by Mark Sampson
Twenty-five minutes it goes on. I look over at Muizz, his face flickering silver in the sheen of the video. His eyes seem so deep in this glare; and below them, he sports one of his thin, enigmatic smirks. I glance at Aspen. He isn’t even watching the video. He’s probably seen it a hundred times. He just stares absently at the darkness.
The video ends and Tito moves on to the next part of the presentation. Designed, I suppose, to speak directly to corporate types like us. Endless bar graphs and table charts of statistics. Exponential growth in the Tour de France’s TV ratings since the mid nineties. Sales figures for Nike, sales figures for Coke, all moving up at sharp angles each time Aspen won a major race. Tito goes on with this for another 45 minutes. It’s numbing. It’s meant to be numbing, to anesthetize us into submission.
“Well, I’ve talked long enough,” he finally says. “I know you want to hear from the man himself. I mean, that’s why he came up. So let me hand it over to Tim. Jerry, can you get the lights?”
Jerry gets the lights. We all turn then to Aspen. The flickering florescence has startled him a little, as if jogging him from a nap. He looks around the boardroom like he’s never laid eyes on any of us before, as if speaking would be the greatest inconvenience he could ever endure. Tito’s mouth falls open with a crack; I can see the pink lining of his bottom lip. Across from him, Muizz’s cold smirk wavers a little.
“I know what I did was wrong,” Aspen begins with a sort of listless truculence, “but shit like that blows over.”
“Tim, please . . .” Tito says.
Aspen turns and looks at him with something like pure hatred. He then swivels back to Muizz and me and locks us into his gaze, as deep and blue as swimming pools. “Another six months and nobody’s going to give a fuck what I did. I win a couple more races and all that shit’s history. You know it’s true.”
His profanity, so jarring in this sterile, corporate room, stirs something in me. My shoulders tighten. I find I can’t blink or look away, despite the sudden blush of embarrassment that bleeds through the room.
“You also know this is your chance to get in on my comeback. I mean, I’m 31. I probably only have a few more years before I can’t perform at my peak anymore. You won’t get another opportunity like this. You know that’s true, too.”
The muscles of my face clench. My heart races. I feel a blossom of empathy open inside me. I feel myself being swayed.
“You know that’s true, and yet . . .” He waves a defiant hand at the blank space in front of us on the table, looks at it in the way he did earlier, before he was asked to sit down. “No notebooks,” he sniffs. “No pens even. No glossy folders with info on your sponsorships program. Not even a fucking brochure. You’ve wasted my time.”
“Tim, please,” I say, “listen to me—”
“I don’t deserve a second chance,” he says, “but the world’s gonna give me one anyway. It can’t help itself; it’s just that stupid. You should think about that, Mister Financial Services Man, and what that might mean to your brand.”
He’s right. I know, suddenly, what I want to do. I can apologize to the managing partner later. Take whatever flack comes.
I raise myself off my seat, open my mouth to speak. But before I can, Muizz cuts me off.
“Let me tell you something about our brand, Mr. Aspen,” he says, his voice full of fury and smugness. “ODS Financial Group is about teamwork. It’s about bringing our best to what we do, every day. We’re about collaborating with integrity. We believe in excellence, not just for our clients, but for our people and for the communities where we live and work. You may think that what you did will ‘blow over,’ but it won’t. You may think that this little outburst impresses us, but it doesn’t. We are one of the most respected brands in all of corporate Canada. And we are a big supporter of athletics in this country. We got to this position by focusing on value; value is a key component of our brand promise. So let me be one-hundred percent transparent with you, Mr. Aspen, because transparency, after all, is one of the key differentiating factors for our firm, and what that means is . . .”
~
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Trip on Friday
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:12:09
Hey Clive,
Toronto’s a bust. Client was acting all weird on the flight up and then had himself a FUCKING FREAK-OUT during the meeting. Target gave us a no before we even left the friggin’ room.
T.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Trip on Friday
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:19:38
Tito,
Shit, really? What a waste. Anyway, it may not matter. Just got word Pepsi-Co is on board for next summer. Something small to start, 600K, but still. Also CK may be up for a magazine run for their new cologne starting next fall.
Clive
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Trip on Friday
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:23:44
Ok cool. We’re comin’ home. – T.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: WestJet
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:23:45
Ma,
I changed my mind. I’m too late to get the seat sale (I called) but I’m coming home anyway. You still around this weekend?
Love, M.
MALWARE
Omnibus, omnibus, write us a line of poetry up the long Dixon Road. See the squat business-park buildings with their concave driveways, their sad shrub rows swaddled in canvas. Look. All the windows here come tinted, like eyes with no souls. Watch a falling plane draw a straight line to the nearby airport. Its fuselage is so low you can see the winter sun ripple off its tailfin, as if sending you a message in code. See Bentley Warhol excreted to the sidewalk through your great hydraulic farting. Oh omnibus, watch him hopscotch over the sidewalk’s treachery, his hands entombed in his pockets and a grey hat on his head. He’s up to the gate as you pull away. He swipes into the building, clop-clops to the basement. It’s Fresh Hell Tuesday, and he knows it.
