Found Wanting: IndyGrrl03

[lb_lee]

Summary: Bob hacks a douchebag and gets a new job in the process.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: I can't believe Neo actually taught me something that proved useful for worldbuilding.
Story Index

IndyGrrl03

 

I never would’ve touched the PIN if it hadn’t been for SpecialestAlpha.

That was the name I knew him by, back on alt.games.alienmenace. His gimmick: brooding secret agent alien hunter, desperate to find teenage girls to join the fight against extraterrestrials (and blow him). The group treated him like a pet troll, and for a long time, I saw nothing wrong with that.

 

Back then, my programming job devoured everything. It was the dot-com bubble, and between the money and the futurism, I managed to overlook the workload, the projects that kept switchbacking from gold to shit. Y2K came and went, but the crunches continued. I hit my breaking point when they had me hastily relocate to Vago, Arizona, a place with sodomy laws still on the books. I never should’ve agreed to it; the five-day drive was 80% corn, cows, and desert, and when I finally dragged into the city, I found a riot in progress. When someone threw a brick at my moving truck and told me to return to California, I started to wonder what the hell I was doing.

So I quit, five seconds before the company went bankrupt. Locked myself in my new apartment with my boxes and a fresh supply of booze, waited for the riots to pass, and plugged in... where I found SpecialestAlpha making progress with some new kid. She was younger than my niece. It bothered me.

So I trawled some archives and found out that this creep had been pulling this for six years. The girls all disappeared from the Web, but not him. When I tried to bring it up to the mods, though, the response was, “Proof, please, Bob.”

I’d made a lot of money for a lot of years on a lot of code now doomed to never see the light of day. I was stranded in the desert, staring into an abyss of empty hours and existential dread. I needed to find a new job and reevaluate my life.

I decided to crush SpecialestAlpha instead.

I thought it’d take me a weekend; it took months. Not because the guy was stealthy—just the opposite. Every time I thought I’d found everything, more turned up, messianic alien screeds and teenage girls strung together with links and screen-names. The guy wasn’t completely fatheaded; I would’ve bet my stock dossier (back when it was worth something) that he had done more than creepily flirt with all those teenagers, but I couldn’t prove it.

I could prove one thing, though: he really was a government employee, or had been. Einstein had tried to show off his legitimacy, back on alt.tv.area51, by using his work email once: eugene.smedley@pin.gov.

With his legal name, the bottom fell out of the sleaze barrel, especially once cross-referenced with the events and locations he’d discuss in his web diary. A complaint of “pigs in jack boots” in Seattle led me to the newspapers, which bagged me arrest notices, which led to a couple phone calls to the relevant court clerks, which got me his domestic violence charges from the ‘90s (dropped; never found out why). From an oblique reference to a “mainstream media smear campaign,” I found a larger newspaper story about an accidental bomb threat one of his art projects had started. The guy had founded an honest-to-god no-shitting millennial teenybopper church (One Universe) around Y2K triggering the UFO apocalypse. I couldn’t make this shit up!

And this two-bit Roswell Messiah was a government employee! Doing what? And what the everloving hell was pin.gov?

An “under construction” page, turned out, with nothing but a header bar, log in, and phone number. At least I learned what it stood for: Peripheral Immigration and Naturalization (no Service, which should’ve warned me). I imagined a bureaucrat behind a desk, shrugged, and went back to chasing rats.

It took me another three weeks to start wondering what “peripheral” meant. The word didn’t mean anything to me in an immigration context. I called my family back in Connecticut and they were equally stumped, even with their old paperwork on hand.

“It was the ‘50s, Babu,” my sister Su said. “Maybe they changed things.”

But it bothered me. The INS website was hideous and cluttered, but it was just as familiar as I expected it to be and never used the word “peripheral.” Finally I called the number on the “under construction” site and after falling through half a dozen badly programmed phone trees and being on hold for an hour and a half, I got a human being. Arguably.

“PIN Vago division, this is Agatha speaking, how may I help you?”

“Hi, I’m trying to get a hold of Eugene Smedley—”

“There’s nobody here by that name. You must want another department. Goodbye—”

“Wait, wait!” I didn’t want a repeat of the past couple hours. “At least transfer me to Seattle!”

Stentorian sigh. “Sir, we don’t do unauthorized transfers. Have a nice—”

“At least tell me what peripheral means!”

Click.

Fine. Screw them. I went back to cracking Eugene, the easier nut.

I had plenty of sources, but it was a morass and the slab of text I was writing to explain it all was more likely to inspire confusion than outrage. Eugene’s DV charges had been dropped, the bomb threat was a harmless accident, and his public interactions with teenage girls stuck with flirtation—if I wasn’t careful, he could spin the whole thing as a smear campaign to feed his next persecuted prophet story. I needed something bulletproof.

