by B C Woodruff
“Do you have any decency left, Bill? Any sense of shame about what you’ve done, and what you’ll look like when they find out you’ve been fucking around like this? They’ll lose respect for you. I’ve lost respect for you. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Calm down, Vera. You don’t want the baby to inherit your special talent for shifting from love to hate in a split second.”
“Fuck you. Dinner’s at seven.” She was about to hang up, but stopped short. “Don’t be late.”
“I won’t.” “You better not. This is important. My parents have come in from–”
“I know, I know. We’ve gone over this a hundred times.” His tone went flat. “Your father was an ex-military, grunt-type guy who owned a few assault rifles before the government took them away. Not the current one. That bad one that took over after his tour was finished. Your mother, well, she was from that country he went out to save.” He struggled with his words. “What I’m trying to say is – would you mind lending me a hand with this?”
“Nope. I wrote it all down in that email you promised to review on the train back.”
“Fine. Whatever. She was in that country. They met after he was wounded during a patrol. She was a nursing student who decided it was worth the risk to work with ‘the enemy’. He was knocked out by an explosion and lost all hearing in his right ear.” He paused to think and touched one side of his face and then the other. “No. I mean, his left ear. It turned out it was friendly fire and by the time he woke up from his surgery, well, he was a foot... I mean two feet, shorter.” Vera didn’t appreciate his attempts at stretched humour, especially when it involved someone she cared about. “So, don’t mention his prosthetics. Don’t stare at his facial scars. Don’t ask about politics or foreign affairs.” He exhaled and drew in a deep breath. “Ask about his favourite sports team. Ask about his gardening. Ask about the trip he and your mother have planned for the fall. Now, is that about right?”
There was soft, slow clapping on the other end, and what Bill could have sworn was laughter.
“Not bad. Not bad at all.” He sighed in relief at that. “And last and most importantly?” “Ask him if he would be so accommodating as to allow me to wed his dear, lovely, wonderful, beautiful daughter. Ask both of them. Say, how good is your mother’s English?”
“Goodbye, Bill. See you at seven.” The phone went silent and he leaned back in his chair, relaxed and confident once more. Ahead of him, glaring like a lighthouse locked in a staring contest with the wide, unwelcoming ocean, was the unopened email from his boss, whose telltale words did not bode well for his future. The future he had intended to spend with his dear, lovely, wonderful, beautiful wife and their indeterminately-sexed baby. He would have appreciated knowing what gender the child was, you know, to prepare, whereas she was more interested in adding mystery.
“When we were young,” she explained the night when he begged her to let the ultrasound technician reveal the details, “there was so much we didn’t understand. Most kids are curious, but I could almost feel the gaps in what I knew. Every new fact and experience made me feel... well, more whole, and so I kept asking questions. Now, my parents loved Christmas. I know you were never into it, but you have to understand that for my brother, my sister, and me, it was exciting enough to make you piss your pants. And of course I had to know what I was getting. But we were always told that if we were patient, we would find out that those boxes contained exactly what we hoped for. This is why I want to keep it a secret. Because the truth is, the more I learned about the world, the more I had to fear. The world is fragile, Bill. It’s cruel. But this – I want to know this more than anything, and that’s exactly why I need to wait. So let me have this one thing. Please?” And she always got what she wanted, didn’t she? He looked at the screen ahead and gave it a daring click. Hoping that he had been too fast for the infernal machine to make sense of what he’d done.
“My office. Now,” was all he needed to see. He glanced at the timestamp. It had arrived forty-five minutes ago.
Sighing, Bill stood up and went out the door. His office had the almost-honorific title of ‘Head Content Developer’ with his name, B. Burroughs, embroidered on a small sheet of laminate on the otherwise bare, green-blue door.
All the office was green-blue. It was the company’s motif and it carried throughout – and not just the paint. The upholstery and the company uniforms; the window tints and the light fixtures. It was almost like being under a calm Caribbean ocean. He felt a little like a fish as he moved through schools of people speaking amongst themselves about this project and that anecdote. Someone almost stopped him, a woman he knew quite well, but he waved her away with his right hand and a look of despair that cut to the point.
Ahead, the purple door awaited. It was intentional, of course. The colour. It gave the place a disconnected, segregated feel. When you got called in there you knew it could only be for a great, if not terrible, purpose. Lives were made in the room beyond. Lives were ripped open and left exposed in a way that almost assured you would find yourself working at a local Stop-’N-Go for the rest of your meagre existence. People would die for his job; people had probably killed for it. The heaviness of Bill’s worry made him feel like the ground was going to swallow him up. Still, he reached for- ward and went to turn the handle and meet his destiny.
It creaked open. Again, intentional. It would have been an easy task for a custodian or a junior member of the team to fix. But none dared fix it without permission. And none dared ask.
“Good timing.” Margot’s voice sounded calm and secure. “I was about to send Michelle to fetch you. Now, sit down.” The room was as you’d imagine: purple-on-purple with a gold lining that, for those familiar with their alcohol brands, looked downright regal.
