The Reply-Guy
Note: This is a chapter from "The Book of Joy", a novel that centers around the life story of Joy. She is a complicated person, although maybe she is very simple and just very deadly.
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which is available at https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
~~~~~~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~~~~~~
Besides his eyeballs and gun, Joy had left Willy's apartment with one other trophy - the realization that observation and intrusion could be done at a distance. The fact that he was able to see video feeds of people right in their homes using remote-controlled cameras, was a revelation. It was still percolating in her pigtailed head when she was reading social-media posts on one of her favorite topics - locksports.
There was a fertile community of people weaving in and out of a social media forum who had some kind of passion for picking locks. There were tips, tricks, and many shared videos, and the members of this loose society ranged from lawyers to locksmiths, and lazy hobbyists to security zealots. Joy glided through the chats, keenly interested in learning but not greatly in search of companionship. Some of the discussions seemed to her to be more about ego clashes or flirting, than about opening locks or studying what was inside them. There were even some who discussed only antique locks, and another group who were only interested in electronic ones. Joy didn't fit in any of those groups, and her quest for knowledge was more instrumental and practical. She wanted to know how to open more complex things than padlocks, office furniture cam locks, and the simple mortice locks found in the average home. She was looking for skills, not community, but then by accident, a special kind of community found her.
Joy had replied to a post about commercial mortice locks, and asked what the "ANSI Grade 1" part of the description implied about the methods used to open it. Alice, the discussion initiator, liked the direct, concise, and factual nature of the question, and then Joy had a follow-up question that Alice felt was best handled on a Signal call. That discussion had led to finding Joy a cheap second-hand lock to play with, and then a few chats on the best low-budget pick tools for the job. As someone who lived with autism, Alice appreciated how Joy was always clear, direct, and with no buried meanings in her communication - there was no hinting that she didn't have enough money to spare for new lockpicks, she just said so directly, and asked straightforwardly if they had an old set she could buy cheaply. Discussion had drifted to the topic of electronic locks, remote sensors, microphones, and cameras. Joy seemed to have some practical understanding, but further explanation would either need a video, or an in-person meeting. Meeting up with other locksport fans over a coffee and some hands-on lock work was not unusual for Alice, and they also wanted to meet this eager teenager. They set up a meeting at three on a Wednesday at a coffee place near the train station.
From Joy's posts, Alice had unconsciously built a mental image of her age and style, and was therefore surprised when instead of an eighteen year old with slightly goth style, Joy suddenly appeared next to them as a twelve-year old in a green and black school uniform, and lugging a pink backpack with a sparkly rainbow unicorn attached to one strap. Alice was a little bit taken aback at the chasm between the expectation and who Joy was in person, but was mostly amused and interested in what was obviously an exceptional kid. Alice also liked pink, glitter, and fuzzy stuff, and admired the backpack, from which Joy tugged a partially dismembered Easilok commercial mortice lock. She proceeded directly to explaining a point of confusion, and Alice stifled a giggle at the little package of cute, earnest, and eager in front of them. Alice was quickly able to resolve the confusion and then pulled out their own lockset to demonstrate the picking technique that had been so confusing. As Alice demonstrated, Joy's eyes lit up, and she yelped with exhilaration.
Life crept up on Joy, and some things were going on for which a mother was needed. At breakfast, holding a spoon in one hand poised over a bowl of oatmeal and blueberries, and the other holding her organic high-pulp orange juice, Joy looked earnestly across the table and asked "Mommy, why are my nipples sore? It's like they have tooth-ache." Jane had been in mid-sip of her coffee, and took some time to recover, mop up the mess, and formulate an answer she had been meaning to rehearse for years. "Well, Darling, remember we spoke about that Women's Health book you got from school?" Jane fumbled. "Oh, so I'm growing tits now. OK. Can we have pizza tonight, Mommy?" Jane was still gaping and stunned when Joy had taken her last spoonful, gulped down the last of her juice, and packed them into the dishwasher. "Um, … yes, Darling, sure, we can have pizza." Of all the ways Jane had imagined this conversation going, this was not one. She had almost forgotten her youngest, Jenna, who was still happily munching her oats, and now looked up at her with a big smile and a waving hand, "Mommy, why did Joy say she's getting tits? What's tits?" Jane could see this was going to be a strange day.
