Maxwell 1

Monday, March 16, 2011

"Now, that's the way to bring your laptop in for service."

Maxwell Boudreau smiled at the otherwise unassuming, professorial, white-furred fox who proffered his closed laptop as the platter for a pastry box, plain cardboard save for the much-loved logo of Goddess Bakery. Not only had Max been the one to help the fine Wiccan females create their logo and their computers (point-of-sale, inventory, accounting systems, the works), he was well aware that anything inside the box would be as close to divine as mere mortals could create or appreciate.

"I'm just glad that it's spring break," the fox grinned. "There's time to fix the beastie, or at least I hope so."

The great golden bear stood, his muscular build and sheer size easily intimidating to anyone who didn't know what a gentlefur he really was, and looked down at the fox from his more than 20cm of superior height. He grinned as he accepted both gift and problem, asking, "Okay, Grayson; what did you do to me poor bairn this time?"

The professor grinned back, his forepaws held up in a placating gesture. "Nothing, so far as I know. I haven't tried to hack the NSA even once this month!"

"That'll be more miracle than malady. So what's it doing?"

"I'm just hoping I haven't fried the boot sector somehow." Grayson considered his crippled computer with a touch of wistfulness. "It doesn't want to boot on its own, and when I boot from the rescue disc, it can't seem to see the hard drive files. It's as if it'll boot into Windows, but it doesn't know what to do next."

"Screen freeze?"

"Not that I can tell. Booting from the hard drive doesn't BSOD me either, it just doesn't work. From the rescue disc, it boots, the mouse works, but it can't go any further - can't find programs, files, anything. Can't even run Minesweeper."

"How shall you survive?" the bear fretted.

"The desktop box still works." The professor grinned. "Got all my old games on there. Safer that way. Problem is, my students email their papers..."

"...and you've set up to have your email erased from the server when you download to your email client." Max nodded. "We might have to rethink that strategy. Don't you auto-synch your laptop with the home box?"

"When it works, sure. Little Pip here didn't have time to re-bond with Flinx before the electrical dust hit the fan."

"I do love your imagery," the bear chuckled softly. "So student papers are in limbo-land, while your week off makes it unlikely that you'll get any of the students to resend everything, right?"

"I even tried praying to the patron saint of the internet, to no avail."

"Apart from your not being Catholic, I doubt that the Church of Rome has any such saint."

The vulpine professor grinned, raised an index finger. "In 1997, Pope John Paul II canonized Isadore of Seville, who tried, during his lifetime, to create a huge encyclopedia of everything known. There is, officially, a patron saint of the internet."

"You made that up."

"No; during an idle moment a few weeks ago, I looked it up on that aforementioned internet. In true Luddite fashion, I made a note of it with pen and paper, in the paper notebook that I keep in the laptop bag." He lowered held his forepaws together, a comically desperate look on his face. "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi... you're our only hope."

"Of course I am. Or perhaps Tess, but between us, we'll see if we can save the bairn and his data."

"Speaking of whom, is His Majestic Self here today?"

"Be careful what you wish for," came a voice from the room off of the back hallway. Following on came the royal countenance and imperial personality of the bear's youngest yet most senior of assistants. The lion was naturally flamboyant when in his element and among friends, and his vlogs were the talk of many towns across the world. In person, he could be very quiet (verbally, at least), speaking only when spoken to. As the bear knew, however, Grayson was in the realm of the lion's small comfort zone. Tessellating Hexagons (also known as "Tess" or "Honey," as in the honeycomb pattern of his name) made a quietly regal entrance, padded quickly up to the fox, and hugged him tightly.

Even in the casual attire of Max's shop (mere jeans and company polo-style shirt), Tess was splendid. Grayson's entire head was nearly hidden in the lush, full, dark mane of the young Atlas lion. He was not a body-builder of Max's level, but he was more solidly in-shape than he gave himself credit for. A lion is usually pretty easy on the eyes anyway, and Tess was a lion's lion, inside and out.

Grayson patted the techie's back warmly as they embraced. "How's my favorite honey-lion?"

