The Space Between

Short story written as an early birthday gift for Heather in 2021.

Dear Steph,

I’ve taken every precaution in transferring this letter directly onto your computer so that it cannot be tracked, so I promise you are not endangered or implicated by receiving it. What you do with this letter now is entirely up to you.

By the time you read this, I expect I’ll have been arrested, or reported missing, or might be—but hopefully not—dead. Since my secret won’t be a secret much longer, I want you to hear it from me. Part of me hopes you’ll believe me—that you’ll still trust me even after what I’m about to tell you and even after whatever you’ve heard in the news. I’m sure none of it was good, and I wish I could tell you that every single bit of it was false. This isn’t quite a confession, and it’s not really an exposé—but it is a love letter. That I am sure of, and my greatest regret as I leave is that, despite everything we’ve shared, there are two secrets I never told you. I wish I had told you sooner. I wish I had told you in person. I wish we had never met.

No, that last thing is a lie. I regret you knowing me because I’ve dragged you into this mess, but I can’t bring myself to regret knowing you. I think this is probably farewell, but I can’t help hoping I’m wrong about that because the first secret I never told you is that I love you. There’s never been anyone else for me. I think, on some level, that I’ve loved you ever since that day in the freshman dorm lounge when you marched over and interrupted a very meta discussion with my roommate to inform me that you were personally appalled by my interpretation of technê in Aristotle’s Physics, and that Aristotle himself would’ve been appalled by it, too. I almost told you this first secret on the night we got completely smashed on absurdly expensive champagne at my apartment when you landed your tenure track professorship at WashU. Through the fizzy haze—just as I got down on one knee—I wondered why I didn’t already have a ring to offer you. Then I remembered my second secret. I remembered that I could never tell you the first secret because I couldn’t tell you the second. That was the only reason I had never bought a ring.

The closest I ever came to confessing the second secret to you was the night we spent in that grimy hostel with no A/C in Berlin during our post-college gap year. We lay awake deep into the night in our sweaty bunks in that glorified closet of a room with only the sound of our breathing against the distant backdrop of the murmur of the city. It would have been easier to tell you in the dark when I wouldn’t have had to see your reaction. Try, if you can, to count the number of times we’ve eaten Chinese takeout on your couch in the ten years since then. That’s how many times I almost told you. This is my last chance, and—assuming I survive this—I don’t want to live to regret not telling you, even if you never want to speak to me again.

So here it goes:

We’ve argued the merits and pitfalls of technology—from Aristotle to Apple—over many of those takeout cartons, so you know I have a love-hate relationship with tech the way only a CS-major-turned-IT-geek can, but you don’t know why because I never told you. To explain why, I have to start at the beginning. Not when the news broke on Tuesday, or when the rumors and accusations first surfaced on Twitter, or even the first time someone in Congress went on a diatribe about Big Tech. I’m going all the way back, long before Apple and the Dot-Com boom and NASA. I’m starting at the very beginning with the 1s and 0s.

If I tell people that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, most people will just nod—a small, sardonic smile on their faces—and go right back to trying to get their stupid computer to connect to their stupid monitor. Maybe they’ll also shout a bit at the adapter cable when the whole set-up resists every troubleshooting attempt with bold obstinance. In workplaces worldwide, IT nerds like me are lauded as wizards when we solve enigmatic technical difficulties.

The thing is, we are. Wizards, I mean. While we generally prefer mage, magician, or technician, it’s basically the same thing. Mr. Clarke was a smart mage who knew what he was talking about; most of the world just misunderstood his true meaning. It works out nicely for the magical community. We aren’t about to go around telling the average person that real magic exists and that it is the force that powers their smartphone, Twitter handle, and even that long-defunct, socially awkward MySpace page they would disavow if it ever resurfaced. They don’t understand their ubiquitous tech, but they don’t ask a lot of questions, so we never tell them.

We remember what happened in Salem and in Spain; we know what would happen if we did.

