CHAPTER ONE: A Crescendo of Chaos

Myron Renault leaned against the office doorjamb, surveying his sector on a Friday afternoon. With less than two hours left in the work week, it seemed a managerial type of thing to do—an easy way to maintain high visibility without actually having to do any work. Two more hours and all his web techs would go climb into their cave-dwellings in the lower tiers of the SekTek arcology, and he would be drinking anejo from a bar of two inch thick varnished maple. Mira Kurtz would be at his elbow trying to figure out how to get him to fall in love with her.

A wry grin crossed his face.

His eyes came to rest on Warren Wright. Everyone else in the tech division was killing time now. Nothing new was coming in on a Friday. There were no big project deadlines looming. Kel Glauson was eyeing the brunette web tech instructor who had just wrapped up her contracted five-day course. Carlo Morales was pretending to browse processor docs or something, but Myron knew that the man’s page count would be in single digits for the afternoon. And why not? These guys worked hard. No sense busting their asses on a dead Friday over nothing.

Myron didn’t know much about web technology, but he had come to understand the techs themselves. Treating them like sales guys was a big mistake. Techs would stay up week nights and spend their own Saturdays figuring out your problems for you off the clock if you just had the sense not to treat them like 8-5 monkeys. Let them live out their misunderstood genius fantasies at the office and their productivity shot through the roof. Try throwing a yolk over their shoulders and everything went south. Suddenly they’d be finding something else to spend their free time on.

So everyone had called it a week, everyone besides Warren Wright. Warren was scribing. You could tell when one of them was really pounding out the data. There was just something about the rigid posture and the way the head moved—methodical, systematic—with eyes rolled up and half-closed if you looked close enough.

Warren was always into something. He never stopped. He was the best of Myron’s techs. Not much of a personality, but Myron made a point to keep on friendly terms because it made things easier. It took an effort. Warren had that thing some W.T. guys get when they know web technology isn’t your thing. That strange aura of intellectual brutality that they seemed to project on purpose, even though it thwarted them promotion cycle after promotion cycle.

Warren was fascinating to Myron even though he didn’t like him. What drove him? He worked harder than anyone in the place. His cobalt-gray eyes were fraught with intensity and his fine blond hair was always pushed out of shape. But being smarter than the rest wasn’t any good to him. It never seemed to bring him satisfaction. There was always that feverish obsession to his look. Where did it come from? He was just one of those guys, and sometimes Myron even felt sorry for him. Feeling expansive, he headed on over to see what Warren was up to.

  *  *  *   

Warren was busy stringing code for a program chassis. He saw Myron coming. What he was doing wasn’t particularly difficult, but at the same time one mistake could lock it all up, and Myron’s well-intended jabber was the last thing he needed at the moment. Warren gave that “I’m too busy for your BS” look that he knew Myron hated, but the man just smiled and kept on coming.

Great. Myron can smell it. Getting into people’s shit is in his blood.

Warren tied off the command string, flipped to a diagnostics program he was designing, and started scribing, hoping that Myron wouldn’t notice.

“Hey, Warren.” Myron’s hands were in his pockets. It was the unmistakable sign of the impending stream of value-free office chit-chat that was bound to follow.

“Leave me alone, Myron. I’m working.”

“Drop the formality. Just call me Myron. Like we’re equals or something.”

“I’m working, Myron. Working as in work.”   

“Oh, come off it. It’s Friday afternoon. Why be a fanatic?” A burst of high-octane cologne permeated Warren’s workspace as Myron flashed that twentieth-century-fascist smile of his.

Warren tied up the command and closed the file. He shot a glance Myron’s way and said, “Do you even realize that you’re an office manager?”

“I hear you’re getting chipped! The CID. Hard to believe!”

“Yeah. I’m joining the hive.” Warren began to fidget with his tie.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” said Myron. “It doesn’t hurt. Think of it as a free week off work. Getting chipped is pretty great if you ask me. Specially for a dub-tee guy.”

“Yeah? How would you know?”

Myron ignored the barb and crooned, “Makes life a lot easier…”

“I’m glad they’re forcing me to do it then.”

“Nobody forces you.” Myron placed a hand on Warren’s shoulder. “It’s just encouraged.”

“Yeah, they’re gonna drop my insurance. Very encouraging.”

“Haha! That’s not SekTek’s fault. We don’t run the insurance company.”

Warren smirked bitterly. “So patriotic, Myron. And don’t you think it’s exceptional of SekTek to give me a week off to get chipped? Doesn’t even cost me anything. Cool.”

“It’s, you know, incentive.”

“I’ll say. All week off for a fifteen minute implant.”

“It's to do with liability.”

“Automatic insurance coverage and my rates drop to less than half. And I can never get lost for the rest of my life. Incentive, all right.”

