Issue #128

Davis slammed an open palm down onto the table, causing the laptop to hop up into the air and the coffee to do a little tilt-a-whirl inside the mug. Locked up again. No matter how many times he installed the patches and updates that IT provided, nothing ever seemed to make any difference. He couldn’t get anything done, but of course the ass-hats in the offices upstairs never seemed aware of any problems relating to hardware. They expected the same results at the same time, every week. What did they care about whether or not what they were asking for was possible? All they cared about was the shortest possible route between them and their private jets and yachts.

He clenched his fists, closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing. Nothing was going to be fixed or accomplished if he let himself go down another rage spiral like this. He needed to get it together, and just deal with the problem. So the computer was going to throw up roadblocks, he would just have to deal with it until he heard from IT. What other choice did he have?

Davis jumped at the sound of his phone ringing, pausing to clench his eyes shut at the embarrassing shout that had nearly escaped his lips. It was just so rare for his phone to ring in the first place, let alone at this time of night when he was pretty sure that the only other people in the building were the janitorial staff. He picked it up, half expecting something to crawl out at him from the device.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Rankin, this is Shelly down in IT, I just wanted to let you know that we think we have resolved your issue, and I just sent up a file for you to install on your system.”

Again, he found himself looking around, as if someone was putting him on, with an overly-elaborate prank. He looked up at the clock again. “Kind of late for you guys, isn’t it?”

There was a chuckle on the other end. “Sometimes it ends up that way sir. When you get the flash drive, just insert it into your primary USB drive. The patch will auto-install and you should have no more issues.”

It was hard to not respond with sarcasm.

“Yeah, you guys have told me that before.”

“Sorry for the frustration, sir. Sometimes the gremlins in the machine are a little more of a challenge than we would like.”

Davis was scrolling through his memory, trying to recall if he had ever had someone from IT actually call him. He smiled a little at the thought of how all those socially inept tech-nerds were likely dealing with actually having a woman working with them when he realized that the line on the other end had gone dead. Shelly, apparently, was not much for small talk.

There was a light tapping on the door and Davis ambled over, opening the door slowly and peeking out, half hoping that he was going to be able to put a face to the voice on the other end of that phone. As he pulled the door open, however, he saw that there was no one there. He looked out into the hall, but it was empty. The thought started to form that he had imagined it, when he caught a glimpse at something on the ground and bent over to pick it up.

It was a flash drive, slightly smaller than a dime. He wondered why the kid who brought it up had just left something this small, waiting to be stepped on or sucked up into the vacuum cleaners. Probably didn’t matter much to IT, just one more from what was probably a shoe box full of these things. He closed his office door, settled back down at his desk and pushed the drive into the port.

Immediately, his system interface opened up a DOS control window, something he hadn’t seen since he was in junior high school. He stared at the prompt, waiting for a command to auto-fill, when the screen scrambled into a wild pix-elated mess, froze for several seconds and blinked off and on, back to normal. It was so quick he almost didn’t notice but then, after a minute it did it again, and again. He stared at the screen for several seconds, blinking, again, and again until, in a sudden moment of realization, it occurred to him that he wasn’t trying to blink his eyes. They snapped shut, out of his control like some kind of essential tremor.

Davis shook his head. He had been going on without sleep for way too long and was clearly feeling the effects. If he didn’t get some rest, something more serious was likely to happen than a few random eye blinkings.

Before he finished articulating that thought in his head, his hand lifted up off the table, raised up to the level of his head, and was brought crashing down, palm first onto the table, causing his plastic cup of pens to jump up into the air and spill its contents everywhere. The silence in the room felt like it had physical weight, as he tried to get his breath. It was like something had picked his own hand up, lifted it up and slammed it back down and at no point did he have control over any of it.

The computer chimed softly and he looked at the screen.

30% installed

This went beyond mere fatigue, this wasn’t normal. He had never heard of anything like this and there was no way that it was somehow—

This time, both of his arms lifted up, took hold of his head and turned it from side to side, wrenching his neck before releasing and slamming both palms down on the desk. He felt stinging pain, and saw that there were streaks of blood, criss-crossing across his hands and wrists.

75% installed

Davis groaned as his feet were lifted up off the floor and pushed off of the wall, causing his chair to move back, spinning at the same time. His arms spun back to try and catch his balance and during all of this, he was just a spectator, increasingly trapped inside of himself. Whenever he tried to do something, he would feel blinding pain pushing out from the inside of his head. His eyes were blinking more rapidly now, as he fumbled around on the inside of his mind, trying to figure out how this had happened, how it was possible.

His body had slipped completely from his awareness and he had been reduced to mere consciousness, watching the world swirl around him. He thought he heard something that vaguely sounded like his own laughter. His hands came into view and reached into the corner to pick up one of the golf clubs from the bag he always kept at work, in case he needed to go on a sudden outing. He watched as the club was hefted in his own hands, as if evaluating its potential as a club. As he felt himself turning to walk out of the office, he caught a glimpse as the computer screen flashed one last time.

Installation complete.