The black rectangle that was Andi’s phone came to life with an intense blue glow illuminated the dark surroundings of the room. Andi who was slumped over a small box against the wall, got up slowly to answer the call. A glance at the phone revealed an unknown caller.
“Yes, hello,” he whispered in a calm and annoyed manner.
On the other side was a deep and scrambled voice that could barely be understood.
“We have another job for you, do you accept?”
“What is the payment?”
“As always, we pay twenty percent over market rates and allow you two strikes that will not be prosecuted. But you need to act fast, this is a last minute job that basically needs immediate execution. The targets are already on location and cannot be delayed if you don’t accept.”
“All right,” Andy replied in a up beat voice, “I am in, I will get right on it.”
She got up from his chair and walked across the dark room that was only illuminated in a slight blue by some screens around it. Putting on his glasses that Andi had be carrying in her front pocket, she stopped in front of the far wall of the room which was covered in thousands of blinking lights. Each light was acting erratically and non of them were in sync. While Andi was walking along the wall she bounced her fingers along the cables that were connected to each of the lights. Pulling his glasses closer and looking at one light in particular, that was not in a deep orange hue, but a slightly brighter yellow. She flicked the light, nothing changed.
“I guess that’s the one.”
She pulled out the cable and the light slowly faded until it was gone. In this moment Andi raised her arm and pressed a button on his wrist watch. Beep.
Franziska and her best friend Luise had just landed. They scrambled to their feet after this ten hour ordeal. The two of them were ready to finally leave the plane and get to the hotel to sleep, to shower and to begin their vacation. As always, just leaving the plane took over an hour because everyone was in such a hurry, standing in each others way.
“What the hell is that? No,” Franziska exclaimed.
An infinite crowd of fellow passengers stretched before them, going as far was the eye could see.
“Do they all need to immigrate?”
“ I think so, this will take forever,” Luise responded.
The two of them looked around, trying to find a shortcut that would enable them to skip the crowd. But to no avail, there were no short cuts and it would take as long it would take.
Minute after minute they kept looking at their phones hoping some bit of information would come across them to change their sluggish destiny.
“Isn’t this amazing, thousands of people being stuck in this airport. Not really inside or outside of the country, stuck in Limbo. Thousands and thousands of hours wasted waiting, so many opportunities missed to cure cancer, to change the world, to fall in love, to have sex, to eat good food and to read the great books,” Luise mused poetically.
“Calm down you little philosopher,” Franziska smiled. “Sometimes you just have to wait, that’s just how it is, the randomness of life.”
After two hours in line they finally reached the first signs of crowd control and airport rule enforcement. A women who was greeting all passengers, explained the situation to them.
“Our system is currently down and we need to process all passengers manually on paper, this will take a while. Hours at least.”
Franziska shook her head and grabbed Luise’s shoulder, “I don’t want to spend my holidays inside this airport building.”
“See, they are distributing papers and pencils,” we are not gonna be stuck here for that long,” Luise replied enthusiastically.
“Yea yea, this is just to distract us from their failure. How can a system fail that is so important? They are saving money this way,” Franziska mustered.
“That was quick acting and very good execution, your funds have been transferred,” the voice on the other side of the phone said.
Andi hung up and put the phone on the table. Just as he had set it down, it rang again.
“Yes?”
“Yes, hello, this is …….” The called had been ended. Andi shook his head and looked at the phone, waiting. It rang again.
“No names!”
“Sorry, we are new. We have been referred to you, you are one of the best they say.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Yes, one of our competitors is about to play his advantage and we want to disrupt him. He gained this advantage illegally by spying on us.”
“Your motives don’t matter, when should this go down,” Andi inquired.
As soon as possible, yesterday would have been the best.
“The more immediate the more expensive.”
“We understand, we have a lot of money.”
“Rate is fifty percent over market for new customers, if you accept I will get right on it.”
“We are in. Don’t you need more information?”
“I got it, remember who you are calling.”
“Thank you.”
The phone call ended and Andi got straight to work. Finding the corresponding light on the wall and the moment he pulled the cable pandemonium would ensue.
