I. The Department

The plaque above the outer door read "Digital Information: A truly sharable commodity."

Yeah, sure.

Avery eased into the familiar folds of his swivel chair and hit power. Although he was fairly certain that his machine had no major moving parts, he still heard several clicks and the buzz of start-up. What was making that noise in there? The reader arm on the hard drive didn't touch the mirror surface of the disk, and the disk spun pretty quietly, too.

It was the first mystery of a ritualized day that would bring him to several more points of awe.

After a moment, the screen gave him his dark red desktop, laden with icons that represented thousands in software. Riches hidden deep within the encoded vaults of the machine.

He did his customary morning mouse calisthenics, making flexible dashed boxes sweep around the screen, turning whole flocks of icons blue and back like a blocky hurricane in a box. After 30 seconds or so of absent-minded clicking, he popped open his email, the first of many such checks over the course of the day.

In the absence of work motivation, Avery's internal task prioritizer defaulted to a quick email check. This was true, at least, early in the day, before the news sites had anything to say that he hadn't already gotten from the paper during his commute, TV during breakfast, or the clock radio first thing that morning.

There were two from his mother (one message sent twice, actually; she had this thing about being certain that he could not quite understand), one from his fiancé's father (a link to a slightly pornographic web site featuring the President's current concubine and a certain funny fast-food mascot that Avery thought of fondly), one from a friend on the East Coast and, of course, the eternal and invincible morning memo from the director of Avery's department.

Every morning, without fail, the Director of the Department composed a quietly thoughtful, still-waters-run-deep-ish personal letter to the rest of her associates. (They were all associates in the department. After three years of service, Avery was almost certain that he had never heard anyone referred to as anyone else's superior. The word "boss" just didn't get aound much anymore. Even though the AM email was the boss, herself. Who else would be busy explaining to you why your benefits package was shrinking again? The net effect of this uncertainty was a department in which few people could say who they worked for. This made loyalties ambiguous and alliances subject to ongoing revision. Like first-century Rome with fluorescent lighting.) The morning emails were meant to reassure the troops that they were still all in this together.

To maintain the nervous friendliness in the halls of the department and to keep people on their toes, the Director of the Department gave forth her daily wisdom, charm, erudition, empathy, wit and judgement through intradepartmental messaging software that Avery was sometimes asked to help maintain or install on new systems, reconfigure for new users or artfully, sympathetically pretend to reconfigure for panicked, ignorant users who might also be Avery's superiors.

Included always with the Director of the Department's daily message, at the bottom, was the "Associate of the Day." The person the Director of the Department felt had given the most of himself or herself the previous day. The times that it had been Avery's honor he'd felt cheated. What good was yesterday today? He knew it was meant only as a token appreciation, but he resented it anyway, in the same way that he resented his cracked molar crown and four-year-old contact lens prescription.

Today's message was a delicately-worded, five-paragraph explanation of a new company policy, Re: vacation time. Put simply, seniority would always win out in cases of conflicting requests for vacation time. Of course, the words "seniority" and "conflicting" appeared nowhere in the memo, but that didn't mean anything to Avery, who was still, at age three in the department, a decidedly senior man, or "less-recent associate."

It was the PR Department that had spawned the Director of the Department. Avery would bet his restricted expense account on it. Well, no. Maybe not that.

He took a bite of bagel and looked around his office. Cheap gray wall-to-wall carpeting, modular wood-veneer furniture, eggshell walls, clacking vertical blinds coated with the requisite grimy dust, ceiling exhaust fan humming every hour for five minutes. He felt a wave of claustrophobia but beat it back easily with a swallow of bitter vending machine coffee. A bush-league emotional response. Biting back on it was part of the territory.

He looked at his desk, with its elevated shelf for the computer monitor, keyboard and mouse at ergonomic level below, their cords snaking off into the dark recesses of the never seen world behind his desk.

He felt sudden dread: What if those cords snaked off into the hidden areas and simply hung into the air, unconnected to any sort of four-pin, SCSI, serial-port thing? What if the machine, with all of its intellect, was not so inert after all? What if it really operated without his input, under it's own mystical binary control? It had never before occurred to Avery that working with a computer was akin to mindreading. What if it read his mind, too?

The office again. The memos, the meaningless exchanges in hallways. Everything: the office, the rhetoric, the feigned sympathy over each other's carpal tunnel ailments. All a sterile shell. A mad war against the appearance of intrusiveness, intolerance, insult and individuality. It was a war that could not be won, but must not be lost. In economic terms, a perfect war. A war that could be propagated forever, and thus provide for the career needs of a few more casual souls.

