Black Teeth Read online

  It was a red bandana around her head today, lurid against the pallor of her skin. Every inhale required a lurching movement with her elbows, propping her up from the bed, dropping her back. Over and over like a pop-up book. The placards she’d made when she first had difficulty breathing still lay either side of her. One said ‘Thank you!’ and the other said, ‘Strewth, Cobber!’ and she held them up at opportune moments like Wile E. Coyote, part-communication, part-entertainment for the staff and fellow patients. I could see now, before she even opened her eyes, that ‘Strewth, Cobber!’ had been crossed out with angry black texta and replaced with the most humourless word there is: ‘No’.

  which then sends my phone the response code. I log in, delete the message, return to the kitchen for a handful of chips.

  When I glance across the room at the terminal, I don’t see what’s happened. Despite how this is what I’m looking for, I don’t see it. Clueless, I fill the kettle and rinse a mug.

  Already my mind has switched from Wednesday’s pizza with Marnie to what’s occupied it every day for months: the true purpose of Thruware.

  ‘Thruware’ is a working title. I’m considering a catchier name like ‘Bloodhound’ or ‘Aardvark’. It’s a new script designed to expedite brute force attacks and rainbow tables and it automates the doxing process to Swedish levels of standardisation. Only certain applications are vulnerable, but if they are then I can raid the datacentre without leaving so much as a timestamp.

  Writing and installing this kind of program isn’t illegal. People all over the world have programs installed, like say the late great Low Orbital Ion Cannon, because it makes them feel like edgelords and true life genuine AnRkists, but they’d never actually launch it. It’s once you launch it, once it leaps the node and merges with the traffic that you officially become a criminal. Chalk it up as one more mark against my name when the party van knocks on the door.

  Why I’m not worried about the party van is: no one knows about Thruware. I’ve never sold it or uploaded it. It has no online status whatsoever, and the Federal Cyber-Crime Department can’t scan for what they don’t know about.

  Also, that they call themselves the Cyber-Crime Department is another reason I’m not worried.

  Right now Thruware exists only in this room, is known only to me, and only operates through a secure server and a host of skeletons. I’ve disguised it with enough nonsense script that even I wouldn’t know it if I stumbled on it. But I’ve left traces of the source code here and there when it hasn’t been too risky, tweaked to be rendered useless, and probably the single greatest achievement of my life is that these traces were identified and labelled Ducnet on rollerbrain.com and entered into Wikipedia as ‘most likely malware developed by the US military to interrupt the timing systems used in rogue nuclear programs’. That’s seriously what it says. The moment I read that, it was like a nerd orgasm.

  Ironically, Ducnet, otherwise known as Thruware, otherwise known as Bloodhound or Aardvark, has only ever been used to track down photographs of job candidates doing bucket bongs on Instagram accounts they thought they’d deleted.

  But in fact Thruware was written with another project in mind, one it began weeks ago, which is wholly separate from my job job and which it completed today. And here’s me, I didn’t even notice when I looked at the displays.

  Rain pummels the window, harmonises with the escalating kettle. I’m about to wash a second mug, an activity I call ‘cleaning up’, when all of a sudden I feel compelled to check the terminals again. This is not a sixth sense, merely the unease I get when I’m not at my desk.

  The kettle in the kitchen is screaming. I don’t hear it because of what’s onscreen:

  1 result(s) found

  Below it, in green text against the black of the Thruware interface, in a living room blasted by heat, in a block of flats where all of the residents live alone, in what must be the coldest, bitterest suburb of all of Melbourne, shine eight green numerals:

  0398734378

  They settle in my brain and I look to my phone, feel the urge to dial the number, as strong as the urge to answer when it rings.

  But I don’t.

  The kettle clicks off. The chair sighs slowly as I sit.

  The mad thing I do next is write the number down on a post-it note, in case a power surge wipes it out somehow, or I lose my connection and the back-up connection and the script corrupts. Then I check I’ve written it down correctly. Then I look back through the query fields to be sure I didn’t error there, that this is what it claims to be. But of course it is. I spent months curating the fields for just this reason—so I would know the number was right if it ever showed up all coy and unassuming in the bottom left corner of my display.

