Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

for him. The tea was now
cold; Alif drank it in a single swallow. Squatting next to his computer tower, he pulled off the casing and examined the CPU. A thin film of dust covered the blades of the exhaust fan. He blew on
it experimentally.
    “Not as bad as it could be,” he murmured. The cat rubbed her head against his leg. As he reinstalled the casing over the CPU, he heard an alarm chime from his speakers.
    “Fuck.
Fuck
.” Alif darted to his desk chair and pounded on the space key until the computer monitor crackled to full resolution. His connection speed was dropping fast.
Hollywood’s encryption software was reporting a string of errors.
    It was the Hand.
    Alif felt sweat break out on his upper lip. He forced himself to concentrate: he had to protect the people who depended on him. One by one he severed Hollywood’s connection with his
clients’ computers—it would leave them exposed, but a few unprotected hours were better than certain discovery. His fingers seemed stiff and abominably slow. He cursed. Another alarm
went off as the first of Hollywood’s firewalls was breached.
    “How, how,
how
?” Alif stared at the screen in awestricken panic. “How in all the names of God are you doing this?” Only four of his clients were still connected
to his OS. OpenFist99, sever connection? Yes. TheRealHamada, sever connection? Yes. The Hand moved deeper into his system.
    “This is not possible,” he whispered.
    Jai_Pakistan, sever connection? Yes. Alif looked at his client list: the only machine still accessible was Intisar’s. He was running out of time.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s not you they’re after.” He pulled the master plug out of the wall. With a whine, his computer went dark. Alif gazed at his
vague reflection in the black screen, breathing in uneven gasps. He heard sand blowing against the window. Little satisfied sounds came from the cat, who had discovered the cheese on his breakfast
tray. Time and the world slipped serenely forward as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. He shook his head to clear it. What had occurred? A series of timed electrical impulses, on-off
on-off. That was all, and it might mean a prison cell for the rest of his life.
    Alif waited half an hour before turning his system on again. He ran three sets of diagnostics on Hollywood, whispering a prayer before each one: they returned no anomalies. Reconnecting his
clients, he debated whether to send an e-mail letting them know what had happened, and decided against it—what could they do but panic? He would find out how the Hand had managed to cut
through his defenses, he would go through the code line by line if he had to.
    “I can fix this,” he murmured to the screen. A wave of nausea seized him. He leaned forward with a groan, pressing his forehead to the cool metal edge of his desk. Sand hissed around
the house, aspirated like some deranged human voice, some haunted voice. Alif heard Dina turn on music in her room—a cheerful
debke
dance song—as though she, too, found the
storm unsettling. He got out of his chair and curled up against the wall they shared. When his computer was on and connected to the grid, he never felt as though he was alone; there were millions
of people in rooms like his, reaching toward each other in the same ways he did. Now that feeling of intimacy seemed fraudulent. He lived in an invented space, easily violated. He lived in his own
mind.
    The cat padded up to him and put one sympathetic paw on his knee.
    * * *
    That night he dreamed of a woman with black-and-orange hair. She slipped into bed beside him, unself-consciously naked, and comforted him in a language he had never heard. Her
eyes shone in the dark. Alif responded to her without embarrassment or surprise, seeking her mouth and the hollow of her throat while she purred. She ran one hand along his thigh with a look of
invitation. He was checked by a feeling of regret.
    “Intisar—” he said.