1-3 October, 2040

Chanbeli looked like an angel in heaven while sleeping. Well, she was their angel but Sonya and Vikram could no longer predict if they could hold onto their heaven on earth anymore.

The Blue Cheese Cottage had been their home for the past three years. They didn't mind doing the daily back and forth between the Fruitvale Campus of the Margaret Mead University and the small community of Elk City, Idaho.

They got lucky when an old barn went on sale after the original owner died and his urbanized children wanted nothing to do with it. They bought the tiny plot, got a good deal on cherry wood planks, and set to build their dream home with their own hands. A small kitchen with dining space, and a playroom for their little girl on the lower level; a master suite upstairs with attached bath and a den sized space for a princess bed was all they needed.

After moving, they drowned the whole cottage in honeysuckle and jasmine bushes and shaped the perimeter around the house into a sectioned garden featuring the prettiest flowers of the region and the healthiest vegetables. Even Chanbeli got her own little bed to plant, right by the french windows in the kitchen, where she grew violets, marigolds, and tiger lilies over the seasons.

Sonya had planned those french windows to have a view of the Blue Mountains, underlined by a thick growth of conifers. They placed their walnut circular table by that view; soon it became a hub for their weekly extracurricular meetings. They got so involved with their self-imposed plans that they both took long leaves from the university while their closest friends would join them on the weekends.

And now, at last, it was go time.

Sonya had insisted they won't leave Jave's house until Chanbeli had fallen asleep again in the spare bed at her Aunt's. Now that their little princess purred softly in her sleep and occasionally smiled at probably a sweet, sweet dream, it was time to leave.

"Hupe is waiting, Sonnie." Vikram gave her a gentle kiss on the head as Sonya lingered at the door frame.

Jave placed a hand on Sonya's shoulder then. "You have a brave little girl, Sonnie. Look how peacefully she sleeps. She understands why it's important for you to go and she knows you'll be back in a day or two. I'll keep her occupied till you do."

"We're truly lucky you got your own place here now. There can't be a more perfect babysitter for her." There was real gratitude in Sonya's voice.

"Don't I know that?" Jave's warm smile only assured the parents further.

Dr. Hunovar Palladino, a professor of Environmental Science at Fruitvale, stood in Jave's living room ready with two leather bags holding everything the couple would need - from water bottles to hacking equipment. He had been central to their vision and the preparation that went toward its realization.

Sonya and Vikram took the bags from his hands. They had already changed into fitted, dark brown jerseys and matching pants. They made a quick check of the bags; everything was in order.

"My offer is still on the table." Dr. Palladino looked determinedly at Sonya. Sonya and Vikram were the only ones with a young child. He wanted at least one of them to stay behind, preferably Sonya. What they'd all painstakingly planned might look foolproof on paper but, in real life, things could go really wrong really fast.

"Don't worry, Hupe. We'll be standing before you and reporting mission success in person soon." Vikram winked at his wife as he assured his long time friend.

Outside, Gen was ready with the van, the newest model of a Highlander. With a last wave to Hupe and Jave who stood at the patio of the ground-floor condominium in a new suburb of Fruitvale, the couple got into the van.

"Ready, you guys?" asked Gen from the driving seat, eyeing the two in the rearview mirror.

The couple lifted their joined hands up into Gen's view and spoke together: "Never more ready."

Gen put it in drive.

When Gen, or Genichiro Shang-Li, first met the couple, he had just arrived at Fruitvale from his alma mater, the University of Taiwan, as a research internee in an exchange program. He loved accompanying these two and their friends to their week-long summer campaigns protesting commercial eradication of natural lands. He didn't mind when soon he found himself poring over laptops, charts and data cells on that table by the scenic windows in the Blue Cheese Cottage.

While Sonnie and Vick rested, Genichiro drove back up north, past the Nez Perce forests, then turned right on the Idaho leg of Route 12, all the way to Missoula across the state border into Montana. There, under the ink of a sky before dawn, at a predetermined rest point, their friend Laim Abend was waiting. He was an avid activist who hated the usual hacking nicknames and preferred 'greenhat' usually skyped with the group at the Cottage during their sessions.

