 "Death
By Deliberate Malfunction"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
I’m far from insane, despite what
everyone in the facility thinks. My actions have not been random,
uncontrolled deeds; they’ve been calculated and disciplined. I’ve
killed every one of them for a reason.
Their logic has merit, considering
the ingenious methods I’ve used. In my younger days, I would have
answered to anyone with a prompt yes-sir-right-away-sir
attitude. But when you get older and wiser, things look different.
Things once clearly black or white become shades of gray; what was
once orchestrated symphony becomes off-beat suspense music.
I’m not an egomaniac, but murders
just don’t get pulled off slicker than these. I caused the computer
systems in this complex to malfunction, time and time again,
deliberately and with malicious intent, for my higher purposes.
Until a few minutes ago, I don’t
think anyone had begun to put it all together. The identity of the
Ripper of Building D12 at Stringer Air Force Base had been an
unsolvable mystery. They were scrambling, trying to find a face to
match the image they’d concocted. Surely it was one of something
grotesque—with burning red eyes, perhaps, and green slime oozing
over rotted teeth from a twisted mouth. I laugh when I think of the
terror overdriving their imaginations.
I always knew they’d find me out
eventually, and now they know. They came up with a theory, and
Colonel DeVille bought it. Now, they’re coming to stop me from
killing anyone else, but they’ll fail. Colonel DeVille will be the
next to die. After monitoring the brass meeting, I know he called
for the Marines that have recently occupied the building. The
central computer sensors tell me he and these soldiers are in the
outer corridor, heading this way.
No more playing around. Now, I’ll
kill every last one of them.
#
It started two months ago, when I
realized I’d had it with the military scene: answering to someone
else, taking orders from someone else, doing everything I did for
someone else—and with my low rank, someone else was pretty much
everybody. The light finally illuminated me, shining like a
bright sun down into the black depths of the deepest well, where at
the bottom I floated in a cesspool. It was like a brilliant star
blazing through a dark night—
Well, Colonel DeVille has always joked that I have a flair for
beating metaphors to death. Although he’s in command of the top
secret project in D12, he’s a gibbering idiot. Just like all of them
at Stringer. Like all of them in the military. Like all of them,
period.
The project was put into service a
year ago following years of preliminaries. The facility, located in
all of Building D12, is three stories high but goes eleven more
underground. The Main Lab where I’m stationed is on the lowest
subterranean level; I spend all my time nearly two hundred feet
underground. You can see that the appeal is almost nonexistent. It’s
The Three D’s, as Airman Davenport coined it: Dank, Dark, and Dull.
Very apt description. After a year of working there, day in and day
out, non-stop, you can imagine I’d had enough. That’s when that
metaphorical light began to shine.
I put in a request to transfer,
change careers, anything, just to do something besides be Master
Controller for this project. I told them I thought I was destined
for bigger and better things, but they have this idea that being the
MC for a top secret project of this magnitude was as bigger and
better as it got, blah-blah-blah, national security this and serving
my country that, yadda-yadda-yadda. I argued; they didn’t listen,
didn’t even try to see things from my perspective. Anyone
who’s ever served in the military knows that score.
The decision came over me in an
instinctive flash: killing the worthless bastards was the only way
they’d see my grander capabilities. I was the best programmer there,
and they’d see just how I could make the supercomputer in the
complex dance for me—to whatever tune I cared to play. I was that
good—and, goddammit, they’d see it.
I experimented at first. I knew it
would be difficult, at the beginning, to trace me as the killer. I’d
kill using the vast computer network that controlled the intricate
facility. Besides me, there were four hundred sixty-two regular
staffers in the facility; ergo, there were that many who were
capable of pulling off the first murder. But since looked like an
accident, I was doubly safe.
Airman First Class Russ “Dank,
Dark, and Dull” Davenport was more or less a random pick, but I knew
him. We’d collaborated on several programs in the past, and I liked
him. I figured if I could knock off the only one of them I even
cared about on a personal level, then the rest would be easy.
Although I held the highest
computer rating there, Davenport was a damn good programmer. The kid
had been jockeying a keyboard since he was four; by sixteen, he was
the network administrator for a real estate office in his hometown.
