2011
2:17pm |
I'm so tired, but let me keep getting down what I know. If I couldn't go back through this record of everything I've been through in this job, I would be completely lost, but even without wine, it's like I can never sober up.
I wasn't sleeping much during my last days in the office either. The things that bothered me kept me up at night, but losing more sleep worrying about it only made everything more confusing. At work, I used more and more coffee to keep going, but I would still fall asleep for fractions of a second during the day.
In my office, staring at the thing in my hand, it took me a second to realize it was the wrong phone. I must have swapped my work phone for the one in my glove box, the prepaid phone I used to get in touch with the nerd underground. I never did that before.
I stood up, using the desk to keep steady, and went to the bathroom. For Harry's plan, he said to keep everything looking normal.
The offices on the 21st floor share four sets of bathrooms spaced around the floor. I usually avoided the 9-5ers, but someone was coming down the hallway. He nodded at me. "TGIF, right?" I said nothing, and he gave me a confused look as we passed. He didn't know what was going on down the hall from him. He lived in a world where the system I watched all day watching people, computers that understood what was going on around them, were still futuristic. He wouldn't believe me if I told him, but I couldn't. That wouldn't be normal.
2 min later
Hiding in the bathroom stall, I knew the programs were getting smarter, and if the system had the ability to "infiltrate other networks" like Dumont said it did, I couldn't even imagine what it might do next. I had to stop whatever was going on, even if I didn't understand it. Harry acted like he understood how to handle the faceless system. He didn't tell me what the plan was, and I had no way to contact him. I had no choice but to believe in my friend, but I can admit now that there were some second thoughts.
The way stuff was back then, I had things to count on, an apartment, a routine. I was comfortable, even kinda enjoying letting my guard down sometimes. Helping Harry take down the Dude was going to change all that, but there was no way to call it off. Eh, nothing lasts forever.
If they would just let me go home, maybe I could relax and get some good sleep. No, I have to keep writing.
Okay, the bathroom. I pulled out the secret phone, my link to the underground social network, and called Acid Burn. She always made me feel better. I could sleep again if I just got one good orgasm. Sleep sounds so nice. She didn't answer.
3 min later
I was still on the can when the text woke me up.
HANS:
Return to work.
Hans shouldn't have been able to do that, right? I had the wrong phone. The system shouldn't have been able to find me, but there was the text to prove that wrong.
Hans was in my private phone, in MY goddamned phone. That was the proof Dumont was right, that the underground was infiltrated. There was no way out. Both my phones were part of the system. Everything was part of the system.
No, that guy from the hallway wasn't, not yet. I know what happened. Probably no human was even involved in tracking me down. One program told another program to send me a message. There was nobody behind it trying to be mean to me, just programs designed to keep us all on schedule. However they had access to my other phone, the programs probably thought it would be more convenient to have the message pop up on whatever screen was closest to me. They were making my life easier, like robot butlers. That's how the programmers designed the system to work. Then it turned around and started controlling them, and that's where I got pissed off.
The nerds didn't create the underground to overthrow the system, just to take breaks from it. If there was one good thing I did in all my time at the company, it was helping make that happen, but if the system was watching them there too, it was worthless. Everything I did was for nothing.
The phone Hans used to call me back to the office had the numbers of every member of the underground that I helped recruit, starting with the phone I gave Lanning all those months ago. If Hans got into my phone, they were compromised for sure and didn't even know it. I couldn't pretend things were normal. I had to warn them.
Lanning answered his phone. "Is this an emergency?" His voice sounded like speakerphone. I heard him crunching the chips I dispatched to him a few hours before. It was nice to imagine there were actually real chips somewhere because I pressed that button.
"Yeah, I need to warn you about something."
"What kind of something?" I could tell he was distracted by the video game he played just off camera.
"The secret network's not secure."
"No. No, we are." I heard his keyboards clicking in the background.
Then I remembered Harry's instructions to keep everything looking normal. "I shouldn't be telling you this." I only meant to say that to myself. Goddamn, I was tired.
"Why not?"
"The plan--" The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. I shook my head to get my concentration back.