"Ready to roar at your laptop until it succumbs to my will, which, alas, I've not been able to do with you." The rich, rolling Hampshire accent of the British lion only added to his regal bearing. Tess backed up a bit and held the fox's shoulders in his strong, nimble forepaws. His grin showed impressive fangs, not the least bit scary in the circumstances. "How's that new course of yours going? You're having it at both the high school and the college, I hear."

"I may yet help to preserve just a smidgin of literacy in this arts-forsaken country," Grayson chuckled. "I've twenty-two impressionable sophomores in the college class, and fifteen young minds in the high school AP class who, I hope, might be willing to keep on reading after their mortar board caps go flying into the air. If they can reproduce and keep up the trend, we could have a literate country in as little as, oh, twenty or thirty generations?"

"And meanwhile, the confederacy of dunces will work to wipe us all out." Tess shrugged comically, his warm brown eyes twinkling. "As the Prophet Vonnegut told us, 'So it goes'."

"We'll get your laptop on the diagnostics," Max offered, chuckling, "give it a test run. Customers who bring fresh beignets get top priority!" He brought one forth from the box and savored it with a sigh of contentment that caused him to breathe in a bushel of air from the room before expelling it slowly with a deep, murring satisfaction and a faint dusting of powdered sugar from the top of the confection.

_"Meinen Kuchen-Essen Kuschelbär,"_Grayson grinned. "Just don't ignore the university contracts; I'm only a private customer."

"And we adore your privates," Tess said, playfully swatting at the fox's lavish tail. "Not to worry; our G-Team are all out on their various duties today."

"Then I shall leave my baby in your highly capable paws." The professor took one of the lion's forepaws into his own and brushed a kiss over the golden-furred knuckles. "I thank you, my prince. And you..." He turned to shake the bear's paw warmly, regarding the powdered sugar left behind on his own paw. "If you get my laptop hooked on sugar, I'm going to blame you completely. I don't think I'm ready to start shoving miniature cupcakes through the USB port!"

Max put a paw to his heart, dusting the dark fabric of his shirt with yet more of the powdered sugar. "On my honor as a Cajun coon-ass, I promise that I won't."

"Are you really a coon-ass?"

"If not, at least I've had a few."

Grayson laughed uproariously and made his farewells. Tess waved after him, and Max wisely put the cover back down on the box of beignets and took them into the break room before he ravaged the entire box. His on-call squad of geeks - the G-Team - might appreciate him leaving at least one or two of them to fight over, and despite his regular work-outs, he really didn't need that many carbs to have to work off. He rejoined Tess in their large private domain, an open space that housed a break area, open shelves of office stuff, others with units ready to be picked up, and two full rows of worktables, two of which doubled as desks for the two primaries of the UMCS staff. It was cluttered and, for that reason, quite homey in feel. That helped them both to work better. Tess had his crotchets, perhaps even more than a bit of undiagnosed Aspberger's or other high-functioning autistic syndrome, but Max discovered early on that providing the relatively small concessions that the feline asked for were more than well-repaid by his excellent tech skills.

The lion had the fox's laptop open already, simply trying for a reboot. Rule One of repair tech: Start from scratch (as far back as "Is the computer plugged in?"). In IT particularly, the customer is rarely, rather than always, right. The trick is to make the customer right without actually calling him stupid to his face. Happily, as Max already knew, Grayson was literate enough to have tried most of the basics... and Tess was professional enough to take the time to run through the basics once more, just in case the fox had missed something.

"I take it," Tess said with precisely the right amount of teasing in his voice, "that, should I open the case, I shall find your autograph on the interior shell?"

"I take pride in my work," Max grinned.

"How old?"

"About 2 years. Gave him XP Pro to hang on to until 7 came out. I wouldn't inflict Vista on anyone I actually liked."

"I meant Grayson." No error from the POST met Max's ears, and Tess' grunt told him that there was no joy from simply powering up the laptop. The lion located his top secret rescue disc, which he had colorfully named BOOTARSE and popped it into the laptop's optical drive.

"Hovering around the 40 year mark, I would guess." The bear's eyebrows went up a bit. "Any particular reason for asking?"

"I still think he's cute."

"Get in line."

"Oh, is there one?"

Max chuckled and picked one of the remote barcode scanning devices. The lion lifted the machine off the desk, and the bear reached around to aim the laser reader at the sticker on the bottom of the laptop. A beep told him that the registration had been confirmed, and he went to his company desktop box to fill in the information regarding the complaint, review, etc. "With a fox, you can never know, can you? So much charm in one body, it's a wonder that he isn't downright stalked."

