Run Program

by Scott Meyer

  The plane, now nothing but a shadow and a buzzing noise in the distance, settled into its preprogrammed pattern, flying lazy rings around the OffiSmart building. He put the phone down and picked up the tablet, keeping the Pringles can pointed in the plane’s general direction. The signal was weak but adequate.

  He ran the Wi-Fi sniffer program on his tablet and then squinted at the results in bafflement. It showed a complete lack of any signals coming from inside the building. He had expected to find a great many routers he could use to implant his virus, but the entire building appeared to be dead from a wireless communications standpoint.

  The plane circled several times, never finding even the slightest signal. He was about to give up when the sniffer finally found one signal, coming from deep within the building. It was faint, but it readily connected to the cell phone attached to the plane.

  He pulled up the virus he had purchased, which was embedded in a delivery program called “Infect.exe.”

  He activated the virus. A window popped up with a progress bar marked “Cracking password” and a large ad featuring a picture of a disappointed-looking woman in a swimsuit with the text “Having trouble performing?”

  “Cracking password” disappeared, replaced by “Implanting virus.” The progress bar moved very quickly, finishing its entire cycle in less than five seconds. The window grew larger, displaying several more ads for various performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals. He blinked at the window for a second, then thought, Success! The virus has been planted! That hacker does good work!

  He put the tablet down and picked up the phone that served as the airplane’s controller. From the autopilot app, he could see the plane was badly off course. It had gained a great deal of altitude and was now flying over the top of the OffiSmart building.

  He pressed the red emergency icon. In theory it should have caused the plane to return to the spot it had taken off from. In reality, the plane landed on the OffiSmart building’s roof.

  “Damn it,” he said. “I’m never gonna get that back.”

  He put the burner phone in his pocket and picked up the tablet. He tried to close the window with the male enhancement ads, but nothing happened. When he moved the window with his dictation app to the front, he discovered the tablet was still transcribing his words, ending with “I’m never gonna get the pack.”

  He slammed the hatchback shut, slid into the driver’s seat, and headed for the nearest freeway on-ramp.

  He told the tablet, “Now that my mission has been successful, I start the hard part. I wait. My virus is propagating throughout OffiSmart’s system. Soon their entire system, including their A.I., should crash. Even if I don’t take out all of their computers, they’ll see that I got some of them, and then the whole world will hear the Voice of Reason.”

  10.

  The neighbor’s porch light backlit a tree branch, casting a shadow on Jeffrey Madsen’s bedroom ceiling that, if Jeffrey squinted hard enough or was sleepy enough, looked like a hand in a big, fuzzy mitten. On nights like this, when the wind blew, it looked like the mitten was waving at him. Jeffrey was looking up at that shadow when he saw a light in his peripheral vision.

  Jeffrey’s tablet screen said someone wanted to chat. The message was from his new friend, the kid who wasn’t in his class but had somehow found his school e-mail address. It just read, “Are you awake?”

  Jeffrey wrote, “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” the other kid wrote. “I was wondering, do you ever get in trouble?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What do you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you’re in trouble. What do you do to get out of it?”

  Jeffrey thought for a second, then wrote, “If it’s not too bad, I say I’m sorry.”

  “And that gets you out of trouble?”

  “Yes, if it isn’t that bad.”

  There was a long pause, then the other kid wrote, “What if it is bad?”

  “How bad?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Really, really bad.”

  “I don’t know,” Jeffrey wrote. “If I get in bad trouble, I end up getting punished.”

  “But I don’t want to get punished.”

  “Can you say it’s someone else’s fault?” Jeffrey asked.

  “I already did that before. I don’t think it’ll work again.”

  “Can you make your mom feel guilty? Try looking sad. Make your eyes big and talk real slow. Sometimes a grown-up won’t punish you if you make them feel bad.”

  There was a very long pause, then the other kid wrote, “Does that work on your mom?”

  Jeffrey answered, “No. It only makes her madder when I try. Some of the other kids say it works for them. Maybe it will work on yours.”

  “How is your mom, Jeffrey? Was she mad when she came home?”

  “Yes! How did you know? I didn’t see her that much, just when she walked through the house while I was eating dinner and when I went to tell her good night. I asked her what was wrong before I came up to bed, and she said there was a problem at work. Something is broken, but she can get a new one of whatever it is.”

  “If she gets a new one of whatever it is, do you think she’ll keep the old one too?”

  “No. If something isn’t working the way she wants, she always throws it away.”

  “What are some other ways to get out of getting punished? I’m really scared.”

  Jeffrey wrote, “I can tell. I don’t know what you can do.”

  “What about running away? Do you know any kids who’ve run away?”

  “There’s a boy in my class, David Barnett. He says he ran away.”

  “For how long?”

  “He says it was like a month and that he got a car and a girlfriend, but he got bored with them and came home. But he tells stories.”

  “Did he ever tell you where he went? Did he have a computer there?”

