by Brian Savage
“How can the video file be corrupted? I watched it more than a dozen times yesterday. Hell, I watched it this morning at like three-goddamn-a.m.,” Jack said, half through clenched teeth.
“It’s not yesterday, is it?” said an exasperated voice devoid of any patience. “All I know is that the file, which you say was in your email and should be attached to the case file you gave me, no longer exists, and since I don’t think you are absolutely crazy, I have to assume it was corrupted.”
“If it was corrupted, wouldn’t I still have the goddamn email in my inbox?” Jack said, raising his voice a bit.
“Well…” the techy sounded unsure of himself now. “Yes, it SHOULD be,” he said, regaining a bit of his assurance.
“What’s your name?” Jack asked.
“Um, well, Phil?” the techy said reluctantly.
“Okay, Phil, I’m coming up there to IT. It’s probably going take a few minutes for me to gather my things, maybe get some coffee, before I head for the elevator, so in that time, find out what the fuck happened to the goddamn digital evidence! End CALL!”
Jack pushed himself up from leaning on the desk. “Fuck!” He turned around and faced Brant.
“How are you?” Brant asked overly intently as he sipped his latte and eyed Jack from beneath raised eyebrows.
“The video of the guy in the aerial is gone,” Jack stated, anger still in his voice.
“Didn’t you email it to yourself?” Brant asked, hiding the glee he felt at his perfect partner’s possible slip-up.
“Yeah, that one is gone too,” Jack said. He dropped his duffle on his desk and walked around to the indent in the wall that was his built-in coffee maker. He placed a black travel mug in the indent and stood there looking at it. Brant figured he was giving the thought commands to power it. A dark, steaming trickle started.
“And IT has no idea how,” Brant said.
“Right.”
“So how are they going to figure it out by the time you get up there?” Brant asked, curious as to his partner’s methods.
“Oh, I don’t expect they will, but by the time I get up there, at least the head of the IT department will have been notified of the situation and will probably be looking into it. Employees go straight to the boss the moment an angry customer is right in front of them.” Jack smirked at Brant.
Brant smiled. It was a rare thing to be let in to the modus operandi of his partner. Jack muttered, “Creamer,” under his breath and watched as a thin white liquid shot into his cup.
“So, the very least, a supervisor will tell me from his own lips that he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on,” Jack said, turning around and screwing a lid onto his mug. The duffle slid off his shoulder as he stepped around his desk and headed for the door.
“You coming?” he asked Brant.
“Sure,” Brant said, following Jack.
On the walkway, the pair turned right, Brant falling in step with Jack. Each gingerly sipped their coffee as they weaved between agents walking toward them, and around ones that didn’t match Jack’s need to get places with a purpose.
“Do you have a copy of the screenshot we took?” Jack asked.
“Yeah,” he said, removing the folded print from the inside of his jacket. “Forensics came back last night, just after you left,” he added, handing the picture to Jack.
“Thanks. Anything interesting?” Jack placed the picture into his jacket pocket but kept his grip on the picture, as if to ward off whatever had “corrupted” the video file.
“Yeah. They said there wasn’t anyone in the aerial at all, that it was loaded down with kinetic explosives, and that it was remotely driven. Said the computer was so toast they couldn’t get anything off the AI.”
Jack didn’t say anything in response. Brant could tell by the way he sucked in and chewed his lips that he was digesting the information. Formulating it in with the big picture of the rest.
“So. We have a guy that was killed, who is still alive, in the back of an aerial that no one was in, and shown on a video file that ceases to exist, sent by an email that does the same.” Brant couldn’t tell if Jack was making a joke by stating all the facts out like that. He guessed not, as Jack looked more troubled than when he first got off the phone with Phil from IT.
“What are you thinking, boss?” Brant said, side-stepping a pair of agents talking on the walkway.
“I think I hope the IT department turns something up. If not, we are going to have to take a trip to the MWA. It’s the only trail we haven’t followed yet.”
Brant shook his head; the way Jack spoke sometimes was antiquated enough to be funny. He wondered where Jack heard stuff like that. What the hell was a trail, anyway? He didn’t ask. He didn’t want the classic, disappointed, “you’re an idiot” look from Jack.
They turned the corner at the far end of the agents’ floor, opposite the one with the entrance. They bypassed a few agents walking the opposite direction and joined a few waiting by the silver elevator doors. There were three, altogether. Silver tubes that spun open and housed two to three people comfortably. Jack and Brant stepped forward as the agents in front of them boarded the nearest elevator. Jack was silent, staring straight ahead somberly. Brant didn’t attempt conversation. He knew the deep-thinking, brooding Jack would say something the moment he had a thought he needed to bounce off someone. If his partner had been someone else, he would have probably attempted the cliché elevator small talk, but Jack didn’t watch any sports that he knew of, and it was always raining.
Jack eyed his distorted image in the elevator. He could see the small, green, blinking light below his right ear, never ceasing. He thought back to his late-night conversation with the old man. If even part of what the old man said was true, how was there any way to tell what was real or not? He could be a brain in a vat, like that one philosopher theorized. He shivered at the thought, pushing the philosophy out of his head, for now. If there wasn’t a guy in the aerial, it fit the forensic evidence, but what did that mean for the computer system that never misidentified someone, much less interpreted a hologram as a real person? He literally could not remember a time, ever, that the computer had been wrong.
