Assured Destruction

By
Michael F. Stewart

By Michael F. Stewart

Copyright 2013 Michael F. Stewart

Cover Art
Don Dimanlig

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form.

The Twitter logo is a registered trademark of Twitter Inc, all rights reserved.

www.michaelfstewart.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Formatting by
Streetlight Graphics

Chapter 1

I
f you ever have to get a job, don’t do sales. I hate sales. And this woman is an example of why.

“I am Mrs. Roz Shaftsbury and this hard drive will be destroyed,” Mrs. Roz Shaftsbury says.

It’s weird how she announces her name, but it does mean something to me. I sit next to her son in half my classes. I’ve never seen her before, though, and she’s dressed in what looks like twenty foxes sewn together and is wearing red heels—I would’ve remembered—that fox is snarling at me.

I guess because she walked into a dingy warehouse with concrete floors and bare beams and the worst Feng Shui in the world, she assumes we’re after her credit card information rather than to earn enough money to buy pizza. But come on, I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, not a … well … not a crook.

Roz leans in and stares at me so I know she isn’t even asking a question; this is a threat. Erase the hard drive, or else.

I want to salute and say, “Yes, ma’am, your son’s secret, torrent downloading will be deleted forever. His Ivy League future is back on track.” But then she’d realize I actually know her son, Jonny Shaftsbury, and I see no point in tipping her off.

“Oh yes, assured destruction,” I say. It’s what’s written on the sign above her head and it helps me keep snide remarks to myself.

“Some computer recyclers just wipe hard drives,” Roz adds; her fingernails scrape the laptop casing, sending shrill echoes through the warehouse. “I want this shredded.”

With a hint of a European accent, she says it like she researched the subject on Google. If she had, she would also know wiping a hard drive works perfectly well and then it can be reused. But this is a woman wearing foxes, and in retail, the customer is king or … er … dark, evil, dead-fox queen.

I point to the shredder, which squats in the corner; it works like a paper shredder but instead of chewing up paper it munches metal.
Chop-chop
is spray painted across its lip.

“Good,” she replies, but her hand lingers.

I slide the computer off the counter with a smile and carry it over to the shredder for show. Shaftsbury forks over cash—this woman really doesn’t want to leave a trace—it all feels ridiculously covert. I narrow my eyes and hunch my shoulders as if I’m doing something shady.

She huffs and stomps out, twirling her foxes and leaving the smell of her sugary perfume behind. I stand nonplussed. I would have thought she’d want to see the shredder do its work. At least take the certificate of destruction.

I hate sales.

If she wasn’t such a bitch, I probably would have popped the hard drive in the shredder, hit the big green button, and assured the destruction of the last few years of Jonny’s life. But since I know Jonny doesn’t have a chance of making it into an Ivy League school, I don’t feel too guilty about checking under the hood to see if it is indeed
the
Jonny Shaftsbury from my high school.

In every kid’s hard drive are pieces of themselves, which, if someone is prepared to take the time, can be puzzled back together to live again on what I call the Shadownet. That someone happens to be me.

Hobby? Art form? Sad, pathetic plea to garner friendship, even virtually? Sure, I am guilty on all counts. Maybe I’m even addicted to it. I can pick apart the private lives of others and don’t need to worry about what they think about me, or whether the profiles I create for them are going to walk out one day and never come back like my dad did. Shadownet is my permanent family. The only thing I can be sure will stick around.

“Janus, why aren’t you working?” The voice of my mother rings with the sing-song tone she uses when she senses I’m about to do something wrong. She’s in the back playing with money.

“I am working. Don’t harass your unpaid labor,” I return in my own sing-song. She has a beautiful voice, though, and mine is like that woman’s fingernails on the casing.

“Room and board qualifies as paid, deary,” she continues in a fun, easygoing lilt. I love my mom.

Luckily a doctor came in an hour before Jonny’s mom, so I pop the shells off his computers, pull the hard drives, and run the shredder. It makes a series of clunks until the hard drives catch in the teeth, then it’s like listening to a car crash in slow motion, metal sheering and plastic splintering. I cover my nose at the reek of lubricant and acrid metal. My mom will hear it and never know that one more hard drive didn’t quite make it into Chop-chop. For now, I tell myself, choking down the guilt.

