Waiting For Service

The funniest thing was that they’d set it up like a murder investigation. Then they’d got a woman in – she was waiting in line, across the room. In line behind ten identical (and identically boring) customers. She was waiting in line to speak to somebody, and trying to already solve her problem while she was stuck in ‘traffic’. Or, at least that’s the way it seemed. She was looking around, pointing at stuff, muttering to herself and taking down notes. Her eyes seemed to scan over the aisles of inventory, without even taking most of it in – probably because it was unimportant to the problem she was solving – then she’d scan over the ten or so staff working either with customers and trying not to scream, or putting stock on shelves and trying not to fall asleep. Finally, after a full panoramic view of the room as it was at that specific moment, her eyes would rest on me, at the checkout. Holding the infrared scanner gun thingy as if it was a pistol. Pew pew. The line cleared slowly, and the guy became less and less far away. Funny how that happens.

After about half an hour, we got to talking, and she told me why she was here. See, the thing is, I already knew. Because I’d messed up, otherwise they wouldn’t have called her. Not to brag or anything, but I was completely to blame for the predicament that required her presence. Well, one of. Because the store management (oh yeah, forgot to actually say, this was during my time working for cash reasons as a store clerk, and for tax reasons as a criminal. What I mean by that last [attempt at a] joke is that I had defrauded them out of a reasonable amount of money. A relatively sophisticated social engineering attack involving, in no particular order; a crying baby, a forgotten password, and at least five failed pickup lines. I may have got the atmosphere in the room wrong when I tried those. Whoops. Although, to be fair, the girl behind that particular counter hadn’t reported me to security. In fact, we’re meeting up on Friday. Not for a date, though. She had a business venture she wanted to discuss. And, as it turns out, I might be able to help her fund it …

So, anyway, this woman that had clearly been sent to investigate the thing I’d clearly done was standing in front of me.
“Hello, my name is -”
“Pew, pew, pew.” Holding the scanner like a pistol normally worked to freak people out. Because they thought the rays were … radioactive or that they could read your soul or something. I don’t know; they can’t. Worst case would be it bleeping because you found yourself, quite by accident, wearing a striped shirt. Or having swallowed a barcode, because apparently the waves travel through skin. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
“Focus.” The woman, who was surely a cop, was not impressed.
“The caution tape’s over there,” pointed at the empty shelf, dead straight ahead, “and the manager’s over there,” pointed at the empty-eyed employee in a special hat, wishing he was dead, straight ahead.
“Should I just go over and talk to him?” The cop seemed unsure.
“I wouldn’t, but not because you aren’t allowed. More because you’ll wish you weren’t allowed.”
She moved off and talked to the manager, and I moved off to my break. Because it was that time of day, and not at all because I just take breaks to go into the bathroom and text whenever I want. No. That’s a friend of mine. And another friend of mine. And ano – you get the idea.

Returning after my definitely-mandated break, the cop had assembled the whole staff at the front of the store, and was asking them for clues. Well, she was actually attempting to care about them as people, but it was fake. Obviously. Or maybe I’m just a cynical asshole.
“Marcus?” The managers seemed curious to talk to me. That’s a first. They cared so little for me that I haven’t even bothered to set them up properly as characters. The guy was called Cassius. Sounded like a cool name for a cool guy, but really it seemed to be a pretentious name for an asshole.
“What?”
“What do you know about the missing stock?”
“Check the tapes.”
“Yeah, we did, it’s well marked out and customers won’t go in there.”
“I don’t …” Why was I helping this guy? “I didn’t mean the actual caution tape; the security footage! You have video.”
“Oh yeah, nah. I.T. deletes that at the end of every day and we can’t see anything on today’s feeds.”
Yup, that’s why I’m helping him. It literally doesn’t matter.
“Oh, no, I didn’t see anything. But, I haven’t been wearing my glasses ha ha ha.”
“Do you wear glasses?”
“No.”
“I’m confused.”
“Someone came in and stole some stuff. They then let you find it and now you’re hunting them down, have I cleared it up?”
“… that wasn’t what I was confused by.”

I’m aware that alerting them to the fact I’m weird as hell is a bad idea. Or, at least, letting them think that. But, I’ll be out of here soon anyway. I’ve already gotten what I came for. The files are tucked safe in a drawer beside my bed. Light corporate sabotage before bed, you know?