When Alice met Joy again, they had a surprise. "Check this out. This is a Flipper Zero. It is used for penetration testing, and it can open garages, cars, hotel doors, and even siphon data from tap-to-pay credit cards." Joy was fascinated, and Alice walked her through setting it up and using it. To demonstrate, Alice used it to open and close the garage doors of an apartment building across the street from the coffee shop. Then they recorded and replayed a customer's key fob to make their big black pickup truck lock and beep a few times, and then use it to set off the alarm. When the owner, a beefy old man with a bald spot and a pigtail, ran out cursing to reset it, Alice waited until he was seated and set it off again. "OK, so maybe that's enough of that, but you get the idea. You can buy one for half the price at this place, … or this place," Alice scribbled down names and details on a Post It for Joy. "You could also watch online personal ads, and if you spot one, let me know, and I can check it out for you." When they parted, Joy's head was buzzing with new information and possibilities. The thought that a cute little thing that looked like a toy could do so many really useful things had her mind ticking. "I wonder if Mommy would get me one for Christmas."
In the year since Joy had first met Alice, her body had changed and so had the way people reacted to her. She was no longer the unnoticed little girl in pigtails, but she was also not a woman. Girls had cuteness, women had agency, and whatever she was now, she was still subject to all the restrictions of being a child without the welcome invisibility or the increased power of a woman. Things were different but the same. For one thing, Joy had decided that breasts were annoying and inconvenient. It was like having two morose grannies strapped to her chest - they complained all the time, got in the way, and just seemed to have no use. They got in the way of even the most mundane tasks, and then hurt if they were bumped. Even folding up a towel could involve bumping into a breast and then having it complain, and she could no longer do her favorite sleeping position anymore, because now there was a breast that could get in the way, or get angry about being trapped between her body and the bed. They got in the way when she was on the climbing wall, or just getting dressed. Women stopped touching her, and gone were the big smiles and comments about how sweet she was. None of them touched her head anymore - which she always thought was weird, but now they glanced at her breasts and gave her a thin-lipped grimace and a face that said quite obviously that she was now competition rather than a partially invisible little girl. Men also saw her now, and they stared in ways that made her want to hurt them. Her butt had swelled, and now her jeans didn't fit anymore, and her climbing outfit was stretched too tight. A bigger butt had uses at least - sitting on hard chairs was comfier. It was like having a built-in cushion.
Her first period had been annoying. She woke up with a severe cramp in her gut. It was sharp and clenching. It felt like that time she had been fooling around with the bulldog clip from Mom's clipboard when she was eight. She had been looking at it close up, opening and closing it and making croaking noises. "Hello Mr. Frog" and she had made as if she was going to kiss it and turn this flat-mouth frog into a prince. It had slipped in her hand, and suddenly grabbed her upper lip. The pain was immediate and intense, and her lip was swollen for a week. This felt like a giant bulldog clip had grabbed her insides. The books were unhelpful and frustrating. It said she might leak 50-90 ml of blood. But how was she supposed to measure that from the clotted mess she was looking at. Either the book was written by a very stupid woman, or by a man who had never seen congealed tissue and blood. She got Mom's measuring spoons to try to estimate how much blood there was, but Mom freaked out for a bit. "Honey … I'm sorry I yelled at you. It was just a shock. That doesn't look like too much. It looks normal. … and yes, every month." Joy concluded that this was the dumbest thing ever, and went to her room mumbling, almost walking into Jenna who had come to see what the fuss was about, and then had questions. "Mommy, … Mommy … does Joy need a doctor? She said that things that bleed this long usually die. Is Joy going to die?"