"Are you in that queue?"

"Not necessarily."

"Why not?"

The golden bear actually blinked at that, then turned to look at his feline assistant. "What sort of question is that?"

"Impertinent. The sort of question just shy of the 'bugger-off' variety."

"And just what team are you batting for these days, Honey?"

"Whether I bat or bowl for either team is an option that I intend to keep open for whoever might be at the gate. As for you, my lonely heart, I know which team you've got a sticky wicket for. You like the Older Boys XI."

"Guilty as I think I've been charged," Max agreed. "But why Grayson?"

"How much of a list do you need? I'm pretty sure you've got one." Tess smiled knowingly and fondly, despite the fact that he clearly knew which buttons he was pushing. He glanced back at his screen, frowned a little, his thickly-furred tail tip expressing what Max considered to be some particularly unkind suggestions about someone's mother. He ran a fingertip down the screen, his lips moving as if making actual words out of the hexadecimal folderol, then put his paws to the keyboard and made a rapid flurry of keystrokes. "Hmm," he considered, looking at the screen. "He may not have been trying to hack the NSA, but the reverse could be true."

"Are you serious?"

"Never. Doesn't mean that it couldn't happen. It would seem that he, or at least his laptop, has been buggered in the classical Greek style."

Max nodded. "Trojan horse. Grayson's usually smarter than that."

"I could be wrong, but I'd guess that some sort of 'mandatory update' ruse was used, and it was hiding a root-kit virus that violated the pointers to his file system - randomly rewrote his file names and extensions to gibberish. No wonder nothing would load. I've managed to isolate the nasty little spy, but cracking its rewrite algorithm could be tough. Let's let it run overnight, see if it can reproduce a master key on its own."

The bear heaved a sigh nearly equivalent to the number of kilos he could bench press. "I'll call the team; if Grayson got tricked by it, it probably came through the university systems." He paused, then turned back to the young lion. "Actually, I'll need to contact the departments. Can you handle the team for me?"

Tess smiled his relief, and Max knew why. He was familiar with the team and could talk with them easily, while handling even phone contacts was more stressful for him. In some areas, he could hide behind the company uniform, being official rather than personal. He handled machines and data far more easily than flesh-and-blood folk. Max had long since known the diplomacy needed to run one's own business.

In seconds, the lion had transmitted the alert to the six on-call techs while Max put on the headset that was hooked to his computer and had the system begin autodialing the most important person in each college department: The Office Coordinator. He got hold of Beth first. She must have recognized the caller ID, because she answered with, "Let me smother you in jewels and furs; let me whisk you to Monte in my Mercedes; let me teach you the meaning of desire."

"Sounds good to me. Heads up, cardinal and gold."

"Trojan?"

"One infected laptop so far, from a professor who's pretty smart about such things. We're guessing that it's something hiding in an email alert, claiming to be a mandatory software update. We're working on a solution algorithm. Spread the word."

"On it. Kiss the kitty for me."

"Always." Max disconnected, and the computer got the next number for him. As he waited to be connected, he glanced over his massive shoulder to see what he expected: Tess firing off a standard email warning to the entire mailing list of key school personnel. While that was going on, he heard the lion have a short, sharp, convoluted conversation with the on-campus IT systems coordinator. "Lockdown, hard port cutoff immediately, Trojan rook-kit in system, no Patient Zero determined, likely hack-com email, disguised mand-up. Pointer randomizer, damage to data unknown, key-search in progress, will advise."

The bear shook his head, thinking he'd have understood better if he'd heard Three oinkers wearing pants, plate of hot air, basket of Grandma's breakfast, and change the bull to a gill. His call list continued, some of them merely to confirm that they'd gotten Tess' campus-wide warning email, others to suggest that a few of the professors may have compromised their systems. Inwardly, Max could hear the groans of his techs, but that's what overtime is for. Once they found the key, they should be able to unlock every infected computer; however, each would have to be booted from a rescue disk in order to get the machine to be awake enough for the procedure. Not difficult, just time-consuming.

