Jessminda42b9 was missing.
Jada had tried to be patient, but she was no longer clinging to the hope that her friend was busy doing something else. Like the other twelve women who had disappeared from the forum she ran, Jessminda had simply stopped posting.
At first, Jada hadn't realized there were disappearances. It wasn't completely uncommon for people to stop posting, or to go long stretches of time in between, even for the close—knit Internet community that composed the forum for sufferers of Kaiser's Syndrome.
It wasn't until the fourth member had dropped out of contact that Jada noticed their members were slowly disappearing. She had phone numbers for some of the missing women, and she had tried to call them all as the weeks had passed. Since they were Internet friends, she didn't always have a way to reach them outside of email or the phone number for some, even though she was the administrator of the forum, but she had continued to send emails every few days that went unanswered.
It was completely unlike the women, most of whom had been her friends since she'd established the forum eight years ago. They had all joined within a few months of her setting up the website for Kaiser's Syndrome sufferers after receiving her own diagnosis. It had been one of the ways she had coped, and as her mobility had dwindled, and her confinement at home had expanded, the forum had become one of the most important parts of her life.
She was deeply alarmed that twelve of her friends had fallen out of contact within the last two months, but Jessminda was particularly upsetting, because they were close friends. They had discovered within a few months of starting to chat that they lived in the same city, so whenever practical, they got together in person. With both of them confined to a wheelchair, it didn't happen as frequently as either would have liked, but it was typical for them to see each other at least once a month.
She hadn't heard from Jessminda for five days now, including emails and phone calls. She had called Jessminda's brother, who often stopped to check in on her, and when he had finally called her back less than thirty minutes ago, it had been with the disquieting news that his sister wasn't home. She usually informed him if she was going somewhere, just to be on the safe side.
Pradheep had also told her the neighbors hadn't seen Jessminda come or go in the last few days. Even in a wheelchair, her friend was a dynamo, often wheeling around the apartment complex or sitting out by the pool in the summertime. It wasn't like her to stay locked up in her apartment for days on end. She wasn't like Jada.
She'd tried notifying the police, but they had dismissed her concerns, taking the view she couldn't possibly be concerned about people not checking in on an online forum. The detective she had spoken with had been slightly rude about the whole thing, as though he considered her a waste of his time.
That meant she'd find no help with the authorities, so the only tool at her disposal was to slip into the underbelly of the world wide web and see what she could dig up. She made herself comfortable, slipped on compression gloves to protect her fragile wrists and finger joints, and began to finesse her way inside databases that were encrypted and technically supposed to be closed to her.
As she made her way around, starting with Internet providers and working outward after learning the identity of each woman who had gone missing over the past two months, she was temporarily amused at her own skills and familiarity with this side of life. Before she had gotten sick and received the unexpected diagnosis of Kaiser's Syndrome, she'd barely used a computer at all, except for work. She'd known how to copy and paste and create new documents, but had no knowledge of how the processes worked or the code that kept everything flowing.
Once she had displayed symptoms, they had moved quickly, and she'd been diagnosed with rapid progression less than a year after the first diagnosis. She had ended up in a wheelchair within two years, and it had changed her life. She stayed home most of the time now, and she had discovered she didn't mind it. The social creature she had been before was the one that felt like the façade that had finally fallen away, rather than her feeling like she was retreating into a shell and hiding from the world.
With all the free time on her hands, and looking for some way to use it, since she could no longer work as a paralegal at the busy law firm where she had been employed, she had learned all kinds of useful information. That had somehow led to her finding her way into hacking, almost by accident.
There was something fun and pleasing about solving the mysteries and breaking the code, and there was an illicit thrill that went with looking through all the deepest, darkest places of the Internet that had drawn her. She wasn't the best cracker around, but she was pretty good, and she had learned it all easily.
Two hours later, she leaned back in her wheelchair and pulled her hands from the keyboard, taking a break for a moment as she absorbed everything she had learned.
While it was still fresh in her mind, she put her hands back to the keyboard and pulled open her blog. It was an unusual posting for her, since she was far more likely to write about the daily challenges of living with Kaiser's Syndrome, or share her recipes and cooking, which was another hobby of hers.
She didn't touch on hacking or conspiracy theories even in a casual way usually, but her blog seemed like the best venue at the moment. The authorities wouldn't take her seriously, and she couldn't reveal her source of information to any recognized media establishment. She would have to act as a citizen journalist and hope enough people became interested in the topic to force the authorities to investigate.
This is a different blog post for me, everyone. As you know, if you're a reader of my blog, I've run a forum for Kaiser's Syndrome victims the last eight years. There are only about eighty—five members, so when they started to disappear, I took notice. These are the kind of women who don't just stop talking to us one day and drop off the face of the earth. For a lot of us, we're as close as family.
I called the local police, but Detective Thorne dismissed my concerns, so I had to become more creative. I've discovered it's not just my friends going missing. My source revealed there are almost four hundred active cases of missing women with Kaiser's Syndrome at the moment worldwide.