He obeyed. There was a silence. Intentional. As Margot Larein was known for. Everything came down to meaning and purpose. Everything and everyone fit into her world like clockwork.She wasn’t merely powerful – she was a bona fide pioneer who transformed a third rate blogging site into an algorithmically-generated news feed that served billions. Some said her insights into natural language processing and narrative cognition made her a modern Turing.
She was a beautiful difference engine. Bill hated her as much as he wanted to worship her.
“Look, Marge, I know what you’ve probably heard and I just want you to know that I was just experimenting with an idea.”
Her head tilted to the side, calculating. “I wanted to see if people really are following the content the way we wanted. I just didn’t think it was going to turn into such a scandal.”
“Sssscannndal?” She said smoothly. “No. I don’t think we have a scandal on our hands here, William. I did, however, believe that I had hired a Burroughs, not a Borrower.” He smiled at that. He had to.
“Ah, but you think I am attempting to be funny?” Her face was crossed with glaring ridges that made her into the epitome of a Disney villain. “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m serious. We don’t have a scandal. What we have is a complete breakdown of protocol. What I can’t abide is knowing that a member of my hand- picked staff is going against our company’s fundamental ethos and paying for others to create content that he is entirely capable, if not even overqualified, to write himself.”
He was holding back a wall of emotions. In a few weeks it would mark his seventh year working in the green-blue office. Five spent in the trenches paying his dues, and two that had seen a respectable raise and benefits. Benefits he was going to need for...
“Vera is pregnant!” Bill blurted out. This did not surprise his employer. “Look, I’m sorry for outsourcing those articles. I won’t let it happen again. I just... I had all these things to do and had to find a new place with room for a nice nursery. I went looking for nannies, because we both work and the baby will need someone to take care of it. I had to learn all this stuff about crap. Literally. I had to read books on what certain types of crap mean and how you should react. I we
nt to these courses and now I’m all jumbled up because I don’t know what to do and if I even want this to happen anymore. Please, you have to understand that this was a once-in-a-lifetime mistake!” The tears were flowing easily now. She was smiling.
“You may be a colossal idiot but I’m not about to fire you, Bill. I enjoy our chats and you have, despite this one occasion – and it had better only be one occasion – never disappointed me. I want you to take some time off. In fact, there are two men here that wanted to speak to you about where you were getting that content. Naturally, after I read it, I knew that it couldn’t be you who had put it together.” She turned her computer screen around. “I mean, did you even edit these, Bill? They’re dreadful. I mean, really.” She made a sound of disappointment that rang in his head.
“Two men? What do you mean?” Margot looked at her nails, fancy as always, and leaned back in her purple armchair. “I didn’t ask after they showed me their badges.”
Bill swallowed. “Badges?” “From a very secretive government branch, I’m told. I called a few of my friends and so far as I can tell, they are entirely legitimate. I told them to leave their guns outside the room, though. I’d rather you not be put in a position where you might soil yourself after that great cry, you big baby.” She was all smiles and affection again. The effect was chilling.
“Well? They should be in your office by now. I had Freric search them, so you’ll be as safe as he wants you to be. I hope you gave him a nice gift for his birthday last month, that’s all I’m saying.” She motioned her hand to shoo him away and before he had fully realized what had happened, he was back in his office with two men in gray, striped suits. They were difficult to look at. The moment you thought you’d found something that was reflective of personality or individuality was the same moment that your attention drifted over to the other and the impression restarted. One had a thin nose and the other, well, it was squished up against his face. Both had brown eyes and both, upon entering, motioned him to where he now was sitting in a synchronicity that felt about as awkward to watch as it was to obey.
Neither introduced themselves or provided credentials, though Bill could see empty creases in their suits where one might have a gun holstered.
“Bill,” Fat Nose started. “We hear you’ve been paying someone to do your work for you.”
“It’s true,” he admitted. What was the point in lying now? “We need to know who that person is,” Thin Nose continued, “where they are, and how you originally found them.”
“I can look at our correspondence. It shouldn’t be hard to figure it all out. As for where – well, I just posted an anonymous job on a writing community board and this person was the first to respond. I didn’t really care about quality. I just wanted to have time to get my life in order.”
Fat Nose typed the details into his jet-black smartphone. “We’ve already looked into your accounts, Bill. Whomever you were in touch with has been very thorough in covering their tracks.” He shrugged. “We’ve got some pretty impressive resources at our disposal, so you can appreciate that we’re a little concerned that we have no details or trail to follow.”
‘Gone?’ He mused on that for a moment. “I don’t think I follow, unless you mean that somehow this other writer got in and erased our emails.
“Not just the emails. Your payment records. Your posts on the community site – yes, we knew all about that – and by the time we started to put two and two together, it was all simply gone.”
Fat Nose sat on the edge of the green desk. “We can’t tell you much, Bill. But we want you to know about our suspicions, just in case you happen to receive any follow-up from this... person.” He leaned in a little, blocking the ceiling light. “We believe whoever wrote your content for you was placing secret messages. Plans. Locations. Dates and times. We think...” He turned to Thin Nose, who nodded.
