Chapter 12 - The Dorm Room
The door to Bryce’s dorm room was unlocked, swinging inward with a soft creak as Maya and Bryce burst into the small, cluttered space, followed closely by Agent Vance with her weapon drawn. The room was dark, illuminated only by the harsh blue glow of Bryce’s laptop screen resting on the cluttered wooden desk in the corner. The device wasn't in sleep mode; instead, a complex terminal window was actively executing a rapid file deletion script, wiping local backups and cross-referencing every student ID connected to the campus Wi-Fi network over the past three years.
“Stop it! Don't let it finish the wipe!” Bryce yelled, rushing toward the desk and reaching out to slam the laptop lid shut.
“Don't touch it!” Maya screamed, lunging forward and tackling Bryce away from the desk just as a loud, high-pitched electrical buzz emanated from the laptop’s charging port.
A tiny spark of blue flame spat out from the USB-C hub, scorching the wooden desktop and filling the small room with the acrid smell of burning silicon and melted plastic. Agent Vance stepped up to the desk, holstering her weapon as she pulled a specialized tactical diagnostic tool from her belt and plugged it directly into the laptop’s secondary port, bypassing the compromised motherboard.
“The kill script originated from an internal subnet routed directly through the campus residential network,” Agent Vance reported sharply, her fingers flying over her own tactical tablet as she isolated the incoming signal. “Whoever is operating this terminal is physically located in this exact residential building—probably within three hundred feet of this room.”
Maya stood up, wiping her hands on her jeans as she surveyed the cluttered dorm room, her eyes landing on a stack of unopened mail sitting on the small kitchenette counter. The return address on top of the pile was addressed to the university’s board of trustees, bearing the same custom crest she had seen on the watch in the security photo.
“They didn’t just monitor the mainframe, Bryce,” Maya said quietly, turning to face him as he nervously clutched his hands together. “Every student who used the CampusGhost app to coordinate pranks was actually building a psychological profile database for the board’s behavioral compliance trials.”
Bryce sank down onto the edge of his unmade bed, his head in his hands as the guilt finally broke through his bravado. “I just thought it was a fun way to get views on my channel... I didn’t know they were using my account to target you and isolate the legacy files.”
Before Agent Vance could trace the final ping on her tablet, the door to the dorm room slowly creaked open wider, revealing a tall figure standing in the dim hallway outside. The person wore a clean university maintenance uniform, their face hidden beneath the brim of a baseball cap, holding a heavy silver flash drive between two fingers.
“You’re barking up the wrong subnet, Agent Vance,” a calm, unbothered voice said from the doorway, the sound smooth and entirely devoid of the previous digital distortion. “The board dissolved five minutes ago, and you’re standing in the middle of a decommissioned sector.”
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Agent Vance whirled around, leveling her tactical tablet like a shield while reaching for her sidearm, but the figure in the doorway tossed the silver flash drive onto the bed next to Bryce and turned to walk away down the hall.
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