Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The Atticus Files

Chapter One

"Just hack it already."

"Patience my young grasshopper," murmured Elsie from inside the pillow fort she had created on her bed.

Roza huffed and threw a paper plane at her friend. It sailed over the clothes strewn across the floor, past the half-dismantled drone lying at the foot of the bed and hit Elsie's laptop.

"I hate you," said Elsie, her eyes never leaving the screen.

"Lovely," replied Roza, putting her feet up on the desk and folding another paper plane.

It had been a month since they had finished high school. After graduating, each had received their respective university offers and Roza had no intention of accepting any of them. Elsie however, had poured through both of their letters, neatly placing them in piles designated yes, no and maybe.

"Hey," Elsie had said, picking up one of the many white envelopes. "You got an offer from Perscott College too?"

"Perscott? Never heard of it." Roza had shrugged it off.

But something in the letter had sparked Elsie's curiosity. After a quick visit to the Perscott College website, Elsie had used a harmless series of shortcuts to bypass nugatory information only to be blocked by the websites over-zealous security.

"Well hello," Elsie had mused, intrigued. "This is incredibly high security for a college website."

"Maybe they want to protect themselves from people like you."

Elsie ignored her. "In my experience, college websites aren't equipped with instant lock out protocols and the most sophisticated anti-intrusion software I've ever seen." Elsie paused. "I'm going to hack it."

"Excellent," Roza had replied, "I'll get us some pie."

Two hours later, Elsie was still glued to her computer screen and Roza had finished all the pie.

"Come on," Elsie muttered, fingers flying across the keyboard. "Where's my backdoor...oh, found the sucker. Wait, what the heck."

"Mmm?"

"Roza, get over here." There was a note of uncertainty in Elsie's voice.

Roza sighed. "But that would require effort."

"Roza!"

"Ok!"

She crawled into the pillow fort, jostling Elsie and her laptop. "Ok, I'm here, what is it?"

Elsie turned the screen to face Roza. She stiffened.

Hello Ms Jones, we have been waiting for you.

Press enter to continue.

"What does this mean?" Elsie stared at Roza. "Is it a joke?"

"Don't ask me, it's asking for you." Roza pointed at the screen.

Elsie hesitated for a moment before hitting enter. The screen went black before text suddenly began appearing.

No doubt you have read about Perscott,

A private college complete with boarding and

State of the art facilities, we have been

Educating students for over 160 years.

We are also an independent organisation which

Performs at the highest level of autonomy and

With the utmost discretion. We seek talented individuals

Who excel in computer sciences and advanced information

Technologies.

The screen went black again. As if it had eaten the words.

Elsie stared at the screen, her jaw slack. Roza opened her mouth to say something when text started to appear again.

"No no no it's starting again! Roza make it stop!" Elsie buried her head in the pink blanket.

"Look Elsie! Look at the screen," Roza urged, nudging Elsie with her elbow.

Sherlock Holmes' Bar

10 Northumberland St

Tomorrow 1pm

...

Oh, and bring Ms Rimsky with you.

Roza let out a torrent of Russian swear words. "How the hell do they know I'm here?"

"I don't know!" Elsie was tapping furiously at the keyboard. "I can't get out of this, it's like I'm completely blocked!"

There was a knock at the door.

"Elsie! Open the door, Dad made some lunch!" Elsie's little brother shouted.

"Not now Clyde!" Elsie yelled.

A high-pitched whining sound began emanating from inside the laptop, the small fan whirring in a pathetic effort to expel the computer's rapidly increasing temperature. Roza put a hand on the laptop and winced.

"Should it be that hot?"

Elsie made an angry strangled sound as indecipherable text began scrolling up the screen. She put her every effort into stopping the barrage of ones and zeros, but the streams of endless key codes and galvanic commands were rejected. What had started as harmless white text suspended ominously in a sea of blackness like a set of bones had turned into a malicious hunter, warping and mutating into a creature with tentacles wrapped around every file, driver, network, modem and microcode. Nothing was spared. Nothing left uncorrupted. The CPU's temperature sensor was disabled along with every other piece of backup software. As the virus spread, it enveloped the laptop. Choking it. Killing it through a steady duplication of it's own running processes until the CPU let out a piercing metallic scream as it burned.

Slowly the laptop gave in.

The mouse stopped responding.

The screen flickered.

And then everything simply stopped.

"ARGH!" Elsie screamed in shock and frustration, throwing the laptop across the room. Roza winced as it hit the floor, the sound reverberating in her head.

"Elsie!" This time it was her other little brother, Archie . "Daddy says not to make so much noise or you'll make Mrs Potts angry again!"

Roza got off the bed and approached the twisted, broken computer lying among the wreckage that made up Elsie's room. She knelt and reached for the laptop. When her fingers met the metallic outer shell she hissed and tore her hand away, dropping it. It felt like touching hot oil. She heard a muffled scream come from behind her. Turning, Roza saw Elsie sitting with her head buried in her pink blanket. The pillow fort, which had at first stood like a proud bastion of surety and confidence, suddenly looked like a childish attempt to play with forces that were still too complicated to contend with.

"Well," said Roza, staring at the destroyed laptop. "We just got our arses handed to us."