  From the home screen it’s clear that the target application was Roadside Samaritan, one of eighty-seven granddaddy datacentres that Thruware can exploit because some IT guys don’t get paid enough to salt their hashes. To find out more I have to launch the botlog.

  20120713 10:24:37:59 L2TP traffic for gy7, interface: 9, protocol: 0, privateRoute: 9 :)

  20120713 10:24:37:59 Connect: iii/ <-> address added. Destination: 19.24.78.92 :)

  20120713 10:24:37:71 traffic hold. Exploit commenced. DNS address. 45.990.00 :)

  20120713 10:24:37:88 traffic clearing for gy8, interface: 9, protocol: 0, privateRoute 9 :)

  20120713 10:24:38:06 traffic filter cancelled, exploit resolved, retrieval p07::%lo07, link#1 :)

  I know it’s kind of douchey to generate a smiley face at the end of every active line of response code, but the log is UTC divided into milliseconds, which means millions of entries, and I don’t have to sort them if I can just search for the smileys.

  Reviewing the botlog is, usually, my favourite part of Thruware: watching the magic unfurl in slowmotion. Electronic pulses over the course of, in this case, forty-seven one-hundredths of a second, spanned out for me in prose poetry. It’s like time travel, watching past events at the speed of brain.

  But the first fantasy crashes over me like a wave of valium. I hadn’t expected it so soon. I wanted more time. To consider things, to cost-benefit the crap out of the decision before I made it. Have I made it? Am I really about to call this number?

  I tip back in my chair, can’t prevent what happens next. Also, I can’t deny that, actually, this is my favourite part. The fantasy. The mental holodeck.

  By the time I remember I’m hungry, my chips have gone cold.

  7

  The view from the conference room is grey and low, looming cloud. In summer you can sit in rooms like this and gawp at the tennis courts on the roofs of the CBD, wonder what happens to the errant balls that make it over the chain-link walls and down to the unsuspecting proles below. This time of year you wonder why Melbourne doesn’t have those pedways that join all the buildings together like they have in Canada—hermetic, corporatised, dehumidified; relieving us of the need to interact.

  Stuart says, ‘What else does the vetting interview consist of? Apart from inquiries into the person’s background?’

  Madison takes a third macaroon and bites it.

  This should have been a standard meeting, just me and Madison, where she handed over the candidate files and the two of us talked through the schedule for tomorrow’s interviews. Which is what we’ve done every year for the past whatever-years since the firm of Albert Kane and Roach first contracted with me to consult on their internship program. But today we were followed into the conference room by an overweight stooge wearing the kind of colourful braces that lawyers describe as fun. Madison introduced him as Stuart, a partner. He said he wanted to ‘shoot a couple of questions’.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Stuart says, not waiting for a response. ‘We need our candidates vetted. We don’t question your ability to do that. But our harvesting process includes half-a-dozen interviews, cocktail parties. Christ, last year we took them ice skating. Why can’t your interview be conducted instead by us, at one of those junctures?’ />
  ‘Yeah, no, they can,’ I say, amplifying my geeky professionalism. ‘And I promise that all I do in the interview is ask about the subject’s background, how much of it is accessible online. It’s just preparation for the research phase. You could ask the questions yourselves. But then, some people aren’t comfortable with…like, digging into a person’s…like, online dating history. Or whatever. I mean, to their face. But I’m used to it.’

  Madison is the HR boss and she’s never so much as coughed suspiciously in the direction of my work. Too, it’s her nature to be as direct as a robot overlord: she wouldn’t dream of going easy on a third-party actor like me, not out of mere courtesy. But instead of offering even facial support—on her home ground at the edge of the troposphere, in the shmick lawyer’s conference room that was designed to intimidate me, flanked by an array of sweet biscuits and a crystal water jug paid for by the tears of failed litigants—she looks back with that mannequin bassface and slowly chews her macaroon. Like all these years she’s been wondering the exact same thing.

