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pull. That would give her time to twist quickly, leaving him to shoot splinters into the floor.

  A flash of light blinded her, chopping off her shriek. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see the men looking down at her. He missed, she thought. He fired and missed!

  “Get the truck ready,” she heard someone shouting from the hall, and moments later a large diesel motor gunned in the street.

  She had to scream again. That would be the first thing to do. Afterwards, she’d twist quickly. Cieran would be impressed with how calmly she was handling herself. Ok, now she should scream. Now.

  Somehow, her lungs would not breath in. Nothing.

  “Got you, you bitch. Now you can’t do any more harm to…” The man’s words distorted into some language she’d never heard before. Why would he speak in gibberish? He knew she spoke English…

  She tried to focus on what he was saying. Well, in fact it didn’t matter, did it? First she would twist, before he could shoot again, then she would run. But her arms and legs wouldn’t move. Nothing moved. Why? Wasn’t this exactly the wrong moment for her strength to give out? Frustrating. There was definitely an explanation for this crap, but what could it be? What?

  It came to her: she must be hit. That was why she couldn’t move. Weird. Very very weird. Her arm tingled, went numb. Her lips tingled all over, the pin pricks spreading to her tongue. Her tongue went numb. What the hell was a server she wondered, and why would they come here for that? Her vision felt like a filter had been thrown over it, contracting into a pinhole. After a few moments the pinhole disappeared as well.

  She failed, Federica thought.. she had failed her family. Please, let them forgive her. Her thoughts faded away, first to a babble, then blank.

  Chatter

  IRC LOG: INTERCEPTED 12-SEPT 11:15 UTC

  Ruutor:has anybody hear nothing about code?

  Nil8:u mean cuz deep node 5 is down?

  Ruutor:yup

  Nil8:dunno. might be sleeping still. it’s early. do you know where he’s based?

  70mm:east coast

  Albu:third deep node to go down this year. anybody worried? yet?

  Ruutor:I don’t run a deep node, so no.

  Albu:sure whatever.

  Ruutor:the admins are secret. You know not to speculate on this channel

  70mm:we’re only talking, ruutor

  Albu:yeah, take it easy

  Ruutor:people we know are missing. doesn’t worry u?

  Albu:All kinds reason: off to university, getting married, police on tail, you know all this.

  Nil8:but we have to be careful.

  Ruutor:remember fps and gaffer. i don’t think they were planning to leave. cell neither.

  ENCRYPTION KEY CHANGES. LOGGING TERMINATED

  Dropped Connection

  The ringing came from the common room, jangling Dorian out of sleep. He glanced at his bedside LED, five thirty am. How could someone call at this time, especially over the internet? He should have muted it. He crawled out of bed, hair spiking wildly, and stumbled into the common room. He answered, first securing the communications channel with a quick encryption, then vadering his voice with the filtering software.

  “Could you turn that fucking thing down?” his roommate yelled from the bedroom.

  “Shut up. You can sleep when you’re dead.” Dorian kicked the door to the bedroom with his heel. It slammed, shaking the small dorm room. He turned to his computer. “Why you waking me up like this?” he said to the caller, call sign ‘70mm’. Because of the vadering, he knew 70mm would hear a rough growling voice instead of his deepening but nasal timbre. They could talk all day and no one would ever be able to know who was really speaking, that’s assuming the interested party could crack the advanced encryption that covered the call in the first place. No, this call would be secret.

  “Nobody’s seen your server for six hours,” 70mm’s vadered voice growled. “Thought you’d like to know, being as Superheroes: Going Nuclear comes out in a week or two. Right?”

  “Fuck, you’re joking. My internet connection is totally unreliable. And Superheroes will be huge. We need to be first.”

  “Who’s your service provider?”

  “Ha. Not telling you nothing. You know enough to connect to my servers, and that’s too much already.”

  “Gonna be tough to win the pixes race without a server.”

  “I’ll get it. I’m backed up. Filed.”

  “Didn’t want my competitor to go down because of a hardware glitch,” 70mm laughed.

  “Thanks.”

  “No probs.”