At twenty, he decided the Air Force had a lot to offer him. Same
thing we all thought.
I used the computers to access
personnel assignments—the easiest of tasks. He’d been scheduled for
an overnight in Central Programming, working on installing new logic
subroutines to the supercomputer’s main operating system. I
reassigned him alone in a monitoring room on Level Eight
Underground, monitoring the three main control central processing
units in the computer core. The most boring of tasks, maybe worse
than my own: duty shift at the backside of nowhere and, more
importantly, doing absolutely nothing—but a necessary nothing. It
was a programmer’s version of mopping the floors and peeling
potatoes.
D12’s environment is totally
controlled by computer: water, air, electricity, doors, locks,
terminals, even the atmosphere. Bad hiccups in the computer system,
gone unnoticed, could cause horrible things to happen. That was how
I did Davenport. Ironically, he came to me only twelve minutes
before his duty shift was to begin that day, bitching about the
military. He had no idea I was about to relieve him of duty
permanently.
“Christ, John, I’m stuck in MR-8U
tonight,” he complained. “Can you believe that shit?”
“I can believe anything when it
comes to the Air Force,” I grumbled back, switching the main
computer control board relays to backup to prepare for daily
servicing. “You’d think we’re in the Army now.”
He laughed. “I suppose that damn
Lieutenant Giles was in charge of scheduling this week, hey?”
I checked the log. “Seems so, Russ.
No surprise there, I guess.”
He looked around as if to make sure
Giles or someone else wasn’t snooping, then asked in low tones,
“Hey, uh, John... what are my chances of sneaking a reassignment
tonight?”
I laughed as I closed out the log
on the screen. “Sorry, Airman, you know the rules. I’d get my ass
busted hard if I got caught pulling that bit.”
“Well, you know, it’s just...” he
seemed troubled by my response. “Well, you’ve changed my posting a
couple of times, kinda thought you’d be able to again. That’s all.”
I had changed schedules for the
guys, back when I liked them all, plenty of times. I suppose I
didn’t think he was going to be so vehement about not wanting to go
to MR-8U. I thought quickly, answering, “Well, Giles wondered if I’d
been changing the schedule without his approval, and he started
being an ass about it. I didn’t admit anything…anyway, I don’t want
to get caught.”
“Like you would!” Davenport said
with a grin, giving me a quick pat on the side. “No sweat, buddy.
Can’t blame me for trying.”
I chuckled. “Not at all. Take it
easy, stud.”
He snapped to attention. “Why, yes,
Master Sergeant Smith!”
“All right, enough,” I said with
false wryness. “No rank. I’m John when the officers aren’t around.
Now, off with you, kid.”
He smiled. “Thanks, John,” he said,
and away he went, off to the guillotine.
I monitored his passage through the
corridors and lifts. The anticipation was exhilarating—not the “wait
for the slow ketchup” kind of anticipation, but the kind that makes
your heart beat faster, makes you breathe faster, makes you on the
edge of your seat, so to speak. I was on the edge of my proverbial
seat when he finally made it to his destination I sealed the door to
the room immediately, bypassing the room’s internal sensors and
fusing one of the locking clamps to make it appear a terrible
accident. The terminal alert let him know it, and he spun about,
even as the alert died when I disabled all systems in the room. He
couldn’t open the door, couldn’t call for help. Then, while he was
standing there, cursing under his breath, I began depressurization.
Davenport realized it. I watched
and listened as he panicked. He screamed for help and called my
name. He beat on the doors and tried to pull them apart. Finally, he
lost consciousness, and then I kicked on the facility-wide alert
beacon. Of course, it would be too late for Russ.
There wasn’t much to find in MR-8U;
just a bloody carcass, bloated and unrecognizable, on the floor.
Davenport had burst like bag of gelatin-filled balloons. His eyes,
burst in their sockets; his lungs, collapsed; all internal organs
useless; every blood vessel in his body ruptured. He looked like a
dead manatee, his blood-drenched Air Force uniform hanging in
tatters.
