Expelled(20)

This is unkind but sadly accurate. And I happen to know that Jere7my’s mom did dress him, at least up till age ten, but I won’t tell Sasha that.

As we approach, Jude filming, Jere7my turns toward us with a nervous look on his face. “Should I call 911?” he asks.

“Why would you say that?” Sasha asks in a lilting voice.

“In my experience,” Jere7my says, “it rarely works out when a group of people approaches me. It ends in physical pain or social humiliation and oftentimes both.”

“Our aim is neither,” Sasha says. “I’m Sasha. We’ve never officially met. You are… Jere-seven-my?”

He refuses to shake her offered hand. “The seven is silent,” he says.

“Oh,” Sasha says, trying very hard to keep a straight face. “Sorry.”

I cut to the chase. “So, Jeremy, I’ve been having problems with my computer.”

“Bummer,” he says insincerely. “Your porn not downloading fast enough?”

“Very funny. Actually I’m having problems with people making it look like I posted things that I didn’t.”

Jere7my sniffs. “So you find the closest coder and menace him.”

Unconsciously I take a step backward. I basically tower over the poor kid, but I’m so used to being dwarfed by Parker that it never occurred to me that I could seem intimidating, too.

And then Sasha, who’s definitely more dangerous than I am, moves forward. “Can you tell us how a photograph could be made to look like it came from Theo’s computer, Jere-seven-my?” Sasha asks. “Oops, I mean Jeremy. If you answer, we’ll be nice.”

He sighs. He’s outnumbered, and he might as well get it over with. “Do you have encryption set up on your router?” he asks me.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It was at school.”

“Wow, menacing and ignorant,” Jere7my mutters. “Arlington has encryption. So my guess is that someone spoofed your computer’s IP address.”

“Which means…?” I ask.

“Xerox previous sentence about ignorance,” Jere7my says under his breath.

“You’re not coming off as a sympathetic character on my video here,” Jude points out.

Jere7my’s shoulders straighten. “Fine. Okay. Internet protocol specifies each IP packet has to have a header with the address of the sender of the packet, and—”

“But we don’t need hacker talk,” Jude interrupts.

Jere7my glares at him. “That’s not hacker talk. That’s basic technical information you should be embarrassed not to know. Anyway, spoofing is when someone fakes their address so it looks like it comes from yours. I don’t know why anyone would do that to you.”

“To make it look like I sent it, obviously,” I say. “Now who’s the dense one?”

“Is that something you could do?” Sasha asks Jere7my.

“Do I speak FORTRAN?” he says, with a tone like Do bears shit in the woods? “And C, C plus plus, C sharp, Java, Python, Ruby—”

“Did you help Tom Thorn post the picture to my Twitter?” I demand.

At this, Jere7my starts to laugh. “Please. I have much better things to do with my time. Look, I can’t help with your little investigation, and I have a Kaladesh deck to purchase.”

He tries to shimmy past us, but I stand in front of him and Jude brings the camera in close.

“We used to be friends,” I say.

“The operative words being used to.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry I couldn’t follow you down the D&D rabbit hole. Did you do this to me?”

“If I wanted to hurt you, I’d have done a much better job,” Jere7my says. “This is toddler stuff.”

“What would you have done?” Sasha asks. “Just out of curiosity.”

Jere7my smiles. “I could clean out his savings account. I could have him declared legally dead. I could have a hundred thousand people camped on his front lawn in hours by telling them he was giving away Segways. I could have six pounds of heroin sent to his mother at her office.”

“Really?” Without a doubt, Sasha sounds impressed.

“Well, the last one might be tricky,” Jere7my admits. He sighs. “Look, I’m not the one to blame for your problems, okay? You’ll have to keep looking.”

Sasha says, “Who else could do this?”

“I don’t know,” Jere7my says, scowling. Interestingly, he seems immune to Sasha’s charms. “There’s no varsity hacking team at Arlington, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re a lone wolf, huh? Renegade bot guy over here,” Sasha says, trying to provoke him.

Jere7my scoffs. “A human is not a bot by definition… oh, never mind.”

“Well, when you get tired of being alone, you can help us out,” Sasha says.

Jere7my shrugs noncommittally.

“Everyone needs a friend,” she says. Then Sasha looks at me and Jude like we’re perfect proof of this, and despite this failed interview, my stomach gives a little lurch of happiness.

But Jere7my just flips all of us off, and then he disappears into Merlin’s.





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