Day Fifteen
At twelve past nine in the evening, Raj noticed the MacBook’s fan was churning louder and louder. He ignored it at first, kept trying to hunt down all the errors iSA was giving him on the new machine. Dependency issues galore. If Beth had been there, she should have had a field day with it all.
But after ten minutes of increasingly-desperate rattling, he couldn’t take it anymore. He put the new machine on the table and wheeled over to the desk, woke the screen, and checked what was going on.
Nothing at all. The only app open was Firefox, but was just showing a plain Google landing page. Still, the fan was going nuts.
He opened Activity Monitor and saw massive CPU usage. Massive. Both processors were going nuts trying to do something, but all he saw was minimal effort by Firefox and the Finder. It made no sense at all.
He clicked around the screen a bit before selecting “All processes” from a drop down menu, and suddenly things changed. The top four processes were battling for supremacy, but the hottest on the list was “iSA.app”, which was taking a full 98% of processing power at any given moment.
iSA was running, but invisible?
Raj clicked through to the development tools, opened up iSA the regular way, and ran the emulator. A second later, the screen came on, the menus slightly different than last time, but still the same. He clicked through to the Heli menu, and saw one was in active use. He paused the cursor over it, trying to decide if he really wanted to do this.
A tap at the window made him flinch, and he took his hands from the trackpad, let out a shaky breath.
In the background, Activity Monitor was working furiously.
He got up, paced to the window, and checked out the blinds. The street lights across the way threw an orange hue over everything. He could see a barbecue party a few blocks away, smoke rising into the sky. It made him think of the blue swimsuit. Hands.
He ran back to the computer, tapped the heli’s camera, and after a short lag for buffering, saw glass shatter as the heli smashed through a window and careened through a living room, narrowly missing a wall. A book hit the wall next to the camera, and the thing swung around, wavering slightly, and caught sight of a dark figure racing around the corner.
The heli seemed to float effortlessly after him, navigating smoothly around the bend, and paused when it saw a door slam shut in front of it. Raj’s hands were shaking.
Suddenly, onscreen, he saw the video shrink down, and a control panel lit up, options cycling. The heli switched to “shotgun”, and his breath left him.
“Oh my god, no!” he gasped, and tried to cancel the action. Nothing responded to him, and he looked back to the video in time to see the door’s upper half explode open in a puff of smoke. The heli charged through, and he caught sight of it in the bathroom mirror… black, ominous, and… a pair of dual buzz saws catching the light, almost blinding.
The thing turned slowly, faced the bath tub, where the show curtain was being pulled tight by the figure inside. The camera moved over, and Raj inhaled slowly as the curtain was cut in a clean line, left to right, and fell down uselessly.
The camera tilted down, and Raj caught vomit in his hand when he saw… he spent the next ten minutes over the toilet, unable to shake the sight of the blood and the horror, and the soundless scream of Reggie begging for his life.