Day Twenty-One
Ziggy munched on the muffin, letting the crumbs fall all over the table where he was working. Raj sat in the corner, back to the racks of machines, scrolling through pages of code with a blank expression on his face.
“Drink your coffee, man,” Ziggy said, nudging the cup closer. Raj just stared at it, shrugged.
“Not thirsty,” he said. “Probably bad for my nerves, too.”
Ziggy sighed, kept typing at his own laptop.
They’d come into the office with great care. There was work to be done that couldn’t be done from home, and Ziggy was afraid that Raj would have a nervous breakdown if left alone. Debbie was busy until the evening anyway, so there was no reason not to go.
Still, it was deathly boring. They had to hide in the server room where nobody would see him — being recently-fired as he was.
He was re-reading the code to iSA, trying to figure out how it all worked. If he could get to the guts of it, maybe he could reconstruct a log file that would help him prove Beth was insane. It was a long shot — especially given how complex it all seemed — but he had to try.
He made a copy of the project files, calling it iSA2, and started cutting out as much of the random code as he could. Every time he compiled it, it gave him so many errors he had no idea how to read them all.
He kept cutting, kept searching, and finally came across the commands to control the heli units. There were so many options — far more complex than he’d imagined — but it seemed as if there was, at the very least a log being kept somewhere. He tried to track down how it was stored, but before he knew it, he was into a whole other part of the code.
This segment was more confusing than the last… all kinds of conditional statements, pulling data from the cameras, from other libraries, from hugely busy methods he had no way of understanding. He deleted the guts of the entire block and replaced it with instructions to return “true” whenever it was called.
With that done, the tried compiling again. Five minutes later, it finished, and the emulator appeared onscreen. Raj had been so used to seeing errors that he almost squealed with joy. He clicked through to the heli screen, and saw they were all intact, but unused. He was in!
He pulled a box out of his laptop bag and unwrapped the second iPhone he’d picked up on the way there, its white back a stark contrast to the black ones Beth had bought for them. He plugged it into the side of the MacBook and registered it as an authorized device for developing, and then installed iSA2 on it.
This alone wouldn’t prove anything, he knew, but it was a major milestone for him all the same. All he needed was a little time, and he could give the police what they needed to lock Beth away forever. He was going to win this war of hers.
“Shit,” gasped Ziggy, standing up suddenly. “The boss is coming. Quick, you’ve gotta hide!”
Raj grabbed his laptop and slid it into his bag, but the iPhone dropped off the cord, smacked onto the ground under the table. He reached for it, but Ziggy caught his arm.
“Leave it, man! You want me to get fired?”
Raj was shoved out the door without another word, a small bit of his victory stripped away.