Chapter One Clearance

The offices of Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd were easily the most extravagant on Charles Street. Where the other buildings had single wood panelled doors and plastic framed windows, Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd had a glass and gilded large double entrance and clean grey bricks that shone when the sun hit them in the morning. It was the first building on the street to have a lift, although Ben Jensen the Security Guard wasn’t supposed to use it.

Ben’s ‘office’ was in the basement. A small box room just off the stairwell down into the employee car park. Ben spent most of his day in his extravagantly named ‘Security Centre’, except for once an hour when he peeled himself from the cheap wheelie chair and trudged to the top floor of the building, only to make his way slowly back down to his ‘office’.

More often than not, Ben believed his job was beneath him, and he was already beneath everyone else in the building, figuratively and literally. He spent his mornings playing solitaire and minesweeper while watching the security cameras out of the corner of his eye. Nothing to interest him ever happened at Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd, the employees all respected their positions and their clearance, so his job was rather pointless. Nothing eventful happened except once a week, when Maggie, the lunch lady, would ‘forget’, with perfect timing each week: 2:57pm on a Tuesday afternoon, that she was not allowed up past the canteen on level one. Of course, it was Ben’s job to jump from his seat, rush after her, and turn her back down the stairs. However, three years into his job and Ben knew every week exactly when this was going to happen, so he now left the office ten minutes earlier and sat on the stairs waiting for her.

It was a particularly bleak Wednesday when Ben finally heard something interesting going on at Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd. Knowing nothing about law, he found the entire building rather boring, and didn’t really listen to the gossip amongst the staff, like Mr Hale’s divorce papers getting lost in the copy room, or how Kelly had botched her cross examination of the lead witness in the Clifton case. No, it was something else that caught Ben’s attention that day. Something he didn’t quite understand until two days later.

He’d been on his four o’clock rounds when, on the fifth floor, he heard one of the law assistants grumbling as he came out of the lift.

“Bloody asshole,” the assistant swore as he walked out of the lift, giving it a swift kick for good measure. “I’m sure they wait until I’m about to get in.”

“What’s going on?” Ben asked, knowing that the man was talking to himself more than anyone in the vicinity, but thought he’d ask anyway.

“Someone keeps pressing all the lift buttons. Every time I get in there, they’re all pressed.” The assistant scowled and walked away, muttering under his breath about five wasted minutes.

Ben shrugged it off. He didn’t really care about the lift buttons, he wasn’t supposed to use it anyway, but as he made his way down the stairs to level four, he stopped when he heard hushed voices in the stairwell.

“I’m telling you,” a man stage whispered from the next staircase down. “He’s getting fired. The author wrote it in last week.”

A second man gasped and muttered something about the author getting more reckless these days, Ben didn’t hear properly. What confused him most was; why were they calling someone ‘the author’? Was it some kind of law code name?

“Why’s he getting fired?” the second man asked.

“Dunno,” the first man answered. “The bit I saw didn’t say. Author must not have typed it up yet.”

Ben waited until the two men had slipped out of the stairwell and out onto the fourth floor before he continued his way down, completely forgetting about his rounds. He made his way slowly back down to his office and slumped into his chair, staring at the half finished game of solitaire still open on his computer.

Ben Jensen had been hired as a Network Security Expert, but in three years, two months, and thirteen days had never been asked to check the computer system. It had perplexed him for a long time, but as he gave up hope of doing anything on a computer except playing mind numbing games, he assumed the bosses wanted an expert on hand just in case and they might as well employ him as a security guard in the mean time.

Two days of codes and passwords later, Ben had hacked his way into the Bosses network and was reading the most personal files he could find. It turned out Cliff in Accounting was the man being fired, but from the files, they had no idea why. All it said under his name was the explanation ‘Reason for termination pending.’

While this was interesting in itself, it was nothing compared to what he discovered half an hour later; Ben Jensen, Security Guard at Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd, was in a work of fiction, and not just that… it was a best seller.

After three hours of file skimming, Ben knew the entire story. ‘Behind Gilded Doors’ was a series of novels based on the lives and work of the employees at Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd. The files didn’t state the name of the author, and from the detailed research he had before him, Ben assumed the bosses didn’t know it.

In an instant, Ben understood why he was never asked to secure the computer network; because if this author person wanted someone to hack into the servers, they’d do it, whatever protection Ben had put on it before hand. He was probably there to fix the servers after this happened.

As he sat staring at the neatly typed files on his screen, he felt his life crash down around him… or his lack of it. He didn’t exist. He, Ben Jensen, was a figment of some writer’s imagination. A thorough writer, as they never forgot which size and colour pairs of underwear he owned, but a writer none the less.

It was just as Ben was wondering why the author had only given him nine toes when he had an imaginary-life changing epiphany. The bossed knew this information. That meant there must be a link to the outside. The man in the stairwell had mentioned something about Cliff’s reason for dismissal not being typed up yet. It was all on a computer, and if there was something Ben did best; it was hacking computers.

