Audiobook Info at the Bottom
Part I – A Business Proposal
The footsteps of both men echoed down the institutional hallways as Simon, being led by his new supervisor, looked at the random notices on the walls interspersed between research doors. Many of the closed doors had paper over the windows, blocking out any presence of other people in the seemingly empty building.
“Our offices are down this way,” he reminded Simon, remembering he only visited the office space once in the interview process.
The door swung into a receptionist's office. The large, scowling woman glanced up from the computer screen.
“Hi John,” she said with disinterest.
“Do you have Simon’s packet ready?”
“Uh huh,” she said, retrieving a file folder and blindly handing it up.
“Thank you...Sally,” Simon said, hesitating to read the nameplate on her desk.
“Uh huh,” she mumbled again, still affixing her eyes to the computer screen.
John led him passed the desk and through the door straight down the hall. The door opened with a ratty creak, and the two men stepped inside.
“I got your replacement, Mike,” John said to the man sitting in front of a panel of computer screens.
He turned to Simon and shook his hand. “Welcome to Collective Camera Co.”
-----
Simon walked around the room looking at all the equipment. The room clearly monitored several cameras, all of which randomly cycled through different streets. The screen detailed a printout of all vehicles passing through a collection of records like a compiler spitting out lines of code. An occasional beep alerted the monitoring room of an anomaly by outlining screens in red, waiting for a button to be pressed after acknowledging.
Each computer processed information for five monitors. All three computers synchronized the LED colors in the cooling fans. The single screen rolling the log of captured vehicles emanated from a separate computer, different in design from the others.
Turning his attention away from the monitors, a small desk with a simple desktop computer sat upon the far corner of the room. A dorm refrigerator fit under a small stand with a coffeepot. A few jugs of water closed the gap between the refrigerator and the wall. The room’s remainder was plain and institutional.
“Are you from these parts?” Mike asked.
“Nah. I just moved here. Came from Austin. I needed to get away from my crazy ex.”
“I know that feeling,” Mike said. “Not from personal experience. My wife and I have had twenty lovely years. But my ex-sister-in-law is a psycho!”
“So, why am I replacing you?” Simon said, changing the conversation topic.
“I needed a little more bread, so I’m changing companies to find a raise.”
“Can’t you get a raise here?” he asked.
“The company issued wage freezes a few months ago. They are trying to tighten our belts to loosen a few notches for the investors. The C-suite still gets their adjustments. A bit of a travesty.” Mike offered.
“I was wondering why they asked if I would be happy with the hiring wage for at least a year.” Simon countered.
-----
Simon shoveled the last of the microwave Salisbury steak into his mouth and washed it down with the last of the cola. He pushed the tray to the center of the table and grabbed the stack of mail. He opened the first credit card bill, seeing the balance. The interest alone accrued more than he wanted to pay on a single card, but the line about taking seventeen years to pay it off made the steak settle like a rock in the pit of his stomach.
“The age of a minor child,” he mused to himself. “That’s how long I pay for this crap.”
With a nodding head, he neatly placed the statement down on the table and grabbed another piece of mail. The electric bill rose twenty percent. An insert in the bill explained the rise in costs incurred because of the increase in demand for power from the community. Another forty dollars beyond what he expected. The remaining bills added up to more than he had budgeted for basic expenses. His neat pile of bills called to him, but he ignored the call and plummeted into his chair, switching on the television to numb his brain some more.
“At least I found a job,” he muttered to himself.
Being unemployed for a few months added to his debt, and his wage is not what he had hoped he might incur for the experience in computer systems he brought to the table. The subtle sounds and lights hypnotized him into a deep sleep in the chair.
-----
Simon walked down the hallway with more confidence than he had on his hiring date three weeks ago. The blackened doors no longer intrigued him, and a confident stride replaced his formerly sheepish steps. He opened the door to the offices, greetings Sally.
“Uh huh,” she always said, as he walked past her without stopping and into his room.
He opened the door to darkness for the first time. Mike moved on to his new job today, so Simon leaned on his training alone for the first time.
Without supervision, he watched the monitors and glanced over to the log, adding new vehicles and appending the database of the pre-existing ones. The screens lit up with notices and flags, all perfectly managed by Simon, a master of the data.
The door opened unexpectedly. John walked in with a paper in his hand.
“We received a warrant. Did Mike walk you through the procedure?”
“No,” Simon said, “but I read the SOP a few times. I should be able to handle it.”
“Great,” John said, handing him the paper. “Get me the full readout on the central server. Once I look it over, I’ll pass it on.”
Simon looked at the paper and nodded to John, who quickly dismissed himself from the room.
Simon approached the computer and opened up the paper. He expected something in the local town, but the warrant looked for the traveling routes of a car throughout the streets of New York City. He punched in the license plate number and found the vehicle in the database. A mapping option showed the various places the car had been recorded by Collective Camera Co, pinging around NYC with timestamps besides a few common destinations in New Jersey and into a small town in Pennsylvania.
He copied the report into a shared folder with John and drafted an email informing him the data awaited review. The report happened quickly, and with no pushback.
“I wonder,” he said to himself. He opened a terminal on the computer and searched for logs. He found the log showing the access to the information and tested adding a line to the document.
Success.
He removed the line and reset the modified date with a command.
“This is too easy,” he said to himself.
Pulling up the access screen again, he entered some information about himself. The database showed several cameras pinging his location with timestamps. He noted the streets to know where to avoid in the future.
He looked up his ex-wife. The cameras followed her around Austin as well. They noted the times she passed by their old house for work in the morning, and they caught her visiting her new fling. He spent a few hours looking at how much detail the cameras had over her movements. He traced the dates back a few months to their breakup and overlaid his car movements with hers, showing them occupying the same space. That was before. This is now. Simon is overworked and underpaid, and progressing into debt.
An idea ran through his mind.
“A data service,” he thought.
Collective Camera Co focused its database marketing mostly to governments and law enforcement with only a few targeted data brokers sharing reciprocity with data. But he had access to the system and the means to clean his access logs.
Simon launched an instance with an AI to create a webpage selling access to targeted location data for anyone in need. His hidden marketplace became indexed with hidden directories, and inquires started filling up a masked email address.
