Alt Esc

by Bob Sorensen

conclusion

Ben picked it up, and looked at the unit. It appeared to be exactly what it was supposed to be.

Taking a deep breath, he pointed the remote out of his cubicle and pressed ‘Pause.’

It was the instantaneous cessation of all heretofore unnoticed office clatter that startled Ben the most. He stood and looked around the office. Everyone, no, everything, was frozen. Stopped in its proverbial tracks.

Ben stood and walked around the office. People were petrified in the most boring of states, propped in front of their PCs, caught mid-stroke, looking, depressingly, much like they normally did for most of the day. A few provided some small amount of comic value. Back in a corner, Ben saw some guy he didn’t know hunched forward, mirror in one hand, tweezers in the other, frozen in an attempt to alleviate his not inconsiderable uni-brow. Ben snickered to himself, then felt guilty. He avoided walking over to Madison’s work area.

Ben hit ‘Play’ and it all came crashing back. He almost got run over by Mary Beth who was sprinting down the row, no doubt responding to the most recent bellow from Peters’ office.

“Sorry,” she yelled over her shoulder. “Where did you come from?”

“No problem,” Ben called after her, but she had already disappeared around a corner.

Ben kept the remote in his pocket for the next few weeks and used it whenever the need arose. He decided not to tell anyone.

He particularly liked the fast-forward button to get though morning staff meeting, which now literally whizzed by. He replayed the quick conversations with Madison from the few times he had worked up the courage to actually talk to her. He used the rewind button to correct programming mistakes he had made, mostly to get Peters off his back. But he decided it was cheating.

It was only after he awoke one night in a cold sweat that he took the battery out of the remote and smashed the remote into a large number of very small pieces. He had dreamt he had accidentally hit the ‘Eject’ button and had been blown out of existence.

* * *

A Saturday morning a few weeks later, Ben’s music player went dead. He was at the grocery store stocking up on chips and soda for the weekend when it cut out mid-tune. Ben smacked the unit a few times, but there was no music, no lights, no verifiable signs of life.

The clerk behind the counter grinned. “Too bad, man. Mine break like every six week. Here, dude, have a jerky. On the house.”

Back home, Ben slowly chewed on the artificial beef, considering. He had been avoiding the ALT site since the bad dream. But in the bright light of day, especially one devoid of tunes, his fears seemed silly.

He sat down in front of his computer and typed in the address.

Ben picked out a music player that was guaranteed to ‘Hold every song you ever wanted to hear.’ Ben chewed his lower lip; a few weeks ago, he would have thought the claim to be pure marketing hype. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

Clicking though the mandatory ordering pages, he hit the instant delivery button and waited. The screen flashed back his order confirmation.

Ben leapt out of his chair and ran out to the front door. Resting on the steps was a pink box. Ben looked up and down the street. There was no truck, no delivery van, car or bicycle, not even a lingering vapor trail from an alien vessel disappearing into another dimension.

He carried the box into the house, sliced it open with a plastic butter knife, and waited until the packing disappeared. In the bottom of the box sat a dull gray metal player about the size of a deck of cards and headphones.

Ben picked up the player and looked at it. It was a sealed case: no volume controls, no display, no charger plug, no place for batteries. There was a hole where the earphone jack snicked in neatly.

Hesitating a bit, Ben put on the earphones on and waited. After a short pause, the music started. It was one of Ben’s favorite tunes. He was surprised because it was from a fairly obscure Irish rock band who had recorded the song more than ten years ago in a barn outside of Cork.

Ben spent the day sunk in the couch listening to songs. Some were old favorites; others he’d never heard before, but he liked them instantly.

At the office on Monday, Ben kept the player tucked into his pocket while he worked. He was obliviously humming along with a song that the player had introduced the night before, when Madison went racing by with a thick sheaf of print-outs in her hands. Today’s hair was blue with black streaks.

“Hey,” she said, stopping short. “Is that Qwerty you’re listening to?”

Ben jerked off the head phones and looked at Madison. He felt his face flush.

“Ummm. Yeah. They’re pretty good.” Ben took off the earphones off and tucked them with the player in the top drawer of his desk.

“I just started listening to them.”

“Wow, who would have thought that you would...” Her voice trailed off.

“What I mean is, they’re new and not a lot of people have heard about them.”

Ben tried to act casual. “Yeah, well. I’m pretty wired into the whole music scene. You know, I try to stay on top of the new sounds.”

Idiot, he thought, but to his delight, Madison giggled. “You’re always kidding with me. Hey, you know, Qwerty is going to be playing down at the Sonic Garden next Friday night. It should be a blast.”

Ben nodded. “Yeah, Should be.” He stared down at his feet.

An awkward silence ensued, broken only by the far off bellowing of Peters, who had only recently moved on from making Ben’s life miserable and was conducting an in-depth search for his next victim.

“Yeah, well,” said Madison. “I better get back to work.”

Ben nodded, pushing his glasses back up.

“Yeah. Me too.”

