Having been given the telecom-account information by Wyatt Rider, Kenny quickly returned to the system in Montana. The previous owners of the ranch, Roy and Viola Kornbluth, had brought the place partway into the twenty-first century, rewiring to accommodate smart-house technology that monitored all the mechanical systems and provided a high level of security for the property—house, manager’s bungalow, stables—that exceeded what was usually to be found in such rural territory. Kenny possessed the codes and passwords, and soon he was searching through archived data on the house-management computer, with special attention to the audio-video system, which Wyatt said had self-activated in the guest bedroom that morning and seemed to have been commandeered by some hacker who had used it to deliver a threat.
Kenny could not have found spoor and tracked it to a culprit in just five minutes; however, that was all the time required for the bad guy to come down on Kenny. His screen abruptly went blank, and from the speakers issued a voice. “Pestilence and vermin. You are blight, rot, a terminal cancer.”
Frowning at Kenny’s screen, Leigh Ann said, “How’d you do that?”
“Wasn’t me. Someone locked me down. My keyboard’s frozen.”
“That sounded like you.”
He was about to disagree when further insults hissed from the speakers. “You despoil this once splendorous world. You are piss and poison.”
This time, Kenny recognized his own voice. He said, “What’s going on here, who the hell are you?”
The Other said, “Perhaps I am the savior of the world.”
“Generally speaking,” Leigh Ann said, “real saviors of the world are awesomely confident of their status as saviors. They don’t try to cover their ass with ‘perhaps.’”
The Other was silent.
Either to express her contempt or to test whether they were being watched through the computer cameras, Leigh Ann flourished a stiff middle finger.
The mimic now spoke in her voice. “You are filth and must be flushed away.”
Although he knew that it was foolish to argue with this Hacker of a Thousand Voices, Kenny said, “Does your mother know you go online to make threats while you masturbate?”
“Don’t descend to his level,” Leigh Ann advised.
“His? Maybe he’s a her.”
“No. He’s a he. The savior complex identifies him. If this were a megalomaniacal woman, she’d be on a Gaia trip or a self-proclaimed goddess, maybe call herself the Wiccan queen.”
The Other said, “The world is a beautiful wedding cake, acrawl with cockroaches like you. You should die off, self-exterminate.”
“See?” Leigh said. “Cockroaches and wedding cake. That’s the pathetic metaphor you’d expect from an unbalanced, narcissistic man. An unbalanced female narcissist would be more creative.”
“If it’s right that you should kill yourselves, all of your greedy kind,” said the Other, “then kill yourselves—or be killed.”
Both computers made the same sound of distress—boop—and the screens went dark.
When Kenny pressed the power button, there was no response.
A series of hanging industrial-style fixtures with inverted-bowl shades provided light. The LED bulbs crackled and went dark.
As the large room fell into shadows that the array of small high-set windows could not disperse, a ringtone startled him.
Before he could pick up the phone, the connection was made without his assent. The man’s voice was deep, rough, and profoundly disturbing, like that of something a corrupt priest might summon into a chalked pentagram during a Black Mass: “The big dark sky. The terrible sky. I am mentally in a dark place. I’m lost. I’m a danger to myself and others.” The line went dead.
Rolling her chair back from the second computer and rising to her feet, Leigh Ann said, “Maybe I better get dressed.”
As the girl padded away barefoot to retrieve her clothes, Kenny picked up the phone and summoned a list of recent calls. There was no record of the one that he had just received.
He got to his feet and stood, considering the phone in his hand, until a high-pitched sound in the kitchen drew his attention.
Although immense, this was a studio apartment, every “room” open to every other, except for the bath. He passed the disheveled bed, where Leigh Ann was dressing, and proceeded into that adjacent space occupied by the kitchen and a dining area.
The keening escalated into a shriek. The noise came from the microwave oven. Through the view window, Kenny watched the glass carousel turning faster than ever before, and then faster still.