The Case of the Possessed Computer

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The Case of the Possessed Computer

A short story by Ryan Cartwright - CC:By-SA

By Ryan Cartwright

Roboteers

Published: May 2017

Publisher: Crimperbooks (crimperbooks.co.uk)

Categories: Roboteers, Short-stories, Ages-6-and-up

Original URL: https://www.crimperbooks.co.uk/roboteers/the-case-of-the-possessed-computer/

License: Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

You are free to share, copy, distribute and adapt this material under the same license terms.

The Case of the Possessed Computer

This short story is one of the adventures of the Roboteers. It is written in the style of a blog post by one of the gang. You can read more of their adventures on the Roboteers page.

When we first started out as the Roboteers, we were just interested in making robots, fixing them and mucking around with electronics. Well, that’s what we were interested in but that’s not what we did. I mean, you have to remember that Tim and I were only about five when we formed our little club so, whilst we were interested in that stuff, mostly we just talked about how cool it would be to build an actual robot. Which, for a five year old, can kind of take u a lot of your time anyway.

Once we got older, and particularly, once Sugar got fixed we got into all sorts of adventures. Tim thought they were brilliant and, of course, it was always up to me to remind him that they were, you know, kind of scary at times too. By the time Martin got involved we were well on the way to becoming the “primary children’s detective agency in town” (as Tim likes to put it).

We started off quite small, if you ignore the two earth-saving adventures that is. We found people’s lost cats and helped people setup their security systems - nothing massive just an off-the-shelf wireless camera setup - that sort of thing. To be honest I didn’t think we were going to have any more real adventures at one point. But then things started getting a little more interesting because people came to us to help them solve mysteries. Solving problems is my kind of thing - I guess it’s why I’m into computers and programming - I like nothing more than diagnosing some bug in my code. So I was probably the most excited when we started to do mysteries as well.

One of our earliest cases was pretty weird but we were able to solve it using some quite logical steps.

We were in our HQ (which was a room at the back of Martin’s shed - not as bad as it sounds) when I mentioned to Tim that we hadn’t checked the Roboteers’ email for a while. In among all the fake messages and SPAM we found a very strange one. It was from an email account called “BkngRcks” and simply said:-

V db hbpr ybh prbplr nrr fbr rrnl. V rrnlly cbhld db wvth sbmr nssvstnncr! V thvnk my cbmphtrr vs vnfrctrd br pbssrssrd. Vt bprns thvngs by vtsrlf nnd drlrtrs nll thr vbwrls whrn V typr Hrlp mr V’m drsprrntr Svmbn Wvlsbn

“That’s weird.” I said

“Yeah,” said Tim, “I mean who calls themselves BkngRcks?!”

“That’s not what I mean.” I interrupted, “The way it’s written is weird.”

“Perhaps,” Martin said, “it’s written in code”

“Obviously but why write it in code at all?” I retorted.

“You don’t think it’s genuine do you?” Tim said, apparently surprised by the very idea. “It’s nonsense, just delete it.”

“Why wouldn’t it be genuine?” Martin replied without looking up from his tablet.

“Martin,” Tim said, “you of all people should understand the idea of trolling! This could just be somebody winding us up for a laugh.”

“Yes, I do understand about trolling,” he shuddered at the word, “but either way there’s no way to find out if this is true or not without replying.”

“I’m not so sure.” I said. “The email has some clues which could help us. The sender for example: there’s a name but the email address is broken. If we tried to reply it would fail without leaving our email program.”

“So? That just means they don’t want us to find out who they are.” Tim said, “Like I said: trolling.”

“No.” I replied, “If a WUM wanted us to think this was genuine, they’d make it so we could reply.”

“WUM?” Martin asked.

“Wind Up Merchant.” I said, “It’s another name for a troll and I thought Martin might prefer us to stop using the T word.” Martin smiled at that. “Anyway, it stands to reason that if the sender was trying to get us to fall for their trap, they’d want us to reply. Otherwise what’s the point of the trick?”

“To make us look stupid?” Tim said.

“But making us look stupid would be something they’d want to happen in public, otherwise where’s the fun?” I retorted. Sometimes I wonder if these two didn’t have their head in the clouds half the time”

++THE EMAIL REPLY-TO ADDRESS HAS NO AT SIGN++

The voice came from Sugar, the Robot, who had wandered over and looked at my laptop. Sometimes I admit I forget he is real because he looks so much like a toy. I think the only one of us who doesn’t overlook him is Tim. I also think he butts in so we don’t forget about him.

“Yes I know.” I replied without looking up, “It has no top-level domain either.” Martin and Tim just looked each other so I continued, “You know the dot-com or dot-co-dot-uk bit.”

“Ohhh that.“ Tim said sagely.

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t find who sent it.” I said and started typing and clicking at the computer. “A lot of people know you can set the reply-to address for an email to anything you like. In this case they’ve set it to “Romeo2WFATRomeo”. But…”, I clicked a few menu options, “we can also see the headers which tell us which servers this email came through and the sender’s actual email addre… oh rats!”

“What?” the boys exclaimed.

++THE SENDER USED A FREE ONLINE EMAIL ACCOUNT++ Sugar said.

“And an account called ‘DecipherTheMessage’ I finished off what he was saying, “Basically they knew we’d check and got there ahead of us.”