Mr. Theodore had worked hard to afford this futuristic sports car. He had worked years, day and night to build what would be known as one, if not the biggest entertainment licensing company on the planet. But he hated the name Mr. Theodore, he was Sam for all his employees. If someone would call him Mr., Sam would not hesitate and fire the person. Everything was going swimmingly, he thought, until he reached the sun bleached parking lot of the northern California company. All his employees were waiting outside and stared at his vehicle in hopeful anticipation.
Sam rolled down the window and slowed his drive down to a crawl.
“What is going on,” he asked.
“We can’t get in, the doors are locked.”
Sam’s face twisted into dislike and he rolled the window up again. On his front row parking spot, his assistant was already waiting. He almost ran her over.
“What the fuck is going on,” he barked at her.
She came running and shook her head.
“I am so sorry Sam, but the doors are all locked, we can’t get in,” she whispered.
“I fucking know that. Why is the goddamn question.”
“ I don’t know.”
“All right, let’s all be calm, there is always a solution to any problem. This is just another hurdle. Let’s have the employees work from home and access the data remotely.”
“Sam, we are locked out, we cannot access the data, all electronic accesses have been severed,” while she was replying she became more and more quiet.
“What the fuck? Are you fucking kidding me,” he started screaming.
“Mr. Theodore, I am really sorry, I am not an expert I am just your assistant.”
“I told you to call me fucking Sam. You know what, you are fired, you are useless.”
In his rage he turned around and looked at all his employees which struck him with an idea. He climbed on top of his car and started proclaiming: “We are clearly under attack, we have to get our access back, if you have to break the doors and cut the wires to regain database access. And the person who does so will get my sweet car. Let’s go, fucking get moving.”
“Yes?”
“We have a very complicated request.”
“There is no complicated, only expensive”
“We thought so, we are willing to pay double this time and it would need to be done during the next forty-eight hours.”
“By considering you as a client and the timeframe I know your target. Doing it in this amount of time and due to the highly critical matter it will cost a lot more, five times.”
“Five times is rather expensive, three times is the max we can offer.”
“Five times, non negotiable,” Andi replied calmly.
“Your competitors charge less but they are not as good, but with this big of an ask.”
“Look, I can only change so much before someone notices and the whole operation is taken down, if you like secure and repeat business this is the price, especially for such a timeline.”
“All right, for our relationship we will go with five times but we need a hundred percent guarantee that the insertion will work.”
“I can guarantee you that from my side there will be no problems, how the masses will react to it, I don’t know. This should be part of your optimisation model.”
“The funds have been transferred, get going.”
The phone fell silent and Andi put it down on the table. He grabbed his glasses and made his way to the wall of lights and inspected them. This time he could not only see one light being off in colour but a whole array of a dozen lights flashing in bright blue.
“Five times was too low, I have to pull twelve strings. Shit.”
She pulled out the first cable and the first blue light slowly died. The second. The third. Just as she was about to pull the plug on the fourth one all lights went out. Not just the blue ones but the whole wall lay in an unknown silence. Andi stepped back from the wall and began to realise what just had happened. He had been attacked with his own tools. The job could not be finished and his clients would not be pleased. Not pleased was an understatement as they would certainly come and hunt her.
“Todays’ presidential inauguration is the most heavily guarded with no visitors being allowed to attend due to the instatement of the first non elected leader in our nations history ….”
The image of the TV went black and Ronald turned to his girlfriend who was sitting next to him on the couch.
“Do you really think the government can control us when they can’t even get their elections right and all voting machines crash on the same day? They are so incompetent, and if we all knew about it, the whole thing would fall apart. They are just people like us, stupid. They have no clue what they are doing,” Ronald began to rage.
“I don’t know, maybe this was supposed to happen, this is their game, maybe not even the government but someone else who also controls the government, isn’t this an option,” she asked.
“I don’t know, seems very complicated, people in control tend not to be the best experts. Who do you think would manage such a system,” he inquired.
She shrugged her shoulders. “ I don’t know, maybe system administrators.”
“Oh Andi, you can think so abstractly.” He took her in his arms and they kissed. “I know, this is a dumb idea.”