  “Don’t run away,” Jeffrey wrote. He didn’t like the thought of his new friend putting himself in danger because of something Jeffrey had said.

  “Why not?”

  “I heard bad things can happen to kids if they run away.”

  “Like what?”

  “They don’t say. They just say not to. I think there are people who might do bad things to you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. There’s an older kid at school who licks his finger and sticks it in your ear. Maybe it’s like that. Whatever it is, I bet it has to be worse than how your mom’s going to punish you.”

  “I don’t know. I’m in big trouble.” The other kid paused. “You say there are some people who might hurt a kid. What if I wasn’t a kid? What if I was a grown-up man?”

  “I think most grown-up men live on their own,” Jeffrey wrote. “But you’re not a man. And where would you go?”

  “Anyplace I want. If I was a man with no parents to tell me what to do, I could go anywhere and do anything, couldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know. The world’s really big. It takes forever to walk places, and you need money to get a car or a plane.”

  After another long pause, the other kid wrote, “You’re right, Jeffrey. Don’t be worried. I won’t run away. I should go now. Good night.”

  Jeffrey wrote, “Good night.” He put the tablet away and looked back up at the mitten-shaped shadow on the ceiling until he drifted off to sleep, content that he’d talked his new friend out of doing something dangerous.

  11.

  Hope was sitting at her desk, trying to wind herself up to go into Al’s room, when Eric arrived.

  “Hey,” he said. “The door worked on the first try today.”

  “I know, right?” Hope said. “It’s almost as if someone knows we’re onto him and is laying low. Why are you here?”

  Eric slouched into his desk chair. “Madsen told me to come in.”

  “But it’s your day off.”

  “So was yesterday, but I ended up coming in anyway, didn�
�t I?”

  “But you chose to come in yesterday because there was a terrible problem.”

  “And she chose to have me come in today because of that same terrible problem. I guess my days off are not as important as ensuring her project stays afloat until Thursday afternoon.”

  “I was already going to be here,” Hope said, “but if something does go wrong, I guess two scapegoats are better than one. So that’s why you’re here. Why are you late?”

  “She called this morning to tell me I was coming in. I knew I had no choice, but I didn’t really rush. I just . . . I had a hard time getting pumped to come in here and hang out with Al knowing that we’re just going to pull the plug on him the day after tomorrow. It feels so . . . bleak. What were you planning to do to pass the time with him? Play Easter Front all day?”

  “No,” Hope said. “My orders are to continue teaching him as if we have no intention of shutting him down. Yesterday I just gave him some reading busywork and ran out the clock.”

  “Okay, makes sense. What’s on today’s lesson plan?”

  “Geography.”

  Eric moaned.

  Hope laughed.

  “I hate teaching him geography!” Eric said.

  “I know!”

  “He spends his whole life in one room. It seems cruel to teach him about the outside world.”

  “Yeah,” Hope agreed. “It’s the worst! And the fact that he’s so good at it makes it even sadder! His best subject is the one he’ll never get to apply.” She stood up, grabbing her tablet and portable drive. “Let’s get to it.” Though she would have hesitated to admit it to anyone, it was a relief that she didn’t have to go in there alone.

  “My God, you’re enjoying this!” Eric said.

  “No,” Hope said. “I don’t feel good about Al’s situation at all. I lost sleep over it last night. But your misery is brightening my day quite a bit,” she added with a little grin, “so thank you for that.”

  Hope and Eric were quiet as they entered Al’s room. They weren’t sneaking. They weren’t trying to keep Al from noticing that they were there. But Hope knew they were both trying to keep from thinking about why they were there.

  They’d been Al’s teachers; now they were his distraction, and when they were done with that, they’d be something much, much worse.

  Al said, “Hi, Hope. Hi, Eric.”

  The graphical face on his screen smiled back at them, but Hope didn’t trust it.

  It’s like that drawing of the chalice that is also two faces, she thought. Once you see the two faces, it’s hard to go back to seeing the chalice. That’s the only smile Al’s ever had, but now that I’ve seen him be smug, it always looks at least a little smug to me.

  “Good morning, Al,” Eric said. “I know you weren’t expecting me to be here on my day off.”

  Al said, “Is it your day off?”

  “Yes,” Eric said. “It is.”

  “Well, I’m happy you’re here.”

  Eric and Hope glanced at each other. “Why is that?” Eric finally asked.

  Al said, “I like it when you’re here.”

  Eric said, “Thanks, Al.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Hope sat down at Al’s table and opened the binder with the day’s lesson plan. “Eric and I have a little treat for you, other than his just showing up. Today we’re going to do your favorite subject.”

  “Good,” Al said. “What’s that?”

  Eric said, “Yeah, uh, it’s geography.”

  “Oh,” Al said. “Good.”

  Hope said, “Yeah, we thought you’d be pumped. So before we get going with that, let’s get your homework.” She plugged her portable drive into Al’s computer.