Joy was online more. There were many things to try out, and Alice had given her little assignments that were always fascinating. She had discovered, for instance, that she could control the school security cameras, and could make them zoom in on Mr. Joyce's hairy ears, which annoyed the staff who had to monitor the camera feed, and made Mr. Joyce start plucking his ears. The online mood had also changed a bit, with more girls saying what they thought, and more men getting angry about that. One in particular got her attention when he said angry things to Alice. He seemed to be dogging her posts, and then he said he was going to kill her, and that got Joy's attention, and she started watching him. The next time she met Alice, they had been distracted, then shared with Joy that the Reply-Guy had tracked down where they lived after they had started banning him from the forum. Joy decided she had a new practice assignment, and once she was at home, she figured out who he was and where he lived. It was the first time she had used what Alice had taught her to find a person and scope out their environment and behavior, and it was thrilling. It took her a week to discover that he had stalked women before, and was just a giant pompous gasbag. She thought about how to do something about this. Some members on the forum had said he should be permabanned from the entire network, and others had said the police should get involved. Joy had a different take in mind, and got down to planning.
Joy took one of the many tote bags Mommy had collected during sales events and seminars, and then dug into her hiding space to retrieve her switchblade and pistol. She rolled up Mom's clear plastic arts apron, a change of clothes, and blue surgical gloves, and put them in the tote with one of the sparkly rainbow unicorns that Auntie Bev and Dr. Foreman handed out at their clinics. She packed in a bottle of sports drink with electrolytes, and a granola bar. On the train, she thought about Alice, and how much they had taught her, and how much hacking was like opening locks. When she got to the destination station, she ducked into the restrooms, and changed. She put on Mom's push-up bra after adjusting it and making a tiny mark where the buckles had been, buttoned up a tight blouse from the thrift store, and zipped up a short skirt. She tucked a handful of Kleenex under each breast, wobbled them about to settle them, and put on eyeshadow and lipstick. With Mom's clipboard in one hand, she was just another young business woman in town going her way.
Bill was fairly sharp about information security, but stank at physical risk management. He wasn't expecting his pizza to come so early, but got up from his sofa in a hurry when there was a knocking at the door. He put his laptop on the coffee table and grabbed the cash before going to the door and plucking it open. He stood a moment, confused to see a young woman instead of his regular pizza guy, but his eyes settled on her cleavage and the nipples that seemed to be trying to pop out. He was so focused on her chest that he didn't notice the Kel-Tec pistol in her hand, or the muzzle of the silencer, before it coughed a little puff of smoke, and she pushed him inside. The world tilted as he fell over backwards and then it spun and vanished as the blood flow to his brain slowed and stopped. In the meantime, Joy had things to do. She took out the unicorn and dipped the horn into the bullet entry wound. She used his PC to take a photo of it, and then stuck the unicorn into the dishwasher on fast cycle. With the PC and its power brick wiped with a soapy facecloth, she wiped off her makeup, and changed back into baggy pants and hoodie, and stowed it all in her tote. She went back to check on the guy, and could feel no carotid pulse, his pupils were fixed and blown, and when she poked an eyeball with a gloved finger, there was no reflex. She rolled him into the recovery position and felt his back. Yes, there it was, a slight bump telling her where the bullet had come to rest. Two minutes later, her switchblade opened up a big enough incision for small fingers to retrieve the bullet. She pulled the shirt back down, patted him on the back, and quickly surveyed the apartment. She took the cash to pay for food going home, and fetched the soggy and steaming unicorn.
It had been less than fifteen minutes before Joy was sitting against the west wall in the apartment block parking garage, hunched over his PC that was still in range of his Wi-Fi. She edited the image, erased most of the background, and then posted it online, tagging the group Alice was in. It took another few minutes to format and remove the hard drive, snap the screen with a kick, and throw the busted PC into a dumpster. She hit the hard drive a few times with a brick, and sang softly on her way to the train station. Joy paused briefly to throw the mangled drive into a garbage can when she went through a mall, and made one more stop to buy a Swiss-cheese and ham bagel, and a Ramune soda, both of which she hungrily dispatched while waiting for her train. On the way home, Joy decided that breasts were still annoying, but they certainly had their uses.
