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Diffstat (limited to 'CH-4.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | CH-4.txt | 2 |
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
@@ -88,7 +88,7 @@ No one on the D.C. side of the conversation had anything to say. The conversation had devolved to username insults. Steven walked away from the camera and sat down on the leather couch that he and Hiroshi had gone in on back when there was money in the house to spare. He poked around on the coffee table, sifting through a few pizza boxes until he found the two they had ordered earlier. I pulled out the last slice of peperoni and ate it even though we wasn't hungry. He half-listened to Hiroshi and Elliot, but mainly he was thinking about Chase, which produced in him a feeling that thinking about Chase had never produced before: guilt. In the beginning it had seemed so simple, when they started searching there had been very little to go on. They used the same search tools everyone used, but they came up largely empty so Steven started plugging it into public government databases, but again there were no significant hits. Then one day he had been sitting at work, watching Chase from across the room for the millionth time, when he decided to try plugging the name into his own database. Nothing. Then he tried the DoD database, which technically he wasn't supposed to do. The DoD logged all its queries, even Steven's, but he decided no one would ever care. He barely looked at the log files for the systems he was supposed to maintain and he assumed that Walter Peabody probably didn't look very closely at his query logs either. After all the main point of a log was to have a record of what happened to the database in case something went wrong. It was pretty unlikely that anything was going to go wrong with a single search, so pretty unlikely that Walter would ever even notice that Steven had searched. He would see Steven logged in, but that wasn't unusual since the network Steven was in charge of was set up to connect to Walter's when it needed to. So Steven had just plugged in the name. -The crust of a Papa Johns pizza was spongy, terrible thing that made Steven regret ever taking a bite of pizza in the first place. He tossed it back into the box. The first bite of pizza tastes very different from the last his father used to say. +The crust of the pizza was a spongy, terrible thing that made Steven regret ever taking a bite of pizza in the first place. He tossed it back into the box. The first bite of pizza tastes very different from the last his father used to say. He kicked at the pile of boxes suddenly, sending them flying up from the coffee table and onto the living room floor. What sort of people had obscene number of pizza boxes lying around their living room anyway? The flying pizza boxes drew John off the doorjam where he had been leaning ever since Hiroshi and Elliot connected almost a hour ago now. John sat down next to Steven, but didn't say anything. John was older than Steven, older than any of them, probably close to fifty Steven guessed, and John had been the Marines for twenty years which, apparently, gave one a great appreciation for silence. John didn't look like a nerd, and when they first met in person at a shortwave conference several years ago Steven hadn't liked him. John was old. He was divorced. He had kids. He talked to people he didn't know, said hello when he ordered coffee, called waitresses by their names. He did not fit any of the stereotypes Steven believed were traits of people he related to. And yet, despite all that John was definitely a nerd. He had that intangible thing that drew him to other nerds and Steven could sense the same thing in John that he had found years earlier in Hiroshi. He might not share Steven's social awkwardness or Hiroshi's blindingly single-minded focus, but John had the obsession and curiosity that Steven considered prerequisites for serious friendship and so, while it took longer, they had eventually become friends outside of Enigma as well as within it. |