The Monitor Read online

  Theresa Banyon was the name of the woman in Austin whose husband had been electrocuted by his computer. Thea was a perfectly common and acceptable nickname for Theresa. Chatgod was not going to like this at all.

  28

  I flicked on the computer on the way to the kitchen the following morning, my usual routine. After filling the kettle and grabbing my vitamins, I was on my way back to the bathroom for a shower when I noticed the e-mail notice blinking in the corner of my screen. I clicked on the shortcut to Eudora, and waited for the mail to load into my Inbox. There were the requisite number of spam offers to enlarge my package and a couple of newsletters from academic and writing organizations with listservs to which I subscribed. What caught my eye was the ­urgently flagged message from Chatgod. I had sent him a message the night before, detailing what I’d discovered about Thea. I had transcribed most of the newspaper article, attached the screen capture of Milan and Tremor, and offered some sketchy comments about the perceived relationship between Thea and Milan, both my observations and those I’d culled from Vixen.

  I had thought he might get back to me at Babel, leaving me a message, but it seemed like he was going to take it a bit more seriously. The e-mail gonged when I opened it, a notification that he had tagged it so that he would be notified when I had received and read the message. I just hate that toggle. It means I have to act on what I’ve read immediately or risk the wrath and ire of whoever sent me the message.

  The e-mail read:

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: YOUR REPORT

  Randy,

  I read your report with alarm. If what you suggest is true, then we might have a hired killer working from the aegis of Babel. That cannot be allowed. I would like to speak with you. Please click on as soon as you are able to talk.

  Chatgod

  Well, confident now that he wasn’t going to bounce onto my screen without warning, I left the e-mail open and went off to have a much shorter shower than I’d been planning. To be on the safe side, I closed and locked the bathroom door.

  A few minutes later I was dressed, but my hair was still wet. I clicked on the e-mail link Chatgod had given.

  Just because I’d seen it happen before didn’t make it any easier to take. The entire screen shimmered and melted away, to be replaced with a view of Chatgod’s ascetic visage. He looked up and straight at me. I knew that he couldn’t really see me, since I didn’t have compatible hardware in my monitor to capture visuals, but his manner of looking straight into his Web camera gave me the eerie impression that he would notice if I even twitched.

  He pointed to my keyboard, toward the sound ­buttons. I quickly hit the non-mute button, and I could hear his voice. I felt like Nipper, the RCA mascot dog.

  “Randy, thank you for responding so quickly. I appreciate your report from last night. It seems I was correct in my assessment that you were indeed the person for the job. However, this situation cannot be allowed to continue.”

  I typed into the white box at the bottom of my screen: “Are you going to contact the police? Which police? Austin?”

  His gaze flicked downward just a hair when I hit enter. Maybe my type wasn’t quite at my eye level on his screen, but so close that I had to believe that he’d engineered it to give that eye-to-eye sensation in the first place.

  “I would rather not bring the police into it as yet. Perhaps we can arrange something along the same lines for this Tremor as you dealt out to the bookie.”

  Chimera: I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. For one thing, if this Tremor is what you think he is, then it seems like he’s pretty good at what he does. I’m not sure I want to tick off a guy who seems to be pretty successful at killing people.

  “I am not suggesting that you become a vigilante, Randy. I am just thinking that while it is not up to us to stop him, it’s not healthy to anyone to condone this tacitly or implicitly in Babel. If he is using our community in which to conduct his illicit business, then it should stop. We need to make Babel a much less likely place to do business.”

  Chimera: How?

  “For now, I think I will leave that to you and Alchemist to discuss. Let me know what plans you two come up with and I will exercise a power of veto. All in all, though, I would prefer to let you begin with an open mind. Many problems can be solved much more easily before a yardstick of behavior is laid down.”

  Fine for him to say. I grimaced, thinking of the horrors of monitoring every PM and every private room in Babel, night after night. Of course, that technically was what I was paid to do, but still it seemed highly invasive.

