Shades of Grey

by Clea Simon

  Or did she? Lucy would say there were no coincidences. Of course, Dulcie had spent much of her life disagreeing with her mother. She reached for the phone.

  ‘Dulcie! How are you? I’m so sorry I’ve let things slide. I meant to get back to you at that party the other day, but you took off before I got the chance.’ Luke had picked up on the first ring. From the sounds around him, he was at a bar or restaurant. Could he have shown up, late, at the grad student gathering? ‘Thanks for calling me back.’

  ‘No problem. I just got in.’ Was he going to repeat his offer of dinner? ‘Actually, I wanted to ask you about Tim’s laptop—’ She didn’t get a chance to finish.

  ‘What is it with my brother’s friends and that computer? Stacia wanted to take a peek at it, too.’

  Of course she did – for the same reason that she’d asked Dulcie to check her computer. ‘Yeah, she said something to me.’ Why embarrass Alana? The sooner those photos were destroyed, the better. ‘But I think there may be a bigger problem.’

  ‘Oh?’ He sounded happy, rather than concerned. He was definitely at a bar.

  ‘Yeah, I have a bad feeling that there’s some kind of virus in Tim’s computer. I think he may have sent me a file or typed something into my computer that’s making it act up.’

  ‘Sounds like Tim. I’m sorry.’ At least he had the grace to apologize. ‘And you think it might help to look at Tim’s laptop?’

  ‘It might.’ Not that she could make any sense out of it, but maybe Chris or one of his buddies could.

  ‘I could bring it by tomorrow, if that would work. Or if you’re free now, you could come out. We’re having dinner but I could pick it up after, and Stacia and I would love your company.’

  Ouch. Suddenly those dime hot dogs were lead in her stomach. ‘No, thanks, Luke.’ How should she put this? ‘I’m just back from a day out with friends and the weather isn’t encouraging.’

  ‘Suit yourself. But what if I swing by tomorrow evening? I’ll call first.’

  ‘Sure, that would be fine.’ Feeling anything but, Dulcie collapsed on the sofa. Outside, the rain poured down.

  Thirteen

  Dulcie had one thing in mind on Monday as she marched to her cubicle. All the way through the now-normal gauntlet of guards and along the hall by the newly hushed coffee room, the only thing she could think of was her email. ‘Look for strange codings,’ Chris had explained. ‘Particularly the extensions.’ It had taken Dulcie a few moments to realize that what Chris meant was what she’d always termed the suffix. But he’d made it clear: if she found an .exe, .cmd, or .bat at the end of an email, she’d have a rational explanation for what had happened to her computer at home. She’d been loose enough to ask if there might be a ‘cat’ extension, but he only smiled and told her that it stood for catalog – and went on to warn her that if she saw a .vbs extension, she should call him right away.

  ‘That may as well stand for “very bad shit”,’ he’d said. ‘And that could explain a lot of your woes.’

  She’d kept the list in her mind – and taken his cell number. Maybe something would surface here at her work email. Maybe Priority would be liable, if there was permanent damage to her laptop. It seemed unlikely that a company that worked so hard at not paying out claims would reimburse her for damage, but if she could prove to them that something from the office had followed her home, so to speak, she’d at least ask. If along the way she shed some light on Priority’s problems that would be nice – Dulcie had a brief image of herself being lauded by her obnoxious boss – but that was not, well, a priority.

  And so, with barely a grunt of hello to Joanie, Dulcie slid into her seat and booted up her computer. ‘Come on, come on!’ She urged the system. She didn’t care right now if some electronic hall monitor was counting her keystrokes. What she wanted was the window that let her email in and out.

  After a few more moments digesting her name and password, the system brightened up. Before she could delve further, however, an internal memo popped up on her screen.

  ‘Priority Employees,’ ran its bold header. ‘As of August 1, Priority Insurance will be refocusing its network security operations to further secure its corporate identity. As of this date, the network usage and data of all hourly employees, as well as salaried staff, will be subject to increased monitoring and security applications. New intrusion detection systems are currently being uploaded and may cause temporary activity declines in the Priority systems. Be assured that these changes are in everyone’s best interests.’

