by Ryan Notch
“Oh you know how some people can’t swallow them whole so they have to chew them up? Well you just pretend to do that while hiding it up in your gums or something. The trick to it is put some toothpaste on your tongue beforehand so it looks like the medicine stained your tongue.”
In theory it was simple, but Shaw knew in practice his nerves might lead him to blow it. He spent the afternoon practicing it in the bathroom mirror (morning pills had already, unavoidably, been taken).
When it came time for their afternoon pills, he was nervous enough to be sweating. As he waited in line he rehearsed the steps in he mind. Take the pills, hide them in your gums on the left hand side (he found that worked better in rehearsals than the right side, wondering if it was possible for your mouth the be left handed), drink the water, stick out your tongue. He fantasized about somehow getting the order wrong and sticking out his tongue before he hid the pills or something like that.
He needn’t have worried though, the whole thing went off almost without a hitch. In the end most patients took their pills just fine, and looking in peoples mouths all day probably got pretty repetitive. The next step, which he thought would be easy, was not. In private therapy later he brought it up.
“Doctor, I’d like to repair the network in the computer lab.”
“Shaw that’s not really for you to do. We have people for that.”
Shaw more or less got the impression that the person who repaired the computers around here might also be the person who changed the lights. Given that the network had been down for the whole time he’d been here and he’d never once seen anyone come and work on it, he could guess what a priority it was.
“I’m bored. I need something to do with my time.”
“There’s always the arts and crafts room. That would be much easier on you.”
“No really, it shouldn’t be that hard. That’s what I did for a living. I could do it here free of charge.” Even as he said it Shaw recognized his blunder. He used to be very adept in the realm of social engineering when it came to getting people in authority to do what you needed them to do, but he’d made a fatal mistake. Free was something people equated with cheap and unprofessional. He would have done better to allude to it with something like I used to get paid by the hour for it, but now I just want to keep my skills sharp, or it would be like when a mechanic repairs cars at home to relax. But instead he’d said he would do it for free. Big mistake.
“You’re here to get better, not to work,” the psychiatrist said. “Now, lets talk about something else. Tell me about the detectives visit yesterday. Did it frighten you?”
Later, Shaw decided to enlist the aid of someone who had contacts a little higher up. He explained the plan to Walter in the form of a challenge.
“So Walter, I know you’re good with people. But there’s something I want to do here that I’m pretty sure is beyond even your abilities.”
“First off, when are you gonna learn to trust me? Did the pill trick work?”
“Yeah, but this involves other people.”
“Well if you want to escape you’ve got to know, I can’t help you. Even I have my limits.”
“No no, all I want is to fix the network in the computer lab.”
“How come? It wasn’t that much more interesting when we all could share our pictures and stuff with each other. No one really knew how to work it back then either.”
“Because I’m bored. Well no, I guess I can tell you the truth. It’s because I want access to the internet.”
“That network doesn’t have access to the internet,” said Walter.
“You said the nurses used to check the sanitarium calendar in there sometimes right?”
“Yeah, but that’s not on the internet. It was made by some lady that works in an office upstairs.”
“Which means the network in the computer room was attached to the main network of the building,” replied Shaw. “Which means it’s attached to computers that are attached to the internet. Anyway, I brought it up in therapy and he just blew me off.”
“Well yeah, you went about it all wrong. You think that guy cares if the network works or not? And let me guess, you told him you could save him a lot of money by fixing it for free.”
“Something like that,” Shaw mumbled. He had a feeling of déjà vu.
“He especially doesn’t care about the money he’d save by having you fix it because he doesn’t deal with the budget. Listen, I can get you what you need here, but I want to know what am I gonna get?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well I just need to wet my beak a little,” Walter replied. It was his favorite phrase from The Godfather.
Shaw sighed. “OK, what do you want?”
“They used to have Pac-Man on those computers then some jerk took it off because we aren’t supposed to play video games for some stupid reason. I want Pac-Man back.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And I want Grand Theft Auto.”
“That is completely out of the question,” Shaw replied.
“OK. Just Pac-Man then. Watch while I make this happen.”
Walter took it to some of the Doctors and nurses who had more to do with the administrative side of things, including budgets. He presented the idea not as something Shaw wanted, but as something they might be able to get Shaw to do if they were lucky. Most of the people he talked to passed the buck on it, saying they didn’t really have the authority. But each person that didn’t say no Walter took as a green light to move on the next person. He was sure to mention if the previous person had said in passing something like “Oh, well that sounds like it would be helpful.” Eventually after having sifted out quite a lot of perceived good will for the project from almost everyone on the floor that mattered, he got the magic words from the floor supervisor.
The magic words being, “I don’t care, but if he doesn’t want to do it then we aren’t going to make him.”
As Shaw saw Walter walking across the room to him midway through an episode of the original Knight Rider, he could tell from Walters jaunty dance-walk that either he had been successful or had managed to get Shaw into something that was going to get him in a lot of trouble.
