Get up offa that thing, p.5
Get Up Offa That Thing, page 5
Agent Sandy honed in on the soft spot in her plan as if she’d seen it written on Justine’s face. “You usually did QA for Brett’s work. Did you miss that error?”
Justine leaned forward and nodded her head, the way she guessed an innocent person would do. “You can tell by the history in our source control who wrote the code, who reviewed the code, who made changes. It’s all clear. I’m sure our manager can tell you what happened.”
Justine waited, trying not to hold her breath. She couldn’t lead them straight there.
Agent Brown cleared his throat. “That’s the thing, Justine. You see, we had your boss, Nitin, walk us through the work you all do. He was quite anxious to help us.”
Of course he was. He could likely see his future disappearing before his eyes. Another thing Justine hadn’t anticipated. Damn it, all she had really wanted to do was show the world that economic justice wouldn’t hurt too much, and throw a little shadow into Brett’s bubblicious life. Now she had Nitin’s future on her conscience, and the chaos resulting from this sudden equity adjustment. The last time she’d looked out her window, she thought she had seen smoke coming out of the top of Salesforce Tower.
Justine looked from agent to agent, blinking. Willing them to come to the conclusion she’d set them up to reach.
At last, Agent Sandy broke the silence. “We saw a regular pattern—one that surprised your boss.”
Justine knew she couldn’t blush on demand, but she looked down at her fingers as if she was blushing.
Agent Sandy continued, “We saw that you’ve been rewriting his code for months.”
Agent Brown took over. “So naturally we expected last night’s push, which we suspect was the code that embezzled all that money, would have your rewrites in it, too. But it didn’t.”
She gulped and looked down again to hide her face. She hadn’t thought about the break in pattern of that last push.
“Oh, last night, Nitin told me to go home. I guess Brett finished it on his own?”
Justine blinked at the agents, waiting. She’d managed to push last night’s code, logged in as Brett. His passcode was easy to guess, given the giant Q on his screensaver: WWG1WGA. She knew Nitin would have told the agents that he was with her at the time the code was pushed, a sort of alibi. She also knew the logs would show that it was done from Brett’s machine. He was gone partying so much that she’d been able to tunnel in to his actual computer. And then erase all evidence of her intrusion.
It surprised Justine when Agent Sandy leaned in one more time. “Look, we know it was Brett’s checkins that planted this bug that seems to have triggered everything. I’m guessing we’ll find that any other sabotage to code was done by him as well. But he wasn’t part of the Integrations team. How could he have known his code would propagate automatically to nearly all domestic banks?”
Justine wobbled in her chair—some unknown ingestion and distribution process had grabbed her code and pushed it to many banks. She flailed for an answer out loud, as they might have done in a release post mortem.
“Perhaps every system on earth talks to every other system now? If it’s possible to accidentally ingest all kinds of instructions.” She laughed at the thought of it, the crazy irony.
Agent Brown’s avuncular face turned cold and hard. “The chaos of this criminal act is bringing us close to economic collapse. Bank runs, civil unrest…Nothing about this is funny.”
Justine shook her head, the way a nice white lady would. “Sorry—of course, this isn’t funny. But maybe the banks can just…roll back the transactions?”
Agent Sandy gave her an up-and-down look that told Justine she’d made a mistake, been too smart or failed to sound sincere. “The code in question erased a lot of logs in a lot of places and followed the trail of replicated data all over the world. So, maybe a few folks can claw their money back—but that’s hard to do when no one knows where each dollar came from, much less where it went to specifically. It’s a mess—and so many people have pulled out of the banking system, there’s not a lot left to take back.”
Justine made her eyes go wide. “Wow, that sounds like a real flaw in our banking system. Hard to believe no one’s taken advantage of that before now.”
The agents looked at each other. Justine silently cursed her smart mouth.
Agent Brown straightened his tie and began collecting his things. “Last question.”
“Anything, Agent Brown.”
“We know the final check-in of this code came at a time when Brett was away from his terminal. Could he have checked in remotely?”
“Oh gosh,” Justine said, and pretended to think. “He could have checked in with his cell phone—you know our employer wants us available twenty-four seven.” Like servants, she thought. Justine caught herself rubbing her wrists where she’d gotten RSI so long ago. She didn’t know for sure if Brett had clicked the link she’d sent to him in the party—a link that would make it look like he’d done something in the source code, destroying his alibi.
She saw the two agents exchanging a glance, and then they said their goodbyes. As she leaned out her window to watch them drive off, Justine noticed the shimmering excitement of the night before had given way to a lot of crazy on the streets—even by San Francisco standards. Justine saw clouds of black smoke rising from a mile or two away. She watched two cars collide up the block, and a crowd formed as the angry drivers leapt out of their rides and started a beef. It was getting really weird out there.
She had just wanted to show the world one small, contained example of how it might not be a total disaster to get America on the good foot, equity-wise, using a single bank branch. But her one attempt had gone far farther than she’d intended, because most software systems were connected to each other one way or another now. Real live people were being hurt.
How could she get America on the good foot now?