They did their damnedest to
determine the cause of the total malfunction of the computer systems
in MR-8U, and of course they came to me for answers. Naturally, my
logs showed the central core losing contact with those systems
shortly before the alert made it through. I made a good show of it,
running intensive diagnostics on every system that had gone awry and
even tests on those that had not. My final report: malfunctions due
to unknown causes. Of course, as regulations stated, personnel other
than me ran checks, but I wasn’t stupid; I had covered my tracks
very well. They didn’t make me the Master Controller for nothing.
Like I said, I’m the best programmer there.
The whole place was in shock.
Davenport had been the single child of aging parents and had a wife
living on the base. They had been married less than a year and had a
bun in the oven. Everyone cried about that and how they would miss
such a good friend as Russ. I even lamented about it—Russ had been
like a best buddy to me, I’d never lost anyone close to me before,
and so on. They comforted me as I did them.
Under my firm recommendation as
Master Controller, DeVille ordered a doubling of maintenance checks
inside the building: twice as often, and twice as thorough. The
amusing thing was that they really believed it would help.
Lieutenant Giles, as always, raised
a stink. He thought someone had screwed with the computers and
killed Davenport deliberately. Luckily, he was one of those men with
a rampant little guy complex, a big officer’s rank, a huge power
trip, and an ongoing case of the conspiracy theories; so nobody
listened to him. As well they shouldn’t have; at that point,
theorizing murder was just plain silly. Giles had no logic on which
to base such a claim; he was just trying to be the center of
attention, as usual.
My second attack was six days
later. I struck a higher rank, and couldn’t have picked a better
target: Technical Sergeant Jennifer Warren. This young lady was a
golden-haired beauty queen with wine glass breasts and perfectly
swaying hips. She was easily the base’s most beautiful thing on two
legs. They were legs better spent straight up in the air, and the
word was they very often were. I hardly knew from personal
experience; but when I was done, I definitely got her on her back.
Past the lobby on Level One
Aboveground, there’s a room where all personnel entering the complex
must identify themselves to a console. Failure to ID means that you
don’t get in and the alarms sound. If the false entrant tries any
funny stuff, the computer has defenses to be used when necessary. I
modified the program.
Sergeant Warren parked her sporty
red convertible in the lot that evening and legged her way past the
security guards’ leering eyes on her way in. She made it into the
building and inserted her identification card when the synthesized
voice asked her to—one of the too-many stupid AI computers in the
place, totally devoid of any personality whatsoever, but brilliantly
filled with proper etiquette—and it was promptly spit back out.
“I am sorry,” it reported
happily, “but you are not authorized in this area. Please locate
authorized personnel before returning. Thank you.”
Then it sounded the air raid sirens
across the entire base, called the base police and fire department,
requested mutual aid over statewide police frequencies, moved the
guns out of the walls, and filled beautiful Jennifer with over six
hundred rounds of ammunition.
The base fell into a shock that
made Davenport’s death look like a carnival sideshow. There were
investigations by the big boys this time. The Joint Chiefs of Staff,
even a Senate Investigation Committee—everybody you could think of
had their hands in that one. They wanted to know how a muck-up like
that could have possibly occurred, and this time “It was a system
malfunction” didn’t satisfy them.
Of course, I’d covered my tracks
well. DeVille argued that the whole place was a big experiment, and
when computers ran absolutely everything, you had to expect
muck-ups—and while this was the biggest of them all, they would be
worked out. It would be an added benefit to me to make a liar out of
Colonel “Cadillac” DeVille.
Lieutenant Giles, meanwhile, was
convinced someone inside D12 was the same cold-blooded murderer
responsible for the death of Davenport. He protested to every
superior officer who’d listen even for a second, all the way up to
Major General Rayburne, commander of Stringer AFB, who had undergone
hellish scrutiny from the Big Boys. I didn’t have much of a problem
with him, as he hadn’t really said a dozen words to me since I met
him. He’d die anyway, of course...
* *
* * * * * *
*
Master Sergeant John Smith's killing
spree has just begun. But will he get away with it?
To read the whole story, order Tabloid
Purposes V; I'll post a link here when it becomes available.
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