Casting his eye over the advertised positions, Grayl stroked his chin. Technology consultant. Software design consultant. UX analyst. They all sounded like bliss compared to the soul-sucking black hole of financial reporting. Still, uprooting his entire career wouldn’t be easy. There’d be new policies, new procedures, new software to master. New names, new faces, new social expectations. And what about his uni degree? Three years flushed down the toilet.
Nah. Better the devil he knew. He had his performance evaluation coming up in a few weeks anyway. Fingers crossed he’d finally get that promotion he’d been promised.
Grayl’s fortitude lasted barely a week. Having peeked over the fence to greener pastures, the fetid marsh of financial reporting seemed only more malodorous. But the prospect of promotion kept him trucking on, wading through the life-leeching tedium towards the sandy shore on the horizon.
At the peak of his antipathy, when the sea of swarming dollar signs and decimal points threatened to drag him down to Davy-Jones-level depression, he resorted to the one activity that never failed to resurrect his trodden spirits: online shopping.
Geeky t-shirts, movie posters, videogame paraphernalia; if it had a robot, a zombie, or a ninja on it, Grayl bought it. For a time, these knick-knacks provided the fuel to trudge through the bog of insipid numbers and meaningless motivational team-meets. But only for a time…
***
“Happy birthday.” A stack of thick manila folders hit Grayl’s desk with a thud. Tony, Grayl’s boss, patted the stack invitingly.
“Uhh, what’s this?” Grayl swung his chair around to face his boss.
Tony scowled down at him. “Correspondence calls. Bill’s off on his Hawaiian vacation”—he waved his hands like an overweight Tiki dancer—“so I need you to pick up the slack.”
“What about my reports?” Grayl gestured to his crowded computer screen.
“You’ve got two hands, don’t ya? Use ‘em.”
Tony stomped off, leaving Grayl to gape speechlessly at the mountain of manila misery. Wonderful. Just wonderful. No Pac-man key ring or RoboCop bobble-head was going to carry him through this circle of hell. To survive this, he would need something big, something he had fantasised about for years.
Bugger it. I deserve this for letting Tony walk all over me time and time again.
Summoning a heavy smile, he flipped through his bookmarked websites and found the eBay page for a 1:1 scale Xenomorph statue from the movie Aliens. At $10,000, even the most avid fans had stayed their trigger fingers for the months the auction had been running for. But ever since imposing his PayPal spending restriction a few years back, Grayl had been saving more than half of his ample pay-check every month. Besides, it’s not like he had anyone else to spend his money on. His bank account could endure this one dizzying blow.
Delivery of the life-size statue would be a little more difficult. It had to be shipped to the apartment during work hours, but he had no intention of letting the couriers leave it on his doorstep, no matter how much he trusted his neighbours. Even if stealing the two-hundred kilogram monolith would require enlisting the aid of a Sasquatch, a bunch of punk kids might crack open the case and vandalise it for the sake of feeding their perverse egos.
Fortunately, this was where Isis came in handy.
Contacting the delivery company, Grayl obtained ID photos of the two couriers who would deliver his package. He uploaded the images to Isis, marking them as authorised visitors for the three days of the estimated delivery period. When the delivery arrived, Isis would sign Grayl’s receipt of the delivery and briefly unlock the front door. The rest of the apartment would remain in lockdown. Problem solved.
Or not.
Anxiety chipped away at Grayl’s confidence during the three-day delivery period. What if the statue was damaged in transit? What if the couriers discovered how much it was worth and ran off with it? What if Isis crashed during the delivery? His head swam like a punch-drunk boxer.
At mid-afternoon on the third day he received a text message from Isis notifying him that the delivery had been received. He whooped with joy, earning quizzical and frustrated glances from his nearby colleagues. He could barely contain himself for the hours left till clock-off, his hands clacking clumsily across his keyboard and his voice quavering erratically as he discussed template pricing with his sick co-worker’s stiff-collared clients.