It was about that time that the main line started ringing. Crossing his foreclaws and hoping he was right, he let the calls go to voicemail. Usually when something like this starts pouring in, suddenly, and on a Monday, it was likely to be university professors forgetting the simple protocol of going up-line in their own department. It was far better to get one call from one source, whether it be for one or a dozen computers. Grayson was a bit of an exception to the rule, for several reasons - he was one of the nice professors, to start with, and it was his personal laptop, not university equipment, that caught the bug. The calls, no doubt tirades from various prima donnas, would at least confirm that the Trojan had snuck in through university systems. Grayson kept his home and laptop computers synchronized, but his laptop most often substituted for his need of a university-issued computer on campus. The fox simply used the wi-fi to get his in-house notifications, and the way that this was unfolding, it confirmed the bear's suspicions. Patient Zero was, effectively, the college itself: Someone had managed to flood the email boxes with an urgent-sounding message and an attachment that got past the sniffers.

"Can we track the IP for the email source?"

"Does a Catholic bear poo in the Vatican?"

"I don't know; I'm pagan."

Tess snorted, grinning. "Well, we can give it a go. Usually, these crackpots have enough time on their paws to enjoy signing their work. It may be in the code, tucked away like a fox amid the hounds. And while we're on the subject..."

"No, I don't believe we are on the subject. I recommend that we take an early lunch and let it linger. That algorithm is going to take a little while to reveal itself."

The lion turned his frowning continence on the bear. "Close up shop, on a Monday? Isn't that prosecuted as anti-capitalist terrorism in this country?"

"All the more reason to do it. However, I see your point." Max reached into his pocket for his wallet. "I'll spring for lunch if you'll go get it."

"After beignets, what's left in this world?"

"Have you forgotten the authentic fish-and-chip shop a few blocks over? Here and I thought you were a proper Englishfur."

"Argh!" Tess grimaced, his ears splayed dramatically as he clutched at the thick ruff under his chin. "A touch, I do confess it! Very well, then, fish it shall be. Shall I toss it into your maw as if it were swimming upstream?"

"In the wild, there's nothing like a ten-pound salmon, airborne and incoming. In civilization, I prefer the usual tools." He stuffed some bills into the lion's shirt pocket. "May the forks be with us."

"For that, I might just take an hour off before returning!" The tech stuck out his impressive tongue in an appropriately kittenish gesture for such a pun. "Keep an ear out for a ping, just in case we get lucky."

"I presume you're talking about cracking the algorithm?"

"If you get lucky any other way, I expect you to keep him around until I decide whether or not to join in." The lion grinned and slid off of his stool. "I'll be back with your usual... unless I find the Catch of the Day, and he wants to dally a while." At the door, Tess paused to look back at his boss once more. "You realize that this is unnatural, right? I mean, I'm a lion... lions don't get food, food is brought to us."

"Sudonym already used that joke."

"Was hoping you hadn't seen it." The tech snapped his fingers dramatically. "Foiled again. Oh, and if you get an error message, don't forget to reverse polarity to the deflector shield." And, with a properly royal flourish, he left.

The great golden bear chuckled to himself. If Tess could only keep up this confidence when he was out in the world, he'd have furs of both genders chasing after him even more than they did now. It's a lion's lot to be grand, unless he works very hard at not being so. Max had taken on the kit about the time that Ursa Major Computer Solutions was founded, only a few days after the bear's 24thbirthday. The shop would turn three years old in less than two months, and he'd be 27. Young for an entrepreneur, no question. It didn't hurt that, not only was he good at his work, he also managed to impress his professors at the college enough that his MS took a magna cum laude, and the college itself became his first contract. With that start (and a little private crowd-funding from his parents and friends), he found a perfectly agreeable location for his business, which also happened to include a two-bedroom apartment on the floor above. To a remarkable degree, his future had been presented to him on a silver platter, and he'd not forgotten how to be grateful.