So we keep quiet, we fix people’s computer problems, and we laugh politely each time someone calls one of us a tech wizard—although each time we’re panicking inside because maybe this is the time when someone finally figures it out and it all comes crashing down. We teach the ancient arts in ivory towers, where we protect our secrets with weed-out math courses that measure innate magical abilities rather than basic number crunching. Brilliant people flunk out of comp sci, IT, and infosec programs all the time. The problem isn’t that they’re bad at math; the problem is that they lack the ability to understand and manipulate abstract space-time, to pull meaning and order from the well of power that exists in the infinite-and-infinitesimal space between 0 and 1.

Now, though, our secret is threatened. Like so many empires before them, the technicians who became known as “Big Tech” fell victim to the siren call of power. Like Icarus, they flew too close to the sun, drawing the attention of others who covet power—like Congress, dictators, and social media influencers. The fire that is melting Big Tech’s wax wings threatens to burn the rest of us as well.

Things took a turn for the worse about three months ago. I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but it was a Friday, and we had dinner that night like we always did. I must have been acting off because you asked me more than once if I was okay. I lied. I said I was fine, just tired. I said work was busy, and I griped about the executive who’d berated me over the phone because his computer would not connect to “The Internets” and insisted that I hike up thirteen flights of stairs to his office (even after I informed him that the elevator was under repair) just to point out to him that his Ethernet cable had come unplugged. You bought that (true) story and let it drop. The other true story that I didn’t tell you is this: just after the Ethernet Emergency, I got a phone call from a fellow IT professional/mage who works in DC. She’d been arrested, and she used her one phone call to tell me—in code—that she thought someone had found out about the magic. She believed that was why she’d been arrested.

We haven’t heard from her since.

Others have disappeared, too. We don’t know how, but a magician somewhere must have let something slip, perhaps during an interrogation as part of the antitrust investigations. Maybe a magician abroad cracked under torture or got blackmailed into talking, and the international intelligence community could’ve easily bartered the intel. Regardless, in the three months since my friend disappeared, we’ve come to believe that someone fairly high up in the US government knows the truth. It’s not been leaked to the press—or, at least, nothing they can act on—but I think it’s only a matter of time.

That’s why I started texting you less often, and canceling dinners, and backing out of everything from Netflix marathons to those weekend travel plans we’d made months in advance. When we did hang out, I was distracted and twitchy, and I think you thought I was uncomfortable being around you. You were right—but only because I was afraid. If they’d found my friend, they could find me. If they found me, they would figure out just how much you mean to me. They might use you to get to me, or they might think you were one of us. Either way, I couldn’t let you get caught in the crossfire. That’s why I stopped returning your calls two weeks ago. That’s why I haven’t replied to any of the all-caps texts you sent since Tuesday when you first learned that my name had been added to a no-fly list and my photo and personal information had been plastered across every online platform with the caption: “Terrorist Suspect. Report Immediately. Very Dangerous. Do Not Approach.”

I see those words on the back of my eyelids every time I close my eyes.

In the news, they’re saying it’s a widespread conspiracy, a radicalization of the entire tech profession. In the past 48 hours since the New York Times first ran the story, I’ve seen dozens of headlines and tweets like these:

“Forget the Rise of the Robots; it’s the IT geeks we should have been watching!”

“Don’t Trust Your Tech Support”

“Supervillains Among Us: The Radicalized Sleeper Cell in Every IT Department”

“How to recognize a hacker (a thread) 1/”

“Unmasking Tech Terrors”

I’m sure you’ve seen all of those—and worse—by now. They’re calling all of us villains, terrorists, and hackers. They’re saying we’re all just like the criminals who stole financial account information and used it to clean out hundreds of millions of dollars from ordinary people’s retirement accounts last month, or the terrorists who hacked into the water treatment plant in New York and changed the chemical levels to make thousands of people—thousands of children—in that community sick two weeks ago. They’re calling all of us villains who want to watch the world burn. I’m not a villain. I’m not a terrorist.

