243 lines
14 KiB
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243 lines
14 KiB
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OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO oOOOO OOOO. OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" .OOOOOO OOOOOo OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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OOOO oOOOOOOO OOOOOOO. OOOO oOOOO
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OOOO .OOOO OOOO OOOOOOOOo OOOO OOOO"
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OOOO oOOOO OOOO OOOO "OOOO. OOOO OOOOo .OOOO'
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OOOO .OOOO" OOOO OOOO OOOOoOOOO "OOOO. oOOOO
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OOOO oOOOOOOO..OOOO OOOO "OOOOOOO OOOOoOOOO"
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OOOO .OOOO"""OOOOOOOO OOOO OOOOOO "OOOOOOO'
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OOOO oOOOO ""OOOO OOOO "OOOO OOOOOO
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|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
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| There Ain't No Justice |
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| #105 |
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|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|
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- Opposition -
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by Arifel
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The battle between the forces of Light and Darkness in our office
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finally came to an end. It was a draw.
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We only employ fourteen people, so I find it peculiar that their
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paths had never crossed before the expansion. We'd been allocated a few
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hundred extra square feet of space, some more machines, three new desks;
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over a long weekend, I organised a general shifting around of our
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equipment so that it all fitted together. Ergonomic neatness and
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psychodynamics weren't a consideration; we were drastically short on
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reliable network cables, and the final situation of the machines was
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limited by this factor more than any other element. I was certain that
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if any drastic personal conflicts arose, they could be resolved.
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Tuesday morning, I noted that Veil's machine was now right next to
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Alannah's.
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It would be hard to imagine two more different people. Veil was a
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Goth, of the Jourgensen Variety; a gaunt, saturnine young man with an
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unruly shock of blue-black hair who habitually dressed entirely in
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black, affected mirrorshades, a walkman and dusty motorcycle boots; he
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wasn't strong on interpersonal communication, but he was a capable
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worker, almost monomaniacal (which always came in handy when we had a
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deadline looming before us).
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Alannah was referred to, privately, as the May Queen. She looked
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like she'd wandered off last year's Tolkien calendar; she wore light
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pastel dresses and about a dozen varieties of dark-brown wood pendants,
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usually had flowers woven into her pale gold hair and rarely wore shoes.
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The scent of patchouli drifted around her like an aura. Few people were
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taken in by the vague, dazed look on her face, particularly those who'd
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been on the receiving end of her wit. It wasn't just the clothing; she
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believed in fairies, and got quite offended when someone would suggest
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otherwise. She never raised her voice.
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That first morning, they were both too occupied with getting back
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into their current projects to worry about their immediate surroundings.
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After the sliding two-hour zone which we called lunch, however, I saw
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them darting the occasional glance at the other when they thought no-one
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was looking. I'd held out hopes that they might have coexisted
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peacefully; these hopes began to sink when Alannah asked Veil why he had
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such a nasty-looking backdrop on his screen (it was a picture by H.R.
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Giger, in sickly blue-green shades). He simply turned to face her and
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smiled, revealing elongated canines. She shifted away cautiously and
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brought up a new backdrop on her machine; a tiled pattern of pale-pink
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roses.
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I imagined that it might end there. Unfortunately, they had to work
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together on the next project. It isn't often that any of our employees
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feel inclined to put any of their personality into their work - Veil and
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Alannah were usually minimalist in that respect - but over the next few
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days, debates over minor points of style began to escalate into
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defensive arguments on the merits of one design philosophy over another.
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Veil favoured what he called the `fascist' approach, in which the
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user was treated like an idiot, rigidly excluded from options that
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Alannah thought should be generally available.
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`If they need to see the previous records, they can ask for them. I
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think the main screen is cluttered enough as it is. They won't all be
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using monitors as big as ours, you know.' She gave him her odd little
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smile, kept typing without looking up.
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`If you had your way, there'd be nothing on the screen except a text
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box with a button marked EXIT.' He smiled his approval.
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`That's the idea. Users are, in general, very simple people, and we
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don't want to scare them off.' She closed her document with a petulant
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snap of the mouse button.
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`Why don't we just put them in camps and be done with it?' His only
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response to this was to add a new button to the main screen display,
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with the text: PUT ME IN A CAMP NOW PLEASE. And he refused to take it
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out.
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After a few days of this kind of sparring, the conflict moved to a
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different level; I called this the battle of the Screen-savers. Veil's
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regular screen-saver was a jarring, sporadic white flash which looked
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like it might set off epileptic seizures. While he was out of the
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office, Alannah committed the unpardonable sin; she touched his machine
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and changed it to one of the smooth, green, cycling Mandelbrot designs.
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He didn't get angry; he simply changed it back and password-protected
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it. Later, she hacked it, changed it back to the green fractals and put
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in her own password. He retaliated by attacking her machine, adding a
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background task that altered the system event sounds on her machine at
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random. At one stage, they'd be as Alannah had set them, soft chirps,
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forest sounds, cat purrs; she'd exit a program and, without warning, her
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machine would scream at her, samples from industrial music songs, horror
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films, sounds of car accidents and breaking glass. It took her until ten
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o'clock that evening to find and remove the task; it came back again by
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itself the next morning. She was more thorough in removing it the
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second time.
