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Outsourcing Blues

by Richard Farnsworth

      I realized I hadn’t really been paranoid until the steel bolt slid into place.

      The metallic snick froze me in mid-type. I looked up from the ancient keyboard to the whitewashed steel door.

      “Hello?” I called.

      No response.

      Standing abruptly from the little workstation, I knocked the chair over backwards and it clattered on the tile. I crossed the small windowless room to the door and hesitated.

      “Hello?” I called again, trying to sound calm.

      Still no response.

      I slipped the little hoop earring off leaned my ear against the door and listened for any indication of life. Silence.

      A tingling panic rose up in my chest. I could see no indication of a lock from this side. There was no slit of a keyhole. Smooth and dull.

      I gently touched the knob with my fingers and twisted and felt resistance. I grasped the knob harder and wrenched it side to side. The small metal ball was immovable. I slapped the door with the flat of my free hand as I continued to jerk and pull with the other. It was a solid door.

      “Hey! This isn’t funny! Let me out! Ted! Colund!”

      The old dot-matrix printer beside the workstation sprang to life. The harsh mechanical whirring reminded me of a wood-chipper. I had wanted to print out some of the code I was working on earlier, but I couldn’t find the driver in the directory. I had thought it was just a dead relic.

      I went over and pulled the printout back so that I could read it. The words were difficult to make out in the light of the single overhead bulb.

//*release is imminent*//

      “What the hell does that mean?” I yelled.

      I was getting paid by the hour, but not enough to be incarcerated in this little dungeon with this crazy computer.

      I pulled out a credit card and tried to slide it along the doorjamb. I had never unlocked anything doing this before but had seen it done on TV. I fumbled and dropped the card. The gap was too narrow, or maybe my hand was just shaking too hard. This was so bizarre.

      I took my Blackberry from the bag on the floor that I kept my laptop in. I might have sent an email or used the phone feature but there was no antenna signal. Not surprising this far down in the basement. I should have checked when I first came down here. Why had I taken this stupid job? Well, the money of course. But I knew as soon as I’d seen this dank little room that the job was a bad idea.

      Earlier that afternoon, I had come from South Bay Tech Support, LLC to install a series of patches on the old Harbinger computer server. These machines had to be at least twenty-five years old, but they were still legendary in the industry. I had never worked on one before. I had never even seen one.

      I wasn’t sure why they didn’t have their own system administrator try to install the software and system upgrades. I guessed it was probably more cost effective for them to outsource. Everybody outsourced these days. That was the niche I had fallen into during my business school sabbatical. Forced sabbatical. Well actually when you withdraw because your professor is a fascist pig that can’t recognize innovation they usually call it failing out. But I didn’t look at it as the end. Rather it was just another opportunity for personal growth.

      Anyway, I did outsourced server upgrades. No benefits, but a nice hourly bill-out rate. When I was working. The Information Technology industry was a living hell, and admittedly, not what I thought it would be.

      I had been booked for six-thirty to midnight so that when I shut down the server no one would have to stop slaving away. It put a real dent into my social life, but I could put up with the odd hours to bill time and a half.

      When I had arrived I waited for almost twenty minutes, on the clock, at the guard kiosk. I tried to get a conversation going through the little slit in the guard’s Plexiglas barricade, but after five monosyllabic replies I gave up and sat on the bench. I slipped my glasses on and waited. Not the cute cat’s eyes, the thick birth-control ones I used for serious work.

      A slow nervous little man, in a rumpled brown suit jacket that was a size too big for him, finally came. As he introduced himself I couldn’t help but think of a little boy in a life preserver.

      I followed him through the quiet office space, past rows of silent cubicles until we reached an office door. The black plastic nameplate read ‘Mr. Colund, IT Manager.'

      At the desk inside sat an unhealthy-looking middle-aged man. Pale. Receding hairline. Deep lines carved at the corners of the tight, lipless seam of his mouth. White shirt with white socks to match, I bet. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he smelled like Aquavelva.

      Mr. Palid looked stressed; keeping a huge Defense Contractor’s IT needs met. But he probably had a good benefits package. I would kill for a steady job with a good benefits package. After I finished an MBA, with the information systems management concentration. Well, started a new one and then finished it.

      The little man introduced me. The cadaverous Mr. Colund gave me a flaccid, perfunctory handshake and a confused smile. I stood in an awkward silence. The old freak and his little toady made me uncomfortable.

      Mr. Palid stared at my breasts and said, “You’re a woman.”