But I am a hacker.

I’m one of the mages who hacked the FBI databases with ransomware on Monday. That accusation is true, but the motive given in the news is false. We weren’t trying to cripple the FBI or steal government secrets to sell to the highest bidder. We were trying to find out what had happened to the magicians who had disappeared and find out who was behind the arrests and disappearances. The ransomware was a smokescreen, a diversion. As soon as we found the information we came for, we copied it and left. We dropped the ransomware and made it look like the FBI’s IT team had found a way past it without paying the ransom. We didn’t receive a single penny of taxpayer dollars. We didn’t copy any data we didn’t need.

The retaliation was swift. The first exposés were published within 24 hours. I don’t think they knew exactly who was behind the FBI data breach, so they threatened all of us at once. I don’t regret my involvement in Monday’s data hack, though, because we found out what happened to our friends who had disappeared. I’m breaking my silence and writing to you now because some of us are leaving to go rescue them—or die trying. These may be the last words I say to you, so I want to make them count.

I don’t know if you ever loved me the way I’ve loved you. But if you ever did—and if by some miracle you still love me even after everything in this letter—would you do something for me? Be happy. Really, utterly, completely happy. Keep doing the things you love: teaching, volunteering, traveling, speaking up about justice and virtue. Find someone who loves you more than life itself, who doesn’t hold back secrets from you, who’ll debate with you on any philosophical topic you want for as long as you want, and who will take midnight walks with you in your favorite park on all the nights when you can’t sleep.

All my love, for the rest of my life (however long that may be),

Will

Steph read the final paragraph a second time as her worldview tilted and recalibrated. She glanced up at the clock and shut her laptop.

Will stood in the shadow of the willow trees that followed the path along the serpentine in the southeast corner of Forest Park. It was already five minutes after midnight and his car was waiting a block away under the Kingshighway overpass, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave yet.

“Who am I kidding?” he muttered. Even if she understood, he thought, she’s not coming. I shouldn’t have waited this long to leave the city.

Just as he turned to go, a faint crunch of gravel drew his attention as a figure edged out of the shadows onto the path.

His heart beat wildly.

It had taken Steph longer to find her gap year travel pack than she’d hoped. Packing it, however, was like muscle memory, as though she’d only packed it up in Berlin yesterday for the long flight home. She packed only the most versatile, lightweight essentials, having learned the hard way just how much weight was too much when sprinting to catch a train. After a moment of hesitation, she added one more item: a dog-eared paperback copy of Aristotle’s Physics, bookmarked with a faded plane ticket. She turned off the location services on her phone, watch, and laptop, then checked that all the smart devices and lights in her apartment aligned with her usual schedule. After emailing a colleague to cover her lectures in the morning, she locked her little Dogtown apartment, pulled the hood of her three-season jacket down low over her eyes, and wrapped her wool scarf up to her ears to hide her face before setting off on a route she’d navigated countless times in the dark on all the nights she couldn’t sleep.

She startled when he stepped out from the shadow of the willows.

“Oh, thank heavens,” she breathed. I’m not insane for hoping, she thought as she ran the final thirty steps and flung her arms around her best friend, the one she’d loved since she was barely twenty.

As he wrapped his arms around her and held her close, she said, “I believe you, and I’m coming with you. Don’t you dare tell me not to.”

He stepped back, hands on her shoulders, and looked at her searchingly for a long moment. “Are you sure? I don’t know what will happen. You might die. You might never be able to come home again.”

She’d thought through the ramifications as she’d jogged northeast to the park; her mind and her decision were clear. “I know,” she said, voice thick, then continued with a shrug and a watery half-smile, “but we always said we’d like to travel the world again someday, remember?”

He huffed a laugh. “Yeah,” he said, offering his hand to her, “we always did.”

She took his proffered hand, intertwining their fingers. “Well, then, what are we waiting for?”

Fin.