It wasn't really a lie. That was where Kafka, Orwell, and the rest had gotten off track. It was really more of a warning to all those involved. A non-threatening way of keeping the troops trooping. An imaginary line in the soon-to-be silicon. An artificial flavoring that might not have made departmental mass-emails sweet, but made the few feel better while the many sat and sucked on them. Avery didn't see this superior-inferior diplomacy game as as an attempt by the suits to subjugate the hourlies, the troops. He saw it as a subconcious way for the suits to accept their positions of unwarranted, unearned power without going mad with guilt and giving up the war.

If anyone was actually guilty, he thought, it was only those at the very top -- maybe even up beyond the scope of the department. Whoever -- or whatever -- was up there, he figured they probably didn't even know that their decisions meant anything to those as far-removed from them as he. Did that make them innocent, too? In the act of merely thinking about his place in what he truly felt to be a dehumanizing scheme, Avery realized that he had auto-absolved everyone invlolved of any wrongdoing and confused himself beyond pondering anymore. Avery wondered if this psychological failsafe was evidence of the system's having been designed or of having naturally evolved.

Either way, he found that he could still put up with it.

The Director of the Department popped her head in to tell him that the bagels in the break room were not for staff consumption, but for clients only, and that he was doing a great job.

He suppressed a chuckle as she left him, licking jelly from his upper lip.

Snapping out of his reverie, he focused again on the tools at hand. No fantasy, no matter how disturbing, was going to save him from this day, or what he had to do.

Avery realized that he had broken a cold sweat. He popped a Zoloft and went to work.

II. Fugue

A few hours later, Avery was leaning back again, having a hard time concentrating and feeling the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. He began musing about the shadowy space behind his desk again, where he imagined knotted, ivy-like coils and twists of cable and cord flourishing. There could be miles of wires back there gathering dust and conducting power and data forever. Maybe even becoming slowly imbued with a sort of animal consciousness.

What would a machine mind's learning process be like? With such computational speed, it could go through the equivalent of countless generations of human learning in no time, evolving a perfectly efficient awareness. An infinite degree of survival instinct.

Avery had read about artificial intelligence in school and still occasionally picked up on a book or article about the state of the art work in neural systems that some thought had already been proven to learn on their own. It was all a matter of input. Garbage in. He wondered if his incessant mental outcries for basic, lively humanity in the hive that was his workplace could have any affect on the machine. Did the volumes of disgruntled emails he typed off to friends and family ever sink into the guts of the machine?

"OK," he told himself, "that's about enough of this line of inquiry."

Still, he had to ask what all of that intelligence did with itself at night and during idle moments. The image of the disconnected mouse cord and the illusion of control came back to him, but he swallowed it and spun 'round and 'round in his chair as fast as he could.

The dizziness added to his disorientation. Now he was leaning back with his mouth hanging open.

Outside his (proudly) wall-sized window, with the horrid vertical blinds, it was a perfect fall day. Blue skies. Crisp air. Wonderful kids on bikes and skates, hustling to classes and home for the weekend. He loved them all, even if they mostly all dressed the same. For girls, the latest thing was the sorority track coach look. The guys all seemed to be carefully toeing the line between grizzled Gilligan and too-filthy-to-date.

Everyone was heading someplace, the newness of the weekend fresh in the air. It was still Friday morning, but he knew that the weekend had really begun the previous evening. Midterms were still at least two weeks away for most kids. The bars were full four nights a week.

On Mondays, Avery never noticed any of the lethargy people commonly talked about. He saw the greatest lack of motivation in himself and others on Friday afternoon. Nobody worked on Friday afternoon.

The first hiss went off like a whip-crack. Either there was a very large snake in the room with Avery or his computer had just been deep-fried by a power surge. But there was no ozone smell of toasted microchips.

His adrenaline levels perking up, Avery scanned the familiar room. He liked a clean workspace. Nothing seemed amiss.

Knowing any fear was irrational, and thus levering it back for a moment, he crouched to look under his desk, past the front of the machine and into the shadowy nether region beneath the keyboard.

Another hiss tore the air, louder this time and right above him. The surprise made him whallop his head on the underside of the desk. His eyes watered.

He got up and looked at the desktop again. The mouse, which a moment before had rested on the silicon-gel-filled mousepad was now three or four inches closer to the edge of the desk. The pad was empty.

Maybe some sort of hissing beetle had gotten trapped under his mouse. (But there wasn't enough room under there.) Something was panicking in there, trying to get out. He turned and walked to the other end of the small office, where his writing desk sat. From the top drawer he took a can of roach spray left over from the previous winter, when scurrying things had invaded the cold halls of the department.

