The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  When I got home I sat down at my keyboard the way a pianist sits down at a concert piano. The window was open, and I could hear the toads in the reed beds singing in four-part polyphony.

  Syzygy28 wasn’t his password on the county admin account; it was the password to his main personal account. He had sixteen user IDs on ten dating sites; what dating sites do if you don’t visit every day is repeatedly email you your user ID and password. So I had a wide selection of passwords to try on the county system. His county password was cassan0va666, using a zero for the O. He has a whole network of accounts with all kinds of interesting stuff in them, enough that I can pour boiling oil on his parade for years and years.

  I set up mail forwarding in all his accounts to dummy accounts so as to make it difficult for him to lock me out if he figured out he’d been hacked.

  But that was unnecessary; he never did figure it out. I was tempted to warn off the women he was defrauding, but I know from experience that such women do not welcome helpful advice.

  I need to tell you the story of the shower again, because I didn’t tell it right the first time. I tried hard to make that experience about me, but there is a way in which it is not about me at all, in fact quite the opposite. The shower during booking is a process engineered to remove identity. It is when they take your clothes and your jewelry. The opal necklace: It’s a rough-cut Queensland opal. When I was in Brisbane, I went opal shopping. The Queensland opals have this amazing spatial quality, like you could go inside and go for a long walk. They are almost more like places than gemstones. The ones that seemed to contain whole worlds, I couldn’t afford. The one I bought is like the door of a cave leading to magical blue and green; a portal to a hiding place that’s just up the path.

  When instructed, I took off the necklace and handed it to the prison guard who was a blond kid barely out of high school. She was wearing rubber gloves.

  She instructed me where I was to soap myself and how I was to wash my hair and never took her eyes off me.

  The shower process is engineered as a psychological transition intended to create docility. A lot of the rest of the experience I describe involves a personal interaction between me and someone else or someone being capricious, but other than the possibly malicious timing, the shower was exactly what it is supposed to be. The extent to which I try to make the shower about messing up my mug shot, I am avoiding the impersonal nature of the system behind the shower procedure. The mug shot is not a school picture.

  The most beautiful thing about the way the computer tech had set up the county system was it allowed for remote installation of software on all county equipment so that he could do his job without having to walk into the office. Installation could be done globally. On what drives would you like to install these keystroke loggers? Select ALL. We were in. My invasion had begun.

  What I had achieved was invisible admin access to the county system and access to the State systems that had information about who held the leases on the privatized prisons and copies of the contracts. That was what I needed.

  Even better, the system also talked to all the county cell phones for all county agencies. Not only did I give them all keystroke loggers, but I turned on GPS position logging. The phone directory identifies the phones being tracked, last name first. I color coded them by department, and set up an RSS feed to a KML; the KML tracks in real time every county employee’s cell phone on a map. With a slider bar, I can walk the map backward and forward in time.

  I trained the network of intelligent agents to receive, process, and archive in the fungal cloud in the yard the incoming data from the keystroke loggers, which was already being displayed on one of my monitors in beautiful green spikes like blades of grass.

  I also gave it an audio track hooked up to my speakers, keyed to the phones coded as belonging to the sheriff’s department, so I would be able to hear the approach of deputies and in particular I would be able to hear any sudden convergence of deputies in the area of my house.

  Vernichtungswille: the desire to annihilate.

  I connected all that to my machine’s security, such that if they kicked in my door—presuming I’d remembered to lock it—and came to take my machine, all trace of this operation would have fled into the yard before they were halfway up the stairs.

  I wish I’d thought to track the state troopers, too

  When I emerged from my trance, there was a devil mask in cut paper glued to the dishwasher. In the hallway, blue-and-green snowflakes decorated the walls. On closer inspection, they were cut from the phone bill that had come in the previous day’s mail. Luckily, the glue that the kids had used to attach them to the walls was rubber cement, so they peeled off easily.

  A pizza had been acquired from next door and had been eaten, apparently some hours earlier. My purse was open and all the cash in my wallet had been removed and replaced with candy wrappers.

  The kids were each at their own computers. My daughter was watching a DVD of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup and was laughing as Harpo climbed into the lemonade. Benjamin was playing a computer game involving monkeys and was happy because he had just leveled up.

  I checked the voicemail. Henry had left seven messages. Apparently, the kids had not felt it necessary to answer the phone.

  The initial ecstasy when you come to own a computer system is followed by a hideous dropping away of the veil once you realize that no matter how radioactive the data, if you flash it around and can’t provide a legal provenance, then you are going to jail. Federal prison. This stuff now comes under the antiterrorism laws because these are government computers. And the trial would be secret, if there were a trial at all.

  So you’re patient; you file Freedom of Information Act requests that the opposition may not feel they need to respond to. And you think that maybe they know what you’ve done and are just waiting and hoping that you have issues with impulse control.