  Dorian pressed the end button. He shook his head, why couldn’t he get a decent internet connection for his server? Now that he was in college, he didn’t have time to be tracking down outages all the time. Absently he pulled yesterday’s t-shirt off the back of his desk chair, slipping it over his shoulders. Sure, servers go down all the time, he thought, but a text message should have notified him instantly. Maybe it was time to go cloud, but then they could track him too easily.

  He went to the bathroom to splash water on his face, the old taps creaking with the effort. He glanced at himself in the mirror, seeing a face that looked much younger than his nineteen years. Wide eyes, unlined forehead, an uncomplicated smirk. He’d always thought his teeth stuck out just a little bit, though. He squeezed his lips over them and went back to his desk.

  At this time of day, his server wouldn’t be sending much traffic, he thought. As 70mm had said, Superheroes hadn’t come out yet, so all he had on the server was a set of older movies that had been seeded around the internet. No one had to download those movies from him anymore. And most people had already downloaded the movies anyway. Which all meant his server probably wouldn’t have crashed just like that. Ok, never say never, but normally. And even if it had crashed, a text message would have arrived. In fact, the server was probably sitting there quietly, waiting for instructions, and doing absolutely nothing, which is exactly what computers did when they weren’t told to do anything.

  So where was the text message? He’d get an email too, so that was the next place to check.

  Subject: Server not responding on port 80, 20, 24, 443, etc

  Damn! So it was down.

  His fingers flickered over the keyboard as he typed out commands, trying to get a connection.

  In one way it was funny, though. Here he was, trying to connect to his server, the same way he’d done many other times. But fundamentally, this was exactly the same thing the NASA people would do when they’d lose connection with a Mars probe and they’d spend weeks trying to regain communication with the damn thing. Only they’d get a headline, and he wouldn’t. But, there was a pretty big difference he had to admit: their server would be flying through space, millions of kilometers into empty space, while his server, in an emergency, could be restarted by someone pushing a button, as long as you could reach that someone and tell them where to go and which button to press.

  And that was the even more funny thing. 99.9% of problems could be solved by someone switching the damn thing off, and switching it on again. In the end, computers were still really simple stupid things. When he compared them to a person’s brain, it was even more obvious. Who ever considered rebooting a person’s brain? Sure, they tried electro-shock therapy, but look where that got them. Rebooting a person’s brain was pretty much the same thing as killing them. It just didn’t work.

  His fingers sent a variety of messages to the server, trying every possible angle, even as his brain mused. No response. He sent a message to the remote power switch he’d had attached for just this situation. Usually, that worked perfectly if the server itself wasn’t responding. But none of the messages got a reply. He only had the cell phone connection left. Again no response. The whole investigation took less than ten minutes and left only two possibilities: either the power was out, or the computer was gone.

  Both required someone physically showing up halfway across the world in Mi
lan at his parents’ apartment to tell him what was going on. And he had classes to go to. He couldn’t be worrying about that.

  He called his parents apartment, just in case. No answer. Were they out? His dad’s cell phone. Again, nothing. Then his mom’s and his sister’s. Only voicemail. Where were they all? In a movie? Or were they on a quick vacation? But in that case their phones would still be working. It was twelve noon over in Italy, six hours time difference. And everybody answered their phones there.

  He stood up, microwaved himself a cup of instant coffee, and stared at the red pennant next to the door: Harvard. When he’d first got in last spring, his heart had beaten like a tambourine. The world had brightened by two shades. He’d done it! Made it! He’d proved wrong, all of those jerks at school who liked to make fun of his geekiness. Showed them up. But now, a few weeks later, it all felt like a fact of life. An inevitability, or at least a non event. And frankly, he was surrounded by piles of other people who’d gotten in too, and for some reason they all thought they were the smartest person in the room, and he suspected, though they’d never admit it, that they’d all been teased mercilessly for being geeks wherever they grew up too. Yes, he did go to Harvard thank you very much. But it was one of those things he’d already gotten used to. Great, but used to. And then ordinary, like everything.

  Ok, not everything. Not the movies. Dorian loved movies, and he loved putting them on his server so they would appear on the peer to peer networks. The thrill of beating