Young David

This was my first attempt at creative writing – I entered the montly ACWClub writing competition. It was finished with about 30 seconds to spare from the 12pm DST deadline, without even the chance of a proofread. Enjoy!

Michael Jeffreys rocked back in his chair, his feet on the desk, and a mug of coffee in his hand. He was going through his early morning routine, reviewing the state of HARVEST’s network and systems, before the day’s work began.

Having finished the final report, and noticed nothing out of the ordinary, he signed off the securiy audit, and filed it in his drawer.

Propping his feet back on the desk, holding his mug in both hands, he tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and savoured the silence. His IT system was in tip-top condition, he told himself. “Purring like a kitten”, he whispered softly.

“Who, me? Would it turn you on if I did?”

Michael turned, blushing. Bianca Dedray stood behind him, a playful smile on her face. Bianca was the latest addition to the HARVEST senior team, and on Gordon’s instructions, had been working closely with Michael since July.

It was now September, and Bianca was almost as proficient as he was at managing the intricate layers of systems and data which were the lifeblood and the heart of the data mining company.

HARVEST had been founded by Michael four years ago, born out of his frustration at levels of deception to which public figures would stoop. He recalled his own father, Senator Jonathan Jeffreys, being voted into power mainly due to his relentless stance on morality and family values. Two years later, Michael had discovered his father in the act of adultery.

Refusing to keep silent, he’d confronted first his father, and then his mother. Both parents, although “deeply saddened”, had ignored Michael’s indignant protestations. His father had continued his adulterous liasons, and his mother had continued to ignore them.

An academic, Michael completed his Master’s thesis that year, focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The following year, he built on that research and stared a free online service, mining the web for information and opinion, negative or positive, on prominent public figures.

A few months later, he’d met Gordon Moon, a self-made millionaire investor, who offered Michael the opportunity to pursue his vision of enabling transparent policital leadership in the commercial sector. So HARVEST was born.

The big-brother of credit and reference checks, HARVEST was an evolving, learning system, which was able (thanks to deals signed with the federal government), to retrieve almost any publically available data on an individual, from their home address to their birth records.

This in itself, of course, was nothing special. What made HARVEST unique in the data-mining industry was its uncanny ability to uncover links between seemingly unrelated information. An employer, for example, could request a HARVEST report on a prospective staff member. In addition to standard credit and criminal record checks, HARVEST would return every bit of information recorded, relating to that person.

Using cutting-edge face recognition techniques, as well as half a dozen new techniques developed by Michael, HARVEST would return every public photograph, every traffic video clip, and every newspaper clipping featuring the target, even if the target was not mentioned in the article, or was simply a face in the crowd at a recorded public event.

“For the second and final time, would you like another cup of coffee?”, Bianca asked, raising her voice slightly. “Were you daydreaming?”, she smirked.

“All great artists daydream”, Michael shot back with a grin.

“Yeah, whatever. Two sugars, Da Vinci?”

II

A week later, Michael had completed the additions to the twenty-fifth iteration of the HARVEST intelligence and data-matching core. He hadn’t added any new features; he’d just optimized some data-matching routines, avoiding redundant matching, and making the harvesting process significantly faster.

He ran his usual battery of tests on the new version, generating a HARVEST report on every staff member, and comparing the results to the scan taken on the previous iteration. His own report was huge – his father had faithfully served the public interest for eight years.

Michael noted with sadness that every time he ran a report on himself, there were a collection of candid photos of his father with women other than his mother. These photos were mainly from public events, such as theatre, and from in-store cameras.

Michael compared the size of the new reports with the older ones. He expected a decrease in size – his redundant matching code should have weeded out some extraneous information. All the staff reports matched his expectations, with the exception of one.

Gordon Moon, his executive partner. Gordon’s profile was now empty.

Surprised, but unconcerned, Michael enabled a debugger, and rescheduled Gordon’s report. This time, he instructed HARVEST to not to check its pre-cached data, but to go out and retrieve live data. Knowing it would take about ten hours, even with his recent modification, he made a note to re-check it the following morning.

“Hey Mike!”, Bianca grinned at him, and perched herself on the desk next to his. “How’d your latest run go? You were testing an iteration today, right?”

