The Dropout Detective - A Comedy Mystery

8. What happens when you mess with The Future

Thursday 1st Feb 2018

I didn't have to wait long for news. The very next morning I got a phone call from a private number. I answered it to hear a robot at the other end of the line.

"Hi Soph-ie," it droned. "I found your stud-ent acc-ount."

I debated whether to end the call. "Is this a recorded message?"

"Oh, wait-a min-ute," said the robot. There was a click and then Ethan's voice came over the line. "Sorry about that. I forgot to switch off the distorter."

I decided not to ask why he had a voice distorter built into his phone line. "Hello Ethan. How did it go with the hacking? Do you have any news?"

"Yeah I do," he said. There was a pause. "Um... Sophie, are you involved with some kind of international agency?"

"What?"

"It was tricky to find any trace of you in the university system. I'll say this, whoever deleted you knew what they were doing. They replaced your record with a fake name in all linked systems and all backups for the whole academic year. I only found you at all because you attended some kind of pre-enrolment workshop thing. Somehow the hacker missed that."

That knitting workshop! Thank god my former foster mother persuaded me to go.

Ethan continued. "And once I'd figured out the alias they switched you for, it was pretty easy to find the rest of your record. By the way, you're now a black guy named Cole Havers."

"Oh my god!" That struck me as hilarious. "But do you have any idea who did it?"

There was a pause. "Yeah, um... that's why I was asking you about agencies. This looks like it was done by someone from the future."

I didn't get it. "Someone from the future? Like a time traveller?"

He chuckled. "Ok, that answers my previous question. No it's nothing to do with time travel. The name of the organisation is 'The Future'. Which, by the way, is a stupid name that they stole from a film. They're all a bunch of stuck-up idiots who do things because they think it'll make them look cool."

It appeared that Ethan might have a personal history with this agency. Interesting.

"But that's not all," he continued. "Before they replaced your record with the dummy one, it looks like they were trying to push you into a certain study route."

I went cold. "What do you mean?"

"Yeah, there are like a million tags attached to your record stating that you're not eligible for certain courses. Did you ever have trouble enrolling online for things?"

"Yes, I did actually." I'd always found it strange that the classes I wanted to take filled up so quickly. I'd done exactly as instructed and attempted to enrol through the online portal but each and every time I'd received messages informing me that enrolment for the course in question wasn't possible. In most cases I'd got around the problem by going along to the classes and speaking to the lecturers in person. They were always perfectly pleasant, apologised for the abysmal failure of the student portal and promised to enrol me manually. Every one of them was surprised to hear about the problems I'd had.

"And your grades in some courses were modified to give you higher scores in the maths and engineering fields," said Ethan.

"What the fuck!"

"Yeah." I heard him typing. "Like here, your grade for Introductory Statistics was modified from 69% to 83%. My guess is that someone wanted to push you to do more statistics."