The metal door slid silently to the side. Jack turned sideways as the passengers on board stepped off. He sidestepped into the car and turned, placing his hands in his pockets. “What floor is IT on?” he asked Brant.
“Fourth floor,” Brant said. The elevator shut and a large four illuminated before them, followed by a loud ad for toothpaste. The ad reasoned that their toothpaste was better than other brands because it employed the economically downtrodden. Brant gritted his teeth. He had grown up in the poorest parts of the city, where a large majority of the economically downtrodden lived. There, they were called Ecolaves, slang derived from the words “economic” and “slave.” The Ecolaves, never called that in the mainstream, were those who struggled with the deeper capitalistic changes that had taken place after the war. Capitalism raised the standard of living for most, sure, but for some it was a hard knock down, not a helping hand up. There was no such thing as insurance anymore. Liabilities were handled in money. If, let’s say, a man crashed his aerial through the second story window of his neighbor’s house after a drunken night out, he was expected to pay for the damage caused. The system was fair, Brant didn’t doubt that, but there were still people who didn’t adequately prepare for the unforeseen, who would work for the rest of their lives to right accidental wrongs.
He had seen a woman on a fourth-story balcony accidentally knock a flower pot down onto a man’s head far below; the man was left blind from the brain trauma. The medical expenses soared into the hundreds of thousands in specialty care, therapy, and a part-time, live-in nurse. The woman, a low-level cleaning lady, was stuck paying for all of it, barely bringing enough into the home to provide for her children. She jumped off the same balcony a few years later.
Jack sucked in his lips. He couldn’t stop thinking about the words of the o
ld man. He struggled to check his premise. The computer had never made a mistake like that. The aerial computer, sure, but not the D.I.E. system. That was the great “un-hackable” system, housed in the deepest security recesses of the corporation’s great system. If it was wrong, how could they figure out what was going on? He stuffed the feeling of hopelessness deep inside. It’s a game of chess, he thought to himself. The only difference is the other player is still moving, even as I am. He just needed to get ahead. He hoped the techies would have found something in their mad scramble preparing for the angry agent’s arrival. He smiled inwardly. The angry agent. If he said that out loud, Brant might not call him anything else as long as they lived.
The advertising screen on the door blinked off, and the door slid open. The elevator was raised above the level of the floor about ten feet. From there, the floor stretched out completely filled with cubicles, each one seemingly different in some way. The policy within the IT department allowed as much leeway in things like dress code and office decoration as was reasonable. This basically meant you could wear what you wanted and do what you wanted until it physically hampered someone else from doing their job.
Jack remembered one techie who had built an entire Lego castle, utilizing leave days and sleeping at the office. Management made him remove it when he started on a mechanical drawbridge that opened like the security doors: by allowing individuals whose implants had the necessary authorizations. This would have been fine, but for one day when, snubbed by a coworker, he built a gate across the coworker’s cube that wouldn’t open. Security had to break it apart with batons.
He took the steps down to the bullpen two at a time, and approached a circular desk staffed by five student techies who worked odd jobs for the Corporation as a way to pay their tuition costs. Jack approached the one positioned at the head of the circle, the one who would usher you to whomever you desired to visit. Jack noticed the man staring at a hologram screen to his right.
“Excuse me,” Jack said, having expected to be hailed the moment he was within a few feet of the desk.
The man didn’t respond. Jack could tell from the young man’s eyes, shaking back and forth rhythmically, that he was looking at some sort of visual feed. He shook his head in disgust. He knew that the students were allowed to work on schoolwork during work hours, but a visual feed was a bit excessive.
“Just a second. I can’t stop the program midway through; it won’t take more than a few minutes,” the young man said.
Jack, surprised that the young man had even noticed him, drummed his fingers on the desk, gritting his teeth impatiently.
“Sorry about that,” the man said, blinking rapidly to rehydrate his eyes. “I haven’t programmed in a way to pause the scan.”
“TV show that good, huh?” Jack asked sarcastically.
“It’s not a TV show. It’s a program I wrote,” the student techie shot back.
“Your eyes looked like you were watching a visual feed,” Brant said.
“Yeah, it’s a code reading program. My implant can read code much faster than I can, so I developed a program that couples my eyes with my implant so I can read code as fast as a computer is able to process it. Almost instantaneously.” The young man swiped nonchalantly in the air, clearing messages seen only from his side.
“Wow,” Brant said, truly impressed. “What the hell are you doing as a student techie here? You should be selling that shit and relaxing in a penthouse.” Brant leaned his elbows down on the desk. Jack shook his head impatiently.
“Oh, I took a large payment from a company to hold off on producing the program for the public.”
“How long?” Brant asked.
“Fifty years,” he said, hesitantly.
“Fifty years?! What?! By the time you can sell it, they will have come up with their own version! You got screwed!” Brant laughed.
“I don’t need your review on my life choices.” The techie continued swiping, jaw now clenched, face turning red.