“Right”, he smiled. “Funny thing, Gordon’s report turned up blank. I’m guessing I made a mistake somewhere, I’ve scheduled a live report, and I’ll check the debug log tomorrow. I guess I was too eager to make those redundancy-matching changes”

“Hmmpf. That’s weird. No to worry, a brainiac like you should be able to nail it easy.

Now how about that coffee you owe me?”

III

Michael stared at the screen. Impossible. He’d run a live report – it couldn’t have come back entirely empty. He examined the debug file he’d recorded.

“Social Security Database – Search Gordon Moon – No records”
“Internal Revenue Service – Search Gordon Moon – No records” The list went on. Credit checks, birth records, drivers’ license, traffic violations. All empty. All null. How could his minor changes have resulted in errors like this?

Michael connected directly to the IRS database, and ran a manual search for Gordon Moon. No results. He raised an eyebrow. He ran an identical search on the social security database. No results.

The realization stunned him. This wasn’t a HARVEST problem. Gordon’s records were missing from two of the country’s largest databases.

Inconceivable. Gordon’s social security number, tax ID, birth certificate – it was all gone. Could he have made so serious an error in the latest iteration that it corrupted their upstream databases? No, everybody else’s reports were normal. What had happened to Gordon’s data?

His mind spinning, he climbed out of his chair to try and clear his head. He almost bumped headfirst into Bianca. She had a hard, cold look in her eyes.

“Hey Mike, did you manage to debug that empty report problem you told me about yesterday?”

“Uh, no, not yet. Still trying to find the logic error”, he mumbled.

“Too bad”, she said, sympathetically. Now she smiled, her eyes twinkling. “How about some coffee?”

“Not now thanks, I need to stretch my legs”

“C’mon, I insist”, she said, stepping into him, forcing him to return to his chair, or find himself awkwardly close to her.

Michael was still thinking about the missing data when Bianca returned two minutes later, holding two mugs of coffee. “Here ya go”, she said, handing him his mug.

“Sorry, got a lot on my mind”.

“Yeah me too, don’t sweat. Just take it easy for a bit. Cheers”.

He raised his mug in salute, and sipped the bitter coffee.

IV

Michael woke with his head pounding, and his mouth tasting like vomit. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he looked around. He heard the faint humming of machinery, and the flashing of lights.

Conciousness hit him in a rush. He recognised the lights, the noises, the outlines of the racks. He was in the data vault, the secure centre of HARVEST’s data mining operations.

He stood up, dizzy, and stumbled over to the door. He pulled the handle. It was locked. Why was he in the data vault, and why was the door locked?

The coffee! The last thing he remembered was talking to Bianca, and drinking coffee. Bianca! She sabotaged HARVEST! What was in that coffee?

Determined to find out what was happening, he walked to the closest system terminal, and punched in his administrative credentials. Instead of the welcome screen he expected, the wail of a siren assaulted his ears. A message flashed across the terminal screen, reading “Fire Retardant System Test Activation – Total Gaseous Flooding in five minutes”.

When installing the system, Michael had insisted on the total gaseous flooding system. In theory, in the event of a fire, the two carbon-dioxide canisters beneath the raised floor on either side of the room would vent enough gas to retard combustion, but not to make the environment unbreathable for humans.

A control panel by the door lit up, counting down from five minutes. Directly next to the control panel, where the override handle was supposed to be, was a metal base. The override handle lay buckled on the floor.

He was in a carefully laid trap, he realized. The door locked, the anti-fire system triggered only when he logged in, the override switch sabotaged – “She wants it to look like I died in here. The CO2 concentrations have probably been altered too”.

Michael knew he couldn’t escape. The walls were one foot of solid concrete, lined with steel plates. The false floor was raised about a metre above the concrete floor, to allow for cabling and power to be run underneath.

That, and the carbon-dioxide canisters.

He would suffoctae here, he realised, unless he disabled the gas-release system. In opposite corners of the room were small vents in the floor. Each vent was connected to an electronic valve, and an airhose, and in turn to a canister of carbon dioxide.

Michael scrambled to the corner opposite the door. He pulled the valve and the hose out of the floor, and pinched the hose under the leg of a desk.

The second vent, next to the door, was more of a challenge. A huge steel desk had been placed on top of it, to provide additional workspace.

