Terms and Conditions

I felt bad for Marcy. I really did. It wasn’t fair what happened to her but we all have a job to do and I’m no exception. She probably deserved better, but who knows? That’s just the way the world works. We’re all cogs in the machine that is the Digital Age.

Last year, Marcy went on a date with one of her internet matches, an app developer at Zillion named Jeff. He didn’t quite meet her physical standards, but she figured his tech paycheck would be justification enough to see if there was chemistry. She knew there wouldn’t be any when his first question was “Do you believe in traditional gender roles?”

“Are you asking me if I believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen?” Marcy scoffed.

“I suppose,” Jeff said, resisting the urge to get defensive this early in the conversation. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“So, like, you’re also asking if I believe it’s a woman’s job to please her man on his schedule? If I want to quit my job to spend all day at home doing housework? If I should make it my sole goal to reproduce while still staying fit? Is that what you want?”

Jeff wasn’t used to women who actually understood the question. He typically targeted women with poor spelling and grammar intentionally, hoping to meet a high school dropout who would be thrilled to spend all her time cooking, cleaning, and fucking. Not picking up on Marcy’s incredulous tone, he took her knowledge of gender roles as a sign that she was indeed interested.

“That’s exactly what I want,” he said.

On that note, their server arrived to take their orders. “Can I get you two a drink to get started?”

“I would love a drink,” Marcy said, “But not with this misogynistic chauvinist. I’m sorry, I’m going home.”

And just like that Marcy stormed out, leaving Jeff to decide if he should still order dinner.

“Tell me,” he asked the waitress, “Do you believe in traditional gender roles?”

***

Unable to get his mind off Marcy’s rejection for weeks afterward, Jeff eventually caved and breached DataBank protocol to hack into her Zillion accounts. First was her Pixly account to see if she’d shared any nude direct messages with suitors. While he found out some interesting drama about her fish tank and a rather tragic series of threads regarding her aunt’s demise from Hodgkins Lymphoma, his initial motivation was never justified.

The next hack was her Z-Mail account, which bore a little more fruit. He learned that in her job as a sales representative, she was skirting state regulations regarding pricing deals. He also got access to perfect scans of her social security card and passport, which were unlikely to become useful without eventually pointing authorities back to himself.

Up next was her Z-News account, her most active app under the DataBank umbrella. Despite the feminist streak he’d witnessed on their date, Jeff was surprised to see that her algorithm was designed to mostly deliver Marcy a series of wellness and fitness articles, with the occasional travel piece or financial news. With that, Jeff had it: the perfect exploit in his sadistic plans for Marcy.

He started by making some small adjustments to workout articles, adding fifteen degrees to a rotation, or rewriting particularly good advice to encourage the opposite. The fakeVogue article encouraging her to use a blend of jalapeno peppers and petroleum jelly as a face mask was a particular stroke of inhuman genius—causing not only searing pain the two times she used it, but clogging a number of pores, resulting in adult acne.

Jeff’s big mistake came in the same way it did on their first date: he tried to get ideology into the mix, replacing the text of several op-eds with articles he found on his favorite involuntarily celibate message boards. Marcy, having fallen wholesale for the initial subtle deceptions, began to suspect something was amiss when a post about yoga was autopopulated with a text about a woman’s place, written by a male yogi trying to defend his hero, Bikram. She recalled her less-than-perfect date with Jeff, whose name she’d already forgotten. All she remembered was walking out before drinks--and that he was a Zillion developer. A sudden paranoia followed, one that Jeff would only become aware of when it was too late.

Marcy found a search engine that wasn’t affiliated with Zillion and began to search for the titles of certain articles she remembered seeming suspicious. Her paranoia morphed to full-blown panic when she found the text to be completely unfamiliar. The Vogue article about the face mask never even popped up when she searched “face mask jalapeno.”

When Marcy uninstalled the Z-News app from her iPhone, Jeff realized almost immediately, having been alerted through his bypass code to her 2-step verification. A certain paranoia that Marcy had caught him in the act took over. Unsure, Jeff went back to Marcy’s Z-Mail. Nothing out of the ordinary. Same for her Pixly account. Not even Zillion search results like “Am I being spied on?” or “Have I been hacked?” showed up in her Zillion history. He was safe, he figured, but the justifiable fear that Marcy had gone outside the Zillion bubble never fully subsided.

On her alternate search engine, Marcy’s search queries were predictable:

“am I being spied on?”

“have I been hacked?”

“finding your revenge porn”

“Zillion corruption”

“Zillion transparency”

“Zillion programmers”

“Zillion alt-right”

None of the results answered any of Marcy’s questions and her further queries were cut short by a Pixly message from her most recent fuckbuddy, Chad: “U up?”

