Bring Back Cerberus

by Phillip Gwynne

  I guess I was expecting something like the Styxx Emporium, a cathedral of geek-chic. But when I thought about it, it made sense that the prototype Cerberus housing would be manufactured in such an unassuming place. Why make a big thing out of it? Why draw attention to it?

  Okay, it was now time to implement the next part of my plan. All the way on the train I’d tried to come up with alternatives to what I was just about to do, and I did come up with alternatives, lots of them, but none of them was as good, or as heartbreaking. So I took my iPhone out, removed it from its skin and placed it on the ground. I picked up a rock.

  ‘Forgive me, for I am about to sin,’ I said as I brought the rock down hard, crunching my iPhone.

  The case cracked, the screen cracked and from the sky came several jagged bolts of lightning. Okay, I made up the last bit, but felt like I totally deserved to be mega-zapped by the great Apple god.

  Crunched iPhone in hand, I walked towards the building.

  All Visitors to Report to the Office said a sign, an arrow pointing around the side.

  I pushed open the office door and walked inside. Again, I couldn’t help but think of the Styxx Emporium. Its sleek interior, the merchandise arranged like priceless museum exhibits, shiny and spotlit. Such a contrast to this place.

  A woman sat at a desk, typing at an ancient computer. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a Commodore 64, but it still looked pretty old.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  She looked up at me and said, ‘Deliveries are around the side, luv.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not?’ she said.

  As I put my iPhone on the counter I could hardly believe what I’d done to it, and the tears that formed in my eyes were the genuine article.

  ‘It needs a new case,’ I said.

  The woman stood up, smoothed down her skirt.

  ‘Oh, the poor thing,’ she said, looking at my iPhone as if it was an injured animal, like a juvenile bird that had dropped out of its nest and needed to be put out of its misery. ‘I’m not sure who sent you here, luv, but we’re not a retailer.’

  The oh-my-poor-iPhone tears were already there, why not use them?

  I screwed my eyes tight, squeezing them out.

  But as I did, as they started to make their pathetic way down my cheeks, something weird happened: other, more legitimate tears decided that they wanted out too.

  Imogen-isn’t-my-friend tears. I’m-not-running-at-the-nationals tears.

  The floodgates were open.

  The-Debt-is-going-to-take-my-leg tears.

  My-life-is-broken tears.

  ‘Oh, you poor boy,’ said the woman, ripping some tissues from a box and handing them to me. ‘I know how you feel.’

  ‘It’s my sister’s phone,’ I said. ‘She’s got coimetrophobia.’

  The woman gave me a sympathetic look and some more tissues before she said, ‘Come on, let’s have a look out back before the boss gets back from his run.’

  I followed her out back, into a storage area. There were rows and rows of shelves on which were square plastic containers, each containing a different type of phone housing. From the other side of a wall I could hear machine noises; I assumed that was where the actual manufacturing was done.

  ‘It’s an iPhone 5, right?’ said the woman.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and I followed her down one of the rows.

  She stopped and pointed to a bin that was labelled IP5. ‘Take your pick.’

  As I took a case from the bin, I checked out the other bins on the shelf, the ones labelled IP, IP3 and IP4. All iPhones, I reasoned.

  My eyes travelled to the shelf above. There was a bin labelled SC – the Styxx Charon? – and another labelled SP – the Styxx Phaëthon? – but the one that really caught my attention was labelled SX.

  ‘What’s SX?’ I asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t have a –’ she started, before she corrected herself. ‘No, wait, I do know. That’s a special order we had.’

  ‘Can I have a look?’

  ‘Better not, luv,’ she said.

  I thought about just grabbing one and running for it, but I decided against it – the woman had been so nice to me.

  We went back to the office and I said, ‘How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘A present for your poor sister.’

  I thanked her, went outside and scurried around the side of the building until I came to a delivery dock. There was a set of sliding doors that were slightly ajar.

  A security guard was standing in front of them.

  I picked up a stone, threw it at a nearby skip.

  As I did, I thought: Is he really going to fall for the oldest trick in the book?

  The stone hit the skip with a surprisingly loud clang!

  ‘Hey! Who’s that?’ said the security guard, falling for the oldest trick in the book and making towards the skip.

  As he did, I ran behind him and slipped through the open doors and inside.

  I walked around pallets loaded with boxes until I was back in the storage area. I made for the row, and grabbed a case from the SX box.

  A quick glance, and I knew that it was what I was after. It was bigger than an iPhone case, but much slimmer, and it was transparent.

  I was just about to put it in my pocket when somebody said, ‘Hey, what are you doing there?’

  A man was standing at the end of the row, in running gear, dripping sweat.

  When the woman said that her boss was on a run I’d assumed she meant a business run, dropping off parcels, something like that. But he really had been on a run.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, looking at the case still in my hand.

  ‘Hey –’ he started, but I didn’t hear the rest because I was running.

  Back down the row, behind the pallets, out through the sliding doors.

  The security guard, back at his post, went to grab me, but I fended him off rugby style with a straight-arm hand in the chest.

  ‘Get him!’ I heard the boss yell.