Sonya drove from there and stopped some five hours later at a quaint motel just outside Billings. After a final check-through of supplies and one last walk-through of the job ahead as per Hupe's insistence, they ate shawarmas in the comfy two-bed room and battled in Mordor as holo versions of the fellows of the Ring to pass the time.

After Gen's Legolas defeated Sauron, they tucked in, setting their alarms to twelve in the morning for a good few hours' sleep.

Laim cut across the arid Great Plains after that and they reached a small city in northern Montana in three hours. Genichiro got off at another cheap motel for any last minute emergency change of plans. Laim took the van off the road and onto the dry land to avoid appearing in any surveillance footage on the freeways. In under an hour they were ten miles away from Saco and approaching the Orion Campus of Big Dipper Inc.

Laim turned off the headlights, trusting his GPS, and stopped as soon as the perimeter lights of the large site came into view. The forbiddingly bare structure housing the data center sat like a dull stone slab beyond a high wall. The solar farm providing energy to the whole facility would be on the other side.

Big Dipper was one of the last few cloud-serving giants with a heavy physical presence on earth. All the others had moved their data centers, in their entirety in most cases, to servelites - the specially constructed artificial satellites with the sole purpose of housing the world's electronic networks. Now, the Big Dipper had folded and were about to execute a move to space in a month's time. That was why it was necessary for this team of unlikely thieves to get done with their data heist as soon as possible.

After checking in night vision that there was currently no sentry on this side, Laim approached the facility at a snail's pace until Sonya reported they had entered the wifi range. Vikram and Sonya got out of the car. Vikram was holding a streamlined, thin-framed folded ladder in one hand. They both had headgear strapped around their heads. Other than that, the pair used powerful penlights to guide their way and had pouches bound by waistbands containing tasers, wireless receivers, pagers and some other necessary equipment.

For the past many months, Laim had befriended the assistant engineer who had essentially designed the Orion Campus, though his boss had gotten first credit. With a stroke of luck, Laim discovered the assistant had saved a copy of the blue prints as it was his first major design. After getting to know the guy really, really well, over late-night sessions involving lots of booze and VR, it was a matter of sneaking into the guy's v-ledger. Laim made sure to have the sneak-in routed through Uzbekistan, via a mirror that was commonly in use by both the Russians and Chinese.

In short, Vikram and Sonya knew exactly where they were headed.

Back in the van, Laim had already scrambled the feeds from the security cameras around the spot where the couple were to climb the long wall. A necessary precaution, despite the black clothing and the transparent polycarbonate shields that they now lowered on their heads, designed to appear dark from the outside.

With the help of the ladder and a grappling hook, they were soon inside the wall. The hum of the datacenter's machinery was prominent as they approached the side of the building where regular rooms such as storage closets and crew washrooms were located. They removed a long panel of vent grille from the base of the building's wall and crawled inside.

It was time to take out the thermosensors.

Laim had ensured the gadgets were fully functional and charged. Vikram's sensor picked one moving heat print at 11 o' clock. They waited until the signature completely moved out of their range. Crawling through, they crossed under the server farms area and stopped near the quadrant hosting the cooling equipment. No heat prints moved above, so Vikram helped Sonya remove a floor panel and let her in. He climbed after her and reminded Sonya how to put the panel back in place later before disappearing from her sight.

Sonya found herself between two rows in a data cluster - an arrangement of tall and narrow, silver polished, wardrobe-like panels full of data cables. She slipped between the rows and reached a side wall looking to locate the exit with her pencil light. Her Litebase-soled shoes barely made a sound as she took quick steps and came to stand before the first panel. She opened the door of - it was a simple latch - and found a network of looping cables socketed into neat rows of ports. She took the one cable toward the middle-right side that was larger than all the others and color-coded differently. She pulled the cable from its slot and inserted the pinout into a generic handheld device (HHD) they had bought from an electronics shop in Missoula.