So I made a new set of accounts and screen-names, pretending to be a depressed schoolgirl in Indiana with a thing for sci-fi and secret agents. I posted a few times in Eugene’s active threads, left a bogus intro post, and within a week got a private message with the subject line “you seem special.”

It took me weeks to soften him up; I’d presumed his whole “the mundies are out to get me” thing was just a way to play the poor baby, but some of it seemed genuine. Maybe I wasn’t the first person to infiltrate him. Many a late night was spent on instant messenger, patting his ass while he moaned about the burdens of the world, his Purpose, and his mother.

Then Su found out.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

I paced my office in my bathrobe. “Look, he’s set to crack, I know it—”

“Bob, you’ve spent weeks talking for hours a day with some guy you don’t even like, following him around like some kind of obsessive—”

“He’s a slimeball!”

“That doesn’t mean you have to act like one! So you found a con artist. Good job. But you’re getting pulled into his story. He’s already got you three-quarters in the bag, and you crawled in there yourself!”

That stopped me dead. Su didn’t like talking about it, but back in college, before she’d settled down with Ravi, she’d gotten taken in by a Romeo-style con man. She’d gotten out okay financially, but it’d messed with her for a couple years. I’d been in high school still, hadn’t really understood how she’d fallen for an oily guy like that, but if anyone knew cons, it was her.

“You’ve got enough info,” she continued, “so just drop the guy. Please? This guy sounds dangerous, and you sound like you’re about to wear tinfoil. When’s the last time you slept?”

I looked at my office. All over the place were unwashed coffee mugs, piles of print-outs and handwritten notes, a timetable of account handles (stuck to the wall with sticky notes because I kept having to add and reshuffle them), a timeline, and a bingo sheet. (Free space: “I’m the Specialest!”) I hadn’t shaved or changed out of my bath robe in days, and as for sleep…

Jesus Christ, I realized, I had more files about Eugene than composed my entire porn collection! What was I doing with my life?

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. But I feel like I’m missing something, something big, staring me right in the face…”

“Come on, Babu.” Her voice was sad. “They always have some stupid little secret you’re on the verge of knowing. That’s how they hook you. Drop it. This is not how you recuperate from that Smithson West job.”

My computer chimed. A new chat window had popped up:

 

SpecialestAlpha: you up?

 

I turned my back on it, shifted my phone to the other ear. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. I have the post about set to go; I’ll feed him to the wolves, delete the accounts, and go back to normal midlife crisis activities.”

Su sounded relieved. “Yeah, go buy some giant ugly car, have sex with people I disapprove of or something.”

I smiled. “You say that like I don’t already—”

Another chime. I forced myself not to look at it.

“Thanks, Su. Maybe this is getting to me.”

“Look, this guy does sound overdue for consequences. Just don’t stare into the abyss so hard, you know? And be safe, huh?”

Another chime. I gritted my teeth and turned to log out.

 

SpecialestAlpha: i have a secret for you

SpecialestAlpha: do you know what a peripherel is?

 

I froze. Grimaced. Told Su, “Final night. I promise.”

The relief in her voice vanished. “Bob…”

“I promise. I swear. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, give you the all clear.”

She sighed. “If you don’t answer, I’m staging an intervention!”

We hung up, and I went back to my keyboard.

That night, I got into Eugene’s hard drive. While he prattled on about peripherals being timespace-displaced universes existing simultaneously alongside our own, I slapped together a zipped file of Alien Menace Kaminari (a Japan-only release), an emulator to play it on, a fan translation, and an installer (plus rootkit). When he took a moment to let me ooh and ah over his genius, I offered to email it to him and walk him through the process.

He was a big fan of Alien Menace, of course; it was why I’d picked it. And he’d spent weeks convincing himself that I was a devoted girl on the verge of putting out. He said yes, installed, and hey presto! I had him. And it turned out he was the kind of guy who kept all his account info in plain text on a document named Passwords, so I got into the PIN “under construction” site.

Where I found he hadn’t been lying.

Oh, the Y2K UFO apocalypse, him being the specialest Messiah, that was all bunk. But he truly was a government agent kicking interdimensional aliens off the planet (or the country, at least). There was no way he faked all that dull-as-dirt paperwork on his hard drive—Eugene was a lot of things but never boring. He worked in PIN Operations, where “Specialist,” with an I, was a real job title—though not one lowly Eugene held. He hadn’t even been shitting about the definition of peripheral! It really was some sci-fi parallel dimensions bullshit!

Meanwhile, in the chat window, Eugene was trying to get into my digital drawers, and I didn’t even care. When he wouldn’t take no for an answer, I said my mother was calling me and went to mix myself a stiff drink or three while my computer downloaded everything in sight.

That night, I didn’t sleep, shower, shave, or change clothes. I was going down a much deeper rabbit hole, armed with coffee and Kahlua.