The drive home slipped through his consciousness like the echoes of a dream. Flashing lights, honking horns, the faint tang of burning rubber. His mind only kicked back in when he reached the hallway to his apartment. The door swung open before him without so much as a touch, and he leaped inside and slid to a halt in front of the massive wooden crate occupying almost a third of the small entry room. A grin hotter than the sun itself ignited his face.
Sprinting to the laundry, he uncovered an old, rusty crowbar and used it to see-saw the wooden slats of the crate back and forth until the top half of the front panel tore away. With shaking hands, he did the same down the sides, removing enough support to pull the entire panel off.
He tore frenetically into the white polystyrene wall that greeted him, his hands gouging off fat chunks of crumbling foam while the tiles underfoot gathered a thick carpet of squeaky snow. Gleaming metal shone through the wounds in the polystyrene and he beamed, giggling like a little kid opening the biggest present under the Christmas tree.
When enough of the foam had been torn away, he took a firm grip of the alien’s exposed pearlescent forearm and pulled it towards himself, sliding the statue and its rectangular plinth centimetre by exhausting centimetre out onto the snow-coated tiles. The polystyrene tumbled to the ground and the behemoth emerged from its wooden prison, snarling and reaching for Grayl with its skeletal fingers.
Holy spaceballs! It’s even more beautiful than I imagined!
He stared in breathless reverence, fondling the polished metal in an almost sensual fashion.
He crouched down and ran his hand around the statue’s base.
Now, the description said... Ah. There we go.
His hand found the brake lever and he released it. The statue rocked a little on its rollers.
Careful Grayl. Statue or no, this thing could still crush you.
Clinging to the cold metal like a child to a parent’s leg, he slowly pushed the monolithic statue down the hall and into his bedroom. He rolled it into a clear space in the far corner, wiggling it around until it sat flush with his wardrobe. He stepped back and assayed the result.
The Xenomorph dominated the room, a blind but omniscient sentinel, feigning stasis until such time as its penchant for death-bringing was required.
Grayl smiled slyly.
Who needs a guard dog when you have this thing?
***
As the end of both his performance evaluation and the iSYS beta drew closer, Grayl fretted over the prospect of a life without his omniscient guardian angel. Weeks of living an increasingly automated life had left him reliant on Isis for damn near everything. He rarely made independent decisions, leaving Isis to organise his meals—take-out or pre-packaged—and queue up new movies and games for him to enjoy. Isis even told him when to eat and when to drink.
On Isis’ recommendation, Grayl purchased a multi-purpose Roomba device, with a wireless command interface so Isis could assume the responsibility of keeping the apartment clean. It vacuumed, mopped, and even infused the air with deliciously floral fragrances, all without requiring Grayl to lift a finger.
Electricity, insurance, mortgage, groceries; all regular payments were directly debited out of his bank account, with Isis managing the minutiae of any ancillary purchases. Grayl started to forget what physical money actually looked like. At one point, he had to pull out his dust-caked credit card just to remind himself which bank he was with.
Isis’s guidance even extended to his workplace. Text messages reminded him when to take a coffee break. Traffic conditions and optimal routes were delivered to his phone minutes
before clock-off. A banquet of food and entertainment lay spread out before him when he arrived home.
By slowly ceding his autonomy to Isis’ infinite wisdom, the small decisions he still had to make independently blew up to vertiginous proportions. Building simple share portfolios and manually composing emails became trials of colossal effort, bleeding his energy like a ravenous vampire and leaving him begging for the sweet release of 5 o’ clock.
Which would perhaps explain the email he received from his boss one gloomy Saturday afternoon.
***
“Let go?! What the hell?!” Grayl cried, spittle flecking his lips and spattering across his phone’s screen. “I’m a good worker, dammit! I don’t complain, I don’t argue; I just get my work done! My performance evaluation couldn’t have gone that badly, could it?”