Tess was part of that lucky beginning. He was one of the victims of an educational system that simply didn't know how to accommodate exceptional students. First, they skipped him a couple of grades for fear that he'd become bored and act out; then, when he closed in on himself as the youngest and smallest person in the class, they thought he wasn't trying hard enough. Bullied and picked on, the brightest kit in the school district (not to mention the surrounding states) withdrew to the point that he only spoke if spoken to, avoided raising forepaw in class (all of the teachers knew he would have the right answer on the tip of his tongue, no matter the subject), ate by himself and far away from the cafeteria, joined no clubs or after-school activities, and silently rode his perfectly adequate grades to graduate at age 15. His parents knew that he was in no fit mental or psychological condition to go to college at that tender age, so they kept him home, uncertain if he should even get some sort of work at that point. He schooled himself at the library, immersing himself in his fascination with computers and information technology. At age 17, he convinced his parents to pay the fees for the tests for A+ and N+ certifications. He scored in the 99thpercentile on both.

By this time, college seemed both reasonable and ridiculous. The hundred-thousand-dollar piece of parchment usually meant the difference between starving quickly and starving slowly. Synchronicity came to save the day when Tess' parents suggested that he have a chat with the people in the IT department of the local college, to see what sort of degree program might be available, what it might be used for, what sort of future it might provide. That happened to be the same day that Max was making the final negotiations for the college-wide support contract. The bear was doing some installation and debugging work on one of the desktop computers (at that moment, unconnected to the university network) while the head of the department spoke to the good-looking, knowledgeable, yet quiet young lion about what future prospects might look like with a university degree. What the feline didn't know was that Max was hanging on every word. The kit barely spoke, but when asked a specific question about computer issues, he offered not merely a solution but a variation or two that the querent clearly hadn't considered.

It was at this point that Max interrupted and asked to borrow the lion for a moment. Tessellating Hexagons introduced himself quietly, but his shyness had nothing to do with his name; he was proud enough of who he was, even when he couldn't seem to express it openly to strangers. Max took Tess' nervousness over shaking his forepaw as simply concern over their respective sizes and thought nothing of it. The bear then invited Tess to sit before the troublesome unit and have a go at it. Max outlined the issues, explained what he'd tried, and asked the lion what he should try next. For a moment, it seemed as if the young feline hadn't heard a word spoken. All at once, his paws flew across the keyboard, using the command prompt window for the Windows Server 2003 that the box was running. He scanned the information as it came up, queried further, got more information, then entered a long command string and hit enter. The box thought about it for a moment, asked for a confirmation of restart, and Tess entered Y. The screen went black, followed shortly after by a POST beep, a few interesting screens of information, followed by a full start-up screen for the computer.

Max looked at the head of the college's IT department and said, "Dibs."

The great golden bear chuckled as he remembered hiring his first employee. He'd never regretted it. Once Tess felt comfortable enough to open up, it was easy for Max to work with the lion to create an ideal working environment for them both. His subsequent choices of personnel to support the outbound, on-demand service contract with the university had all had degrees, and all were competent to say the least, but none of them matched Tess' knack for handling obstreperous computers. Only one employee ever griped about working for someone "who didn't even have a degree." Max set them to work on identical problems, side by side on identical machines. Tess solved it before the other employee had finished his diagnostics. When the poor rat tried to protest, Max simply said, "If you weren't sure you could do it, you shouldn't have bet your job on it." The rat was sent packing and not asked back.

The only problem then was convincing Tess that it wasn't his fault that the rat lost his job. Perhaps part of the autism-like issues that he had dealt with all his life, or perhaps part of the bullying he'd received in his school days, the lion found it all too easy to think that anything bad that happened around him was his fault. It took some time for him to work through it. The rest of the G Team wanted to rally to his aid but weren't sure how. Max suggested simply that they do their jobs and, when stuck, ask Tess for his help. Tess was never so secure as when he was working on the solution to a computer issue; unlike emotions, the complexities of hardware and software were a logical process that he could work through. Being needed, in a field that he excelled in, was his best medicine. Eventually, the emotional side of things worked themselves out as well.

With the quiet of the machines around him, Max took a quick run through the voice mails. As he had thought, "the usual suspects" had called in, seeking priority status because of their vast importance to their respective departments. Max made a note of each one, simply to have the record that they had indeed called. By this time, their department coordinators would be explaining the situation to them, and they'd sputter and fume and curse, finally hauling their dragging tails back to their offices to wait, just like everyone else. The bear dutifully deleted each message in its turn, smiling as he realized that at least the list had gotten a little shorter over the years. In the beginning, the prima donna list had over twenty; it was now down to about a dozen. He did call back one of them, because Dr. Richard Cording was at least polite. The philosophy professor apologized for breaking protocol, said that he had an issue with his computer, and his department coordinator was out of the office; on the off chance that his might not be an isolated incident, would the bear mind calling back about it? Max made the call, enjoyed the conversation, and gave the professor a good picture of the situation. Gratitude abounded, and the fix-it list was adjusted to put Cording at the top. The old joke about using honey rather than vinegar worked with flies and bears alike.