  VII.

  For most of my life I have allowed myself to think that jail is for other people, people I don’t need to think much about. People getting what they deserve.

  How do people come to deserve things? What do I deserve? What do you deserve? I deserve an ice cream. You deserve a spanking. She had it coming to her. And he deserves to disappear into a jail cell for a very long time.

  If you’re arrested, you’re guilty.

  Your moment of decision is at three a.m. when they open your bedroom door. Can you keep your cool?

  What is most interesting about the prison privatization project is that it is failing. This world has no shortage of venues where you can suspend someone from the ceiling and beat the bottoms of their feet with a rubber hose and hook up a car battery… Despite our civil liberties being suspended here in the enterprise zone, our utopia is just not globally competitive in the atrocities market.

  There are a few contracts. The purple block of the Public Safety Building is leased to a 501(c)(3) that promotes “Nordic rejuvenation”—sounds like Swedish massage… I’ve read the business plan.

  So I’m in the New York State system, and I start seeing references to something called the bio-monitoring system. It’s being deployed for checking whether people have hunting licenses and it works twenty miles from the nearest road. The idea works like this: If you fire a gun, the system uses some kind of Internet to check whether there is a hunting license in proximity and tries to match the gun to a license. So if you fire the gun and lack a proper license, the Department of Environmental Conservation cops arrive, perhaps by helicopter, and you get a very expensive ticket plus their bill for transportation.

  And prisoners are chipped: the chip is injected between the shoulder blades. If they escape, they can be tracked even if they hide in the forest. Ironically, the denser the forest, the better the bio-monitoring system works because of the density of the fungal mats in the ground, and because there are so many trees to act as antennas.

  My water treatment plant is part of the bio-monitoring system. It’s an AI that funct
ions as a major hub. My mail-order fungi had long since added themselves to its network when the flood waters briefly overflowed into the tanks. That’s where the unexplained traffic through my Internet connection was coming from. The network password is syzygy29.

  Same consultant. Same security holes!

  Our Cassan0va doesn’t know me, but he and I have had quite the relationship. Almost a partnership. One system administrator and his bad habits can take me a very long way. Further, I guess, than I really wanted to go. I got carried away.

  Let’s be sensible. Let’s get back in touch with reality. Lock your doors at night. Wash the dishes before you go to bed. Consider your bedroom: How would you look to a cop, sprawled on the bed like that? Consider it from their point of view.

  It’s not that I didn’t try other solutions. I talked to my elected representatives. I wrote letters. I filed complaints. I filed Freedom of Information requests. But at a certain point, you lose faith in reality as you knew it, sliding sideways to a place where police come into your bedroom with a gun in the middle of the night if they find a door to your house unlocked. They define an open door as a door it is possible to enter without kicking it down.

  Be sensible. Think about it. Would you rather have the cops haul you out of bed, or the robbers? The fundamental difference between police and criminals is that the police have rules they must abide by. If there are criminals in your bedroom you can report them to the police.

  Would you rather have the cops haul you out of bed, or the robbers? The answer to this riddle is that the cops are supposed to haul the robbers out of bed and leave me out of it.

  Hacking the government, any government, just isn’t a very good idea. Just because I can enter a computer system doesn’t mean I should. Surely, there is another solution, something I could have done differently.

  If the police come into your house in the middle of the night, you can report them. Don’t argue when they are in your house. Ask for an explanation of what is happening, but in a quiet, calm tone of voice. Phrase it, “I would like to understand what you are doing in my house.” Not, “What the hell are you are doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?”

  In the morning, drive over to the police station and speak to the sergeant. The cop will call you after a few days and explain himself. If you are calm and patient and understanding, he might even apologize, might even admit that he made a mistake, that they came into your house in the middle of the night with their guns drawn, but when they saw your beautiful little daughter asleep in her bed, they realized their error and put their guns away. Which is why they weren’t pointing guns at you when they woke you up.

  You may have some legal rights, but you need to understand that when the cops are in your bedroom at three a.m., this isn’t the right time to articulate the fundamental principles of human rights. You may think you should be recording this surreal conversation, but don’t go for the mp3 recorder even if it is right there on your desk, because at three a.m. the police may think it’s a gun.

  It’s probably a good thing that you don’t have a gun. If you have a gun in your nightstand in case of intruders, it might get you killed. Stop and think. Think of it from the cop’s point of view. The cops have come into your house expecting you will be angry, that you may freak out. They are just doing a job. Their job is to protect themselves while on the job. That’s why they had their guns drawn in the first place.

  That’s all water under the bridge now. Once I was in, I couldn’t just walk away. I had to do something.

  I don’t even own a gun. I have a gun phobia. I am not advocating violent revolution, though I understand that may be the consequence of what I have done. This is not a call to arms.

