It Wasn't Me

“You killed him!”

“Well, I…” says the round shouldered man, intently hunched over his computer, his tired, saggy face illuminated by the blue screen glow. The lighting helps him look like a forlorn gargoyle.

“He’s dead! And you did it!” says the other occupant of the room as he leans back in his chair watching another screen, a screen linked to CCTV in a way that isn’t at all usual. CCTV that unwittingly records the demise of the latest ordered hit.

“It wasn’t me,” says the hunched man. His name is Gareth and he isn’t used to conversation, less so this excited buzz that the other man, Dave, is filling the room with. Dave’s transmitted excitement is grating against him and rubbing him up the wrong way. This is supposed to be Gareth’s room, he doesn’t even know how Dave got in here, let alone why. The room is locked down with a key fob that Gareth had lapsed into believing was a singular fob. No one visits Gareth, if they can help it.

Then Dave waltzes in. His invasion was not a Blitzkrieg, but now he’s exploding all over the show and everything is in disarray.

“Mate!?” Dave turns and beams a smile at Gareth. 

Gareth flinches in the brightness of that beam, so Dave turns it up a notch, saying, “credit where credit’s due!”

“How do you mean?” Gareth reluctantly engages with Dave, but he is hooked nonetheless.

“If you hadn’t worked your magic, that man down there would be alive!” Dave enthuses.

“I suppose that is one way of looking at it,” Gareth admits, “but…”

“But me no buts! And if my no ifs!” pronounces Dave grinning away as though life is a bowl of peaches and cream.

He’s looking at Gareth in something like admiration, but poor Gareth doesn’t see it like that, it feels to him like Dave is sizing him up for dinner or something even worse, so it is all he can do not to squeal in horror and anguish when Dave pushes his feet against the floor and propels himself towards Gareth’s desk on his wheeled office chair.

Gareth leans away, fearing a chair to chair collision, but Dave deftly and almost gracefully comes to a halt an inch from Gareth’s seat, “show me how you do it?”

“What?” says Gareth, affronted at the prospect of sharing anything about himself with another human being. 

This is why he does this work. This is why he is firmly ensconced in this dimly lit, locked room. He doesn’t do people. He does code. Code and games and a never ending supply of diet cola. He once heard that the sweetener in diet drinks gives rats cancer, but he’s not a rat and the sweetener is a lesser evil to sugar. Sugar should be a banned drug. But then sugar exerts a terrible control on the populous and the powers that be are fully aware of this. Sugar is no accident. Few things are.

“How do you do it?” asks Dave in a conspiratorial whisper.

“I write code,” says Gareth simply, and in the vain hope that that is sufficient to placate the manic Dave. To him, his answer is self-explanatory.

Dave waves his hand around in a circular motion and Gareth stares at it, but says not a word.

“Explain it to me like I’m dumb,” Dave explains when it’s apparent that Gareth is not going to be forthcoming.

Gareth takes a moment, assessing whether he should tell Dave that he is dumb. That Gareth already knew this on the balance of probabilities. Statistically, Gareth is far brighter than almost everyone he will ever encounter, and this has been corroborated on a local basis. Everyone Gareth meets is limited and not worthy of the possession of the brain that they have been gifted. He sighs and thinks it a waste of time to state the obvious.

The next assessment he makes is how best to rid himself of the presence of Dave. He thinks his best bet is to give Dave what he thinks he wants. Then Dave’s eyes will gloss over and he will walk away seeking instant gratification elsewhere.

“I embed code within the algorithms,” Gareth tells Dave.

Dave nods a nod that does not belong as a response, “and?” he asks.

Gareth takes a breath, “the code is essentially a filter,” he says.

“Okay?” Dave does that circling thing with his hand again.

“Algorithms target people, right?” Gareth says to Dave.

“Yeah,” Dave agrees, “I only have to mention something like, oh I dunno, car tyres and I’m getting ads from half a dozen tyre manufacturers across all my apps.”

Now Gareth nods, “that sort of thing, yes.”

“And when I say mention,” says Dave, “I mean talking. To a friend. In the old fashioned, analogue style of communicating. It’s like they’re listening. Are they listening Gareth?”

Gareth weighs up his options in a split second. Trying to put Dave straight would be too much like hard work, so he lies instead, “I’m afraid so. They’re always listening…”

“I knew it!” an animated Dave punches his palm.

That must’ve hurt, thinks Gareth to himself, concluding that Dave is definitely not the brightest button on the winter coat.

