“It’s a backdoor I coded into the sleigh’s navigation system. Krampussoft doesn’t know I hid it in the fragmentation algorithm.” He paused. “Also, unplug the phone line. They’re triangulating your location to brick your BIOS.”
The tiny Santa pointed up—or rather, toward the top-left corner of the screen, where a new window had opened:
Leo grinned. “Can I play?”
Leo tried to move the mouse. The cursor was gone.
Leo’s mom had yelled at him for using the phone line, but she was upstairs napping. The modem squealed like a tortured hamster. Finally: Download complete.
In its place: a tiny, animated Santa Claus, no taller than his thumb, running frantically across the screen. The Santa was pixelated—two red pixels for a hat, three for the beard—but his panic was unmistakable. He slammed his little fists against the edge of the monitor.
