* * * * *
Chris Tallant
[email protected] 15,300 words.
THE CRIMSON CHIP
By Chris Tallant
I want to dedicate this book to Melissa Sharpe and the hard working students struggling to make it through the bloody trenches of argumentative essay writing involving around Composition 2.
In alphabetical order: Sara Borowicz, Troy Burton, Justin Corcoran, Joseph Cutlip, Eiran Fowler, Madeline Graham, Rachel Kaspetrus, Jessica Milazzo, Alina Morgan, Laura Rosebrough, Stephanie Scott, Brittany Shaw, Aaron Stephens, Joyous Strong, Jarrod Vandermeullen, Laina Vanwyke, Darlene Vreven, and Kendra Webster.
Keep writing; you will never know what stories your brain hides until you try writing them down.
In addition, I must thank my best friends Jack Sweeney and James Sobieski for stepping up and helping edit and clean the story arcs in the limited time I gave them.
Also, extra special thanks to Pattie Tallant for the painstaking task of proofing and correcting many flaws in the original drafts. I thank you even though you believe my feelings hurt – trust me, they ain’t.
Moreover, huge thanks to Marissa for giving me the time to write, and coming up with a great title.
If not for her, you would read something called “Blood on a Tiger” or something lame.
Chapter 1
I stood in front of Comerica Park on an otherwise unremarkable overcast Tuesday. The bells of St. Mary’s began their long droning chime indicating the arrival of noon, while I finished the quick text message on my iPhone and hit send:
“Trying again. I want her phone number this time.”
I slid the phone into the pocket of my trench coat and opened up my laptop. The fresh spring air danced around the myriad of oblivious people walking between lunches, meetings, or meandering around Detroit for some God-forsaken reason. Typing in commands into the console of the laptop, I glanced into the security camera at the top of the utility pole ten-feet from the base of the Detroit Tiger’s mascot statue where I perched and smiled. From a distance, I looked like a standard college kid, however to the security people staring at me from the other end of those cameras, I was their biggest threat - an unleashed hacker with access into their firewalls.
Most people look at the black non-descriptive boxes hanging from the poles and buildings in various locations around Grand Circus Park and ignore or see them as speed cameras. I know the truth. These cameras record every movement on each section in high-definition within a ten-block radius around the Compuware building; the world headquarters of Quicken Loans, the largest private owned financial institution in the United States. The cameras feed live footage through fiber optic cables into a sub-basement data farm underneath Cadillac Square where a certain fluorescent orange-haired security expert controls a team of “machinas,” or “legal hackers”; people arrested for hacking and later hired by security teams for their skills after serving prison time.
Not only do I know the little security hottie is watching my every move, but her boss is watching as well: Robert Hendrickson. Four blocks from where I sit, they’re waiting for me to do something.
Robert’s name alone made my smile widen as my fingers flew faster on my keyboard, the keystrokes coming faster as the code started to complete. Once the script finishes, I can put it in the directory to compile, cut, and remove the tracer while erasing any existence of me ever being in the system.
“It’s not going to work, Matt.”
I jumped at the sound of the voice behind me, the notebook almost flying off my lap. Turning around in a slow motion, my heart moved to my throat and accelerated in rhythm.
“How did you…”
“I’ve already cut off the account you targeted within your first Dim variable statement.” She said, brushing a chunk of her wild curly hair out of her eyes, “Why are you trying to get arrested again? And more important - why are you targeting Quicken Loans?” She paused, with her hands on her hips and sighed, “Haven’t we been over this before?”
“I told you the first time we met, I want a job doing this computer work.” I was dead serious. “I want to be on your team doing forensic security stuff.” God, she is beautiful. Her honey-brown skin, topped off with bright and wild hair in the sun made her glow like an angelic bronze statue chastising me while I pondered my next move. Even her scowl is cute, and while sitting beside me, I can’t look in her eyes while she talks. My stomach turns into pudding.
“You’re 19 years old,” she started as if reading my file, “an intern for the DMC as an Analyzer while a still in college,” she let out a sigh and shook her head. “Trust me, Matt, this job is not what you think. It’s not like the movies. There is no matrix.”
A nervous laugh escaped my lips, “I know all that, but…but it’s what I love to do. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”
“We’ve stopped you from cracking into our systems at least a dozen times,” she stood up, putting her hand on my shoulder and stopping my heart for moment. I caught a faint hint of cocoa butter, jasmine and stale coffee. “What makes you think we haven’t looked into your home network to find out what type of person you are?”
This threw me off guard. “You spied on me?” I was angry, insulted, and ashamed, all at once. “Did you find my secret stash of Paula Abdul albums?”
She cocked her head to the side and sat back, “Your…what? I love Paula Abdul.”
“I know.”
“How did you know that?”
“I can’t say.”
“I’ll beat it out of you.” The tone in her voice turned serious.
“Then I’ll never say.” I smiled back at her, trying to keep the conversation light.
She bent her head and growled, “Tell me.”
