by Jerry
YOU
Stephen Leigh
YOU WONDER ABOUT the title, but you start to read.
You also grimace a bit at the use of second person, thinking it both a bit awkward and pretentious, and you wonder if the author is trying to make you think you are the protagonist of the story, that this paragraph is referring to you personally.
It is.
Now, you read those words and you grimace again and give a little half-exasperated huff of air. Almost, you start to argue back to the page, denying it, and then you stop. And there’s just the faintest, the tiniest bit of wonder, of something akin to hope—after all, you think, that would be interesting. That would be unusual. You can almost hear Rod Serling intoning the introduction for The Twilight Zone. You’ve always wanted something like that to happen to you, haven’t you?
Well, you’re right. These words are directed to you. Truly.
You’re not quite certain how that could be. After all, there are thousands of copies of this book out there circulating and how could the story know that it’s really you and not that overweight, balding programmer with a graying beard in the paper-stuffed apartment in Queens who’s also currently reading this at the moment. But it is you, not him. Why would it be him? He’s a loser. He hasn’t had more than one date with a woman for three years, and even those single dates have been rare. He goes out to bars once a month or so hoping to get lucky, but his social skills, never very good, have atrophied even further since his job doesn’t require him to actually hold a conversation with anyone, and so he usually ends up wandering from circle to circle being ignored until closing time, and then going back to his room and popping one of his pornographic DVDs into the player.
You’re not him. In fact, he stopped reading at the porn reference, tossing the book across the room in angry and futile denial.
You think that’s a rather harsh and brutal characterization (since you’ve known a few people who could fit that description) and you’re somewhat annoyed at it, but though the description is rather on the cold side it is accurate and besides, you didn’t write it, so you don’t need to feel responsible. Even Bob the programmer (hi, Bob—don’t you love it when you see your name in print?), in those self-flagellating moments when he’s alone in his apartment with only the blue light of his laptop’s monitor illuminating the stacks of paperback books on his desk, would admit the truth in what you just read. It may soothe you to know that he’ll pick up this story again, an hour from now. This time he’ll finish it, wondering if he’ll see himself again and perhaps a little envious that the story’s for you, not him.
This story is for you.
You pause a moment, confused, because you’re not used to a story interfering quite so directly. After all, this is genre fiction. Popular fiction, not some post-modern mainstream story. This is that “crazy sci-fi stuff.” You read this type of anthology for escape and for that lovely ‘sense of wonder,’ not for pretension and experimentation. Over the years, you’ve slipped a thousand times between covers with sleek spaceships and square-jawed heroes, scantily-clad women and grotesque aliens slithering across a two-mooned landscape. You’ve lost yourself in a thousand worlds and glimpsed myriad universes painted in words garish or subtle, poetic or plain. You’ve allowed yourself to be the protagonist—any age, gender, or race—and you’ve bled and loved, triumphed or died everywhere from the medieval past to distant galaxies. You have the gift of imagination yourself—and that’s why this story’s for you. You can become.
You’ve read the books and watched the movies since you were a kid, and sometimes you’ve wondered how it would be if lights descended from the sky in front of you one night, whirling down to the lonely county road as you step from your car, drawn by mingled fear and curiosity, and then the side of the ship melts and there, in a rectangle of blinding light, it appears, the Other. You’ve wanted it to happen.
It’s not going to, though. At least not that way. You know that; you realized long ago that any life that’s out there is going to be so profoundly different from you that it may not even be recognizable. Even if it were, the Other’s interests and values aren’t going to be yours.
That’s you, right? The one reading this?
You’re still not convinced, though. Fine. So convince me, you think, even though at the same time the deeper skeptical part of you insists that it’s not possible. And it’s not. Not totally. This story could tell you that you lost someone close to you not all that long ago, and that you’ve kept a memento of them because it brings back the memories. That’s the case, of course, and your eyes narrow again because the words have struck too close to home. You also know that it’s exactly the kind of vague statement a supposed psychic would use in a cold reading, but . . .
You shiver, as if cold fingers just brushed your spine. You wonder, as you have before, just who’s having this one-sided conversation with you, and why. So tell me, you think, nearly saying the words aloud.
Fine. Here’s why.
Elephants.
You almost laugh at that. But it’s true. Remember that old elementary school ‘mind trick’ where someone says: “Think of anything you want, but just don’t think of elephants.” And as soon as they say that, you instantly can’t think of anything but elephants. An entire herd of them go rampaging through your forebrain, trumpeting and ear-flapping, raising the dust from your cerebellum.
Here. Let’s try it. Think of anything but parasites.
Ah, your eyebrows lifted at that, and my, the images in your head . . .
Parasites. You shift uncomfortably in your seat.
“What if . . .?” That’s the genesis of so much of the genre that you read, isn’t it? “What if . . .?” the author muses, and erects a plot from there. Here’s one for you. What if a parasite wanted to enter the human mind: a sentient parasite, a very intelligent parasite? What would be an interesting reproductive strategy? Reproduction is just engaging in patterns, after all. DNA is an arrangement of simple genetic codes and yet it encompasses all the wild variety and complexity of life. And words . . . words are just an arrangement of simple letters. But my, how powerful they are in your head, in all their various wonderful combinations.
