The 4th Subject

Chapter 17: Who is This?

A lot happened in the next few days. Just as Matt said, we cracked into the safe the next day. But of course, we started the day with some Reddit.

~*~

Matt, Woods and I had been sitting in Megadesk for about an hour or two. The amount of people simping for Woods was unreal. We got to the memes and I saw a specific one as Matt scrolled.

"Wait, Matt, look!" I pointed to the screen. "How did we miss that?"

Matt looked at the image, confused, then leaned back and added, "How on earth did we miss that?"

"What?" Woods asked, looking from me to the tv.

"Look closer!" I cried, motioning for him to get up. He stood and stepped up to the monitor. Just as he reached it, I looked into the camera and yelled, "Play it!", then began singing Never Gonna Give You Up.

Woods turned around and lowly chuckled, "I hate you guys." Matt and I burst into laughter, continuing to vocalize.

We kept looking at memes, Sam eventually joining us. We came upon a meme about Woods dropping the walkie.

"Do you have good grip strength, or no?" Sam asked, turning to him.

"Sam," Matt began, "have you seen the comments?"

"No," she replied incredulously.

"Everyone's hostile towards you."

"Me?" She cried, leaning back in the chair. "What did I do?"

Before Matt could answer I butt in.

"You put into question the god of Woods's camera skills."

Woods leaned away from the mic, laughing his head off as Matt did the same and Sam turned to the camera.

"Ok, have you seen Woods's vlogs? They're shaky!"

We laughed for a while, then continued to look at the many Woods simp posts. Sam was clearly a little bit upset. She grabbed the mic and moved it closer, loudly saying, "Why is everybody taking pity on Woods? We're all going through this. I'm not ok!"

After a lot more laughing and a few more memes, we found a post about a code we could try on the case. Though Matt hemmed and hawed for a bit, we eventually headed out to the warehouse to try it on the case.

Matt disconnected the hidden camera, pulled the case out from under stairs, and put in the code 015. We all took a breath as Matt fiddled with it for a moment. Suddenly, it popped open. We were in.

Inside, we discovered many strange devices. There was a thick, heavy duty laptop, a cell phone, and a router, along with other pieces and wires. Everything was on and running, one thing connected to the other. There was an Ethernet cable hooked up from the router to under the stairs. We even opened the laptop, and that was on, too. Matt looked at it for a minute before looking up to us and saying, "This intercepts phone calls."

There was a moment of silence before Sam asked, "Do you think that's what he's been doing?"

We kept discussing the possibilities, but every possibility led to the case being designed to intercept phone calls. I hated the idea of all my calls I've made at the studio being intercepted.

"So, have we been... have we been talking to Syphus this whole time?" I questioned, still trying to wrap my mind around everything.

"I don't like that," Matt replied with his classic nervous laughter.

We discussed it a bit more, did a bit of research, then decided to call the police and see if the system intercepted the call.

Matt used Woods's phone since he hadn't called the police yet. He dialed the non-emergency number, looked up to us momentarily, then hit call. We saw the phone in the case light up, Woods's number moving across the screen. After a second or two, Matt took a step back and stuttered a moment before blurting out, "Sorry, wrong number."