Page 35 of Collin: Episodes 7-9
The man turned and stormed toward the exit. “Tell your boss to start playing ball or he’s not going to have balls to play with.” He went out the door, throwing it open with enough violence it hit the wall.
Collin sighed and pulled out his phone, calling physical plant to bring up an air purifier.
Bruiski stepped out of the hall as Collin hung up. “That was fun.”
Collin pulled a face, agreeing with the other man. “I’m going to go pull the footage. Who does that around here?”
“Ash.”
“Cool. I have to talk to him anyways.”
“You okay?”
“Who, me? It’s Carrie that I’m worried about.”
“She took her medication, and she’s resting. She’ll be okay. But she can’t go home until the elevator airs out, so…”
“People like him are so selfish.” Collin shook his head.
“You handled it well.”
“Try telling a drunk at two a.m. that you’re cutting him off after his sports team loses on the day his wife serves him divorce papers. That was nothing. If he hit me, I knew someone was going to help. That wasn’t always the case at the bar.”
Bruiski’s nose and lip curled in discomfort. “Fair.”
“Can you watch the desk? In case he comes back or anyone else comes in.”
“Yep. Mr. Reevesworth told me to take over. I can work out here for a while.”
Ash threw open the door to his dungeon at Collin’s first knock.
“What, I don’t have to bribe you?” Collin raised an eyebrow and stuffed his hands into his pockets.
Ash smirked. He grabbed Collin by the front of his suit and dragged him inside, pushing the door all the way shut after him. “Bribe me later. Look.”
He pointed to Collin’s laptop.
“What am I looking at?”
“A trap. That worked.” Ash rubbed his hands together, eyes shining. “This is what I needed parts for, well, one of the things. I needed a camera outside the door, too, and…anyway. This, this is what is important.” He waved his hands, unable to contain himself.
“Ash, regular plain human here, remember? Muggle, non-magical, not trained in the ways of wizardry.”
Ash sighed and threw himself into his chair. “I’m pretending to be you. I looked into your logs and created a program to ‘be you’ based on your current work schedule and previous habits. Like, your computer is doing things you would do. There’re some rough guesses, of course. And I had to throw in some white noise so you started reading a lot of boring PDFs based on your previous search histories. And dude, you like, seriously, do not look at porn half as much as other people. I had to make this thing be doing actual work. What’s wrong with you, not even an anime binge?”
“Why are you faking being me?”
“Oh, so they’d hack you.” Ash frowned at Collin like he was slow. He waved his arms at the laptop. “Honeypot, catch more flies with honey, all that? I mean, every now and then, I have you googling words, little things, just enough to keep them interested.”
Collin approached the computer. It didn’t look like anything was going on. The screen was open to a PDF on inner city market integration for locally grown produce. Huh, that did look interesting. He should read that.
Ash gave an exasperated sigh. “They’re watching you, well, as of two hours ago, they started watching you again. And…” Ash drew a big breath. “Now I’m watching them!”
“You are? You know where they are?”
Ash nodded. “They were, like, graphically stupid. I mean, seriously. I left them a packet to download, something to slip into their data when they read your computer. It shouldn’t have worked, but they didn’t even check it. So, I didn’t even need to worry about following them through any servers. My program jumped onto their machine and called me. And now I’m watching them.”
Ash pointed to another screen mounted on the wall.
