by Mark Sampson
“Okay, no problem.”
“Thank you so much, Bentley.”
“Oh, and Graham?”
He turned back. “Yeah?”
“My computer’s a bit logy today. Do you know what’s going on?”
Graham’s lips pursed into a brief O, the closest he ever came to showing emotion. “I think a few other people were complaining about sluggish machines. We’ll have to look into it after you guys leave for the night.”
“Does it have anything to do with that installation we—”
“I said we’ll look into it, Bentley.”
~
Message one.
… it was all about self-reliance, Bent. That’s what I’m talking about. We left you alone so you could stand on your own two feet. It’s what your puppa did for me, and I did it for you. But this is how you turn out? Really? I’d like to say to hell with you, Bent, but you’re my son. You hear me? Look, we need to talk. I have a golf game in about an hour, but I’ll be home later tonight. So call me. Let’s talk about how we can start turning your life arou—
Message deleted.
~
Unleash yourself, oh code. Reveal to me your references, your sweet secrets in hypertext, your vast ciphers and endless rows of cryptography. Bentley disembarked from the elevator to find Redmond in the living room with three of his friends. They were gearing up for a Take Back the Night counterdemonstration. Their strange attire was an allusion Bentley didn’t get: They wore white jumpsuits tucked into big black boots, and had bowler hats squeezed onto their heads. Over his jumpsuit, Redmond was wearing his favourite tee-shirt, which read:
NO
MEANS
buy her aNOther drink
Bentley kicked off his snowy boots and hung up his grey hat. He listened as the boys argued in faux-Cockney accents about various new sex laws that the government had introduced. He went around to the coffee table and helped himself to the joint that was simmering in the ashtray. There were a couple of Bristol board placards propped on the couch—they read No means yes! Yes means anal! and Make rape a right!—and Bentley moved them aside so he could sit down.
“Hey Redmond,” he asked when the conversation lulled, “did you get a chance to hack that thumb drive I gave you?”
“Did I ever,” he replied, letting out a long, slow whistle and straddling the ottoman with his lanky limbs. “Man, there is some fucking crazy shit on that thing.”
“What you mean?”
“Well I didn’t parse the whole program, once I realized what it was. It’s total snoop, Bent.”
“Really?”
“Yep, and not just keystrokes and shit like that. This thing is malignant.” He took on a professorial air. “It can suck in whole quadrants of VoIP, instantaneously. It can suck in anything you upload to an FTP, even if it’s on a third-party server. You put a cat video on Facebook and this thing snags it and compresses it within three-seventeenths of a second. I’d have to download it to check its flow rates, but I ain’t putting that shit anywhere near my machine. I’ve never seen such an aggressive piece of snoopware.”
“What the hell?” Bentley said. “They already put tons of snoop on our machines. I don’t get it.”
“No offence, but I don’t think your company’s dev guys could cook this up. The code strings are too complicated. It reeks of an outside job. An official job, if you know what I’m saying. I think your bosses might b—”
Just then, the bathroom door off the living room banged open, and a fourth member of Redmond’s posse clambered out. It was Ken, whom Bentley referred to as the ‘learned’ one. He had a ring of black face paint around one eye and a huge rubbery codpiece over his jumpsuit. He pointed at its jelly-like mass with the cudgel in his hand. “Wait till their l’il glazzies get a load of these yarbles!” he bellowed, and the boys all laughed. Bentley didn’t get the reference.
The phone rang. Bentley went to his bedroom to check the call display. When he saw that it was—yet again—his father calling from Florida, he let the voicemail get it. He came back out, looking to pick up his conversation with Redmond. But the boys were already piling into the elevator, pumping their placards and speaking their queer, tuneful argot.
