by Bruce Bethke
My eyebrows went up.
She nodded. “That’s what they did the last time. And we can also presume that our jobs are safe, since we’re not getting a firsthand look at the outplacement meeting.” She stopped, pursed her lips, and thought it over. “Given that we know that much, and only that much, your best option right now is to hang loose and keep on keeping on, until someone else tells you different.”
I mulled over what she was telling me, looked down at my mismatched socks, and shook my head. “I don’t like that. I mean, I liked Hassan. I feel bad about what I think is happening to him. Do you suppose it would be okay, say, this afternoon, to call him at home or something?”
T’shombe shook her head vigorously. “Absolutely not! At least, definitely not from a company phone, and probably not from your personal phone, either. The company really doesn’t like it when re-org survivors talk to ex-employees, and they can do some downright spooky things with back-tracing and caller ID.”
And here I’d thought I was surprised before. “But—”
“Believe it, Pyle.” She gave her coffee a stir, tried another sip, and almost spit it out. “Now that Hassan’s a nonperson, they could sue you for talking to him. In fact, I’ll bet that right now, even as we speak, the cops are serving a warrant on Hassan’s wife and searching their house for stolen paperclips and ballpoint pens.” She forced herself to choke down a gulp of the coffee and watched me narrowly over the rim of the cup.
“But—”
“I couldn’t make up anything this ridiculous, Pyle. I’ve seen it happen.”
I was still fluttering. “But—but—they can audit my home phone records?”
“Read the fine print on your nondisclosure contract sometime. You’d be amazed what rights you signed away when you joined MDE.” She attempted one last gulp of the coffee, fought down a dry heave, then dumped the contents of the cup onto the split-leaf philodendron in the corner, which immediately began shuddering and wilting. “Your e-mail, voice-mail, and working dataspace are all monitored. You knew that, right?”
“Well, yes—”
“And everytime you see a doctor, MDE gets a complete copy of the medical report. You knew that too, right?”
“Well,” I shrugged, “of course. ‘An unhealthy lifestyle is everyone’s problem.’”
T’shombe shook her head and muttered, “Christ. I remember when that was a public service announcement, not a dogma.”
I didn’t understand the reference. “Excuse me?”
She stopped shaking her head, and looked at me sharply. “Pyle, everytime you renew your car insurance, you have to report the car’s mileage. Did you know that your insurance company immediately reports that mileage to MDE?”
That was news to me. “Why?”
“Because MDE has to report it to the EPA Office of Mass-Transit Enforcement.” A shrill edge crept into her voice. “Because MDE is under court order to get sixty-percent of its commuters out of their cars and onto light rail!” Her eyes went wide and wild. “Because the EPA matches your mileage to your exhaust-system test results and counts that against MDE’s environmental damage quotient!” She grabbed me by the front of my shirt and shook me like a rag doll. “Pyle! Why the hell do you think I spend so much time in this stinking hardware room?” She didn’t stop shaking long enough to let me answer. “Because this is the only place in the whole goddam building that’s SHIELDED!”
T’shombe caught herself. Stopped shaking me. Slowly released her grip on the front of my shirt and let me slide to the floor. Followed me down.
“Shielded,” she whispered. “TEMPEST-certified. Class Triple-A MilSpec. No cameras. No video links. No transponder pickups. No one can watch us.”
She leaned closer. Her lips grazed my ear. “Shielded,” she said again in a husky, sultry voice. The smell of her sweat and perfume clouded my mind. Her moist, warm breath tickled my ear hairs and made me squirm with anticipation. Oh, my God, if what I thought was about to happen was really happening… This was great! Alone, in a back room, at the office, with an experienced and attractive older woman—I mean, I’d read about stuff like this in http://www.penthousemag.com, but I’d never thought, well okay, I’d thought, but never really believed…
“Shielded,” she whispered, ever more softly. “No audio links.” I stole a quick, guilty peek down her ample cleavage and tried to work up the nerve to reach for that straining top button of her blouse. “No one can hear us, Pyle.” In a voice just barely audible, she added, “Except the Master.”
Something with cold and scaly feet slithered down my spine and made my hand stop right where it was. “The Master, T’shombe?”