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She put subliminal text in his flashing screen-saver; it took him
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almost as long as she'd spent fixing her system to get the messages to
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stand still long enough to read. They were selected sayings from
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oriental mystics, Discordians, Temple Ov Psychick Youth shamans, and
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when he'd managed to capture an example of the latter, he brought it
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over to me, a bitmap-file on a disk.
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`See this? TOPY was founded by industrial musicians. She's losing
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it.' I almost laughed.
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`I don't think she knew that. Anyway, didn't Genesis P Orridge go
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all techno-new age? Maybe that's the point she's trying to make.' His
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face went blank, a sign that he was plotting revenge. His eyes narrowed
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a fraction.
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`I'll show her a point or two.' he muttered. I didn't mind; this
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altercation wasn't affecting productivity, and I liked to think it was
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healthy.
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The next morning, he'd slipped a kind of dust-cover made of black PVC
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over his machine and monitor; two guttering black candles sat on either
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side of the desk, each giving off an unusual scent, and to top the
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ensemble off, a bleached ram's skull sat on top of the monitor. A CD
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player concealed under the desk played dark ambient rumbles. When she
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came in and favoured his altar with a withering look, he said casually,
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`It helps me think.'
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She couldn't allow this to go unchallenged; that evening, she
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equipped her desk with a tiny bronze gong suspended from a wooden frame,
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arranged vines around the base of the monitor, and two incense burners
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near the machine's cooling fan. The scents of rose, musk, sandalwood
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and the ever-present patchouli began to spread throughout the office.
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She rang the gong with a chrome-hex-nut-topped glass wand every
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twenty-three minutes; I could tell from the way his knuckles whitened
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when she did this that she was winning this round. He parried this
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attack by plugging headphones into his CD player and listening to
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industrial music. I could hear it, leaking out from around the edges of
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the headphones, from where I sat. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa roar. His hands
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would still occasionally clutch at nothing as if he was being given
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electro-shock therapy, but now it was his own doing. With his
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mirrorshades and his music, he was almost completely insulated from her.
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She'd go outside and smoke clove cigarettes until she stank of them,
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then she'd come back inside and sit upwind of a battery-operated fan. He
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came in after lunch with a jar of ground nutmeg, which he'd snort
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through a fountain-pen case. For a moment, I thought she had him there,
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but he mailed her a copy of his contract, subject: `no mention of legal
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substance abuse in this'.
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This whole thing had escalated to the point of interfering with work.
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I was about to step in and do some mediating, when our semi-sentient
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office network took a hand in it.
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They were both at lunch (she at a local vegetarian restaurant, he at
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a nearby hamburger joint, stoking his burner with cheap scorched meat
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which he'd come back and breathe all over her); I happened to look up
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and saw the hard-drive lights on their machines flashing almost in
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synch. First, her machine; then, his, for about ten minutes. Then, a
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tiny window appeared in the middle of her display: `HARD DRIVE FAILURE'.
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I had my suspicions, but I thought it prudent to let them work it out.
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Fortunately, she came back from lunch before he did. She saw the
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window, typed frantically with much use of the alt-key and deft
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movements of the mouse; it looked like something had just overwritten
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every sector on the disk. The only things left were memory-resident
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things running when she'd gone to lunch, and the first time she tried to
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use something that referred to a disk-based library, it fell over in a
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heap. I could see her lower lip quivering.
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Just then, Veil came back from lunch, oblivious to her distress. The
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first thing he noticed was that his hard drive was almost full; then he
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spotted the new subdirectory on his machine, and only after this did he
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notice that Alannah was about to collapse into tears. For the first
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time in weeks, he took off his shades; I could almost see his defences,
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his dark-shield aura, fade. She was just standing there, trying to come
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to terms with the loss of month's worth of work, when he cautiously
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approached her and handed her a glass with about three fingers of some
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dark-red liquid in it. She took it from him, sniffed it cautiously and
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then drank it down in one go. He smiled.
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`Vodka and cough syrup. Now, you go sit down over there, relax and
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Veil will fix.' Meekly, she complied; all he had to do was reinstall
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the operating system, re-establish the network connection and copy the
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contents of that sub-directory off his machine and onto hers. Magically,
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her machine had been brought back from the dead.
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I thought that he'd won when she asked him for another slug of that
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drink, but after considering that he kept his mirrorshades off for the
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rest of the day and assumed a much more open and friendly attitude, I
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decided it was a draw.
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The next day, instead of unadorned black, he was wearing blue jeans
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and a promotional T-shirt for the Cocteau Twins' `Four Calendar Cafe'
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album.
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She wore a dark-purple tie-died dress. And his mirror-shades.
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<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>۲<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20><> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>; <20><> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>ݲ<EFBFBD><DDB2><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>۱<EFBFBD><DBB1><EFBFBD>
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<EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> <20> <20> <20> tanj@pms.metronj.org <20> <20> <20> <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
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