“I bet you blew through all that cash already, too, huh?” Brant continued laughing. “What was it? A car? Condo? Sexually stimulating robotic companion?”
The poor techie sharply inhaled, about to lose control, when Jack interceded. “Shut the fuck up, Brant,” he said in a low growl.
Brant covered his mouth and manually stifled his laughter.
“I’m here to see Phil,” Jack said, trying to take a softer tone. “Would you please let him know I’m here?”
“Just head down the main aisle; his is the green goblin-themed cubicle near the end.” The techie’s face was still beet-red, and he didn’t even bother turning to answer.
“Thank you.” Jack worked his way around the edge of the desk, Brant close behind.
He slowed so that Brant could catch up beside him. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“It’s the truth; just calling it like I see it,” Brant said, shrugging.
“Not everything that is true needs to be said, and the truth is, if you want to do well as an agent, you’ll learn when to keep your fucking mouth shut.” Jack sped up, effectively ending the conversation. He didn’t need to look at Brant’s face to know his words had made an impact.
They made their way down the main aisle between the cubicles. Near the end, Jack started looking down the cross rows on either side, looking for a green cubicle. He didn’t know what the hell a goblin was supposed to look like. Two rows before the end, he saw a completely green cubicle with what looked like a tree growing out of it. He hadn’t seen any other green since he began looking, so he cut a sharp left down the rows and threaded his way between the endless babble of techies answering phone calls.
“Yes, is it plugged in?”
“Have you tried restarting it?”
He was about to turn into the green cubicle when he stopped short. Vines appeared to be growing over the entrance, seemingly thick and impenetrable. He slowly snaked a hand out to brush them aside when a voice from beyond the foliage called out.
“It is just a hologram, Agent Ripley, just walk through it.” The snark came from a voice that called to mind the earlier phone call with IT. The voice was familiar, but the smugness was new.
Jack stepped through the nonexistent vines and into a magical, holographic world. Small creatures resembling humans with dragonfly wings buzzed around, glowing faintly. Every inch of the inside of the cubicle looked like moss-covered swampland. Even the cubicle walls were now an ultra-realistic, three-dimensional swampland as far as the eye could see. Between the cypress trees, complete with old man’s beard hanging low, Jack could see greenish-brown, human-like creatures with animal-like mouths jutting out, jumping from tree to tree, eyeing the new arrivals and snapping their tusked mouths together, communicating with guttural, grunt-like calls.
“Don’t worry about them,” an overweight man, with thick brown hair sticking up at all angles, said. He was sitting a few feet away, on what appeared to be a giant toad stool.
“Wow,” Brant said, stepping through the vines and squeezing behind Jack, who had stopped just a little bit too close to the door.
Leaning on a large flat boulder, a tall, skinnier man in a suit uncrossed his arms, then stepped through a small pond, hand extended toward Jack.
“I apologize for Phil’s choice of workspace decoration,” he grasped Jack’s hand, “he very much likes this make-believe world.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jack said, nodding.
“Agent Trapp.” The man shook Brant’s hand as well, before walking back over to the boulder and resuming his previous leaning position.
“All worlds are make-believe,” Phil said in a slightly annoyed tone, spinning around on the toad stool. A goblin stepped out from behind a tree and fired an arrow toward the tall man. Jack was mid-draw before he saw the arrow disappear harmlessly into the tall man’s chest.
“Please, pay them no attention; the goblins react based on Phil’s emotions. My comment must have bothered him.” He condescendingly glance
d toward Phil, who pretended not to notice. “My name is Charles; I’m the head of the IT department. Phil explained to me a little about what was going on. He said an email is missing?”
“Yes, specifically a video file on the email. It was also supposed to be automatically uploaded to the case file,” Jack said.
“Please, have a seat,” Charles said, motioning toward two toadstools against the far wall of the cube.
Jack gingerly sat down on the toadstool and slowly leaned back. He knew that what was beneath the holographic projection was a chair, but he couldn’t quite turn off the warning signals being sent by his eyes that said there was nothing there to lean on. He felt pressure from the back of a mesh chair and relaxed. Brant shook his head and leaned against a holographic tree instead.
“When did you receive this email?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“Did you open it?”
“Yes, and watched the attached file.”
“Who was it from?”
“The standard department ‘no-reply’ email. I received two other video files the same way at the same time.” Jack noticed the goblins had stopped firing arrows.
“Phil, can you can pull up those emails, please?” Charles asked, turning toward the overweight techie.
“Sure thing, Oh Great One!” Phil said, turning toward the far wall, where two goblins popped out from behind a tree and produced a large cauldron. They danced maniacally around it as they threw things into the pot. As they continued to dance, muttering and chanting, smoke began to rise from the bubbling cauldron. Slowly, it morphed into a white cloud, which displayed the two emails that Jack had received the day prior.
“Summoned at your bidding,” Phil said, smirking.
“Thank you, Phil,” Charles said, ignoring the eccentricity of Phil’s demeanor and workspace. “According to the system, these are the only two emails that you received from an official source yesterday.” He raised a hand toward the cloud, indicating the displayed emails.