Inside Things
by Bill Kirton
Genre: Horror/Supernatural
Swearwords: None.
Description: An IT specialist sits at his keyboard creating the algorithms he loves so much. Soon, however, the machines around him begin to show that life can't be reduced to sterile equations.
____________________________________________________________________
There was just room for the banana and the two apples on the shelf between terminals seven and eight. Bidmead wedged them in very carefully. Food was banned from the central computer room but Denbeigh had insisted that the loop on the data management system be installed and checked before the overseas meeting. That gave Bidmead just under two hours and he knew that if he missed lunch, the meeting would be punctuated by his stomach making noises like a 747. He didn’t want that. In the interests of efficiency, all intimations of mortality had to be suppressed.
The fruit was a splash of colour amongst the grey terminals. The apple on the left shone with a dusty red, looking as soft as a peach. Not to Bidmead, though. For him, it glowed because it was clean, sterile, fit to eat; an integral part of the 240 calories he judged necessary to complete an afternoon’s work without getting tired.
He swivelled the monitor of terminal seven to face him and sat down. It took only thirty-seven seconds to access the management system codes. With the software manual open beside him, he started tapping in the hieroglyphs that he loved so much, launching himself into some speculative routines and algorithms to by-pass the humdrum and cut newer, straighter paths to the functions he was after.
He quickly became suspended in the cocoon of concentration that the routines and sub-routines always spun around him. Since his early days with a chugging old ZX, contact with a keyboard had been a passion. Sports, television programmes, even sex had been trivial pursuits that were pale reflections of the real experiences he had manipulating memory addresses, stacking software packages and interfacing with their menus and commands. His fingers flew, caressing the keys, persuading the symbols out of their cold, plastic touch. His thoughts flowed down through his hands and up onto the pale screen, twisting into delicate patterns, building up shapes and formulae that he knew would eventually combine in a powerful manipulative structure to send currencies ricocheting from this small room to all the branches of the Allied and Northern bank in Britain, Europe and the USA. You could keep all the smiling at customers, all the excitements of market movements; this was what made the adrenaline flow. This was what made the stress acceptable.
It was also why he was now in sole control of programming. Jarfield had had his chance, but he’d wandered off into dreams. Investment analyses, relative currency arrays, differential accountancy procedures, these were the programs which were central to Allied and Northern’s move towards an international listing. Jarfield was competent. He’d done what was necessary to earn his salary, but he’d also wasted disc space and memory on creating the (to Bidmead at least) dreadful ‘user-friendly’ packages which he’d tried to sell to the board as a way of creating a warmer image, the image of a bank which countered the tooth and claw formats of its competitors with heart, soul and humanity. In the end he’d been a sad figure. There’d been problems at home or something. Something about his wife and a heating engineer from the biscuit factory. He’d put in a lot of time at the bank, trying to refine his programs, trying to finalise the package that would revolutionise Allied and Northern and leapfrog it over the competition. He crashed on the by-pass at two in the morning on his way home from work. No-one was surprised. Jarfield and machinery didn’t belong together, simple as that. It took the fire brigade over two hours to cut him free, and even then they didn’t get all of him out. He was three days dying, conscious all the time, asking for Julia. Nobody knew who she was; his wife’s name was Catherine.
It had left Bidmead in sole charge and he’d made sure no replacement was needed. This was his room.
He typed: SET RECPRO C: :NO_PARAMETER and hit the return key.
The computer said: ‘No’.
Or, rather, the word appeared on the next line beside the flashing cursor.
Bidmead looked at it, hit the backspace key twice and saw the cursor drop down to the next line and type: ‘I’m really sorry. But I said no and I meant it.’
Bidmead swore. No virus had ever got past his screening procedures. When the one called Vasco da Gama cut great swathes of data from finance corporations world-wide, Allied and Northern was one of the few institutions it missed. He began typing the instructions to change directories and load his personal debugging program. Immediately, impatience shifted to fear as pixels started mutating away from the words and letters to form a graphic. It was a high resolution screen and the image that appeared on it was remarkably realistic. It was a woman’s face – not the face of an avatar but a real woman, the hair long and dark, the eyes wide, with lids lowered half over them, the mouth full but set now in a tightish line of disapproval or disappointment.
Bidmead swore again. As viruses went, this was very sophisticated. Perhaps it was no surprise that it had got past his filters. He decided to switch keyboards and call up his scanning program in another area before transferring it to deal with the problem. He swivelled his chair away and reached for the laptop he always kept by the modem. He pulled it out, flicked up the lid and immediately sat upright as, on the dead screen, the woman’s face appeared once more. He hadn’t even switched it on. How could she be there?
He felt the hairs on his scalp and neck lift as, this time, an actual voice said: ‘I’m not a virus.’ The mouth on the screen formed the words, but the sound came from the speaker Jarfield had installed in the mainframe as part of his friendly package.
