Hardware

Lousada, their teacher, was long-nailed and the nearest thing to any example of Freud's definition of the Castrating Vagina. Even the girls were scared of her. Despite this apparent flaw in her fine, fine character, she had her moments and most of the kids grew to love and respect her, allegedly.

Scroll broke into Frag's house by disarming the alarm and resetting the code just by cutting the cable from the keypad to the door. No wonder he was such a genius. A Mensa test purported that his IQ was somewhere in the region of three hundred and sixty, but most people found it hard to swallow.

He stumbled into the library and sniffed at the pungent air. A smile grew outward as he recollected the day he burnt it down. He had finally got in touch with his anger when he realised that only by setting fire to other people's books could he really be happy. How unhappy he had been, afflicted with his own kind of psychosis - a gifted one at that. What was it his therapist had said in response to his flare for fire?

"Every stroke of genius is brushed with madness."

The reason for the analogy to painting she made, he will never figure out, but it was subtle and it summed him up delightfully.

Scroll's eyes panned the room until he noticed Frag's huge computer system stacked high and taking up half the space in the library - and that library was BIG. He keyed in his user ID and strolled through the system. It was pretty much the same as his own, but with a nicer interface.

He liked Frag's interface. It reminded him of one that was used by an old computer company which had gone bust because it wouldn't integrate its system with any of the other companies and had subsequently perished into oblivion except for one or two antique machines that lay around, usually in some old guy's attic.

He looked through most of the drives, found nothing of interest and was about to log out when something caught the farthest corner of one of his eyes.

Two small blue dots, the size of pinheads bounced up and down next to the file menu. He directed the mouse there and pulled the menu down, now the blue dots bounced near the open file command so Scroll clicked on "open".

There was only one file on the desktop, it was called "EnCyDro". Scroll hummed the French National Anthem, chewed his bottom lip, ran his fingers through his damp, dank hair and opened the file.

Random numbers began to appear in very quick succession and then the screen went violet. Scroll re-opened the file, this time securing the screen using the pause key.

Obviously, this was encrypted text, so Scroll fumbled around Frag's real-life desk-top for a floppy. Having found one, he copied "EnCyDro" onto it and took the disk home.

When he tried to load it onto his computer, it caught a virus.

It was a mild head-cold kind of virus with an itchy nose and a sinus, but the computer survived.

He finally managed to get a print-out of the random numbers and began to read them in succession. They were just a page long so Scroll was able to memorise them. He then laboriously decoded them. He discovered two layers of encryption and yet another layer of cipher. Eventually, he found the hidden message. It made very little sense but then, he figured he was never meant to understand it.

The message read as follows.

"Ten to the left and ten to the right. Catch a bus and take a flight.