Madison turned and slowly walked away.

Ben slapped his forehead, then took a deep breath. He ran after her. “If you want, we could go to see them together.”

Madison smiled. “You mean, like on a date.”

Ben smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “A date.”

“Cool,” she replied.

* * *

Ben and Madison had a great time at the concert. Madison surprised him by showing up with blond hair. Ben guessed it was her real color, but he was afraid to ask. During the concert, Ben impressed Madison with his new-found expertise in underground music, and once he stopped trying so hard, Ben found it easy to make Madison laugh, on purpose.

After the concert, they went to a diner for a quick snack. Qwerty had been exploring the bleeding-edge of amplified sound and they both wanted to let the ringing in their ears drop a few decibels. They got a booth near the back. Ben ordered some scrambled eggs and home fries; Madison an egg-white omelet.

Between bites, they chatted the usual first-date chat, both laughing at all the right places. Eventually the conversation got around to office gossip, and they shared the usual secrets about who and what and when and where. Then suddenly, Madison’s face darkened and she lapsed into a stony silence, picking at her last piece of whole-wheat toast.

“Hey. What’s wrong?” Ben asked. “On my god, did I say something stupid?”

Madison looked up. “No, Ben. It’s nothing like that. It’s something I heard at work. I’m hope it’ll go away, but I don’t know.”

Ben reached across the table and took her hand. “What? Is it something you can talk about?”

Madison’s hand felt warm and smooth. Ben prayed that his palms weren’t sticky from the grape jelly. “You can tell me.”

Madison shrugged. “Maybe it’s nothing. But the other day I had to drop the quarterly on Kurt’s desk. I saw a draft memo on his monitor. I wasn’t sneaking or anything. And I just glanced at it for a second.”

“Yeah,” Ben leaned in. “It doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong. You weren’t snooping on purpose. Right?”

Madison nodded, and her eyes teared. “No way. But the memo. It looked like some kind of plan to shut down the group. Ship the effort overseas.”

She reached for a napkin and wiped her nose.

Ben exhaled and sat back in the booth. “Wow. That’s big stuff.”

Madison nodded. “It’s got me losing sleep. Do you think he can sell this to management?”

“I don’t know. No. Maybe. Those guys are capable of anything. Have you heard anything since?”

“Nothing. But I’m afraid to ask around. I guess I don’t want to hear the answer.” She looked at Ben. “What do you think we should do?”

Ben thought for a second, pushed his glasses up, and then smiled. “Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”

“For real?”

He nodded. “I already have a few ideas.”

* * *

Ben ordered the software from ALT that night and brought it into work the next morning. It installed in the blink of an eye. A new icon sat innocently on the lower right portion on the screen, labeled “Viewer.”

Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he double clicked. The program opened and Ben was looking at a complex interface with controls for volume, resolution, position, screen size. At the bottom was a box, “Enter Address Here.”

What the hell, he thought, here goes. He typed in “Peters’ office.”

Almost instantly the screen filled with an image that looked like his boss’s office. Ben tweaked some of the adjustment buttons until his point of view showed out of the office door. Ben stood up on his chair and peered across the rows of cubicles into Peters’ office. He waved and looked down at his screen.

Ben almost fell off his chair. The image on his screen was an exact real-time feed from Peter’s office.

Ben sat down and scratched his head.

“Hey, what’re you up to?”

Ben jerked out of his chair and X-ed out of the program. Jack stood at the entrance to the cubicle, eating an apple and grinning.

“Spying on the old man?”

Ben blanched. “Nothing.”

Jack smiled. “Gotta be better ways to waste your time than keeping an eye on that loser.”

Ben nodded; he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Whatever you’re up to, and I don’t wanna know, don’t get in trouble. We need guys like you around here. Keep us all sane.”

Ben smiled. “You got it.”

Ben kept the viewer minimized in the corner of his screen, but didn’t see anything interesting that day.

Maybe Madison was wrong, he thought, as he powered off his machine at quitting time.

* * *

A week later, Ben invited Madison over to his house for dinner. She seemed to have settled into the blond routine, which was fine with Ben. He burned the meat loaf, and was angry with himself until Madison told him she was a vegetarian.

Over dessert, Ben’s famous lemon jello with pineapple chucks, he worked the subject around to Peters.

“Have you heard anything else about the, you know, the department shutting down. I’ve been checking around all week and haven’t come up with anything.”

Madison winced. “Kinda. Not like I was snooping or anything.”

Ben nodded with an admirable degree of sincerity. “Of course not. Who would?”

“Well, I did hear that he was making a presentation to the board on Tuesday. It’s supposed to be hush-hush. I heard him yelling at Mary Beth about getting his slides transferred onto the office server. Seems he’s been working on it at home. I wonder if he was worried someone saw the original memo?”

Ben nodded. That’s why I haven’t seen anything, he thought: wrong address.

He considered for a minute. Madison looked so miserable. He wanted her to be happy. And the jello just wasn’t cutting it. “Okay. Look, I know a way that we can find out what’s going on. It’s a little weird, and maybe kinda hard to explain, and you have to promise that you won’t tell anyone.”

