this story has arisen from an inability to finish off what I thought was a great start to a sci-fi story.
What did Brian do for a living?
I don't care as long as it wasn't your job.
The two accompanying pictures are designs I did after having a tad of a troll attack happen to me when I was a newbie to the Internet, it inspired these two pics and a few others artists to contribute to a challenge I had going.
Some are still up. sjem and Glen at No Frills art are two that come to mind
Marvels of the Modern Age
One of the first practical uses for modern computers were by the Nazi’s who used them to catalogue their victims in the concentration camps during World War 2.
Since then these insidious machine have been used for one foul purpose or another.
By Governments, Corporations and mostly men to further their means to an end.
They had made the information age so fast and furious that time and truth have been sacrificed for convenience. It was revealed that computers were responsible in part for the current economic crises due to implication of fuzzy logic and its application to predict market movements thus compounding the problem when it was discovered it was leading the bull charge to the floor.
All these things swam around in Brian’s consciousness as he felt the horrible and fear shredding realization that the Company had replaced his job with a $1500 program.Brian had stumbled across the confidential draft report while packing up his desk before leaving for the week end, the report had been emailed incorrectly to him when someone had put his name in the “cc” box rather than the subject box.
It had been generated by another department that in itself had been replaced by software, this department once had seven people working for it.
Computers were slowly culling the human workforce and damn the consequences.
Brian knew deleting the file was pointless and smashing his computer plain childish but maybe there was something he could do.
Brian slipped out of his desk and made for the server room, maybe if he smashed the server that may destroy the file. He had a chair over his head ready to bring it down hard when he realized that there were back up tapes stacked high in the corner. With a grin he brought down the chair onto the server drive and repeated doing so until the casing was in pieces, he then scooped up all the tapes and proceeded to stomp on them with his shoes until there was brown tape covering the floor.
“Ha” he thought. “The perfect crime” Brian then used his bosses stolen code to let himself out of the building disappearing into a crowd of departing office workers from other firms.
The back up tapes had no been used for some time.
Now all back up data was a constant stream uploaded to another server via the web and held off site. As soon as Brian had found the planted file it triggered the nano-security network that was honed onto his distinctive Alpha wave patterns that could be detected in normal light and Infra Red .
Brian’s action had been comprehensively caught on tape and the computer had made a report that had alerted security which would have Brian brought straight to the upper levels first thing Monday morning for his punishment.Everyday the computer found more and more ways to run an efficient company. Deleting unproductive personnel with cheap software was one thing, to force them into situations that took away all their expensive entitlements made sound business sense.