Poking about the new laptop, I can see it isn’t old—three or four years—but then I’m not hoping for baby pics. I want secrets. Secrets are power. I first realized how powerful when my mom wouldn’t tell me why my dad walked out on us. I wonder about it every day. And about what he’s doing right now and whether he thinks of me. The hard drives I fail to destroy are my secrets, and no one knows about them, especially not my mom.

I slip the hard drive into the front pocket of my overalls and smile at the next person, who lugs a behemoth of a television he probably paid ten grand for a decade ago. He now has to pay us to take it off his hands.

Finally, it is eight o’clock, and I can quit. My mom’s still in the back office with her head in a spreadsheet. I know we’re not making much money, but
Assured Destruction
is all that keeps us from the food bank. Still, we manage. I work a lot of hours and have ever since my dad abandoned us.

I pat the hard drive in my pocket and dream about what secrets I will find within its folders. It being the end of the month, I’ve got a couple more hours before my mom rolls away from her computer and comes looking for me. She’s in a wheelchair due to her Multiple Sclerosis, otherwise known as MS.

I lock the doors to the warehouse store and wheel the television and shells of computers to the staging area at the back. Fenwick, our forklift driver and all around handy dude, will skid them and add them to the next shipment out. Fenwick looks like a pro wrestler ten years after retirement—built like a truck but starting to fall apart. I haul some of the lighter items off the cart to make his life easier but balk at the television.

The whole place is filled with racks of old computers, televisions, and electronics. But we don’t actually recycle, not anymore; we do better just collecting a fee for the drop off and letting the larger companies do the hard work. The only business where we still actually do anything is destruction. People don’t like to think you’re shipping their data anywhere and all it takes is a shredder. I know when a doctor, lawyer, or accountant walks through the door, they’re carrying the next pizza I can order.

As I take the stairs to the basement, cool air slides up my thighs. It’s like descending to a lake bottom on a hot summer’s day. Goosebumps bubble over my arms and I slip on the sweater I leave across my chair. To me the hum of the computers and server is a Buddhist’s meditation. Knots at my neck unravel. I sigh and sit in my rolly chair, feeling a little closer to the Internet, which to me is the same as enlightenment. My chair needs to be rolly because I have seven terminals in a ring network. I am like a starship captain: I kick out, the chair rattling over the floor to the first terminal.

From the screen, a cartoon version of me stares back. Black straight hair, overlarge dark brown eyes, pale complexion, and a pointy chin. It looks like me, but without the zits, and in real life my neck isn’t only an inch wide.

As I shift the mouse, it takes me to my home blog:
JanusFlyTrap
. When I built the site, I was trying to think of a cool name and spotted all the wires tangled at the hub of my network like a web. Six other computers all link to mine and to each other. One dysfunctional family. And like any family, each part has its own personality.

On my right is
Gumps
. Gumps is my conscience, my grandfather, my confidante, my Magic 8-ball, all on the oldest motherboard I’ve ever seen. The computer is pre–Internet and so Gumps isn’t connected to the others, but I still see him as the closest thing I’ve got to flesh and blood, the only person I can really trust. His display is green, and rather than sporting an avatar, he’s just a blinking dash. Don’t let appearances fool you, though. He’s with it.

I type:
Gumps, 8-ball question: should I search around in Jonny’s files?

I programmed it to recognize key terms I enter. The response is immediate.

Answer:
Janus, the ball is in your court.

He speaks in idioms, which is nice because it leaves me to interpret his answers however I want. Exactly what I imagine grandparents are for.

I set the hard drive into a casing I have for this purpose and turn on the unit. This could be interesting. A year ago Jonny asked me out and I turned him down, mostly because life was crazy with my mom’s illness and with taking care of the business while scraping by at school. Then, just a few months ago, Fenwick caught Jonny snooping around Assured Destruction—it was a bit too close to stalking for me. Jonny could barely look at me in class afterward. If he ever came around again, I joked that Fenwick should feed him to Chop-chop.

On the computer screen, a series of folders appear in the file tree.

I was right. It’s Jonny.