      Great. Mr. Placid-perv was actually oogling me. Part of the reason I took this job was so that I didn’t have to put up with this crap. Not needing to dress for success, I was wearing a baggy flannel shirt that did nothing to accentuate my figure, so what was he looking at anyway? Give me a break.

      I did that little dip, where my eyes drop down to catch his and pull them back up to my face and said, “Thank you for pointing that out.”

      A little flush of red up his neck and he said, “I’m sorry the agency said they would be sending a Tony Farragolo.”

      “Yes, Toni with an ‘i’.”

      Mr. Palid-perv-preconceptionist looked down at the papers on his desk and said, “I was expecting.” And then he trailed off, realizing what he was about to say.

      I let out a breath and said, “You were expecting a man?”

      “No. No, just the name.” He paused, collected his thought as continued. “Well, thank you for coming this evening. I’m afraid the server has been acting up and I’d like to see if you can’t help with the installation of a little software patch.”

      I thought his face would crack when he smiled.

      I didn’t smile back, not wanting to give him encouragement. I’m unfriendly, not coquettish, Mr. Perv.

      His smile faded slowly, and he handed me an antique five and a half inch floppy disc. I hadn’t seen one of these since third grade. I turned it over in my hand.

      “There is a brief tutorial on the operating system there. It shouldn’t take you long.”

      “I don’t have a drive for this,” I said holding the disc up.

      “The computer you’ll use does,” he said.

      I looked back at Ted, who didn’t make eye contact and then said, “I brought my laptop to link in through the USB port.”

      “I’m afraid you can’t access the server through a USB port.” Colund’s expression shifted from flustered into impassive.

      “I saw dozens computers on the network. I can just plug into the LAN through one of their ports and remote access the server.”

      “No. I’m sorry. The only way to access the server is through the hard-wired interface. Ted, why don’t you take Ms. Farragolo down to the access room.”

      The nervous little man didn’t look up. He sighed and nodded slowly.

      “Could you take me to see the hardware?” I asked. I wanted to be able to tell my friends I had seen a Harbinger in the flesh.

      Colund looked at Ted and shook his head.

      Ted looked up at me, without making eye contact, and said, “It’s proprietary.”

      “I have a signed a non-disclosure agreement on file.” The whole point of using South Bay Tech was to get someone like me in to look at proprietary hardware and software.

      “The server is in the sub-basement,” Ted said. He started to leave. It all seemed a little strange.

      “I don’t mind basements.”

      Ted looked back at Colund.

      “She doesn’t need to go there.”

      Ted turned to me and said, “You don’t need to go there.”

      Gender bias, lasciviousness and Jedi mind powers. He was a package deal. This freak was going to get an entire post dedicated to him on my blog.

      “The access terminal is enabled with all the server permissions. Hard wired. Ted will escort you, and I will see you at midnight,” Colund said.

      I followed Ted to the service elevator. One flight below the ground floor and down a deserted corridor. A light green discoloration to the industrial off-white paint hinted at mold taking root on the cinderblock walls.

      “It’s warm down here.”

      Ted didn’t respond. He stopped his slow cadence march down the hall and turned into a small room. It wasn’t much larger than a broom closet and smelled musty. An ancient computer terminal and keyboard rested on a desk, which was the only furniture inside. An ancient printer beside it was coated in a thin layer of dust.

      Ted explained that I would need to access the server through this terminal and that the floppy disc had the patch I needed to install already loaded. It seemed like easy money, if I could remember my elementary school computer skills.

      I placed my laptop bag on the floor beside the desk and sat at the terminal. Ted stood hesitantly in the doorway, and I contemplated getting my pepper-spray out of my bag. He was probably harmless. And if he wanted to see computer magic, he was in the right place.

      I sat at the workstation and reflexively cracked my knuckles. I brushed the keyboard and a single line blinked on the screen in response:

//*Pishacha is prepared*//

      “Whoa, there’s some life in this old thing. Ted, is Pacha-Pachinco-whatever, is that the server’s name?”

      I turned when there was no answer. Ted had left, closing the door silently. These people really were freaks, and they were both earning some serious blog-space.

      I spent the next few hours working with the code, drinking back-to-back Jolt colas, warm, and listening to Rob Zombie on my iPod. I never realized there could be so much data on the old disc.

      The older Harbinger server had an arcane relational database management system that overlaid what I might have mistaken as old Unix. It read like a Boyce table language, but it had some newer SQL commands mixed in. Anyway, it was difficult to troubleshoot, and every time I tried to enable the patch the system would fail and the screen would read:

//*Pishacha is unprepared*//

      Harbinger, Inc was serious about their servers being magic. I went through the OS tutorial several times and was sure I had everything right. It was like the computer was stalling me. Or it had a mind of its own. Or maybe Mr. Placid-perv had a webcam and wanted to watch me struggle.

