Writing Prompt Boot Camp, Day 4

Sorry there was no prompt yesterday. I was travelling and travelling really knocks the wind out of me. So, let's pick things up with a cautionary tale about what happens when you send something to the wrong printer...

Incorrect Prompt

The jacaranda tree outside her office window was in full bloom, and usually the sight of it was all she needed to feel better. But the tree wasn’t cutting it today, and she didn’t think it ever would again. She picked up her phone and dialed the extension.

“Greg? Can I see you in my office for a minute?” She hung up the phone before hearing the reply. She knew what the answer was.

Several seconds later, a timid knock on her door.

“Come in,” she said brightly. As Greg entered her office, she took a moment to brush her long red hair away from her eyes. She knew that he often stared at her when he thought she wasn’t looking and figured that her long and curly red hair was mostly to blame. That and her very nice curves. She didn’t get to where she was in the company by not using the natural assets that nature had gifted her.

“You wanted to see me, Mrs. Kelly?” Greg asked as he stood in the doorway. Kelly appraised him: an average white man with mousy brown hair and a physique that could generously be described as “basement dweller”.

“Close that door and sit down, Greg,” Kelly said in a neutral tone. Greg closed the door and sat down on the other side of her desk; his hands knotted tightly in his lap.

“Do you know why you’re here, Greg?”

“Honestly, no, I don’t, Mrs. Kelly. I checked my stats this morning and they looked ok to me,” Greg answered, trying to inject an optimistic note in his voice.

“So did I, Greg, so did I,” Kelly purred while tapping some keys. “And yes, they look ok. You’ve had better months, but this one’s not off to a bad start.”

“So, um,” Greg stammered, “is there a problem with my timeliness?”

Kelly smiled at that. Recently, there had been a run of tardiness and improper shift switching. Some well-placed disciplinary actions had put a stop to it, but she did notice that her people had been checking their timecode accounts on a more frequent basis. Good, she thought. Got to keep the worker bees in line somehow.

“Your timeliness is perfect, Greg,” she buttered him up to relax him a bit. It did; she saw him sink a little bit more into the chair.

“No, that’s not what I wanted to discuss with you today. What I want to talk about is this.” Kelly opened a desk drawer, withdrew a single sheet of white copy paper, and put it face down in front of her. “Go ahead and take a look at that for me, would you?” She did not make this a command, just a suggestion.

Greg smiled and leaned forward to grab the paper, but her next words stopped him in his tracks: “Before you look at that, I want you to know how disappointed I am in you.”

Greg’s smile curled into a quizzical frown. “What have I done to disappoint you, Mrs. Kelly?”

“Oh, I think we both know the answer to that, Greg,” Kelly answered. “I’m just surprised that your cleverness has failed you at this late stage in your careful plan.”

Greg withdrew his hand and leaned back in the chair. To her surprise, Greg’s posture changed: he appeared more relaxed than before. And was he slouching back in the chair? How rude!

“I’m not touching that piece of paper, Margaret,” Greg said with a new edge in his voice.

“I beg your pardon?” Kelly asked, stunned at Greg’s tone.

“You heard me,” Greg said, more steel in that edge. “And I’m through taking orders from the likes of you.”

“Oh, really now!” Kelly exclaimed. She used her volume to tamp down the shock she felt a moment ago and stoke her earlier calm. “And what are you going to do instead?”

“I’m going to arrest you on several charges, which run the gamut of violation of privacy through improper surveillance all the way up to the big one: corporate espionage.”

Kelly blinked, her calm snuffed out like a candle. “You’re what?”

Greg pulled a small device from his pants pocket and set it on Kelly’s desk. It was a black plastic rectangle with a stainless-steel cylinder covered with wire mesh on one end.

“This is a recording device that I have been using for the past three months to document my time here at this hellhole you call a ‘support center’. It’s been modified to record not just audio and video, but data.” Greg leaned on the last word.

“But you can’ t do that! Not without a warrant!” Kelly shouted. And then her computer chimed the receipt of an email.

“Ta-da!” Greg said, a smile blooming on his face.

The door to her office burst open, and several agents entered. They picked her up out of her chair and handcuffed her before she had the chance to offer another protest. They began to move her out of the office when Greg raised his hand. They stopped and turned Kelly toward the young man, who was still seated in the chair. No, Kelly thought, he was slouching in her chair.

“I really shouldn’t steal the DA’s thunder on this, but she owes me a favor and told me I could indulge myself by telling you one thing before you exit this office never to return. Wanna know what it is?” Greg’s smile got even bigger.

“Go ahead, you piece of shit! What is it?”

“It’s who turned you in. Don’t you want to know?”

“It wasn’t you?” Kelly stammered.

“No, it wasn’t a person. It was your computer.”

“It was my… what?” Kelly responded.

“Well, not your computer exactly. What was inside it.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Kelly said, a wave of exhaustion crashing over her. She sagged a bit in the agent’s arms, but they propped her back up.

“The AI, Margaret,” Greg said in sing-song tone that sparked Kelly’s anger anew. “It was the latest generation of the AI your company installed in their system. Now the previous version would not have batted a cyber-eyelash at your prompts to falsify certain documents and redirect certain assets from one account to another. But the latest version? That came with a spiffy subroutine created by my colleagues in the FBI Cyber Crime Task Force. Any request to use the system for nefarious means gets flagged. And then somebody in the task force reads the flag, and that flag gets passed up the chain and so forth and so on.”

Greg got up from his chair and retrieved the piece of paper from the desk that formerly belonged to Margaret Kelly. He flipped it over and smiled.

“No matter which office I’ve ever worked in, all execs share one of the same personality traits: they fail to understand technology.” Greg turned the paper around so Kelly could read what it said.

In addition to the highly classified data with her username attached, there was a string of text at the bottom of the page. Kelly thought she recognized it as the metadata associated with the print request: the username of the requestor, IP address, network printer address, etc. But that’s not what was printed on this sheet of paper. This was printed instead: “EVIDENCE #88067-5 PURSUANT TO DOJ CASE #88067 THE PERSON OR PERSONS REFERENCED IS HEREBY SUBJECT TO ARREST AND INDICTMENT.”

Kelly felt all the air escape her lungs and she lowered her head almost to her chest. She felt someone put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up into Greg’s face and he said the words that she heard over and over again in her dreams for the rest of her life: “Shoulda asked the system to write you a better Bumble profile.”