“Shhh.” She touched a perfectly manicured finger to my lips, then pointed at the split-leaf philodendron in the pot in the corner. “It’s listening.”
I looked at it. I looked at her. I blinked.
I looked at her again. “That—plant—is the Master?”
She smiled at me and giggled. “Of course not, silly.” I sighed in relief and started to pull back from the brink of panic. Okay, this was all just one of T’shombe’s weird jokes…
“It’s just a cutting from the Master,” she completed. “Just one tiny piece of its giant world-wide brain.”
Riiiiight.
Slowly, delicately, much as I imagine one might tiptoe through a minefield, I began sitting upright and edging away from T’shombe.
She looked hurt. “Don’t be frightened,” she said gently. Her eyes went far away: for a moment I thought she was hearing voices, then realized she was checking the walls of the hardware room. “It’s perfectly harmless in here. Shielded. Isolated. That’s why I brought it into this room.” Her eyes snapped back onto me. “So I could study it in safety. Learn from it.”
I returned her gaze; stared deep into her cocoa-brown eyes. What I saw in there scared the absolute living hell out of me.
T’shombe was utterly mad and totally serious.
“So, uh.” I managed to get my hands under me, shift my weight to my arms, and start coiling up for a spring at the door. I look a long, steady look at the plant. Why the hell had she decorated it with tinsel? “So this Master, he likes to dress up for Christmas, huh?”
Quiet, catlike, moving on hands and knees, T’shombe slipped around to my left side. “Chaff,” she whispered in my left ear. Her soft breath made me shiver involuntarily. “I got it from the guys in STS. Radar chaff. They say it jams the Master’s telepathic transmissions.”
That got another shudder out of me. “The guys in STS?”
She nodded slowly, seriously. “Oh, yes. They know all about the Master. Even more than I do.”
Oh.
Okay. I got to my feet and slowly, carefully, stood up. T’shombe stood with me.
I smiled at her. A big, friendly, totally fraudulent smile.
She seemed to react positively to that.
“Well, uh. Er.” I froze a moment, groping for words, much less an idea.
“You won’t tell anyone I told you?” she whispered urgently.
I shook my head. “No. No, of course not.”
“And you won’t mention it outside this room?”
I couldn’t decide whether to nod or shake my head, so I sort of did both. “Swear to God. Scout’s honor. I won’t.”
T’shombe nodded seriously. “Good. The Master has cuttings everywhere. Don’t let their innocent appearance fool you.”
I nodded along with her. “I understand.”
“In fact,” she whispered, “you should probably go back to your cubicle and pretend you know nothing.”
I kept nodding. “Right. Good idea. I’ll do that.”
T’shombe looked at me and smiled. “Thanks, Pyle.” She looked at me again—some mad thought obviously flashed right through her mind—then grabbed me and pinned my arms to my side with an impulsive hug. “I knew you’d understand.”
“Thank you.” Dear God, get me out of this lunatic’s arms, get me out, get me OUT, GET ME OUT!
She relaxed the squeeze, then gave me a nod and a wink and reached for the door handle. “Ready to go back to the battle?”
Not trusting my voice not to scream, I only nodded quickly. She cracked the door.
I didn’t stop running until I was back in my cubicle.
Considering the first hour, the rest of the morning was pretty benign. The network was still down, but I could work on local files, so I strapped on my videoshades and datagloves and dove into my working copy of the DIP Marketing Database mess. There’s this misconception people like Uberman have, that virtual reality work on relational databases is somehow fun and exciting.
Sorry, kids. Hallucinatory visual metaphors may work for games and student projects, but in the business world, a well-structured database resembles nothing so much as a warehouse full of children’s alphabet blocks. And the virtual tools your average MIS staffer gets to play with bear a depressingly strong similarity to heavy construction equipment: front-end loaders, hopper-fed sorters, file compressors; that sort of thing. About the only place where there’s any room for fun at all is when you start putting together deep-level user objects, and even then you have to make sure the objects you create will forever remain MIS eyes-only.
