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“Hello! Who is there? You know you’re not supposed to be here. Please come out. We need to get you to New York,” another voice said.
She placed her hand on the wall as her mind raced for the next line of action. That was when she noticed that some of the red bricks were missing from the wal
l.
She looked up and saw that the ceiling boards were in place. An idea came to her mind. Her hand went to the knife at her belt.
The two soldiers walked into the furthest section of the building. They looked around, but there was no one there.
“I could have sworn I heard sounds from here,” one of them said.
“Me too. And there’s the bike that’s parked outside the building,” the other said.
“That could mean anything. All vehicles are currently down. Maybe the owner abandoned it there and left. People said they saw a lady here. That’s why we’re here,” the first one said.
“Well, there’s no one,” the second one said after looking around. “Let’s check another building.”
The first one agreed, and they left.
They didn’t notice the torn out ceiling board. Suzanne was hiding on the wooden trusses that made up the roof.
16th November 2021
4:02 pm
Ray of Hope HQ, Staten Island, Richmond County, New York.
USA.
Adrik sat in his office at the underground headquarters of The Ray of Hope. Across the table, Harris sat with two other members of the governing body.
“So what have you guys found out so far?” Adrik asked, running out of patience.
“This is very hard for me to say, sir, because there is no reasonable explanation for how it would have happened: I think that our main computer was attacked by the Wormhole. It has all the attributes we’re currently experiencing. I’m sure that the program is still at the installation stage. That’s why we can’t access the computer’s features,” Harris said.
Adrik sighed, running his palms over his face.
“What can we do about it? There should be an antivirus for it, right?” he asked.
Harris wasn’t too eager to reply.
“Well, we would have been able to rectify it if this happened two days ago. The issue now is that the antivirus is with our software engineers in Russia and, apart from our computer, there’s currently no other means of international communication.”
Adrik barely managed to restrain himself from reaching out over the table and grabbing Harris by the collar. Maintaining his calm composure, he asked, “But how is it possible that we have the virus and not the antivirus? In fact, how is it possible that we didn’t have the antivirus installed on our computer before this attack?”
“It was an oversight, sir,” Harris said, and his voice quivered. “We requested only the virus as we felt there was no need for the antivirus. We weren’t expecting this attack from anywhere. I’m sorry, sir.”
Adrik thought for a while. It was an oversight, and, really, no one would have expected what had happened.
Who could have done this? He thought.
“When was this virus uploaded to the system? Gather all the staff on duty in that period for questioning,” he said.
“We have a problem with that: we don’t know when the upload was done. There was no uploading done within the past two days. We used the secondary computers to check the hard drive where the video footage of the main computer room was stored. No one was doing anything suspicious then. It means that the upload was done before the EMP. We don’t know what date to look into. However, what I can say is that whoever did this was smart enough to install it at such a moment. Trying to interrupt the installation by cutting off power supply will render our hard drive useless. We’ll all be trapped here,” Harris said.
“That’s true,” Adrik said, deep in thought. “How many people had access to that software after it arrived in the US?”
“Just a handful: it came to me then we sent it by a mercenary to Viv-” he paused, knowing that Adrik and Vivien had been lovers. He feared that hearing her name would make Adrik angry. She had died mysteriously after the EMP, and so she couldn’t be a suspect. Adrik rolled his eyes.
