DualCore arrived at the Intergalactic only minutes after us. Dee tossed the Skeleton Key as they approached our table, and Liz snatched it from the air.
“Mission accomplished,” Liz announced as she stuffed the USB dongle into her pocket, “We've shredded their firewall and downloaded a ton of docs. We're running in depth data mining now.” She turned to me. “So how is our very own junior Jedi? I hear you had quite the adventure.”
Jedi? Dee must have told them about my supposed freaky mind powers. In my best Yoda voice I answered, “adventure... excitement... a Jedi craves not these things.”
“Well, he hasn't lost his sense of humor,” Brian observed, “that's a good sign.”
In truth, I was still a bit shaken up by the whole ordeal, but at the same time I felt fantastic. Giddy, even. It was like the rush I always felt after an acting performance in high school. I'd joined the drama club mostly to pad my academic resume and raise my chances of getting into a good college, but I found I really liked it. I always felt nervous and a little sick before the play, but that was washed away in the controlled chaos of the performance. Afterwards, only a warm glow of relief and happiness remained. I imagine it is a bit like a runner's high; a prize one obtains only after supreme effort. This was like that.
“He was supposed to leave the adventuring to me.” Dee glared at me with mock seriousness.
“Next time, I'll try to stick to the script, I promise.”
We grabbed a table in the back, and Dee fetched coffee. Liz and Brian arrayed their tablets before them and began performing their magic. I watched in awe as their hands slid across the touchscreens, anticipating each other, never colliding.
I finally had to ask, “how did you learn to do that?”
“Necessity,” Liz answered. She grabbed an icon on her tablet and slid it sideways. It traveled off the edge of the screen and reappeared on the center tablet.
Her brother deftly grabbed the icon and expanded it into a text window. “There was only the one computer in the foster home we grew up in. We had to share, but we didn't like taking turns, so we devised our own system.”
“It started out as a hack to the Linux operating system,” Liz explained, “We added an extra USB keyboard and mouse, then wrote code so two windows could have focus simultaneously. They shared a clipboard, which made it easy to collaborate.”
“Eventually we were able to add a second monitor,” Brian continued, “and then eventually we could afford a second computer, but we still wanted to collaborate, so we evolved the system.” He finished doing something in the text window and slid it over to his sister.
Liz caught the window on her tablet and began making changes. “Our desktop system works pretty much like what you see here, just bigger screens and more of them.”
Dee leaned over to me. “Just like I said. Totally Matrix.”
Liz smiled. “We should have you over for a LAN party. It'll rock your world.”
“Hey, I think I've got something here,” Brian slid something to the middle tablet and expanded it. “There's been a systematic attempt to purge certain email addresses from their mail server. That's worth digging into.”
“Think we can piece it together from external sources?” Liz grabbed the window and began scrolling through the data.
“It's worth a shot.” Brian turned to me and Dee. “They deleted the actual messages, but the connection requests are still in the security logs. We can use that to trace back to the other email servers involved. It will take time though.”
We discussed it and decided to meet again tomorrow, this time at Dee's lair. I had already missed more classes than I was comfortable with, so we scheduled the meeting for the three hour break between my morning and afternoon classes. We all downed the last of our coffee and began to head our separate ways.
As I headed out the door, I happened to glance at the television in the sofa lounge. It was tuned to the local news and showed a reporter standing in front of a familiar Subaru wagon with a giant piranha on top. The sound was off, but the caption read Piranha Employee Describes Brazen Pizza Piracy.
Dee stopped next to me and looked at the TV. “Piracy my ass. I paid for that pizza.”