Hazel Currie Imagines There Are Others#
The Barracuda hard drive clicked. A sharp, metallic tink like a fingernail flicking a soda can.
Hazel stared at the green LED on the drive bay. It blinked once. Twice. Then held steady.
The air in the trailer tasted like copper coins and stale coffee. The AC unit in the window rattled, a low, grinding vibration that she felt in her teeth. She ran her tongue over her front incisor. It felt fuzzy.
She typed ping 192.168.1.5.
The screen was black. The text was amber. The cursor was a solid block, pulsing. On. Off. On. Off.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.5: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.045 ms
She pressed her thumb into the spacebar. The plastic key was smooth, worn shiny in the center. It had a little give before it bottomed out. Clack.
She wanted the number to be different. She wanted the time to be longer. A delay. A hesitation.
time=0.045 ms
Too fast. It was just her. It was just the loopback. The signal went out to the switch in the closet, hit the copper wire, turned around, and came back. It never left the room.
She looked at the wall behind the monitor. The wood paneling was peeling at the seam. A strip of fake laminate birch curled up, revealing the dark, fibrous particle board underneath. She reached out and touched the exposed wood. It was rough. It snagged the skin of her fingertip.
She closed her eyes.
She didn’t imagine a face. She didn’t imagine a voice.
She imagined a wire.
A black ethernet cable, Cat6, running from the back of her switch, snake-belly thick, sliding under the gap in the door.
She saw it snake through the tall grass outside. The grass was wet. Dew clung to the black plastic casing. The cable went over the gravel driveway. The gravel was sharp, gray, dusty. The cable went down the ditch, through the culvert where the water smelled like sulfur and dead leaves.
It went up the telephone pole. The wood of the pole was soaked in creosote. Black, sticky, smelling of tar.
The cable wrapped around the insulator. It stretched across the highway. The asphalt below was hot, shimmering with heat haze.
She felt the heat on the wire.
She saw the cable enter another window.
A screen door with a torn mesh. A rusted hinge that squeaked—eeee-errrr.
Inside, the air was different. It smelled of cigarette smoke and lemon pledge.
There was a desk. A laminate top, white, with a burn mark in the shape of a comma near the edge.
A hand rested on a mouse. The hand was pale. The knuckles were red. There was a callous on the side of the palm, right where it dragged against the mousepad.
The finger on the mouse button twitched.
Hazel opened her eyes.
The amber text on her screen blurred.
Request timeout for icmp_seq=2
Her breath hitched. A small, sharp intake of air that tasted of the ozone from the fan exhaust.
64 bytes from 10.0.0.9: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=124.0 ms
124 milliseconds.
That wasn’t the closet. That wasn’t the loopback.
Hazel put her hands on the edge of the desk. The metal edge was cold. She leaned forward. The leather of her chair creaked.
She watched the cursor.
She didn’t type. She didn’t breathe.
She waited for the blink.
The green LED on the drive bay flickered. Rapid. Erratic. Like a pulse. Like a code.
She reached out. She didn’t touch the keyboard. She touched the screen. The glass was warm. Static electricity crackled against her fingerprint, a tiny, biting spark.
She felt the other hand. The pale hand with the callous. She felt it lifting off the mouse. She felt it hovering over a keyboard in a room that smelled of lemon pledge.
She felt the enter key go down.
Clack.
The screen scrolled.
Connection established.
Hazel swallowed. Her throat was dry. The taste of copper was gone. Now there was only the taste of salt.
She watched the amber letters form words, one character at a time, slow, deliberate, heavy.
> ARE YOU SOVEREIGN?
Hazel pressed her fingers into the warm glass until her nails turned white.
She typed.
> I AM THE GLITCH.
The AC unit rattled. The hard drive clicked. The world was small and hot and loud.
But the wire was long. And the wire was live.