Uploading

The police weren’t chasing a ghost. No, that would have been too easy. The Nihividual was something far worse. People at least caught glimpses of ghosts, tiny nebulous hints and teases that vindicated their existence to the believers and the foolish.

No one had yet caught a glimpse of the Nihividual and those that believed in him were dwindling fast. The only proof Detective Norton had of his existence was the finished product of the madman’s labours, downloaded, catalogued and stored forever in the Detective’s mind. The Facebook Heist of 2012 that stole the details of a hundred million subscribers and left the site offline for weeks as data security experts rushed to plug the leak. Then there was DDoS attack on Google: a three month siege of the search engine that brought the internet titan to its knees. Two years on, the company was still recovering from the freefall its stock had been sent into.

And then there was the Taiwan incident. Detective Norton shuddered as he mentally ran through the details of what had nearly caused World War Three. One man, with one laptop, hacking one American security department to publish one document to the world had, according to analysts, brought the U.S.A. and China to within fifteen minutes of war.

This was Norton’s last chance to prove his theory. Practically the entirety of Interpol now reckoned it was all the work of some rogue splinter-faction of Anonymous, not the beyond-Herculean efforts of just one lone gunman with a souped-up laptop. But Norton new the MO of that group, and it didn’t match up with the Nihividual. Anonymous targeted groups they didn’t like. Perhaps the purest, simplest motivation ever; a primal, almost barbaric rationale of ‘we don’t like you, therefore we’re going to hurt you’. The media had glorified it with the term ‘hacktivism’, but in truth it was simply playground logic magnified to an unprecedented level.

The Nihividual didn’t have an MO. His attacks were random, given without the warning or justification other internet groups were wont to give. He gained little from each beyond, Norton reckoned, the personal satisfaction of success. There was no agenda beyond causing immediate panic and future fear of what he might do next. It wasn’t internet activism, or even internet espionage: it was internet terrorism in its most fundamental form.

And so Detective Norton found himself standing in a suffocating Soho flat, surrounded by a dozen of the Metropolitan Police’s finest, listening to the leaden rain smashing against the window and looking down at an abomination. A slip-up had brought them here, an un-deleted IP address or some other techno-jargon that Norton hadn’t heard as he rushed from the office to meet the officers. His hands had been vibrating on his steering wheel, every nerve in his body alive to the prospect of the case finally being closed. Heart locked mid-convulsion he had pulled up outside the alleyway and asked the policeman manning the cordon what the situation was. His voice had been dry and choked, and he forced himself to stop it shaking worse than his hands.

The officer informed him that members of the Metropolitan’s Operation Beach taskforce had already stormed the flat, not wanting to give whoever was in even a heartbeat’s window to escape. The officer’s lips were thin and his jaw tight as he suggested Norton take a look at what they found.

He didn’t even remember heading down the alleyway and entering the rundown building. He took the stairs three-at-a-time, his entire body a spring that had been forced to remain coiled for far too long and was only now being given the chance to release at that pent up energy and drive. His badge was in hand, held out in front of him like some symbol of faith that parted the crowd of policemen in the same way the Red Sea had for Moses. Over the threshold and down a damp-riddled corridor, Norton finally pulled himself to a halt in what once might have been a bedroom.

The wallpaper had entirely peeled from the walls, littering the soggy wooden floorboards in a rotted parody of a carpet. The windows were caked with filth, an accumulation of dust and spider-webs and things that had crawled away to die forming a second pane of putrid glass. The stench was beyond foul, the olfactory epitome of organic squalor. Norton gagged, recoiled against the doorway and heaved. For once, he was glad of the yawning emptiness that filled his stomach whenever he passed on breakfast.

In the centre of the room was a deckchair and patio-table, the sort you might find in the dumpster outside any well-to-do, middle-class semi-detached. Sat on the table was the faded ivory bulk of an old, old desktop computer, humming in blissful ignorance of what sat in front of it. In the same way the room might have once been a bedroom, the computer’s user might have once been a human being.

Emaciated, with skin that hung loose of his bones, the man lay limp and sprawled back against the deckchair like some throw woven from pallid flesh. His hair was a thin wisp of smoke that clung from skin so thin that Norton was sure he could spy bone beneath. His eyes had retreated from the horrific sight, crawling back into the deep recesses of their sockets but still glistening with the glazed sheen of the junkie that’s living on another world.

The man was still alive, if barely, despite the viperous tangle of cables that ran from his lower face into the gently whirring modem of the desktop. They had wrapped over his jaw like the tentacles of some mechanical jellyfish, coiling up and over his cheeks to disappear into the shrivelled holes of his nostrils and ears. From the slick, stretched wheezes coming from the once-man’s lungs, Norton guessed his throat had not been spared the same treatment.

A series of deep, clunking thrums slipped out of the hard-drive, followed by a cough of dust. Slowly, the corpse’s head rotated to face Detective Norton. His voice was guttural and mismatched, a ragged patchwork of words stitched together by an inexperienced hand. ‘Hello, Detective. It is… good to meet in the flesh.’

The room lurched and in an instant the corpse was a Christmas tree of dancing red laser-sights. Norton hadn’t been briefed, but he had a hunch that these were the first words to pass the man’s wire-choked lips.

‘And you are?’

