Page 61 of Headcase
“No, ‘hi Calliope.’ ‘How are you, Calliope?’ Just chop-chop,” Calliope muttered.
“Hello, Calliope, how are you?” Thomas said, his voice dripping with impatience.
“Don’t humor me,” she said primly before her voice became all business. “Okay, I found something. Well, I think I’ve found something. Maybe.”
“Which is…?” Asa asked, irritation creeping into his tone. Zane gave him a look. They didn’t need to get on Calliope’s bad side.
“Okay, so I’ve been scouring Gage’s computer for two days for anything out of place and there was literally nothing. So then I started thinking about how that could be. I mean, obviously, there could have never been anything there, but I had to start thinking like a person who knew something had once been there.”
“Are you following any of this?” Zane asked under his breath.
“No, but she’ll get to the point eventually,” Asa said.
“So then I thought about self-destructing emails which, before you ask, are exactly what they sound like, emails that delete themselves after a set amount of time.”
“But if they self-destruct, how do you find them?” Noah asked.
“In the hands of lesser people, you don’t, butmoi, supreme goddess of the interwebs, has a program that allows me to at least find the dates that these emails were received, even if there’s no way to know what was in said email. When I ran the program on your brother’s system, I found a series of destructed emails. I then cross-referenced those dates with any downloads—”
“Good luck making that meeting, Dad,” Adam muttered.
“You want to do this yourself?” Calliope asked. “I work pro-bono, pal. I’m only here because I want to be. If you think somebody else can do a better job—”
“I’m sorry, jeez,” Adam said, sounding much younger than Zane knew him to be.
“Stop making people hate you,” Noah murmured. “Please go on, Calliope.”
“I found this.” A picture of Gage popped up on the screen. A selfie taken from a webcam. Zane’s pulse quickened, though he couldn’t say why. There was nothing overtly ominous about the photo. “That’s my brother. It looks like a selfie. Why is that weird?”
“Well, one, because somebody sent that photo to him in one of those embedded emails.”
“How do you know that?” August asked.
“Because there was a file embedded in it that I don’t think he would have had access to.”
Lucas shifted, leaning forward to prop his elbows on the desk. “What kind of file?”
“This.”
A screen appeared. It was a low budget graphic like something out of an old school nineties video game. There was a man with a large gaping mouth repeatedly making an evil laugh. Above the screen, it saidDO YOU WANT TO PLAY?with a yes or no button flashing in green and red boxes.
That uneasy feeling was turning into a bugs crawling beneath his skin feeling. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the man and the mechanical laughter leaving his mouth. There was something not right about all of this. Did nobody else see it?
“Is this some kind of retro thing? This is the second bad guy website where it looks like some kind of Atari throwback,” Adam said.
“The dark net is fond of old school,” Calliope quipped.
“Did you click the button when you first saw this?” Atticus asked. “Do you know what happens next?”
“No,” Calliope said. “I wasn’t sure I’d get another opportunity once I did. Should I?”
There was a long pause as the group exchanged worried glances before all looking to Thomas.
“Do it,” Thomas said.
Calliope’s mouse moved to the button, then clicked yes.
The screen exploded into a thousand bricks and then the wordsGAME OVERformed in the rubble. Then the screen went black.