      “Well Pachinco, I’ve done all I can. It’s getting late so one more round, and then I’m calling it a night.”

      A waft of moist warm air blew up my pant cuff and I jumped back. Under the desk against the wall was an air conditioner vent that I hadn’t noticed before. The words ‘Demon speed too fast for you’ squealed at me. I flicked off the iPod and pulled the speakers from my ears.

      I leaned under the desk and could just hear the hum of machinery. And something else. Something wet. The air coming up through the vent smelled acidic but foul, like too-ripe tomatoes.

      I sat back up and took a deep breath.

      “It’s okay. Almost midnight.” I billed by the hour, but I didn’t get the bonus if the job wasn’t done. For that I needed my performance evaluation signed.

      I cracked my knuckles again and started to enter more commands, and that’s when I heard the door lock.

***

      My Blackberry read eleven-fifty PM. I had been here too long. And I had the feeling I was screwed. There was only one exit. There was no way I could get through that door unless it was unlocked. The vent looked too small. The walls were concrete blocks. As I looked around my cell, I noticed for the first time that the ceiling was made of drop-down panels.

      I put the chair on the desk while both cursing my short Sicilian genetics and praising my forethought at wearing flats. Then I scrambled up onto the chair and balanced while I pushed up a panel. The concrete ceiling left a space of just a few inches. Enough room for an air vent and the sprinkler, but not enough for even little old me to wiggle through.

      I heard a little metallic tap from under the desk. Then another. I shimmied down my teetering tower of furniture and looked on the floor. Nothing unusual. Then I noticed two little screws on the floor. As I watched, another screw fell to the floor and made a metallic tap on the tile. They had come from the corners of the vent grate.

      I watched as the fourth screw rotated counterclockwise of its own accord. And then it too plinked off the dusty tile. The grate was no longer secured, and it fell from the wall. I reflexively grabbed it half way to the floor. It shook violently in my trembling hand.

      The sheet rock around the vent looked puckered. It reminded me of a fabricated sphincter. There were little flakes along the rough sides of the hole that looked like dried meat.

      I looked closer. A blood-soaked fingernail pulled out at the quick.

      “Oh, no. Oh-no, oh-no, oh-no.”

      I could hear something moving deep in the vent hole. Metallic rattling. Something small sliding against smooth metal. Many somethings. I didn’t like this at all. The rattle grew louder. Something was getting closer.

      I grabbed my pepper-spray with one hand and slammed the grate atop the hole with the other. I held it with both hands while the rattling continued. There was something just on the other side of the grate, but I couldn’t see. Something brushed the other side. A rat? God, I hate rats. Maybe a snake? I hate snakes worse.

      My hand, pressed against the little holes, was sliced. I pulled it back at the sharp pain and there was a thin, deep slash on the palm above a small rivulet of blood. Whatever was on the other side of the grate pushed full force, and I almost lost hold with my other hand. Then it was cut too.

      I switched off hands, trying to keep the vent from coming free and not get cut again. What the hell was back there? I pulled my feet up and pressed them against the grate. I had better leverage and I laid back.

      “Help!” It was probably useless to yell, but I was pee-myself scared. I screamed it over and over again, trying not to sound too shrill.

      I felt the bottoms of shoes being nicked time and again. The pressure against my feet increased. The corner of the grate bucked and I moved my foot to keep it down. And then the other corner popped away. Whatever was back there started to thrash against the grate.

      I stared at the ceiling and tears started to blur my vision. This was so wrong. The sprinkler. It had a little heat indicator attached. I could start a fire and then the rescue team would come. I reached in my front pocket for my smokes and matches, forgetting that I had quit again.

      “Damn!”

      I tried to reach up on the desk but couldn’t. I really needed to stop skipping my Pilates class. The grate pushed away, and I stomped it back against the wall slightly askew. From the slim gap at the corner a thin, headless black snake slid out. No, not a snake. It was a length of coaxial cable. There were thin slivers of copper wire poking out of the end where, if it had been a snake, the head should be. It waved back and forth.

      Then another slid out at the opposite askew corner. I kicked at them and lost my purchase on the barrier. The entire grate flew away as the hole expelled a Medusa's head of writhing black cables.

      Thick strands of cable wrapped around my ankles and undulated up my thighs, twisted around my waist. Securely bundled, they dragged me into the hole that had seemed too small.

      I kicked. I screamed. I thrashed. I grabbed at the sides of the vent hole.

