DoubleThink - An SOS Novella

SEPT. 15, 11:34 A.M.

UMPQUA COMMUNITY COLLEGE — ROSEBURG, OR

PENNY POLONSKY TRIED, AND FAILED, to stifle a yawn while Professor Saroyan droned on at the front of the classroom. She was tired, essentially running on root beer Bawls, but she was more bored than anything else. She could pass this Orientation to Programming class, the first step to earning an Associate of Applied Science degree she didn't particularly want, in her sleep—and she probably would, the way things were going.

Penny yawned again. She'd been up late again testing the online security of her newest client, Lectric Motors. It had only taken a month of sleepless nights to get into their systems, but other than some mundane corporate emails and outdated schematics, she hadn't found anything juicy—and her contract was almost up.

From her employer's perspective, that was a good thing; they didn't want hackers like her to be able to break into their servers and steal information on their new products. That's why they had hired her, or more accurately her alter ego Emmie Steed, to do her best to do the worst. Regardless of how far she made it, she would collect a check, but there would be more zeroes at the end of it, not to mention bragging rights, if she managed to break into a sensitive area.

Of course, she cared more about her reputation. Not being able to p0wn the company—any company—made her feel like a failure.

Penny was feeling like a failure a lot lately: as a daughter, a sister, a student, a girlfriend. She hadn't been able to connect with anyone IRL the way she could online. Computers were so much easier than people! The only thing that she was good at was hacking, and she still wasn't the best. She wasn't even the best one living in her house.

And here she was at college, just going through the motions. Too bad she couldn't get credit for all her former exploits in Dramatis Personai.

The look on Saroyan's face if he saw what she could really do with a computer would be priceless, but it would also confirm his suspicions of her. The next thing she knew, she'd be hearing heavy knocks on her bedroom door, and then she'd be dragged away from her house in a black car. She'd avoided that fate so far, and she was determined to keep it that way.

Penny opened one of her unencrypted email accounts and idly scrolled through the messages. She hadn't checked this one in a while, and spam had taken over most of the inbox like weeds choking an untended garden. However, one email made her sit up, now wide awake: a news alert she had set to crawl the web for specific terms. There was a new match for "Gyaraga 1981," an online puzzle that appeared each September to challenge obsessive fans of alternate-reality games.

Penny had almost forgotten all about it, but the game was back again, like clockwork. Her friend Evan had always been fascinated with ARGs, like the ones movie studios made to promote new movies and video games, and he had participated in Gyaraga 1981 every year, without fail. But since he had had died last October, Penny was planning to do it in his memory. She was going to win this one for him.

No one knew what happened when you reached the end. Some people thought the NSA or another "intelligence" agency was using it as a recruitment tool for creative thinkers and hackers. Participants usually pooled their knowledge in Reddit forums to figure out the answers to more difficult and esoteric puzzles, so only the people who reached the goal fastest—most likely on their own—were contacted by the game organizers, whoever they were.

Penny opened an encrypted browser and clicked the link to the IP address provided in her search results: 24.132.231.42, noting the elegant symmetry. Evan would have appreciated that. A webpage loaded with painstaking slowness, ultimately revealing blocky red numbers and letters that read: 23:26:10.