✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

44. My Hidden Ace

This chapter is dedicated to babysofia1234, who has some great stories of her own if anyone wants to check them out. Thank you for all your support, and happy new year.

I wanted to let go of my worries. I wanted to be happy that Tess was accepting her status as a little, and that Ffrances was convinced it was her own idea. I wanted to celebrate. But at the same time, I had to accept the fact that there was a chance of people in my office finding out that I had an interest in looking after a little.

When I got to the site, I got out of my truck and got myself a coffee first. It looked like a quiet suburban street with a coffee shop on the corner, because that was the way Upper Ashfields had been built. The whole town was arranged like a college campus, with homes, shops, and office buildings all in close proximity. The different neighbourhoods were all separated by parks, and they said that the town planners had made sure that the initial residents all had homes within ten minutes' walk of their place of work. SYL's offices were scattered all over the town, practically dominating it, but there was no central building that would overshadow the high-tech idyllic aesthetic.

It didn't take me long to get to the office I was looking for, where I swiped in with my badge and then went to find Matt. His office had moved twice since I saw him last, which was probably a good sign of how seriously he took his job. He didn't exactly move frequently, but he always wanted to be close to the new parts of the campus so that he could sort out teething troubles. The unfamiliarity of these particular surroundings was simply because it had been a very long time since I needed to see him about anything. He was the sitewide IT technician, and most of the time he could chill playing games because our systems just worked.

Once his receptionist knew I was looking for him, I wandered off to look around the immediate area. It didn't take me long to find a couple of arcade machines situated in a corridor. Two little alcoves provided just enough space, and a corkboard nearby had a list of names tacked up on it. Some kind of wager on the high scores, I gathered. The cubicle-dwellers would laugh at the idea of an arcade machine in their building, but a small proportion of them would come back and play. Matt Buchannan said that watching people in a flow state helped him to think better, and the dreaded site administrator had a reputation for giving staff what they wanted as long as it seemed to lead to increased productivity.

"Matt!" I called out, and raised a hand to wave to him.

"Hey!" he answered, turning away from the machine. He probably didn't recognise me, it had been such a long time since we worked together. But I remembered his quirks well enough.

"Gabby Noel. Noel333. Had a score on one of these things a while ago."

"Oh, yeah. Defender, right? You surprised me with that one. You want a go?"

"I'm a little busy today. But there's something I need to ask you. So maybe I got time for a game or two."

He offered me a coin. Of course we did; these machines were his pet project, and it would be anyone's guess whether they were expecting antique pennies or Japanese 100¥ coins. Anybody who wanted to play would probably end up borrowing a stack of the relevant currency from Matt or his assistant, and that meant he knew the styles of almost every player.

This one was a two-player thing. I wasn't good at video games, but that wasn't the point. Everyone in this firm had their quirks, I knew that. And Matt was just as interested in the ways that different people would approach a game, and watching them get better. So he showed me the basics of a top-down shooter that looked like something out of the last century. And then as we played, in between comments that I was starting to get the hang of it, I explained that I seemed to have printed a document without meaning to.

I didn't say what the document was, or when it had happened. I was very careful never to imply that it wasn't work related. But I said I needed to know how I could manage to print a page without meaning to, because it could represent an ongoing threat to data security. Of course, if Matt checked the logs he might be able to see exactly what I had printed. And I certainly didn't want to give him an excuse to look. But I also thought that he would find nothing; the offending chapter of The Baby Button hadn't been in my logs when I looked. So he wouldn't see it either. Probably.

"Are you sure it was your account?" he asked. "Someone else on your team could be working on the same document. Could have been a coincidence that they left some pages behind. Perhaps they printed too many copies. If they were impatient and took the pages as soon as they came out, they might not have noticed one more landing in the tray."

"I don't think so," I answered, shaking my head. If somebody else had a copy of that story, and knew I'd been reading it, the only motivation I could imagine was some kind of blackmail.

"Probably best to check with them," he said. "I'll check the records, but I suspect it's more likely offline error. I don't believe the printer setup in your block can output anything without a header page. Now, if you had the header, I could look up the job number and tell you more about what application generated it. Then maybe we might have a clue. But without that, I don't think it can happen. Was this a confidential doc, something we need to investigate?"

"No. Not anything like that," I mumbled as quickly as I could.

"Then someone else has a copy of the document, printed it, and then the header was separated by someone else collecting their printout perhaps. No big deal, right?"

"Thanks, Matt," I said with a smile, and focused on the screen to finish off this game. Matt took his games seriously, and I never knew when I might come asking for his help again. This unofficial procedure would save me a lot of time in the long term.

Before long I was walking away again, still not sure what I could do next. The computer guy said the computers couldn't have done that. Whether I'd pressed some button by accident, or some malicious script inhabiting the webpage had somehow decided to print itself, it couldn't have come out without the header page. Somebody must have taken the header from the print tray, so they would know who I was. Or someone else had printed it, and left it there for me to find. Either way, it was not something that I wanted to hear.