Alice sat knees-up in bed with one hand on the tablet resting against their thighs, and the other holding a nearly-cold mug of coffee. That asshole guy had posted again, but it was just an image of a stuffed unicorn, rather than the usual taunts and provocation. They zoomed in on the unicorn image - Something familiar about it, but the horn wasn't a stripey twirled rainbow or gold. This one was dark red. Alice zoomed as far as it would go. Was that blood? Zooming out again, they tried to make sense of it, and then decided, this fucking guy can just drop dead. Alice switched to something else and then noticed the coffee was cold. With a grunt, they rolled out of bed, slipped on the fluffy pink bunny slippers, and went to reheat the unfinished coffee.
It was a week before Alice noticed that "Reply-Guy Alpha" hadn't posted anything since the cryptic unicorn post, and took another look at the unicorn image. They knew where they had seen one like that before, and also knew that this was a very private message, and why Reply-Guy was silent and would never bother them again. It was a complex feeling of alarm, admiration, trepidation, and appreciation. There was also certainty that asking questions would not be possible.
When they met again, Joy was her normal calm and eager self, but Alice had struggled to come up with what to say and how to say it. Alice also knew what kind of creature Joy was in this forest. As a person with autism and a background in abnormal and criminal psychology, Alice had noticed at a certain point that Joy was mirroring their body language, speech patterns and expressions. They had pushed back a little, and there was a moment when Joy had noticed this, and there was a fine and sharp instant when Alice could see a cold but unthreatening evaluation going on in Joy's head. Nothing was said, but Joy had backed off on adjusting Alice's behavior, and Alice had signaled that they liked and appreciated Joy for who she was. This felt like one of those moments again, but maybe a lot more dangerous. Alice was not very good at the whole thing of social signaling with buried and latent messages, but they had practiced, and now delivered the message of gratitude. "That reply guy has fucked off and vanished. I am very happy about that." Joy's usually deadpan face had shown a flicker of acknowledgement. Message received, the scales were balanced again. Joy took a sip of her decaf latte, and asked "What can you tell me about SQL injection?", and the two got busy with some details and a possible new assignment for Joy.
~~~
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which you can get on Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which is available at https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
~~~~~~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~~~~~~
Besides his eyeballs and gun, Joy had left Willy's apartment with one other trophy - the realization that observation and intrusion could be done at a distance. The fact that he was able to see video feeds of people right in their homes using remote-controlled cameras, was a revelation. It was still percolating in her pigtailed head when she was reading social-media posts on one of her favorite topics - locksports.
There was a fertile community of people weaving in and out of a social media forum who had some kind of passion for picking locks. There were tips, tricks, and many shared videos, and the members of this loose society ranged from lawyers to locksmiths, and lazy hobbyists to security zealots. Joy glided through the chats, keenly interested in learning but not greatly in search of companionship. Some of the discussions seemed to her to be more about ego clashes or flirting, than about opening locks or studying what was inside them. There were even some who discussed only antique locks, and another group who were only interested in electronic ones. Joy didn't fit in any of those groups, and her quest for knowledge was more instrumental and practical. She wanted to know how to open more complex things than padlocks, office furniture cam locks, and the simple mortice locks found in the average home. She was looking for skills, not community, but then by accident, a special kind of community found her.
Joy had replied to a post about commercial mortice locks, and asked what the "ANSI Grade 1" part of the description implied about the methods used to open it. Alice, the discussion initiator, liked the direct, concise, and factual nature of the question, and then Joy had a follow-up question that Alice felt was best handled on a Signal call. That discussion had led to finding Joy a cheap second-hand lock to play with, and then a few chats on the best low-budget pick tools for the job. As someone who lived with autism, Alice appreciated how Joy was always clear, direct, and with no buried meanings in her communication - there was no hinting that she didn't have enough money to spare for new lockpicks, she just said so directly, and asked straightforwardly if they had an old set she could buy cheaply. Discussion had drifted to the topic of electronic locks, remote sensors, microphones, and cameras. Joy seemed to have some practical understanding, but further explanation would either need a video, or an in-person meeting. Meeting up with other locksport fans over a coffee and some hands-on lock work was not unusual for Alice, and they also wanted to meet this eager teenager. They set up a meeting at three on a Wednesday at a coffee place near the train station.
