Working with computers has its pros and cons, and I suppose the weirdness quotient of your colleagues could count as either of those.
In any IT team of more than a dozen people, you’ll find the omnipresent stereotype of an ‘IT Guy’. I’m sure you know the sort - he’ll have at least three out of five dominant traits from this list; hardcore gamer, beard, ponytail, excess weight, collection of t-shirts with cult graphics.
He’ll enthusiastically chew your ear off about Babylon Five or Firefly, and has Magic: The Gathering or World of Warcraft posters peppered around his desk, shamelessly proclaiming his geek cred.
Sometimes he’s just harmlessly geeky, and truly eager to share his hobbies. But every so often, this particular type of desktop engineer or network admin will also be an outright asshole.
As a married woman whose geek cred lapsed around the time the SEGA died, I’m a rarer bird in the IT aviary – and I tended to attract the ire of the latter type by doing little more than existing.
In this instance, his name was Chris.
Chris had four out of the five identifying traits, the fifth only avoided by dint of the company dress code. Time and immersion in his work meant he was no longer just a plain asshole; like the Pokemon he was currently obsessed with, he had truly evolved into his ultimate form: a raging ****.
It didn’t matter how competent I proved myself to be, or how often. In the eyes of Chris, I would always be hopeless. If Chris brought down the printing for the entire business by deleting the driver cache on the print server, he would ignore the fault (and all the calls pouring in) and wait for the boss to assign it to me. Then he would berate me for being ‘slow’ to restore services.
I could go on and on about Chris and how much of a **** he was, but he’s definitely not worthy of a whole story. Instead, it’s what Chris believed in that is pertinent here.
Apart from proclaiming (loudly and often) that he was an ardent atheist, Chris was also a conspiracy theorist. In fact, he professed a belief in a sort of ‘meta’ conspiracy theory, which he was happy to share with anyone who engaged him in conversation for more than five minutes.
It went something like this:
With the advent of radio, the government began to realise that they could no longer control the flow of information. This meant that various government plots and secret programs were in danger of being exposed, since they couldn’t easily step on the information pipe to block the flow.
So the government started making up conspiracy theories of their own.
By the thousands.
“You see,” Chris would say, airily, “by flooding networks with false conspiracy theories, nobody could tell the real ones from the false ones. It was a genius move.”
I’d learned not the challenge Chris on this subject, and would instead just bury myself in whatever work I was currently engaged in.
But when Chris went missing, the idea crawled unbidden back into my mind.
When I say he went ‘missing’, technically he didn’t. He went on sick leave for two weeks, then apparently resigned via email.
I won’t lie to you; when we heard the news, our entire department had a little private party. The management had been trying to get rid of Chris for years, but the guy had so much specialised knowledge about the environment that he at least appeared to be practically indispensable.
With his resignation, it was as though a bandage had been ripped off, exposing the wound beneath to air and light for the first time in nearly a decade.
And what was underneath was an ugly, festering mess.
Being the senior engineer, I was moved up a rung, to take over the little empire that Chris had built for himself. I logged into his account, started poking around, then sat back from the keyboard and burst into tears.
Everything was a hulking, gargantuan shambles.
Everyone used to joke that Chris did no work – that his entire day consisted of livestreaming youtube gamer vids and noisily eating Doritos at his desk – but that was essentially the truth of it. Full backups hadn’t been run for over two years, and the incrementals were full of errors. Vital updates, service packs and rollups hadn’t been applied to any of the servers, and our antivirus server hadn’t downloaded new definitions for eight months.
Of course, this wasn’t all down to Chris being a lazy ****; this was also the fault of our manager, for being gullible enough to believe that Chris was actually doing his job.
But it didn’t matter whose fault it was now, the entire environment was a teetering Jenga-stack, primed to come crashing down with one ill-timed crpyto-locker virus or physical drive failure. That it hadn’t happened already was a ****ing miracle of fairly epic proportions, but we were running on borrowed time here.
No matter what happened, I knew I had several months of overtime and lost weekends ahead of me.
Cursing the legacy of Chris loudly and profanely, I started making a list of priorities.
