This is how a guy ends up in a windowless room full of computers, wearing nothing but his jockeys. He kicks everyone out. He locks the doors. He looks for code fingerprinting. He spends a long time—the lighting change he programmed tells him it’s just about twenty-eight hours—finding nothing. He takes a shower to clear his head. In the middle of it, with soap in his hair, he realizes he could check the core dump for clear text. Rinsing his hair doesn’t even occur, and drying off will take too long, so he puts his underwear on while he’s walking back to the cage. It sticks to him like a wet T-shirt sticks to tits. He sits down and searches everything.

There isn’t much to see until there’s a squeak of the door opening behind him, and he spins his chair to see who it is.

---

“How did you end up…?” Deepak held out his hands, incredulous over how I looked.

The full-speed-ahead train of my thoughts runs through how I ended up in a windowless room full of shattered computers, sitting in front of my laptop, wearing nothing but my jockeys.

“Your dick hard?” I spun back to my screen.

“Yeah. I’m going to fuck you in the ass if you don’t let everyone back in here.”

“No one’s getting in until we know who did this, or they’re going to do it again.”

“What the fuck, Taylor?” He pushed a smashed computer with his toe.

I’d trashed four in a deliberate, organized way and couldn’t find a chip out of place. Then I lost my shit and smashed monitors against whatever edge I could find. Then I found it. A dongled chip with a quarter inch antenna right in the board.

“The poison pill was in the monitors. Five of them.” I pushed the one nearest my foot toward him. A 27-inch screen with a lightning fast GPU. We didn’t have the facilities to make our own monitors, so we bought them like normal people.

Deepak saw it right away and picked up the green board. “Motherfucker.”

“Said that right.”

“What was it talking to?”

“It had to be transmitted to something coming in and out of the cage. I found a power strip in reception with a receiver in it. Another fucking mail order. Never again.”

Deepak spread the monitor guts on the table next to me and examined them closely. “We’re a young office. We had to buy shit to set up. We had to buy a coffeemaker too. We can’t open up everything and check for receivers.”

“We do now.”

“Did they come from the same place? The monitors and the power strip?”

“No. It’s a fucking mess. I can’t make a connection. Monitors through TechWorld. The power strip was Amazon. The coffee maker was some artisanal company in Seattle.”

“You checked the coffee maker?” He stood up from his inspection of the monitor.

“It was clean. Look at this. I’m in the poison pill now.” I pointed at a little chip in the GPU I’d hooked up to my laptop, then at the screen.

“Anything?”

“The complete Sherlock Holmes.”

“Really?”

“Really. He’s fucking taunting me with it.”

Deepak looked over my shoulder. My hacker had pasted the entire library of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the comments, and I had to go through every word.

“Have you considered it could be one of our guys?”

“No.”

That was out of the question. I paid them well and treated them like princes. They each had a stake in making this work, and they each cared about what we were doing. Whatever it was—worm, virus, hack from God—it had locked me out. I could see the size of the box my life was in, but I couldn’t open it. I hadn’t connected offsite backups because we were off the grid.

It wasn’t anyone on the team. I trusted them, and not a line of code got pushed to the source without me looking at it.

It was me. I’d been complacent. I’d let all their work get destroyed. I’d failed them. They relied on me to lead them, and I’d let them down.

“You all right?” Deepak asked.

Fuck it. Guilt was taking up time and energy. I was running low on both.

By accident, I laid too much weight on the page down key and forwarded to the middle of a completely different section. I was about to go back when I saw slashes. I hadn’t seen slashes anywhere else, then I noticed the digit at the beginning.

“Look at this.” I pulled the paragraph onto the big screen in front of the room.

Deepak stood before it with his arms crossed. He was best when he had a problem to solve or a journalist to charm.

“Isolate the odd ones,” he said.

I’d already done it.

“He needed the q,” I said. “So he misspelled problem.”

“What if the slashes aren’t for the letters?”

“Other options? Numbers?”

“Three Ls?”

“Or ones. Leet style.”

We stood in front of the green letters on the black background, arms crossed.

He tilted his head a little.

I paced away and looked quickly.

He looked at it from the side.

I squinted.

As if we had the same neurons, Deepak and I always thought with one mind. This time was no different.

“Eleven digits. Geohash coordinates,” I said. Geohash was a newer version of latitude and longitude that split the world into a grid and gave each box a code.

“God, please let it be Tahiti. I want to go to Tahiti.”

We didn’t have internet in the cage, but I had a geohash database inside it. I called it up, and the cached satellite picture came on the big screen. All grey. The coordinates were inside a water mass.

“Lake Superior,” I said. “Change the three in the second string.”

“Done.” It came on the screen in a split second, and it was land.

“No white sand beaches.” I folded my arms over my bare chest, looking at the pin. The coordinates fell on a big building in a little town in the middle of nowhere. “Where are we?”

Instead of answering, Deepak contracted the map until the surrounding area was in the frame.

Nothing.

Freeway.

Train tracks.

Farms.

An interstate.

A nameless tributary.

Nowheresville in The Great State of Nowhere, USA.

“Do you think…?” Deepak said.

“Yeah. I think he left it so I’d come looking for him.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go looking for him.”

“Put on some pants first.”

I was already out the door.