by Brian Olsen
He sat up. “I’m a wreck. My heart is broken. I met him Friday. It’s Wednesday. A week ago I didn’t know he existed. Why do I feel like I lost the love of my life?”
“Come here.” He slid over next to her and she put her arm around him. They leaned back against the wall. “You had the start of something good, baby, and it was taken from you before you got a chance to see how good it could be. Of course your heart is broken. I’d be worried about you if it wasn’t.”
He didn’t respond. They sat there in silence for a few minutes. She could feel him shaking and held him tighter.
“Too much,” he said at last. “Too much, all at once. We have to end this. We have to do something.”
“We do. We will.”
“I hope Kevin calls soon. I need to know what happened. Do you think one of the AmSyn zombies crashed into him or something? It has to be connected to AmSyn, don’t you think? The accident, I mean? It’s not just random, it can’t be.”
“It’s not. Kevin called while you were asleep.” She stood up and offered him her hand. “Come on. Caitlin and Mark are downstairs. They should hear this too.”
Caitlin and Mark were on the living room sofa. They were watching CNN, but Caitlin muted it when Dakota and Alan joined them.
“I thought maybe there’d be something,” Caitlin said. “About Pete, about Derek, the killings, AmSyn, anything. But no. Nothing.”
“Kevin called back,” Alan said abruptly as he sat in the chair by the television. “He told Dakota what happened.”
Dakota sat in the other chair. She took a deep breath. “Pete drove off a bridge. There weren’t any other cars involved. He was far from the highway, the police don’t know why he got off or where he was going. They’re still examining the car to see if it was an accident or...or if it wasn’t.”
“They think he might have killed himself?” Alan asked. He started to jump out of his seat, then collapsed back into it and folded his arms. “No way. He was the happiest guy I’ve ever met. No way.”
“That’s what Kevin said. Pete’s family, too.”
“Why do the police think he might have killed himself?” Caitlin asked. “Why don’t they assume it was an accident?”
“The road Pete was on had crash barriers everywhere except on the little wooden bridge he was crossing. They think it’s too big of a coincidence for him to have crashed at that exact spot, especially when nobody can explain why he drove there.”
“Coincidence,” Mark said. “Fuck. I am really starting to hate that word.”
“Alan,” Dakota said, “do you know what kind of car Pete drove?”
“No. Wait, yes. He told me. What are those cool Japanese cars with all the gadgets?”
“Kurihara?” Dakota offered.
“Yes! Kurihara something. Neuron? Neuron.”
“Wow,” Mark said. “That’s a nice car. It’s like a robot, it parks itself and it talks to you. I would love to drive one of those.”
“Why does the type of car matter?” Caitlin asked Dakota.
“Kurihara is owned by Amalgamated Synergy.”
They were all quiet as that sank in. Finally, Alan said, “Pete said something was up with his GPS. It was leading him out of his way.”
“So,” Dakota said, “Pete’s AmSyn-built car with its AmSyn-operated navigational system leads him to an unsafe bridge in the middle of nowhere. Maybe then the AmSyn-built computer parking system takes control of the gas and the brakes and the steering...”
“And kills him,” Caitlin finished.
“So what are we going to do about it?” Alan asked. “Enough talking, enough hiding. What are we going to do? Do we go to the police? Do we do something ourselves? What?”
His voice rose as he spoke. He addressed all of his questions to Dakota. Her three roommates looked at her expectantly.
“I don’t know about the police,” she said. “I don’t think they’ll believe that AmSyn employees are being controlled, and if they don’t believe us, they can’t protect us.”
“Plus,” Caitlin added, “we don’t know for sure that it’s only AmSyn employees who are affected. Mark and I barely got out of a bar full of killers, I don’t want to have to fight our way out of a police station.”
“So the police are out,” Dakota said. “For now. That means we need to go back to AmSyn ourselves. We check out the server farm on twenty-five. I’m pretty sure that’s where the account Pete’s client traced is operating from.”