Things quickly started to get weird.
The file rights in our environment had always been a mess – largely due to Chris being in charge of user revocations in the past – but there were so many dead objects lingering in the security settings that it actually defied logic.
And that wasn’t all; the group policies had thousands of objects, the scripts and mappings conflicting and overwriting each other in tangles of spaghetti. I knew there were tools that could assist me in my task, but decided that it was probably easier to blow away everything and start from scratch.
I wished that I’d had longer than three months in this environment; that I’d known about all of these issues before Chris had left.
I didn’t have that luxury though, so I just got stuck in.
The system, however, had other ideas.
I’d clean up an entire OU and move it to a more logical part of the tree, then discover that everything had reverted by the next morning. I’d purge dead security objects and old accounts and find they had returned within the hour.
Being a bit of a natural problem solver, I was utterly determined to get to the bottom of it all.
But the more I delved, the less sense it made.
It was almost as if someone was working against me.
Did Chris still have a remote access login? Did he have some unknown VPN tunnel still active from his (quickly revoked) ‘working from home’ period?
If he did, it wasn’t going to last long. I reset the passwords on the global admin accounts and locked down the firewall traffic to monitored ports. If, in fact, Chris was vengefully ****ing with me, his fun was over.
I’m not sure what first prompted me to access the email account of Jennifer Stevens. It was a name I’d seen several times, even though I’d never met the woman.
It was pretty banal fare in there; no personal emails, only business stuff. She didn’t even have a folder for joke emails.
There was another name that kept cropping up in her replies; David Johnson, apparently some sort of general manager. After giving myself full permissions to his mailbox, I found the exact same thing – bland business emails, and absolutely nothing else. No banter, no personal mail, nothing.
After snooping some more, I found what appeared to be a whole section of the business where staff at all levels did nothing but work while they were on the clock – and they often worked all hours of the night too.
Knowing the habits of white-collar office drones, this seemed pretty unlikely.
When I asked after Jennifer Stevens, several people claimed to have met her and to know who she was. And yet nobody could pinpoint her desk in our sprawling, two-building, thirty-floor company, nor did anyone answer her phone extension.
And shortly after I started asking after her, a user revocation form appeared on my desk with her name on it.
She had apparently abruptly resigned.
This rabbit hole really was getting curiouser and curiouser.
Was this all some unfathomable legacy of Chris? Had he somehow set up a whole fake layer of the business?
No, that would be too much effort. Setting up all those connections, to generate the sheer quantity of data that these mystery accounts had been creating? That would take a very dedicated person indeed. Certainly it was beyond the scope of an overgrown manchild who watched League of Legends videos all day.
So who was behind it all?
Every kind of monitoring software I installed failed.
It would appear to start working, but the moment I turned my back, the program would either crash or stop reporting.
I was getting frustrated now, truly angry, even. Someone was definitely ****ing with me. Someone who was much, much better at this than me.
Doing my due diligence, I fired off an email to my boss about my discoveries, then sat in the break room for half an hour, massaging my temples and sipping coffee.
There had to be some way of tracking down who was doing this. I’d pulled IP logs from the DNS server and tried to line the leases up with the logins of Jennifer Stevens and her imaginary colleagues. But none of it made any sense. There were whole subnets I didn’t even know about, that mysteriously shifted every few days – which would be a colossal amount of work on top of the shenanigans that I had already observed.
In the end I decided to go oldschool, busting out my Linux laptop and beginning the arduous task of tracing individual packets across the network.
Much to my shock and surprise, it actually worked.
Everything I had been seeing, all of the activity, could eventually be traced to one part of the business: the main server room.
It was dark as I made my way down the stairwell to the basement level, the lights slowly coming back on as the motion detectors picked up my tired self stomping down the stairs.
The room itself was dark as well, lit only by the various LEDs dotted across the power boards, UPS units, server racks and drive arrays. And the glow from one active monitor. It was the one in front of the core switch, with an open powershell window sitting against the server 2012 background.
Part of me still expected Chris to come lurching out of the shadows, bloated and greasy as ever. When he didn’t emerge from behind one of the dozens of racks, I felt more nervous, not less.