  ‘So that’s what the slowdown is,’ Dulcie muttered to herself. She itched to edit the memo: so brief, and yet so pompous. ‘A bit like closing the barn door after someone stole the horses.’

  ‘You say something?’ Joanie’s head popped around the corner. She must have had a wild weekend; her hair was green.

  ‘Whoa!’ Dulcie looked up and realized that she’d been particularly antisocial – and to the one person here she liked. ‘Great hair. That was just – I just saw the security memo.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, the new programs. Great, huh? Just make sure you back up all your work.’

  ‘I will.’ Dulcie rolled her chair to the edge of the cubicle. ‘But what I’m really worried about is my home computer. Something went off on me this weekend and I’m wondering if a virus could have followed me home.’

  Joanie rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t tell me, you’ve been emailing attachments to yourself at home?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dulcie felt foolish admitting it. ‘I do it all the time. I mean, this stuff doesn’t exactly take all my concentration, and I’ve got real deadlines – grant deadlines – breathing down my neck. So when I have a thought about my thesis I type it up.’

  ‘And you’re wireless at home?’ Dulcie nodded. Joanie made a face. ‘It could be. I’m sorry. But you know, unless you’ve got good firewalls at home’ – the blank look on Dulcie’s face answered the implied question – ‘well, it could have been any number of hackers. But, hey, did you check the server?’

  ‘No, I thought I’d just check my own “Sent” box.’

  Joanie dismissed that notion with a clucking sound and rolled her chair over to Dulcie’s desk. A fast spate of typing, and Dulcie found herself looking at a huge ‘Sent’ file full of old emails. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I figured out how to get into the server,’ she said. ‘The password was so stupid – “PRIORITY123”.’

  ‘Wow.’ Dulcie was impressed. No wonder Joanie seemed to keep herself busy. ‘Can I read everything everyone in the company has sent out?’

  ‘Not without their passwords you can’t, at least not any high-level stuff. This is as far as I got before the ax came down on us all.’ She smiled. ‘But peons like you and me, you know, our emails aren’t encrypted. I confess, I was following a flirtation between Bart in graphics and Penny upstairs.’ Dulcie looked at Joanie, but the younger woman wouldn’t meet her gaze. ‘After a while I started to feel a little, I don’t know, sticky. Anyway, check through these. At the very least, you’ll be able to find your own emails – or anything that was sent to you. Maybe some spambot picked up your address and hit you with something.’

  Spambot? The language never stood still, did it? ‘Thanks,’ was all Dulcie said, and with a quick glance around – they were on the clock, after all – she got to work.

  Three hundred emails in, she was ready to give up. How many times had she sent herself the link to that cat cartoon? And why had she thought that her ramblings on the symbolism of cloud formations would add anything to her research? It was almost a relief to get back to her paying work. The names and addresses she was typing in no longer seemed to repeat. Could it be that they’d finally re-entered all the old data? Or was her brain just mush?

  ‘Maybe I’ve got a virus in my brain.’ She hit return on yet another file.

  ‘Ms Shorts?’

  Dulcie started. The voice came from so close behind her that for a moment she thought perhaps a program in her head had come to life.


  ‘Ms Dulcie Shorts?’

  ‘Schwartz,’ she said, spinning her chair around to face a dark-blue jacket, with a matching tie. She looked up. A tall, clean-cut suit stood in front of her. The man inside seemed to have no personality, so still was his face. Behind him stood his clone, different only in that his tie was striped. ‘It’s Schwartz. Dulcie Schwartz.’

  Dulcie couldn’t tell if either of them got the Bond reference, although the second suit blinked. ‘Come with us, please, Ms Schwart,’ said the first suit. Well, that was closer to her name. But the whole twin thing was disconcerting.

  ‘Why? What do you want with me?’ Dulcie heard her syntax changing. This was too weird. The suit closest to her reached for her upper arm. ‘Unhand me, sir!’ After this many years of literature studies, the phrasing was automatic.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ It was Joanie. Dulcie’s tone of voice, if not her words, had alerted her colleague. Down the aisle three other sets of eyes peered her way.

  ‘The computer security officer needs to see you,’ said the clone. Dulcie reached under the desk to get her bag, and found her chair pulled swiftly back. ‘We will retrieve any of your belongings for you. Please get up now without touching anything.’

