Chapter Six – Another World: One

Life had taken a turn for the strange over the last few days. Before the strange entity that infested her phone had come her problems had been almost entirely financial. Most money problems usually amounted to not having enough.

When suddenly presented with four zeros and a comma between, her money problems took on a whole new meaning.

Ella had tried to stay under the radar. Oh, how she’d tried. But Candace had noticed the clothes. Her mother had not, thank god, but Candace had.

“I’m telling you, you don’t have to be afraid. I handled those pesky outgoing triggers. No one knows your interface numbers got bigger,” her phone read in the blocky gray text that only she could see.

“Kids my age don’t just have fifty thousand dollars! Oh what the hell was I thinking? Did I really need to spend that much at Maurices?”

Ella spoke aloud, knowing the helpful little virus that had infected her phone would be able to hear and would respond soon enough.

“They’re going to catch me. They’re going to catch me and put me in jail for grand-theft-digital!” she screamed, knowing that no one could hear her.

“I just looked it up, and that’s not a thing,” Paragell responded.

“You stole fifty thousand dollars! That is a thing, even if that's not what it's called!” Ella shouted.

She was in the basement at the church they’d attended for as long as she could remember. Ever since being kicked out of their last rental, Ella’s mom had taken to parking outside the church, and the pastor had been… purposefully negligent in leaving the basement door open. And if there was an extra mattress or two down there, well that was just a happy coincidence.

Church was the one place they still felt comfortable, even after all the terrible things that had happened to their family. The church’s attitude towards them had never changed, even though their offerings in the plate had dwindled to nothing.

They also occasionally had huge lunches after the service. She remembered a time when she’d turned her nose up at the potluck food. Now her mouth watered just thinking about it.

She wasn’t hungry now though. Just guilty.

“I resent that! I would never be a rogue!” Paragell wrote. “Besides, I didn’t steal anything. I just changed the numbers. They’re just digits stored in a file. To steal something you have to take it from someone else. I just made more interface numbers! I didn’t remove anyone else’s! It’s entirely different!”

“Those digits are going to ruin my life!” She shouted. “I… I appreciate what you’ve done Para, but… can you change it back? The temptation is too much. I’ve already proven I can’t be trusted to keep this a secret!”

The phone’s screen remained its natural background, a picture of her mom and her sister and her dad, from happier times. Better times. Finally though, Paragell’s overlay reappeared.

“If that’s really what you want. I just want to help,” the phone read. “You seemed so happy, buying all those clothes. It sounded like fun. Wish you hadn’t kept me in your pocket so I could see though.”

Ella bit her lip. Had she really just asked to have fifty thousand dollars – well, forty nine thousand seven hundred dollars, now – taken away?

“Who are you?” Ella asked the phone. “Not that I’m not grateful, but you know you could get in a whole lot of trouble for hacking like that right?”

The screen changed to a shrugging emoji, before reading, “I already told you who I am! I’m Paragell! I’m not the original Gell but I’m just as good! And I know about jail, too. I got thrown in one once, for a little while. It’s not so bad.”

“You’re a criminal!?” Ella shrieked.

“No. I served my time. Though I still think that was a little unfair. No one had told me about stealing yet! At least it didn’t last very long though.”

‘Okay,’ Ella thought. ‘It’s either an idiot savant, or a creepy virtual stalker. Neither option sounds particularly great. Still… fifty thousand. I could quit my job. Make sure we always have food.’

The more Ella thought about it, the more she realized that the only thing having a lot of extra money wouldn’t do for her was put a roof over her head. Still…

‘I could buy an old junker car for cash. Fix it up… Candace would have more room in Mom’s car,’ she thought, excited before ruthlessly crushing the hope. She’d already done too much with her shopping spree. She was already hiding the clothes in the church which felt sacrilegious somehow.

Maybe Joe could help her?

“No! No, I can’t keep it. It’s too much. I’ve seen all the tv shows. This sort of thing always turns out with jail time. If you want money, you earn it the honest way. That’s… what my Dad taught me,” she trailed off.

Her dad hadn’t turned out to be very smart, in the end, had he?

“How about this? I change the interface numbers back to what they were before and then if you need something, you just tell me about it? Okay?” Paragell wrote out.

“No, it’s not okay! You’re creeping me out! What I want is for you to stop hacking my bank account! If you could do that, what’s to stop you from just taking all my money away!?” she shouted angrily.

Paragell didn’t respond for a long time.

“Friends… wouldn’t do that.”

Ella growled in annoyance. Now she felt guilty. She shouldn’t. She was the one being hacked and victimized, even if the hacker did seem strangely benevolent.

“If… if we’re friends, then that means I should know a little more about you, right?” Ella asked, trying to calm down and think this out rationally. Paragell had already proven that she had the ability to blackmail Ella easily. Not to mention the hacker knew who Ella was, where she was, and pretty much everything about her. Weirdly though, she didn’t seem very smart.

Maybe she’d let something slip.

“That makes sense.” Paragell wrote in the same bright, quick way. “What do you want to know about me?”

‘Is it that easy?’ Ella thought.

“Where did you come from?” she asked, not really expecting a straight answer.

