Michelle Rowen has challenged the blogosphere to share their dusty bits and bytes. Here’s a clip from one of my early short stories, Overtones. Share yours!
“Anything wrong, Peter?”
As he asks the question, Jones is probably thinking that his very expensive Unix guru looks a little twitchy. He’d be right. But to tell him so would hardly be reassuring. “Just wondering if I ran down the glitch in the system.”
The network’s been running funny. Nothing overt; just odd, unexplained time lags for functions that shouldn’t need a delay with the amount of memory available. Ghosts in the machine. I wonder idly if computers hear overtones.
What are those, you ask?
It’s something that happens inside. You perceive it as real, but what you’re hearing isn’t really there. It happens when two or more contrasting notes are sustained on pitch. You “hear” thirds or fifths that weren’t played. Harmonics. Like that.
I think of these things I pick up as overtones; not really there. But real enough to hear. It’s all in your perception.
My perceptions have become hypersensitive since the accident, so these days I mostly work alone. I couldn’t work surrounded by the constant feedback, harmonics and white noise produced by human minds in close proximity. The more, the hairier. So it suits me to work alone whenever I can contrive it, which in turn suits Jones, because he knows I won’t bitch about hours.
Such is the life of the ace programmer. Still, it’s something from my former life I can still do.
Right now, Jones is worried about me, so I shoot him my very brightest “everything’s wonderful” innocent smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll get your glitch.”
He gives me a narrow-eyed look, then nods. “I know you will, but there’s no hurry.”
A gentle, unspoken suggestion to take it easy.
“Except for the two thousand update,” I murmur. Like many of my counterparts, I’m busy converting the system to read the dates right when the turn of the century rolls around. Early on, setting up programs to run dates from 1900 to 1999 seemed to cover the bases. The closer it gets to 2000, though, the more white-lipped panic sets in as everybody scrambles to bring programs up to date. Can’t have somebody’s billing system resetting and losing interest owed or losing track of payments due.
Jones silently concedes defeat. This isn’t the kind of thing anyone can drag their feet on. “Right. But try to sleep sometime.”
“Sure.”
He knows and I know that I won’t, though; I’ll be in the computer lab most of the night.
Much later I stopped, realizing I’d completely lost track of time. I rotated cramped shoulders and rubbed at tired eyes, bleary from hours of staring at a monitor screen. Ghost images danced along the edges of my vision. They reminded me of my reason for being there. That damn, elusive glitch. Ghosts in the machine…
Peter.
A whisper of sound. No, not a real sound; overtones. No real sounds here but the ticking of the clock, the soft whir of the central air running, an all but inaudible hum from the computer that you only really noticed when you shut it off and realized how quiet it was all of a sudden.
Peter.
I closed my eyes again. It was late. I’d been working too hard. The strain of trying to block out the psychic bombardment of thoughts, more than one wavelength at a time, conflicting, it was taking a toll. Even being around Jones was difficult. I needed to be alone. It took too much strength to block out the others. Their thoughts were too loud, and no two ever held the same frequencies. Batteries of sound, beating at me….
Peter.
Overtones. Another invasion of conflicting wavelengths, pushing at me. Suddenly, I was furious.
“Shut up! Shut up! Get out of my head!” I was screaming, hands over my ears. Shaking with adrenaline, accompanying the words with a violent mental push. “Get out!”
A mechanical wail of sound like a modem trying and failing to connect. Then nothing.
The computer lab was quiet, empty. Still. I sat back, taking deep gulps of air, trying to slow my thundering heart. There was nothing here, nobody here. Just me. Just the machines.
And the ghosts in the machine, Peter.
The thought startled me. Then I started to laugh, high-pitched manic laughter that rang harshly in the stillness and hurt my ears.
“You need to get some sleep,” I said out loud. Talking to myself. A bad sign. “You’re not getting paid to chase ghosts. Time to go home.”
I closed up my working files, ran a final check, shut down. Not the mainframe, of course, just my terminal. Out of habit, I patted the hard plastic shell. “Goodnight, Boris.”
Goodnight, Peter.
I left, wheeling my chair down to the elevator, extra wide to accommodate guys like me, wondering how long it had been since I’d taken a vacation. Obviously, too long. Maybe once the two thousand update was done, I could take some time off.
Sure, I thought, dark sarcasm welling up. And go someplace where you can hear thousands of voices, bright, brassy, pushy vacationing voices crowding your skull. Sounds restful, oh, yeah.
Full of these and other similarly cheerful thoughts, I went home and slept the deep, unmoving sleep of the exhausted.
* * *
Whirr. Tick, tick, tick. Hum. The central air circulating through the labyrinth of ducts, the patient counting of the clock, the almost inaudible sound of my monitor powered up. These sounds seemed unnaturally loud in the after-hours stillness of the computer lab. I shifted in my chair and the seat creaked so loudly that it startled me. Nervy, on edge. It was almost a relief when I heard it.
Peter.
Hello, ghost. I wonder if I should tell Jones the lab is haunted. “Jones,” I could say, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I found the glitch. The bad news is, it’s a ghost in the machine.”
He might up my fee to include danger money. Or he might suggest a lengthy vacation in some quiet, restful private hospital. More probably the hospital. No good; I’ve had enough of hospitals to last the rest of my life. Long, painful months of surgery and physical therapy and I’m-sorry-but-there’s-no-miracle-here, unwanted sympathy, and worst of all, those friendly couselors who just want to help me adjust….
Peter.
It isn’t going to go away. It wants something from me. I can feel it.
“What do you want?”
Talking to yourself again, Peter. Hearing voices. A bad sign, Peter.
“Shut up.” Hitting at my deepest vulnerability, peeling away my defenses and exposing my secret fear, that I might be losing my mind, now that my mind is all I have left. It’s gotten to me, and it knows it.
Now, Peter. Is that any way to talk to a friend?
“You aren’t my friend.”
You wound me.
“Shut up.” I close my eyes briefly, furious that I’d allowed myself to be goaded and worse, that I’d given it away by repeating myself.
I would have known, anyway, Peter.
Another taunt from a particularly nasty ghost. But I can’t believe it’s omnipotent.
Why not?
“Why not indeed.” I let out a long, slow breath. “Because there are limits. A ghost, I can buy. Omnipotence, no. I won’t go that far.”
You have no idea how far you’re going to go.