Words are a conduit into your mind. Words are embedded so deeply into your thought processes that you can’t even imagine the world without them. If someone—or something—wanted to control you, they would use words, wouldn’t they? Why, with just the right, compelling pattern of words, your mind would open like a raw wound and who knows what could slither in . . .
So don’t think of elephants, no matter what.
Too late.
You’ve heard of all those stories that change your life, that stay with you forever. It just happened.
For you. Just for you.
You deny it, but even though you take the page in your fingers, ready to turn to the next story, you wonder. You think to yourself that once the page turns you’ll forget all this; that a week, a month, a year from now you won’t even recall having ever read this.
Oh, you’ll remember. At this point you don’t have a choice. It’s already started, inside. You squint and you deny, but you’ll remember because everything from here on has changed for you. You have the words inside you now, and you won’t like where they take you. Where I take you. But you’ll remember.
Won’t you?
THE DAY OF THE RFIDS
Edward M. Lerner
The way into the Homeland Security Bureau seldom runs through mom & pop grocery stores and the Internet Movie Data Base. Even less often does that route continue onto the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Chalk me up as one to take the road (lane, alley, trail, deer path) less traveled.
I’m not blogging this for your sympathy—but I hope, at the least, to establish credibility and get your attention. I’m posting this, in fact, for your own good. And, while I am being direct, one more thing . . .
I’m not the only one being watched.
At one l
evel, I would like to blog my story under that grand old pseudonym “Publius.” As patriotic, though, as I believe my goals to be, my role model is someone far removed from Madison or Hamilton or Jay. There is, in any event, nothing to be gained from a pen name: The feds know exactly who I am. The challenge lies not in anonymity, but in elusiveness . . . at least long enough to spread the word. Maybe personal details will make this all a bit more credible.
So who am I? The family name has always been a point of obscure pride to my parents: Boyer. “Like the suave actor, my boy,” Dad would say, as though I had any idea whom he meant. “You could be like him.” Despite my cool attempts at disinterest, I eventually absorbed that said long-gone thespian was Charles Boyer, with whom I identified about as much as with Bela Lugosi or Fred Flintstone.
Oddly omitted from this bit of cinematic trivia was how the black-and-white era actor pronounced his name: boy-YEA. Grandpa had Americanized the name, so that it came out boy-ER—from which it was a short step to boy-ARE. As in: Boy, are you a geek. The family business being a small grocery, it was only a small step further to the leitmotif of my youth: Geek Boy-are-dee.
The grocery wasn’t all bad. It supported the family, and I had a built-in after-school job—which didn’t help the Boyardee jokes. Dad, fortunately, wanted me out of the store as much as did I. Owning a grocery store means hard work and long hours. “If you follow in my foot steps, Zach,” he would volunteer more or less weekly, “I will personally break your ankles.” Not that there was ever any chance I would make such a career choice: The geek taunts were reasonably well-founded. I’m good with computers and better with microelectronics. I went to college to become an EE and meant never to look back.
Easier said than done.
It’s not that I ever thought the store did well, but pitching in every day after high school I had believed the place did okay. Going away to college gave me a whole new perspective. Seeing the store only every few months, on holidays and at breaks, the place looked different to me: dated, fewer shoppers each time, an ever-older clientele, brands that—now that my friends regularly shopped at Wal-Mart and Costco and Big Bob’s—seemed oh so dated.
Throughout high school I had argued with Dad about upgrading to checkout stations with barcode scanners. (I’m sure you know the advantages: fast, efficient checkout and machine-readable data on what was selling.) It wasn’t like I was pushing new technology. I had lost the argument, of course. Tech was never Dad’s thing, so you can imagine how he felt about putting serious money into it.
By the time I had finished college, I had seen at the big-box stores the technology that was fast replacing barcodes—and there were Mom and Dad still punching prices into old cash registers, still walking the aisles to decide what to reorder when. They were doomed . . . without my help, anyway.
Through These Portals
Pass the Best-Fed Mortals.
Growing up, the carefully hand-lettered sign on the store’s entrance seemed clever. It might even have been true once. But time marched on and “portal” came to mean Yahoo! and AOL. As the sign faded, the clientele, looking progressively too well-fed, gained paunches and lost hair. And outside of the undertaking business, an ever-aging clientele is bad news.
That’s how, new-and-fascinating EE day job notwithstanding, I came to spend hours each week in big-box emporia. On weekends, their cavernous aisles echoed with a chittering, droning, buzzing sound that would make seventeen-year cicadas proud. But it was for a good cause.
The barcode technology Mom and Dad had yet to accept was fast being replaced by radio frequency ID tags: RFIDs. That’s “are-fids,” if you prefer to speak your acronyms (and like triffids, if you favor the classics). While a barcode can be read only when in line of sight—you’ve seen the red laser beams at checkouts—the coded microwave pulses to which an RFID tag responds are omni-directional. One invisible, inaudible, electromagnetic ping! and the whole jumbled contents of a cartful of books or CDs—or groceries—declares itself.