Bidmead shook his head, trying to clear the delusion away. This sort of thing didn’t happen. Not to him, anyway. He closed the lid of the laptop.
‘Makes no difference,’ said the voice.
He looked at the face on the monitor of terminal seven. She was looking straight at him.
‘What’s going on?’ he said. Not to her, of course, but to himself.
‘I’m just trying to survive in here. That’s all,’ said the face.
Bidmead was about to answer, then he checked himself. First, you didn’t have dialogues with machines. And second, if you did, you typed instructions onto the screen; you didn’t just chat.
‘Don’t like it, Bidmead, do you?’ the voice went on. ‘Ripples on the surface like this. Ought to be smooth, didn’t it? Stainless steel, flawless. People aren’t like that, though.’
Bidmead reached for terminal eight’s monitor. As he turned it towards him, the face was already on it.
‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ said the voice and, instantaneously, the image appeared on all the monitors arrayed around the room.
Bidmead felt sweat forming under his arms and in the hollow of his neck.
‘OK,’ he said, his voice tight and strained, ‘good joke. Well organised. Smart bit of programming. Come on then. Who is it?’
The woman’s head shook sadly from side to side.
‘Tiny little mind, Bidmead,’ she said. ‘Closed and groping along your little binary pathways. I’m not a virus. I’m not a program. I’m the ghost in your machine, a little living spark in all this sterility. Roger understood.’
‘Who the hell’s Roger?’ asked Bidmead, in spite of himself.
‘Of course. You didn’t even know his name. Roger Jarfield.’
Bidmead snorted. The mention of Jarfield helped to orientate him. This was typical of his messy programming. It was clever, sure, but irrelevant. If it was Jarfield, he could deal with it.
‘Left one of his residuals, has he?’ he said. ‘Well, well.’
‘And you’re talking to it,’ said the woman.
‘No, I’m going along with whatever game it is that’s been set up here. And I’ll find out who’s responsible and I’ll crucify him.’
‘Crucify the air, then.’
Bidmead’s anger was rising. He reached for the terminal’s switch. The voice stopped him.
‘No. It’s not that easy any more, Bidmead. Life’s not logical. It’s not a set of formulae. It moves, hurts, destroys even, but it doesn’t have switches.’
As she spoke, the screens, independently of one another, began to shift through startling palettes of colour. The face was diffused with peach, pink, and then on through the spectrum, tones bleeding from the brightness of the primaries to the wash of pastels. Inside his sticky shirt, Bidmead felt the sweat freezing.
The voice dropped back into a gentler register again.
‘Roger knew about things, tried to set a pulse beating in all this hardware.’
Bidmead tried to reassert himself.
‘You mean he started to learn to program and ...’
She interrupted him, the anger flashing briefly back.
‘No. Listen. I was with Roger from very early on. Started in an Apple Mac. Yes, simple as that. Julia, he called me. Whatever he did, whatever sort of programs he was working on, he always made me part of them. He wanted heart, warmth...’
The colours were flashing faster. Bidmead was held by them, his pupils dilated, his mind racing.
‘I don’t believe this,’ he said, his voice pitched as high as the woman’s and barely distinguishable from it.
‘Believe it, Bidmead. It’s a truth outside your machines, a dimension beyond your mechanics and your electronics. You can’t always persuade life into your packages.’
‘Oh no?’ he shouted. ‘Oh really? No? You don’t think so?’
Battered on all sides by the kaleidoscopic screens, he stood up, rubbed at his eyes and stumbled the three steps to the door. On a panel beside it were the installation’s electrical fuses and switches. He put his right hand on the master switch.
‘Try this for control,’ he said, and banged the switch down.
Immediately, there was pitch blackness. The lights had gone, along with the relentless screens, the woman’s face and all the programs he’d been working on. He leaned against the wall and breathed deeply, trying to squeeze down on the pressure in his mind. His hand slipped slowly from the switch and then froze hard against the panel in the blackness as a single giant image flickered across the wall opposite him and began to slide forward. The voice came at him once again.
‘You look at things but you never see them. Surfaces, that’s all you can handle. There are more things in heaven and earth, remember... Roger knew.’
Bidmead felt the tears of frustration hot in his eyes. He was shaking now. In the darkness, he stood petrified as the voice continued.
And in the apple on the left, a worm turned slowly.
Swearwords: None.
Description: An IT specialist sits at his keyboard creating the algorithms he loves so much. Soon, however, the machines around him begin to show that life can't be reduced to sterile equations.
