Issue #14 Online Exclusive Content
Poisoning the Machine
Jake McCulley
The thing sat in there with him in his windowless gray office, a thing about the size of a person but squat, humming softly to itself, a squat gray thing emitting heat from its sides, a feverish heat which always startled him if he accidentally brushed against it, which he tried not to do.
He knew he was getting old, and that therefore his opinions about technology were likely to be retrograde and invalid. He had accepted the thing’s arrival without complaint; he had learned what he had to of its functions but was incurious about the occult mechanisms by which it operated; he had long since memorized the VigorTex maintenance and repair number. He and the thing had a cordial, if strained, work relationship.
Any work relationship, he reasoned, would occasionally be strained under these conditions. His “office”—low-ceilinged, cramped and narrow, rather longer than wide, and poorly lit—was actually a repurposed jail cell, complete with a heavy steel door; he worked in the county jail, which had been remodeled and expanded fifteen years ago. He drew the short straw and was consigned to the old jail cell. He took it with good humor; he and his colleagues had laughed about it, saying You better not be trying to escape! when 5:00 rolled around, or Who let you out of your cell? when he came to the cafeteria to eat, sometimes even with an officer pretending to tase him, and him going into pretend spastic convulsions, to excellent comedic effect. They joked about it for a long time before it became normal and not funny. But that was a long time ago, and after it was no longer funny, he still had to work in a jail cell, and it made him claustrophobic.
In such conditions, what work relationship would not be strained? One is already primed for irritability in an office like this; he kept this fact in mind and tried to be forgiving of the thing. It had its idiosyncrasies and rituals just like any other coworker would; he hoped that by noticing the ways in which the thing really was in many ways almost just like a person or a coworker, by intentionally anthropomorphizing the thing, he might come to...to like it? He doubted he would ever like it. But at least he could get used to it. Really, he was used to it already. It had been so long. He should have gotten used to it by now.
* * *
He had protested the purchase of the thing years ago, a VigorTex Fingerprint Scanning Machine that had cost the department—the taxpayers—thirty thousand dollars—$29,998.00 plus delivery and installation fees. He knew this for a fact, because he liked to leaf through the VigorTex Detention Supply catalog on his break—at least he had liked to leaf through it before they stopped sending paper copies.
He had protested the purchase on what he still felt were quite sound fiduciary grounds: assuming a cost of $3 for an inkpad with a 5,000-impression lifespan, and assuming an average of 20 weekly fingerprint cards taking 12 impressions apiece (fingers and thumbs, and then two all-four-fingers for good measure), the savings on inkpads would total about $7.50 annually—in other words, the machine wouldn’t pay for itself for 4,000 years. And this was assuming the complicated, person-sized machine, with its plastic parts and a tendency to overheat, didn’t accrue any maintenance fees during that time.
Furthermore, he had argued at the time, the machine locks us into using the single proprietary fingerprint card sold by VigorTex Detention Supply; what if they raise prices? Or go out of business? If we have to switch to a digital system, why not buy a top-of-the-line PC, scanner, and printer? We would save a ton of money, plus the system could be upgraded and repaired by a tech support person without a VigorTex Systems Maintenance certificate.
Do you know what the most expensive liquid on earth is, by volume, he asked in a final bid for common sense. Not blood, not oil, not single-malt scotch. Printer ink.
The sheriff would not be dissuaded, though he made a show of listening politely.
Every other sheriff’s department in the state has switched to the VigorTex Fingerprint System. What do you think it looks like if we keep using inkpads? And sure, it looks expensive on paper, but the costs are defrayed by free maintenance for the whole first year. The sheriff looked up at him with sparkling eyes but saw that he still looked unsure. Besides, this will make your job easier, not harder! I know you’re getting older, and you’re worried about learning a whole new system, but I promise you, it couldn’t be easier. That’s why we went with VigorTex! The whole point of the self-contained system is to eliminate user error! I’ve seen the manual, it’s like 2 pages long—the user manual, anyway. The maintenance manual, on the other hand...but hey, that’s not your job!
He never understood why the sheriff was so totally unswayed by his arguments. He didn’t follow local politics, and so it escaped his notice that the sheriff’s reelection campaign was almost entirely bankrolled by VigorTex.
