Kingdom Keepers III(37)
He backed out of the error log and found his way to the wider view that showed the tubes and wires. There were six codes pulsing. He wrote them down and circled them repeatedly so he wouldn’t forget them.
At the bottom of the screen Finn saw an identifying marker change. Beside CURRENTLY ONLINE: 1 flashed and then changed to 2.
“Philby…I’ve got a visitor.”
Philby didn’t hesitate this time. He hurried to Finn’s side and ran a finger along beneath the Cast Member Monitor line.
“Dang,” he said. “We need to find an exit.”
“An exit? Can’t I just close the session?”
“It doesn’t exactly work like that. Once you’re in this world, you’re in it.”
“Sounds familiar,” Finn quipped.
“The main problem being,” Philby said, taking a look at the door leading to the Utilidor, “as long as your avatar’s online they may be able to determine which station you’re using.”
“What! So get me offline!”
“I just told you: it doesn’t work like that,” Philby replied anxiously. “It’s a virtual world. And…maybe…” He sprinted around the stack and into the next aisle and began tugging on cords and trying to sort through the massive bundles of multicolored wires. Finn was alongside him now. Philby grabbed and pulled Finn’s finger so that it pointed to a particular blue wire. Philby then followed that same wire as it twisted and traveled along the stack to another set of boxes. He pinched a plastic clip, and pulled the wire from a box.
Together, they raced around to the other side. Finn couldn’t remember seeing Philby so flustered. He’d been mumbling to himself for the past thirty seconds.
“Tracers…user logs…spiders…not good, not good…”
They reached the terminal Finn had been using. His avatar was gone.
“You did it!” he said, pounding Philby on the back.
“No…no…no….” Philby muttered. “Not really. Not so fast. Not quickly enough.”
He sprinted to the next aisle and typed even faster than before. But he kept looking at the room’s main door as if expecting someone.
“What the heck is going on?” Finn said.
“You know that wire I disconnected?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve got to reconnect it.”
“What?”
“We can’t leave that kind of thing behind. It’ll give us away. Don’t you get it?”
“Apparently not,” Finn said.
“These are computers.”
Finn waved for him to give him more, like they were playing a game of charades.
“They’re self-monitoring. They keep logs of everything they do. Every computer does, these especially so because they’re like ten times more serious than anything you’ve seen. Our being on here—it’s all there. That’s not a worry as long as no one goes looking for it.”
“But now…my avatar…someone’s going to come looking.”
“It’s possible. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Do they know I was in this room?”
“By now? It’s possible,” Philby repeated.
“So what are we doing here?”
“Plug that wire back in,” Phiby said. “I’m wrapping up.”
“But—”
“The wire!” Philby yelled.
Finn took off, slipped and fell, got to his feet and found the wire. Philby had reached the door by the time Finn caught up.
“Go!” Finn said. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll meet you in the apartment. We left the remote at the Studios, remember? We’ll have to go back there to return.”
“But—”
“Don’t wait for me!” It was Finn’s turn to yell.
Philby nodded.
They unlocked and cracked open the door. Philby peered out. “It’s clear,” he said.
Finn pushed his DHI out the door.
He locked the door from the inside, and attempted to calm himself, to clear his mind. His fingers tingled. He stepped forward.
He crashed into the door. He was not yet pure DHI, not yet able to pass through the door. The more he thought about someone coming for him, the more difficult it was to make himself clear enough. He debated just leaving the door unlocked, but it was sure to give them away, certain to make them audit the computers and discover the intrusions. He had to do this.
He closed his eyes and focused on a song, humming to himself. Out of nowhere Amanda’s face appeared in his imagination. That combination: Amanda in his eyes and the song “With You” in his ears and…
He walked through the door and into the hall.
Looked both ways.