everything falls apart — a serial

Foreword III

Saturday morning — well, closer to afternoon than morning by the time I dragged myself out of bed. There was that phone with the clock moving slowly across the screen like a new toy for the bored house cat that I was.

I tapped the screen to life and gave a good long look at Miss Alice before the screen faded to black. I tapped the cracked surface again, glad that the spiderwebs were localized on Mister Handsome, with only a stray fissure touching Alice’s shoulder.

Something about her eyes as they looked into the camera made me want to know more about someone who would abandon both car and phone. She didn’t have the look of someone who would just go with that kind of flow.

Alice Donovan.

I’m no internet jockey, but I am pretty good at finding things when I put my mind to it. I brewed up some coffee and sat down at my laptop to see what I could discover about Alice.

Right away, I found a blog site called “After Everything Falls Apart” with an address of alicedonovan.[withheld].com. It contained two posts. The oldest was a standard “Hello World!” entry that was never deleted. The newer post contained only the following:

Under the Entry — coming soon!
[24 Sept 19:01 CDT] by Alice.Donovan.73

Found another way to reclaim part of Kyle’s past, some people who tell me they know a way under. I’m not expecting much, but it will be nice to re-live some of what Kyle once lived, even if his scene is long gone.

I miss him. God, do I miss him.

I can’t say when or what exactly, for reasons that I’ll go into later. But I’ll post what I find afterward here. Pictures, notes, the whole kit and caboodle.

Wish me luck!

I couldn’t say what any of it meant at the time, but the mention of Kyle was enough to convince me I was on the right track, so I started looking for more from Alice.Donovan.73 on the platform.

I didn’t find any other sites with that handle as an author, but she left a handful of comments across several blogs.

One of the things that drives me crazy about people on the internet is that so many of them don’t think twice before giving away all kinds of private data. That “73” at the end of Alice’s handle got me wondering if she had the same bad habit. The undeleted “Hello World!” post suggested that she was more of a casual internet visitor than someone who spent a lot of time worrying about leaving a footprint.

I picked up the phone. I was greeted with the picture of Alice and the message “PIN required after device restarts”. Not expecting anything resembling success but wanting to check my sudden inspiration, I typed in “1973” for the PIN. My forefinger hovered over the arrow button for a few seconds, and then I jabbed it.

The phone did some thinking and spinning. Before long I was greeted with the wallpaper of an unlocked phone.

Disbelief filled me as I sat back hard into my chair and stared at the screen until it faded to black.

After several very long minutes, I leaned forward and repeated my actions to see if it was just a fluke.

The phone unlocked.

“Oh, Alice,” I said to an empty kitchen.

To my credit, the phone sat unmolested until nightfall before I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer. I wanted to know more about Alice. Needed to know more.

So I unlocked her phone and did a little poking around. Hours of video and hundreds of photos. Voice memos. A message to someone named Nils, still waiting to be sent. The usual stuff, until it was plain that it wasn’t.

As I said in the beginning: This is not my story. I am only the momentary caretaker of the story.

Alice can tell you the rest herself.