* * *
Years he had spent since then, in the jail cell with the machine. In that time, he had gotten to know it as well as you would get to know any cellmate. Even without talking to someone at all, by inhabiting such a small space together, you of course learn their rhythms, their habits, their motions, their smells and noises. And so he knew, for example, that after every 48 minutes of disuse the machine would start a series of high-pitched whirring noises, as various motors ran, fans tested themselves, lights blinked in a complicated sequential order. He was put in mind of how a dog will rouse itself from sleep, stretch, walk in a few circles, and return to sleep. He thought of this as the machine doing its calisthenics, though he tried to deny to himself that he thought of it at all.
But more than he noticed the machine, he noticed his own constant failure to ignore the machine. It was just so needlessly large. It was the size of a dishwasher, or a squatting fat man. With its accompanying printer and monitor, it took up nearly half the space of his already small office. No matter where he sat himself, he felt his every movement was a movement around the machine. He was afraid to bump into it, because it ran so hot.
It ran day and night; it never turned off, except for software updates, procedures which it performed on itself according to its own arcane schedule. Besides these rare brief reboots, it was always whirring, always humming a little tune. He found himself distracted by the noises and blinking lights. All day long, under the surface of his work-related thoughts, ran a pattern of self-talk that sounded like Just ignore it. It doesn’t matter. Focus on your work. It doesn’t matter. Ignore it. It’s a machine. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Focus. Focus. Focus. Ignore it.
The lights were maddening; except when the machine was doing its calisthenics, they blinked to different rhythms, falling into and out of sync over long periods, periods which he wasted a shameful amount of time and concentration watching, at one point even timing their periodic synchronizations with a stopwatch. Just to settle the question. Just to know, if there was a logic to it, what the logic was. So, for example, he recorded that the red light, which blinked approximately once every one point one seconds, formed an approximately fifteen second period with the small yellow light, which blinked approximately once every point nine seconds. The big yellow light and the green light formed a 70-second period, while the big yellow light and the small yellow light were so similarly timed that his 99 minute, 99 second stopwatch wasn't long enough to record their full period.
It was too abstract for him to keep straight—not without better instruments of measurement—but he soon became aware that the period of each light-pair interacted differently with each other period, forming superperiods, which hypothetically could be precisely described—for example, occasionally all the lights would sync up for a few seconds: a statistical inevitability not unlike a solar eclipse. He couldn’t be sure precisely how often this happened, since he couldn’t watch the machine all the time (and since he tried to watch the machine none of the time). He only witnessed total synchronization a few times, and it was gone almost before he knew what he was seeing. It occurred to him that an attentive 17th-century mathematician could have invented a crude calculus merely by studying and describing the behavior of the machine’s blinking lights. He was half-tempted to give it a shot himself. If he could just pin down the machine’s behavior, if only he could predict it, he might be able to ignore it.
* * *
The act of fingerprinting changed, too. Before the thing arrived, it had been a delicate, intimate, almost sensual affair: together and alone in his quiet office, a citizen of the town entrusted their hands to his own soft touch. Often, there was a little nervous banter; a hand might involuntarily jump at his first touch, then yield to his gentle but sure guidance. The inkpad welled up with a surprising moisture, leaking its fluid from between woven threads. And the paper had a receptiveness, tight pressed white fibers lapping eagerly at inked fingers. The sensations were pleasurable to most; he felt people relax in real time, as if he were giving them a massage. What began awkwardly and stiffly ended all too soon; the citizen only wished they had more reason to linger, more fingers to ink.
He tried to bring some of the same grace and intimacy to the new, digitized fingerprinting process, but the situation was hopeless. A third wheel was present for the entire procedure; the machine squatted next to them, between them, just a little beneath them, looking up at them expectantly. Ink-wet cloth and soft dry paper were replaced by a hard glass pane glowing with the red light of the scanner, which whirred noisily with each scan. The large white monitor brightly revealed what the scanner saw, and the overlarge, overprecise real-time image of the fingerprint was somehow unsettling; it rolled like a giant eyeball; it stared at them. Finally, each successful scan was attended by a loud beep, which shattered whatever peace might have been attained. One of the few times he had truly gone menu-diving on the machine was in a furious attempt to silence that beep; an afternoon’s frustration confirmed that this was impossible. The machine was a beeping machine.