  I did not abduct children and make them fight a war. I did not buy them from the revolutionary forces as so much military surplus. I did not import them to the US on the pretext of rehabilitating them. I did not hide them in a jail in the Adirondacks. I merely set them free. What would you do in my place?

  Understand that these are children that I have liberated. The oldest of them is fifteen and they’ve been through some very bad stuff. They were bought as a batch by a private military contractor. The prison contract with the State of New York is in the name of a pharmaceutical company, and there is a budget line from somewhere else that appears to be military.

  I couldn’t just leave them inside.

  There are no little boys in your barn. The boys are all still inside. The child soldiers hiding in your barn are all girls, very damaged little girls.

  I knew you’d want to help. I knew you’d want to help me.

  I have been inexact if I’ve called this a police state. It’s not a state at all. The state, disempowered and defunded, has withered away. Withered and wilted, it has dropped its petals all over like blood on the ground. The police remain, but really, there is no longer any state. Only power that has a logic of its own and the apparatus of a state that is reanimated by power.

  We can win this thing. We can win.

  Are you detaining me? Or am I free to go?

  Copyright © 2012 by Kathryn Cramer

  Art copyright © 2012 by Scott Bakal

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  They pushed me out of the portal, dumped me into the sage and manzanita. The great orb’s pastel colors glowed against the clear night sky. As I backed away she rocked, then lifted into the air, the only sounds a scrape and rattle as dirt and pebbles rolled into the hollow she’d left. I saw the sparkle of distant flashbulbs from the perimeter of the landing site, like stars on waves.

  I wondered if it was my fault the aliens had stolen my grandmother.

  This happened back in the eighties. Like everyone else, Grandma and I followed the story on the news. I remember the first time we saw the ship on television, a soft globe banded in edible-looking shades of pink, orange, and yellow that floated down through the atmosphere and settled lightly on the ground.

  Over the next months we watched as they guzzled psychedelic herbal brews in the Amazon basin. We saw them at the pyramids and Machu Picchu. We heard an interview with them when they visited the south of England to marvel at the crop circles.

  I even read the book they’d published to finance their tour. It was one of those big-type/wide-margin/one-platitude-per-page deals. “Beware of rationality—it is an enemy of the spirit,” seemed weird coming from a space-going culture. The rest of it was the same kind of thing.

  They’d spoken to the Pope and the Dalai Lama and had made an absolutely baffling appearance on The 700 Club, so it shouldn’t have surprised me when they cozied up to my grandmother.

  * * *

  Since Amy dumped me, I’d gotten in the habit of drinking on weekends. She’d been my first girlfriend. Her sharp mind and soft body, the unexpected sight of myself through her eyes, had given me the first real feelings of joy I’d known, and now I needed something to fill the time I used to spend with her. That Sunday I was sober. Grandma had promised to introduce me to her new friends. I was excited for the first time in months.

  Grandma was a small woman with hair that had gone white when she was young. She kept it in a disciplined bun and wore a blouse, skirt, and jacket that hid her body, reduced it to a piece of furniture. She preferred to live from the neck up. Age had taken most of the individuality from her face. From a distance I recognized her by her glasses and bright red lipstick.

  We drove to church in her oxblood-and-silver Buic
k sedan, a four-door with power everything. It was early spring, and the light of the wine country cast a tawny color over vineyards that curved with the slow roll of the land. Grandma was repeatedly startled by the behavior of other cars or the sudden appearance of stoplights. She should have had her license taken away at least a year ago.

  “It’s called Christian Science because when you apply the principles you get predictable results,” she said.

  “Then why don’t they work on cars?” I hated these discussions; they brought out my mean side and it always made me feel like a jerk when I teased Grandma. But she was the one who started it. “You know what you ought to do? Get a garage next to a reading room, do Christian Science auto repair.”

  I glanced over, scared for a second that I might have hurt her feelings. There was a faint smile on her lips.

  “You know,” she said, “that’s not a bad idea.”

  Affection and irritation had a quick tussle. In the end I felt a little pride in the invincibility of her faith. No one pushes buttons like family; they installed the buttons in the first place.

  We had to walk a roped-off passage through the crowd to get into church. Grandma had been complaining about this for weeks. I’d expected more news people, but I suppose they’d covered this part of the tour already. Inside, the back two rows were full of aliens. A cross between a palm tree and a jellyfish bobbed like a fishing rod with a bite on the line. A licorice-black man turned pointillist on close inspection, his flesh a swarm of insect-sized machines. A trio of six-limbed fliers the silver-green of sage leaves fluttered around each other, then settled down in one of the pockets where the hymnals were stored. Church had been the place where I’d found out that I hallucinated when sufficiently bored, but there was no need for hallucinations around this crowd.