  Stuart smiles the way you do when a joke isn’t funny, furrows his brow, holds open his mouth and licks his lips.

  ‘That with which we are or are not comfortable needn’t be a concern of yours.’

  I can’t help a nervous smile, a shuffle in my seat. My nipple twitches. It is there, in my breast pocket, where the post-it burns hot and itchy like a mosquito bite. I tap at my suit jacket and scratch, not too hard in case I somehow smudge the number.

  ‘Also,’ I say, ‘to be honest, I was under the impression my time was cheaper than yours.’

  I strafe them with a grin.

  ‘Obviously…’ Madison says, her tongue sifting biscuit-mush from her teeth. ‘This isn’t a question of money.’

  Last night, in the warmth of my flat, I wasn’t able to make the call. Despite the exhilaration of having found the number, my dialling finger couldn’t man up and dial it. I knew what I was going to say, had the pretext all figured out. But last night, at the moment of truth, I got stage fright. Something more than stage fright. Stagefuckingterror.

  So coming here on the bus I made a deal with himself: if Madison said ‘obviously’ eleven times or more, I’d call that number today. If not, the post-it could sit in my pocket another twenty-four hours, let tomorrow wring its hands about it.

  It’s a word she’s fond of, repeats it like there’s a glitch in her voice chip. Eleven times was possible, while being in the outer realm of possibility.

  But then Stuart walked in and presumed to run the meeting, because he’s a partner or because he’s a man or both, and I knew in the first five seconds that I wasn’t going to get my quota.

  Therefore: I have altered the terms of the deal.

  ‘Let me put this another way,’ Stuart says, adjusting the tension of his braces. ‘It’s come to my attention that you don’t use your real name in these interviews. I’m sure you have your reasons. But I’m also sure you can understand that, from our point of view, it seems odd. I’m wondering if it doesn’t scare off our best candidates. Can you explain that practice to me?’

  Madison bends forward as far as her tummy will allow and stares down another biscuit. She does not pick one up.

  ‘You come to embrace certain work practices,’ I say, breathe in hard. ‘…when a crazy person attacks you in your home.’

  Stuart licks his lips. He always seems to be preparing to speak, but now he stays quiet. They watch me blink down at the boardroom table to properly dredge up the memory.

  ‘You may have seen it. It was on the news. Do you know the name Paul Heaney?’

  Stuart, not a man to let on when he doesn’t know something, doesn’t respond.

  What else I knew in the first five seconds of this meeting was that Madison de Silva is pregnant, evidenced by the baby bump as much as by the macaroons she’s had three of. This is someone I’ve only ever known to nibble at a rice cake, to wear a thick layer of make-up and do aerobics in the park at lunch. My theory is that Madison is not one of those thin people who do not get food, for whom eating is as uninspiring an act of replenishment as a visit to the petrol station. My theory is that Madison has fought hunger every day of her life: circled her trouble spots in the mirror; sniffed at a hamburger while she devoured a stick of celery; flirted with eating disorders and maybe even taken one home. But now that she’s With Child, something has triggered: she’s lurched for cover behind the big-tummy branding of Mother-To-Be.

  My decision, therefore, is this: if Madison eats four macaroons or more, I’ll make the call. Today. Like, before I go home. As it stands, one more macaroon and it’s ring-a-ding-ding.

  For now, Madison shakes her head, waits for me to explain, doesn’t so much as bat her eyes at the biscuits.

  ‘Paul Heaney was a candidate at SoSecure. This is a while ago, before they went public. I used my real name back then and I interviewed him and he told me he was a blank slate. He said there was nothing I would find on him.’

  Madison just listens. So does Stuart.

  ‘I wound up with a photo of him at the Jabiluka protests. Remember those? Students in the Northern Territory? Big placards, bongos. The photo was a police officer dragging Heaney out of a picket line. He had long hair and a different wardrobe to the one I’d seen, but it was him. So I passed that on to SoSecure and they cut him from the harvest. For obvious reasons. They didn’t want an employee who’d once picketed their clients.’