~
Muscle memory is a powerful thing, with its marionette tugs on our limbs. Make no mistake: you are conditioned to be conditioned. But it seemed mild by comparison, when the next Fresh Hell Tuesday consisted of Management slapping down a new script for everyone to follow. Bentley read it over and was baffled—it seemed to instruct them to do exactly the opposite of what they had always been told to do. While Bentley never really believed it, the company had assured everyone it hired that its business was, more or less, legitimate. Still, there were things that employees were strongly encouraged not to say while on the phones: the job came with a lengthy list of restricted words and phrases. Now, it seemed, Management was ordering them to use these words and phrases as much as they could when on the phones.
Bentley flagged down Phil as he walked by. “Is this for real?” he asked, lifting up the sheet of paper he found on his desk when he came in. “You actually want us to—”
“It is, Bentley. Don’t argue with us. Just do it.”
“But are you sure—”
“Bentley. Just do it. Listen to me.” Phil steered his gut into Bentley’s cubicle. “You’re one of the more senior staff members now, so we expect some fucking buy-in when we introduce important changes to our business. It looks bad in front of junior staff if you’re throwing up resistance all the time.”
“You don’t pay me like senior staff.”
“Bentley.” Phil’s eyes widened, dragging his jowls upward. “Look, either you’re a team player or you’re not. But if you’re not, then there are plenty of guys on the street with your,” and he twiddled his fingers in the air, “qualifications who would be happy to have your job.”
Bentley pressed his lips together. “I’ll read the script,” he said.
“Yeah,” Phil nodded maniacally. “You’ll read the fucking script.”
Bentley swiveled back around as Phil ambled off, and took an incoming call. “Virus, Worm or Trojan?”
“Yeah, I’m launching a DDOS attack.” Young guy. Late teens. American accent. “I mean, I mean, it was a worm, but I’m launching a DDOS. Seven different ports on Windows 11. But you gotta help—I think they’re fucking on to me!”
“Wait, you’re . . .” Bentley looked at the script. Don’t say ‘compromise.’ Say ‘attack.’ “You’re attacking seven different ports?”
“That’s right.”
Fucking script kiddies, Bentley thought, shaking his head. “When did you download the . . .” The script said: Don’t say ‘product.’ Be specific. Say ‘malware.’ “. . . the malware from us?”
“I don’t know—does it matter? Look man, I’ve got unidentified flow rates comin’ in hot. Could be CIA, could be NCFTA. They have my fucking IP address!”
“Okay sir, I don’t want you to panic. I’m going to talk you through this.”
“Where are you based?” the kid suddenly demanded, and then cut Bentley off before he could look at the script. “And don’t tell me Odessa, because I’m in fucking Odessa.”
When asked your location, don’t say Odessa. Tell the truth.
“I’m in Toronto, sir.”
“Yeah? Well dig yourself out of your igloo and tell me how to pull the plug on this thing. The five-oh are practically at my door.”
“Well, sir, we can start by dismantling your VPN . . .”
Fucking kids today, Bentley thought as he worked. Can’t get their ducks in a row. Can’t see the little details right in front of them.
~
Message one.
. . . and it’ll be a comeuppance, Bent. That’s a word you should teach yourself sometime. A great comeuppance is
coming, but it’s not too late. So call me. Would you fucking call me? Again, you have the number here in Florida. So please call me as soon as you get th—
Message deleted.
~
Dixon Road, oh Dixon Road, there is no poetry in a fleet of Shred-It trucks outside your employer’s door. It was another snowy day, and he should have noticed there were no fresh tracks behind those Shred-It trucks in the parking lot. The fact that snow had climbed high around their tires meant that they had been there since at least the early morning, and this should have alarmed him.
He went to the door to swipe himself in. His pass didn’t chirp, and he furrowed his brow at that. When he tugged on the handle, the door opened away. And that’s when the first eddy of panic swirled in his bloodstream. He paused at the top of the stairs but then descended anyway, not quite believing the doubts that numbed his bones and robbed his mouth of saliva. When he reached the bottom, he saw stacks of big blue tubs lined along the hallway wall. Like it was moving day.
