OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO oOOOO OOOO. OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" .OOOOOO OOOOOo OOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO OOOOOOO. OOOO oOOOO OOOO .OOOO OOOO OOOOOOOOo OOOO OOOO" OOOO oOOOO OOOO OOOO "OOOO. OOOO OOOOo .OOOO' OOOO .OOOO" OOOO OOOO OOOOoOOOO "OOOO. oOOOO OOOO oOOOOOOO..OOOO OOOO "OOOOOOO OOOOoOOOO" OOOO .OOOO"""OOOOOOOO OOOO OOOOOO "OOOOOOO' OOOO oOOOO ""OOOO OOOO "OOOO OOOOOO |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | There Ain't No Justice | | | | #105 | | | |---------------------------------------------------------------------------| - Opposition - by Arifel The battle between the forces of Light and Darkness in our office finally came to an end. It was a draw. We only employ fourteen people, so I find it peculiar that their paths had never crossed before the expansion. We'd been allocated a few hundred extra square feet of space, some more machines, three new desks; over a long weekend, I organised a general shifting around of our equipment so that it all fitted together. Ergonomic neatness and psychodynamics weren't a consideration; we were drastically short on reliable network cables, and the final situation of the machines was limited by this factor more than any other element. I was certain that if any drastic personal conflicts arose, they could be resolved. Tuesday morning, I noted that Veil's machine was now right next to Alannah's. It would be hard to imagine two more different people. Veil was a Goth, of the Jourgensen Variety; a gaunt, saturnine young man with an unruly shock of blue-black hair who habitually dressed entirely in black, affected mirrorshades, a walkman and dusty motorcycle boots; he wasn't strong on interpersonal communication, but he was a capable worker, almost monomaniacal (which always came in handy when we had a deadline looming before us). Alannah was referred to, privately, as the May Queen. She looked like she'd wandered off last year's Tolkien calendar; she wore light pastel dresses and about a dozen varieties of dark-brown wood pendants, usually had flowers woven into her pale gold hair and rarely wore shoes. The scent of patchouli drifted around her like an aura. Few people were taken in by the vague, dazed look on her face, particularly those who'd been on the receiving end of her wit. It wasn't just the clothing; she believed in fairies, and got quite offended when someone would suggest otherwise. She never raised her voice. That first morning, they were both too occupied with getting back into their current projects to worry about their immediate surroundings. After the sliding two-hour zone which we called lunch, however, I saw them darting the occasional glance at the other when they thought no-one was looking. I'd held out hopes that they might have coexisted peacefully; these hopes began to sink when Alannah asked Veil why he had such a nasty-looking backdrop on his screen (it was a picture by H.R. Giger, in sickly blue-green shades). He simply turned to face her and smiled, revealing elongated canines. She shifted away cautiously and brought up a new backdrop on her machine; a tiled pattern of pale-pink roses. I imagined that it might end there. Unfortunately, they had to work together on the next project. It isn't often that any of our employees feel inclined to put any of their personality into their work - Veil and Alannah were usually minimalist in that respect - but over the next few days, debates over minor points of style began to escalate into defensive arguments on the merits of one design philosophy over another. Veil favoured what he called the `fascist' approach, in which the user was treated like an idiot, rigidly excluded from options that Alannah thought should be generally available. `If they need to see the previous records, they can ask for them. I think the main screen is cluttered enough as it is. They won't all be using monitors as big as ours, you know.' She gave him her odd little smile, kept typing without looking up. `If you had your way, there'd be nothing on the screen except a text box with a button marked EXIT.' He smiled his approval. `That's the idea. Users are, in general, very simple people, and we don't want to scare them off.' She closed her document with a petulant snap of the mouse button. `Why don't we just put them in camps and be done with it?' His only response to this was to add a new button to the main screen display, with the text: PUT ME IN A CAMP NOW PLEASE. And he refused to take it out. After a few days of this kind of sparring, the conflict moved to a different level; I called this the battle of the Screen-savers. Veil's regular screen-saver was a jarring, sporadic white flash which looked like it might set off epileptic seizures. While he was out of the office, Alannah committed the unpardonable sin; she touched his machine and changed it to one of the smooth, green, cycling Mandelbrot designs. He didn't get angry; he simply changed it back and password-protected it. Later, she hacked it, changed it back to the green fractals and put in her own password. He retaliated by attacking her machine, adding a background task that altered the system event sounds on her machine at random. At one stage, they'd be as Alannah had set them, soft chirps, forest sounds, cat purrs; she'd exit a program and, without warning, her machine would scream at her, samples from industrial music