Release 1.19

Anabella sat with her back to the door and a phone to her ear. "No, I don't believe it either," she was telling someone. "The little twit can barely tie his own shoes."

I cleared my throat loudly. I was relatively sure she was talking about Eugene, but I didn't want to give her a chance to change my mind. She turned her head and saw Eugene and me standing by the door. "Got to go; he's here," she whispered, and hung up the phone. "So tell me, boy wonder, how did you get the system back up?"

Eugene sidetepped the question. "Anabella, I need the keys to the storage room," he said. "There's some equipment in the communications closet that I'd like to replace, just in case."

"Relax, half-pint," Anabella laughed. "Everything's working perfectly right now." She glanced over at the monitoring console, and shook her head. "Actually, it's working better than that. We're getting higher throughput numbers than I've ever seen. Relax a little. You've earned it."

Eugene shuffled his feet a little. "No, thank you. I'd like to do this while it's fresh in my mind. I really need those keys." I had no idea why this was so important to Eugene, but he was beginning to bounce slightly up and down, as if he had to pee.

Anabella shrugged. "Whatever you say, geek-boy." She pulled a ring of keys from her belt and tossed them to Eugene, who deftly snatched them out of the air. Eugene then turned, without a word, and marched out of the door of the data center.

Anabella and I exchanged quick glances of befuddlement. Eugene had a rare chance to sit on his butt and do nothing but bask in his new-found glory, and instead he wanted to work. It was beyond comprehension. I was becoming more and more convinced that he actually had hit his head in the comm closet, and wasn't telling me.

For the next several minutes we monitored the network, and Anabella was right: things were working better than either of us would have expected. There were areas of the network that almost always showed signs of congestion, and even those were running completely error-free. As hard as it may have been to our egos, Anabella and I were forced to admit to ourselves that maybe a kid who couldn't even shave yet might really know what he was doing.

"No," Anabella said finally, "It's just not possible. That kid might be able to think circles around you, but there's no way he's that much smarter than I am. You don't think he could have caused this outage, do you?"

I remembered my earlier suspicion that the blockages had been an inside job. Was Eugene really capable of that kind of sabotage? For what, a little recognition? I had my doubts. Compliments usually had no effect on Eugene, other than to make him extremely uncomfortable. It just didn't make sense to me that he would have staged this.

However, he had been acting a bit strangely since I found him in the comm closet. Maybe it was the result of a sudden nervous breakdown or something. It wouldn't be the first time that had happened to an employee of AUSS¹.

Our speculation was cut short at Eugene's return. He was carrying a laptop computer, into which he'd plugged some sort of contraption he'd put together from cables, adapters, and other spare parts he'd salvaged from the storage room. A network cable ran from the laptop out the door and down the hallway.

Eugene looked slightly distressed. "What happened to the spare cellular modems we used to keep in the storage room? One of those would have made this much easier."

"Would have made what much easier?" Anabella asked.

"I was just about to show you," Eugene said, and raised a handful of cables above his head. "Don't worry, honey, this won't hurt," he said, and lunged at Anabella.