I’m also now painfully aware that I haven’t introduced myself properly. I’m Marcus, and I committed a robbery. That sounds like a Thieves Anonymous introduction. Of actual stock, but only so that the management at the store I work at wouldn’t notice the fact I’d actually stolen all the management, staff and customer data. That had been an interesting phone call back to my actual bosses.
You see, I wasn’t just a worker at this firm. Which, now I think about it, should have been something I said before; something that was, or could have been, useful as part of my introduction. Because I was a spy. With all the subtlety and charm of James Bond. Which is to say, none. But, I hear nobody asking, why infiltrate a small store and terrorise them by stealing their data? Thing is, I have a family. I know, I know, I’m special. They used to live here, like, years ago. Long before all of the … development. In fact, I have family buried here, as in here. Yes, here-here. In the ground this store is built on top of.

Late in the afternoon, so the story went, boats arrived on the horizon. They would proceed to disappear from it due to a minor sinking incident just off the coast. Always familiar with the best way to start an invasion, our conquestors would try and fail to make landfall at the same beach for the better part of the next sixty years. Apparently they’d never heard of a beach before, and seemed unaware of the potential dangers of running aground in shallow water. Or at least that’s what the locals at the time were told when they were finally invaded (for some reason, I’d doubt the reliability of this account). It might also have been that the waters they were attempting to make land in were shark-infested, but so were the boats. They would slowly build up rapport through art and culture (there’s a joke about rappers in there somewhere), and then the subsequent removal of non-conforming art and culture. Then they’d slowly and carefully use the power and influence they’d seemed to have built up, to build a shop on land the locals definitely hadn’t given away. Except that they now had blankets. Mmmm, warm.

Speaking of blankets; at about lunchtime, I got a strong urge to hide. One of the animal-instinct urges, not based on evidence or anything. It just seemed as though they knew. Although, if they could intuit my guilt in this way, how had they not also figured out that my drink bottle contained vodka. Perhaps they noticed that too, but only through trial and error …
I say that because just after my post-lunch premonitions, Cassius ushered the rest of the assuredly-unimportant management team into a meeting room and shut the door. This meeting would probably be the only time I’d ever seen most of these guys look even vaguely serious, and just a little scared. They knew. They filed out of the room, and scuttled back to their individual corners of the store, like spiders along a web. Business continued as usual, for a while. Then I started noticing the intercom announcements changing. For a while, they blared out the current range of offers, discounts and crap twenty-years-out-of-date pop music; then hastily recorded staff announcements to check that store data held on them was accurate (it wasn’t); until finally the store intercom settled, in a move that is as bizarre to me as the fact people choose to wear lycra, on ads suggesting the store would now sell data.
The problem with that … looking around … is that it wouldn’t. Or at least it wouldn’t yet.
Perhaps the detective was having a field day.
Perhaps the managers had lost their minds.
Perhaps this was all part of a plan.
But most likely none of those things, and the store had just blindly jumped on an opportunity for cash, like a cat lunging at a very odd, cash-shaped laser.

It seemed likely that this turn of events had messed with the detective’s plan, as she sidled up to my counter, with a small “so, I didn’t say earlier, I’m Gabrielle …”
So that’s what desperation actually looks like. Huh.
“What can I help you with?”
“You see how it’s wrong that they’re gonna misuse personal data for … personal gain.”
“Where the persons in question are different, and the gains in ques –”
“If you make a joke about how much you can lift, I swear …”
“That’s no way to treat a person you want help from.”
“And yet,” Gabrielle mused, twirling the ends of her hair between forefinger and thumb, “and yet, I’m gonna.”
“Anyway, what.”
“You don’t suppose there’s a way to stop them?”
“I know Cassius has a switch around the back of his neck, but I’m not sure that’s what you were after.”
“No, it wasn’t really. You see, I wasn’t even called here about the fact they’re thinking of becoming a marketplace for stolen data, I was –”
“… misinformed.” Worth a try. Gabrielle looked up, surprised; maybe I’d done a better job of convincing her that she was wrong about something she was absolutely right about than I’d intended. Perhaps there was indeed a light at the end of the tunnel currently marked out with caution tape.
“How so?”
“The theft and transition to ‘data mining’ or whatever they’re gonna call it; they’re linked. Is it not possible that the staff knew something was coming long before it happened?”
It wasn’t linked, and they don’t know shit. Half of these assholes can’t even tie their shoes.
Gabrielle countered this thought with a fairly quick ‘yeah, I thought of that, half of these assholes can’t even tie their shoes.’ See? I must be accurate, and not at all being mean because she agrees.
“But do you want to at least try to find the person?” I don’t know why I said that. Help her to not find me? Ludicrous. She stuck out a hand, nevertheless.
“Partners.”
We were not, in fact, partners.