      “Please! Please-please-please.” I laughed maniacally as I slid in through the puckered hole. My laughs degenerated into bubbling sobs.

      I tried desperately to hold on, but the pulling was irresistible. I slid in and down the vent. I snaked down through spaces almost too narrow for me. I bumped and scraped and left patches of skin and a few shirt buttons as I twisted downward toward the rotting tomato smell.

      The confinement fell away all of a sudden. I fell out of the conduit onto a concrete floor. Exposed light bulbs dangling, girder ceiling, cinder-block walls, probably the sub-basement. I looked down between my feet in the direction I was being pulled.

      The cables ran across the floor and up into a hole in the bottom of a huge server console. The console was dark and shiny. A sweaty mass that didn’t want to be pressed into the shape of a server rack.

      My pace was the same, but I felt a greater urgency being this close. In the dim light it was hard to tell, but it looked like the hole in the console dilated. The corners pulled up and made that hole look like a leering grin. Twelve feet to go.

      Colund sat to the left of the server typing into an antique PC, a twin of the one I had been using. He looked over his shoulder and down at me.

      “Help me!” I screamed and twisted. I tried to scramble up into a sitting position. Ten feet.

      “We’ve almost finished the server upgrade, Toni with an ‘i’,” he said. He didn’t turn from the keyboard and continued to type.

      “What’s going on?” I screamed. Eight feet. The hole at the bottom of the server console dilated open and then closed. Snick. Snick. I couldn’t help but think of a dog snapping at a treat it was about to receive.

      “Pishacha is one of our older servers. Enslaved in the early nineteenth century, but a use wasn’t found for him until Harbinger, Inc. started turning these little devils into the most advanced computer servers on the planet. He’s the fusion of demonology and cybernetics, a perfect union, don’t you think?”

      “Help me,” I cried. Five feet. I didn’t want to sound so girly. I cleared my throat; tears streamed down my face.

      “You’re serving a greater good here. Harbinger is bidding a Department of Defense contract, and we need all of our servers in top form. War on terror and all that.” While he typed he made cooing sounds to the machine-thing.

      Two feet.

      “If it’s any consolation, I’ll give you a very favorable assessment on your performance evaluation.”

      My feet slid up to the lip of the open hole. I could see now that it really was a mouth. A terrible bubbling feeling welled up in me.

      I thrashed side to side and could just touch one of the little wheels on the bottom of Colund’s chair. I bucked again and was able to grab the base of the chair, above the wheels with both hands. I used the force that dragged at me to tip Colund over on top of me.

      He squawked.

      I shimmied and twisted and pushed him down toward my feet. Then I remembered the pepper-spray and shot ejected the contents into Colund’s surprised face.

      His hands shot to his face, and he kicked his feet for purchase. This caused him to scoot closer to the server. More wet black cables snaked out of the server and flailed blindly. They swept across Colund’s tear-wet, red face. He started to brush the cables away one handed, and they wrapped and twisted around his wrist.

      More cables emerged and swept gently across the twisting old man’s face. Then they wrapped quickly around his head and neck. Colund let out a muffled scream and went rigid. The cables loosened their hold on me, and I scrambled away.

      Colund’s head and shoulders disappeared. A spasm rippled through his lower body. The edges of the hole reached out as the man was pulled in. It reminded me of a little kid sucking down a wet spaghetti noodle.

      The whole body was gone in an instant. I sat on the floor listening to the wet crunching sounds. Then silence.

      I sat there with my back against the far wall. An old dot-matrix printer, identical to the one I had seen in the little room sprang to life. I walked cautiously to the printer, pepper-spray ready, and read:

//*maintenance cycle complete*//

***

      I was going over the server comparison sheets when Ted brought the new consultant into my office. After I had cleaned out Colund’s stuff, I got one of the old Harbinger Inc, posters out for my wall. The slogan read: Our servers are magic.

      True, but demonic would be more accurate. It was amazing how much information the various Harbinger models could handle. Aside from the occasional human sacrifice, they were a lot more economical than any other system on the market. It would probably be another twenty years before the industry could produce a competitive alternative.

      The board had offered me a full-time position with a competitive salary and benefits package after I’d fed Colund to the demon, without having to go back for my MBA. Feeding the old guy to the demon didn’t bother me too much. I mean, he knew that’s how the tech industry works.

      Ted looked down at the floor and fidgeted.

      I looked at the new consultant and said, “Thank you for coming this evening. I’m afraid our server’s been acting up and we could use your help.”

      The IT business really is Hell.

Richard Farnsworth is a scientist by day, a soldier on weekends with an aspiring scifi writer squeezed in there somewhere. This is his first work of fiction.

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