Free Stasis: A Will Vullerman Anthology by J. Tobias Buller Page A

Follow me."

    ************

    Will left his room several hours later, his mind clear and refreshed. He had taken a short nap, and now he had a plan worked out.
    The house's lamps cast a warm, yellowish light as Will walked down the hallway. Much better than the energy-saving fluorescent that Will had gotten used to.
    Will found Mr. Torrey sitting in the living room, working on a touchpad. He glanced up. "You need something?"
    "I'd like to work on your phone, if that's okay." Will gestured toward the phone. "I might have to tear it apart, but I've got some stuff I'd like to try on it."
    “It's all yours. I thought about tearing it apart myself—not to look at it, just to disable calls altogether—but we got a new number several days ago, and...” His voice trailed off. “It called the new number, too.” He glanced up at the clock and changed the subject. “It's a bit late. I figured you went to bed.”
    Will sat on the tile and crossed his legs. "I took a short nap to clear my head. It shouldn't keep me from sleeping, though, since I'm still getting over jet lag."
    Will reached up and grabbed the phone off the table. He balanced it on his knee and took off the back panel. He then removed the battery and took off another panel, revealing wires and hardware. He set his comm on the table as he worked, saving it for later. Now, if he could find a way to connect the computing power of his comm to the phone itself...
    He heard soft steps behind him. "What you doing, Mister Vullerman?"
    Will looked up to see May dressed in pink pajamas, her hair still wet from her shower. "I'm working on your phone, Miss May." Will showed her the phone.
    She stared down at it with a frown. "It looks like you're destroying it."
    Will laughed. "No, I'm just trying to find a way to connect it to my comm."
    "Daddy wanted a comm, but they're too much money." May sat down beside him and peered at the phone. "Why do you need to connect it to your comm?"
    Will showed her his comm. "You see, when this guy calls, it shows no number and leaves nothing but a message, which means you can't call him back. But in order to call you at all, his comm has to have a signal. If I can find a way to reverse the signal, I can call him back. Then I can tell him to stop." Actually, Will planned on saying a lot more than that.
    “Sounds smart,” Mr. Torrey said, setting aside his touchpad. “But how do you reverse the signal?”
    “That's the tricky part.” Will held up a wire. “Once I connect the comm to the phone's hardware, I have to program a command that allows me to use both systems to essentially 'grab' a signal and follow it back to the source.”
    Mr. Torrey shrugged. “It's all Greek to me. My degree's in Agriculture. But do you think it'll work?”
    “It works in theory. We'll see if I can get it to work in practice.”
    May frowned. "Are you a hacker, Mister Vullerman?"
    "Well..." Will stopped for a moment. How could he answer this question discreetly? "My job requires me to be good with technical stuff. I'm not one of those people who can hack into everything, though."
    The answer seemed to satisfy her. For a while, she said nothing, and Will continued working on the phone, trying to find the wire he needed to connect his comm. No good. His fingers were too thick. He dug in his pocket and came out with a pair of tweezers, using it to part the wires and look through the more delicate ones deeper in the phone.
    "Do you have a family, Mister Vullerman?"
    Will paused his work. Children could afford to be blunt, he supposed. "No. I had my grandparents, but they're...gone."
    "Oh."
    There was another moment of silence, and then she spoke again. "Didn't you have a mommy?"
    Will set the phone in his lap. "My mom left a long time ago." He didn't elaborate. Will's mother had left him with his grandparents after his dad had died. He barely remembered her now. But May didn't need to know that. The world was a hard place, but not to a girl of May's age.
    If only