Let the fun begin.

Chapter 2

I
can tell by the homework assignments that it’s Jonny’s hard drive. All his files are still there; Jonny’s mom hasn’t attempted to erase anything, which saves me a ton of time. With the woman’s
or else
still echoing in my head, I scroll around only to hover above a folder marked
Chippy
—Chippy is our computer science teacher. He and I have a mutual hatred of one another. This is not a friendly, competitive dislike; this is an
I can write circles of code around him and he knows it
animosity. In turn, he fails me. All the time.

Sure, he justifies it because I never do the work. His lessons are stupid. He teaches an antiquated programming language that no one ever uses. If he gives us a lesson to program some simple math functionality, I’ll give him back a calculator iPhone app instead. But I don’t do it in BASIC, so he fails me. It’s like being forced to write Latin in English class. I refuse to cave in.

I take my revenge on him online. He suspects who’s running
denial of service
attacks on his Dungeons and Dragons blog. He even accused me once of changing his profile picture to a donkey and spamming him with penile-enlargement offers, but that wasn’t me; that was
Heckleena
.

Heckleena sits two terminals down from JanusFlyTrap. She’s a tough cookie—thirty three years old, single, baby clock ticking, no relationship prospects. Rumors about her Special Forces background swirl in the digital ether. Just like people are into whips and chains in the bedroom, some people like to be heckled in public. Lots of them. Her Twitter followers love how she bites the heads off of everyone else. I created Heckleena to keep myself sane during a tough period in my life—my first profile on Shadownet. I use her Twitter feed to let out all my anger and frustration.

I go to my Twitter page. I scan everything and DM Heckleena:
@Heckleena I’ve got Jonny on the hard drive, wanna see?

I scoot to her terminal; her avatar’s a set of screaming lips.

@JFlyTrap
Why would I care about your piddly life and stupid friends? #pleaseunfollowme

I don’t even know what she’s going to say until I type it! It’s what her bio says too:
I don’t like you, please don’t follow me.
An example of how well reverse psychology can work.

Having all these virtual Twitter accounts might seem weird, but it’s freeing. I can be who I want. On the Internet, I’m not some drudge of a retail clerk. I’m not the only thing keeping my mom and me from starving. Besides, real people and real relationships end badly. Eventually, always.

I know what some psychologist would say, that these terminals are all me, and they are, or parts of me. But they’re also more real than a doctor might think. I’m Dr. Frankenstein and online Shadownet has a pulse.

In a flurry of new activity Heckleena types:

@Sue369 Saw pic of new baby—can you put it back?

@Wendyshawmister The Internet is not solely for LOLcats—post one more and your felines are roadkill.

Heckleena finishes with a post to all her followers:
Oh Lord, it is hard to be humble when you are perfect in every way.

Back at my terminal I search Jonny’s pics. There’s one where he looks off his rocker—heavily lidded eyes, drooling mouth, a total zombie. I paint a big black rectangle over his eyes and fire it over to Heckleena, who sends back an
LOL
and retweets the pic to her followers with:
Ottawa’s education system at work!

Ha! Maybe Jonny’s here to stay. The first thing I need to do when creating a profile for Shadownet is to create an avatar, a visual representation of his online presence. Maybe a jester? Every family needs some comic relief. But I’ve got other stuff to do before I recreate Jonny and I’m not a hundred percent sure he’s a great fit—it’s like asking myself if I want a little brother.

In my inbox I’ve got messages from flesh and blood people, lots of them, most are just fans thanking me for the free iPhone apps I make. A couple are from wannabe boyfriends. I seem to attract guys who—just because we can talk tech—think I’m into them. Other boys just find me weird. Why can’t I get a real guy? The only boys I like are in senior year. I’m taller than most boys in my class and the ones I’m not taller than would be like dating coat racks, well ... most of them.

My mom says I’m threatening. But only once did I tell a guy to stay away or face having his Internet surfing habits spread across the school. It’s not like I would have done it.

Oh my—here’s an email from a would-be suitor that has a poem:

Your hair like firewire.

Mind like a terabyte drive and your dual core processors …

My heart is a cursor beating for your fingertips.