The rest of the detective process went fairly smoothly, for me. For Gabrielle, I would imagine she probably thought she wasn’t getting anywhere. But that’s the nature of the beast; or, at least it is when I’m guilty, and also leading the investigation. But the data mines were, in fairness, extremely valuable information sources; and that’s just the staff ones. The shipment of customer data we’d sent off for hadn’t arrived yet. Now I’m thinking of it, it’s possible that poses some issues for the customers we have phoning us about how much information costs to buy. The ads were doing well, though. Too well. Turns out you could make up whatever the hell you wanted and just say it, then people would buy things from you. Sounds like politics, to me. Speaking of which, as part of my completely-intentional-I-assure-you-and-not-at-all-because-I’m-in-any-way-incompetent sabotage of the fraud investigation, I planted fake evidence against a ‘random’ member of staff and will ‘find’ it and use it in the investigation. So it’s looking like I’ll be emigrating with my cache of cash and data without anyone caching on to me. Ha. Ha. Ha. But, in the meantime at least, I had to pretend to care that Gabrielle found out from the data that one of the managers had a secret sex cult, and that, in an assuredly unrelated move, Cassius had also used this information to secure himself a promotion. Makes sense, I’d never liked that guy.

On about day four of the data mining / retail operation, the managers realised something was up. Sales. Apparently we had them, for once. The manager that Cassius had leveraged off was the first to resign, for obvious reasons. Or at least they were obvious to me. Didn’t seem to be as obvious to him. Interesting. My not-partner-in-not-crime to struggle through staff interviews and data-dredging, mostly due to complete lack of interest in petty staff drama. Apparently at one point, a horse had got to a final-stage interview as a cashier.
“I think I have enough evidence for Cassius to need to resign now.”
“The face is surely enough?”
“Is he an answer to the joke ‘why the long face?”
“That’s about a horse walking into a bar.”
“Cassius certainly looks like he walked into a bar. The metal kind.”
“Have they fired him? They probably have reason to do so …”
“I don’t think anyone’s used the company cannon today, no.”
“Has your actual investigation returned anything interesting yet?”
“Interesting, or useful?”
“Fine. Useful.”
“There was a data breach by a member of staff.” Passive voice. She knew.
“Any idea who?”
“Whomever … they … are, they better have a plan to get out of here fast; I can see the whole thing going to shit really quick.”
“Cassius’ plan seems to be basically ‘retire to a yurt as a self-selected naughty step. I was thinking I’d join him.”
Gabrielle looked up with a glint in her eye.
“I mean, just for company. Can’t leave the guy on his own.”
“Yeah. That’s what you meant.”
“So how are we gonna get out of this?”
“You want my help? They’re the ones paying me.”
“Please …”
“First thing I’d do is …”
“Teach the company horse to use a calculator?”
“A better member of staff than solidly half of the current employees.”
“Yeah the days he’s on are our most productive.”
“And the days you commit data fraud are probably the least.”
“You saw the ads, right? It’s not just me.”
“And that makes it okay? That’s only one step away from … rigging an election and buying your way into power.”
“That’s … very different, and it only happened once in a dream.”
“Sure. Let’s get out of this mess.”