  I ran back along the side of the building. When I was on the street I looked over my shoulder.

  The security guard was behind me, but that was where he was going to stay – nobody with a running style as cumbersome as that was ever going to catch up to me.

  I slowed down a bit to catch my breath.

  As I did I, heard the scuff of footsteps.

  Was the security guard foxing? Had he gone from cumbersome to Speedy Gonzales?

  But when I looked behind, it was to see the boss chasing after me. Immediately, I did what all runners do when they’re in a race: I analysed my opponent’s style, his form.

  My conclusion: he, the boss, could run.

  I better get a move on, I thought as I went up several gears. I had another problem, however: I didn’t really know where I was, or where I was going. When I reached a T-junction, I turned left. This street looked the same as the previous street, the buildings looked the same as the previous buildings. I took a quick glance behind – he was still on my tail.

  I thought of Coach Sheeds’s Hakuna Matata. A gazelle must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. A lion must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. Right now, I was a gazelle.

  I increased my speed. If he was just a casual runner he wouldn’t be used to that, to running in spurts, to Kenyan running. When I dropped it back down again, I looked behind. I’d put a bit more distance between us, but not a huge amount.

  This guy was more than just a casual runner.

  Up ahead, on my left, I saw a laneway. I kicked again, veered into it. On either side were the backs of factories, skips overflowing with rubbish.

  Then walls. Then a high chain-mail fence. The deadest of dead ends.

  Nowhere to go but back.

  I looked behind, and the lion was almost on me. He stopped about four metres away. Chest heaving, he was trying not to show how much he was hurting.

  ‘
You’re a lovely runner,’ he said, between gasps.

  ‘You’re pretty good, too,’ I said.

  ‘You a miler?’ he said. ‘You look like a miler.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Marathons,’ he said. ‘I’m in for the long haul.’

  He pointed at the case that was still in my hand. ‘You need to give that back to me, son.’

  ‘I do?’ I said.

  He nodded, walking towards me, hand outstretched.

  I could’ve charged him, tried to knock him over, maybe even hit him. Or I could’ve used the skills I learnt in my one season of football and dodged him. But I didn’t.

  I handed over the case.

  ‘Good lad,’ he said, smiling.

  And then I ran, jumping out of the blocks like Usain Bolt.

  I sprinted past him, back down the alley, back along one street. Past the security guard, bent over, gulping for air. Halfway along the next street I hit the wall: oxygen debt, lactic acid, thighs on fire, all that stuff. And I wanted to end the pain, wanted to stop.

  Suddenly, I was at Stadio Olimpico in Rome, the last lap of the 1500 metres.

  I’ve got a five-metre lead, but they’re catching up: the Kenyan and the Ethiopian and the Moroccan.

  The crowd is on their feet.

  The crowd is roaring.

  And I’ve got to find something, got to find some guts.

  The Kenyan, the Moroccan, the Ethiopian kick as one, and so do I.

  A burst of power that starts at my toes and surges through my fingertips.

  I reached 1919 Goldman Avenue. Scrambled along the side of the building, in through the sliding door. Into the iPhone row. Grabbed another SX case.

  When I was out on the street again, I saw him in the distance. Trudging along.

  Marathon man, you just don’t want to mess with us milers.

  FRIDAY

  ANAGRAMS

  All the way home I was on a high.

  And why not?

  I’d devised a pretty audacious plan and then I’d successfully executed that pretty audacious plan.

  Even when I swapped the sim card from my damaged phone into my old iPhone 4 I was still on a high.

  There was nothing wrong with an iPhone 4, I told myself: it wasn’t so long ago that it was tomorrow’s technology, it wasn’t so long ago that it was Cerberus.

  And that’s just about when I fell off my high, toppling, head over toes, back to earth.

  Who in the hell was I kidding?

  I was only a third of the way to a whole Cerberus, and that was assuming the other two components were as accessible as this one had been.

  It was time to stop slapping myself on the back and time to return to work.

  I opened ClamTop, once again bringing up the session from the day we’d nabbed Nitmick.

  He’d sent this email to SheikSnap@hotmail.com.

  Interceded huge toys? That’s so scrambled!

  I remembered what Dr Chakrabarty had said: if you see the words ‘crazy’, ‘mixed-up’ or ‘scrambled’, then you pretty much know it’s an anagram.

  So I did what he’d done: I wrote the letters that made up Interceded huge toys? in a circle and tried to find something that made sense.

  It was easy to find words, but I couldn’t use all the letters up and make a meaningful phrase or sentence.

  Something occurred to me. I got on my computer, typed anagram into Google. The first hit was called Anagram Server, a ‘free web-based anagram generator’.

  See, Miranda, Google is my friend!

  I went to this website, entered interceded huge toys into the field and hit enter.

  I got 55,557 results!

  I started scrolling through them, starting with ceded tighteners you. After about ten minutes, I was ready to give up but then I found it: did you get the screen.

  That had to be it.

  I went to SheikSnap@hotmail.com’s reply.

  It consisted of a single symbol: !

  There was only one conclusion: SheikSnap@hotmail.com, whoever they were, already had the screen.