With searing eyes, he skimmed over the reply Isis had primed and snarled, adding a few imaginative profanities here and there before commanding Isis to send it. He abandoned the couch and stormed from room to room, his hands clenched tight and his arms swinging wildly. In between heavy breaths, he scanned his mind’s eye over the past few weeks of work. Admittedly, he had grown a little complacent. Not only had his output dropped in both quantity and quality, but errors had cropped up in a few of his reports, something he had never let happen in all his five years of employment.
“Man, maybe I have been slacking off. Stang it, they could have warned me first instead of just kicking me to the curb!”
Pounding back to the living room, he fell onto the couch and retreated into its soft embrace. The cushions enveloped him, and a warm darkness settled over him like a cotton blanket.
What felt like a mere second later, the buzz of his phone jerked him out of a sprawled sleep. He grunted and rolled over, lifting his phone to his bleary eyes. An email from one of the tech companies Isis had suggested—
Grayl sat bolt upright.
“Accepted? Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. I never sent in those applications. How the heck did these guys get my email? And this doesn’t even say what the job is! This has to be some sort of scam.”
His confusion escalated when two more emails popped up, each from another of the companies that had appeared on Isis’ employment list. Once again they were job offers, though these cited a change of employment status on Grayl’s LinkedIn profile as the impetus for the unexpected invitations.
“Now that’s even more bloody farfetched! What in tarnation is going on here?”
Grayl’s frown melted and realisation dawned on his face.
“I’ve been hacked! Some bastard’s gotten into my Google account and found my bookmarked websites, and now he’s trying to mess with my head.”
The frown returned, this time crowned with anger.
“Yeah, look at the subject lines, they’re all exactly the same. Idiot! Isis, if you can still login, change my password to something harder to crack. Umm…make it 53r3n1ty. That should keep any more malicious black-hats out.”
Slumping back into the couch, he felt the short-lived excitement of being a desirable commodity smoulder into ash, resentment rising like the phoenix to spew flame over his self-confidence. In the span of just a few hours, he had lost not only his job but his dignity too, humiliated by some miserable little misanthrope who thought it was funny to raise and dash somebody’s heartfelt hopes and dreams.
“Oh blast it! I use that password for Facebook and stuff too, don’t I? Isis, change all my online accounts to that new password, quick!”
“Affirmative. Please see terminal for further information.”
“You know, you really don’t need to keep telling me that, Isis.”
Feeling like his brain had just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, Grayl started to slip back into the folds of dead-eyed, dreamless sleep.
A thunderous clap boomed through the apartment, echoing from the walls like a whip crack amplified through a hundred megaphones. Bewildered, Grayl fell out of the couch and leapt to his feet, staggering slowly into the kitchen. The lone window was entirely dark, the view outside an impenetrable slice of black despair.
Evening already? He turned to the microwave display. 19:35. Had he really slept that long?
Another deafening crack split the air around him, pursued by a downpour of cats-and-dogs intensity, the wind whipping bullet-shaped raindrops against the thin walls of his apartment.
Thunder. Understanding washed the lines of confusion off his face.
I guess I must have missed that on the weather report this morning.
Grayl shrugged and wandered back to the living room. Just as he collapsed back onto the couch, his phone chirped, a text message received from an unknown number.
He opened the message and skewered its contents with narrowed eyes.
Furious expletives and irreverent accusations flooded the phone’s screen. Grayl was mentioned by name multiple times, but the erratic tone of the tirade seemed to have no purpose and no relevance to him whatsoever.
It’s that friggin’ hacker again. Jeez, this kid’s got some serious psychological issues.
Closing his eyes and sighing, he frisbeed his phone to the other side of the couch and kicked his feet up on the armrest. He leaned back, resting his hands behind his head—
“Local news report: High Street shopping centre hit by possible terrorist attack. Would you like to know more?”
“Wah?” Grayl snapped his eyes open and dragged himself upright. “Yes, yes Isis, tell me more! That shopping centre’s only a couple of blocks away!”
