Page 108 of Trip Me Up

The progress bar disappeared, replaced by the button to delete the files. Permanently. “Almost done.”

He leaned down and peered at the screen. “Your destruction routine has a fancy button? You must’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

I looked away. “Just—I can’t. Do it for me.”

“On it.” His big hand covered the mouse, and the click echoed through my small office, pricking my heart.

After I blinked away the tears, I glanced back at the screen.

CASE was gone.Three years of work disappeared into the ether.

“May it rest in peace,” Jackson said. Thirty seconds of solemn silence ticked by as I remembered the long nights filled with the clicks of my keyboard, the moments of buzzy discovery, the elation of scanning a perfect bit of code.

He cleared his throat. “I imagine there are some backup tapes we need to dispose of?”

“Shit. You’re right.” Someone could take those backups and resurrect CASE, same as when a freak power surge two summers ago had taken down its main server. I’d spent four hours flipping out until the IT guys had restored it from the backup.

Avoiding Martell’s office, I led my brother downstairs to the basement. Jackson turned his face from the camera as I swiped my ID at the entrance to the server room.

The servers’ fans roared louder than the surf at the beach during a storm. The sound was familiar, almost soothing.

“Fortunately,” I shouted over the noise, “grad students’ work doesn’t merit offsite storage. The tapes are stored here.”

Shelves full of tapes filled one wall of a small back room. Since that power surge, I knew what to look for.

“Here they are.” I held up the two plastic tape enclosures with my student ID number written on them in Sharpie. The backup and its backup. “Do I take them home and burn them?”

“Take them home.” Jackson snorted. “And add theft to the destruction of university property charges? No, these die here. If all goes well, it’ll look like the backups disappeared by mistake.

“That is”—he stared deep into my eyes—“if you’re sure you want to do this? Throw away years of your work? We could take one of these copies. In case you ever wanted to pick it up again.”

It was tempting. CASE represented so much work. And I could turn parts of it into the new games Jackson and I would build together. But would I be tempted to use it all and make CASE 1.1? And what if someone found it and made their own version of CASE? Someone who hadn’t learned the lessons I had?

“I learned a lot about creativity, about storytelling, on the book tour. CASE will ruin the things I love. It’s better this way.” Tears blurred my vision.

“Computer science is creative, too.”

“I know. But it’s not the same as art. And there’s room in the world for both without one destroying the other.”

Jackson squeezed my shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to learn that the hard way.”

I sniffled.

“Do you have a degausser?”He flipped the tape cartridge over in his hands.

“A what?”

Jackson rolled his eyes. “It uses a big magnet to erase data. If you had one, it’d probably be in this room. I bet you guys have been reusing these tapes since the dawn of time. I’m doing the university a favor by taking these two out of circulation. Find me a screwdriver, a drill, and some wire.”

A screwdriver lay on the desk nearby, and I handed it to him. He set to work on the tape cases. By the time I’d returned from fluttering my eyelashes at the maintenance guy to secure the drill, a coil of wire, and some wire cutters, he had the cartridges open, exposing the tape bobbins.

I winced when Jackson started up the drill to make a hole in the back side of the tape case, right in the middle of the bobbin. The roar of the servers’ fans masked the noise. Mostly. I hoped no one came to investigate. An unauthorized guest destroying the university’s property would be difficult to explain.

Jackson stepped onto a chair and used the wire to hang one tape cartridge from a vent in the ceiling. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the plastic tape spooling down toward the floor. I grabbed the end and yanked until gravity had done enough work to keep the tape flowing. We repeated the process with the other cartridge on another vent, and soon two fluffy piles of plastic ribbon mounded on the floor.

“Now we wait,” he said. “Where are the shredders?”

“There’s one in the mail room on each of the main floors.”

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