When I surfaced from Eugene’s files, the sun was coming up and my caffeine/alcohol balance was getting out of whack. I figured I had maybe fifteen minutes before I passed out, so I went to Eugene’s preferred newsgroups and message boards and slapped up my text brick and sources as IndyGrrl03. I added the attempted cybersex chat log but didn’t bother editing; I’d lost those abilities somewhere around 5 AM.

Then I did something that the sober, well-rested me wouldn’t have. Using Passwords.txt, I accessed Eugene’s email and sent my text brick and sources to every @pin.gov address that I could find in his contacts.

Then I deleted all my IndyGrrl03 accounts and collapsed into bed.

I woke up thirteen hours later to a pounding hangover and a ringing phone. Su, of course.

“Well?” she asked when I fumbled the receiver onto my face. “Are you done with this creep?”

Reality crashed down. I lurched upright, clutched my head, looked at the external hard drives I’d filled up in my drunken info orgy. I made a suppressed screaming sound.

“That better mean, ‘why yes, Su Didi, he’s out of my system and you’ll never have to hear about him again.’”

I tried to think what to say. Finally, I settled on, “Yes.”

Someone knocked on the door. I ignored it.

“Good,” Su said. “Now lay low and forget you ever saw him—”

The knocking was getting louder. “Come on, Doshi!” I heard through the door. “Don’t make this unpleasant!”

Even Su heard that. “Is that the creep? Did you bring him home?”

“What? No! Look, I—I have to take this, I’ll call you back.”

When I answered the door, a hungover shut-in in my bathrobe, I found a skinny black guy in a navy blue PIN jumpsuit with a box under his arm, what looked like a cochlear implant, and a big smile.

“Evening, guy,” he said, wedging his foot in the door. “Got a minute?”

Of course they’d found me. I’d hacked some Orwellian corner of the federal government, by accident, and announced it in neon over email, all while using only enough security to protect myself from some dumbass like Eugene.

“Be chill man, be chill, it’s all copacetic,” the guy said in a soothing stoner voice. “I’m not the one you have to worry about. She is.”

He jerked his thumb back at the hall. A woman in a navy suit and shades leaned against the wall, relaxed as a panther in a tree. She waved at me.

“So how’s about we sit down and have us a nice, mellow conversation, eh?”

I let him in. The woman made no attempt to follow.

“Can I get you some coffee?” I asked, even though it was evening. I didn’t know what else to do, and I was too groggy and hungover to be clever.

“Sure.” Putting his box down on a stack of mine, he sat, grabbed a stack of Eugene papers, and started leafing through. “You’re older than I expected.”

I poured myself a mug of leftover coffee from the coffeemaker, chugged it down cold, put on fresh for him. “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

“Busy night?” he asked without looking up.

I grunted and refilled my mug with water, which I also chugged.

“Unemployed.” It didn’t sound like a question.

I didn’t answer him. He didn’t seem to mind, just read, looked around, and waited for the coffeemaker to start burbling. I refilled my mug again, poured him one, brought it over but stayed standing.

“Come on, guy, don’t be like that.” He gestured to the couch. I sat. He seemed to know that I was capable of conversation now, and extended his hand. “I’m Harmonius. And you’re Bob.”

I shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Pleasure’s all mine.” He took a sip of coffee, made a sound of relish. “I’m from Neurophysics. You know what we do?”

No. What I’d found was too bogged down in “Dellan bioelectromagnetism” and “synaesthetic bleed” for me to make sense of it.

“We’re good at reading people… and solving problems like Eugene.”

He handed me a portion of the Seattle Daily. I found circled: “Eugene Smedley, 28, was found wandering in an agitated state by local police. Unable to state his name or age, he was identified by his driver’s license…”

I felt the blood drain from my face. Harmonius kept smiling.

“Hippocampal cleansing—washing, we call it. Awful thing; we hate doing it. Guy like him never should’ve gotten hired in the first place. Us fizzies, we’re supposed to vet all the new guys. Only way to do it. We’re going to have to clean house, make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

He sipped his coffee. I just sat there. He didn’t seem to notice the silence.

“It’d be worse for you. Bilingual, right? What’s that you’re thinking in, Hindi?”

“Gujarati,” I said.

Harmonius whistled. “Yup, no speakers on staff. We’d have to blanket-wash, just to be safe, and you don’t want that. We don’t want that.”

My coffee mug started to tremble in my hand.

“Lucky for you, my friend, I don’t think we’ll have to,” Harmonius said. “See, you’re a smart guy, smart enough to be scared. You like your brain just the way it is, and I agree: a mind is a terrible thing to wash. You did us a favor, and,” he gestured at the conspiracy hut that my apartment had become, “if you’ll pardon my saying so, you seem to be needing some direction here. Why don’t you come work for us? Keep us honest. Plenty of room for a guy with your talents; what do you say?”

What else could I say? I chugged my coffee and said yes.

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