The device was programmed to connect to the scanner active on Laim's remote access app on his purposefully configured laptop. Seeing Laim was now connected, Sonya had nothing to do but wait. She took out her thermosensor again and kept her eyes on its tiny screen.

At the farther end of the hall, Vikram found an electric plug that fed into the last two clusters. As soon as he got a page from Laim that the latter was now connected to the HHD, Vikram unplugged the wire. A beep echoed somewhere on the administrative corner of the building. Vikram instantly crawled into a floor opening and hurriedly rescrewed the panel that he had taken off before looking for the electric cable. He hoped Sonya would have done the same before anyone entered the data hall. She would have to tape her HHD to the inside of the panel door and see that the door was latched in place before sneaking out.

It had taken three seconds for the alternate generators to turn the clusters back on. It would take three minutes for the information system to reboot and another two for the firewalls to fully kick in. The customers of the 'data storage for rent' facility wouldn't have suffered a hitch due to the seamless rerouting to mirrors located at different campuses of the Big Dipper across the country. But to the hacker physically logged in to the system via the HHD, it was all that mattered.

In under the first two minutes, Laim's viral critter had skipped the HHD and through the port. It would remain seated at the very base of the whole network and work undeterred while the system came back online. All Laim had to do now was zip through the root directory in search of their target: InstaCalc. The system would interpret his activity as a routine check by one of the authorized crew whose login the malware had just cracked.

There was no <InstaCalc> but there was a <7Realms>, one of several possible directory tags Hupe had prepared them to expect. Laim paged Sonya and slid back on his seat, relaxed but alert.

Sonya's eyes had been glued to the square screen of her thermosensor but apparently no human movement had made a print. The on-site crew must have dozed off or gotten lost in Holoplay. Good for her.

She waited for Vikram to confirm the absence of heat prints from his side and from Laim to confirm a hit before she crawled back in and unstuck the HHD. The physical connection was no longer needed after Laim's message meant insider access. Paging Vikram, she crawled back under the raised floor, the HHD back in her waist pouch.

To her relief, Vikram joined her under the floorboards in five minutes and helped her secure the panel back into place. They made their way out by retracing their paths. They had to wait for quite some time before finally getting back into the open; somebody was probably using the nearby toilet for a long time.

They remained glued to the base of the outside perimeter giving Laim time to turn on the scrambler again. They sneaked off into the distance in roughly the direction of the van when the time was right. The Highlander's outline became visible only as they were within a few feet of it because they had been moving away from the light source.

Laim informed them it would be another ten minutes before the whole directory got copied. They were pumped but anxious, silently praying for the smooth completion of this last, key step.
Sonya and Vikram smiled in unison when Laim gave them an enthusiastic thumbs up for mission accomplished then put the van in drive.

They couldn't wait to set eyes on their Chanbeli again. And to get to jump onto the next leg in this crazy journey of theirs against corporate greed.

***

24 September, 2050

She sat with her back to the rocky formation, the fairy's wand raised above her head. If the fairy had spun her magic or thrown pixie dust around, Roxie doubted the spells would have any effect on her life.

The ocean moaned and purred under the rookie moon's soft pull as the crescent peeked from above the mangroves. Stars winked at the cloudy robes of invisible figures, gently billowing across a generous swath of midnight blue.

Her fingers craved for her paintbrushes to capture the scene. Not the ones she had shared with Vera once - her friend's sisters must have ruined those now. The ones that were left behind ten years ago in a night of panic, in that fairytale, dreamy cottage.

She had spent the last hour trying to surmise what the hell her parents had been up to that month and how could she ever learn the truth.

Her head was hurting. She closed her eyes and tried to catch some sleep, hugging herself even tighter against the chill.

Why had she decided to come to this corner of the beach, she wondered.

She wasn't sure. Except for the fact that Ida's son could be home for the weekend and she had no wish to make more acquaintances.

Maybe there was something else. Another reason that had made her come ... something that still rankled, still enticed, something she wasn't letting go of yet.