The Alpha For Her

“He was a bad boy for a while, you know,” she said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yeah. He was seeing Jennifer West and Margo Saunders at the same time, all the while cheating with Lillian Crow. Crow went through that ugly divorce. It was all over the tabloids. You must have seen that.”

“Missed it,” Jennifer said. “So, you’re saying that he’s a cad also?”

“Was. After he sold Selfie-Nation, he dropped out of sight. Holed himself up here. But…then there was that SEC investigation. Miss that one too?”

“Yeah.”

Vera paused at a grape cluster. The berries were a soft, pastel mint green clinging to their sprigs. There was a delicate, somewhat musky scent in the air.

“I wonder,” Vera said, “do grapes flower?”

“I – I don’t know.”

“Why do you think he does it?”

“Manipulate people?”

“No. Grow grapes.”

“I don’t know.” Jennifer studied her studying the berries. “Vera,” she began, “what’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Why do you think that anything is wrong?”

“Because you seem to have changed. When first I met you, you were confident, a little brash, and quite bold. Then you had your meeting with Flint, and since then you’ve changed. You seem more quiet and, well, disinterested. Vera, is something wrong?”

“Oh, Jennifer, Jennifer,” she said, strolling down the row, her hand touching clusters. “I bet that you were that girl in school who made friends with everyone; the one people would go to with their problems.”

Jennifer said nothing.

“Well,” Vera went on, “this isn’t high school, and you hardly know me well enough to see whether or not I’ve changed. And, if something was bothering me, I keep my own council. Always have.”

“Okay, then.”

Both their phones toned with a text message. Jennifer grabbed hers. Vera kept strolling.

“It’s Candy,” Jen reported. “She says there’s an emergency.”

“Are we going to be overwhelmed by a mudslide?”

“I don’t know. But she wants us in your rooms. Now.”

“You go. I’ll catch up.”

“Vera, Candy is not an alarmist.”

“This better be dire.”

As they hurried across the patio, no one seemed in the least bit alarmed about anything, so Jennifer reasoned that it was either Billie, or their presentation. It was the presentation.

“We’ve been sabotaged,” Candy said in her sitting room. Billie was pacing.

“Sabotaged?”

Vera let out a quick snort of a laugh.

“Someone hacked my laptop,” Billie said, on the verge of tears. “The presentation – all of our work – it’s garbage.”

“Hacked?” Jennifer said, eying Candy. “Now whoever would do such a thing?”

Candy went back to her screen.

“Well,” Vera said, “don’t you have a backup?”

“I do,” Billie said. “I did. I got that Cozy Cloud thing. It’s supposed to save everything every ten minutes. But when I accessed my account, and opened my file, it says that there’s nothing there.”

“It’s okay,” Jennifer said, taking the girl in her arms. “We have our notes. We can just recreate it.”

“But that’ll take–”

“Bas*ard,” Candy said, laughing. “Mischievous, devious bas*ard.”

“What?” Jen and Billie said.

“It’s not garbage,” Candy replied. “It just looks like it. C’mere.”

They leaned in to look at the screen. The page they saw was a block of characters: line after line, it filled the screen for pages and pages and pages, occasionally blocked by a pic or a graphic.

“What,” Vera asked, “is that?”

“It’s our presentation,” Candy said. “Sans end-of-record markers – EoMRs in programming parlance. Bas*ards.”

“What?”

“It’s not the end of the world,” Candy said. “It’s just the end of our night. It will take hours to fix this – but it can be fixed. Slowly.”

“What happened?” Jennifer asked.

“Our hacker,” Candy said, slumping back in the chair, “came in and deleted all of our end-of-record markers – I know, I know – hear me out. An EoMR tells the program that the line that you have just typed is done, and so the program skips to the next line. When the text wraps about a pic or an image, the EoMRs need to be precise.”

“But,” Jennifer said, “without the – the EoMRs…?”

“It is as if we typed everything in one long stream on a roll of paper a half mile long. Reminiscent of Jack Kerouac.”

“Who?” Billie asked.

“An old poet,” Jennifer said. “But never mind. So, how do we fix it?”

“We start at the top,” Candy said, starting at the top. “Read each and every line, and insert an end-of-record marker. Simple. There’s only about a million and a half of them.”

“That’s less than a prize-dollar for each,” Vera said.

“How do we start?” Billie asked.

“Inserting the markers is no great task,” Candy said. “But it’s tedious.”

“Can’t we divide the thing?” Billie asked. “Split it up four ways?”

“No. Our hacker left us with a contiguous mess. I cringe to think what would happen if I started dicing it up. We do this step-by step. It’s actually very simple. Watch – see the first line? See the end-stop?”

“What’s an end-stop?” Jennifer asked.

Candy rolled her eyes.

“Americans refer to it as a ‘period’.” She said. “Which you also use for so many other unpleasantries, including your school’s class timings. Now, when you read, and you see an end-stop – control-click RE…”

Candy’s instruction was brief and simple. Working around pics and graphics was a bit tricky, but Billie took notes. Candy reasoned that if they each took a shift of four hours, working through the night, the site would be cleaned and back to normal by the time they were to meet with Alaiah. It was getting time for Flint’s presentation. Jennifer volunteered to stay behind and start the grudge work.

“No argument from me,” Vera said.

Billie protested, but Vera ushered her out the door, telling Jen to text her if she had any problems. Billie promised to record the presentation.

Jennifer sat alone. Billie’s laptop glowed an eerie blue as evening turned to night. She thought to unplug the rig and take it to her own digs. But she feared messing with computers, so she began reading.

The work was repetitive and mindless, and her thoughts often wandered. She wondered about why Flint had chosen to usurp the schedule and offer his own presentation on the very subject that he had urged her to consider: goals. She thought that he might be angry if he realized that she had skipped out.

She drew her brain back to the task. She had missed three lines. She focused – then her thoughts wandered again.