  It was as if he could read my mind and see my facial expressions.

  “Yes, it does seem like an invasion of privacy, doesn’t it? However, you have to remember that this is a new frontier for so many of these people. They are behaving as if the old rules apply, those rules that tell them to trust people as soon as those people know a certain number of things about them and have achieved a certain level of intimacy. When the timing for that intimacy is foreshortened, all the old rules go out the window. And after all,” he echoed my thoughts, “it is what you are being paid, as a monitor, to do.”

  I shrugged. Yes, it was, however 1984ish it might feel.

  Chimera: I see what you mean.

  Chatgod nodded, a short decisive movement that was almost a forward movement of his erect head, rather than a bob.

  “I’m glad we can agree on this. I am counting on you, Randy. Between the two of you, you and Alchemist should be able to contain this cancer. Meanwhile, I am going to cull the logs for all transmissions by Tremor and see if I can isolate a constant IP address for him. Or her.”

  Chatgod nodded once more, and the screen shimmered again, leaving me staring at an e-mail offer for receiving my doctorate of divinity through the mail.

  For a few minutes, to take my mind off the whole mess at Babel, I contemplated The Church of Randy. For one thing, there’d be a whole lot of singing and just the one rule: Be good to each other. I recalled a joke wherein God told this to Moses, who replied, “Listen Lord, I know these folks; you’re going to have to be more specific.”

  I was afraid to think how many of Moses’s specifics had been broken recently in Babel. Even the biggie—thou shalt not murder.

  29

  I went into Babel about an hour before my shift began. Alchemist was hovering about in the background. He appreciated my coming in during his shift, and I knew that if our brainstorming went on into my shift, he wouldn’t complain about having to stay on. He was amazingly loyal to Babel.

  Chatgod had sent him a copy of my report. He opened a secure private room for us to talk in while we both kept an eye on the general room.

  Chimera: I was going to talk to you about it tonight, but the pieces didn’t fall together till quite late last night.

  Alchemist: No hassle. You did exactly the right thing, Randy. Chatgod would have been livid if we’d waited before taking something like this to him.

  Chimera: So what are we supposed to do? I am not even sure what Chatgod really wants us to do. Are we supposed to catch this killer? Or just chase him away from our playground?

  Alchemist: This is like those ethical dilemmas in social studies class. Who do we throw out of the lifeboat? Who do we eat?

  Chimera: *laugh* Yeah, a little bit more serious when it comes out of the hypothetical, though, don’t you think?

  Alchemist: I think we’re almost better off trying to keep it as much in the hypothetical as we can. After all, we aren’t sure of any of this, right? We know that Thea’s name is Theresa Banyon and that someone by that name in Austin, Texas, is the widow of a man electrocuted by his computer. The whole business of Tremor demanding money from Milan for services rendered could be for anything. He might be a sexual surrogate, for cripes’ sake.

  Chimera: A what??!!?

  Alchemist: Well, we leap to the conclusion that he is a hired killer, but really,
check your screen capture. Does it say anywhere that he is asking to be paid for killing Thea’s husband?

  Chimera: Well, would you expect a hired killer to be broadcasting that on-line where anyone can take a screen capture? He would have to be aware that chat room conversations are invariably logged, right?

  Alchemist: You’re granting him a lot of brains. I’m not so sure he can be Alpha and Omega. There aren’t as many Hannibal Lecters out there as fiction would have you believe. Those who by nature are destroyers can’t also be creative thinkers.

  Chimera: I’m not so sure about that. I’ve met one pretty clever killer in my lifetime.

  Alchemist: Randy! There are hidden depths to you, girlfriend! One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me all about your personal relationships with killers! But right now, we have to rid ourselves of a pest.

  Chimera: How he can appear without logging in like everyone else? I’ve been meaning to ask you.

  Alchemist: Well, he could be on cable and just ­constantly logged in to Babel. Or, if he’s a hacker, he could have created himself a back-door program where he can maintain a constant open access to Babel even when he turns off his browser. On the other hand . . .

