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