There is an awkward silence in which Gareth grabs his current two litre bottle of fizzy drink and quaffs a significant quantity. For the first time in a long time, because he has rare company, he stifles the resultant burp. Gareth doesn’t notice the way that Dave eyes him as he drinks.

“So your code filters the targeting?” asks Dave.

Gareth nods, an uncomfortable feeling is developing in his midriff, he assumes this is as a result of holding back his burp, “it filters out all the positives and ushers in only those things that will hurt and unhinge the intended recipient.”

“It’s a bullying filter?” suggests Dave.

Gareth shrugs, “you could say that, only it’s much more potent than bullying.”

“How so?” asks Dave.

“Like it or not,” Gareth shifts uncomfortably in his seat and stifles another burp, “screens and all things online are as much a part of our reality as this desk.” Gareth touches the desk for emphasis, “it’s possible to change someone’s online reality to such an extent that they lose the will to live.”

“Just like the guy who stepped out in front of the bus just now?” asks Dave.

“Just like that,” Gareth says. 

He’s even more uncomfortable now. He doesn’t like to connect all the dots when it comes to his work. His is a more theoretical existence and purer for it.

“Show me the code!” Dave shifts nearer to Gareth, so he can stare at the screen.

“Really?!” Gareth is surprised anyone would want to see his code. This confuses him, but it also stokes his ego a little. Dave is actually interested. Now there’s a thing.

“Really,” confirms Dave, “I want to see the magic spell! I want to see your magic, mate! Take me to Mordor!”

When Dave puts it like that, Gareth can’t refuse him. Even if his referencing to a mythical location is way off as far as Gareth is concerned. He scrolls through and brings his magical creation on screen for Dave to see in all its glory.

“That’s beautiful!” exclaims Dave.

“You really think so?” asks Gareth bashfully.

“You’re an artist, Gareth,” Dave doesn’t take his eyes from the screen, “what you have done is truly remarkable. No one else could have done what you have done. You really have worked magic here.”

“I’ve never thought of it…” Gareth burps, the burp comes from nowhere, “…like that.” He stifles another burp and partially stands, “sorry… I… need to pay a visit… wait here…”

He almost runs from the room, but remembering himself before he opens the door, he turns to Dave, “don’t touch anything, OK?”

Dave smiles sweetly and nods his head. The sight of this angelic expression of Dave’s will haunt Gareth for evermore, but right now, he has more pressing matters to attend to.

*

When a dishevelled and unwell Gareth returns to his room, of Dave there is no sign. His relief at Dave’s absence is palpable. He is glad to have normality restored and to have the run of his space again. 

As he takes his place at his work station, the mobile phone lying on his desktop beeps a notification, and then another and another. His face creasing in consternation, he opens the phone and stares morosely at the screen as he opens his apps and attends to the notifications.

His mood has drooped and his shoulders slumped even further as he then opens his computer. 

Gareth knows as soon as the screen lights up his incredulous face. His screen tells him everything he needs to know and so much more. 

Dave isn’t as stupid as he had seemed. In fact, Dave is far from stupid.

Either that, or Dave is that form of stupid that is as dangerous as it comes. Gareth has a growing certainty that Dave is that special kind of ignorant, the kind of ignorant that has the capacity to end worlds.

This is confirmed as Gareth attempts to access the code. 

His code. 

Dave has locked him out.

Feverishly, Gareth hammers at the keys of his keyboard. Eventually, after hours of battle, Gareth can at last see the code, but he can’t reach it. That code may as well lay across a bottomless chasm for all the good it will now do Gareth. He can see it, but he cannot change it. 

He will never be able to take it back. 

Not in time anyway.

The code that Gareth wrote was only ever for singular targets. Gareth’s code was a necessary evil to make the world a better place.

Dave had other ideas. 

Dave has amended one small aspect of the code and opened it up, so it now targets everyone. Each and every single person who interfaces with the online world, via any form of screen, is going to get dragged down into an abyss they have no hope of ever returning from. Worse still, the algorithms are already learning. They are learning to use people against each other to accelerate them towards their intended goal.

Annihilation.

“It wasn’t me…” Gareth whispers to himself as he stares at his screen and takes in the enormity of the chaos that is already befalling the world.

“It wasn’t me…” is all they get out of him as they drag him from the solitude of his room in the facility and take him to a more ominous solitude in one of the interrogation rooms.

But it must have been him. 

There is no record of anyone else entering or leaving Gareth’s room. Apart from Gareth, not once in the last six months has another person been in that room.

Of Dave there is no sign.

He’d even taken the laxative laced cola bottle with him as he left Gareth to take the credit for his own achievement…