Madison looked at Ben. “Umm...is this the part where I’m supposed to be scared? Sorry, Ben, but I trust you too much already. Let’s see what you got.”

Ben shrugged. “Okay, you asked for it.”

Ben got the viewer disk out of his backpack and loaded it onto his machine in the living room. “Now watch this,” he told Madison with a grin he just couldn’t hide.

He clicked the viewer icon and typed in “Peters’ house.”

The screen filled with the image of his boss sitting at the dinner table with what must have been his wife and two children. They ate silently.

“Not exactly a happy bunch, are they?” Ben said.

“Umm, Ben, what the hell am I looking at?”

While they watched the family finish off dinner, Ben explained the software, where it came from, and how he had discovered it.

Madison listened with growing enthusiasm, interrupting with an occasional “cool.”

“Ben,” she asked, “if this program is so good, why don’t we just try the obvious?”

“What do you mean?” Ben said.

“You power nerds always make things harder than they have to be. Watch.”

And she reached over and typed in “Peters’ secret presentation for Tuesday.” She hit “Enter.”

The screen went blank and then filled with a syrupy, fuchsia-based multimedia presentation arguing for the immediate shut down of the entire in-house software production unit. Ben and Madison ticked through the slides, each heralded with a different sound effect. Their favorite was the cowbell.

“Wow. This is most impressive.” Madison commented finally.

“What do you mean?” Ben moaned. “This is awful.”

Madison shook her head. “You gotta hand it to the guy. Most of this stuff is completely made up. And what is based in fact is wrong. It’s amazing to me that he wrote the thing without one piece of correct data or any hint of a valid conclusion. That kind of shoddy workmanship doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a lifetime of training.”

Ben laughed in spite of how miserable he felt. “Sure, you can make jokes. But what if he gets his way and closes us down? Where does that leave us? We’ll never see each other...”

Madison leaned over and kissed Ben on the forehead.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. You know, this ALT site sounds like it has some pretty neat stuff. Why don’t we check it out together? Maybe there’s something we can use.”

Ben cheered at the thought. “Good idea. Where do you want to start?”

Madison rubbed her hands together. “Gotta admit, I’m pretty impressed with their software. Let’s see what else they have.”

* * *

The next day, Ben and Madison got to work at their usual time. They wanted to wait until after lunch, when everybody was around, to run the new package. The morning dragged on, even worse then usual. A hot-off-the-press memo from Peters’ regulating bathroom paper towel consumption alleviated any last-minute guilt.

At exactly one o’clock, Madison walked over the Ben’s cubicle. She reached into his backpack and pulled out a single cd. Together she and Ben loaded the disk into the drive and waited. After a few seconds the screen went blank and then a menu appeared. Across the top of the screen was a message.

“You have activated the disaster recovery software package. Please ensure all of your new settings are correct before initiating. There is no turning back.”

Ben and Madison carefully typed in the options that they had decided on after much debate late the night before.

They looked at each other, nodded, and held hands.

Then they slowly reached out to the keyboard.

Ben hit the ‘Alt’ key, while Madison hit the ‘Esc’ key.

The screen displayed the familiar hour glass, then flashed the message: “Recovery Complete.”

Ben turned to Madison. “That’s it. Did it work?”

Madison shrugged. “Don’t know. Do you feel anything different?”

“No,” said Ben. “Not really.”

Just then Jack stuck his head in the cubicle, startling them both. He was wearing a fairly disgusting Hawaiian shirt and a pair of ragged shorts. “Hey. My two best programmers. What are you doing hiding in here and making the boss come and find you? The party is about to start.”

The two stared.

“And you were supposed to wear an ugly shirt for the contest. Get moving, people. The brass from upstairs should be here to hand out the bonus checks any minute now.”

Jack started to walk out.

He was almost run over by Peters, who promptly dropped a large stack of print-outs across the floor.

Jack looked at him and laughed. “Kurt, how many times do I have to tell you? Slow down. Take it easy. It’s going to get there sooner or later.”

Jack knelt and started to gather up the mess of papers.

Mortified, Peters rapidly dropped to his knees to help. “Yes sir, Mr. Dvorak. Let me get those.”

Jack grimaced. “How many times do I have to tell you, it’s Jack. Just Jack. Now say it after me.”

Ben and Madison watched this scene with wonder.

When the two men moved on, Ben and Madison started to giggle and hugged each other out of sheer relief.

“Not a bad piece of programming,” Madison said, looking down at the disk. “Anything else on that site we need to be checking out?”

“Well,” Ben said, “I know for a fact that we both have a month of vacation coming up, mainly because I programmed it in myself. And there was this one section of the ALT site...”

“What was that?” Madison asked.

Ben smiled. “All I know is that it was labeled ‘World Travel’ And whatever that means, it should be worth a look.”

Madison smiled, reached over, and pushed up Ben’s glasses.