"What are you talking about? What plan?"
"Nothing." I didn't want the programs to hear me.
He stopped eating chips. "You want to take down the project, don't you?"
"How did..."
He still sounded distracted. "It's all you ever talk about. Can it wait? The progress we're making is kinda huge."
"That's exactly why it can't wait." I got off the can. I had to get back to my office, keep things looking normal. "The system is going to spread itself across the world."
"You remember the fern in my office?" Lanning jumped subjects a lot.
I knew the giant green blob hanging between him and the window facing his desk from at least as far back as the first time I delivered to him. "Yeah."
"I got a little fern clipping for the first place I lived on my own. It moved to every new house with me, stayed with me through my divorce. It grew alongside me, and I water it so it doesn't die. In return, the plant gives me a reason to keep going. I look up there everyday and know something in this world is counting on me. The system takes care of me the same way."
"But you're building something that's going to make people prisoners, like us." Going down the hallway made me nervous to be seen, but if it happened, it happened.
"You remember the dot com boom in the late '90s?" He jumped subjects again, but his voice didn't sound like speakerphone anymore, and the keyboard noise was gone.
I nodded, even though he couldn't hear me. "Kinda. That's when there were those delivery guys who would bring you anything?"
"It was the first time so many people like me started getting paid insane amounts of money to do this kind of work, but it was intense -- nights, weekends -- nothing else mattered. My divorce was only partly... We had a real purpose. We were building a new world, and anything was possible. It's been ten years since I've really felt like that." It sounded like my life in the band, and it almost made sense.
I didn't have many friends left, but Lanning was generally cool. Maybe he did have a reason to keep working. Or maybe he was falling for the Helsinki Syndrome. "You really believe in what you're doing?"
I could tell for the first time, I had Lanning's full concentration. "There've been times when work was just a random grind for loot, but anything can feel that way after a while: eating, sleeping, marriage. Then, every once in a while, you find something that can change the rules of the game. I mean, if I wasn't working on this, where would I be?"
I remembered the warning of where I might have ended up if it weren't for the Dude, but I stuck to the subject. "I don't want the system to run everyone's lives."
"What, you have a better idea? Would things be better with you running things?"
"Run things? No, I just don't want to be told what to do, that's all. Everyone should have that." Casimir taught me it was possible.
I reached my office, where I sent people orders to do the same work I used to do, and it dawned on me what a tool I was. Sure, the nerds chose to live that way. Who was I to tell them not to? The programs kept their schedules for them because that's how they were programmed. I was choosing to carry out bossing around the drivers, but who were the victims of that, people like Roger? He didn't seem to mind, and driving wasn't actually that bad when I looked back on it. The programmers looked like prisoners, but who's fault was that? The Dude was just another one of them. Who should I blame? How could I stop it? I wondered if I should.
No, the real problem was that the programmers in the underground were being lied to, watched when they thought they weren't. That was horrible. Even if Casimir somehow inspired this whole thing, this was exactly the kind of world he fought so hard to prevent.
I spoke into the phone with force. "You need a new network, John. Start fresh. Here's what you do, take who you know from the first secret network and find a way to make one that's even more secret. Use dixie cups and string if you have to, but find a way to have thoughts for yourselves."
"Why would we need that? We have a network." He still didn't believe me. "If anything, that would be easier to monitor."
"I'm telling you, the same system you're building watches the secret network too."
"No. We locked it out. This is a safe place."
"It found me in the can. You taught it to predict what you're gonna do. It got in."
"You're lying."
"Hold on." I sat at my desk. I had to prove it. Like at the internet cafe, I took the instructions on how to log into the secret network, and I used them to connect the laptop full of surveillance software to the network of the resistance.
Lanning noticed my screen name in the chat room. "Why'd you log in? We're already talking."
"Make a new network." I repeated what the Dude told me, or whoever he was quoting. "Fight this small evil now to be ready for the big ones later on."
"Wait, I know that IP address. Where are you?"
"If the system wasn't in there before, it is now."
That's how I got banned from the secret network. For what came next, Harry and I were on our own.