  Chimera: Yes?

  Alchemist: Maybe he is transmitting from his own ­server, which he would have to keep on at all times himself. If that’s the case, it should be pretty easy to locate and fix his IP address. Thing is, I think we’re going to have to operate on the assumption that he is either a really, really clever hacker type, in which case, I am betting he’s not an actual murderer, or he is a killer who has a certain amount of savvy around machines like ours.

  Chimera: That’s two different trails entirely.

  Alchemist: Yep. Of course, there are two of us.

  Chimera: Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to be tracking the clever non-murdering type?

  Alchemist: Do you think you have what it takes to track a hacker?

  Chimera: Well, when you put it that way . . .

  Alchemist: Kiddo, before we do anything that might bring you to his attention, we are going to do a little hacking of our own and get you routed through some circuitous patterns to Babel so that he can’t easily ping backward and find where you are. It wouldn’t fool a ­really good hacker, but if it’s someone using us to wreak havoc of his own, it should do the trick.

  Chimera: What if he is both hacker and murderer, though?

  Alchemist: *shaking head* I guarantee it. That doesn’t profile at all.

  Chimera: Well, I just hope you’re right. Otherwise, he’s going to be on top of one or both of us.

  Alchemist: Randy, you can contact me any time. I will be at home for the next three weeks almost exclusively, and I’m not planning on being far from my computer. I’ve got a program I want to test for bugs before I submit it to my bosses. So, day or night, I am yours.

  Chimera: Speaking of, it’s past your sign-off, hon. Thanks for sticking around. I’ll talk to you some more tomorrow about it.

  Alchemist: Yep. In the meantime, I should have a program set up by tomorrow that will list all private rooms as soon as they become active. That should help our monitoring considerably. You can just leave it up in a corner of your screen at all times.

  Chimera: That would be great. ‘Night.

  Alchemist: ‘Night, Randy. Take care.

  He logged out, leaving me to wander through the place, checking corners for murderous intentions. Even before the limerick contest started up, I felt pretty silly about the whole thing. Still, it was my job and whatever I’d suspected earlier was obviously enough to get Chatgod nervous, if you could detect nervousness in that glacier-like demeanor.

  I just hoped Alchemist’s instincts for what hackers were made of was accurate. We hadn’t discussed the whole Sanders conversation about assassinating folks, either. Babel was turning into a rather bloodthirsty place altogether.

  At the end of my shift I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or annoyed that there had been no sign of Thea, Milan, or Tremor. In fact, the only slight bit of excitement the entire evening had come from the private room that Venita and Theseus were in.

  I hated it when she managed to get to the library in the evening. Tonight, she was turning Theseus into her school principal and was being called into his office for some discipline.

  Venita: You’re having a hard time staying behind your desk, aren’t you, sir? It’s hard to sit still in that big leather chair while you’re getting so big and hard seeing me in my uniform. I shouldn’t have worn this black lacy bra under my white blouse, and my daddy would spank me if he could see that I’ve folded the waist band of my kilt over twice. You can see that my kilt is wa-ay high on my thigh.

  Theseus: Come here this minute. I think we need to measure the length of that kilt.

  Venita: If you were to put your hand out, palm up, and I were to walk toward you, the bottom of the skirt might skim your hand . . . and if I opened my legs just a little, your hand would move right through . . .

  Theseus: You’re not wearing your complete uniform, Venita, are you?

  Venita: Well, I was, sir, until I heard your voice over the intercom, and I just started to get so wet that it soaked right through my panties . . . so I ducked into the doorway to the Industrial Arts room and slipped them off. *wiggling on the palm of your hand* Can you feel how wet I am for you, sir?

  Theseus: *groaning*

  Damn, he wasn’t the only one, although my moaning wasn’t sexually inspired. What was it about this girl that she got such a kick out of scripting masturbation sessions for dirty old men? Where the hell were her parents while all this was happening?