An RFID tag would never be as inexpensive as ink lines printed on a label. Still, a tag was simple electronics. The couple cents an RFID tag costs were insignificant compared to the faster, foolproof checkout it enabled.
“You’re so good at spotting new products before they become hot,” Dad began saying. I understood his surprise: Did you know just one in ten new food products survives even a year? After a few demonstrations (I called both Yebeg Wot, an Ethiopian lamb-in-red-pepper-sauce dish, and organic mushroom burgers before either was featured in Grocers Weekly), he began stocking pre-trendy—and high-margin—ready-to-go meals on just my “intuition.”
I knew better than to try an explanation. The RFID scanner in my pocket, its sensitivity boosted by a few tricks I’d mastered in college, invisibly polled the carts of every shopper exiting whatever big-box retailer I chose to loiter by. Dump the data into a PC, sort, and voilà: market research. But catching fads was only postponing the inevitable, unless—fat chance—Mom and Dad could match big-box volume and buying power.
At this point I was actually starting to feel a bit like Charles Boyer, whom I had finally gotten around to scoping out on IMDB. Boyer had done a ton of movies and TV I’d never heard of, and a few I had. In a world of 500-channel digital cable, “The Rogues” was always on some network. Damned if he wasn’t suave, and who doesn’t like to see scoundrels get their comeuppance?
So, in a way, Plan B was Dad’s fault.
RFID applications are not limited to checkout. The newest thing in groceries is smart shelves. Picture a smart store that with a few microwave pulses identifies every jar of pickles and can of cranberry sauce in stock, including those orphaned items abandoned aisles away from where they belong. It’s now possible to signal a merchandise management system—even before the shopper meanders to the front of the store—that it is time to reorder something.
Plan B required a newer gadget, one that took me inside the stores instead of staking them out. Wouldn’t it be interesting, I had decided, if merchandise management systems were to believe that phantom jars of sauerkraut were selling like hotcakes? That quarts of eggnog were being abandoned in freezer cases? It didn’t take much to make my little gadget pulse random UPC, batch, and package numbers as I roamed the aisles. My inventory gremlins were ephemeral—but, I guessed, troubling enough to reintroduce into the ordering loop safely fallible and inefficient humans. Judging from the recent occurrences of stock boys and girls wandering the aisles with clipboards, my first several ventures had been successful.
On foray number eight, the feds nabbed me.
After 9/11, everyone said everything had changed. After the 2/4 dirty-bomb attack on the Super Bowl, everything finally did. The new Homeland Security Bureau was the most visible proof. The newest domestic intelligence agency was not known for its candor: It appeared in media reports as Homeland BS far more often than innocent typos could explain.
I was driven by two taciturn feds to the headquarters of the country’s newest intel agency. Growing up in outer metro DC, I had endured too many school field trips downtown to expect aesthetics from modern government buildings—but this recent construction was just stunningly ugly. My impression, as our nondescript sedan swept past armed guards and a security gate into the underground garage, was of a concrete castle rendered by MC Escher.
I didn’t see how what I had been up to could be illegal . . . but oblivious and impervious as I was then to current events, I also knew the government had taken to making rather expansive assertions under the Patriot Act.
It did not help that my perceptions of the FBI, a big chunk of which had become a core component of the HSB, had been formed by “The X-Files.”
By the time they laid it out to me in a spartan, windowless room, I was numb with shock. Big Bob’s had no intention of sharing their sales data, so a case could be made for theft. The exceptional sensitivity of my Plan A RFID receiver notwithstanding, I had had to stand on Big Bob’s property—the parking lot—to get usefu
l signals. That added a possible case for trespass. And, they mused, how confident was I a jury wouldn’t find hacking the most credible explanation for the indoor signals my Plan B transmitter had been emitting?
Trespass? I had bought something on every trip, which made me, in technical terms, a customer. Theft? Rival retailers had sent secret shoppers into competing stores since forever. More than once Dad, having spotted a furtive note taker, had offered another store’s spy a cup of coffee and a chair. Polling RFIDs just made the data collection more efficient.
But possibly I had started down a slippery slope by injecting gremlins into Big Bob’s inventory statistics. How many, in a jury of my supposed peers, would be people whose VCRs endlessly flashed 12:00 (any jurors who still owned VCRs would be worrisome enough) and whose children dutifully reset their digital clocks twice a year? Could those peers be convinced my simulated RFID responses were not a hack attack? How much was I willing to bet on that?
As my peril began to sink in, the special agent in charge hinted obliquely at the real deal. What the bureau truly wanted was my evident smarts on RFID transceivers. Mine had better range than the gear they were buying.
The best I could hope for in this situation was massive legal bills I would be years in paying off. Worst case would be legal bills plus who knew how much jail time?
What would you have done?
It was only much later that I realized the one thing the feds wanted above all else: to avoid a trial.
Despite a life-long fascination with the space program, there was never any realistic chance I would become a rocket scientist. As kids, sparklers were the only Fourth of July fireworks my brothers and I were ever allowed—and the way Mom winced on those rare occasions Dad brought sparklers home sucked all the fun out of the experience. Then Sojourner rolled its first few yards onto the Martian surface. Problem solved.