She brewed a strong pot of coffee and sat down at her home laptop. After a few hours of prep, she began her online campaign on Facebook. She asked all the Q-anon moms “what’s wrong with sharing the wealth? Did you lose anything? Don’t you think it’s safer for your kids and grandkids to have people fed and housed than not? If those rich people thought you were anything more than a tool, wouldn’t they have done something for you by now?”
Justine was still feverishly at work, building an anonymous campaign to embrace global equity, when they arrested her the next morning. This time they spoke with her at the local jail, and the agents didn’t bother with any niceties at all. Polite but not at all nice.
“You have started a chain of events more seditious than—”
Justine lowered her head and held up her hand. “You can call me a law-breaker if you must, but just you remember, if I did this, that I did it for my country.”
Agent Sandy sensed an opening and plunged in. “Do you admit to sending the code that sent the entire banking system into an economic tailspin from which the nation might never recover?”
Justine realized then that Agent Sandy was likely a hobby-investor in the stock market. And was temporarily losing her shirt.
After a long pause, Justine set her foot on a path she’d never again leave.
“Child,” she began, feeling an ownership of her age, of her actions, of all of it. “I admit to showing the world what real equity might look like. I admit I committed a lifetime of small wrongs—letting my racist cracker father tell jokes he shouldn’t. Letting my Black friend tell me about being ignored at a restaurant without doing anything except sympathizing. Hearing my Asian friend complain about the extreme and daily affronts that exoticism dumped on her—usually ending in gross sexual harassment. It didn’t happen to me, so I could pretend it was rare, unusual, not part of daily life, and not behavior with life-or-death consequences. I could empathize, but then go back to my comfortable world.
“Then one day the camera-phone brought me up short. Now I can’t pretend innocent Black men aren’t jailed or murdered by cops simply because they are black. I can’t pretend women of color don’t endure rape, obscenely low wages, or face the dilemma of whether to buy food or medicine for their children! Numbers and pictures caught up with us. The facts are there for everyone to see. Even an intellectually lazy old white lady like me.”
Agent Brown interrupted her. “You’re telling me you ‘liberated’ an entire banking system and didn’t suck up a little for yourself? You’re risking the entire rest of your life in prison for other people?”
“No. I’m merely paying back the ease and privilege that was given to me by a system that’s so broken we don’t even know where to start fixing it.”
Agent Sandy snorted. “Nobody does that. Nobody steals for other people.”
Justine answered, “I’m in a unique position to understand the stakes and the consequences. Passive resistance is all well and good in an analog society—but digital life means digital resistance, my dear agents. I never intended for things to go this far, but that’s the chance you take when you strike a blow for freedom. Now that the world’s felt the effect of one modest equity leveling, there is no suffocating the fire of our imaginations. The future will change now.”
As they led Justine to the holding cells, she heard the faint cry of a crowd from outside. She hoped against hope that some of them knew how to hack.
Illustration credit: Dale Berry
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Back to TOC
Money to Burn
(inspired by the song “The Boss”)
Lisa Morton
When Teresa woke up after the first surgery, she asked for her phone; she told the nurse she had to call her brother right away.
“Eddie, it’s me. Don’t talk, just listen: I got t-boned by a drunk on my way to the store yesterday, and I’m in the hospital. I’ll probably be here another week, so you need to call that agency that we get Dad’s caregivers from and get him twenty-four-hour help.”
It was 1 p.m., but Eddie already sounded drunk, his words half-slurred. “Holy shit. Are you gonna be okay?”
“I’ll be fine, but it’s just going to take a while and Dad needs somebody now.”
“Yeah, I’ll take care of it.”
She knew she should be the one to call the agency, but she was drifting in and out of post-op consciousness…and surely Eddie could handle just this much, right? He’d have to go to Dad’s house, find the number, make the call right away—it would be easy for anyone else.
Teresa’s last thought before she drifted back into drugged slumber was: He’ll fuck this up like he always does.
The hospital stay took two weeks, not one. The twenty-two-year-old asshole who’d slammed into her in the intersection had broken her left hip and shoulder in multiple places. The doctors told her she’d been lucky that other, softer things hadn’t also been broken.
Teresa had to laugh at that—“lucky”. Sure, she was lucky…so lucky that she’d been smashed up by an uninsured drunk at nine in the morning. So lucky that her insurance would only cover some of her medical costs, leaving her with a huge bill she didn’t know how she’d pay. So lucky that her seventy-year-old father, who thought the year was 1993 and didn’t know his own address, had to have a twenty-four-hour caregiver until she could return home to look after him again. Dad had the money to cover that additional expense, thank goodness, but only for a few weeks.
No, the drunk who’d walked away with only minor bruises was lucky. Teresa, on the other hand, had felt like a bad luck-magnet her whole life, from the day she was born and the nurses had mixed up her I.D. bracelet with another baby, to losing her mom to cancer when Teresa was only sixteen, to giving up her job—hell, her life—at thirty-two to take over her dad’s care, to today, stuck in a hospital bed because she’d dared to go to the grocery store. Even her Auntie Jo, who’d helped raise her, had called her “cursed.”