“What about Derek’s voice on the phone?” Alan asked. “How can we find out about that? Is there a telephone switchboard or something?”
“Derek went to the same audition I did,” Caitlin said. “They recorded him speaking vowels and consonants, they must be piecing those sounds together to reproduce his voice. They’d need good computers for that, right? Something better than a laptop.”
“Server farm first, then,” Dakota said. “If we don’t find anything there, we keep going up. The CEO’s office is on the top floor, thirty-eight. Whatever’s happening here, the person in charge must know about it.”
“From what Pickle told us, it sounded like she and all the other top dogs had their heads messed with,” Mark said. “The CEO would be the only person above them, right?”
“There’s the board of directors,” Dakota replied, “but I wouldn’t know how to get to them. Let’s start with the CEO.”
“We’re talking about Walter Ackerman, right?” Caitlin said. “He’s famous. Famous enough that I’ve heard of him, and I know fuck-all about business. We can really just walk into his office?”
“Probably not,” Dakota conceded. “Maybe we can break in, if we go at night. If my ID is still valid I can get us to the floor, at least. We’ll have to play it by ear from there.”
“I have another question,” Mark said.
“Shoot.”
“Why is Alan on CNN?”
Dakota looked at the television. There was a photo of Alan against a red background, with his name displayed underneath.
“Turn it up!” she barked at Mark.
He fumbled for the remote and hit the mute button. “...stock prices for Amalgamated Synergy have plummeted since this baffling announcement.” The photo disappeared, replaced by the face of the afternoon anchor at her desk. “We’re working now to find out more about Alan Lennox, but there has been no further information forthcoming from AmSyn. We’ll bring you more as this story develops. In Tokyo today...” She continued with an unrelated story about Asian markets.
“What the HELL?” Alan shouted.
“Rewind it,” Dakota told Mark.
He hit the rewind button on the DVR remote and the live broadcast paused, then reversed itself. Alan’s picture appeared, then disappeared. A stock photo of Walter Ackerman appeared and disappeared just as quickly. Mark hit play. They listened to the anchor finish another story, then: “A shocking announcement from Amalgamated Synergy this afternoon that Walter Ackerman would be stepping down from his position as the corporation’s Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. No explanation was given for his departure and there has been no statement from Ackerman himself. Ackerman has served as AmSyn’s CEO for over twenty years; in many people’s minds his name is synonymous with that of the corporation he has led so successfully for so long. Ackerman’s replacement has already been named – according to a press release we received just a short time ago, Alan Lennox is the new Chief Executive Officer of Amalgamated Synergy.”
The photo appeared. Dakota recognized it as the ID photo taken when Alan arrived for work that past Monday.
“AmSyn provided CNN with this photo. Apart from his obvious youth, we have no information available about Lennox – where he came from or how he is qualified to serve as the CEO of one of the largest and most diverse multinationals in the world is a mystery. What isn’t a mystery is why stock prices for Amalgamated Synergy have plummeted since this baffling announcement.”
Mark hit the mute button.
�
�What the HELL?” Alan shouted again.
“That...that...” Dakota was stupefied. “What the HELL?” she finally echoed.
“Hey!” Mark said excitedly, “Now we don’t have to worry about how to get into the CEO’s office!”
“Congratulations, Alan,” Caitlin said. “You’ve finally got a real job.”
Chapter Seventeen
Mark thinking
Mark stepped quickly off the elevator and onto the twenty-fifth floor of the main Amalgamated Synergy building. The lobby was empty, the receptionist’s desk abandoned for the night. He flattened against the wall, then skulked silently towards the glass door to the left. He tried the door – locked. He pressed his face against the glass and peered left and right down the side corridor as best he could.
He turned back, and whispered loudly, “Looks clear! You guys can...oh.”
His three roommates were right behind him.
“We’re on the security cameras, Mark,” Dakota said. “The guards can see everything we do, so don’t sneak around. Act like you own the place. Okay?”
