New Kid On The Block

Ch 8: Swelter Skelter

"You know if you reroute most of the-" Wrench said breaking me from the blank stare I was giving my laptop screen. I was working on a side project for Dedsec, decoding some hardware we stole on a digital raid. I won't lie, it was some pretty intense stuff. Wrench reached around me, fingers gliding across the keyboard. "It doesn't do much but it's a little work around." He hummed close to my ear.

"Thanks." I sighed leaning back in my chair, and coincidentally against him. He didn't move pretending to still be interested in what was on my screen. It was just an excuse for him to have his arms wrapped around me. Not that I minded.

"You haven't been sleeping again." He stated concern echoing in his voice. It's been over a two week since I fell asleep over at his place. Waking up hadn't been as awkward as I thought it would be. We ended up going to some family diner for breakfast afterwards. And things between us have been....different. And I'm not sure if in a good way.

"I..." I huffed tilting my head back to look up at him. "You have no room to judge, mister five hour energy."

"I'm not judging." He laughed, arrows flashing across his mask, ^ ^

"Hey Wrench, I need your help with some hardware." And just like that, he jumped away from acting like nothing was happening. And I'm not saying anything was.

I guess we weren't in a declared relationship. But we've spent the last two weeks with each other about every other minutes of the day. Sometimes at the Hackerspace or his garage. I liked to sit at his desktop eating popcorn and watch him work on all of his techy stuff that I could never understand. His current favorite project was named Wrench Jr., a robot he stole from Haum. Sometimes we'd just chill at my place and watch a terrible movie just to laugh at it. It really depended on the day.

"Sure, what can I do you for Marcus?" He asked, walking away. I slumped forward scrolling through what he had done, trying to make sense of it. In the background, I could hear the two of them joking but I eventually drowned it out focusing on the task at hand. A half hour passed with out me noticing until Josh broke me from my concentration swearing loudly.

"Shit. Shit. Shit." I looked up from my work as he paced back and forth, hands on his head.

"Hey man, chill down." Marcus said. "What's up?"

"I was looking at our numbers, how many people downloaded our app, how much processing power we had available and that's when I saw it." Josh said clearly agitated.

"Saw 'it' what?" Wrench asked.

"A chunk of our followers came from dead or inactive !Nvite accounts."

"Wait, some one used fake accounts to boost our follower accounts?" Marcus asked. "Who?"

"And how many fucking accounts man?" Wrench asked, I shot him a glare. There's no point in yelling at Josh, it wasn't his fault and it only scared him.

"I-I don't know who but someone with admin access, I'm sure if that. Ad for how many..." he looked at me and motioned to my computer. I nodded and he minimized what I was working on pulling up the Dedsec Page. A pie chart with almost 1/4 of it colored red popped up.

"Fuck me!" Wrench yelled.

"I'm sorry, I didn't check, I know it's all my fault, I didn't check." Josh said sounding very distressed.