“It’s done baby,” Walter said. “Now what about my end of things?”
“Walter my man, which computer do you want your Pac-Man on?”
The computer room was, in a word, imposing. Not because of incredibly advanced technology-frankly, Shaw had a better setup in the basement of his old house. It was imposing because of the architecture. It hadn’t always been a rec-room, but had once been an operating theater. The old type, where people looked down from circled rows of chairs above and watched people perform non-sterile lobotomies below. It was kind of unsettling, to think about the horrible things that had gone on in here.
The computers themselves were also in a circular setup, to match the general architecture. Wires led from each to the next, finally going to a router and power strips in the center, then led off from there to the wall. It was an old style network, 10Base2. Meaning the computers were linked in a circular chain until the cable got to the terminator at the end. Like old style Christmas tree lights, if one went out they all did. Finding the bad one meant trying one at a time.
Shaw wondered at the security of it. It would be a simple job for an inmate to make a noose of the wires and hang themselves. Then again, one thing Shaw had learned was that eliminating all the things someone could kill themselves with was completely impossible outside of a padded cell.
He’d noticed all this from the door, peeking in during the ten minutes of pacing back and forth in front of the computer room before he could get over his fear induced mental block and enter it. He felt like a bungee jumper afraid to leap off the platform. It was weird how it could be so much easier to do something entirely new than it was to do something you had done for years then stopped doing. He wasn’t sure what he was afraid of. For some reason he had this bad feeling that when
he turned on the computer something terrible and dark would be waiting for him on the screen.
When he forced himself to approach and power on one of the machines, what he actually found on the screen was just as upsetting, if not at all horrific. The computers were all set with highly limited Windows user access. No administrator rights whatsoever, meaning the inability to make any changes to the computer, write any files to it, or even to explore it. Far from being a clean setup, it would be a hack job.
Shaw could claim no misspent youth hacking his way into government computers, surfing on an adrenaline rush to get access to forbidden information and virtual vaults. But in his job he’d run into many computers that had been password protected with the client having forgot the key. Ultimately what hacking skill he had consisted mainly of nothing more exotic than knowing how various operating systems worked. Windows was a simple one as such things went. The system had never been designed for very tight security, rather the designers expected other people to design further safeguards and sell them to those who needed them. It was a decision that made Windows vulnerable to literally thousands of viruses various immoral programmers had gleefully designed. But at the same time it did lead to a versatility and user friendliness that kept it the best selling system on the planet.
The first thing he did was boot the system up in what was called “safe mode,” a less protected diagnostic mode. From there he could activate the “command prompt.” Anyone who used computers before the 90’s would recognize it. A black and white screen containing simply three characters:
C:
To Shaw it had always been the symbol of possibilities, an invitation to make things happen. The command prompt was a simulation of DOS, which is what Microsoft used to run computers on before they built Windows. No mouse, just you and the keyboard. Now he had access to do what he wanted on the computer, if in a somewhat handicapped way. For it was only a simulation of DOS still running off Windows (an ironic state to a programmer given that the first Windows was a simulation that ran off of DOS). From DOS he ran the explorer program to get access to the desktop again. Basically it was a case of the tail wagging the dog; it was pretty clunky but it did the job.
Next he went about seeing if he could keep up his end of Walter’s bargain. Walter had said someone took Pac-Man off the computers, but he didn’t say how. He typed the word “pac” into the search program and found what he was looking for in a matter of seconds. Rather than properly uninstalling the game, someone had just deleted the “Pac-Man” shortcut from the desktop. The actual program was still sitting there, not even hidden. Creating a hidden file for Walter to access it was the work of less than 20 seconds. Despite the fact that this is exactly what he had been hoping to find, it still made Shaw mad. Shaw knew intellectually that most people didn’t know much about computers, but like most computer experts he’d prefer those people didn’t try and mess with them. He wondered if this was like how mechanics felt when people brought in their cars with brake damage before they had not known how to turn off the emergency brake. Sure it meant more money for them, but come on. With people like that running the computer lab it was no wonder the network was busted.
As for why it was busted, that was a much more daunting task. Everything he’d done so far had been child’s play, and the whole process had only taken him a few minutes. Repairing the network, on the other hand, was a whole different animal. His attempt to ping the other computers on the network definitely showed it wasn’t just another hidden desktop shortcut. The boxes really weren’t talking.
Two hours later, as he sat on the dusty floor inspecting cable connections by hand, he realized for the first time exactly how useful tools had once been to him. He’d had a sense of it before, like when one new tool or another was invented and suddenly he could trace a single cable all the way through a building just by sending a signal through it. But here he not only didn’t have any sniffers, he didn’t even have a fucking screwdriver. He was going at the job literally tooth and claw, and his fingernails were not up to the task.
