Strategic

Am I the only one?

Is everyone else actually happy to be here with the fluorescent poison sliding down their hair follicles, pounding away at keyboards and dying a little more in each cubicle, each day? Look at Hammer; his fat face all squinched up as he lets loose with more of his stupid jokes. And oh sweet Christ on a biscuit! I’m going to start including every um and uh and belch from each junior associate and up.

Davis transcribes tapes. Currently he’s working at a somewhat sketchy law firm and is booting up to transcribe this morning’s sessions but first he just has to tempt the gods and see if he can’t get fired from this job, too. Then he comes to his senses, deletes the made-up lines of gibberish and gets to work. Time for his new mind trick. Davis, listening to lines of spoken nonsense, pretends he is coding not just doing dull old transcription.

From there he discovered it takes only a tiny shift of mind for him to shift from man to code.

This allows him to forget that his tiny allotment of time alive is being wasted in yet another cubicle.

Using this strategy, he becomes immortal. He’s not even human. He’s an experimental line of code being run to test a possibly faulty program. Frustration, impatience, and cynicism don’t even come into play.

The words from this morning’s session flow over the surface, his fingers fly and under what looks like an ordinary Wednesday late morning something very different is going on. Davis concocts unplanned pathways, turning right instead of left and wreaking new kinds of havoc. Just as he’s doing a last spell-check, he rounds a corner and there it is. Oh, this is going to be good. Ping! Out goes the rogue line and the whole thing caves in. Then he dutifully re-writes it so the whole stupid structure weaves slightly but stays put.

Davis saves the document and stands up for a stretch. He may hate the work, his bosses may even know he hates the work, but he’s still the fastest and most accurate transcriber in the office. The downside of this is that, yep, two more tapes are already on his desk. How many glitchy programs will he have to invent and then bring down today just to make it to 5pm? He goes for a piss and a smoke and then gets back to work.

When he comes back, one of the tapes is gone.

He checks and double checks his desk when Hammer stops by.

“There’s a new chica on the shift. I gave her your easier tape. Like the Giants for ten?”

“Give her someone else’s work.” As if he’d even know or care about the spread on a football game.

“Oh chill. There are like six more tapes due before end of business.”

Davis sits down and stands back up. He has to see this new set of ears and fingers. He saunters down the row between cubicles ignoring the occasionally raised head. The first thing he sees is jewel-like hair, parrot colored and glossy and short, tight as a helmet. She’s oblivious, banging away as blocks of text appear on her screen. He stands there for a bit just watching. He’s willing to admit that she’s fast. Ok, fine. But, dammit, she’s not slowing to back up and correct. At all.

He goes back to his cubicle and reaches for his headset. Oh fabulous, the new tape is from Winky, new junior partner Michael Winklestein. The new juniors always suck the worst because they refuse to use ten words when they think a hundred can maybe impress a senior partner. And do they ever love the long, obscure passages. Bring it.

He logs back on, cues the tape and slides into his subterfuge, sending out his feelers. And gets nothing. Gets sidetracked by Winky’s annoying nasal delivery. The words jumble up, back up, tumble off the conveyer belt and Davis cleans up the mess. Gets back on track and loses it again.

For the rest of the day, he grinds out the work, hating the universe and primed for blood as he logs off for the day.

And there’s the new chica.

“Hey.” He moves just enough into her path that she has to pause. Except that she doesn’t. Fluid and minimally responsive she glides by with a nod. And here Davis is left to either watch her walk away or not. Not. He gets his stuff, crams it back into his bag and heads out.

Her name is Evangeline and, yeah sure enough, with that name and that hair she lives in Brooklyn. Davis can tell just by looking at her that she blogs or is working on a graphic novel or is in a band but she’s not talking. To anyone. She punches in on time every day, goes straight to her cubicle, logs on, delivers the work and leaves. She doesn’t chat with anyone. And so what? Davis slams himself into the work for the next few weeks with a ferocity that earns him more fawning from Hammer. And even a raise.

It also amps up the competition with Evangeline. He knows that there’s no way she’s earning that much yet. But she’s bound to catch up at the rate she’s going.

“Evangeline, hey wait up a sec.” Davis pitches his voice just so and waits. She actually does stop and turn.