The closest floor tile was about twelve feet away from the vent. Michael picked up the suction grip, a triangular device with a handle in the middle, and three rubber suckers at each corner. By laying the grip on top of the nearest square, steel floor tile, Michael was able to twist the handle, engage the suckers, and lift the board out of the floor.

Headfirst, he squirmed his way under the floor, and crawled towards the corner. It was dark, and he bumped his head on the metal rods and power cables which ran beneath the reased floor. He backtracked, and wormed his way to the canister in the corner.

Feeling the smooth, cylindrical shape under his hands, he worked his hands up towards the neck of the cylinder, until he felt the ridged edges of the mechanical valve. Heart pounding, he twisted the valve closed. Seconds before he completed tightened the valve, a loud hissing noise escaped from the cylinder. Time was up! Holding the breath he’d been about to exhale, he completed tightening the valve, and heard the hiss tail off into silence.

Still holding his breath, Michael wriggled his way back to the opening in the floor, climbed out, and at last heaved a breath. He’d made it.

V

Michael made his way back to the far corner, and removed the air hose he’d pinched beneath the desk. Immediately he heard the hiss of the gas, and felt the hose cool in his fingers.

Silently, he considered the hose, and then placed it back under the desk, and lay down on the floor, twisting his body into what he hoped looked like an acceptable death-by-suffocation position.

He didn’t have to wait long. After about twenty minutes, he heard a metalic clunk as the steel door was opened from the outside. Taking a deep breath, he froze in position. He heard footsteps approach him, then a faint rustle of fabric, and he felt a hand touch his neck, feeling for a pulse.

Straightening out, he pulled on the hose and pointed it directly into the face of his attacker. The gas whooshed out explosively. Startled, and unable to catch her breath, Bianca dropped to her knees. Michael pushed past her, and raced out the door. He slammed the door behind him, and engaged the manual lock.

Michael staggered back into his office, trying to make sense of all the thoughts running through his head.

“Michael!”

He turned, and saw Gordon Moon standing at the doorway. Gordon was wearing a blue windbreaker, and looked as if he’d recently been sleeping.

“Gordon, man it’s good to see you!”

“The alarm company called me. What happened?”

“Attempted murder”, Michael responded grimly, “You’d better sit down”.

Gordon’s eyes widened as Michael told him about the missing data, about Bianca’s drugged coffee, and about the fire-retardant system in the data vault.

“What I can’t figure out”, Michael started, “is why Bianca would sabotage you – what did she have against you, anyway?”

“Actually, yes”, Gordon said quietly. “I instructed her to. HOWL was far more effective than I’d hoped.”

“HOWL?”

Gordon smiled. “A working title. I figured since you came up with such a great acronym for your project, I should be entitled to the same. You howl at the moon, get it?”

Michael was dumbfounded. HOWL?

“So what is HOWL, basically HARVEST in reverse? Seek and destroy mode?”

“One step further, Michael. Seek, Destroy, and Discredit. Bianca built it with the same AI core as HARVEST. It silently purges what data it can, and fortunately we now have full access to the upsteam databases. What it can’t purge, it statistically discredits.

Michael was speechless. Gordon and Bianca had constructed the anti-HARVEST!

“Why Gordon? Why would you do that? The business. our purpose is to expose deception, to promote transparency. This is the opposite of that. This would allow someone.”

“To disappear”, Gordon finished. “Well, it’s quite obvious really. Our clients are the honest ones, the trusting public, and thanks to your genius, we ensure that their leaders, can no longer deceive them.”

“Yes”

“But those clients only take us so far. Where the real profit lies, Michael, is in the clients who want to be hidden from scrutiny. The clients who want to be un-harvestable.”

Michael was silent.

“.. and I need you with me, Michael. Bianca was acting on her own tonight, I need your brains – I wouldn’t try to get rid of you”. Gordon shuddered.

“You’ll have full developmental control, Michael. Test the two systems against each other. Think of it as sibling rivalry”.

The prospect thrilled Michael. Hadn’t he been on his twenty-fifth iteration yesterday? Hadn’t he been thinking how it was no longer challenging?

“What do you say, Michael?”

“Full developmental control?”

“Absolutely”

Competition is good for the industry.

Light and dark.

Yin and Yang.

Superman and Lex Luthor

Michael reached his decision.

“I’m in.”