____________________________________________________________________
There was just room for the banana and the two apples on the shelf between terminals seven and eight. Bidmead wedged them in very carefully. Food was banned from the central computer room but Denbeigh had insisted that the loop on the data management system be installed and checked before the overseas meeting. That gave Bidmead just under two hours and he knew that if he missed lunch, the meeting would be punctuated by his stomach making noises like a 747. He didn’t want that. In the interests of efficiency, all intimations of mortality had to be suppressed.
The fruit was a splash of colour amongst the grey terminals. The apple on the left shone with a dusty red, looking as soft as a peach. Not to Bidmead, though. For him, it glowed because it was clean, sterile, fit to eat; an integral part of the 240 calories he judged necessary to complete an afternoon’s work without getting tired.
He swivelled the monitor of terminal seven to face him and sat down. It took only thirty-seven seconds to access the management system codes. With the software manual open beside him, he started tapping in the hieroglyphs that he loved so much, launching himself into some speculative routines and algorithms to by-pass the humdrum and cut newer, straighter paths to the functions he was after.
He quickly became suspended in the cocoon of concentration that the routines and sub-routines always spun around him. Since his early days with a chugging old ZX, contact with a keyboard had been a passion. Sports, television programmes, even sex had been trivial pursuits that were pale reflections of the real experiences he had manipulating memory addresses, stacking software packages and interfacing with their menus and commands. His fingers flew, caressing the keys, persuading the symbols out of their cold, plastic touch. His thoughts flowed down through his hands and up onto the pale screen, twisting into delicate patterns, building up shapes and formulae that he knew would eventually combine in a powerful manipulative structure to send currencies ricocheting from this small room to all the branches of the Allied and Northern bank in Britain, Europe and the USA. You could keep all the smiling at customers, all the excitements of market movements; this was what made the adrenaline flow. This was what made the stress acceptable.
It was also why he was now in sole control of programming. Jarfield had had his chance, but he’d wandered off into dreams. Investment analyses, relative currency arrays, differential accountancy procedures, these were the programs which were central to Allied and Northern’s move towards an international listing. Jarfield was competent. He’d done what was necessary to earn his salary, but he’d also wasted disc space and memory on creating the (to Bidmead at least) dreadful ‘user-friendly’ packages which he’d tried to sell to the board as a way of creating a warmer image, the image of a bank which countered the tooth and claw formats of its competitors with heart, soul and humanity. In the end he’d been a sad figure. There’d been problems at home or something. Something about his wife and a heating engineer from the biscuit factory. He’d put in a lot of time at the bank, trying to refine his programs, trying to finalise the package that would revolutionise Allied and Northern and leapfrog it over the competition. He crashed on the by-pass at two in the morning on his way home from work. No-one was surprised. Jarfield and machinery didn’t belong together, simple as that. It took the fire brigade over two hours to cut him free, and even then they didn’t get all of him out. He was three days dying, conscious all the time, asking for Julia. Nobody knew who she was; his wife’s name was Catherine.
It had left Bidmead in sole charge and he’d made sure no replacement was needed. This was his room.
He typed: SET RECPRO C: :NO_PARAMETER and hit the return key.
The computer said: ‘No’.
Or, rather, the word appeared on the next line beside the flashing cursor.
Bidmead looked at it, hit the backspace key twice and saw the cursor drop down to the next line and type: ‘I’m really sorry. But I said no and I meant it.’
Bidmead swore. No virus had ever got past his screening procedures. When the one called Vasco da Gama cut great swathes of data from finance corporations world-wide, Allied and Northern was one of the few institutions it missed. He began typing the instructions to change directories and load his personal debugging program. Immediately, impatience shifted to fear as pixels started mutating away from the words and letters to form a graphic. It was a high resolution screen and the image that appeared on it was remarkably realistic. It was a woman’s face – not the face of an avatar but a real woman, the hair long and dark, the eyes wide, with lids lowered half over them, the mouth full but set now in a tightish line of disapproval or disappointment.
Bidmead swore again. As viruses went, this was very sophisticated. Perhaps it was no surprise that it had got past his filters. He decided to switch keyboards and call up his scanning program in another area before transferring it to deal with the problem. He swivelled his chair away and reached for the laptop he always kept by the modem. He pulled it out, flicked up the lid and immediately sat upright as, on the dead screen, the woman’s face appeared once more. He hadn’t even switched it on. How could she be there?
He felt the hairs on his scalp and neck lift as, this time, an actual voice said: ‘I’m not a virus.’ The mouth on the screen formed the words, but the sound came from the speaker Jarfield had installed in the mainframe as part of his friendly package.
Bidmead shook his head, trying to clear the delusion away. This sort of thing didn’t happen. Not to him, anyway. He closed the lid of the laptop.
‘Makes no difference,’ said the voice.
He looked at the face on the monitor of terminal seven. She was looking straight at him.
‘What’s going on?’ he said. Not to her, of course, but to himself.