“I’m Davis.”

“I know.” She doesn’t ask what he wants. Davis/man, shifts to Davis/code, the latest twist on his mind trick that he’s moving into beta mode out here in real time. Hey, using it last week in the negotiation for the raise got him a 5% bump.

“There’s been a development on a case. Got time for a drink?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself. But that Glimmerson case is being rerecorded and I thought you’d want to salvage what you can of today’s work.”

“Hammer said you’d be like this.” She hefts her bag onto her shoulder and turns to go.

“Yeah, he said you’d be like this, too.” He’s talking to her back.

His strategy begins to slip. He gets three transcripts returned with errors in one pay period and reassesses. Is it Evangeline? Davis feels an almost physical ache to somehow engage her. It’s not even about hooking up; a simple conversation would do.

And then she’s gone. No notice. No office chatter. One day Davis comes in and there’s some nobody sitting in Evangeline’s cubicle. Hammer gives him a look, but doesn’t say anything. The hours taffy out in all directions and the stack of tapes on his desk sneer. Here ya go, Ace, death is coming and you’re going to sit here in this fluorescent hell and type away your irreplaceable hours. Get to work. And Davis gets some coffee and does exactly that.

Just as he’s closing down for the day, here’s Hammer with that stupid grin.

“Hey, thought you’d be interested to know that snotty ass chica was in with McKendrick for the past couple of days before clearing out today.”

“Gee, Hammer, and I was just telling Robbie the other day how much you care about us little guys.”

“Yeah, it’s probably pretty fun to be such a smart ass until you aren’t.” Hammer huffs off.

Davis, operating at the level of code, begins a new campaign: a quest to find a way out. His focus is so relentlessly on the well-worn path of What Else Can I Do To Earn Money that he nearly misses his chance. And it’s Winky, of all people, who offers his salvation. Winky, whining along through a series of briefs about a wrongful injury suit and letting slip a name. A name attached to an interesting new development. Oh, those silly junior partners!

So Davis has information. He bides his time and pays attention. Now he knows what to be listening for and accumulates what he’s going to need. He morphs into code effortlessly these days, confident and aware. Davis/man recedes and Davis/code takes over, subverting everything that’s not work so that he doesn’t get hungry, doesn’t go for coffee or cigarettes, doesn’t even know he needs to piss until it hurts. Where he once slammed the words from his ears onto the screen, deaf and brutal, he’s now sliding himself in between the words, pulling them around him and into him, seeing them from the inside out. He has a plan.

“Hey, Davis, before you get started, McKendrick wants to talk to you.” Davis almost feels bad for Hammer, that the poor schmuck is going to blow his entire stock of time in this dead end office and, man, is he going to be surprised when his life ends and he’ll have done nothing, been nowhere.

That is not going to happen to Davis.

In Davis’ assessment Chief Technology Officer Arthur McKendrick is harmless, but likes to think he matters around here. Davis drops his stuff in the cubicle and goes up to the next floor where McKendrick’s door lady, Imelda, lets him in.

“Ah, good morning Marty. You remember Evangeline.”

And there she is, Miss Fuck You Very Much herself, so cool she might actually have a tinge of blue around the edges of her mouth. Fabulous. No, really. Fabulous. Davis has hit the super lotto and he’s the only one in the room to realize it.

“Martin.” Davis ticks off another invisible mark against McKendrick and sits down with a short nod to Evangeline.

“You may have heard that we’re restructuring. Coffee?”

“Yes and no. Thanks.” Here it is. Here we go.

“We’re bringing in a new technology; a new voice recognition software that transcribes dictation immediately.”

Davis relaxes and is careful not to smile.

“Obviously we won’t need an entire pool of transcribers as this new software comes online.”

“Obviously.”

“We will need a couple of our top performing people who know the old system from top to bottom, however, to assist in the transition. I want you and Evangeline to assess everyone currently in the pool. By next week you’ll have a full report to me with everyone’s stats. But beyond that, I need you to develop a timeline for the transition. Any questions?”