Marcy contemplated whether all she did indeed need was a good raw-dog dicking to get her mind off the paranoia that had consumed the better part of her evening: “Yeah babe, this kitty is hungry”

Rather than simply accept a willing sex partner, Chad asked the thing all dipshits who’ve already got someone horny on the other line do: “Got any sexxxy pix?”

Reluctant but horny, Marcy sent over a particularly flattering photo from the prior October.

“OMFG SO HOTTTTTTT”

“It isn’t gonna fuck itself”

You could say Jeff was surprised when the Pixly notification, which he checked on a fluke, actually gave him something to work with this time. Perhaps, he guessed, Marcy didn’t realize Pixly was also owned by DataBank. She actually did know, but hadn’t yet made the connection that the tampering extended beyond her Z-News app. Hadn’t made the connection, that was, until her phone started blowing up mid-coitus.

“Let me just silence that,” she said, and upon unlocking her screen, finally saw what all the fuss was about. The photo she had just sent earlier was now posted to her Pixly account and visible to all 537 of her followers.

“What the fuck?”

Chad got up out of the bed, “What is it?”

“We’re done. Get out.”

“Like done done or just done fucking for tonight?”

“I’m not sure yet. But you gotta go. Actually, can I use your phone?”

“Why? Yours is right there.”

“I know, just be useful and let me do it.”

When Marcy grabbed Chad’s phone the impulse was so ingrained that her first place to search for a lawyer was on Zillion. The first query was “corporate tech lawyer.”

The first result to pop up: Brian Knickerbocker, Esq.

When she cross-checked on the competitor’s search engine, it was also the first result—as an ad.

And that was the fatal mistake Marcy made when she contacted me. Brian Knickerbocker is really more of a pseudonym that DataBank gave me back in the days when they were still just Zillion. To keep my cover for this long I would take the occasional pro-bono piracy case (defending the pirate, of course), but DataBank uses my shell office more as a filter for potential threats to the corporate structure. While Jeff wasn’t quite in the upper echelon of DataBank’s coder hierarchy, he did lead a team of forty, which was not insignificant. The breaches of conduct he’d committed would be enough to attract substantial press attention if they were to surface.

***

By the time I met Marcy in person, Jeff had already initiated a full hack of her laptop, having grown frustrated with her lack of activity on any of the apps. After the Pixly incident she had deactivated that account as well as any other DataBank entities. Having lost his precious access, Jeff still had one route back in: Marcy had never uninstalled the Zen browser from her laptop.

This hack was more complicated than Jeff merely taking administrative control over her mobile apps. Unlike DataBank’s mobile entities, the Zen web browser didn’t come with a “God mode” for senior developers. The hack required two days of reverse-engineering a pathway into Marcy’s webcam and keystrokes assisted by some intuitive and well-targeted phishing. To devote the energy, Jeff took a brief work hiatus but made the mistake of doing most of the hack on DataBank property. Aware of what Jeff was up to, but curious to monitor his hacking for the improvement of future security patches, DataBank top brass told me to hold off on the plan until he had completed the hack.

At 2:17pm that Sunday, he finally got through. To his surprise, Marcy was already on her laptop, browsing at-home yoga classes. She had only been in the tree pose for two seconds when Jeff saw a dark shadow on the wall behind her.

“Behind you!” he screamed at his computer screen, aware of how hopeless his cries would be. In half a second, his animosity toward Marcy had morphed into concern for her safety, but it was too late. I already had the piano wire around her neck.

Jeff watched the webcam feed in terror as Marcy’s eyes bulged out of her increasingly purple head. Small drops of blood dripped down the lower half of her neck. Her limbs thrashed about and she collapsed on her knees, which only increased the force of the piano wire and silenced any remaining gasps of air she was able to take in.

At the 90-second mark, I felt Marcy’s body go limp. I grabbed a mirrored compact off her dresser and checked under her nose. She wasn’t breathing.

Jeff, still paralyzed with fear, was conflicted. He wanted to call the police, but would have to admit to his highly illegal hack to explain how he’d witnessed the murder. Any desire to get the authorities involved subsided when I went up to Marcy’s laptop and addressed the webcam directly.

“Jefferson Wilson, you will tender your resignation to Zillion when you report to work tomorrow morning. You will not discuss what you saw today with anyone. In return for your cooperation, DataBank will not publicly reveal your indiscretions. Consider yourself lucky.”

With that, I shut the lid to Marcy’s laptop and began the arduous process of breaking her body down into smaller pieces that could fit in luggage cases.

If you’re reading this, and I hope you still are, please heed any lessons I can provide from Marcy’s example. Did I want to kill her? No. Was it my job? Yes. I’m not the evil one here. The evil is Big Tech. If you think I went to law school just to be a glorified assassin, you’re sorely mistaken. But that’s the way it is--they’ve got dirt on me too. The technological behemoths we trust our personal business to daily are still corporations. They will always protect their profit margins over their customers. Remember that.

© 2021 by Robert de la Teja