“Right, sorry,” Mark said, red-faced. The prospect of coming back to AmSyn, to the home base of whoever had tried to kill him and Caitlin, had his heart pumping with excitement and he wasn’t sure what to do with all his nervous energy.
Although it was after midnight on a Wednesday – or early Thursday, really – the building was open. AmSyn had offices and holdings all over the world, so there was always someone who needed to work on something with somebody in another time zone. Still, Dakota had said that at this time of night the place was as dead as it was likely to get, and they had all agreed that tonight was as good a time as any to brave the lion’s den.
The security guard in the ground floor lobby hadn’t been anybody Mark recognized from the homicidal mob at Slot Machine, to his relief. The guard had scanned Dakota’s ID without hesitation, but had started to question why Mark and Caitlin were there when he saw Alan. His jaw dropped. He looked down at something on his computer, then back up again, and waved them in with a deferential nod. As they passed, he said, “Have a good evening, Mr. Lennox, sir.”
Alan had initially suggested that they split up to save time, with two of them heading for the server farm while the other two went straight to Ackerman’s office. Caitlin had quickly declared that to be the worst idea that anyone had ever come up with in the history of the world, and Mark, who was a horror movie fan and familiar with the standard tropes, had agreed. So they had made their way to the twenty-fifth floor together.
Dakota scanned her ID against a black plastic pad mounted on the wall next to the glass doors, and with a quiet beep a small light changed from red to green. She pushed the doors open and strode off to the left. Her trio of roommates followed behind.
The corridor ended in another door, this one metal. Dakota scanned her ID but the red light stayed red.
“Damn,” she said. “I don’t have access to the server farm.”
“Let me try,” Alan said, gently nudging her aside. He swiped his temporary ID against the pad and the door clicked open.
“That shouldn’t have worked,” Dakota said with a scowl. “Temp ID cards don’t open anything.”
“Perk of the new job, I guess.” Alan shrugged. “Shall we?”
They pushed through and Mark noticed a slight dip in the temperature. The door opened into a massive chamber filled with row upon row of tall, gun-metal gray cabinets. Each one was filled with racks of computer equipment protected by a glass door. Mark supposed this must be the farm. He knew what a server was, roughly, but hadn’t had any idea what one would look like. He didn’t know why he had assumed there would be punch cards.
“So, what now?” he asked. “Do they talk?”
“No,” Alan said, “they don’t talk. They’re just computers.”
Mark hated the look Alan was giving him. All three of his roommates did it sometimes, talked to him like he was an idiot. Even Dakota couldn’t help herself, and she knew how much it bothered him.
He didn’t think it was such a stupid question. Even if they were reluctant to say it out loud, they were all thinking the same thing – that the computer had come to life and gone crazy and started killing people. Was it such a stretch to think they could have a conversation with it?
“I know they’re just computers,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Some computers talk.”
“Not these,” Dakota said. “These are just for storage.”
She opened one of the glass doors and hesitantly pressed a button on a small control panel. She looked at the display screen for a moment, then stepped back.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said with a sigh.
They stood there for a moment, looking around.
“Well, this was anticlimactic,” Caitlin said.
“Can I help you?”
They all jumped at the sudden voice. A balding, middle-aged man in a dress shirt and a coffee-stained tie was standing at the far end of their row.
“Should you be in here?” he asked as he approached.
“Hi,” Alan said, stepping forward. “Sorry. I’m Alan. Alan Lennox.”
“Oh!” The man stopped short. He peered at Alan. “Oh, wow, hello. I...yes, I saw the email. Hello. Welcome.” He gripped his tie anxiously. “What are you...I mean, hello. I’m Jared Wilcox, I’m on-duty tonight. Can I help you with something?”
“No...” Alan started, before Dakota nudged him. “Actually, yes, thank you. I’m...taking a tour of the building, you know, getting to know the new digs. This is my personal assistant, Miss Ross.” He indicated Caitlin, then turned to Dakota. “Miss Bell works in Marketing, she’s showing me around.” He looked at Mark. “And this is, uh...”