  Speechless, finally, she did and watched as the second suit – he was ever-so-slightly blonder – reached for her bag. He opened it up and began to look through it; something the security guard did every day, twice a day, but this felt different.

  ‘Hey, that’s private.’

  He didn’t even look up. The darker suit took her by her upper arm and propelled her down the narrow aisle. ‘You gave up any right to privacy as part of your agreement of employment here at Priority.’ He looked down at her. ‘If it was personal, you should’ve left it at home.’

  ‘If it were, asshole,’ Dulcie muttered under her breath. It was her last bit of resistance, and with a glance at Joanie, she let the two virtual robots escort her to the elevator bank.

  ‘What is this about? Where are you taking me?’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. Please just come along,’ said the blonder guard.

  ‘Why?’ It seemed a reasonable question to Dulcie, but neither of her escorts answered. By the time they deposited her in a conference room, she was bursting with questions. ‘Do you even have any right to have me marched about like this?’

  ‘You are on our property, young lady. We have the right to do anything we please.’ Dulcie spun around and found herself facing Sally Putnam. The snakelike manager didn’t look pleased, and her dark eyes pinned Dulcie in place. ‘And I’d watch my tone of voice in this office.’

  She didn’t strike, she didn’t hiss. Dulcie got her breath back.

  ‘What is going on here, anyway?’ Now that Dulcie was calming down, she realized she was curious.

  ‘As you may already know,’ the perfectly coiffed boss put an emphasis on the last word, ‘we’ve been experiencing some security mishaps.’

  Dulcie nodded, noting the woman’s coy choice of words.

  ‘We are in the process or rooting out the culprits and making sure they will be punished to the full extent of the law.’

  Dulcie waited. What did this have to do with her looking for her own email? Was wasting company time a dismissible offense? ‘And I’m here because . . .?’

  ‘We know full well that you were on the company server, in clear violation of company regulations—’

  ‘Regulations I was never informed about.’ Dulcie cut her off. If she was going to lose her job, she wasn’t going down without a fight. ‘I’m a temp, remember? All I was ever told was, “Sit here and type what we give you”.’

  ‘Ignorance of the rules is not a legal defense.’ Dulcie was surprised to hear one of Suze’s oft-repeated lines coming from that tight little mouth. Sally Putnam must have been well briefed; as the head of human resources she was probably being held responsible for hiring a thief. But then the woman’s words kicked in: why would Dulcie need a legal defense?

  ‘Are you considering firing me?’ She might as well face the worst option. ‘I mean, officially, I’m an employee of TempLive, not Priority.’

  ‘Terminating your contract is the least of your worries, Miss Schwartz.’

  Dulcie bridled. That ‘Miss’ was an intentional insult, and the hissing sound made the phrase more ominous still.

  But Sally Putnam wasn’t done. ‘We’re considering having you arrested.’

  Fourteen

  ‘That . . . that sweater thief threatened me!’ Several hours later, she was at Foley’s with Joanie and a few more of the office’s friendlier faces. Her boss had kept her in the conference room until closing time, but after her brief interrogation, had pretty much left her alone. Several times, one or the other of the security clones had come in, and despite Dulcie’s best efforts she’d been unable to hear much of their whispered conversations. The blonder clone had taken over babysitting finally, and although he had looked like he was on the brink of speaking several times, Dulcie had been unable to engage him. Finally, his partner had showed up to let her go, holding out her bag with the ominous words, ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  ‘They detained me. Is that even legal?’ Back out in the free world, she was finally getting angry.

  ‘Was the door locked?’ Joanie seemed to take the question seriously.

  ‘I didn’t check.’ Dulcie was embarrassed, but it was the truth. Joanie looked disappointed. If it had been her, Dulcie was sure, she’d have shimmied out of the fourteenth-floor window and up to the roof.

  Right now, Dulcie just wanted to let off steam. She had managed to call Suze once she got her phone back, but had only reached her voicemail. She had been about to call Trista, too, just to have someone to spout off to, when Joanie had grabbed her outside on the sidewalk. ‘She was going to have me arrested!’

  ‘She still might.’ Ricky, Joanie’s friend, had the grace to look unhappy at the prospect. ‘I mean, they’ve got IT guys tearing apart your desktop now.’