Myron’s mood was turning. He hated to let Warren or anyone see him drop his positive demeanor, but he was already wishing that he had just let Warren work. He couldn’t steer the conversation, and the tone was definitely deteriorating. People were starting to watch. “Look, Warren—"

“No other medical procedure I can think of SekTek will actually pay for. That’s why I need medical insurance. They pay for this one, though. Wonder why.”   

Myron proceeded warily, softening his voice a notch or two. “Look, it just makes you more reliable.” He saw the expression on Warren’s face begin to change and took a step or two sideways as if he had somewhere else to be.   

“More reliable? An ID chip does that?” Warren’s eyes flashed. He licked his lips. “I thought it just held all my personal information and located me on a satellite grid.” He was pointing emphatically off in the direction of the fire escape for some reason.

“Look, Warren—it’s to stop criminals, okay? Don’t take it so hard."

“Take it so hard? They canned Alvarez right after he attended that protest on Grand. He wasn’t even arrested. Just—they knew he was there.”

“Come on Warren, man, that’s not what—” Myron was pumping his hand out in front of him, suing for peace. “Everyone has a right to protest. Right to assemble arms or whatever.”

“Yeah?” Warren pulled his own hair. “They put it in his file. Now it’s in the blockchain. Carved in stone, Myron. How’s he get another job? How?”

Warren’s voice was peaking, and Myron was turning his head, checking to see who was watching. He lowered his voice. “Look, Warren. Corporations are people too. It’s a free country. You know? Live and let live—that’s the way I see it."

Warren sat there, silent, his lips tightening. His face was going white as the blood rushed to his core. He closed his eyes and scribed “Zerofile.ST.rfx” and executed it, turning it loose on the registry. “It is now,” he whispered, and with his eyes still shut, he listened.

There was a ripple of murmurs from one end of the office to the other. He heard an aggravated female voice not far away lilt, “What the hell?” and across the room somebody was calling his name. The background noise in the room began to change. The pitch of conversation was intensifying as talk shifted from things like “I’m going fishing with my son tomorrow” to “How can there be an access validation error on a proprietary system kernel?” The crescendo of chaos went out in waves, the volume building, reaching new orders of magnitude, elevating from plateau to plateau as confusion and outrage spread.   

Demands for attention and response began to hit Myron from every side. Suddenly, the first words out of every person within conversation distance were “Hey Myron, take a look at this” or “Hey Myron, what’s going on?” or something like it. He was going from workstation to workstation and each web tech was showing him a projection of locked access panels and looking at him as if it were his fault or as if there was something he could do about it.

All Myron really knew how to do was maintain calm so that the techs wouldn’t overreact. After all was said and done, the webbies were the ones who had to identify and fix the problems. Myron was only there a) to maintain a positive work environment, b) to report project status, and c) to take credit. It usually worked out pretty well, but every once in a while that last one could really bite you in the dick.

Myron could see his weekend dissolving into next week and Mira Kurtz disappearing into bed with that shyster, Colfax (again). Phong’s name and icon began to flash red in the upper corner of his right retinal display. She’d be wanting answers that he didn’t have. He could see with one glance that Tony had his boys pulling out hard copy manuals of emergency procedures which meant two things. None of them had a clue what was going on, and the system was down. He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose, breathing in once for balance before activating Phong’s icon.

“Hello, Phong.”

“Don’t Phong me. What’s going on?”

“We don’t know.”

“You’re dub-tee, Myron. Double-u tee. Short for web technology.”

Myron winced and said, “I know.”

“Oh yeah? I found something you DO know? Get this system up in under five or I can’t protect you.”

The line went to tone, followed by a cute little chirp. Then silence. It had happened just that fast – a lazy Friday afternoon of counting down to roasted eggplant and tiramisu had suddenly become a cthulhu-scale catastrophe that was about to confetti his career.

Myron directed his steps down the aisle towards Warren. It was sheer corporate instinct. Warren was the one person he knew that would be trying something other than what everyone else was trying. It was all a part of that “I’m not one of you guys” stink he had going on. He passed Tuscini, the tech lead, who was staring helplessly into space, gawking at the lack of data on his retinal feed—empty text panels that had never been empty before.

“Only in a crisis do you figure out who you really need to get rid of.” Myron could recall his former boss saying that, and at the time it had struck him as a fine-sounding dictum, something you tell yourself you’re going to remember to say at the right time for a good laugh. But seeing Tuscini posed there in dramatic disbelief really pissed him off. Warren might be doing just about anything right now, but the one thing he would not be doing was staring into space dumbfounded.

If Warren ends up fixing this, I'll go to bat for him with Phong. I don't care if he does remind her of an “off-duty rapist.”

Phong's icon was flashing at the top of Myron's retina again as he reached Warren’s station and turned the corner. “Tell me wha—.”

Myron was staring at an empty chair, and Warren was nowhere to be seen, but a message on Warren's screen stared back in Calibri bold 24-point:

TO BE CONTINUED...