‘I’m just trying to survive in here. That’s all,’ said the face.
Bidmead was about to answer, then he checked himself. First, you didn’t have dialogues with machines. And second, if you did, you typed instructions onto the screen; you didn’t just chat.
‘Don’t like it, Bidmead, do you?’ the voice went on. ‘Ripples on the surface like this. Ought to be smooth, didn’t it? Stainless steel, flawless. People aren’t like that, though.’
Bidmead reached for terminal eight’s monitor. As he turned it towards him, the face was already on it.
‘I’ll save you the trouble,’ said the voice and, instantaneously, the image appeared on all the monitors arrayed around the room.
Bidmead felt sweat forming under his arms and in the hollow of his neck.
‘OK,’ he said, his voice tight and strained, ‘good joke. Well organised. Smart bit of programming. Come on then. Who is it?’
The woman’s head shook sadly from side to side.
‘Tiny little mind, Bidmead,’ she said. ‘Closed and groping along your little binary pathways. I’m not a virus. I’m not a program. I’m the ghost in your machine, a little living spark in all this sterility. Roger understood.’
‘Who the hell’s Roger?’ asked Bidmead, in spite of himself.
‘Of course. You didn’t even know his name. Roger Jarfield.’
Bidmead snorted. The mention of Jarfield helped to orientate him. This was typical of his messy programming. It was clever, sure, but irrelevant. If it was Jarfield, he could deal with it.
‘Left one of his residuals, has he?’ he said. ‘Well, well.’
‘And you’re talking to it,’ said the woman.
‘No, I’m going along with whatever game it is that’s been set up here. And I’ll find out who’s responsible and I’ll crucify him.’
‘Crucify the air, then.’
Bidmead’s anger was rising. He reached for the terminal’s switch. The voice stopped him.
‘No. It’s not that easy any more, Bidmead. Life’s not logical. It’s not a set of formulae. It moves, hurts, destroys even, but it doesn’t have switches.’
As she spoke, the screens, independently of one another, began to shift through startling palettes of colour. The face was diffused with peach, pink, and then on through the spectrum, tones bleeding from the brightness of the primaries to the wash of pastels. Inside his sticky shirt, Bidmead felt the sweat freezing.
The voice dropped back into a gentler register again.
‘Roger knew about things, tried to set a pulse beating in all this hardware.’
Bidmead tried to reassert himself.
‘You mean he started to learn to program and ...’
She interrupted him, the anger flashing briefly back.
‘No. Listen. I was with Roger from very early on. Started in an Apple Mac. Yes, simple as that. Julia, he called me. Whatever he did, whatever sort of programs he was working on, he always made me part of them. He wanted heart, warmth...’
The colours were flashing faster. Bidmead was held by them, his pupils dilated, his mind racing.
‘I don’t believe this,’ he said, his voice pitched as high as the woman’s and barely distinguishable from it.
‘Believe it, Bidmead. It’s a truth outside your machines, a dimension beyond your mechanics and your electronics. You can’t always persuade life into your packages.’
‘Oh no?’ he shouted. ‘Oh really? No? You don’t think so?’
Battered on all sides by the kaleidoscopic screens, he stood up, rubbed at his eyes and stumbled the three steps to the door. On a panel beside it were the installation’s electrical fuses and switches. He put his right hand on the master switch.
‘Try this for control,’ he said, and banged the switch down.
Immediately, there was pitch blackness. The lights had gone, along with the relentless screens, the woman’s face and all the programs he’d been working on. He leaned against the wall and breathed deeply, trying to squeeze down on the pressure in his mind. His hand slipped slowly from the switch and then froze hard against the panel in the blackness as a single giant image flickered across the wall opposite him and began to slide forward. The voice came at him once again.
‘You look at things but you never see them. Surfaces, that’s all you can handle. There are more things in heaven and earth, remember... Roger knew.’
Bidmead felt the tears of frustration hot in his eyes. He was shaking now. In the darkness, he stood petrified as the voice continued.
And in the apple on the left, a worm turned slowly.
About the Author
Bill Kirton was born in Plymouth, but has lived in Aberdeen for most of his life. He’s been a university lecturer, presented TV programmes, written and performed songs and sketches at the Edinburgh Festival, and had radio plays broadcast by the BBC. He’s written four books in Pearson’s ‘Brilliant’ series and his crime novels, Material Evidence, Rough Justice, The Darkness, Shadow Selves and the historical novel The Figurehead, set in Aberdeen in 1840, have been published in the UK and USA. His other novel, The Sparrow Conundrum, is a crime spoof set in Aberdeen and Inverness. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and Love Hurts was chosen for the Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 2010.
His website and blog can be found at http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk.
His website and blog can be found at http://www.bill-kirton.co.uk.