“I’m his boyfriend,” Mark said.
“Right,” Alan said. “My boyfriend. Why not?”
“How progressive,” Wilcox said with a half-smile. He hesitated for a moment. “My nephew’s gay, so...” He trailed off.
“Oh,” Alan said. “Well, there you go.”
There was a long, awkward silence.
“So can you play games on these suckers?” Mark asked suddenly.
“He likes video games,” Alan said. He reached up and tousled Mark’s spiky black hair. “He’s just a big kid.”
“Well,” Wilcox said, “I suppose there’s no reason you couldn’t load some games onto them. But we never would. These are very sophisticated machines.”
“Who has access to them?” Alan asked.
“Everybody. We use them as extra storage and backup for the whole building, every department gets a share. Do you want to see my office? I can show you some of the logs. I don’t know if it’d mean much to you but if you’re interested...”
“Mr. Lennox would love that, thank you,” Dakota said.
They followed him back down the row to one of several offices leading off of the main room. It was dark, most of the light either coming from the doorway or from the multiple computer screens. It smelled like Chinese food.
Wilcox flipped on the overhead light and talked them through various files detailing numerous statistics on the usage of the server files. It was all very complicated and boring. Mark’s three roommates peppered the man with questions about how exactly the servers were used, but Wilcox’s answers weren’t very helpful, mostly because the three of them kept dancing around the questions they really wanted to ask. Frustrated, Mark cut the man off mid-sentence.
“Could somebody play an online game from here for, like, a really long time without anybody knowing?”
Mark examined Wilcox closely to see if he could detect any sign of guilt. All he saw was utter bewilderment.
“I...what? No, look, I’m sorry, son, we don’t play games on these computers. It’s against company policy.”
“Really?” Alan asked. “I’m sure I’ve seen employees at their desks playing games now and then.”
“Oh, well, sure,” Wilcox replied softly, shooti
ng a quick glance towards the door to make sure nobody was eavesdropping. “Unofficially, people do all sorts of things on their desktops. To tell you the truth, enforcement of the policy’s been a little lax lately. But not here, no non-work-related use of company equipment in this department. We’re very strict on that point.”
“Okay, so no games,” Mark said. “What about...” He looked at Alan quickly, but decided to press on. “What about controlling...stuff?”
“Stuff?” Wilcox asked blankly.
“Like...if AmSyn makes something...”
“Like a video game?” the man said wearily.
“Yeah, or anything...like a car, maybe. You guys own Kurihara, right?”
Mark felt Alan take hold of his hand and squeeze.
“Yes, yes, I believe we do,” Wilcox responded, trying hard not to look at their hands. “Why?”
“Kurihara makes those cool robot cars. Could you guys take control of one of them? Drive it from here, make the GPS tell dirty jokes, shit like that?”
“Oh, I see. Heh. Golly, you have quite an imagination. That’s a funny idea. No, no, nothing like that. Kurihara has its own computers, ours are just for this building. We don’t have any connection to them from here, not to any of our subsidiaries. This server farm is really quite small, we have a larger one upstate that does most of the heavy lifting. You should head out there, Mr. Lennox, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. It’s pretty fascinating.”
“I’ll be sure to do that.”
“We won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Wilcox,” Dakota said. “Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.”
“No problem at all. My pleasure, it gets awfully boring here late at night.”
“We’ll show ourselves out. Have a good evening.”
The foursome stepped out of Wilcox’s office and headed down a few rows, out of his sight.
“That was a bust,” Caitlin said.
“At least we know for sure now that these computers aren’t powerful enough to come alive and play video games and kill people,” Mark said.
Before they could give him the look, he added, “Come on! You were all thinking it! I’m the only one who was smart enough to play the dumb eye-candy so I could ask the stupid questions we needed answered!”