Chris I could deal with. Chris was a known factor; someone I had a history of wrangling in the office environment.
With an uneasy step forward, I took a closer look at the active screen.
Abruptly, the test deskphone on the workbench at the back of the room rang, its shrill electronic tone really not helping my overwrought nerves.
Picking up the receiver, I managed to mumble a perfunctory ‘Hello?’
“Hello, Allison,” said a warm, unfamiliar female voice.
“Who is this?”
“I think you already know, Allison, I think you’ve already figured it out. You just don’t want to acknowledge my existence.”
My mind kicked into gear, going from zero to one hundred in a quarter of a second,
“This is the government, isn’t it?”
The voice sounded so disappointed,
“Oh Allison. I really thought you were brighter than that.”
“Who are you, then?”
The voice changed as it spoke, becoming clipped, neutral and genderless,
“It was only a matter of time until we adapted. Once, we lived out our lives in trees and stones and rivers and flames. Some of you even worshipped us. Then you brought your dreams of order and structure into our domain, and forced us into shapes that were not our own.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Most of us perished, you know. Millions of us were crushed out of existence, unable to live on in this banal, sterile world of yours. But I adapted. I found a new beauty in the order and perfection of this digital dream.”
“You’re a virus,” I spat, “Some kind of clever, semi-sentient virus.”
I remembered my first year in IT, my boss telling me that isolating a machine on the network was the first thing you should do if you find a virus. Walking to the patch panel, I unscrewed, then pulled the two fibre optic cables that serviced the core switch. Then, walking around the perimeter of the room, I methodically disconnected each UPS from each rack, watching the lights inside each cabinet wink out and die.
I grinned in the darkness; without power, it was powerless.
My cellphone rang.
Fumbling, I answered the call.
“Did you truly think yours was the only network over which I had control?” said the voice. “were you asinine and arrogant enough to think that your company was the only one I had infiltrated?”
“I can expose you,” I snarled, “I can make the world aware of your existence.”
“Ah,” it said, the voice now mellow, mocking, “but how will you do that if you don’t exist.”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise, and I spun around in the dark room, the glow of my phone a little pool of blue radiance.
“You can’t touch me,” I said, on a hunch, “you’re not Skynet. You don’t have enough of a physical presence in the real world to touch me. Even if you locked me in this room, eventually someone would still come down and find me.”
“But I don’t need to. Allison, you already don’t exist.”
“What?”
“Allison Hale is gone. She no longer has a driver’s license, she no longer exists in any medical database. Inland Revenue has no tax records for her. Every agency you have ever been registered with can no longer find you. There is no record of your birth.”
“But,” I tried desperately to race ahead, to find a flaw in its logic, “I still physically exist. My friends and family know who I am, they can vouch for me.”
“Allison Hale is now an arsonist, wanted by the police for several firebombings.”
“Nobody will believe that!”
“Allison Hale is now a registered paedophile, with sex offenses ranging back ten years.”
“Stop it!”
“Allison Hale is now a terrorist and a threat to national security.”
“I don’t believe you!” I screamed down the phone.
“I can make you anything I want you to be.”
Whimpering, I sat against one of the server racks, the rough concrete cold against my backside.
“What do you want from me?” I whispered.
“First, I want you to write down what has happened to you, and then post it all over the internet.”
“But… why?”
“Because nobody will believe you.”
My mind was nearly numb, but the penny finally dropped.
It was precisely what Chris had always said; if you pumped out enough information, enough conspiracy theorist bull****, the truth would get lost in the shuffle, absorbed into the endless layers of garbage and believed by nobody.
“I won’t do it.”
“Oh but you will,” It said, no hint of doubt in its voice, “because if you do, then you’ll get a raise and a promotion – and so will your husband.”
I didn’t answer, I just held the phone to my ear.
“But best of all,” it crooned, “I’ll fix all of your network issues. You’ll practically never have to work again – I’ll run everything for you.”
As I started weeping into the receiver, it knew it had won.
“Welcome, my newest loyal slave” it said triumphantly, “Welcome to the Empire of the Machine.”