Davis lets the tug and release of tedious meeting-speak scratch past him, adding a pertinent bit of noise when appropriate and then asks for a moment alone with McKendrick as they wrap up. Evangeline betrays herself with a sudden sideways glance at him and, just like that, he’s aligned perfectly. How she got in this tight with McKendrick needs to be checked out but he’s ready to move and she never did matter that much anyway.

“Yes, Martin?” McKendrick loses the chumminess as Evangeline closes the door behind her.

“Aidan Winerep at Star Enterprises is your support guy on this transition. I wonder if you’re aware of who some of their other, well, clients are and what some of them have found to be running as an adjunct to this nifty new software.”

McKendrick is good; there’s almost no indication that he does know this or that he’s shocked that Davis knows. But there’s that slight wrinkling of his nose as if he’s just picked up a whiff of shit in the room and Davis knows he’s hit real meat.

“Young man, you’re almost as smart as you think you are.” McKendrick leans back. “If you could have waited even another week, you could have really gotten somewhere with this knowledge.”

Davis, now fully operational code, sees where McKendrick is going and sidles up to him gently.

“Mr. McKendrick, by next week we both know it would be too late for me to do anything with this information.” Davis leans back himself, feeling as at ease as a tightrope walker a mile and a quarter up in the air with birds gliding beneath his feet. “You can’t really fire me now, you know. I mean, you can, of course, but we both know where I’ll go with this information and you don’t want that.”

“What do I want, Martin?”

“You want to create a position for me post-transition. You want me to monitor the full implementation of the new software and to subvert the underlying code.”

“And why on earth would I want to do any of those things?” McKendrick is enjoying himself but so is Davis.

“Because there’s a way to make that sneaky bit of spyware work for this firm, putting you in the very enviable position of neutralizing the flow of information to whatever entity that is going to be monitoring all that sensitive data.”

“Martin Davis, you read too much William Gibson.”

Davis stands up with a small smile. It worked.

“You do realize, of course, that my niece Evangeline is going to be right beside you every step of the way.”

Snap. So that’s it. Not a problem; Davis can work with this.

And, as if he’d custom written a new reality, here’s Evangeline out in the waiting room. She rises and they walk out together and keep walking. Davis stops to let Hammer know they’ll be back this afternoon and they go to a coffee shop together.

“I suppose he told you he’s my uncle.” She orders an Italian soda.

“You think that was some kind of secret?” He gets a double espresso. What a good day this is turning out to be. “I’m hungry. Excuse me, can I see a menu?” Davis is putting every step forward into the exact right place today and the only mystery is why it took so long to see how incredibly easy it could be.

Outside shadows of clouds chase across the pavement and bicycles run against traffic. Evangeline stays quiet; watching the dance of walkers navigating through what they blindly believe is just another day, just an ordinary Tuesday. Davis orders a sandwich and lets the circuits blast where they will. What he doesn’t do is indicate in any way that he’s loving sitting across from her, watching how even people outside on the sidewalk do a quick pause to check her out. There’s a discipline in place here and to deviate from it now, risks tumbling everything back into ordinary Tuesday mode.

That is not going to happen.

When they get back to work, they find that they now have an office. No more cubicles. It’s not a corner office but it is an office with a door that closes and some damned impressive hardware. Evangeline nods. Davis exults silently. Here goes. He closes the door and is firing up the new machines when, out of the blue, a brief spike of anxiety hits. This went too easily. And? Davis/code scans the scene and readies himself to go ahead with the plan. That he has absolutely zero idea what to do when it comes to actual programming is beside the point.

Davis has known since he was a kid that there was only one thing to trust in this world: his own mind. Even back in middle school when the bored teachers were trying to scramble his circuits, he knew what was important and what was crap. Grades? Crap. Information? Ok, that’s more like it. He hoarded information, parsing it out later and keeping the bits that were useful. Acting as if he knew it all was another useful trick. When he behaved this way, adults, teachers, his parents, his guidance counselor, all believed that he did, in fact, know what he was doing. As he perfected his system, he found that he didn’t need to be there to listen to every stupid day’s droning. He knew what to read. He showed up for tests and aced the ones that interested him. This worked brilliantly in community college as well.

Plopped in front of his first computer when he was eight, he immediately began clicking around, driving deeper into the guts of the thing, while his classmates gingerly pushed their mice around and looked anxious.

