it must be whatever Rufus finds interesting,” said Henri, “or … significant?”

“Yeah good luck guessing his algorithm,” said Erik. Henri had to agree; there didn’t seem to be any particular pattern. “And,” Erik added, “it looks from some of these like the whole wall … man, this whole wall is a camera …”

Henri looked at one of the movie icons, the film-strip across its shoulder labelling it as such. It looked to him like two drunk men, carrying their friend between them. He grinned – he’d been in such trios. He reached out and touched the icon. A black border appeared around it, slowly pulsing.

“Maybe it’s drag-and-drop?” said Erik, looking on.

Henri drew his hand across the wall and the icon followed, staying beneath his palm. The only obvious target seemed to be the circle in the middle, so Henri aimed for it and let go – the circle and icon both expanded. The picture in the middle was clearer now, and to their astonishment there were what appeared to be standard video player control symbols at the side of it. Henri shrugged and touched the Play triangle.

The figures staggered across the frame, then hesitated for a moment. They looked like they were trying to determine some course of action, but were hopelessly hampered by their intoxication. Both Henri and Erik giggled.

“Been there,” said Henri.

“Me too,” said Erik, “don’t tell my parents.”

“They know, mate, I’m sure they know.”

Henri had a thought. “I’m guessing,” he said, “that the fact that they hesitated for a while – and maybe did something unusual – is what made them interesting to Rufus.”

“And in our case,” said Erik, “it was that we were hacking into him.”

“Quite so.”

The drunks’ movie finished with the men leaving stage-left, and the video looped again. Henri wondered if this was all the movies were, or if this was just a précis? He reached out and touched the Stop square. Then he grabbed the scroll bar – its outline thickened under his hand – and dragged it all the way to the left. The grid of icons re-drew itself, this time with a different set. He strained to get some height, and read the date on the upper-left-most icon.

“That’s about two years ago,” he said, “so these start right when his ‘enhancement’ happened. Funny, I’d have thought there’d be a lot more.”

Erik shrugged. “This alley doesn’t get used much. And like we said, it’s whatever his algorithm decides is significant. Only some … events qualify.”

Henri scrolled back slowly then stopped, surprised. He could not help but notice that he was looking at a pair of exposed breasts. The woman was standing with her hands on her hips, leaning slightly to one side. It was another movie.

“What the …?” he said, more or less in time with Erik.

Henri dragged the movie to the centre and started it playing. The woman appeared to be belly dancing. Naked.

“No idea,” said Henri, throwing up his hands in a shrug.

Erik leaned in close, examining the looping nude. “Hey! That’s a real movie!” he exclaimed.

“Huh?”

“Look there, in the corner. That’s a compression artifact! The Graf can’t quite switch fast enough to reproduce it, but underneath – this is a real video …”

Henri’s thoughts jumped – these were merely précis after all?

“What was the next command?” he asked Erik. Erik tore his eyes away from the gyrating woman and scooped up the tablet.

“Push to storage.”

Henri stopped the video, ignoring Erik’s faint “aw”.

“Rufus,” said Henri. “Push to storage.”

The icon shrank and fell out of the circle, dropping to the “ground”. Rufus stirred, padded over to the icon and began head-butting it. Both of the watchers were fascinated by the realism of the gesture. His nudge pushed the icon to the right. He kept going, nudging until the icon made it to the side of the Graf. As he kept pushing, the icon slowly disappeared across the edge, taking a few seconds to vanish completely. Then it reappeared in the centre of the grid again, as Rufus headed back to his post on the left.

“Ok … now, we swap to storage!” said Henri, but Erik was way ahead of him.

When the storage drive appeared it had a new file, to Henri’s lip-smacking satisfaction. He didn’t, however, recognise the type of file.

“What’s LFV?”

Erik looked at him in amazement. “You’re old!” he exclaimed, “Light Field.” Erik blinked at the wall, suddenly awe-struck. “Man, this whole wall is a Light Field camera.”

Henri knew about Light Field devices, he just had had no cause to use them himself. For most purposes the old fashioned 2D cameras were sufficient, even for professionals. A Light Field was like – essentially was – a limited hologram. To a certain degree, you could rotate the image, move to a different viewpoint, and even focus in and out. But they consumed a lot of bandwidth, especially if they were movies – Henri revised his monetary valuation of Rufus’s wall upward. Again.

“Can I install a free viewer for you, do you mind?” asked Erik.

“Go for it.”

Erik sat cross-legged with the tablet again while Henri stood next to him. Within two minutes Erik had the application installed and was able to hit play on the video. The first view was of an empty alley. Erik looked at the playing time of the file. It was long, so he restarted it some way in. Faint tribal drumming emitted from the tablet.

“Oh my gods it’s got sound,” said Erik. “Hey – Rufus must record in a continuous loop, a ‘ring-buffer’,” he added, “did you notice how the movie started before she turned up?”

Henri leaned in.

The girl – she looked in her early twenties – was belly dancing naked, back and forth and side to side, towards and away from the camera, making ballet-like movements with her arms. Henri was amused, but he noticed Erik appeared engrossed. Oh yeah, he thought, seventeen, I remember.

“Have to admit she’s nice to look at,” commented Henri.

“But what on earth is she doing?” asked Erik, not taking his eyes off the screen.

Henri thought for a moment, then laughed. “I’ll just bet it’s some hippy chick. She thought Rufus was some kind of manifestation – whether she thought literally or not, who knows – and this is how she honoured him.” He clapped Erik on the shoulder. “Well there you go, mate. Rufus has given you a little present.”

“Thank you Rufus,” said Erik, to the cat, then looked up at Henri. “Mind if I transfer this to my pok?”

“Knock yourself out. Just please don’t post it around.”

“Roger that.”

Henri walked back over to the wall; he wanted to explore what else Rufus had caught for posterity. He pondered whether he’d get into trouble with Erik’s parents over the dancing girl, but he figured they’d probably just laugh. At worst, Sonya might withdraw biscuit privileges.

He had one grim thought: there was no way any of these recordings could be erased again, not without – most likely – doing fatal damage to Rufus.

He scrolled back across the collection. About half way through the list, he noticed a movie that looked broken. The icon was nearly empty, with a collection of squiggly lines at the bottom. He dragged it to the viewing circle, but even when expanded the picture made no sense. He started it playing. The only result was that the squiggle patterns at the bottom jumped around, randomly.

“Yeah, that’s corrupted,” he said, not really addressing anyone.

Erik looked up. “What, more porn?” he exclaimed.

Henri was baffled. “Huh?”

Erik pointed at the video, then stood up with the tablet to join Henri. “It’s two people having sex!”

Henri looked back at the dancing squiggles. With the assistance of teenage hormonal vision, the Rorschach shapes flipped to a completely different interpretation. Erik was right, it was clearly a man and a woman in coitus, the man on top.