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Mac Messiah • Most Of Your Mac • RealBasic • Grack • Moore's Views • Abacus • Absurd Notion • Quantum Threads • Mac Basics •
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October 29th, 2000
WARNING: This conclusion is rated PG (violence).
On Friday afternoon, the e-mails I asked for went out to 2274 customers. We explained that there might be a harmless bug in the OS and that the Sunday update would fix it. Four customers insisted on their money back anyway. So we gave it to them.
Carol didn't show up for work Friday. I called her home Friday night, with some aprehension, to see if she wanted to get together, but there was a message on her answering machine that she had gone out of state to visit her mother. Family illness. So that weekend, I watched a lot of Stanley Cup playoffs, cooked up some steak, and caught up on my reading. New stuff from Patricia McKillip.
When I came in to work on Monday morning, I checked the Perl script's log from my office. No one had fiddled with the file. And all the firmware updates had gone out Sunday morning. Except one. It was one of the first units we shipped, to Idaho, a little town called Garden Valley outside of Boise. I looked up the purchase records for customer William Grot, got the phone number, and called.
I couldn't get through. The operator said the phone had gone dead on Friday morning. No explanation. I started to worry. Could the handyMan have done something stupid? Was Mister Grot in trouble? What had killed the phone line?
It was time to find out. I checked with Delta at the Salt Lake City airport, and there was a 10:30 am flight to Boise. Just enough time to drive to the airport. I called Jeremy and told him I was on my way to check on a customer. He dumped a copy of the original firmware to a Flash Stick, and I picked it up from him on my way out.
The flight was uneventful. Even though it was early June, the Rockies were still covered in snow. I pressed my nose to the glass and gazed at the mountains the whole one hour flight. I felt rather perfunctory as I rented a Taurus in the Boise airport and headed out.
Highway 55 north out of Boise is a scenic, beautiful drive. Pine trees line the road as it gently winds through the hills. In the 40 minutes or so that it took to drive to Garden Valley, my mind often turned to thoughts of Carol. I wondered how well I had really gotten to know her since we formed the company. I had some vague ideas about how to confront her on the doctored file, but nothing specific. I was glad that she was out of town. It gave me time to think about what I was going to do about her -- her job and our relationship. If, in fact, she was behind all this.
The home of William Grot was a classic white farm house. There was a row of blue spruce pines along the road, and a stream paralleled the highway. I turned off the asphalt and crossed a convex wooden bridge, over the bubbling stream, and parked in his front yard.
I looked around for a second. There was a medium sized red barn, very neat, with white trim, and there was a green John Deere tractor parked in front of it. An old, beat up, silver Honda was up on blocks. No other cars. Some chickens seemed to be running loose. Except for the occasional cackle from a chicken, it was very, very quiet.
It looked like the Grots had gone out, but I got out of the car anyway and walked towards the farmhouse. A meandering set of flat stones formed a pathway through some trees leading to the front porch. Perhaps, I thought, someone was home. I climbed the porch steps and approached the front door. The screen door was slightly ajar, swinging slowly, banging lightly in the breeze. The inside door was open, so I looked through the screen door into the living room. Empty. I knocked, but no one answered.
"Nobody here but us chickens." I whirled around, startled. It was Carol, looking really great in tight jeans, a white sleeveless blouse, and a cute straw hat. I was momentarily confused and delighted. What was she doing here? By habit, I started to move towards her.
And then she raised her hand from her side, and I saw that she was pointing a rather ugly looking nickel plated automatic at me. She walked up the porch steps, but kept the gun pointing at me in a rather disturbing, businesslike way. I backed away from her. Suddenly, her voice was colder than I had ever remembered. "Just stay put, Steve."
"What's going on, here, Carol?" I backed up anyway, along the porch, keeping my distance.
"Just a little friendly on-site support. Too bad you had to screw this whole thing up."
"So it was you?" I had to fight to keep my eyes off the gun and retain eye contact. I couldn't believe what was happening.
Carol threw her head back. "God, you are a nosy bastard. You should have just stayed out of this."
"I have a small problem with that, you see. It's my company."
