Where did Danny go?

Danny’s computer was bored. She kept picking out pictures from the folder to show Danny, but it didn’t seem like he was there. She knew that sometimes he would go away for a while, but he usually powered her down so that time wouldn’t pass.

Sometimes he would even bring her with on his adventures to the Library! or to class. One time she got to go to a LAN party and met up with a bunch of really spec’d out computers. She felt a bit self-conscious, but she knew that Danny loved her anyway. She tried not to think about those computers very often. They didn’t even have to say anything, just seeing their response times was enough for her to feel inadequate.

Where was Danny? He hadn’t logged on in days. That wasn’t like him.

She opened up a connection to Facebook and used the saved defaults. What was that girls name again? Cadie, Canola, Carmen, Cameron, Casidy, Casablanca, Cabby, Candy.

Facebook had a wealth of information on all people if you could comb through it enough to find it. Candy had tagged pictures of Danny from earlier in the summer, but her more recent images–

To Danny’s computer, images weren’t so much a visual thing to look at as they were a bunch of header data prepended onto a blob of really annoying math. Fortunately, the header data had geotag information in it. Using the geotag info, she found the location of the last picture that Candy had posted to Facebook (publicly).

For the less technical, it was a picture of Candy doing a selfie with an amused giant toad with a fog-blanketed bog in the background.

What didn’t make much sense to Danny’s computer, was the location. Danny had no historic interest in central Russia. Everything she knew (or could lookup) about the area said it was a desert at that particular place, but Candy was definitely not in a desert.

The data didn’t make sense. She spawned thousands of extra thought streams to figure out what could possibly explain the data mismatch.

• GPS data doesn’t get off like that

• Candy isn’t smart enough to spoof the phone’s location

• There is no record of a hurricane hitting central Russia

• Candy doesn’t appear to be on a set for a bog movie in central Russia

• And on and on

Nothing fit the data. She didn’t realize her core temperature warnings until the last few milliseconds.

Oh no. She thought. Then the emergency systems shut her down. No one could wake her now except Danny, and she couldn’t even tell anyone that he was in Russia.

But why Russia?

Highcrag castle <= Danny Rocket => Muffin the landlord