Never, not remotely, did he consider telling the sheriff that he missed the old, sensual fingerprinting experience. He didn’t consider considering it. He didn’t tell his wife, his friends, or any of his coworkers; it had been a secret unnamed pleasure, innocent and small. He hadn’t known its full significance until after it was taken from him, so his most profound reason for resenting the machine was never given open expression and was soon lost even to him. The reason was lost, but the resentment remained.
* * *
Some months after the thing crash-landed in his office, he was struggling to get his work done. The sheriff noticed and reprimanded him. A county-level administrative job wasn’t overly demanding—he had gone into government work in part to avoid the pressures of the corporate world—but he was just so distracted. The machine’s habits—no, its functions—its blinking, its beeping, its calisthenics, its humming—were distracting. Anyone would have found them distracting.
He tried turning his desk around so he couldn't see the machine, so he faced the gray cinder block back wall of his office. This helped, albeit briefly. He could no longer obsess over the blinking lights, which was a huge relief. No more manic compulsive calculation of the lights’ intricate pirouettes, and for a shining moment his problems seemed as if they could all be so easily solved. No longer persecuted by the lights’ mad rhythms, he could charitably imagine them as dancers whose style was simply alien to him. There was nothing inherently evil in what they were doing, it was only beyond his comprehension. Perhaps to a strange god the whole thing could be quite lovely.
But sitting backward in his office made every interaction with anyone who came in awkward; they caught him from behind, off-guard, compromised—which was especially embarrassing for a jail worker. And he knew his visitors thought the new arrangement was weird. When someone occasionally asked why his desk faced the back wall, the distraction of the machine’s blinking lights was an inadequate explanation, and he hated the unconvinced half-smiles they gave in response. They had no idea what it was like to live with the thing day in, day out. They had not been burdened with the calculus of blinking lights.
Worse still was his feeling that he was yielding too much ground to the machine. Wasn’t it demeaning enough that he allowed the thing the size of a rhino to take up three quarters of the space in his office? Was this admitting defeat? Staring at the cinder blocks that made up the back wall of his jail cell office day after day, he was more distracted than ever, positively fuming at his own weakness, effeminacy, impotence, his endless give. He felt like an inflatable doll of a person, with all the air squished out by the machine. He felt like a dog. He had rolled right over for the sheriff on this one. And now he was rolling over for the machine.
But the thing that finally changed his mind, the thing that got him to give up and turn his desk back around, was when one day, as he glowered at the back wall of his cell, contemplating the sheer rudeness of the thing as it did its calisthenics, as always, right on schedule, huffing and puffing and whirring away, probably on the verge of overheating again—as he sat there stewing in his own juices, no longer able to see the slightest humor in his situation, he caught it, just barely, just faintly discernible on the upper left corner of the wall: the reflection of the machine’s blinking lights.
* * *
He could no longer ignore the thing, he could not tolerate the thing, any more than a gazelle can tolerate a python’s tightening coils. The walls of his cell—his office!—now blinked the machine’s alien code; he was engulfed. Surrounded. Squashed into a tiny corner of the space he used to call his own. He saw with perfect retrospective clarity how the machine had surreptitiously overtaken the office; how it had gained an early upper hand in the sheriff’s gleaming eyes; how it had stripped the pleasure and the humanity from his work, and reduced him to the role of technician; how it camouflaged itself, appearing as an ordinary machine to everyone who didn’t live with it; how its rhythms and routines were maliciously contrived to push him over the edge.
He spoke to the sheriff simply and honestly. The machine has made my work difficult and unpleasant; I have asked for very little over the course of my career; now I ask that the machine be relocated, if it can’t be removed altogether.
Have you given any thought to our early retirement program? the sheriff asked, eyes glittering.
* * *
He dialed the old familiar number for VigorTex Maintenance and Repair. He worked through an automated menu and scheduled an appointment.
