Brenda didn’t like running late on important things, like classes or her mandatory exercise hours. However, she wasn’t going to abandon Kitty to her own devices, not when the girl was clearly terrified for her friend on Earth.
At least Linnea at the gym was understanding. She’d lost her husband a few years ago in the cyber-attack on Slayton Field, and knew the terror of incomplete information in a bad situation. However, Brenda’s senior teacher was not as likely to be flexible — but then, they were trying to teach basic literacy skills to a bunch of little kids, which meant they needed consistency.
I just wish Sprue would get his butt over here. I know he’s got that new project he’s keeping so mum about, but surely it doesn’t take that long to touch base with the principal researcher, or whoever’s his main contact.
Brenda reached for her phone, then checked herself. The last thing Sprue needed was for his phone to chime incoming text right while he was talking with his boss. Sure, SMS was an asynchronous means of communication, but the urge to grab one’s phone and check could be difficult to resist.
Instead, she looked at Kitty’s messenger app yet again, as if this time would suddenly give her the ability to sort some sense from the garbled mess of alphanumeric characters. It really looked as if the packets had become corrupted as they passed through one or another server on the way between Earth and the Moon.
She’d seen some text spam that looked like that — supposedly there were ways to hijack some phones’ OS and turn them into zombie machines for DDOS attacks. She wished Lou Corlin could be here, since he worked for IT. However, this was his air shift, and she was not going to take Kitty down to the station just to talk to Lou.
And then the module airlock cycled, and in walked Spruance Del Curtin. “Sorry I’m late, but I wanted to talk to Dr. Doorne. You do realize she’s a specialist in signals processing. I was hoping she might have some suggestions.”
“So did she?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Brenda realized just how snarky she sounded.
“A few possibilities, but they may require seeing if the message is still on the server, or if it was erased there as soon as it was downloaded to the phone.”
At that moment Kitty’s phone chimed. There was another message from Amy — or at least her telephone number. However, it didn’t look anything like the last several messages, which had been increasingly fretful. Instead, it was relentlessly upbeat, and had a feeling of having been dictated to her: We have been moved to a new guardian. Do not worry about me. I am healthy and safe, and am keeping up with my schoolwork. Be careful, and keep studying.
When Brenda was younger, before she’d had kids, she’d gone through a period of reading a lot of true-crime. There’d been several cases in which people were kidnapped and forced by their kidnappers to make phone calls or send texts claiming that they were going somewhere for a while, in order to delay suspicion.
She showed the text to Sprue. “What do you think?”
“How old is she supposed to be? This doesn’t look like something a middle-school kid would write.”
He looked straight at Kitty. “I think we’d better take this to your Aunt Betty. If something fishy is going on, she’s a lot better equipped to handle it.”