“We believe this is the terrorist cell that was responsible for the massive friendly-fire incident in – well, I don’t need to remind you about what happened, do I? When communications broke down, and all those people turned on one another because their superiors delivered conflicting orders.”
“But, you can’t mean... That was almost thirty years ago.” “We have our reasons. We think they’ve fine-tuned their methods and they’ve been slowly growing a presence on native soil. This was the closest we’ve been to catching up with them, and we need you to be ready and willing to give us your full attention and assistance should you be approached by anyone related to those posts.” Thin Nose was pacing around the room.
“If they’re moving this fast... We can’t have a lot of time, Bill. They could spring their little trap at any point and, well, if we’re being honest with you, we haven’t had a good whiff of anything in a clean decade. Sure,” he waved his hands in the air, “we should be pleased that nothing’s going on.” His head cocked forward. “The chaos from their last operation never fully faded. People are still suspicious. New copycat groups – not nearly as sophisticated, but still dangerous – spring up every day. These people are smart. Smarter than me. Smarter than you. Smarter than everyone in this damn turquoise office. You understand me, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes. You’ll be the first to know if anything happens. Just tell me how.”
Thin Nose handed him a SIM card. “Put this in your phone and dial 1-2-4-3. It might not be an elegant passcode, but it’s one you’ll remember. Won’t you, Bill?”
“Yes.” “Good. Well, it’s about quitting time, ain’t it? We’ve asked your boss to give you a few days to recover. Hopefully, someone will get in touch with you before then. If not, count yourself lucky, man. Count yourself lucky and we’ll never cross paths again. Just know that even if this all seems unlikely, you’re our best chance to get these guys. Got it?”
“Got it.” He was stuck in a loop, and when the agents left he couldn’t stop thinking about what the hell he had just learned. It wasn’t hard for him to figure out who was responsible for the content that he’d so graciously and thankfully placed online. In all the confusion and the craziness, his mind had clued in immediately. Now, the question was: Why? Why would she do it? Little lines connected. It was her family. Her father, who had been wounded out there during that terrible page in history. Her mother, born in the chaos of war.
It was a family operation, or it was just the woman who shared his bed. And Bill was late for dinner with all of them.
WHAT WASN’T SAID
Is it millennia of evolution or simple force of habit that has ensured that, no matter how much we try to fight it, that sleep is more difficult in the open air than in the comforts of a warm, soft bed – shielded from nature’s light and its cut through the slime layer of skin between dreams and reality? And why don’t we have thicker eyelids? That, for the moment, would help. Anything to help me sweep up the pieces of that dream, the last night I’ll be able to believe it.
I keep my eyes closed. I pray that the sun will have pity. I want to sleep. I beg for fantasies, no matter how outlandish, to rip me from my life.
Epiphany strikes me and, keeping my eyes sealed, I reach around for a blanket or pillow to put up a more durable barricade to soften the impact of the events of the night before. My hands come up empty.
I’m not sure where I am, and I’m not really ready to find out. No matter how sincere the negotiations I attempt with reality, no matter how I bargain, I am left with only one recourse: I have to get up.
Master of your own body, my ass. It shouldn’t come as a great shock to awaken this damaged. Last night marked the ten year anniversary of the day my ex-wife, Jean – we were married back then – up and decided to become part of the Program.
You must remember those old commercials, the ones that started with that cute couple looking over the New Bethlehem skyline. That little spot that they focus on in the distance marking the dividing wall between the countryside and the Aggregated New York Megapolis. If you don’t, you’re probably too young to realize how ha
rd we fought against the transition back then.
Now it has become standard. Necessary. Trendy. I can’t get over the way the man in the ad looked at his wife, how a perfectly romantic moment blossomed into a sick caricature of happiness. They reached out and just as their hands touched, they turned to the camera and blissfully asked us to “Be a part of the solution. Get with the Program.”
If you don’t remember them, well, like I said, you were born after the civil protests quieted down and our leaders were silenced – one way or another. These days, they’re in every content stream. Not those actors specifically, but that same smile, and that same message. Do what we say. We know best. Make choices that you have every goddamned right to refuse.
I like to think that neither of the people in that vintage propaganda piece actually believed what they said, because it makes me feel better about my own decisions. I find myself sick to my stomach wondering if Jean actually bought into it like so many others across the world. That she believed the company line. I mean, sure, the incentives were attractive, but to lose that part of what you are – the potential you can offer the world – seemed to me then, as it does now, to be a fundamental betrayal of what it means to be human.
It seems so obvious these days what it all meant for us, but skeptics like me learned that silence meant safety.
I was twenty-seven when I returned home to find Jean smiling at the door to our condo on the Upper E-End near the coastal barricade. She was excited in a way that I had never seen before and because of that I absently allowed myself to get pulled into the gravity of the moment.
“I did it!” she said to me, holding out the freshly-stamped slip of Causal Paper (or Causper) that they were so reluctant to let any of us E-Enders get a hold of. It was practically in the bylaws that we had to ask permission before moving forward. I did my best to keep a smile on my face. “We’re going to be just fine.” Jean was referring to our recent tax problems.