Altered States (16 page)

It’s not totally unheard of for me to take the veggie option. Being fully aware that the ruminants are happily belching our world to an early apocalypse, sometimes I feel I should cut back on the meat. Clearly today my subconscious was making some kind of feeble attempt to address my virtue balance.

It was making this attempt because today ... I was going to screw everyone over. Including all the guys I was sharing lunch with, most of whom I counted as friends. Although it would be merely a matter of days before they would gladly be chewing over my own previously-sentient carcass for lunch. As such, I was embarking on a major guilt trip over this final part of my plan. And strangely enough, not eating a cow did not make me feel a whole lot better.

I just needed to hold it together. I needed to keep low, talk to as few people as possible, and ride out the day.

Then, exactly what I didn’t need in achieving this aim ... walked right in through the door. Zack Bayliss with some high-profile entourage. Not that Bayliss would even know my face but his presence made me nervous, in the way that the presence of important people does. I’d never seen him in these parts before, with the low-life. He was presumably on a flying visit, showing some bigwigs the facilities.

One of his entourage was his personal assistant – or whatever they call themselves these days. Tanya Scarlett was her name and she bugged the hell out of me. Not that I’d ever spoken to her, so maybe I was judging her too soon. But it was clear to all that she suffered from an acute case of org-chart vertigo. Allow me to explain. The object of an organisation chart is to represent employee seniority on the vertical axes – top to bottom. A quirk of this layout is that the only logical place to put a member of support staff like Ms Scarlett is directly under and slightly to one side of whomever she supports – the big man himself, in this case. This places her vertically above everyone else in the organisation, even her boss’s first line of management. Usually this does not pose a problem. But it does in the case of someone like Tanya Scarlett, who is deluded enough to think that her abstract loftiness actually
means
something; and cavorts about the place like some supreme being and sovereign ruler of the land.

Rumours are of course rife that this PA embarks on a number of out-of-office activities with Bayliss. Whether true or not, I’m sure the primary source of these rumours are her own lips, and indeed hips, as she prances about on her power-heels with her unmistakeable
I’m-shagging-the-boss
swagger.

Harlot.

The rest of the group were all male, smart-suited and hobnobby. I did not know who they were but I would be willing to wager that their collective power was significantly greater than that of the president himself. For this reason, I did my best to ignore them.

I brought a spoonful of soup to my lips, remembering with disappointment that it wasn’t clam chowder. I’m not sure of the exact environmental impact of clams but clearly my subconscious thinks they should be avoided along with the ruminants, from a virtuous planet-saving perspective.

Then something really unexpected happened. As the Bayliss rabble passed by our table, in a haze of sycophancy, little Miss Sassy Pants herself looked right at me. And do you know what she did?

She said, ‘Hi’.

Hussy.

I was rather caught off guard. All I managed was a stunned smile in return, before missing my mouth with a spoonful of clam-less broth. The reason I was startled was that I wouldn’t have expected her to have any idea who I was. Did she know who I was? Or was she just doing the friendly ‘Hi’ thing? I hadn’t noticed her say ‘Hi’ to anyone else. Jeez, that’s all I bloody well needed. On the very day that I needed nothing but to melt into the walls, I was suddenly ‘known’ by the upper-echelons. I was suddenly being ‘Hi’-ed at by a woman who flirts around in the corridors of power – and indeed
fondles
around in the
trousers
of power.

Today, of all days, I was not handling so well. My immaturity was showing through. I was not quite a grown-up in a very grown-up world.

After work I made myself scarce until midnight, and then returned. On my way in I nodded politely to the security guard in reception.

‘I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on,’ I said with a cheery smile, by way of explanation of my presence. The guard glanced up from his security monitor-slash-TV just long enough to return the smile, and I made my way up to the lab.

The lab was dark. I stepped in and as I made my way to the far side the fluorescent lighting flickered into life sporadically down the room.

At my desk I booted up my machine to set about my deleterious handiwork. I remotely logged into the repository server with the deviously-acquired admin password. Passwords are still the chink in any security system’s armour. Correction, password
owners
are – they’re easier to crack.

And so it was time for my final task.

My job here was simple. All I needed to do was delete the source code for Hide. To extinguish it from the hands of power.

This had taken quite some preparation, because all the local file servers were backed-up in a number of off-site locations. That’s just standard protocol. As such, it took weeks of social engineering to get into a position where I could modify the backup policy, and turn off the backup for our systems. Luckily, the thing about backups is that nobody notices their absence until they are needed. Once the backups were removed I figured the servers would be written to enough times to make any residue of the data unrecoverable.

That done, all I had to do was purge the local repository. But that was one task that would be noticed immediately. So this had to be the last thing I did before turning out the lights – on the lab and on Aaron Braunn.

So, there I was, habitually twiddling a ballpoint pen around my thumb; all set to issue the command to erase over a year’s worth of hard work. My hard work. My friends’ hard work. And I discovered something I really should have anticipated. I discovered that twiddling a ballpoint pen around my thumb was about the only thing I was ever going to achieve. Because I could not bring myself to do it. It seemed so ... irreversible. It would be like killing my baby.

I sat there for a while longer, grappling with my conscience, until I finally conceded that it was never going to happen. Not like this.