He walked to the glass door and saw there was no longer any nameplate there. Not VWT Enterprises, not Darkside VWT, nor any of the other names they had gone by. He knew he should have fled then. Knew it in his guts. But there was something reflexive in his movements now, a conditioning that took over his synapses, that made him pull open the glass door anyway. He was almost in a trance as he walked into the call centre and saw all the desks gone, all the computers. Happy fucking Tuesday.
His coworkers were lined up along one wall with their backs to the room, Blair Witch style. He looked across the empty expanse to where Management had gathered at the other end. They were standing next to men in dark suits. Men who wore sunglasses, even inside.
Phil stepped forward and took one of the dark-suited men by the arm. He had a clipboard in his hands. Phil raised a finger and pointed it directly at Bentley. That’s him, the gesture said. And the agent, whoever he was, passed his clipboard to Phil, and then rushed over to where Bentley was standing.
THE FANTASY
The town I grew up in was a fairly ordinary place except that we had a writer living in it. He wasn’t a journalist or a school teacher who dabbled on the side, but a real live genuine book writer. He would publish a new book every two or three years, and it would be in all the bookshops and at the library. It would get reviewed in the city papers, and he in turn would review other writers’ books in those same papers. When the writer released a new book, his publisher would send him out on tour with it, doing readings and lectures and workshops at literary festivals and universities around the country. His books always had a proper hardbound cover, with a nice dust jacket and a photo of him on the back; and after a year they would come out in a slightly cheaper soft-cover edition.
Our family knew quite a bit about the writer because my uncle owned the pub he drank in. He once got the writer to describe a normal day for him, and later my uncle described it to us. The writer said his typical days—not the days when he was out on book tour or conducting interviews, or in the library doing research—followed a fairly basic routine. He would write for three hours in the morning, read for three hours in the afternoon, and drink in the pub for three hours in the evening. Somewhere in between, he might do his shopping or laundry or other domestic chores, but otherwise he stuck to his schedule.
The writer wasn’t wealthy but he did seem to get by. He lived alone in the east end of town, in a small two-bedroom, two-storey box of a house just a few doors down from my uncle’s pub. Those who had been inside his little house said that, with the exception of the wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall books, it was utterly characterless. So too was the writer’s physical appearance. His clothes always seemed right on the cusp of shabby; his hair always on the cusp of needing of a cut. As for his build, he looked like what he was—a man who spent much of the day sitting down, and who ate a bit too much pub food.
The writer was, it goes without saying, not married. He did have an ex-wife, from years ago, who now lived in a different town, whom he referred to as That Old Cunt. Despite this nickname and the fact that they were divorced, the writer would often see That Old Cunt if he was visiting the town she lived in, or if she was visiting ours. Very occasionally, they would get together for dinner. And even more occasionally, they would shag each other afterwards, for old time’s sake. My uncle assured us that this was not the writer’s only source of sexual contact. When he was out on book tour, there were all manner of young creative-writing degree coeds at his disposal. Many were eager to invite him into their low-rent bohemian bedrooms in exchange for career advice. He also got a bit off his literary agent, who was hard up for it on account of her husband always being out of the country.
To my ears, this sounded like a charmed life.
Though he relied on intellectual self-employment, the writer wasn’t a snob. He had no qualms befriending and carousing with the factory workers and civil servants and ad men who also frequented my uncle’s pub, even though his lifestyle was so different from theirs. When those men talked of money, they talked of wages and salaries, of overtime pay and time-in-lieu. When the writer talked of money, he talked of royalty statements and reprint rights, of reading fees and whatever freelance work he could squeeze out of the glossier literary magazines from the city that we had all seen but never read. When the men griped about their jobs, they talked about the idiot in the next cubicle or all the work that landed on their desk right before a holiday. The writer, in turn, would have to stretch it a bit to gripe about his work. He’d say something like, “There’ll be no break for me at Christmas this year, boys. My editor says if I can’t get the next round of rewrites to her by February 1ST, she can’t guarantee a slot for my book come autumn and we’ll have to wait until the following spring to publish it. Imagine, making me wait a year and a half at this juncture. What a cunt.” (He called her this despite the fact that he thanked her effusively on the acknowledgements page at the back of his books.) And when the men complained about their snot-nosed kids or plumping wives or having to go out to their jobs in the morning in the snow and the cold, the writer just kept his mouth shut.