He still hadn’t found the problem when the dinner chime sounded. He closed his eyes for a moment to mentally review all the steps he had thus far taken in the process, creating a step by step in his mind of what possible issues had been covered and which ones remained to be checked. Missing a step would only cause more delays and work later. He could feel his mind starting to clear up already, but not enough yet. The steps kept slipping away into the mist and ultimately he had to write it all down on the computer, working quickly so they wouldn’t come looking for him. He had permission to be here of course, but it wouldn’t do to push the matter.
That night, having pulled the same trick with his nightly meds he’d pulled with the afternoon ones, Shaw had some memory of his dreams for the first time in months. They were still filled with darkness, nothing clear, but he could tell he was trying to flee something. Something that kept almost, but not quite, finding him. He mind dodged around, sometimes even going into one dream for a few moments then moving on to another just to keep moving, keep running. Like fever dreams. Making no sense but not stopping. The opposite of rest.
He woke up in a foul mood that came from more than just lack of rest. As he stared in the bathroom mirror and rubbed some toothpaste on his tongue he realized he was beginning to feel the effects of withdrawal from the pills. Headache and nausea accompanied a bitterly short temper. When the asshole orderly started banging on the bathroom door he wished he had a knife to greet the man with. The fleeting thought reminded him of his last moments with Brock, which made him feel even worse. It was going to be a long day.
In fact things went even worse than he thought. His attempts to work on the network after breakfast met with absolute failure as the headache went from annoying to blinding. By noon his nausea had turned to stomach cramps. Finally he gave up and sat on the couch watching TV. Soon he was shivering and had the cold sweats. Bobby Scott came and sat down beside him.
“Walter told me you quit your meds, man,” said Bobby. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Shaw was momentarily appalled that Walter would have told anyone about what he was doing, let alone Bobby Scott. But this wasn’t the first time Walter had done something like that, he liked to get people in on things. Liked to make a conspiracy.
“Listen dumbfuck,” said Bobby. “You can’t just quit them all at once. The machines they put in them will eat out your insides that way. I tried it once, ended up having seizures.”
Shaw was about to make an angry retort, something fitting with his mood. But he realized that Bobby was right. He was starting to look like a junky without his fix. If he got any worse someone would catch on and they would force him to take them again, or worse yet put him on intravenous injections.
“OK thanks, Bobby,” Shaw said. “I’ll take the slow path.”
“Yeah you’d better take the slow path. I don’t want to have to tell you again dumbfuck.”
Shaw decided he would take his afternoon pill like normal. At the thought of it his mouth started watering.
A wasted day, he thought. I forgot how much I hate those.
The next day he was in much better shape, despite the same dreams. He decided to go from three pill sets a day down to two for the next three days, then down to one for the next four days, then none. He didn’t base this time table on anything scientific, it just seemed like a decent plan.
After another couple of hours work in the lab, he tracked down the source of the signal blockage in the network – a bad cable coming out of the router. He’d prefer to repair or replace it, but it was the only one long enough to make it to the wall. Instead he had to lay an encyclopedia on it to keep it pressed down at a weird angle, like a bad headphone wire. Frontier medicine.
Following a policy of good practices, he decided to check all the computers for other problems now that the network was working again. Each one had four main art and instructional programs that the patients were supp
osed to use for various monitored activities. On most of the machines at least one or two things were messed up somehow. On rest he messed one or two things up himself. He decided the goal would be to make it look like he was fixing them one at a time, leaving a little twenty second problem on each to solve one day at a time to simulate progress should anyone ask.
Of course just because he had the network up and running again, didn’t mean he had access to the internet. The network in this lab was meant to pull down information off of one main shared drive, and from no where else. A one-way path of information that he had to go the wrong way on, like a salmon swimming upstream. He worked on it all day, his only company being when Walter stopped off for a while to play Pac-Man and when Bobby Scott stopped by to berate him for not having learned his lesson about using computers. At the end of the day he hadn’t finished the job, but he’d made progress. He couldn’t help but feel he could have done it in half the time given a better physical and mental state. With enough drugs in his system to fog up his brain but not enough to keep him from feeling the sickness of withdrawal, he had the worst of both worlds.
The next day he had managed it by just before noon. He hoped the secretary upstairs wouldn’t notice someone piggy-backing out to the internet through her computer. It really all depended on what kind of worker she was. Regular internet surfing didn’t take up much bandwidth at all, but if she spent her days watching YouTube videos and playing online games, it could be a problem.
The novelty of being back on the internet was so exciting that he wanted to start watching YouTube videos. Or at the very least catch up on the months of Dilberts he’d missed. But his actual goal left him in the mood for neither. He needed to read the news. Not the news of the University, although that had so much information about it that he had a hard time trying to find the information on the other suicides he needed to investigate. Because the mold theory, plausible as it was, could easily be proved or eliminated in a manner the police hadn’t thought of simply because they hadn’t known Brock’s secret.