Fresh Hell was practically their corporate culture, and it seemed to always (and inexplicably) arrive on a Tuesday. The most benign Fresh Hell Tuesday simply involved a name change. They had been known for weeks now as VWT Enterprises, which was far better than their previous moniker, Darkside VWT, which made them sound like video game programmers. Before that they were known as WW-VWT, the WW (apparently) standing for “Wild West.” But Bentley had also been through other, more malevolent Fresh Hell Tuesdays—the mass layoffs, the senior managers vanishing, the new protocols, the new strategies that seeped into the office firmament like gas. But even he was alarmed that Tuesday morning when Management came bounding down the aisles with shoeboxes full of thumb drives.
“Everyone put these into your computers—now!”
—Seriously?
—What the hell?
—I’m right in the middle of a—
“Do it, people. Don’t argue with us.”
Management worked the room, passing out the small, colourful rectangles like licorice allsorts to each headsetted employee. Bentley accepted this Eucharist from a fat, middle-aged supervisor named Phil. Phil, who wore the same style of golf shirt every day to cover his big grey gut. Phil, who didn’t even speak dev—he was just a project manager. He wouldn’t know his object code from an in-line CSS.
“Are we still taking calls?” Bentley asked.
Instead of answering him, Phil answered the entire room. “Yes, please continue to work the phones. You are not on a break here, people. I repeat: you are not on a break.”
&n
bsp; Bentley swiveled around to his small desk. The hesitation he felt was ancient, hardwired into his bones. You don’t introduce a foreign object to your machine; it’s a rookie mistake. But the bosses were watching. So Bentley snapped the thumb drive into one of his computer’s USB ports, then released the button on his phone to allow an incoming call. His computer’s hard drive began to whirr and grind, and Bentley thought of ripping the device out. But then a tone filled his headset, followed by the crackle of a new call.
“Virus, Worm or Trojan?” he asked the caller by rote.
“Yeah, Worm,” the caller replied, his voice carrying a thick Ukrainian accent. “I am trying to implement the WaxOnWaxOff.exe and the buffer won’t overflow.”
“Are you compromising port 314 or port 352?”
“The 352 on Windows 11. Look, I paid you guys $8,000 for this worm and I need it to work.”
“Okay sir, no problem. We’ll figure out what’s going on.”
Meanwhile, the hard drive below him continued its whirling drone, like a washing machine on spin. In fact, the call centre’s air had grown thick with this melodious whine as each computer inhaled whatever the thumb drive was installing. Bentley looked over the low walls of his cubicle to where Management had gathered near a bank of offices on the far side of the room. The shoeboxes were empty now and Management held them at weird angles as they put their hands on their hips. The panic was receding from their cheeks and they appeared almost smug as they spoke in low tones, proud of themselves for distributing the thumb drives so efficiently.
Bentley sent his caller a LiveMeeting request over icq so he could share his desktop. He would get to the bottom of the kid’s problem. The hard drive chugged and chugged, then suddenly stopped. A small pop-up window appeared. Installation complete. Bentley had no choice but to click Okay.
~
Sing to me of commuter highways, the ravine’s varicose blight. Let those exits drain us like water into vast ceaseless suburbs. See the abandoned Catholic churches, the market research buildings, the government torture chambers with their ball-gags and Skinner Box maneuvers. I seek you, hulking apartment complex on the horizon, your one shade of grey. I seek you, elevator that takes me home. I seek you, I seek you—icq, the hacker’s instant message.
The elevator opened directly into Bentley’s apartment, like a Lex Luthor lair. He arrived home to find his roommate, Redmond, sitting on the floor in front of the TV. He was eating garlic fingers out of a Styrofoam container and playing his favourite video game, Rape Her Now!TM, for PlayStation 5. Redmond, dead-eyed and acne-scarred, would spend hours engrossed in the game instead of looking for work. Got a PhD? queried the console’s pop-up ads, which he ignored. Well, we’ll find you a job anyway! Redmond did have a PhD, in software engineering, and his hacking skills put Bentley’s to shame.
“Any calls?” Bentley asked as he threw his keys onto the counter, a metropolis of filthy dishes.
“No,” Redmond replied without breaking his concentration. One hand left the controller to raise the garlic fingers off the floor. “You want some?” Bentley could see that the cup of white dipping sauce had spilled, dousing the fingers in a sticky mess, so he said no thanks. Redmond dropped the container suddenly, his hand flying back to the controller. “Oh I gotchu now, I gotchu!”
Bentley hung up his coat and grey hat, went into his bedroom, grabbed the cordless phone from its charger and checked the screen. There was a voicemail message. He scrolled to the call display and saw his father’s Florida number at the top of the list.
He stuck his head out the bedroom door. “Redmond, did my dad call?”
“Oh yeah. Your dad called.”
“Jesus, Redmond.”