For example, my morning project was to create a query agent for that wonderful warm human being, Scott Uberman. For the user side—for what Uberman and any other end-user would see—I took a standard metaphor from the system library and gave the query agent that nice, polite, boot-licking bow-tied little Young Republican toady look.
For the code side, though, in that wonderful realm visible only to we mystic wizards of MIS, I went into our secret library of bootlegged adult cartoon characters and gave him an entirely different aspect: Pudnose Bobbin, the ultimate self-pitying and self-righteous white male dickhead.
Seemed rather fitting, I thought.
Along about noon, I delta’d in my changes, launched a recompile, then shrugged off my gloves and goggles and took a break for lunch. The company cafeteria was in the basement of the south wing. I made it there without incident, caught up with Bubu Rubin and Frank Dong in the serving line, and opted for the daily special. Bubu guessed it was some kind of beef. Frank was a bit short in the wallet department (considering the badge tracking system monitors us everytime we so much as fart, you’d think the company cafeteria would take personal checks, no?), so I wound up fronting him a few bucks.
Then we lucked out and got our usual table by the window, the one that offers the best view of the Cute Babes From Document Coding. We ate; we stole surreptitious glances; we sighed. Bubu made his usual comment (“So many women, so little nerve”). Frank told us once again about how when he was first hired the company cafeteria actually gave out salt. Bubu tried to derail his story by mentioning that T’shombe was brown-bagging it in the hardware room again and asked me if I’d noticed anything odd about her lately. I almost started to answer, then spotted the tinsel-covered split-leaf philodendron lurking in the corner behind him and changed the subject.
2: REBOOT
After lunch we got the call to bring the network back on line. Normally this is a delicate and dangerous operation that requires at least five people, six terminals, and a whole lot of loud shouting and running around—
Frank “Yuan Huang” Dong stands before his terminal, hands poised dramatically above the keyboard, like a master concert pianist psyching himself up to tackle a particularly difficult Rachmaninoff piano concerto. A graying, fifty-something, but still handsome, Asian man, he is clearly in command here, and his bespectacled eyes reflect both a deep inner strength and the overhead fluorescent lights.
Reaching the end of his brief meditation, he draws a deep breath, lets it out slowly, then stands on his tiptoes, peers over the cubicle walls, and makes eye contact with the rest of his loyal crew. They are—
T’shombe “Babe” Ryder, the buxom, beautiful, thirty-something female Chief Hardware Engineer, poised at the door of the computer hardware room with a CO2 fire extinguisher in one strong but perfectly manicured hand and a #16 Torx wrench in the other.
Charles “Charles” Murphy, the young, brilliant, but tragically wheelchair-bound Assistant Network Analyst, fully jacked into his interface dock, already deep into virtual reality and beeping and buzzing like an arcade game in attack mode.
Abraham “Bubu” Rubin, the middle-aged, frustrated, and endearingly neurotic Senior Network Analyst, standing between a matched pair of vintage DEC VT-320 terminals, a hand on each keyboard and looking for all the world like a Hassidic Keith Emerson.
And last but not least, Jack “Pyle” Burroughs, the Junior Assistant Software Engineer-in-Training and Guy In the Red Shirt, standing in the middle of the multiplexer junction snakepit, with a hundred feet of coiled EtherNet cable slung over his right shoulder and a complete hardware store dangling from the thick leather tool belt around his waist.
ACTION
FRANK: (Surveying his crew.) “All stations ready?”
CREW: “AYE, SIR!”
FRANK: “Very well. Commencing Primary Initialization.” (Frank turns to his terminal, bites his lower lip nervously, and taps in a short, cryptic, command:)
cat foo | egrep "666"
(The terminal digests the line. It hums quietly, and spits a few blurry pixels onto the screen. For perhaps half a minute, nothing seems to be happening. Tension builds in the breathless silence. Then—)
MURPHY: “Frank? I’m picking up an anomalous flutter in the flowgate collectimizer.”
FRANK: “Analysis, Mister Murphy?”
MURPHY: “Hard to tell at this time. It could be nothing more than—”
RUBIN: “Uh-oh.” (Leans over left keyboard; taps a few keys.)
FRANK: “Abraham?”