He was not going to take this lying down… or sitting, or standing on his head – whichever position the author had chosen.

Over the next month, Ben kept his routine as normal as possible. He figured that if the author wasn’t writing about him, it he was just one of those characters that passed through the background every once in a while, then if he stuck to his routine and performed his rounds once an hour as instructed, the author wouldn’t crack on to his hacking activities.

For the first week, he was nervous every time he turned on his computer. He began sweating and his heart raced, worrying that the author had caught on and would delete the paragraphs when Ben discovered the secret.

As he trundled into the second week, he calmed down and decided that the author had no idea what he was up to. Cliff had been fired for making sexual advances on a married client, and it was a big scandal. It was enough to keep everyone’s eyes, and writing, away from Ben.

He was almost at the point of giving up hacking his way out of the imaginary world he had been written into when the breakthrough finally came. He was another computer… and not just any computer – the author’s computer. Ben whooped and jumped around for almost ten minutes before he realised it was 2.56pm on a Tuesday. He had to stop Maggie.

Sprinting back to his office fifteen minutes later, Ben began frantically searching for the files, the computer documents that created his life. It didn’t take long. As it turned out, writing ‘Behind Gilded Doors’ was pretty much all the computer was used for.

Ben found the manuscript for the first book in the series, ‘The Clover Book Affair’, and began reading; stopping only to do his rounds, which he now had an alarm clock to remind him about.

He was pleasantly surprised to find the book thrilling and well written. It was set almost five years previously, before Ben had been hired, and although he was impatient to see his grand entrance into fictional life, he decided to stick with it and read everything.

As he moved through the second and third books he began understanding a lot more about the series. Every book was based in Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd, but each followed a different character. It wasn’t until half way through book four, ‘The Heiden Dealings’, that Ben finally made his appearance. It was in chapter eight, when Dennis, who was the main character for this edition, bumping into the new security guard as he tried to sneak out of the offices to meet the client of another firm.

A tall man with a buzz cut of thick blond hair stepped out of a room to the right of the stairwell. Dressed in a pair of black trousers and a light blue shirt, he towered over Dennis with a suspicious glare.
“Bit early to be leaving isn’t it?” the guard asked with a slight soft growl.
“Late lunch meeting,” Dennis replied, trying to sound insulted at the insinuation.
The security guard looked at his watch.
“Very late,” he grinned.
“Look, I’m assuming you’re new here,” Dennis snapped, drawing himself up to full height, which still made him a head shorter than the towering guard. “But lawyers here will come and go during the day for meetings. I suggest you stick to your monitor watching.”
Dennis stormed away in what he hoped was an indignant manner as the guard stared bemused after him.

Ben’s mouth opened in disgust and disbelief. The author had made him out to be some kind of mindless gorilla. Sure, he was taller than most at 6’5”, but that didn’t mean he was a thug, and sure, maybe he voice was sometimes had a slight growling quality to it, but he couldn’t help that.

As it happened, Ben specifically remembered that day. It was his first, and Dennis was the only person he’d bumped into. The comment about leaving only a joke; hoping to engage the man in a little harmless banter. It wasn’t Ben’s fault the guy had flown off the rails.

No… it was the author’s. The blasted author who made Ben seem like an idiot thug. The author who hadn’t given him a better education or job, or even storyline. As he glared angrily at the computer before him, Ben decided to write his own storyline…

This was war!

He started off small, and in the past. In the manuscript for the sixth book, the last one he find finished on the computer, he wrote in a paragraph about Ben, the security guard finding a fifty pound note on the floor in the background of a scene where the main character, Claire for this book, and another lawyer Daniel were having a conversation about tax laws. As soon as Ben had typed the final full stop, the memory of that day flooded through him. His elation at finding the money and that he’d used the money to buy a new computer game he’d been hankering after for weeks.

The game had been fantastic, and assuming the author wouldn’t read the manuscript any time soon, he left his paragraph in there.

His next experiment was in the new book the author was writing. He decided to do it in the latest scene as it was the right time for his rounds anyway. Hoping against hope that the author would assume it was something they’d written and forgotten about, Ben erased the last few words and began typing carefully.

James lowered his voice as the security guard walked around the corner and glanced at the two of them.

Ben blinked. He was standing on the third floor, James Walker and his assistant Joy engaged in a hushed conversation before him. He strolled past them with a respectful nod and walked away casually until he was out of sight before sprinting back to his office. Throwing himself into his chair, he stared in rapture at the screen.

“I know what you mean, but…” he paused as the guard sauntered past, nodding cordially before continuing on his way, disappearing around the corner a moment later. “We need that information, Joy,” he finished.
“Of course, Sir,” she replied.

Jumping from his chair, Ben yelled happily. He danced, he screamed, he dug into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out one of the beers he kept hidden for particularly dull days.

Ben Jensen, Security Guard at Smith, Bakeman, & Lloyd, was the master of his own universe.