The Human Operator
Episode 4
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Hale turns away from Fisch and puts one foot in front of the other, pacing herself down the glass corridor. Her face turns to stone.
Mind racing - what’s the priority - don’t run. One foot, the other foot - she turns back to see -
Fisch watching her all the way down the corridor. A thoughtful frown pinches his face.
Dread washes over her.
Hale smashes her ID on the scanner and pushes through the double doors into Engineering.
The minute she turns out of sight, she breaks into a run.
A rush of blood in her ears - Hale almost can’t see straight -
booking it down the glass corridor that now feels like some kind of demented maze. Her face a mix of nausea and disgust.
She bangs into people - catches her hip on the corner of a desk - ow - rams straight into a guy then keeps going. The other employees seem annoyed but they’re used to her eccentricities.
She turns abruptly and turns again. Slower ... slower ... dragging her hand on the wall as if she needs the support.
She stops.
The glass boxes surrounding her spin. The world spins. She feels like she might fall. Lean against the wall.
For a moment, the world disappears.
Frozen in time, she can’t help or stop this.
Breathe. Breathe. How can she stop this.
A few minutes pass like this and then - it passes. She keeps going through the vast open plan warren of work stations toward their glass pavilion.
Useful stuff on people’s desks leaps out to her. Stuff she might need. She considers taking it.
She reaches the biometric scanner in front of Creative Engineering. Her department. Through the glass she can see her employees as well as a team from IT.
Her engineers are packing up their work stations.
“What the hell is going on in here?” says Hale as she walks in.
Gould stacks his novelty coffee mugs into a box. “They’re moving us to the basement.”
Hale feels like the walls are closing in. “You can’t be serious.”
An IT guy crawls beneath Hale’s station poking around at all her cables with a flashlight. “We’ve got a security threat regarding your team.”
Zakaria shuts down anything non-mission critical. “They want to put us in the basement where there are no windows.”
Hale steps astride the IT guy beneath her desk and grabs a thumb drive from her drawer. She begins making a copy of her hard drive. “How ... do you think infosec works? Leaks don’t go out through the fucking windows.”
Zakaria’s affect has gone from their normal flat to depressed and overwhelmed. They’ve got a lot of personal items to pack - anime figures, tchotchkes, talismans. “It’s not like the windows open anyway.”
Hale seems dizzy. She’s reeling at this news. “What do you think we’re doing, leaving code on our monitors for some corporate spy to photograph with telephoto lenses?”
Gould is having a neurotic freakout at all these IT guys messing with their carefully positioned systems. He’s hunched like a cashew. “It’s like the people running the top secret data harvesting firm don’t even know how computers work.”
The IT guy lifts a heavy monitor onto a cart. “We know how computers work. Who do you call to fix them?”
“We don’t call you,” says Gould, bundling his own cables.
“We fix them ourselves,” says Zakaria, anxiously pulling their hair and taking apart the components of their machine.
“That’s fine. But when it comes to caring for and moving the company’s physical property, that’s us.” The IT guys seem determined to do this as fast and intrusively as possible.
“We’re not moving. Who put in this request?” Hale tries to dart around the IT guys in the crowded space as she grabs things from her work station and stuffs them into her backpack.
“Don’t know.” The heavy IT guy grunts as he squats to dismantle the set-ups.
“Don’t touch that. We’ll move our equipment ourselves.” Hale tries to get between him and the computer but he blocks her.
“No you won’t.”
“Yes we will. We built these machines, we’ll move them.”
“You will not. Back away.”
“I ordered every single one of these parts myself. Do not touch our machines.” Hale glances at her first monitor to check the progress on her hard drive copy. Almost there.
“Just following orders, Ma’am.” What an asshole. The IT guy removes Hale’s third monitor and places it on the cart, just to hit his point home.
“We are running highly sensitive programs in here. You might break everything.” Hale feels frantic, grabbing whatever shit she sees for her backpack. Thermos. Phone charger. Multi-tool.
“We’re IT. We fix what you break.” An IT guy moves Gould’s entire tower over to the cart while he watches helplessly, biting his fingernails.
“You don’t know what you’re doing. These programs are carefully calibrated. They all need to stay online at all times.” Hale catches Zakaria watching her copy the hard drive out of the corner of her eye. Hale looks away.
“We’ll keep them connected with a battery pack on the cart.” He’s finished with Zakaria’s set-up and ready to remove Hale’s.
“Just ... Let me just finish backing up my hard drive.”
The hard drive copy completes. Hale pulls out the thumb drive and fumbles, dropping it. She kneels like she’s tying her shoes and grabs the drive. She looks up and sees Zakaria watching her. Brief questioning eye contact. Hale ignores it and palms the drive, stuffing it in her front pocket.
One of the IT guys pushes the first cart loaded with equipment out the door of the pavilion, toward the elevators. Hale grabs her backpack and follows, taking a hard left and slamming out the exterior emergency exit door marked “alarm will sound.”