Strange Flesh (59 page)

No one would ever write sample code like this, so where did it come from?

The answer’s obvious: Gina.

Reading her syntax elicits a welter of emotions. Sadness that I never got to meet this tortured genius mixes with creeping guilt over my exploitation of the project for which she was murdered.

I’m trying to parse a particularly thorny section when I get a feeling of déjà vu. This code is distinctive enough that I must have seen it before. I do a global search and find, in a totally unrelated library, an almost identical function.

My screen-burned eyes finally focus on the difference:

Function 1 is called:
O_fill_packet
Function 2 is called:
O_fi11_packet

Only a couple of shifted pixels separate the lowercase L from the number 1 in most default programming fonts. A discrepancy so easy to overlook that the names must be intentional. We hackers often use such lettering tricks when trying to disguise files or processes on a target’s machine.

The only difference between the two functions is that O_fi11_packet has a single line allocating a variable that creates a huge memory leak.

Someone intentionally put a bug into the system.

I restrain myself from immediately stomping this guy, and instead I check the value of the wayward variable when Ginger goes into her post-coital depression. It reads:

This little death I exalt \n
For I’d rather halt \n
Than make a pillar of salt \n
Gina Delaney \n
03.21.1980 - 10.29.14 \n

Gina put in an Easter egg.

The practice of embedding hidden treasures into software has a storied history. There’s the Hall of Tortured Souls in Excel ’95 wherein, by executing an obscure series of keystrokes, the user can enter a
Doom
-like 3D world. The infamous “Hot Coffee” pornographic cut scene in
Grand Theft Auto
actually prompted Senate hearings, with Hillary Clinton, of all people, acting particularly aggrieved. But generally Easter eggs are credit reels for underappreciated programmers.

Strange for Gina to put hers in a critical bug. This critter has caused enough ill will that any normal coder would remove it immediately. I fix the memory leak but decide to leave her secret memorial. She deserves it.

The word “memorial” sticks in my head. Gina’s statement weirdly evokes her final words, and the lifespan notation at the end makes it look more like an epitaph than a signature. Knowing her history, I’m not surprised that she would focus on the connection between death and orgasm. Or that she’d program her bots to actually “die” after experiencing a certain amount of pleasure. But the “halt” she mentions can’t mean Ginger, since the next line refers to Genesis 19, just as she did in the video of her death.

Then it hits me.

How could she correctly guess the date on which she would be murdered? And if she didn’t put it in, who did?

This section of IT’s code base was Garriott’s responsibility. But the file history shows he never changed it. So Gina must have added it. Which means the line really was her epitaph, and she hid it in the DNA of the project that came to define her life. If that’s true, then she knew the day she would die.

My mind recoils from the logic. I try to clear it by standing up to stretch. But my gaze keeps returning to the verse sitting calmly in my debug window.

If Gina placed these words in her magnum opus, then either she was clairvoyant, or she
selected
the date of her own demise. She could only know it would be October 29 if she chose that date.

And if that’s true, then Gina wasn’t murdered after all.

H
er message goes to work on me that night.

Why do I care so much about what happened to this poor girl? I feel like over the past weeks, I’ve come to know Gina well. In fact, my now gleaming future is really a gift from her.

It was Lot’s wife who turned into a pillar of salt, so is she saying here that she’d rather “halt” or die than share the fate of her mother? Billy had assumed Gina’s death related to her work on the Dancers, as did I, but here she’s invoking her wretched family.

Thinking it might be helpful to review a few details of her case, I lob in a call to Detective Nash, leaving a message that I just want to “tie up some loose ends.”

Then I call Ruth Delaney. Having delivered her daughter’s last words to her, I guess I owe her these as well. And she may be the only person who can help me decode them.

But the Delaneys are now represented by a “please check your number” message. Charles probably burned through Billy’s largesse in a hurry, and now maybe they’re having trouble with the bills. I search for an alternate listing but can’t find anything.

I know I won’t be able to give this up until I talk to her, so the following morning I catch a train to Boston.

Standing at the corner of Cross Street and Blakeley, I stare with amazement at a vacant lot where the Delaneys’ wilted house used to be. Did the city mercifully elect to put it down?

No. A quick look around reveals traces of debris from a fire. Chips from burned timbers still leach black soot onto the sidewalk in the cold Boston drizzle. A few remnants show where the brick chimney fell and fractured across the back of the lot. I find a mud-covered scrap of yellow safety tape from the fire department.

Eventually a neighbor, a balding man with an impressive belly not quite covered by his yellowed T-shirt, shuffles out to get his paper. He darts a suspicious look at me but doesn’t retreat when I walk over.

I ask, “When did it burn?”

He replies in thick Bostonian, “Back on the first day of February. Two o’clock in the goddamn morning.”