My uncle said you could always tell when the writer was having a lean year, when the royalty cheques and reading fees were a bit thin on the ground. During those times, he’d have to take work teaching an evening writing class at the community college two towns over. These would cause him to arrive at the pub late, usually after 10, and in a foul mood, moaning about the general illiteracy and talentlessness of his students. They were invariably bored housewives and university dropouts—no chance of getting any off them, anyway—who were under the erroneous belief that there was a link between acts of literature and self-affirmation. Conversely, my uncle said, you could always tell when the writer managed to briefly get a book on the bestseller list, or if he received a larger-than-normal advance. He’d come swinging into the pub ready to buy rounds for his whole table, or looking tan from a vacation to some tropical island where he could get a massage on the beach from a brown-skinned girl in a grass skirt.
It came to pass one year that my uncle wanted us to invite the writer to Christmas dinner. He made this imposition even though it was our turn to host, Christmas dinner being rotated each year between my mother’s kitchen and the kitchen of the wives of her four brothers, this uncle being one of them. My father thought inviting the writer was a corking idea, but my mother was hesitant. She said if my uncle wanted to invite strangers to Christmas, he should wait until it was his turn to host. But the writer was hardly a stranger—my uncle had been regaling us with tales of his exploits for years, even though my mother was clearly uncomfortable with them, always off in the kitchen to tend to something on the stove or freshen up people’s drinks at the height of these stories. She seemed leery of letting a man with such a reputation into her home. But my uncle, backed up by my father, was adamant. “Look, he’s had a rough year,” he said. “His last book didn’t do so well; the r
eviews were awful. And his ex-wife, That Old Cunt, reneged on having him join her at her parents’ place this year. I know he’s not family, but irregardless, nobody should be alone on Christmas.” My mother relented, even as she made a point of correcting his grammar.
Since we were hosting, my mother felt that it should be us who tendered the invitation, that it would be improper for my uncle to do it from the pub. She let the actual responsibility of inviting the writer fall to me, sending me over to his little clapboard house on the morning of Christmas Eve. I was greeted on his stoop by the clack-clack-clack-ding sound of his typewriter coming from the window directly above my head. When I knocked on his door the typing ceased, and after a moment the entire house seemed to shake as he descended the stairs to his front entry. The door opened and there he was—eyes squinty in the sun, his hair standing up a little, and a slight musk coming off his skin. (The writer once told my uncle he found it somewhat effete to bathe more than a couple times a week.) He peered down at me and then said, “You’re Claire Dixon’s boy.” “She’s Claire Holloway now,” I replied, not knowing for the life of me why anyone would refer to my mother by her maiden name. Before he could say anything else, I launched into my carefully memorized invitation speech, as my mother had said it was paramount (that was the word she used: paramount) to extend this offer of Christian generosity in a certain way. I was to emphasize that my uncle, whom he knew from the pub, really wanted him to come. When I finished, the writer squinted at me a while longer. But then he just shrugged and said, “Alright then.”
The next night came and of course our place was a Christmas cliché: the house packed with family, fire blazing, stockings hanging on the mantle, opened presents all around our ornately decorated tree, and Bing Crosby on the turntable. The writer, bundled against the cold, arrived at our door about an hour before we were to sit down to eat. He came in and immediately handed my father his contribution to our dinner—a bottle of wine that was right on the cusp of plonk. As the writer unwound his scarf and hung up his coat and undid his boots, it became clear he was already in his cups a little. He shook hands with my father, shook hands with my uncle. When he got to my mother, he wasn’t sure whether to shake her hand, hug her, or give her a kiss on the cheek, and so they did this awkward little dance for a moment.