บท 13: FROM 50 TO 100

MINUTES EARLIER

Down at the sublevel where I was tinkering away. The security panel right in front of me this time required fingerprints and DNA biometrics input in order to activate and allow access

The order was first the fingerprint, followed by the blood analysis so I took things one step at a time. For the fingerprint I grabbed one of the chalks from the backpack and went down on one knee then I untied the ribbon which held my hair in a ponytail, making my hair to fall down, covering my face and sight in the process.

"This would have been better if it was shorter"

*SWIPE*

A one handed hair adjustment by crossing my right hand behind my neck and pulling the hair at left side, raising it over my neck, pulling them to the right and dropping them. This fixed the sight issue in a second.

With the ribbon I wrapped it around the chalk and dropped it on the ground, making sure the ribbon properly covered the chalk before I stood up and used my feet to stomp on it, turning the concealed chalk to powder form.

Unfortunately, the pieces were still a bit chunky so I used the edge of the phone to do a more refined job until I finally got the powdery consistency I wanted.

I grabbed the two hotdog boxes from my backpack, holding them in front of me with the tissue protecting my prints from getting on them while I tried to identify which was Brian's and which was mine because I couldn't afford using the wrong fingerprint.

"Which is it?"

With no idea of which was which, I decided to make an educated guess and since mine had only one hotdog in it when it was bought while Brian's had two, then the one with more sauce stains had to be his. Also, the fact that Brian had spilled some sauce when he rushed to me and the kids outside helped me in deciding because when it was time to eat, my hotdog looked like the sauce was mostly intact so the spill must have been from his.

I took a considerable amount of chalk powder and sprinkled it all over the box, blowing off the extra afterwards which revealed some fingerprint marks.

"Okay!"

I pulled back a piece of transparent tape, cutting it off with the knife in the multipurpose screwdriver then I plastered it on the biggest looking print mark I could fimd which most definitely must have been the thumbprint.

To be certain of where the thumbprint was, I mimicked how the box would have been held using the way the prints aligned on the box with what I remembered during the lunch time with Brian on my own box then I slowly removed the tape, capturing the print on it as I pulled back on the tape. Too fast and I stood the risk of destroying the print.

I held the tape in front of my face, inspecting to see how good the print I collected was then I pressed it on the fingerprint scanner on the panel and after scanning for some seconds the screen flashed green.

"Alright, now to the next one" I gave a half smile

The next step was clearing the blood analysis and this was going to be a tough one because I didn't have a vial of Brian's blood lying around somewhere. I needed to be creative in my approach to this dilemma.

Since Amanda and Brian shared a fifty percent DNA similarity I thought of using hers for the scanning, however, fifty percent wasn't going to do the job. I needed to either make it a complete one hundred percent or fool the scanner enough that it thinks that the fifty was one hundred.

I needed to mess with the efficiency rating of the scanners, so with that in mind, I opened up the circuit board and made some changes to the hardware and program with the phone and after some time with it I closed it back up.

"Only one way to find out if all my hard work paid off"

I cracked my knuckles in anticipation which hurt as Amanda's knuckles weren't used to it then I stuck my thumb inside the blood extraction port only to exclaim soon after "Ouch!"

A pin from the inside popped up and pricked my finger, taking a drop of blood for scanning. The display started to read its progress in percentages starting from fivr to ten to fifteen to twenty and from this point on it made increaments of ten percents with each interval.

It did that until it got to ninety percent where it started increasing by one percent in a steady slow pace and so it got to 95%, 96%, 97%, 98%, 99%....

"Wow, looks like this is going to work... Eat it Tom Cruise!" I grinned, also forgetting the fact of how truly smart I was with me usually questioning my own ingenuity however my joy was cut short when...

[ERROR]

The screen started to flash red with the writing [PLEASE INSERT FINGER FOR RESCANNING]

"What? Shit!" I exclaimed

I knew that I wasn't going to do that, as demanded of me to by the panel, again because I was certain that if it didn't work once then it wasn't going to work at all, no matter how many times I tried it and I didn't have time to make any adjustments or the necessary tools for that.

"What should I do!?"

I began to panic not knowing what to do or which steps to take anymore and things got even worse as seconds later the alarms went off because I failed to follow the instructions. The entire room started to flash red

"FUCK!"