“Over dinner.” I stood up, closing the laptop lid, nodding down the street to the back of the almost visible Compuware building, “6pm at Texas De Brazil. The reservation is under my name. You know where the place is, I assume?”
She stood up, studying my face with a curious expression, her wild hair blowing in the warm noon wind, “Of course, but will you tell me everything you know? I don’t respond well to blackmail and this is in no way a formal date or any type of interview for a job.”
I laughed, “This isn’t blackmail at all, but I don’t have time to tell you everything I know,” I said, looking up. “However, I will tell you how I know about you.”
“6pm?”
I swung my backpack over my shoulder and headed back towards the hospital district. “I’ll see you at 6.”
I didn’t wait or turn around to see her expression. My imagination took care of her overjoyed schoolgirl reaction to our date - skipping back the four blocks down Woodward to wait with butterflies in her stomach. In reality, she probably shook her head at me for being a pathetic teenager and walked to grab a Coney dog on Lafayette.
I, on the other hand, had to learn as much about her as I could - the Paula Abdul fact was a wild guess. One of those things you question your brain “Why the hell did you just say that?” In addition, when you get a different response than what you expected say: “Well done, brain! Well done!” Except now, she thinks I know more.
The truth is, I don’t even know her name. I have tried to learn her name for two months. I only know her as “The pretty black girl with wild orange hair.”
* * * * *
I walk into my building floating on cloud nine.
“I have a date with the most beautiful and intelligent woman in the world and even though she said it wasn’t a date,” I take a breath before jumping up the next flight of stairs to the third floor, “it’s a date and we
both know it.”
I look down at the door to open with my swipe card and fish my phone and ID badge out of my pocket. I glance at my phone to check the time and notice a screen full of messages from my roommate - all telling me to call him ASAP. As I swipe into the floor, I tap his icon on the phone and call his cell.
“What’s up? You’ll never guess what happened.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at work,” I say, still trying to catch my breath from skipping up three flights of stairs, “Just got back from lunch.”
“You,” Jason stammers, at a loss for words, “aren’t arrested.”
“Nope.” I said victorious, “She told me to stop trying and I invited her for dinner. She said yes!”
“She said yes?” I could picture him standing there with one eyebrow raised in a questioning stare.
“Yes,” I said, still full of confidence. “She wants to know what I know, so kind of like a date and an interview in one!”
“You’re full of it.”
“Nope, for real, yo.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, putting my backpack and coat in my locker, “I have a date with her tonight.”
“I still don’t believe you, besides, there’s a bigger issue.”
“What’s that?”
“Your boss called me today.”
“What?” My happiness left my body, “why would he call you?”
“Well,” Jason said, “we go to the same church and it’s how I suggested you for that position in the first place.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting on the wooden bench in front of my locker, tying up my scrubs, “What’s wrong now?”
“He’s worried you’re getting careless,” Jason said, “Something about you not submitting the final day’s paperwork for the last two weeks?”
“Oh come on!” I stood up, now mad, “He’s just trying to micro-manage me and wants to know where I am every second of the day.” I started pacing back and forth, “I do a great job here, this is bullshit and you know it. Paperwork doesn’t mean squat - it’s all political nonsense used to track me.”
“Entirely possible,” Jason said, trying to reason with me, “but everyone in corporate America does time tracking of some type. There isn’t a job or a career out there that doesn’t require some form of time tracking for management purposes.”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting back down, “you’re probably right.”
“I have to do it here,” he tried to sympathize, “and this is all R&D work. Nothing medical about designing cars.”
I kicked at the grout in the floor tiles with the toe of my shoe. Not saying anything, I wondered how I could get out of doing this time tracking nonsense again. All I do is scan the microchips the surgeons put in patients and confirm they show up on the network and communicate a two-way cross-talk with the server; it’s not life or death.
“Hey Matt,” Jason said, “you really got the orange haired girl to go out with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get her name?”
“Not yet. I still need to find out more about her.”
“Have you tried the corporate organization chart? If she’s an employee…”
I cut him off. “I tried that already. She’s security, so she’s not listed to the public and all the security employees are sub-contracted through some other firm so they don’t have to list them as corporate employees which is how they get around the rest of the stuff.”
“Facebook?”
“Tried it.” I admitted. “I tried Google Plus, Facebook, Yahoo, Linked In, Tumblr, Twitter, and any other social media I could think of. Hell, I tried typing in ‘orange haired security quicken’ into Google images and found a ton of porn, but nothing on my dream woman.”
“Odd,” Jason said. “Well, if she’s an old school hacker, maybe she has an old MySpace page?”
“I didn’t try MySpace,” I admitted.
“Before we get off the subject,” Jason reminded me, “you should speak with Dr. Roma. If for no other reason to clear the air between you two.”
“He hates me and you know it.”
“He does not hate you.”
“Yes he does,” I said, realizing I sounded like a spoiled child. “I’m a paid intern, unlike the other interns here, so he treats me worse than he treats the nurses.”