He heard a third hiss -- loud and clear and definitely coming from inside the mouse. It was another whip crack, but this time with another sound beneath it: the scuttling of spidery-slick limbs.

Armed with the poison, Avery sidled up to his customary place.

The mouse was now perched on the edge of the desk, it's cord trailing back and away. His monitor was running an aquarium screensaver featuring greenish clams and wicked darting angelfish. Cartoon bubbles, complete with gurgling sound effects, gassed up from the murky ocean floor where reef creatures crept about, their eyestalks peering at him through the glass.

He put his hand on the mouse. He felt revulsion build at the squirming animal he suddenly realized he believed would soon crawl up his shirtsleeve, sink fangs into his armpit, and nest, laying thousands of eggs that no soap could kill.

Nothing. He picked up the mouse, lifting it high and giving it a good downward shake while aiming the aerosol can at the field of battle below. No roach fell out.

He took a step back and felt his cold sweat pumps turn on again. From within the shell of the oyster-shaped device in his hand came (Was he unconsciously clicking the buttons?) a light but discernible rattle. More like a tiny jolt. Like an egg about to hatch, or the movement of the larva known to cartoon fans as "the Mexican jumping bean." Hideous. Horrible.

There was a pest -- a virulent, plated, spiny thing inside the mouse for sure.

He flipped it over in his hand, noticing that the cord had come unplugged and was now hanging down to the floor. He saw nothing at first, but was already aiming and squeezing the button on the spray can.

The can let out a weak, empty hiss. Nothing came out of the can, but from out of the hole in the mouse's underside shot a snapping, octopus-like beak. It bit the air, clapping shut and let out another warlike "hssssst!"

Clearly, there was something in residence in the mouse. Avery tried to fire again, but nothing came out.

He shook the can hard, then the mouse -- no change in either. Nothing. It was then that he saw the hanging mouse cord twisting and jittering. The cord's length no longer terminated in a familiar PS/2 plug. Instead it tapered off into an oblong, tentacular point.

Alive.

Before Avery could think, the cord snapped out horizontally and whipped around his throat, coiling with an iron strength that it's width could not possess.

The coil tightened. The beak made a convulsion of snaps from the underside, working closer to his face, eyes and ears. It took all of his strength to slow it down, to stop it from coiling any closer, but his efforts worked against him. He realized that he would strangle himself with the creature's tail if he didn't stop panicking and do something smart.

The beak was shell-pink with a deep red rim. It hissed and snapped in it's socket like a starving thing. He felt the plated plastic surface of the mouse give way in his desperate, white-knuckled grasp. It took on a revolting, marshmallowy squishiness. Within it, he felt the throbbing fluid tensions of life.

He flushed and got very dizzy. Gray and black motes swarmed in his peripheral vision. Still the coil tightened.

He felt too weak to go on strangling himself or to stop the beak's advance. A dreamlike feeling of inevitability came over him. The thing rasped and clacked, working mindlessly.

It was close enough to his face to spit tiny droplets, misting his cheek as it hissed again and again. It smelled like the ocean.

It grew slippery in his grip, secreting some sort of ooze. He remembered the scissors in his writing desk drawer.

Stumbling across the room, he felt the first flicker of crabby mouth parts on his jaw. He lost his feet and fell to the floor, his full awareness focusing in terrified but oddly disembodied fascination on the side of his head. His face was white, he could tell, his head almost bloodless. Expectation overtook his preservation instinct and he went numb.

The office door swung open.

"What the fuck, Av'ry?" the perplexed but always calm Owens intoned, entering the office. He left the door wide open.

Avery was lying on the carpet. The alien trilobite in his hand was just a plastic, desktop toy again, but the cord was still wrapped loosely around his neck. He realized he was drooling -- heavily. He began to see himself through Owens' eyes. Not good.

"Ahh ... I was just ... Just messing around, man," Avery replied with glazed eyes.

He was weak from his adrenalized struggle. His ears rang and his throat hurt. It was the most compromised position he had ever achieved on the job.

"If you wanna kill yourself, just blow these," Owens said, brandishing a clot of file folders. "They're due in three hours. Fuck it up and I'll kill you myself." He smiled amiably and dropped the work on Avery's chair.

Owens bugged out. He was heading, no doubt, for the break room to dish some dirt.

Avery took advantage of the moment.

He hurtled the mouse hard at the opposite wall.

It bounced.

[ Story copyright © 1999 Dave Stawinski. All rights reserved. ]

Dave Stawinski is a graduate student in the journalism program at Michigan State University and a web designer (for The MSU placement office and as a freelancer). This story was inspired by his thoughts about the place of computers in modern life. He set out to write a story that would do for computers what "Jaws" did for beaches.

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