“Dude, I’m sorry. I told him to just call back and leave a voicemail.” His thumb was pounding the A button in an ardent, methodical rhythm.
Bentley went back, settled onto the edge of his sagging air mattress, and dialed into the voicemail. He wondered whether his father would be in mid-sentence, as he often was, when the message kicked in.
Message one.
. . . and I wouldn’t have helped you pay for school, Bent, if I had known how you’d turn out. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? All those thousands wasted so you could be what? I mean, what the hell are you thinking? Anyway, call me. I’m back in Delray Beach now. You have the condo’s number. So call me back, you little shi—
Message deleted.
Bentley slipped the phone back into its charger; it chirped like a bird. He reached into his breast pocket and dug out the thumb drive he had smuggled out of the office. (Management had come around with the shoeboxes to collect them when the installations were complete, but Bentley purloined his and switched it out with a spare one he kept in his desk.) He took the device out to the living room. “Hey Redmond,” he said to the back of his roommate’s head, “if I gave you a thumb drive, do you think you could hack into it and tell me what’s on it?”
“Sure. Just leave it on my desk.”
“Okay. But be careful. It’s from work and I think there’s something really nasty on it.”
But Redmond wasn’t listening. He was leaning in toward the TV screen. “Is that a nun? That’s a fucking nun! Oh baby, come . . . over . . . here.”
~
Oh preach to me, you pompous oracle, you winner of last century’s lottery. Go on, tell us how we should live—those of us trapped inside the economy’s stalled clock, those who rolled generational snake eyes. Bentley thought: Dad’s money hadn’t even been that much. Not nearly enough to cover tuition. The old man had once bragged that his own undergrad education had cost a grand total of $2,600, and this slow-dripped a resentment through Bentley’s entire academic career. So why was the geezer so surprised by how Bentley had paid for school? He rustled up more than a few botnets to sell to the highest bidders, and did some credit card skimming on the side. Sure it was illicit, but so what? Lots of kids did illicit things to mitigate their student loans. How many hot chicks had he known during school who had worked in strip clubs or brothels to pay for their communications degrees? (Bentley had once taken a communications course but dropped out after it became clear the prof was going to make them read stuff.) If hot chicks had it, they flaunted it for cash. What was the difference, if you were a geek with the right technical skills? And besides: it all landed him a job in the end, didn’t it?
He thought about this on his long snowy commute, and at his desk as he took the first call of an evening shift.
“Virus, Worm or Trojan?”
“Yeah, Virus. Uh, my name is TroyBoy223. Look, I bought your CardSharker 6.1 about a month ago. It worked great, but I’m having trouble getting in to the access files.” The kid had a Southern accent, maybe Texas or Alabama.
“What seems to be the problem, TroyBoy223?”
“I dunno. It just won’t let me in. Look, I need to get at those numbers. The gov’mint is gonna make me pay back my entire student loan in—” The guy paused, presumably to look at his watch. “—in exactly three and a half hours. If I don’t get at those numbers, I am seriously fucked.”
“Are we talking dumps and wholes here?” Bentley asked, meaning both credit card numbers and their PINs.
“No, we’re talking CVV2s,” he replied, meaning full card information including expiration date and the security code on the back. “That’s double encryption, my friend. This is serious bidniss. You gotta help me out here.”
“No worries. I’m gonna send you something over icq and we’ll figure out what’s going on.”
As Bentley opened up CardSharker and transferred over his client’s temporary files, he noticed something strange. His computer seemed to be a half beat slower than usual. It was barely perceptible, but each command he made was followed by a slight, sticky pause and a quick flicker of his hard drive’s light. The call centre always had the fastest machines; it was a prerequisite of the job.
But now Bentley’s computer had to think for a half-second before executing a command. He was convinced this had something to do with the thumb drive installation from the previous day. It had clearly put something on their machines to gum them up. Redmond hadn’t yet hacked into the device. Bentley would have to remind him about it.
He finished uploading a new program, TrackFactor, to his client’s system and flushed out the older script he was using to get into the access files. “Now clear your cache and see if that worked,” Bentley told him.
There was a long pause on the line, but then TroyBoy223 let out a whoop. “Bingo! I’m in. Ohh, thank you so much. You guys are the best!”
“Hey, glad I could help. Call us back any time.”
“Will do.”
Later, another member of Management strolled by Bentley’s desk while he was between calls. It was Graham, the senior operations manager. A tall guy, nearly as old as Phil, with hair in permanent waves and the thinnest eyewear perched on his blunt, technocratic nose. Bentley had never seen Graham smile, frown, laugh or shout. He always spoke with the same neutral lilt, like an android.
“We were listening in on your CardSharker call from earlier,” he said to Bentley. “Great job. Nice customer service. That’s what we like to see.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you able to come off calls in about an hour or so? We have a client launching a DDOS attack on Home Depot’s website and we need some technical support.”
“These script kiddies or the real deal?”
“No, they’re for real. Their botnet’s about 150,000 strong. We want you to monitor the eastern Russian part of it for them.”