RUBIN: “It’s—” (Pauses. Taps a few more keys.) “It’s the left lateral fibrillation array. I… I think—”
MURPHY: “Confirmed. We are experiencing a degradation in the heuristic flowgate stabilizer. I am adjusting delta-V to compensate.”
RUBIN: (Worried.) “It’s not responding.”
MURPHY: “Continuing to adjust delta—”
RUBIN: (Becoming alarmed.) “It’s not responding, I tell you!”
FRANK: (To Rubin.) “Get a grip on yourself, man.” (To Murphy.) “Can you lock it down and switch to auxiliary?”
MURPHY: “Perhaps. In theory, at least, it is possible to—”
RUBIN: (Gasp.) “My God! The stack pointers have just jumped right off the scale!” (Pounces on left keyboard with both hands; frantically bangs in commands. Terminal responds with ear-splitting string of guttural squawks and high-pitched beeps. Rubin leaps to right keyboard and pounds even faster.)
FRANK: “Abraham?”
RUBIN: “It’s breaking up! I can’t hold it!” (Right terminal joins in the beeping and squawking.)
MURPHY: “Confirmed. I am projecting catastrophic cache failure in approximately forty-one-point-two-five seconds.”
RUBIN: (Backs away from terminal in fear.) “We’ll never make it! We’ve got to abort!”
FRANK: “No! We can do it!” (Leans on intercom button.) “T’shombe! I need more MIPS!”
T’SHOMBE: (For some inexplicable reason in a Scottish accent.) “I’m givin’ ‘er all I can, Frank. She cannah take much more o’ this!”
MURPHY: “Thirty seconds to total cache failure.”
RUBIN: “Blowout in the synchronic gilloolystat! We’re losing spin control!”
MURPHY: “Twenty-five seconds to total cache failure.”
FRANK: (To Rubin and Murphy.) “Steady, lads, steady!” (To the intercom.) “Dammit, T’shombe, I need more MIPS!”
T’SHOMBE: (To sound of CO2 fire extinguisher blasts in background.) “F’r God’s sake, mon, I’m still pickin’ up th’ pieces doon here!”
MURPHY: “Twenty seconds to cache failure.”
RUBIN: (Hysterical.) “The dialectical prophylactimizer has failed! We’ve got zombies and orphans floating all over the pi
pes!”
FRANK: (To the extra in the red shirt.) “Pyle! Bypass the Number Three Latent Positronic Matrix!”
PYLE: “But sir! That could blow out the entire—”
MURPHY: “Fifteen seconds to cache failure!”
FRANK: “I’ll take that risk! Bypass it! That’s a direct order!!”
PYLE: “Aye, sir. Cross-circuiting to B.” (Pyle frantically yanks some thick cables out of a rack panel, swaps them around and plugs them into other sockets, then punches the backup M/UX unit into diagnostic mode. The panel lights up like a Christmas tree on amphetamines.)
RUBIN: “The containment buffer is breached!” (Jumps out of his cubicle.) “There’s demons respawning everywhere!”
FRANK: “Stay at your post, Mister Rubin!” (To intercom.) “T’shombe, I need those MIPS and I need them now!”
MURPHY: “Ten seconds to cache failure!”
T’SHOMBE: (Grumpily.) “All right, all right. Seems an ‘onest civil servant cannah g’t ‘erself a decent coffee break aroond ‘ere—”
MURPHY: “Five seconds to cache failure!”
RUBIN: (Wails.) “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” (A long, dramatic pause. Rubin is gnawing on his knuckles. Frank is poised, hands like curved talons, ready to pounce upon his keyboard. Murphy is beeping the last few seconds slowly down. Pyle is—aw, who cares? There comes a blast or two of CO2 from the hardware room. Then…)
COMPUTER: (In a voice eerily reminiscent of both Keir Dullea and Barney the Dinosaur.) “Good morning, everybody! I’m happy to be here, and really looking forward to another exciting day at MDE! In fact, I’m so happy, I could sing a little song! Maestro, if you please?” (Music intro. Computer sings.) “Daisy, Daisy, tell me your answer true. Everybody sing along! I’m half crazy—”