Henry Clark often wondered how he’d landed the position he had at the school as the administrator of all things IT. He had no real idea what he wanted to do with himself after high school aside from the vague notion that he liked computers. He had got into a mild argument with his father one day, in which his dad had claimed that in the guard they allowed you to drink at the age of eighteen. Henry had yelled something along the lines of “you don’t believe in alcohol, father!” at his dad and found himself at the recruiter’s office the next day.

He did his time in the service and then floated from one gig to the next until he’d landed the job at District Seven’s Elective High School. The previous administrator had a very lazy attitude towards the job and Henry threw himself at it, doing his best to improve and update the infrastructure of the whole school, running cables through the whole building and adding access points in strategic locations. He had network stacks in each wing on all three floors of the school providing each with multiple layers of redundancy.

So, it wasn’t like the switch above the janitor’s closet on the east wing of the first floor was essential for the school’s network to operate. In fact, most people wouldn’t even notice there was an issue at all. But he was a bit of a perfectionist, and seeing the strange inconsistencies of the packets coming through that stack had his hackles on the rise.

One of the perks of his job was that he had the veritable keys to the kingdom. Anywhere a device needed network connectivity he had access to, which just so happened to be everywhere. He was just about to slip his key into the door of the closet when Derek arrived with Ryan in tow. Both were heaving in lungfuls of air, so we were unable to speak for a few minutes.

“Holy cow, Ryan! I just meant it would be a good learning opportunity, not that he needed to sprint his way down here.” He shook his head at the two boys and turned back to the door, lining his key up with the lock.

“Wait, don’t!” Ryan stifled himself from shouting. Being out of breath assisted with that.

“Don’t what?” Henry asked as he turned the handle and began opening the door. Both the boys winced, as if expecting something to explode. “Guys?” Henry gave them a quizzical expression. “You…Okay?”

“What? Yeah, we’re just messing around,” Derek said dismissively. “What’s going on?” Mr. Clark shook his head, turning back to the closet.

“Not sure yet. Some packet loss. Other packets have messed up headers. Some getting routed to the wrong device.” He had been flipping the light switch up and down while he spoke, looking up and around, but no illumination came. In the end he pulled out his flashlight and handed it to Derek. “You mind?” he asked.

Derek clicked on the light and shone it up at the ceiling while Henry unfolded a step ladder he grabbed from the wall, climbed up, and started poking at the ceiling tile. A few white flakes fell on his shoulders before he got the tile up and out of the way. The roar of fans running at high speed filled the cramped room, bleeding out into the hallway. Ryan absently slipped his hand inside his pocket, tentatively reaching out to the orb. It didn’t shock him this time, but was warm to the touch. He was watching the various flashing green lights of the switch as Henry hooked up a diagnostic tool to one of the ports.

After a moment Mr. Clark apparently got the data he needed and slid the tile back into place, muffling the fans and sprinkling a little more of the white dust everywhere. He looked towards the broom hanging on a rack next to where the step ladder had been, obviously thinking about cleaning up, took a look back at the device in his hand, shrugged, and put the step ladder back in place. He saw the amused judgement on Derek’s face and answered with a challenging “what?” They both chuckled as he closed the door.

“Want to see the results?” he asked the two of them. Ryan looked at the time on his watch and shook his head sadly.

“Sorry, I’ve got Biology next. Last time I missed a class it took me forever to catch up. Thanks though.” Derek gave him a fist bump, and they shared a look. Neither had any idea what they had been expecting, aside from the fact that they were expecting something. The lack of anything out of the ordinary left them both feeling a bit more let down than relieved.

There were only two more periods to the day, both classes were a bit of a slog but also required Ryan to be directly involved in labs, so he didn’t have much time to let his extracurricular concerns impede on his thoughts. Instead, his mind just let them stew in the background until the final bell rang and the students were set free to their own devices for the rest of the evening. He and Derek had planned to meet up outside the school Library, where the Astral Academy Study Group met up every other day. They had about fifteen minutes before the club would start and took the time to discuss the non-event from earlier.

“Look, I’m actually a little more worried that we didn’t see anything than if there had been some entity in there,” Derek said.

“I know, right? Somehow, despite seeing for myself, the ominous has only increased.”

“Well,” Derek continued. “The data Mr. Clark collected seemed to indicate some kind of electro-magnetic interference damaged the switches. We swapped them out and they’re running fine now.”

“Hmm,” Ryan took on a thoughtful expression. “So, something definitely was there but isn’t anymore. Either it’s gone now, or it’s intermittent and will come back.”

“I had another thought.” Derek said. “What if it’s still there, but the type of interference is no longer magnetic, but some other type of radiation that is invisible to the human eye. And what if we had some way to see those parts of the spectrum?” Ryan nodded as he understood what Derek was getting at.

“You want me to try and check with the PerSpectives? See if they detect anything?”

“Exactly,” Derek said. “We can try it now, if you want, or wait until after the meeting.”

“Won’t the door be locked?” Ryan asked.

“You didn’t notice? Mr. Clark totally forgot to lock it.”

“Forgot, huh?” Ryan threw up air quotes at the word. “Either way, let’s wait until after,” Ryan said. “I’m already late trying to get into the club, I don’t want to show up late on the day I’m trying to join late.” Derek rolled his eyes at Ryan’s convoluted sentence, and they headed into the Library.