From Joy's posts, Alice had unconsciously built a mental image of her age and style, and was therefore surprised when instead of an eighteen year old with slightly goth style, Joy suddenly appeared next to them as a twelve-year old in a green and black school uniform, and lugging a pink backpack with a sparkly rainbow unicorn attached to one strap. Alice was a little bit taken aback at the chasm between the expectation and who Joy was in person, but was mostly amused and interested in what was obviously an exceptional kid. Alice also liked pink, glitter, and fuzzy stuff, and admired the backpack, from which Joy tugged a partially dismembered Easilok commercial mortice lock. She proceeded directly to explaining a point of confusion, and Alice stifled a giggle at the little package of cute, earnest, and eager in front of them. Alice was quickly able to resolve the confusion and then pulled out their own lockset to demonstrate the picking technique that had been so confusing. As Alice demonstrated, Joy's eyes lit up, and she yelped with exhilaration.
Life crept up on Joy, and some things were going on for which a mother was needed. At breakfast, holding a spoon in one hand poised over a bowl of oatmeal and blueberries, and the other holding her organic high-pulp orange juice, Joy looked earnestly across the table and asked "Mommy, why are my nipples sore? It's like they have tooth-ache." Jane had been in mid-sip of her coffee, and took some time to recover, mop up the mess, and formulate an answer she had been meaning to rehearse for years. "Well, Darling, remember we spoke about that Women's Health book you got from school?" Jane fumbled. "Oh, so I'm growing tits now. OK. Can we have pizza tonight, Mommy?" Jane was still gaping and stunned when Joy had taken her last spoonful, gulped down the last of her juice, and packed them into the dishwasher. "Um, … yes, Darling, sure, we can have pizza." Of all the ways Jane had imagined this conversation going, this was not one. She had almost forgotten her youngest, Jenna, who was still happily munching her oats, and now looked up at her with a big smile and a waving hand, "Mommy, why did Joy say she's getting tits? What's tits?" Jane could see this was going to be a strange day.
When Alice met Joy again, they had a surprise. "Check this out. This is a Flipper Zero. It is used for penetration testing, and it can open garages, cars, hotel doors, and even siphon data from tap-to-pay credit cards." Joy was fascinated, and Alice walked her through setting it up and using it. To demonstrate, Alice used it to open and close the garage doors of an apartment building across the street from the coffee shop. Then they recorded and replayed a customer's key fob to make their big black pickup truck lock and beep a few times, and then use it to set off the alarm. When the owner, a beefy old man with a bald spot and a pigtail, ran out cursing to reset it, Alice waited until he was seated and set it off again. "OK, so maybe that's enough of that, but you get the idea. You can buy one for half the price at this place, … or this place," Alice scribbled down names and details on a Post It for Joy. "You could also watch online personal ads, and if you spot one, let me know, and I can check it out for you." When they parted, Joy's head was buzzing with new information and possibilities. The thought that a cute little thing that looked like a toy could do so many really useful things had her mind ticking. "I wonder if Mommy would get me one for Christmas."
In the year since Joy had first met Alice, her body had changed and so had the way people reacted to her. She was no longer the unnoticed little girl in pigtails, but she was also not a woman. Girls had cuteness, women had agency, and whatever she was now, she was still subject to all the restrictions of being a child without the welcome invisibility or the increased power of a woman. Things were different but the same. For one thing, Joy had decided that breasts were annoying and inconvenient. It was like having two morose grannies strapped to her chest - they complained all the time, got in the way, and just seemed to have no use. They got in the way of even the most mundane tasks, and then hurt if they were bumped. Even folding up a towel could involve bumping into a breast and then having it complain, and she could no longer do her favorite sleeping position anymore, because now there was a breast that could get in the way, or get angry about being trapped between her body and the bed. They got in the way when she was on the climbing wall, or just getting dressed. Women stopped touching her, and gone were the big smiles and comments about how sweet she was. None of them touched her head anymore - which she always thought was weird, but now they glanced at her breasts and gave her a thin-lipped grimace and a face that said quite obviously that she was now competition rather than a partially invisible little girl. Men also saw her now, and they stared in ways that made her want to hurt them. Her butt had swelled, and now her jeans didn't fit anymore, and her climbing outfit was stretched too tight. A bigger butt had uses at least - sitting on hard chairs was comfier. It was like having a built-in cushion.