The VigorTex guy and he were on good terms, having met each other a fair few times, each time with a common enemy. Yeah, I don’t know why they make em like they do, the VigorTex guy said the first time they met, echoing his own wonderment. Things fuckin suck. But I’ll never be out of a job, tell you what.
The maintenance code he dialed in was an 0414, faulty scanner motor. When the VigorTex guy arrived, he was too nervous to say anything about his deception; his heart pounded. The VigorTex guy removed the front panel from the machine, got heavily down on his back, and with a penlight began searching for the problem. I don’t see...what’d you say was wrong with the thing?
What would you do...he began slowly, almost whispering. How would you...if you wanted to make it look like an accident. He was sweating with nerves, and he wrung his hands.
The VigorTex guy looked up at him curiously. Then he laughed. You serious? he asked, and saw the answer in the man’s dour face. Hell, I could do it for you. Hundred bucks.
No, he said firmly. I'll do it. I’ll pay you for the information.
* * *
The VigorTex guy’s plan was ingenious and untraceable, a slow burn in the most literal sense. The “overheating” the machine experienced with such regularity, he explained, was actually the precise opposite of overheating. A threat sensor triggered an emergency shutdown when it reached a certain temperature (the confined space of the jail cell office probably contributed to its frequent shutdowns, he opined, vindicating age-old suspicions); trick the sensor, and the machine won’t recognize when it’s dangerously hot. It will have a heat stroke and die.
He asked the VigorTex guy to leave the machine in its vulnerable disassembled state and got to work. Water was the natural poison; the only question was how to convey it continuously to the heat nerve, a small metal nib tucked away deep, hidden beneath one of the machine’s large central motors. In the jail’s medical supply closet, he found a spool of IV tubing and a 100 ml syringe with which to administer the deadly medicine. The staff nurse returned to her office while he was still in the closet, but he calmly explained to her that he’d come for a box of tissues; he showed her the box, inside of which were hidden the pilfered supplies.
Back in the machine’s office, he fed the tubing through a vent on the back of the machine, making sure that it wouldn’t obstruct the ineffective cooling fan. With forceps he pulled the tubing past various intricate circuit boards and sensory apparatus, organs whose functions were as opaque as the functioning of his own spleen. The tubing in place, he secured it with electrical tape. When he found that the electrical tape wouldn’t stick to the rear panel’s strangely sebaceous surface, he switched to medical tape.
He replaced the front panel and inspected the machine from all angles; the IV was virtually undetectable. Just then, the machine began its calisthenics. Right on schedule. It didn’t suspect a thing.
* * *
The poisoning required him to pay closer attention to the machine than he ever had before; he forced one milliliter of water past its heat nerve every minute, monitoring for any signs of a short. The sheriff knew he hated the machine, and he would be forced into early retirement—perhaps even lose his pension—if it looked like it was his fault in any way.
So he sat by the machine all day, its feverish heat burning his leg, gently administering cold water every minute. Seated so calm and patient, relaxed for the first time in years, entranced by the mechanistic inevitability of his plan in motion, he daydreamed himself as the mother of a sick child, as she gently rocks it, rocks her babe to sleep, spoonfeeds it medicine and prays for its fever to break. The machine was his sick child, it seemed. As it underwent the same arduous calisthenics for the ten thousandth time, which had always struck him as a fitness routine, now it seemed more like an asthma attack—the machine was unwell! It was wheezing!—and his irritation melted to pity. When sixty seconds passed again, he was staring intently at the syringe, moralizing; could he go through with it? Could he kill this sick machine, which depended on him for everything, which now depended on him for its life?
He sat balanced on the verge of compassion and denunciation. Then a cold mechanism overtook him, and he administered another dose with clinical precision. To complete the task, he realized, he must be dispassionate and resolute. He must execute the program. Sitting with the dying machine, he summoned visions of life before the machine: the idyll of traditional fingerprinting; the wide open space of his office; the sheriff’s respect and admiration. On a legal pad, he rehearsed the list of things he hated about the machine. He administered another dose.
Jake McCulley studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. There, he discovered an interest in existentialist and Marxist thought. Since graduating, he has developed a powerlifting practice, which he writes about at mindfulpowerlifting.com. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with two cats, Corncob and Eloise. This is his first published fiction.