OMG. If the kid hadn’t sent it anonymously I would make sure everyone saw this. Hair like firewire? Mine’s straight and glossy black and I thought one of my better features, until now. Credit given for the last line. I sigh. I don’t have time to sort through all my email and I’m growing drowsy, my eyelids drifting lower as the combination of too much homework and too many hours at the cash catches up to me. One message shocks me back; it’s from my mom:
Dear Janus, Have you remembered our little deal?

Our deal: Pass your courses or bye-bye computer time. Hmm.

I have a math test tomorrow, but I’m good at math. English essay due as well. That I’m not so good at and I haven’t started the book … who wants to read some book whose author offed herself after writing it? But if I fail this essay, I fail the semester.

Crap.

I used a free essay site for the last one and shouldn’t push my luck. I don’t have much choice, though … not when I have to work a four-hour shift most nights—and so I set about cobbling a combination of Wikipedia entry, cum-free essay, and Amazon reviews together. It’s mindless work, although it shouldn’t be, and I keep drifting back to Jonny’s files. And then I’m searching through them …

Secrets aren’t the only reason to dig around in hard drives. I also learn a lot about myself. I’m not as strange as I thought. Everyone thinks they look sort of kooky … other than Ellie Wise, who even I have to admit is pretty. Everybody has a guy or girl she or he hasn’t talked to, but wants to. Rebuilding a person’s profile isn’t just fun, it’s cathartic.

What ho! Do my eyes deceive me? I’m staring at a folder tree with a whole series of dates, one folder for each day. Is this a treasure above all others, held deep in the bowels of Jonny’s hard drive?

A journal! It is!

Jonny has a diary!

Only one of my terminals has a diary and that’s
Frannie
. Frannie is ten, and her journal is this naïve stroll across the lawns of rich, white, urban Canada. I use her naiveté for pranks. Like, she has a fetish for replying to spam—the emails that ask for help to win a lottery prize, or to collect an inheritance? Just for fun she once tried to help a bunch of widowed Nigerians by copying them all on the same email so they could share their common need for foreign assistance in recovering tens of millions of dollars.

Frannie comes across so startlingly innocent that the Russians actually believe her—one actually asked to speak with her via SKYPE, reminding me that there are real people at the other end of these fiber optic cables.

I agreed, of course, but when I answered the SKYPE call I didn’t turn on my webcam. He wore silver wraparound shades and this heavy gold necklace. Muscles bulged all over him, and hair tufted out his collar. Obviously Russian.

If that wasn’t enough, he spoke with a heavy accent and, when he removed his glasses to peer at the screen, his eyes were completely black, as if they were just the pupil. Still gives me the shivers. I didn’t say a thing, just waited until he swore at the computer and disconnected. I know what you’re thinking, but I route my server off a half dozen other servers, so there’s no way they can trace me.

Given Jonny is sixteen, I’m willing to bet his journal is a little more risqué than Frannie’s. I open the first entry and gasp.

Looks like Jonny can draw.

There I am on page one … he actually took the trouble to scan this stuff in.

And page two. I’m drawn in pastels here with an overlong neck and blank staring eyes.

The sound of my mom’s wheelchair as it rolls across the warehouse floor warns me that she’s coming. She can never sneak up on me. One day I’ll fix the squeaking, but for now it’s handy. Besides, there are bigger things that need repairing around here.

Page three: doodles of an alien.

Page four: me again. A penciled profile of my face, blemish free, nose snubbed upward and eyes shut as if I’m enjoying something. It’s hyper realistic. Shivers rattle down my spine. One thing is for certain, Jonny’s interest in me hasn’t waned.

I don’t know how to do it without tipping him off that I have his old computer, but when I get to school, Jonny and I are going to have words.

The drawings confirm it; Jonny deserves a spot on Shadownet. It’s time for me to work my magic. It’s time for Jonny to take his rightful place. He should be honored.

“Janus, come up for dinner,” my mom calls from the top of the stairs.

“Half an hour?” I ask. Half an hour is barely enough time to get started but it’s the most I can demand. The squeaks slowly roll away, and then the gears of the elevator crank over as it descends to pick my mom up.

Thirty minutes for a Jonny makeover. Let’s go.