Her first period had been annoying. She woke up with a severe cramp in her gut. It was sharp and clenching. It felt like that time she had been fooling around with the bulldog clip from Mom's clipboard when she was eight. She had been looking at it close up, opening and closing it and making croaking noises. "Hello Mr. Frog" and she had made as if she was going to kiss it and turn this flat-mouth frog into a prince. It had slipped in her hand, and suddenly grabbed her upper lip. The pain was immediate and intense, and her lip was swollen for a week. This felt like a giant bulldog clip had grabbed her insides. The books were unhelpful and frustrating. It said she might leak 50-90 ml of blood. But how was she supposed to measure that from the clotted mess she was looking at. Either the book was written by a very stupid woman, or by a man who had never seen congealed tissue and blood. She got Mom's measuring spoons to try to estimate how much blood there was, but Mom freaked out for a bit. "Honey … I'm sorry I yelled at you. It was just a shock. That doesn't look like too much. It looks normal. … and yes, every month." Joy concluded that this was the dumbest thing ever, and went to her room mumbling, almost walking into Jenna who had come to see what the fuss was about, and then had questions. "Mommy, … Mommy … does Joy need a doctor? She said that things that bleed this long usually die. Is Joy going to die?"
Joy was online more. There were many things to try out, and Alice had given her little assignments that were always fascinating. She had discovered, for instance, that she could control the school security cameras, and could make them zoom in on Mr. Joyce's hairy ears, which annoyed the staff who had to monitor the camera feed, and made Mr. Joyce start plucking his ears. The online mood had also changed a bit, with more girls saying what they thought, and more men getting angry about that. One in particular got her attention when he said angry things to Alice. He seemed to be dogging her posts, and then he said he was going to kill her, and that got Joy's attention, and she started watching him. The next time she met Alice, they had been distracted, then shared with Joy that the Reply-Guy had tracked down where they lived after they had started banning him from the forum. Joy decided she had a new practice assignment, and once she was at home, she figured out who he was and where he lived. It was the first time she had used what Alice had taught her to find a person and scope out their environment and behavior, and it was thrilling. It took her a week to discover that he had stalked women before, and was just a giant pompous gasbag. She thought about how to do something about this. Some members on the forum had said he should be permabanned from the entire network, and others had said the police should get involved. Joy had a different take in mind, and got down to planning.
Joy took one of the many tote bags Mommy had collected during sales events and seminars, and then dug into her hiding space to retrieve her switchblade and pistol. She rolled up Mom's clear plastic arts apron, a change of clothes, and blue surgical gloves, and put them in the tote with one of the sparkly rainbow unicorns that Auntie Bev and Dr. Foreman handed out at their clinics. She packed in a bottle of sports drink with electrolytes, and a granola bar. On the train, she thought about Alice, and how much they had taught her, and how much hacking was like opening locks. When she got to the destination station, she ducked into the restrooms, and changed. She put on Mom's push-up bra after adjusting it and making a tiny mark where the buckles had been, buttoned up a tight blouse from the thrift store, and zipped up a short skirt. She tucked a handful of Kleenex under each breast, wobbled them about to settle them, and put on eyeshadow and lipstick. With Mom's clipboard in one hand, she was just another young business woman in town going her way.
