Folio Two, Page Forty-Eight (svegra mos droskron tal-kot)
“Eràsis?”
How could a hacker have made me so perfectly afraid? And no one would have believed me. It sounded perfectly crazy to think that someone had jetted the air like breathing or — or — but the beeping wasn’t a part of that. It sounded like a low alarm.
“I’m — I’m coming.”
As I walked to the door, I realized that I had wet myself. It seemed like such a boyish thing to do. Girls like me should have fainted or screamed. I grabbed a towel from the wardrobe and turned on orchestral music to overshadow the beeping.
When I opened the door, I saw Senet. He looked no different than before, but he was warm and soft and hu — not the thing in my wall screen or Nightofday1840. He didn’t know what to do when I wrapped my arms around his waist and held him close, but I bet he smelled the urine and saw the sweat beading on my forehead.
“I’m not sure —”
And then the tears came.
He stroked my head with his hand and pulled me closer. “Maybe we should clean you up while I retrieve your aunt —”
“No, don’t.” I looked up at him. If she knew, she would take the wall screen from my room or discipline me for even troubling him. “I think there’s something wrong with the screen in my room. It keeps — it keeps — the eye, it opens and I don’t know what to do, and sometimes things move when I’m not touching … I think someone’s there.”
Senet pushed me away and knelt until we were face-to-face. “How long has this happened?”
“Since … earlier this week.” I didn’t want to tell him the exact date. It felt stupid. “I think that someone’s trying to hurt me.”
“Why would they do that?” He moved beyond me into the room and looked at the screen. The eye was closed and the wall screen had gone to sleep around it. “Is this networked with the other computers in the house?”
“I don’t know.”
He turned on the wall screen. Everything from last night had disappeared; the final shutdown had reset everything, including the browsers. The messages would still remain, but if I didn’t log in, no one could find me.
“Not a word of this to anyone,” he murmured. “Did your mother use this machine while on holiday?”
“Yes, and her portable one.”
“I see.”
“Shut the door.”
He hit something and went into a blank screen with terminal commands, all of it written using the Tveshi alphabet, and switched keyboard settings. The characters on my board metamorphosed before my eyes, filling out the blank spaces until the entire alphabet manifested. Most of the output consisted of strings of numbers. Technical names in the output were common to both languages because we had developed the technologies together, but I still didn’t understand most of them.
While he wrestled information from the computer, I looked at the small glossy smear on the wardrobe door where my urine-dampened pants had brushed against it. It had come from the founder of our dynasty, my mother had said; she had carted it out of the middle depths. I felt so ashamed.
“Two different accounts have accessed this computer from beyond the household — one in the city and one in Galasu.” He smiled at me. More lines of information appeared.
“How can you get this stuff? Do you — do you work with computers?”
Senet shook his head. “Operating systems contain built-in parameters that allow the Karatha to retrieve important information. We can’t learn everything about a person, but … it’s helpful.”
“Can you see everything I’ve done?”
He met my eyes. It was like being drawn into the ocean and tossed about in the waves “No — Eràsis?”
“Ah …”
“What are you doing?” The end of his sentence was nearly an octave above the beginning, and a faint light pulsed from just beneath his skin. If I could only touch it —
It seemed too much like a fantasy story, or at least one of the more whimsical things coming down from the Tveshi religious texts. The tesekhairač, while essentially immortal, had no special powers and seemed to have more inhibitions than special abilities. Mere mortals with special abilities always had severe psychological problems. I didn’t want to go insane. Still, the light kept growing.
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t stare at me like that!”
I looked at the ground. The glow subsided. “Have you found anything else?”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t know what to make of you, Eràsis, or understand why you weren’t screened properly — but I won’t make it public as long as you maintain the same confidentiality. Just never do that. It could kill you. Shit.”
“Okay.”
Senet closed out of the terminal and returned the screen to its normal function. “I enabled some basic locks on the computer to prevent outside interference. Talk to your aunt about upgrading the security on your network. She’s the only one with permissions. You would expect a family with so many political connections …”
“But you’d still be able to get into things, right?”
He changed the keyboard back. “Many of the things you’ve heard about us are wrong. The Taritit nearly wiped us out — thousands gone in just the first year. And yet everyone still expected us to find a way out of the Occupation. They killed us whenever we came out of hiding.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your family is in the Progressive Movement. Your founder hated us.”
“You mean Adviser Tenes Sari?” I scrunched my face up and turned away. “He must be a hundred by now. Everyone says people from the twenties were crazy. How old are you?”
“I’d rather not say.”
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