  ‘Great.’ Dulcie slumped in her seat. Joanie had bought her a beer and a shot, but she needed a clear head to think through what had just happened. ‘Not that they’re going to find anything.’ A horrible thought hit her. ‘Unless, well, you don’t think that the virus on my home computer could be the one that hit Priority, do you? I mean, by accident?’

  Neither of her drinking companions had an answer, but Joanie’s face lit up with a sly smile. ‘Hey, Dulcie, tell me the truth. Did you have something to do with it?’

  The thought was appealing, but truth will out. ‘No,’ she acknowledged with a sigh. ‘I wish.’ Joanie kept looking at her. ‘I mean, if I’d managed to embezzle from Priority, would I still be working there? As a temp?’

  ‘It would be the perfect cover.’ Joanie had a point, but the thought of money had moved Dulcie from righteous anger to simple depression.

  ‘No, I’m innocent. Innocent and broke. And jobless.’

  ‘You’re not coming back?’ Joanie looked a little surprised.

  ‘I don’t think they’d let me in the building. And I can’t imagine the temp agency will want to place me someplace else after this.’ At least she had Tim’s half of the rent. But where was she going to come up with the rest? She still owed close to a grand to the vet, not to mention phone, food, and the all-important caffeine fixes.

  ‘But that’s so unfair! They don’t know anything.’

  Dulcie nodded. ‘I know. And they told me that they would be in touch. But I’m not holding my breath.’ Mr Grey. Tim. Luke and Stacia. And now this. Didn’t she deserve a break? As if on cue, her cell phone rang.

  ‘Yes?’ She knew her voice sounded tentative, but at this point, she dreaded news. She turned away and put a finger in her ear, the better to hear the latest bombshell.

  ‘Dulcie? This is Bruce. I was so sorry to be so out of it the other day. A friend was, well, having some troubles and I was distracted. I was wondering if you’d give me another chance to explain. Maybe you’d want to get
some dinner?’

  She knew her reaction must have been obvious by the way Joanie was looking at her. ‘Are you cleared? Are you coming back?’ Joanie was bouncing off her stool.

  ‘Even better.’ Dulcie could feel the smile spreading across her face. ‘I’ve got a date.’

  Although she and Bruce had agreed to meet at the Vietnamese place in Harvard Square, Dulcie still wanted to stop by her apartment first. There was no way a day like this wouldn’t show in her face, if not her hair. But maybe the anger had been energizing. The face that stared back from the mirror had more color in it than she’d expected. And her hair was unruly, but not in a bad way.

  ‘I look positively rock and roll,’ she said, and immediately regretted it. Not that long ago, Mr Grey would have been sitting on the counter beside her. He rarely responded when she spoke, but she could remember the way he’d flick his tail in acknowledgment. If she kept looking straight into the mirror, she could almost imagine him in the corner of her eye. With his silky fur and flag of a tail, he always looked good. Even his eyes, green with a hint of gold, shone, set off by a natural dark rim like kohl against his silver fur.

  Mascara. Without it, her own hazel eyes almost disappeared in her face, and Dulcie reached for the tube, knocking it into the sink.

  ‘This isn’t mine.’ Startled out of her self-contemplation, she rescued the black and gold container before the constant drip from the faucet could damage it. Unscrewing the applicator, she saw that her usual soft brown had been replaced by a darker shade. A quick swipe on her wrist showed traces of gold glitter, too. No wonder everyone at the pub had thought she’d dressed up. It was a nice color – but not one she had purchased. The maker – she checked the bottom of the tube – was a fancy brand that was decidedly out of her budget.

  How had it gotten into her bathroom? Had one of Tim’s girlfriends left it there? In a moment of revulsion, she dropped the tube with a shudder. Already, her eyes were itching. Did she really want Alana’s cooties? But, well, she’d been using this same mascara since . . . since when? At any rate, she knew she had used it before without having her eyes fall out. Picking up the slim tube, Dulcie turned it over in her hands. It was expensive, certainly pricier than her usual drugstore brand. And, yes, very flattering – especially on her fair lashes. Carefully unscrewing the brush again, she sighed and took a breath, and then dabbed the curved brush at her long, but light lashes.