They showed up in waves, over the horizon. Like a zombie invasion but with fewer brains and less purpose. In hindsight, the store should have panicked upon the first sighting. But they let some through. Some of the customers will have requests we can handle, they thought. But no, naturally, as soon as the store switched to a completely-stolen-data-centric market plan, the only customers they’d deal with would be in service to this new manifesto. Especially troubling, this, because it was a manifesto the store itself couldn’t meet. So, equally naturally, the customers had problems with this. Despite every member of staff’s best effort, except for the few staff that seemed to get by on zero-effort productivity schemes.
Numerous complaints to managers, but the pool of employed managers seemed to be decreasing by the hour. Maybe they were leaving, or perhaps just sitting in the staff lunchroom watching while greed set fire to everything they’d worked for. As the staff complaints piled up, so did the customer orders, and the requests to solve the store’s inventory investigation. But why, I hear nobody asking, are people in need of the result of the investigation? You see, the store needed to have information on something. So they used their own files as a start point, and that wasn’t enough; because, obviously, the occasional scandal would only soothe the angry masses for so long. Especially ironic, this, as they’d created their own mob, then failed to control it.
The roar of the crowd eventually became louder.
I’m not saying I made that happen, I’m just saying, I know a guy. Or several. In fact, there was a whole line stretching out the door.
A line of ‘can I speak to the manager?’ to which the correct answer is no. Because we don’t have one.
A line of ‘where’s the item I ordered?’ to which the answer is that obviously we can’t give you something that doesn’t exist.
A line of customers thinking ‘I need drugs to deal with this…’ which is relatable.
A tactical exit seemed in order, not least because I’d packaged some malicious data alongside the real stuff (a Trojan horse, if you will), and a call to the police.

The police showed up travelling quickly across the city towards the store … then they disappeared, due to a minor pothole incident just over the horizon. Reappearing shakily on bikes that had just taken significant fall damage, the entire city judiciary streamed through the doors of the store, or at least that’s how it seemed. After about the tenth blue hat, I gave up watching the authority figures filling the metaphorical gaps in the store’s moral structure, as well as the physical gaps between its shelves. The management team wouldn’t last long now. I looked across at Gabrielle, who shrugged. The game appeared to be over now, no more point trying to solve her case.
“Nice work, I guess?” Gabrielle walked over, smacking a particularly fast moving policeman who just so happened to be in her way on the hat.
“W-w-with what?” I replied, with all the grace you’d expect from a smooth criminal; worth another try. At least in theory.
“With the data theft. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
The river of policemen still at high tide, and my ego suddenly at a low ebb, I sank a little and nearly fell in.
“I had hoped …”
“Nah, it’s no big deal,” Gabrielle gestured at Cassius being fireman’s carried out of the store, against flow of salmon swimming upstream. Wait, I mean cops.

Table for two, small restaurant. Somewhere public so she could run. Or wouldn’t need to. On a ground level so she could run fast.  But shouldn’t want to. She hadn’t even turned up at all. Typical. At least if you’re gonna try and sell me a business idea, then sit down and actually explain it to me. You can’t profit if you can’t pitch. Also can’t sing if you can’t pitch; I’m still paying for the windows of that karaoke place. So I did what any vaguely stood-up guy does on dates, and tried to get in on another one. Sorry again to Mr and Mrs Harvey, and congratulations on your engagement.
I looked down at the menu, surely I’d be able to fix this date somehow. Someone sat down across from me.
“Sorry, I’m taken—”
“… for granted.” The voice. We’d only spoken over the internet, but I knew that voice.
How though?
Oh.
Gabrielle.
This fact left an imprint on my train of thought like somebody’s open palm had attempted to smack it out of shape, not dissimilar to the open palm that then attempted to remould my neck.
“—been learning martial arts?” I spluttered the sentence, coughing from the surprise of the manoeuvre as well as the sudden lack of accessible lungs.
“Had to beat up the white men somehow.”
“I would have hoped you wouldn’t beat up this white man, though.”
“Oh, you’ll be the last to die when I take over. Just get frequently injured, that’s all.”
“What even is your plan?”
“My?” Gabrielle repeated the word as though she were turning it over and examining it like an artefact.
“Not just you?”
“A whole group of us, yeah. Kinda just decided we’d try to bankrupt this company, but why not keep going?”
“Until what?”
Gabrielle didn’t have an answer, so she changed the subject.
“You still hoarse from earlier?”
A crash from behind. “Don’t tell me,” I remarked, while Gabrielle looked as though she was trying not to laugh.
“I’m saying nothing about the horse with a receipt taped to his saddle.”
“At least he’s respecting the returns policy.”
“Does that mean nobody will mind if we give him back before the end of the month?” Gabrielle had made up her mind, and picked up her bag.
“Worst case, they’ll investigate his absence as though he’s been murdered. I reckon we just scored ourselves a horse. And one that knows how to use a calculator.”
“Maybe he can tell us how far away the nearest village is?”