Bill was fairly sharp about information security, but stank at physical risk management. He wasn't expecting his pizza to come so early, but got up from his sofa in a hurry when there was a knocking at the door. He put his laptop on the coffee table and grabbed the cash before going to the door and plucking it open. He stood a moment, confused to see a young woman instead of his regular pizza guy, but his eyes settled on her cleavage and the nipples that seemed to be trying to pop out. He was so focused on her chest that he didn't notice the Kel-Tec pistol in her hand, or the muzzle of the silencer, before it coughed a little puff of smoke, and she pushed him inside. The world tilted as he fell over backwards and then it spun and vanished as the blood flow to his brain slowed and stopped. In the meantime, Joy had things to do. She took out the unicorn and dipped the horn into the bullet entry wound. She used his PC to take a photo of it, and then stuck the unicorn into the dishwasher on fast cycle. With the PC and its power brick wiped with a soapy facecloth, she wiped off her makeup, and changed back into baggy pants and hoodie, and stowed it all in her tote. She went back to check on the guy, and could feel no carotid pulse, his pupils were fixed and blown, and when she poked an eyeball with a gloved finger, there was no reflex. She rolled him into the recovery position and felt his back. Yes, there it was, a slight bump telling her where the bullet had come to rest. Two minutes later, her switchblade opened up a big enough incision for small fingers to retrieve the bullet. She pulled the shirt back down, patted him on the back, and quickly surveyed the apartment. She took the cash to pay for food going home, and fetched the soggy and steaming unicorn.
It had been less than fifteen minutes before Joy was sitting against the west wall in the apartment block parking garage, hunched over his PC that was still in range of his Wi-Fi. She edited the image, erased most of the background, and then posted it online, tagging the group Alice was in. It took another few minutes to format and remove the hard drive, snap the screen with a kick, and throw the busted PC into a dumpster. She hit the hard drive a few times with a brick, and sang softly on her way to the train station. Joy paused briefly to throw the mangled drive into a garbage can when she went through a mall, and made one more stop to buy a Swiss-cheese and ham bagel, and a Ramune soda, both of which she hungrily dispatched while waiting for her train. On the way home, Joy decided that breasts were still annoying, but they certainly had their uses.
Alice sat knees-up in bed with one hand on the tablet resting against their thighs, and the other holding a nearly-cold mug of coffee. That asshole guy had posted again, but it was just an image of a stuffed unicorn, rather than the usual taunts and provocation. They zoomed in on the unicorn image - Something familiar about it, but the horn wasn't a stripey twirled rainbow or gold. This one was dark red. Alice zoomed as far as it would go. Was that blood? Zooming out again, they tried to make sense of it, and then decided, this fucking guy can just drop dead. Alice switched to something else and then noticed the coffee was cold. With a grunt, they rolled out of bed, slipped on the fluffy pink bunny slippers, and went to reheat the unfinished coffee.
It was a week before Alice noticed that "Reply-Guy Alpha" hadn't posted anything since the cryptic unicorn post, and took another look at the unicorn image. They knew where they had seen one like that before, and also knew that this was a very private message, and why Reply-Guy was silent and would never bother them again. It was a complex feeling of alarm, admiration, trepidation, and appreciation. There was also certainty that asking questions would not be possible.
When they met again, Joy was her normal calm and eager self, but Alice had struggled to come up with what to say and how to say it. Alice also knew what kind of creature Joy was in this forest. As a person with autism and a background in abnormal and criminal psychology, Alice had noticed at a certain point that Joy was mirroring their body language, speech patterns and expressions. They had pushed back a little, and there was a moment when Joy had noticed this, and there was a fine and sharp instant when Alice could see a cold but unthreatening evaluation going on in Joy's head. Nothing was said, but Joy had backed off on adjusting Alice's behavior, and Alice had signaled that they liked and appreciated Joy for who she was. This felt like one of those moments again, but maybe a lot more dangerous. Alice was not very good at the whole thing of social signaling with buried and latent messages, but they had practiced, and now delivered the message of gratitude. "That reply guy has fucked off and vanished. I am very happy about that." Joy's usually deadpan face had shown a flicker of acknowledgement. Message received, the scales were balanced again. Joy took a sip of her decaf latte, and asked "What can you tell me about SQL injection?", and the two got busy with some details and a possible new assignment for Joy.
~~~
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which you can get on Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
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