songs, horror films, sounds of car accidents and breaking glass. It took her until ten o'clock that evening to find and remove the task; it came back again by itself the next morning. She was more thorough in removing it the second time. She put subliminal text in his flashing screen-saver; it took him almost as long as she'd spent fixing her system to get the messages to stand still long enough to read. They were selected sayings from oriental mystics, Discordians, Temple Ov Psychick Youth shamans, and when he'd managed to capture an example of the latter, he brought it over to me, a bitmap-file on a disk. `See this? TOPY was founded by industrial musicians. She's losing it.' I almost laughed. `I don't think she knew that. Anyway, didn't Genesis P Orridge go all techno-new age? Maybe that's the point she's trying to make.' His face went blank, a sign that he was plotting revenge. His eyes narrowed a fraction. `I'll show her a point or two.' he muttered. I didn't mind; this altercation wasn't affecting productivity, and I liked to think it was healthy. The next morning, he'd slipped a kind of dust-cover made of black PVC over his machine and monitor; two guttering black candles sat on either side of the desk, each giving off an unusual scent, and to top the ensemble off, a bleached ram's skull sat on top of the monitor. A CD player concealed under the desk played dark ambient rumbles. When she came in and favoured his altar with a withering look, he said casually, `It helps me think.' She couldn't allow this to go unchallenged; that evening, she equipped her desk with a tiny bronze gong suspended from a wooden frame, arranged vines around the base of the monitor, and two incense burners near the machine's cooling fan. The scents of rose, musk, sandalwood and the ever-present patchouli began to spread throughout the office. She rang the gong with a chrome-hex-nut-topped glass wand every twenty-three minutes; I could tell from the way his knuckles whitened when she did this that she was winning this round. He parried this attack by plugging headphones into his CD player and listening to industrial music. I could hear it, leaking out from around the edges of the headphones, from where I sat. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa roar. His hands would still occasionally clutch at nothing as if he was being given electro-shock therapy, but now it was his own doing. With his mirrorshades and his music, he was almost completely insulated from her. She'd go outside and smoke clove cigarettes until she stank of them, then she'd come back inside and sit upwind of a battery-operated fan. He came in after lunch with a jar of ground nutmeg, which he'd snort through a fountain-pen case. For a moment, I thought she had him there, but he mailed her a copy of his contract, subject: `no mention of legal substance abuse in this'. This whole thing had escalated to the point of interfering with work. I was about to step in and do some mediating, when our semi-sentient office network took a hand in it. They were both at lunch (she at a local vegetarian restaurant, he at a nearby hamburger joint, stoking his burner with cheap scorched meat which he'd come back and breathe all over her); I happened to look up and saw the hard-drive lights on their machines flashing almost in synch. First, her machine; then, his, for about ten minutes. Then, a tiny window appeared in the middle of her display: `HARD DRIVE FAILURE'. I had my suspicions, but I thought it prudent to let them work it out. Fortunately, she came back from lunch before he did. She saw the window, typed frantically with much use of the alt-key and deft movements of the mouse; it looked like something had just overwritten every sector on the disk. The only things left were memory-resident things running when she'd gone to lunch, and the first time she tried to use something that referred to a disk-based library, it fell over in a heap. I could see her lower lip quivering. Just then, Veil came back from lunch, oblivious to her distress. The first thing he noticed was that his hard drive was almost full; then he spotted the new subdirectory on his machine, and only after this did he notice that Alannah was about to collapse into tears. For the first time in weeks, he took off his shades; I could almost see his defences, his dark-shield aura, fade. She was just standing there, trying to come to terms with the loss of month's worth of work, when he cautiously approached her and handed her a glass with about three fingers of some dark-red liquid in it. She took it from him, sniffed it cautiously and then drank it down in one go. He smiled. `Vodka and cough syrup. Now, you go sit down over there, relax and Veil will fix.' Meekly, she complied; all he had to do was reinstall the operating system, re-establish the network connection and copy the contents of that sub-directory off his machine and onto hers. Magically, her machine had been brought back from the dead. I thought that he'd won when she asked him for another slug of that drink, but after considering that he kept his mirrorshades off for the rest of the day and assumed a much more open and friendly attitude, I decided it was a draw. The next day, instead of unadorned black, he was wearing blue jeans and a promotional T-shirt for the Cocteau Twins' `Four Calendar Cafe' album. She wore a dark-purple tie-died dress. 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