So I had no choice. If I was ever going to get out of here, having achieved my aim, I had to take a copy of the entire thing first. But considering that the sole intention of this whole charade was to prevent the software falling into the wrong hands, it would be pretty dumb to just start walking around with it in my pocket.

So I began the process of encrypting the copy with a key so large that even NSA weren’t going to crack it without a global distributed computing effort or a string of quantum computers.

However, this presented me with a problem. I did some quick maths regarding encryption algorithms, and calculated that the process of performing serious number-crunching on a serious quantity of data would take a serious amount of time – squared. And such amounts of time did not feature in my original plan. So I needed a new plan. It didn’t take long to arrive at one because the new plan was very similar to the old one – with about four hours of hanging around in the middle.

Remarkably, I eventually grew bored of twiddling my ballpoint and I found myself nervously pacing up and down the corridor instead as I waited for the numbers to be crunched. I tried drinking the coffee-approximation vended by the machine in the lobby, but it was only the colour the machine ever got close to approximating with any real success.

There were a few sofa-bench type affairs clustered around a coffee table near the machine. I perched myself on one of them to begin my second cup of coffee-coloured liquid. By this point I figured I had a couple more hours to wait. And so I waited.

And waiting made me worry. I needed to be gone by now. What I was doing was seriously bad news – for me that is. I believed I was doing the ‘right thing’, but there were people who wouldn’t see it that way. And those people were pretty powerful. This was some real deep shit I was getting myself into one foot at a time – and I could almost begin to smell it. As soon as I could, I needed to ditch these cruddy shoes and get as far away as possible.

As I sat there, amidst the drab perfunctory surroundings, with nothing but my paranoia for company, I started to feel that the walls were judging me. They stood around me like schoolyard snitches threatening to go tell on me. And, paradoxically, as the silence solidified around me, the childish taunts began to crescendo toward a deafening cacophony inside my mind.

I was, by all accounts, losing it.

At that moment an eerie and hauntingly realistic flash of déjà vu washed over me and brought with it a deep bout of nausea. It snapped me out of my downward spiralling reverie but if it were a portent of any future event then I did not anticipate its arrival with glee.

My stomach flipped. The steps were coming from behind me, from a corridor the other side of a door. I couldn’t move. Whoever it was would be able to see me through the glass in the door. If I scuttled back to the lab it would imply wrong-doing. So I had to stay put.

The footsteps were slower than normal walking pace: slow ... careful ... steps – as if intentionally building suspense. They were hard-soled shoes making a crisp clop-clopping that echoed toward me. All I could think of were those power-heels of that blasted PA Tanya Scarlett. She knew! That was all my mind could think. She was here to get me. That was it. It was all over. It wasn’t fair. I was only twenty-four. I was way too young to die. I hadn’t even been to Disneyland yet.

The footsteps stopped. There was a beep as a security pass was waved. And then the door opened.

This, I knew, was the point I had to begin standing. It would appear just as odd if I did not react at all to another individual at this late hour.

‘
Sir
?’ It was a male voice. I finished standing and turned to face its owner. Then it delivered something that wasn’t in any of my pre-conceived scenarios: ‘Would you like some
real
coffee?’

It was the security guard from downstairs, holding out a large steaming mug of black coffee.

‘It’s Colombian,’ he said proudly. ‘Freshly ground.’ He leaned in. ‘I’ve got a coffee-bean grinder under my desk.’ He delivered a smile and a conspiratorial wink, as if keeping a contraband coffee-bean grinder at his post was the greatest crime against his nation.

I realised my jaw had been hanging open a moment too long and pulled it shut.

‘Thanks,’ I said as I approached to take the mug.

‘I was watching you on the monitor,’ the guard continued, ‘drinking that vending machine muck. Thought you could use some of the good stuff.’

Damn it. I hadn’t even noticed the camera in the vestibule. My paranoia slipped into overdrive. My mind whizzed. Surely, there was nothing I’d done on camera that looked suspicious? Had I been consuming a beverage in an incriminating fashion? I reeled myself in. Clearly not in the eyes of the security guard, and that was all that mattered. I just had to make it through tonight.

‘Very kind,’ I said as I took a sip from the offered mug and suddenly felt like the worst human being alive. This stranger had held out a hand of friendship. He had initiated an unsolicited act of kindness. And I was betraying him. In the next room, on his patch, on his watch, I was conducting
real
crimes against
his
nation, against
him
. And at the same time I had the audacity to stand here and drink his fucking coffee. I might just as well be pissing in his face.

Shit. Now I’d gone and walked off with his Kennedy Space Center mug. He probably intended me to stand there with him, exchange some company for his coffee. What sort of unrelenting scumbag was I exactly? That was it; I was going straight to hell, without passing Go. Lucifer wasn’t even going to wait for my ever-nearing death. He was just going to suck me through the floor right now. Briefly, I entertained the idea that this was a fairly attractive proposition.

At almost four in the morning, the encrypted copy of Hide was complete and stored neatly in my portable storage device – jacket pocket. I issued the command to erase the Hide software code. Then I installed a little app to write zeros then ones repeatedly across all the clusters of the hard-disk a few hundred times.

Then, I went.

On my way past the front desk I dropped off the security guard’s mug. ‘Great coffee,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell anyone about the grinder,’ I added.
It’s the least of your worries
, I thought.

He smiled and winked again. ‘Good night, sir.’

I prayed he wouldn’t get into any trouble.