  If, as Alchemist said, she was only thirteen, she was learning this behavior and this language from someone. Surely a thirteen-year-old didn’t just make this up on her own.

  Maybe her parents had inadvertently let her rent Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, so that she had some inkling of how schoolgirl uniforms turned on some Viagra-swilling geezers. Or, who knows, maybe she had just been taking notes during music videos. Of course, it might be wrong to blame the parents. Oh hell, might as well blame the parents. If we didn’t have lousy parents, where would Oprah be today?

  I stood behind my chair, one elbow held with the other hand, leaning my lower lip and chin against the side of my coffee cup, trying to decide how to deal with Venita. Could she get prosecuted for transmitting kiddie porn, if she herself was the underaged component of the porn? It occurred to me that it might be Babel that was shut down if we tried that angle. Proving that she was consistently acting on her own wick and always within the confines of a private room could be very difficult. I was going to have to do something about her, though, if we were going to bring in the big guns to help us out with Tremor. I didn’t need any police types getting so ­distracted by her hiked-up wet kilts that they refused to take us seriously.

  So how was I going to declaw the sex kitten? I tapped my teeth against the rim of the cup. There had to be a way. If I chased Theseus away, maybe she would follow. On the other hand, maybe she would just set her sights on another regular.

  I would try talking with her. Maybe she would respond to a reasoned request to clean up her act. I would approach her as Alvin and ask her to tone down her actions. The thing is, I would need to have a fallback plan in case she decided not just to stick around but also to get snarky about it. If she wouldn’t respond to reason, I was going to have to have the means to get rid of her, and permanently. Banning her would only work for as long as it took to register another nickname.

  So, how did one make a thirteen-year-old girl disappear? Ask her to clean her room? Take away her cellphone? Tell her there were calories in what she’d just eaten? Dangle tickets to a boy-band concert? Post a picture of her with acne?

  Hmmm, now maybe that was a possibility. What the heck was a thirteen-year-old with those many coursing hormones doing lap dancing with a forty-year-old? If she was so hot, why wasn’t she working her way through the basketball team i
n her junior high?

  I set my cup down on the edge of the kitchen table and pulled the computer chair out with more purpose than I’d felt all day. After the earlier search for Thea’s sign-on identity, whipping through the steps to find out who Venita really was turned out to be a snap. Maybe I was fertilizing my inner geek, after all.

  It seemed that Venita had logged on as a Julie Madison from Oxnard, California. Thank the lord she didn’t hail from New York. I knew it was a long shot, but I decided to Google the Oxnard public school system. I came up with five middle schools and logged in.

  There are all sorts of privacy laws hovering over Canadian schools and institutions. I couldn’t even post the marks attached to ID numbers of students on my office door at the college. However, it didn’t seem like there was quite that amount of security involved in California schools. I cruised through the on-line yearbooks of two middle schools, searching for Madisons. Nothing. On the third, I hit pay dirt. She was listed as a member of the glee club and the computer club. I’ll just bet she was.

  I clicked on the link to the computer club. There, just under the blinking banner (obviously no teacher had bothered to vet their entry), was a group photo of seven earnest-looking boys, two bored fellows who likely had to pick up the option or lose some sports benefit, and three girls. The first one had long blond braids, braces, and a vaguely equine look. She was sitting near the back of the group, and looked older than most of the boys. The name embroidered on the sleeve of her sweatshirt was Amy. The second one was Asian and was fighting her breathtaking porcelain beauty by spiking her hair and bleaching it blond. The third, I knew, had to be Julie Madison. She was sitting cross-legged on the table next to the ­computer. She was wearing the standard costume of the average skateboarder—clunky runners, oversized hooded sweatshirt, baggy pants. The trouble was, on Julie, none of the clothes were baggy.

  Julie, as well as being clinically obese, had a terrible case of adolescent acne. Her hair was probably just lank, but in the photo it looked greasy. No wonder she had turned to the Internet for her fantasy sex life; if she ­didn’t watch out, it was going to be the only sex life she was going to see.