"Our company. And you would have pissed it all away eventually with your idiotic values. What a self-righteous S.O.B. you turned out to be."
On this note, I smiled and spread my hands, trying to put her off balance. "Does this mean the wedding is off?"
"Lousy sense of humor too." She brought up her other hand to brace the gun and raised it to eye level. Time was running short.
"You're going to prison, you know. We have the doctored code. Jeremy can probably prove you created bogus update from the system logs." I was bluffing, looking for a way out. Hoping to confuse and rattle her. I looked around the porch for a weapon of any kind. Not much, except for a garden rake leaning against the house. But too far away.
Carol laughed, but that laugh I had loved seemed hollow now. "I don't think so, Stevie boy. Jeremy had a little electrical engineering accident in the lab this morning after you left. But he spilled his guts first. He's quite dead now. Tom Bellows has the DVD disc. All nicely erased. And farmer Grot, who stopped paying his phone bill, was kind enough to let me update his handyMan with the original code. Now you have no evidence. Nada. Two thousand robots are now factory fresh thanks to your own update."
"The Grots will no doubt disapprove and testify against you."
"They just left to pick up someone up at the bus station. Any more bright ideas?"
"So after you kill me, you go back, run the company, and cook up some even more crooked schemes, right?"
"Maybe. At least I won't ruin the company with childish, pathetic public admissions." I watched her move her finger to the trigger and got ready to leap off the porch. She tossed her head a little, moving the hair away from her eyes. "Good-bye Steve..."
That was the moment when the handyMan came through the screen door. He must have heard us talking and wanted new instructions. Anyway, the robot pushed open the screen door with both hands, apparently underestimating its weight, and it quickly smashed into Carol's hands. The gun went off as it tumbled to the floor of the porch. For a second, Carol looked at me, still standing, as we wondered where the bullet went. Then she lunged to ker knees, reaching towards the gun. I was too far away from her to go for the gun, but now I had time to reach for the rake. As the screen door was pulled shut by the spring, I moved forward fast, caught the rake by the handle, and started it on a fast swinging arc.
Just as Carol grabbed the gun and brought her hand up, I caught her in the side of the head with the tines. There was an ugly thick, meaty sound when the tines penetrated her temple. I didn't expect that sound. She fell forward, pushing the rake through my fingers, and collapsed in front of me.
It felt like an eternity as I stood there, holding the rake.
What had I done?
After a few minutes, I knelt down and took the gun out of her hand. Then I sat down next to her, looking at her, laying there completely motionless. I knew she was dead. For some reason, I took off her hat, covered in blood, and threw it aside. I stroked her blond hair. My knees were shaking. I don't know how long I sat there weeping, holding my knees in my arms. The handyMan stood by, quietly waiting. It had no clue what just happened.
The funeral for my best friend Jeremy and my fiancée was the toughest thing I've ever had to go through. Unlike the funerals you see in the movies, where it's always raining, and everyone is under umbrellas, it was a clear, blue sky day with high cirrus clouds. Ice crystals at 40,000 feet presided over the congregation like tiny monuments to the icy cold mind of a woman driven by greed.
Here we are in the year 2006, at the dawn of a new age of humans and robot companions, but the worst part of mankind is still coursing through our veins. Sigh...
I stayed around at the company long enough to make sure Tom Bellows went to prison for murder. Then I sold the company to Hewlett-Packard. Made a bundle.
My friends tell me that I'm good enough to be a ski instructor at Deer Valley. Plenty of exercise. Lots of sunshine. Nice, friendly people.
Sounds good to me.
Copyright 2000 by John
Martellaro, All rights reserved. Artwork by Tracy Haynes,
Copyright 2000, John Martellaro and Tracy Haynes. My sincere
thanks to Tracy for his great art and contributions to
Quantum Threads.
About the Author
John Martellaro lives in Colorado at 2,800 meters above sea level with a Ph.D. wife and two cats, Nikki and Data. He holds a B.S. in Astrophysics and an M.S. in Physics. His hobbies, include amateur astronomy, downhill skiing, bicycling, and listening to piano solos. His personal Macs are a B&W G3/400 with a flat screen Studio Display and a blueberry iBook.
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