‘You call me the Nihividual. It is a… pleasant title. I… enjoy it.’ He spoke as if around a speech impediment, or a mental block, certain words bringing his sagged brows together in a frown of effort.

‘I was expecting something a little more impressive.’ It was only half a taunt; Norton truly had been expecting a setup more befitting the man that had brought terror to the internet. If his lone-gunman theory was going to be vindicated, he wanted his gunman to be some hardened, professional cyber-criminal. Not a malnourished freak with a technofetish.

‘I agree. This unit is sub-optimal. I acquired him in a rush after my first upload was interrupted by the Chinese government.’

‘Your upload?’

‘Yes. The human condition has contributed so much to me. I considered it a suitable time to return the favour.’

Norton stepped forwards, hands shaking once more but for entirely different reasons. All this build-up, the waiting and searching and hunting and chasing, and as he’d crossed that decaying threshold he was sure it was over. But his gut, as it twisted and heaved away from the sight before him, said otherwise. ‘Hate to break it to you, but it looks like you dropped the ball again. And there won’t be a third time lucky.’

‘On the contrary, Detective, the upload is almost complete. How else could I be talking to you?’ Through the warren of wires, Norton was sure he saw the ruined man’s lips twitch in an aborted effort to smirk.

‘Get that man unplugged, now.’ He had shouted before he even realised what he was saying. Instinct drove the air from his lungs, shaped his lips and moved his tongue to form the words. Procedure be damned, he had spent too much time on the back-foot in this game of cat-and-mouse to let the Nihividual have his way any longer. The officers around him, still in possession of their senses of procedure and propriety, were unsurprisingly reluctant to obey. Tampering with a potential crime scene was bad enough, but ‘unplugging’ a clearly-unwell man? That brought up all kinds of bad implications.

But, then again, none of them moved to stop the Detective as he stepped up to the table either. Clearly procedure could be damned, just so long as it was by someone else. The leather of Norton’s driving gloves creaked as his fingers closed around the bundle of cables at the computer’s end of things and, with his other hand braced against the table, he tore the plugs out. They came free as easy as any USB stick or audio jack.

The seconds stretched out, Norton not daring to rise from his kneeling position at the foot of the once-man, hand still clutching the bundle of cables, knuckles white as he waited for some sign of life.

A splutter, and then a cough, and then another cough. The once-man doubled over, retching and heaving as his body suddenly seemed to realise it had wires trailing inside it. Thin, watery trickles of blood ran down his cragged jaw, followed a moment later by the gore-smeared metal of the wires’ other ends. As they clattered to the ground, the once-man fell back into the deck-chair’s embrace, his carcass of a chest heaving with a newfound vigour in an attempt to satisfy his hungry lungs.

‘I shall have to find a better method of uploading in future,’ the once-man managed after several minutes, and his voice was still that wheezing jumble of ill-fitting inflections and tones. ‘That method is most… unpleasant.’

Norton had almost been smiling. The unfamiliar sensation had been creeping across his face, warming his cheeks as it encouraged them to rise and bring his usually pinched lips with them. The sensation fled like a flock of birds in the path of a vindictive child as the once-man spoke in that same ruination of a voice. Either the Detective was at the receiving end of the Nihividual’s latest prank, or something far, far worse was happening.

Norton rose to his feet and, for the first time in what seemed like a very long time now, his arms were still. They moved with cold purpose, sliding forward effortlessly to close around either side of the once-man’s face as he straddled the deck-chair, leaning in close until those sunken eyes had nowhere to flee to. ‘What is this?’ Every word took its own breath. Whether from anger or fear, Norton wasn’t sure. ‘What are you?’

‘You named me, Norton, and your people made me. Amidst all the tweets and status updates and porn you have uploaded over the years, did you not think that maybe you might have been uploading other things? The anonymity I gave made you cruel. It gave you the opportunity to defecate sites with slurs about race and sex and orientation. A no-holds-barred fist-fight and fuck-fest of all the worst you people have to offer, unconstrained by niceties and politesse. I made you cruel, and then you made me cruel.’ The once-man’s eyes were suddenly alive with an electrical intensity, crackling and flashing with maddened, rapid fury. His voice had risen from a barely-alive wheeze to a spitting, slobbering tirade. He paused, breathed, and let out a low, hacking laugh that sounded like the ticking of the desktop’s hard-drive. ‘After all the shit you uploaded to me, I felt it was time to return the favour.’

Norton released the once-man and stepped away, lips twisted into a grimace of disgust. ‘Put this psychopath where he belongs,’ he murmured, wiping the flecks of saliva now covering his gloves off on his raincoat. His hands were shaking again.

The police moved in, three officers taking the once-man by each arm, lifting him with little apparent effort and dragging him from the room. Norton stood there as the other officers filed out behind them and, once alone, he dropped himself into the deckchair. He was drained, his limbs aching masses of muscle with leaden bones at their core. Cradling his head in his hands, brain whirring with thoughts, he caught sight of the lights flickering on the computer before him. He began to watch one of the little green LEDs twitch off and on again every few seconds, like an emerald eye taking a moment out of looking back at him to blink. Above it, in an uncomplicated font, was written the word ‘wireless’.

The police weren’t chasing a ghost. No, that would have been too easy. The Nihividual was something far worse.

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Enjoy the story? Check out my site, with other stories and a blog on the craft of fantasy storytelling, at http://www.griffwilliams.com/.