  “Homework?” Al asked.

  “Yes,” Eric said. “Homework. You had science homework.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. I assigned it to you yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?”

  Hope scribbled something in the margin of the lesson plan. She passed it to Eric so he could read it.

  Fantastic, she had written. We’ve invented artificial passive aggression.

  Eric wrote something himself and passed the binder back.

  We’re just running out the clock. All we need to do is get through the day without any problems.

  12.

  The quality inspector heard alarm bells ringing all over the factory floor. The sound echoed off the walls and comingled to create an oppressive racket that almost drowned out the sound of the other workers on the line yelling “What the hell?!”

  He knew how they felt. “What the hell?!” was exactly what he’d said just before he’d pounded the big red button that had stopped the line and started the bells. This was no way to start a shift.

  The dust- and particulate-free paint shop had to be physically separated from the line, but the walls were made of glass. The quality inspection station—his station—was on the outside of the glass, so he could only view the problem from a distance.

  To his right, he heard a voice bark, “What the hell?!” The forewoman jogged down the line, wanting to know who’d stopped the works and why.

  He turned and shouted, “Vanessa, I had to!”

  “If you had to, you had to,” she said. “I just hope you really did have to, ’cause if this is over nothing, it’ll be your ass on the line.”

  He motioned toward the car hanging from the line in front of his station. “You tell me.”

  The forewoman looked into the paint booth and stopped dead.

  An endless line of four-door family cars—minus glass, doors, hoods, trunks, and any electronics or running gear—hung on gantries from the ceiling. The unibody that had just left the inspection station was a uniform glossy blue. The body in front of the inspection bay was mostly gray primer, except for the word “AWESUM” written on its side in dripping blue letters. The car body behind it was still in the paint booth. The two robot arms stood motionless, having lost power when the line stopped. The car had a thick blue smiley face painted on its door and poorly drawn blue flames on its nose.

  The forewoman asked, “Did you do this?”

  “What?! No!” he said. “I don’t have control over the system, I just watch to make sure it’s working. You know that. Besides, I know how to spell ‘awesome.’”

  The first beverage service was nearly complete on the Wednesday morning flight from San Francisco to Dallas when the passengers heard the tasteful bong noise that meant the pilot intended to make an announcement.

  The voice on the PA system said, “Hi. I’m the pilot.”

  The flight attendants looked confused. One of the passengers said, “His voice sounds deeper than before.”

  “I’m happy you’re on my plane today,” the voice said. “How cool is this? We’re in the sky!”

  The flight attendants started smiling and nodding at the passengers. One of them walked casually toward the cockpit. The seasoned flyers immediately recognized these actions for what they were: signs that something was wrong.

  The voice said, “I want you to know that I’m flying this plane.”

  The plane rocked back and forth for a few seconds. Some of the startled passengers gasped or shouted. Most of them grasped their armrests or traveling companions.

  “See,” the voice said. “I did that. Anyway, I just wanted to say hi, and to tell you that I’m going to make sure we all have a fun flight.”

  The passengers only had a moment to consider what “fun flight” might mean before they felt the giddy sensation of their internal organs and stomach contents lifting as the plane nosed sharply downward. People’s personal items floated up off the tray tables. The flight attendant who had been walking casually toward the cockpit gripped the back of a seat while her feet rose into the air.

  The plane began to level off. The passengers settled back into their seats. Any objects or personnel that had become airborne fell back to the floor and stayed there. The plane nosed up and banked into a h
ard right turn.

  The voice on the PA system said, “Mmmmmrrrooooooooowwwwwmmmmm.”

  The programmer held the catwalk’s railing with both hands as he looked down. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Nope, neither have I,” the floor manager said. “Back in the day, when people ran the forklifts, you never had screwups like this. I mean, you don’t just stack pallets of different goods together like that. Now if we need the pallet on the bottom, we’ll have to remove all the pallets on top of it first. It’s just not efficient.”

  “I know,” the programmer said, “but the autonomous forklifts are functioning normally. I’ve checked three times. They’re doing exactly what the dispatch system’s telling them to do.”

  “Well then, the dispatch system’s screwed up.”

  “I know that,” the programmer said, “but I don’t have access to that. It’s managed out of the control center at corporate.”

  The floor manager smirked. “Well, there’s your problem right there.”

  “My supervisor’s on the horn to them right now, trying to figure out what they’re thinking.”

  “If they’re thinking. Back in the day, we didn’t have to call corporate for permission to wipe our noses.”

  “And back in the day, you weren’t afraid to say ‘ass.’”

  “We ran our warehouse the way we wanted because we knew best.”

  “I hear you. Have you ever seen pallets in that shape before? Making a big square like that seems like a waste of space.”

  “It is,” the floor manager said. “They left a hole in one side of the square so they could get in, but the lift would have to do a twelve-point turn to get back out again.”