The Garden of Whimsy {A Growing Short Story Collection}

The Hacker in the Glass Slippers

Alarms blare as Prince Richard strides into the security room. He tries to rub away the soreness from where his wrists had been bound, but the feeling won't go away. "What's your report, Captain." His voice echoes through the white, cavernous room with the authority of his title.

    Royal guards in their tidy red uniforms jump to attention. The room reeks of panic.

    The crown prince joins the captain of the guard in front of video monitors that replay different angles of the unknown girl's flight from the palace. There's a smirk in her warm brown eyes as she looks back over her shoulder. She teases him. Catch me if you can.

    "Your Highness," the captain says. His voice trembles. "We are having trouble finding her registration number. We've searched the invitations scanned for tonight's ball and one has been tampered with. It was just a shell. It didn't have a personal ID attached to it."

    Richard folds his arms across his broad chest. "So we don't have a name. What about a ship? She can't have entered Sigyn palace airspace on an unregistered craft."

    "The number was brand new, issued in the past week..." his voice fades.

    "No name to that either?"

    "No name." The captain continues his summary. "She left on an old planet jumper so she can't go far. Those things aren't meant for deep space."

    "Assuming it hasn't been modified," Richard says.

    "You really think her capable of that?"

    "I wouldn't put anything past her." Richard smiles despite his wounded pride. "No, she hacked into our information archives. Alone. I need to know what she was looking for."

    A woman with a tablet rushes up to them. "Your Highness, the only files accessed in the last hour were the files on our proprietary terraforming technology."

    Prince Richard's head snaps to look out the gaping window that faces north. Sigyn-9's atmospheric stabilizers glow on the horizon. A green light pulses against the night sky like the planet's heartbeat.

Genius.

The terraforming technology developed by the Sigyn Federation was the crown jewel of what would soon be Prince Richard's kingdom. That tech was worth more than any gem in their treasury. It was what made the Sigyn Star System so powerful — that they didn't have to rely on terrodomes to stay alive. An artificial magnetosphere meant they could do much more than just get by. Smart girl. The wealth of a kingdom at her fingertips and she chose knowledge. Dangerous girl.

"The files were downloaded to a storage device. They haven't been released onto an interplanetary computer network so that's a relief," the woman says.

The captain shakes his head in disbelief. "Impossible. She can't have downloaded them. Those files are too large."

"She put them in her shoe," Richard says.

The two look at him, confused.

"She had on glass shoes. The heel of one fit into an access port and she downloaded the files onto her shoe. At first, I thought it might have been a key to get past the firewall of our archives, but it was her storage device."

"Glass shoes?" the captain asks.
    "The right glass can store three thousand times more data than a computer chip—" Richard says.

"Sir." The female guard points to the looped video of a camera in the palace gardens. "She dropped something."

The prince's heart stutters in his chest. "Replay that."

The mystery woman's step stutters and she stops. She looks back at something that glints in the light of Sigyn's moon, Loki.

"Whatever it is, find it," the captain commands to a bunch of lower level guards.

* * *

A lab tech takes a swab and runs it over the fingerprint-locked laser multitool and swirls the swab in a vial of clear solvent. She injects the solution into the mass spectrometer. The multitool is a piece of junk compared to what's available these days, but, it had special meaning to the mystery woman. In the time he'd spent bound and helpless on the floor of the archives while she hacked into the servers, he'd gained a few pieces of information on her.

"Since there's no salvageable DNA on this, the spectrometer will tell us where in this universe the thief came from," one of the lab techs says.

"All right then," the prince says. "Let's see if we can at least get a general region to start our search." He knew two things already. First, that the multitool had belonged to her father. Second, that she had been orphaned. These facts she'd offered when he'd mocked the outdated tech she used the unscrew the access panels to the servers. He wouldn't soon forget the glare she'd turned on him.

The machine whirrs and after a while, beeps. A spiky graph appears on the monitor beside it. The tech slides her wheeled chair over to the screen. Richard moves to read over her shoulder.

"I'm impressed she made it through our firewall," the tech muses while she clicks through the data to see what the mass spec came up with.

"Really?"

"Yeah. I mean, hacking is hard enough, but our system's firewall is essentially impossible to hack. She's not just good. She's the best."

"The best?" Richard's lips lift into a bemused grin as he remembers the sheer bravado in her daring smirk at him.

The tech leans closer to her screen. "Ahhh... okay."

"What?"

"There's organic matter on this tool that originated in Nottinghamshire - a spit of planets outside the Alfheim nebula."

"Nottinghamshire." Prince Richard's pulse races. "I can work with that. How many planets in the system?"

"Five, Your Highness," the tech says. "Only two are habited, though. There are terrodomes on Nottingham, but I can confidently say this tool has been on the surface of the other."

"And what's that?"

    "A forest planet called Sherwood."

Prince Richard smiles. "Sherwood. I'd better assemble a voyage then. I know someone who'll be wanting her multitool back."