"They're completely drained," Sunitha said. "All of his accounts."
"This is what I was expecting," Nico typed, still a flamingo. Sunitha knew she was interrupting his sleep schedule, but it was an emergency.
"What do you mean?" It was strange talking to a phone and then waiting for the messages to appear, but she'd refused to go into VR or AR, or use anything but her voice.
She stared at the phone, while the words "Nico is typing..." appeared.
"Look, there are some heavy hitters at play here. They must have seen the live stream last night, and knew that Chase would be hung over. Vulnerable."
"That doesn't make sense," Sunitha said, closing the door to the private room off the Snow-foot restaurant, where they'd done the live stream. The staff had agreed to let them use it as a practice/recording studio for the day, in exchange for doing a half-set as an opener for a different bad (surf-rock, ironically) later that evening.
Sunil had headphones on, lost in the remix. Chase was in the opposite corner, staring at his phone. "It wasn't just him. It was this entire liquidity pool he was involved with. Sunil says you can track the wallets. The exploit was actually published 12 hours ago, on some hacker site, but no one was saying anything, because they knew as soon as people found out the price would crash. So it didn't have anything to do with the link he clicked last night. It wasn't targeted." Chase looked up at her, gratefully. She took off another layer of the clothes she'd put on to go skiing, unwrapping a scarf and unzipping a hoodie.
"We still think it was," appeared on her phone. "There's no information. It might not be a bad idea if you canceled the show tonight. You all should leave, go to a different resort."
"Are you serious? And can you please turn off that filter?"
"Yes, sorry, my dear. I forgot that was on." The usual castle backdrop was replaced with an ocean reflecting a clear, almost painfully blue sky. Nico the flamingo bobbed up and down on the waves. The avatar was wearing sunglasses, with whatever Nico was looking at projected in reverse on the lenses, as if they were AR goggles.
Nico switched to voice, his accent thicker than normal. "Sadly, I am serious. It's my fault, I'm afraid, or at least the DAOs fault. We've poked something with a stick that should not have been poked."
"You summoned a daemon?" Sunitha asked.
"No. Well, yes, actually, now that you've mentioned it. Those trolls in the stream. Some of them were a branch of the pseudoghost code."
"Hold on. I'm going to put you on speakerphone."
"Hi, everybody. Sunil, Chase. If you want to put on the AR or VR goggles I sent you, then...no? Okay, fine. I was telling Sunitha about the pseudoghost."
The waitress came to check on them, knocking and then opening the door. To her credit, she read the room, and didn't say anything more after her, "Y'all need anything?" met only shakes of the head and distracted looks.
"Should this be, like...a secure call?" Sunil asked.
"Well, my dear, that was the reason for my suggestion. But to be honest, unless 'y'all' want to crawl inside a faraday cage, the people who did this, should they be so inclined, will be privilege to this call. I apologize. There are, currently, some agents, probably foreign, that are engaged in a conspiracy to commit a terrorist act, some kind of false flag to discredit crypto, or an environmental group, or both. It seems like they might want to kill Chase."
Chase stood up, staring at Sunitha's phone. Nico was still a flamingo. Currently, there were daemonic horns jutting out of his skull.
"You mean...metaphorically?"
"No," the flamingo said.
"Why?" Chase asked.
"Let me tell you about the pseudoghost. Originally, it was just the idea of some hack novelist. The narrator of his novels, according to the fiction, was an algorithm from another dimension. A being of pure memesis, able to travel between dimensions before the merge."
"Screw this," Chase said. "Jump ahead to the part where someone wants to kill me."
"They think you're the person most likely to make the pseudoghost real."
"Is this one of those 'I'm here from the future to kill you because you will be a hero in the robot wars?'" Sunitha asked, trying to get Sunil's read on the situation.
"Not quite," Nico said. His sunglasses were showing a kind of slide-show of his conversation points. "The pseudoghost isn't from our dimension's future, according to the copy-pasta, just a parallel reality that happens to resemble one that our world might someday become. As I was saying earlier, the pseudoghost achieved a sort of local singularity, a flash-point in the fitness landscape of digital evolution (in the world of the novel), because it was possible that they arose as a pure meme, a garden state."
"You didn't just throw our own album name back at us, did you?" Sunitha was starting to feel very creeped out by the flamingo, floating on an eternal sea, mirroring a cloudless sky.
Sunitha had seen Chase an hour ago, drinking coffee at the Snowfoot bar, looking haunted. The mug had the logo of the lodge rampant on a field of red.
The redness of his eyes went beyond hangover. He'd looked like he was about to run away when she sat down next to him. She asked him how he was, saying his name. The waitress who had been their server during the gaming session came by to refill his coffee, with impeccable timing, giving him time to think. She all but winked at Sunitha as she walked away.
He'd been hacked. Although, Chase had told her, with fresh self-loathing on his breath, that was too generous of a word. He'd clicked on a link. Probably a phishing attack. He'd been drunk, and careless.
Sunitha had looked at him, thinking quickly. "I know you are feeling vulnerable right now. I'm going to say something that will hurt your feelings, then ask you a question. Okay?"
"I guess?"
"I'm not interested in you, romantically or sexually. Can I give you a hug?"