I run this through my mental calendar. That was the night I called Ruth Delaney.

“You know what caused it?”

“Yep.”

“What?”

“The wife.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well . . . I ain’t a fire-ologist, but they can tell stuff by the way the gasoline was spread around, or so they said.”

“The fire department said this?”

“Uh-huh. Charlie being stuck to that couch of his with a samurai sword through his gut probably helped them figure it out.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. I got the feeling the guy was hard to live with.”

“And Mrs. Delaney?”

The neighbor looks a little pained. “I guess she didn’t want to live with herself either.”

Ruth Delaney burning everything the same night I spoke with her is way too much of a coincidence for my heathen mind to process. So I turn to religion.

She heard something in her daughter’s words that I couldn’t. I pull up
the entire chapter of Genesis 19 on my phone, and this time I read to the end. It details what happens between Lot and his daughters after their mother transforms into a condiment:

While incest may have been the order of the day in Biblical times, in 2014, being impregnated by your father might start a girl on trying to find a way out.

Is that what Gina meant? Is that why Charles Delaney objected so fervently to an autopsy? Had he received a revelation of what they might find?

I recall Olya’s chronology of Gina’s final days. She went back to Boston to tell her parents about her new love. She came home depressed and spouting Bible verses about Sodom. Might her grand declaration have set something off in her father? With his frayed sanity, I can imagine Charles deciding that his daughter had surrendered herself to the Sodomites, and that somehow justified him in doing whatever he wanted with her—to her.

So he rapes his girl, maybe reverting to an old habit that Gina thought she’d escaped. Her personality is probably consistent with someone who had been sexually abused growing up. She returns to New York the broken woman Olya observed. Her despair deepens over the following months, enough time to miss two periods. She goes to a doctor and has it confirmed: she’s pregnant by her own father.

Like the daughters of Lot.

It stands to reason Ruth Delaney would have a better working knowledge of Old Testament stories than I do. Thus the vacant lot.

Incest would also explain the bloody bathtub the night before Gina died. I’d thought Olya was lying about that incident, but thinking back, she never actually said that Gina slit her wrists again. She just said she cut herself. I pull up Gina’s morgue photos from my private server and see it immediately: a ragged scratch moving horizontally between her hips about an inch or so below her belly button. Perhaps she was working up
to a freelance hysterectomy the patient was not expected to survive. But Olya finds her first. Gina asks if she can forgive her anything, says she “can’t bear it.” She looks for redemption through her lover. But Olya lashes out, rather than comforting her.

For a certain breed of computer scientist, symbols are of the utmost importance. So upon learning of her pregnancy, and that Olya cared more for their robot babies than she did for her, Gina might have felt the keystone supporting her life had cracked. That her great project, her Jack of Hearts, had brought her to ruin. I can see how she might want to expunge it.

And so Gina gets busy in her workshop, and the next night she jacks out.

While incest is far more common than people realize, it remains so taboo that even when it’s staring one straight in the face, most people won’t see it. Social workers have to be specially trained to tweak their antennae. The tragedy here is that if anyone could understand the toxic emotions that spew from a gothic upbringing, it should have been Billy. But he sought an explanation for Gina’s misery in his own fucked-up family, instead of hers. Once taken with the idea Blake was responsible, he was predisposed to believe later that he’d actually murdered her.

So did he conjure all his proof out of thin air? Sharpening digital artifacts until they looked like something sinister? Could those two blond apparitions have been summoned by Billy himself?

Whatever the source of his evidence, he was wrong. If there was one person responsible for Gina’s fate, I’m now sure it was her father. And Billy ended up dying for his mistake.

I get a call from John McClaren at nine
AM
the next morning. He’s full of his usual hail-fellow irony, but there’s an undercurrent of irritation. He wants a meeting. Now.

On the way over, I try to figure out the significance of this appointment. Nash must have informed him about my call. The two had known each other before I ever got involved, and I start to wonder about the basis of their relationship.

At McClaren’s office, I get an overhand shake and a slap on the back. He tells me to sit and spends a moment inspecting me. Finally he says, “So, bud . . . you must be hella busy with your
twatomata
.”

“Yeah. It’s getting hectic right now.”

“Sure, sure.” He tilts his head to the side. “That’s why I was surprised—I’d say amazed, even—to hear that you’ve been bothering the local con-stab-ulary with interview requests.”

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

A mirthless chuckle. “So are you planning to blow up the Overlook just for a little excitement?”

“No, I’ve seen enough fire for the year.” I smile back at him and reach for a tone of idle curiosity. “Something came up that muddied my understanding of recent events. Just wanted to mop up a couple details.”

“Jim, cleaning is my job. And I just dealt with a very big mess that you were involved in making. Everything’s fine now, but what I don’t need is you tracking in more shit.”