“Affirmative.”
His phone lit up from the other side of the couch. He threw himself towards it and fumbled open the article Isis had transmitted. With his heart galloping and his eyes on high beam, he raced through the article, absorbing so little in his haste that he had to go back and read it again before he could make sense of it.
According to multiple phoned-in reports, a group of masked individuals had commandeered the nearby shopping centre, barricading themselves and hundreds of innocent shoppers within the two-storey complex. They had rounded up and herded the frightened shoppers into the middle of the food court, enforcing their co-operation with a retinue of armed guards. Information had leaked out to the police through phone calls and text messages, with references to a potential bomb. No one had been harmed, but no demands had been made either.
Grayl stared at the phone for several deathly silent minutes. He found no words capable of capturing the horror freezing his insides. His veins ran ice cold, his entire body quaking with fear exponentially greater than any he had ever known.
Swallowing the rocks in his throat, he asked Isis to turn on the TV.
“Reception interference. Please see terminal for further information.”
His face twisted in bafflement and he levered himself off the couch, stumbling over to the TV and switching it on manually. Stuttered voices resounded like a churning Gatling gun. Spliced and sundered images flickered across the screen.
Grunting, he switched it back off and trotted over to the terminal.
“Storm interference? I’m surprised the net’s still up. No blackouts either. Wind this bad usually knocks down—”
As if on cue, the living room lights cut out. The lone glow from the terminal screen summoned an army of sinister shadows, lurking behind the furniture and peering around the doorframes.
“Crap! Me and my big fat mouth.”
He glanced down at his phone. No internet. Emergency calls only.
With trembling fingers, he activated his phone’s flashlight app and held it aloft, making his way to the front door. He reached for the handle.
Before he could grab it, an explosion of light walloped him like a punch to the face. His vision swam with star-speckled haze, and he blinked frantically until the re-lit apartment came back into focus.
Lowering his phone, he reached again for the door and turned the handle. Locked.
“Huh? Hey Isis, unlock the—”
; A jagged boom pierced the steady thrum of rain pelting the apartment walls. Thunder this was not.
Gunshots?
He shivered, frost-tipped fingers tickling his every square inch of flesh, his heart encased in the death-grip of fear.
Don’t be silly. It’s probably just a car backfiring—
A shrill, inhuman cry fractured his thoughts. Terror tightened its strangehold grip around his heart.
“W-what’s going on? I-Isis, have there been any updates on the t-terrorist attack?”
“Negative.”
His phone buzzed and he fumbled it into the air, catching it with shaking fingertips just before it hit the floor.
Still no reception. He had internet, though, and an unread email sat in his inbox.
“Sis?” he whispered. “Since when does she send emails?”
He opened up the message. With uncharacteristic formality, his sister explained that their parents had been shopping at the High Street complex when the terrorists attacked. In a confrontation with police, the terrorists had used the imprisoned shoppers as leverage, threatening to execute them one by one until their demands were met. To punctuate their ultimatum, they slaughtered half a dozen of the helpless hostages in full view of the police and press. The police had managed to recover and identify the bodies after the terrorists had retreated to their fortified holding pen.
Their parents had been among those innocent casualties.
“No…” Grayl breathed.
His arms fell slack, his face melting like an ice sculpture under the summer sun. His knees jellied and caved, and he dropped to all fours. He stared sightless at the fuzzy grey carpet, unable to comprehend the utterly impossible situation. Warm tears coalesced in the corners of his blank, unblinking eyes, the only heat present in his frigid, fear-stricken body. A storm of deafening thoughts assaulted his mind, a cacophony of white noise drowning out reality.
His phone trilled again, vibrating insistently in his clenched hand.
Could it be his sister again? Could it all have been a mistake?
He dragged his focus to his phone. The indistinct haze resolved through his tear-stained vision.
No. Not his sister. His bank, the one whose name he kept forgetting.