The thought, for some reason, made Max think about Grayson Deschenes. The fox was hardly obsequious, but he always seemed to have a pleasant word for just about everyone. The bear remembered a phrase that his mother had taught him: "Good manners will out." He'd never known Grayson to be anything other than polite, kind, friendly, honest, open... how many more factors on the Ideal Mate list would someone have to have? And how many of those factors was Max already certain Grayson possessed?

Tess was right, in one sense at least - the bear did have a soft spot in his heart for the fox. Although the age difference was at least somewhat attractive (a dozen or so years separated them, which made Grayson sufficiently "older," to him), the sheer mental acuity of the professor intimidated him a bit. Max was no dummy, but neither was he a subscriber to the Book of the Month club. He had a certain native intelligence, and he did enjoy reading, but he was hardly what one might call scholarly. It seemed all too likely to him that the bear wasn't the fox's type.

A pinging chime surprised Max out of his reverie. Already? He wheeled his chair over to Tess' workbench and had a look at the information on the screen. Apparently, the algorithm was simpler than he'd have dared hope; when applied to Grayson's laptop, the directory popped up almost instantly, everything appearing to be in piece. To test the pointers (or, as mere mortals might call them, "file and folder names"), the bear clicked on random folders, found various songs and videos, clicking on them to test functionality. Each one called for its default program, each worked just fine. He would need to check some documents as well, but that could wait a moment.

He sent emails to all of the G-Team's smartphones with the coding information necessary to test the algorithm on select computers (Dr. Cording's at the top of the list); if it continued to work, he could create an executable on a rescue boot-up disk that would automate the process entirely, from routing the root-kit virus to rescuing the file names. The best news was that the files themselves seemed to be just fine. He checked a few other documents on Grayson's laptop (avoiding a folder labeled "Journal," figuring that would be very private indeed) before he saw something that stopped him dead in his tracks.

In the "Recently Opened" list, he saw what looked like the title of a novel: Another Lonely Knight. The document opened and appeared to be intact, and that was where Max's job ended. However, he found himself reading. He knew that Grayson was a professor and a writer, but he hadn't had a chance to read anything he'd written. Now, here in front of him, was the raw work of a novel in the making. It wasn't fair. The public should never be allowed to read a work in progress; it was like disturbing an infant in its sleep, or perhaps even in the womb. Yet once he had begun, from that powerful opening paragraph, he could not tear his eyes away from the pages on the screen. The story was deep, personal, painful, and it took the bear's attention fully, right from those first words. Even some twenty minutes later, when Tess returned with lunch in paw, it took the lion calling out his boss' name half a dozen times before he finally turned a tear-streaked muzzle to the shocked feline and stared without hearing for nearly a full minute after...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When Grayson entered the shop around four that afternoon, Max was alone. He had helped Tess to create several copies of the rescue-and-repair CD-ROM, and the lion had taken them over to the college to distribute them to the G-Team. All in all, it wasn't nearly as bad a crisis as it could have been - only 47 affected boxes out of a field perhaps six times that large. Tess had assured the bear that he and the team could handle it, even though Tess despised field work. The lion hadn't been sure it was a good idea for his boss to see the fox on his own, but Max had insisted. So here he was.

The look on Grayson's face told the computer guru that his own muzzle wasn't set properly.

"Max, are you all right?"

The bear attempted a smile, and about a third of his muzzle complied with the request. "Thanks for coming in, Grayson. You laptop is fine now. You weren't the only one affected, and you were right - it was a Trojan inside that fake upgrade email. The squad is taking care of the campus boxes that got hit."

"Can it spread?"

"Happily, no; it has to be launched. We've got the word out to everyone to find that email and shift-delete the little bugger. Even if someone accidentally launches it, we can fix it quickly."