On her last day in the hospital, Teresa brought up Dad’s main bank account on her phone, hoping to pay a few of his bills. What she saw brought on a shock almost as bad as realizing that car doing fifty mph through a red light was going to hit her: Dad’s account had just over $300. It had been over $30,000 two weeks ago.
Trying to push down panic, Teresa looked through the recent activity. Dad had written two checks, to someone named Reynaldo Samosa. Both checks were for $15,000.
Fingers trembling, Teresa immediately called her brother. “Eddie, who is Reynaldo Samosa?”
“He’s the caregiver I hired for Dad. Why?”
She hung up without another word and called Dad’s number. After ten rings, he answered.
“Dad, it’s Teresa.”
“Oh, hi, baby. Will you be home soon? I’m really hungry.”
Teresa’s free hand clenched into a fist. “Is Reynaldo there?”
“No, he left yesterday. Listen, I had to loan him some money to cover his mom’s cancer surgery, but he says he’ll pay it back next month with ten percent interest.”
“Look, Dad, sit tight and somebody will be there soon, okay?”
“Okay, Marianne. Love you.” Marianne had been her mother’s name.
“Love you, too.”
Teresa called the caregiver agency herself and got somebody to stay with Dad until they released her. She called her brother back, trying to stay calm as she asked for the details.
Eddie hadn’t called the agency, of course. Instead, he’d called his friend Ty, who’d recently hired a caregiver for his grandmother, a guy named Ray. Ray came highly recommended. Ty had assured Eddie that Ray was compassionate, dedicated, strong enough to pick up a senior who’d fallen, and an all-round good guy.
“Your ‘good guy’ conned Dad, Eddie,” Teresa told him. “Dad’s got almost no money left. I don’t know how we’re going to pay for anything.”
“Don’t you have money?”
Teresa wanted to reach through the phone and strangle Eddie. He’d always been an amiable loser, one of those people who never seemed to accomplish anything but was personable enough to skate through life on the kindness of others. He currently lived in a backyard shed behind a friend’s house, paying no rent but always ready to party. When that fell through—because it always did—he’d come home for a few weeks until Dad and Teresa couldn’t take it anymore, and then he’d find another couch or guest house or garage.
“No, Eddie, I don’t have any money. I haven’t worked since I became Dad’s live-in caregiver. We were living off Dad’s pension and social security.”
“Yeah, but he’s still getting those, right?”
Teresa actually pulled the phone away for a few seconds, staring at it in fury. When she could speak again, she said, “The property taxes are due this week. Do you have even the faintest idea how much those are? I have to pay them from Dad’s savings. Without those savings, I can’t pay his property taxes, and without paying his property taxes, we won’t be able to live in his house. Do you get that at all?”
“Ohhh. Shit. What are you gonna do?”
She noticed he didn’t ask, “What are we gonna do?”
Later that day, they sent Teresa home with dozens of pages of instructions, prescriptions, and numbers for places that might help. When she arrived home, she found Angie, the agency caregiver who usually took care of Dad while she was out, making him lunch. Since Teresa would be wheelchair-bound for a few more weeks, Angie agreed to take on extra hours. Angie was funny, tough, but loving, middle-aged but corded in muscle. Everything a caregiver should be, in other words…not a cheap conman preying on the elderly.
Teresa tried calling Reynaldo’s number, was unsurprised when there was no answer, not even a voice-mail. Eddie had no other way of contacting the man, so Teresa called the cops next. They sent out a tired-looking middle-aged detective in a rumpled pantsuit who listened to Teresa’s story, asked a few questions, took all the information she had on Reynaldo Samosa, and as she stood to go, gave Teresa the bad news. “I’m sorry to tell you, Ms. Michaud, that it’s unlikely we’ll be able to do much. If we find this guy and it goes to court, all he has to say is something like your father gave him the money as a bonus and that he never said it was for his sick mom. You’ll have to prove that your father’s mental state was such that he was incompetent, and that might be tough.”
“But he’s plainly got dementia. He doesn’t even know who the president is, or how long my mom’s been gone…”
“Do you have a doctor’s diagnosis of dementia?”
Teresa’s hope curdled. She hadn’t taken Dad to his last regular physical exam because it had been scheduled during a resurgence of coronavirus. “No,” she admitted.
The detective shrugged, gave her a business card, and left. When Teresa called two days later, the detective told her they’d found Reynaldo Samosa’s last address, but he’d left there just after cashing Dad’s two checks. He had no previous record, and they had no clue on his whereabouts right now.
And she had no money. There was enough of a limit on one card to pay Angie, but that was it.
“It’s okay, baby girl,” Dad said a few nights later as she sat before the TV with her head in her hands. “Ray will get that money back to us soon, and with interest. It’s like we get to help someone and make a little money doing it.”
She couldn’t answer, not even a comforting lie.
Over the next week, Teresa was able to wrangle assistance for her medical bills, and she found a program to offset some of the costs of the extra care Dad needed while she was recuperating, but their property tax payments were now delinquent.