Now he begins driving deeper into the guts of this thing confident that he’s going to find what he needs and that he’ll know it when he sees it. At first he is aware of Evangeline, watching and judging. This fucks with his concentration; he’ll miss something if he doesn’t pull it together. Drawing on his own version of discipline Davis lets some bottom fall out from under him and goes down the rabbit hole.

At first he’s good. Ok, sure, nothing looks familiar; nothing is clicking, but that just means that he needs to go deeper. He’s pretty sure that’s what it means anyway. Drilling down, he holds onto his certainty like a lucky charm. It can’t be all that complicated after all. It crosses his mind that not knowing how to actually write or understand code might work against him but that kind of defeatist thinking had no place in his current program. Time to go for broke.

A thought floats up: he’s not simply an insurgent here. This isn’t just a guerilla action and he’s not here to take anything down. He adjusts his strategy. Simple. Focus, baby, ease down deeper and pay attention. At first he’s noting his path, keeping track of what he’s passing so he can find his way back out. This won’t fly. Really, this isn’t the time for caution. He stops watching where he’s going.

What had once appeared to be layers of files, each with a thousand choices of where to go next, becomes branching corridors that are lined with doors. Some doors open to blank walls. Some doors open to more corridors. Some doors open to….nothing. To vast, open, unexplained space. After passing several of these, Davis reconsiders. Blindly trotting down the labyrinth isn’t going to get him anywhere. At the next door that frames only black he steps off into the nothing.

Except that, of course, it’s not nothing. Nothing is.

The sensation of falling, rocketing downward is an illusion. He’s sitting in an office in a chair in a building in a world where the laws of physics aren’t suggestions. He holds onto that and the falling eases into a gentle floating. He’s still surrounded by options and he’s got all the time in the world to ponder each one. Small red sparks seem to appear in his peripheral vision. Each one pokes at him to see how stable he really is here.

Then in a blink he lets go of his strategy which, after all, was only a slightly more sophisticated version of closing his eyes to achieve invisibility, to lock into what he has perceived to be power. There’s something else going on here. Something is coming and it’s coming fast. Is it what he needs to find? Suddenly he doesn’t have time, any time at all, and all he can do is spread himself out as flat as possible to decrease the force of impact.

Here it is. All he had to do was be open to it, to trust and to not get sidetracked. The thing itself is unremarkable. Just another snaking line of code. But it’s not behaving as a properly written line of code should; it’s wrapping around him and vibrating so that he vibrates along with it. The vibration widens into all out shaking, like an earthquake that has its epicenter at the base of his spine.

The corridors, the doors, even the lines of code all stretch to the breaking point and shatter as he convulses through pitch black. Still, he holds onto his golden truth; his talisman. He has found the subverted line of code and now he can alter it. Right? Of course he can. But he’s suddenly sitting at a keyboard in a tiny space and he has no arms. He looks at the monitor which is the entire wall in front of him and feels something fiddling around at the base of his skull. Oh right; now wait just a minute. I can’t be reprogrammed. I’m not code.

I’m. Not. Code.

“Hey, champ. It’s quitting time.” Evangeline’s voice sounds tinny and remote. He’s not code and he doesn’t know how to write code. He doesn’t know the first thing about how this software works or how it could have been subverted.

He’s just another schmuck with a lousy job and a silly kid’s crush on a woman who doesn’t even see him.

“Right.” He stretches his arms. Well, at least he does have arms; that’s good. He’s ravenously hungry and it’s clear that no amount of damage control is going to save the day. He scrubs his face with his hands, rises and gets his bag. Glancing over at Evangeline’s work space he sees that she’s compiled the reports McKendrick asked for. Davis suspects that she’s gotten a solid start on the transition plan as well. Good for her.

“You want to get something to eat?” What the hell; Davis figures it’s worth a try.

“No, thanks. How’d your stuff go? Did you find the ghost program?”

Too many answers pile up behind his teeth and he can’t pick the right one.He shrugs and walks out the real ordinary door. The labyrinth is here all right and he hasn’t got the first clue which path to choose. So what?

They all go to the same place after all.

By Remington Write

Website: https://anomalyworksnyc.blogspot.com/2019/08/false-epiphanies-and-true-treasure.html