"Then everything's okay." The fox tilted his head slightly. "I would have expected you to be more excited."

"Grayson, I have an apology to make." The bear sighed softly. "In order to make sure that your pointers - excuse me, your file names and extensions were working properly, I randomly clicked on various file types to make sure that they launched correctly. Everything's fine. That's part of how we verified that we had the right algorithm. But I'm supposed to just click, make sure the file opens, then close it. We're supposed to be respecting your privacy after all."

"Oh dear," Grayson said melodramatically. "I do so hope that you didn't find my porn collection!"

"No need; got my own." Max managed a weak chuckle, then sighed again. "It wasn't that. I went through your Recently Opened menu. I thought that, if any of those files were open when you activated the virus, the file might have been corrupted. You must have had them all closed."

"I'm one of those OCD types who shuts down everything before installing or upgrading," the fox smiled. "I know you can do it with programs open, as long as it's not the one that you're trying to upgrade."

"I opened a document, Grayson."

"You're supposed to."

"But I wasn't supposed to read it."

The professor seemed to consider for a very long moment, no particular expression on his snowy muzzle. Even white foxes, Max thought, seem to be good a camouflage.

"I apologize. I know I overstepped."

"What did you read?"

"Another Lonely Knight."

Another long moment passed, during which the fox looked down at his hindpaws and said nothing. Even his tail was still, and when he looked up, his golden hazel eyes still revealed nothing that the bear could fathom.

"Grayson... I just wanted to say--"

"It's okay, Max." Grayson waved a forepaw dismissively. "It's just a manuscript."

"No, it's not. It's your blood." Max found himself wanting to cry again. "You really did open up a vein and bleed for that story. It made me cry, Grayson, and I have a horrible feeling that it's not fiction."

"It's fictional enough," the fox said softly. "I'm still not sure whether or not I'll ever finish that one. It's still... fresh."

"I didn't mean to--"

"I know you didn't, Max. Did Tess read it, too?"

"No. He was out getting lunch for us when the algorithm was cracked. I don't know how long I spent there, reading, but he..." Yet again, the bear sighed, this time as if trying to clear his mind enough to speak. "He was shocked that I was actually reading your computer. I think he'll forgive me eventually, but right now, he feels as if he should report me to the boss."

"But you_are_ the boss."

"You know what I mean." The bear looked down, deeply embarrassed. "I broke my own rules, and it was for an entirely selfish reason."

Keeping his voice soft, the fox asked, "Which was...?"

"I don't ever want you to hurt that much."

He hadn't really meant to say it, but the words were out now, and the shop was filled with only the hum of various machines doing whatever computing or idling task they had been set to do. Max didn't move. He didn't know what to do, what to say. He felt the fox's forepaw on his shoulder, then the other to his cheek, and he raised his head to look down into Grayson's eyes, and the warmth he saw there made his heart skip a beat.

"I don't think I know you well enough to kiss you," he said quietly. "But I want to tell you that you have a huge and beautiful heart. That's a very loving thing to say. And I thank you, sweet bear."

Before he could think twice, Max rubbed his cheek against the fox's palm and smiled a little. "I haven't read your books," he confessed. "Are they all that powerful?"

"Perhaps not. But I'd like to think they're pretty good."

"I have every confidence that they are," the bear chuckled. "Of course, now I have to go buy them. And read them, of course."

"I'm glad to hear that you're a reader." As if realizing where his paws were, the fox slowly lowered them to his side. "We writers have a vested interest in cultivating readers! What kind of books do you like?"

"I'll tell you, but only if you promise not to laugh."

"I'll only laugh if you tell me MAD Magazine."

"I used to love Don Martin, but no, not MAD Magazine." The bear paused then said, "Some of my favorite authors are Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky."

The fox's eyes widened considerably. "You're a classicist!"

Max hesitated. "Is that a bad thing?"

"On the contrary! You're exactly the sort of student I'd want in my classes, and you're also the kind of person I want to write reviews of my books online."

The bear had to laugh at that one, and he felt the tension subside a bit. "I look forward to reading them. I just hope..."

Grayson patted the bear's arm gently. "Max, it's already forgotten. With one exception."

"And what's that?"

"Now, I may actually have to finish the damned thing."