“Well,” I could hear Jason trying to come up with some logical reason he would treat anyone bad from his Christian point of view, “he is the chief of medicine, a busy man, maybe cut him some slack and do the paperwork everyone else does to stay off the radar?”
“I guess.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” Jason said, trying to cheer me up. “Give me the details of the date when you get home. You know how I live vicariously through you.”
“Yeah, I will, bud.” I did smile at that, because Jason never went out with women. I know he wasn’t gay due to his extensive problems with spyware on his laptop I have to rebuild every few months, but his social problems stem from back in grade school when he couldn’t talk to anyone. He sat next to me in many classes due to our last names being close alphabetically, but even then, it took two years for him to speak openly about things bothering him. It wasn’t until college when he finally admitted he had a problem and I helped him find a good psychologist to get his agoraphobia and social anxiety medicated.
Still, after all these years and after all we’ve been though, he’s the closest thing I have to brother or any family for that matter since my Mom and Dad died five years ago. Of course, he was the only one who could relate since his Mom died of cancer back in middle school. He is, hands down, my best friend.
I guess it’s time to face the music and speak with my boss.
* * * * *
“Dr. Roma?” I said, knocking on my Boss’ open door, “You wanted to see me?”
“Ahh,” Dr. Roma said, not looking up from his paperwork littering his desk, “please have a seat, Mr. Becker.”
I walk in to his tiny office. If he would clean it once in a while, it would seem so small. Someone with a claustrophobia fear wouldn’t last five minutes in here. Maybe this is by design.
“Have a seat, son.” He looks up at me with a plastic smile and waves towards a seat filled with paperwork.
“No thank you,” I said, estimating the seat pre-occupied with the printed remains of a tree, “I’m good standing.”
“There have been a few complaints, and we need to discuss them before they become worse.”
“Complaints?” I fake interest knowing the only complaints are from him.
“Yes,” he says, going back to his paperwork, picking one seeming at random, “one surgeon made a note on his report saying he saw you tampering with the dosage of the microchip after the insertion.”
“What?” I screamed, “I never…”
He held up his hand to silence me. “This is not the place, I am here to make certain wrongs become right.”
“Sir,” I said, trying to clear my head, “I don’t have the proper access in the network to alter any medication levels on these chips. You gave me the access needed to scan and verify the chips work.” I tried to calm my rapid breathing before adding, “That’s all I can do.”
“Yes, but…” Dr. Roma shuffled through some more papers and pulled out another one, “did you also not go into the system on April 3rd to look for the serial number for a microchip out of Royal Oak? We don’t support Royal Oak patients I’m aware of unless one came through triage, which should be brought to my attention on a worksheet. Which brings me to my next complaint…”
“I know, I know…” I said, lowering my head, “my time sheets.”
“They are vital in not only giving you the recognition you deserve for doing a great job, however, the school requires these to confirm you work here for your internship.”
“So you’re telling me be
cause I haven’t turned these in, I’m not getting my intern credits?” I tried to slow my words, however my breathing accelerated again and Roma noticed, going in for the kill.
“Until you can prove you have the time clocked in and the work recorded,” Dr. Roma took his glasses off his large nose, “I’m afraid not.” The glasses left large indentations on the sides of his nose where small migrating birds could create nests in springtime. Most people noticed Dr. Roma gigantic nose first since it looked like he could sneeze and blow his moustache away.
“Great.” I threw my hands up and knocked over a stack of paperwork on the chair. “I… I’m sorry, I’ll pick it up.”
“Don’t worry, son,” Dr. Roma said, “Start turning in your sheets and keep your nose clean and we can make sure you get the credit you need for the internship.” Dr. Roma stood up and placed his hands on his desk, “Just make sure you keep your nose clean. No more funny business.”
“Yes sir,” I nodded, backing out of his cluttered office, “I promise.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
I shut his door and walked down the hallway towards the elevators, my shoes squeaking on the polished white tiles. Why do all hospital floors squeak when you walk on them? Never mind, it’s time to get back to work. Maybe I won’t lose this job and internship after all.
I hit the down button on the elevator and waited for the elevator as the doors opened. Robbie from Post Op waited in the elevator going down to the basement where I planned on going.
“Hey Robbie, how’s it going?”
“Another day, another dime.”
“True, true…”
“I think this guy may belong to you,” he pulled the chart and flipped it over while the elevator descended, “yup, recent heart attack, microchip implanted for nitro and remote EKG monitoring.”
“Great!” I feigned interest, focusing my attention on the bigger news of the day - my orange-haired date later in the evening.
The elevator doors opened and I followed Robbie and the patient into my little glassed-in area where a small table next to an old Hewlett-Packard smoke-stained desktop with a coiled IR hand scanner laid on the side of the monitor, the screen scrolling in a mind-numbing black and amber hue. I smacked the space bar to stop the dizzying screen saver and punch in my ID code to log in.