  Still nothing. She’s had enough. What kind of glutton did I take her for? The alternating current of relief and disappointment surges through me.

  ‘Then one night, I’m at home and there’s a knock at my door. And I think it’s the pizza guy so I open up. And it’s Heaney. And he’s got a broken bottle in his hand. And he’s drunk. And he demands an explanation from me, for why I doctored that photo. He said he’d never been to Jabiluka, it never happened. So I must have shopped him into the pic. I tried to shut the door, he swiped at me. Cut me pretty deep along here. They call this a defensive wound.’

  It’s an effort, but I pull up my shirt sleeve to display the four-inch scar below my elbow.

  ‘Oooooh,’ Stuart says. Madison sighs in sympathy.

  ‘I got the door closed but he cut up the security screen. Cops showed up and that was it.’

  Stuart says, ‘Christ.’

  ‘You know the scariest thing…’ I lower my voice, talk directly to Stuart now. ‘I spoke to half-a-dozen people who were up there with him. I saw video footage of Heaney at the site. I saw the bus ticket with his name on it. But he was convinced. I mean, I looked him in the eye. He was convinced he’d been the victim of a fraud. He’d made himself believe, without a doubt, that this thing which had happened had never happened. That was the scariest bit.’

  Stuart nods, his glower weakening.

  ‘Well…’ he says. ‘Getting stabbed by a disgruntled job seeker might have been a bit scary too.’

  ‘People can freak out when you dig into their past. So I take precautions.’

  And he smiles, looks at his watch with an air of conclusion. I’ve brought him round.

  It’s a lie, that story. The scar on my arm came from a tower PC that fell on me at Mum’s place. There is no Paul Heaney. He never went to Jabiluka.

  I’m just more comfortable being someone else. I don’t get panic attacks when I’m being someone else.

  It’s the same with Madison de Silva, finally bingeing on the biscuits she’s been bringing to meetings for years. She had to become someone else before she could be herself.

  She swipes another macaroon from the plate, a pink one. I try not to let her see me notice, but she does. She disarms me with a coo:

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Andrew. I’m eating for two here. Obviously.’

  8

  It rings for an age before someone answers. Like, for a minute. No message bank or answering machine. The ringtone is the weird kind of analogue one that landlines have. I hug my coat tighter, am about to ha
ng up when I hear a cough and a man’s voice:

  ‘Hello?’

  An old man. But not a very old man.

  ‘Hello, is that Mister Glen Tyan?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  I’m in a paved alcove skewered between Albert Kane and Roach and a sheer brick wall, the pedestrians of La Trobe Street just far enough away for me to believe I’ve found privacy. But through an invisible glass door emerges now a hunched and grim-faced woman and before she does anything I realise this grey nook is the official smoking yard for her and her fellow office dwellers. A black enamel ashtray clings to the wall, overflowing with butts and black ash and a sign beneath it says Smokers Please, like it’s asking for more smokers. The ground below is strewn with orange stubs. She lights up and I turn my back to her and the traffic and the wind and jam a finger in my ear.

  ‘My name is Alan Harper, I’m a journalist with the Daily Sun. Your name was suggested to me by the Police Association as someone who may be interested in discussing a piece I’m working on about the lives of retired police officers.’

  ‘How did you get this number?’

  Glen Tyan draws on a cigarette, inhales deep, but the smoke I can smell comes from behind. To keep this conversation private I huddle into the glass wall, an icepack against my forehead.

  ‘Um, the Police Association—’

  ‘The Police Association does not have my home phone number.’

  I glance around, thrown. The woman stands silent, as if waiting to hear what I’m going to say to that.

  ‘Mister Tyan, all I can tell you is that Marjorie Schwitzer at the Police Association gave me the names of three former officers who may be appropriate for the feature I’m writing, one of them was you, and she included the telephone numbers.’

  ‘Who were the other names?’

  I flounder.

  ‘Paul Heaney and Madison de Silva.’

  ‘Never heard of them.’