Page 45 of Hellbent

The clacking of Joey’s Rubik’s Cube continued, grating on his nerves. Without looking up, she said, “No luck, huh?”

He ignored her, powering on the NeverLost GPS. When he searched the settings, he saw that everything had been deleted from this device as well. No saved locations, no last destinations, no evidence that the unit had ever been used.

Clack-clack-clack-clack—

“Can you please stop that?”

She halted, cube in her hands. The thing had exploded outward into different planks and beams, an architectural scribble.

He frowned at it. “What is that thing?”

“This?” She turned the monstrosity in her hands, showing off its various dimensions. “It’s a three-by-three-by-five. Cubers call it a shape-shifter.”

“What does it do?”

“Gives you a headache.”

“Like you.”

She flashed a fake grin. Let it fall from her face.

She returned her focus to the cube. Her hands moved in a flurry, whipping the various planes around. “You have to solve the shape first. Wait, wait—see?” She held it up. She’d wrangled it back into form. It looked like a miniature tower. “Then you solve the colors. This part’s easier. There are algorithms, sequences of steps.…”

To him it was just a blur of primary colors.

“You have to look for the wayward pieces, find the patterns that make them fall into place. Like so.”

She held it up, finished, gave it a Vanna White wave with her free hand.

“Impressive.”

“They say girls suck at geometry, but they forgot to tell me that.”

“You would’ve ignored them anyway.”

She tossed the cube into her rucksack, flicked her chin at the GPS unit. “How’s it going with that?”

“They wiped everything. Can I use your laptop? I need to get into this thing.”

She shrugged. “Sure.” She retrieved her laptop and a USB cable, watched him plug in the NeverLost. “Whatcha doing?”

“Even if they deleted everything, the GPS still has coordinates, destinations, and deleted routes stored internally somewhere.” He set to work. “First step of a forensic recovery is to image the data. It’s called mounting the file-storage system. Then you make a copy of the device’s internal memory in your computer but contain it so it can’t infect your own data. Then I’m gonna wade through it, determine the data structures, see where and how the data’s stored, what kind of encryption I’m dealing with. Like jailbreaking a phone. Understand?”

She tilted her head at the screen, taking in his progress, then looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. “What grampa taught you to hack? You learn that when COBOL and IBM S/370 were state-of-the-art?”

This joke seemingly amused her.

He said, “What?”

“Maybe you could use a dial-up modem. Or, like, we could get a bunch of hamsters on wheels to power the software.”

He stopped, fingers poised above the keys. “You have a better approach?”

“You’re using a memory-dumper program,” she said. “Why don’t you spin up a new local virtual machine like any idiot would, image and then boot the virtual device inside it, use the Security Analysts desktop code to do the heavy lifting?”

Blowing hair out of her eyes, she spun the laptop around to face her. Her fingers moved across the keyboard, a virtuoso pianist hammering through Rachmaninoff. Then she flicked the laptop back around to him.

The screen was doing lots of things and doing them speedily.