  Now all I had to do was find out who SheikSnap@hotmail.com was.

  And get the screen from them.

  I typed three words into the anagram server. The website took about a second to generate two hundred and sixty-six anagrams.

  After looking through them all I decided on see nice nerd.

  So far so good, but now I was into more technical territory, like how in the hell did you phish somebody?

  But then I remembered that the program Guzman had used to phish Nitmick had been called Nuclear Phishing.

  Easy, I assured myself. I’d just download myself a little old copy of Nuclear Phishing.

  I entered that as a search string into Google and hit enter and all I got was a whole lot of stuff about the evils of phishing.

  I thought of what Miranda said, that Google censored results.

  Maybe she was right.

  Hey, but Google wasn’t the only search engine out there!

  So I tried Bing, Yahoo, AltVista, Webcrawler, Lycos and DogPile.

  And I still got nada.

  So I went down to the kitchen and filled a bowl right to the top with chocolate ice-cream and poured chocolate topping over that and sprinkled that with chocolate chips and came back upstairs.

  If there’s anybody who thinks chocolate isn’t brain food, then they’re a total cretin.

  Because after I’d finished the chocolate ice-cream with chocolate topping and chocolate chips it came to me: I was going about this the totally wrong way.

  If you want some dirty work done, then you need a dirty worker.

  Which Google obviously wasn’t. And neither was Bing. Or Lycos. None of those goody two-shoes search engines.

  But which one was?

  I vaguely remembered these nerdy kids at school talking about something called Astalavista.

  Astalavista was easy to find, which was a bit of a worry – surely something so evil should be more hidden.

  Its tag, ‘the best underground download portal’, was pretty encouraging, though.

  And when I entered Nuclear Phishing, I got none of that righteous stuff about how bad phishing was, all I got was – hallelujah! – about a thousand different places where I could download this software.

  Which I proceeded to do.

  After installing the program, I typed Nitmick’s email address into the ‘From email:’ field. Typed SheikSnap@hotmail.com into the ‘To email:’ field. I typed hey did you ‘see nice nerd’, he was totally mixed up into the message section and hit send.

  Now it was a waiting game: it could be hours, days, weeks until I got a reply.

  Or if they were onto me, then there wouldn’t be any reply at all, except maybe one that consisted of two monosyllabic words.

  But I got a reply almost instantaneously: coca fizzes.

  I didn’t need an anagram server for this – it had to be Cozzi’s Café.

  I replied straightaway with an emoticon:

  And received one in return: Now? I wrote.

  Hero union, came the reply: in one hour.

  One hour was perfect because a plan was forming in my head, a plan that necessitated quite a few phone calls.

  Firstly to the dubious Hound and then, hopefully, to some of his even more dubious acquaintances.

  When I’d managed to do this I went to go downstairs.

  From the top of the stairs I could see Gus sitting at the kitchen table, staring into the distance.

  For some reason he’d taken his prosthetic off and it was just lying on the floor next to him.

  I stopped and watched.

  Gus didn’t move, just kept staring.

  That was so unlike him, because Gus was always doing something: reading, writing notes, lifting weights, something.

  I felt a chill.

  Okay, Gus was old, but he was so fit, so strong, so active, I never really thought of him as being old old.

&nbs
p; But right then, he looked exactly that, old old, like somebody who had had enough.

  I wondered if me not being allowed to race in the nationals had anything to do with it. Gus hadn’t said much beyond ‘Hell’s bells and buckets of blood’ but it seemed that he had changed somehow.

  I took another step, making sure I scuffed my shoes so he knew I was coming.

  Immediately, he turned his attention to the book that was open on the table.

  ‘Hey, I just have to pop out for a while,’ I said.

  ‘I promised your mum that I’d make sure you stayed put,’ said Gus.

  I gave him a look and it was enough.

  ‘Okay, I didn’t see you go,’ he said as I made for the door. ‘You sneaked totally out of the window.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And actually it’s “totally sneaked”, not “sneaked totally”.’

  ‘Okay, you totally sneaked out of the window.’

  ‘Totally, dude,’ I said as I opened the door.

  FRIDAY

  COZZI’S AGAIN

  As soon as I got there I realised that this was a really tricky place to meet. Especially at this hour as there were so many people dropping in after work. How was I supposed to know which one of them was SheikSnap@hotmail.com?

  I went inside the café, got in the queue. It was the same stubbly man serving, he of the ‘Either you order a proper coffee or you go to Starbucks’ line.

  Except he didn’t call it Starbucks.

  Immediately, I had another cause to be concerned. Humiliation, I reckoned, must have a half-life somewhere between Uranium and Plutonium. I started practising my order in my head: an espresso please, an espresso please.

  In front of me was a girl who looked like Miranda – she was about the same age, had the same degree of emo-nality. She was even carrying an iBag, just like Miranda usually did. I felt a rush of excitement: could this be SheikSnap?

  When it was her turn to be served she said, ‘I’ll have a soy dandelion.’

  No! I thought.

  ‘Either you order a proper coffee or you go to Starbucks,’ he said.

  Except he didn’t call it Starbucks.

  Well, at least he was an equal-opportunity a-hole.