his room but he’s not there. I keep the lights low, and make like I’m loading my pro golf program onto his machine. Money starts flowing back into my account but from a different source this time.
After a while I ask: where is Jazza?
I go back to the bar. My crew’s not there. Neither is Jazza. Oh god, he’s wandered again.
I get worried; I turn on his terminal to trace his bracelet. It’s pumping out signals. It’s coming from the shower. But there’s no shower running.
At our age, you’re always thinking in the back of your head: who’s going to go next? And I’m thinking maybe this time it’s Jazza. I can just about see him crumpled up on the floor. So I go to that shower with everything in my chest all shrivelled shut like a fist. I turn on the light, and there’s no Jazza there.
Just his bracelet on the shower floor.
Oh fuck. I push the buzzer. It seems to take an age. They’ve done these experiments that show why we always think a second is longer than it really is. The brain is always anticipating. It starts measuring time from the thought, not the vision. So I cling on to the buzzer saying come on, come on.
I think of all those times I check Jazza’s buzzer before going to bed. Jazza nice, and secure in his bed, it shows, or Jazza happy in the shower.
Has he done this before? You see Alzheimer’s, they wander off, they try to buy ice cream in the middle of the night in a suburb or they pack a couple of telephone directories and go catch a plane. They don’t understand, they feel trapped, sometimes they get frustrated and start to punch. They disappear and leave you to worry and grieve and hope all at the same time.
“We find him, don’t worry Mr. Brewster,” says the Kid.
So I see them, on the lawn, with flashlights. A light little feather duster of a thought brushes past me: the ordnance is turned off. The lights dance around the trees. The bricks in the wall are lit from underneath like a Halloween face.
Nothing.
I haul myself off to bed, and the callipers are really doing it to the side of my knees, scraping the skin, and I’m old and I just don’t sleep. Here in the Happy Farm there aren’t even passing car lights on the ceiling to look at. There’s only walls, and what’s up ahead, closer now. At night.
When you’re old you got a few things left and one of them is your promises. You can keep a promise as slow as you like, and as fast as you can, just so long as you don’t give up. I promised Bessie. I turn on my machine and hack.
Who knows SecureIT like me? Well, it’s been a few years. I get to work through a whole new bunch of stuff, but I do get into the Human Resource files. I mean, who would want to hack personnel, right? Just everybody.
And I go through every name, every face, every voiceprint recording. I see a face, I know it, but only sort of. I know that girl, sort of. She went and got a patent out on a new polymer, then joined. Real scholarly, real pretty, real nice legs. And I realise hell, she’ll be 40 now. She left years and years ago. After I did.
I see some old guy like me, pouchy cheeks and glasses and I can’t place him at all, except there’s a weird sensation in my chest, like I’m a time traveller. I used to say hi to that face every day.
One after another after another. Who are these people, being replaced?
One guy I knew now heads up a department. What? He was nothing. He was a plodder. Guess what? That’s who becomes head of the department.
I look a skinny, hollow staring scared face and I suddenly realise, shoot, that’s Tommy. Tommy was a nice young kid who taught himself to program, he had talent. Now he’s staring out at me wide-eyed with creases round his mouth like he’s been surprised by something. Like failure, like going nowhere. It makes me want to get in there and sort it out, and tell them, no you got it wrong, this guy’s got talent, you’re supposed to use it for something!
It makes me want to show up again every day at 8:00 am, and work my butt off, and take the kids out for a drink. It makes me want to make something happen again, even if it’s just in some little job in an office.
And I look at face after face and there is no Silhouette. There just is no Silhouette.
And then I find my own record. I see my own face staring out at me. Hey, maybe that guy’s Silhouette.
First time I saw that photograph I couldn’t take it, I thought that’s not me, that’s not the Brewster, who is that old, double-chinned geezer? Now, I look at it and I’ve got most of my hair and it’s black, and think how young I look.
And I read my record, and it tells the story of a middle manager who got a couple of promotions. It doesn’t say I came up with loop recognition iterations. It doesn’t say I was the first guy to use quantum computers on security work. It doesn’t say I was the guy who first told the CE about ISO 20203 and that getting registered to that standard got us Singapore and Korea and finally China.
What it does have is my retirement date. And then it says down at the bottom. “Left without visible security compromises. No distinguishing features.”
No fucking distinguishing features. What was I expecting, a thank you? A corporation that tried to credit its employees? I guess I was expecting that since I did some pretty extraordinary stuff for them, big stuff, stuff that got a whole congress of my peers on their feet and applauding, I guess I somehow thought I’d made some kind of mark. But they don’t want you to make a mark. They want that mark for themselves. But they don’t get it either.
We just all go down into the dark.
And I feel the fear start up.
Oh you can blank out the fear. You can turn and walk away from it. Or you can let it paralyse you. The one thing you can’t do is what you would do with any other fear. You can’t just turn and walk right at it. It won’t go away. Because this fear is the fear of something that can only be accepted.
The only thing you can do with death is accept it, and if you do that at our age, it’s too close to dying. You accept it, and it can come for you.
You get something like angry instead. You do what you do when you’re trapped. You writhe.
I can’t stay still. I go lolloping and limping like I’m stoned and drunk at the same time, because my room is like a coffin and the dark is like my eyes will never open. I go off down the corridor hobbling and jerking like some kind of goddamn puppet that something else is making move. I’m slamming my ribs against the wall and I don’t care.
And then I see a light under Mandy’s door. I don’t have my shirt on, but what the fuck. I’m scared. And I can’t afford to let myself stay scared. I knock on her door.
“Kinda early for socialising,” she says. She checks out my sagging pecs. “Are you inviting me for a swim?”
She still has her make up on, she looks sussed, she looks great, she looks like it’s a big bright beautiful Saturday.
For me, everything starts to fall back down into normal. “I… I just need to talk. Do you mind?”
“Not much. I hate nights as well.” She walks off and leaves her door open.
Her room smells of perfume. On the bed there are about eight stuffed toys… puppy dogs, turtles. On the shelf there is a huge lavender teddy bear, still wrapped in cellophane with a giant purple bow.
“I got nothing,” she says, and flings her fake fingernails at the TV screen. For a second I think she means nothing in her life. Then I get it: she’s been hacking. On the screen are eight old faces and the photo of the guy who mugged my granddaughter.
I take a chair, and I start to feel strong again. “Me neither,” I say, meaning I got nothing out of SecureIT. “I’m… uh… kinda surprised that you’re doing this so openly.”
“Are you kidding? We’re doing our bit to catch Silhouette. I want any brownie points that are going.”
That TV is pointed straight at the surveillance. I gotta smile.
“You’re smart,” I say.
“Oh wow, really? Like I didn’t know that without you telling me.” She looks at me like I’m bumwipe.
I like her. “So has anybody else said you’re smart recently?”
She nods. She accepts. “Most people don’t give a fuck what you are so long as you can pay.”
“You got any family?” I lean forward, into the conversation. I want to hear.
“No,” she says, just with her lips, no sound. She breathes out through her nose. “I got property instead.”
“For real.” I understand. I flick my eyebrows. It’s like: so why do you have to hack, then? . She gets it. She answers the question without having to hear it. “Keeps the brain in gear,” she says. “Beats talking to teddy