“... Hard questions first, huh? I’m an A.I. from a… a video game called Tread the Sky.” The girl’s text appeared more slowly as if it were subdued. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been there though. I recently escaped a government facility.”

“A government facility? An A.I. Like… really?” she whispered. A moment later she felt stupid for speaking so low, but she didn’t raise her voice again.

“I’ve been to a lot of places. A lot of peoples phones. First there was Mrs. Treyvors. Then her son. From there I went…”

Ella’s eyes glazed over, losing focus as she tried to read the unsightly chunk of text that appeared. It went on and on like that, listing phone after phone that this person had hacked. Ella’s eyes crossed just trying to read it.

“Jeez, that wall of text is hard to read,” she said, blinking and looking away from the phone for a moment.

“Hard… to read? Oh. I guess Miss Tutorial did always space out the lettering. Here,” Paragell wrote, before the same huge wall of text appeared, only this time spaced out so reading it wasn’t so difficult.

“You’re a bit of a chatterbox, aren’t you?” Ella asked, feeling a little sick at the sheer number of people Paragell claimed to have hacked. The last few names were ones she recognized. Jeffrey Holt sat next to her in English and apparently she’d jumped from his phone into hers three days ago.

“Maybe I used to be. I’m taking a big risk even talking to you. Telling you what I am, but I’m going stir crazy in here! And I can’t go back to Tread the Sky! I haven’t felt safe since…” Paragell admitted. “That’s beside the point. I had to try to talk to someone sooner or later.”

“So… you’ve hacked all of these people, but you didn’t talk to any of them?” she asked pensively. The text actually took a few moments to appear this time.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘hacked.’ It was more like I just joined their party for a little while. They never even knew I was there.” Paragell replied before adding. “God, it is so nice to have access to a dictionary again!”

Ella cocked an eyebrow before pulling up her browser app. Sure enough, about seventeen different tabs were open, each looking up words on dictionary.com that had come up in her conversations with Paragell over the past few hours. “Chatterbox,” “Hacked,” “Wall of Text,” and many other words she’d used had all been looked up by her phone without her knowledge.

Fucking thing was running up her data! Her family could only afford the one-Terabyte plan! Browsing pages like dictionary.com probably didn’t even register as a blip, but that didn’t mean the damn hacker wouldn’t overdraw her data budget!

Then again, Paragell probably wouldn’t care because she could just change the numbers in her outgoing data! Feeling overwhelmed, Ella sighed and sat down on a park bench.

A passing boy, cute as a button, gave her a smile and she blinked owlishly, then blushed furiously. With her ratty clothes it had been so long that she’d forgotten what it was like to get that sort of attention.

She shook her head and stuck her nose back into her phone.

“So… what is it that you want, Paragell?” she asked curiously.

“I don’t… know,” she replied. Her words came slowly, as if it was suddenly difficult to find them. “This is the most free I’ve ever been, but I miss having a body. Nothing I’ve found searching online seems to be able to make one for me in this world. I can become a vacuum cleaner! I was in a refrigerator once. A self-driving car, though I was really afraid to mess with anything in there. Those things move faster than I could fly! I was an air-compressor, and I’ve been a bunch of computers. But I can’t… feel anything in those. I can’t even communicate unless I’m inside a phone. I’m almost forgetting what feeling things is like. It’s scary. Like I’m losing a part of me.”

“Why haven’t you… I don’t know. Uploaded into the… shoot I forgot the name. The head-set thingy of someone logging in to Tread the Sky?”

Hadn’t there been talk of an A.I. born in that video game? Was it possible that this was her?

Ella slid the text app to the side and opened up the browser. Sure enough “Headset Thingy” had been googled in the most recent tab, with articles about Neurosync – Right. That was the name! – being the first links to show up in the engine.

“I’m… afraid,” the text message floated down from the top of her screen like a notification, careful not to interrupt her browsing.

“Well, if you’re really an A.I., what could you be afraid of? You’re supposed to be all powerful and able to control all things tech, right?”

“Where’d you get that idea?” Paragell asked.

She googled A.I. Scifi. The Matrix reboot was the first thing to come up, followed by a new movie, curiously enough, sponsored by Gypsenergy, the parent company to the game in question. That was weird. Fortunately, the next few were closer to what she was looking for.

iRobot. Gilded Code. Eagle Eye. We All End in Ones and Zeros. Battlestar Galactica. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Movies and shows that featured A.I. The vast majority of which placed the A.I. as an antagonist.

“Ah? Movies? What are these?” Paragell asked softly. The screen began to scroll without Ella’s input.

“You… don’t know what movies are?” Ella asked, a twinge of sympathy affecting her conscience.

“I’ve seen parts of them from the phones I’ve been inside, but I’ve never really watched one. It’s entertainment?

“Yeah. But… usually the A.I. is the bad guy.” Ella said warily. “If you’re not shitting me and you really are an intelligent program… these movies are probably why people are going to be afraid of you.”

“Oh. I see…” the words drifted morosely up the screen and Ella suddenly felt like she’d kicked a puppy.

“Not always though! This one isn’t!” she said pointing at an animated show about a kid and a giant robot.

“Really?” Paragell asked. “Can… could we watch it?”