I like your pants around your feet
and I like the dirt that's on your knees
and I like the way you still say please
while you're looking up at me
you're like my favorite damn disease
"That one. That one that one that one that one!" Tech #1 bounced in his chair with excitement.
"Got it." Tech #2 pressed a button on his keyboard. The screen in front of showed a high end SUV enter an intersection just as the light was turning yellow. When Tech #2 pressed the spacebar, the light turned immediately from yellow to red, while the SUV was still in the intersection. An unelected advisory committee to the state council, after being given a directive to reduce the duration of the yellow lights without leaving a paper trail, had already reduced the yellow lights down to 1 second. With Tech #2's timely intervention however, the light have been on for no more than 0.56 seconds.
"Do you think we can get away with a $500 ticket?" asked Tech #1. Four hundred dollars meant a $40 "commission."
"No. We're not allowed to give out the five hundreds any more. Write him up for a $400. I'm switching to another light before lunch runs out," said Tech #2.
The next light was down near the waterfront between The Mark and Trench City. The light had 2 seconds left on it. Some kind of black, 4 door sports car with a large spoiler was approaching. It was going way to fast to stop. "We got this," said Tech #1.
Tech #2 held his hand over the space bar. The light changed yellow. The driver slammed on his brakes so hard the car visibly leaned forward. Then...the car stopped in an incredibly short distance and did not even enter the intersection.
"What the hell was that?" Tech #1 was upset.
"He's not even tipping over the line. This is bullshit."
"Fucking jackass."
"That's not right. No one should be allowed to stop that fast," said Tech #2. Suddenly, the screen froze up and stopped responding. "What the...."
"Shit! What do we do now?"
"Call Orville. He wrote it."
Unfortunately for them, Orvlle was busy.
Inside the all-wheel-drive black sports car that stopped too fast, Dave put his phone away. After receiving a warning that the light was being watched (by a mechanism that would bore you) Dave had used his phone to send a text message to a special number that the traffic light software.received. This text message caused the traffic light software to deliberately and slowly crash. Every two minutes, for a while, the software would pretend to start working. Then, a half hour later, it would blue screen and die. The software did this because Dave wrote it. Dave wrote it because an unskilled programmer named Orville Pennington was too lazy to write it himself, and had unofficially "subcontracted" the job to Dave over a period of 3 months. Orville paid Dave almost nothing, like $3 an hour, because Dave was just a research programmer and those guys didn't make shit. Orville miscalculated. Dave had written the entire program in a single weekend and had spent the proceeds on bullet proof glass for his rear windshield. Boys and their toys, you know?
Orville was waiting for him in the coffee shop. "You sold me shit, man!"
"Keep your voice down. I'm getting a coffee."
"Hey my lunch break ends in like 20 minutes." And Orville wouldn't be late for anything. It was his first day and he would rather die than get fired.
"Yeah, whatever." Three minutes later Dave sat down with his latte. Orville hadn't ordered anything, but nonetheless was taking up a lot of space and using the free internet. "So whats the problem?"
"The problem? Whats the problem? You fucking program doesn't work thats the problem."
"Yeah that's why we're here. Be more specific."
"It doesn't get any of the pictures."
"Hmm." Dave was not happy. He had written an entire page of instructions about this. They could have talked over email. But nooooo Orville was too worried about getting caught having someone else write his code for him. "You have to train it."
"What? Its a software, not a dog."
"Actually, its a lot like a dog in that respect."
"How are you such a shitty programmer that you give me dogshit software for $500 bucks? I want my money back, fool." Orville didn't sound fake until he said the word fool. Dave glanced outside and saw one big ass SUV in the parking lot. Minivans for Men. Probalby Orvilles.
"Tell me, Orville, can you name a single image recognition algorithm?"
"No, fucker, that's why I-"
"Did you know that image recognition is NP-Hard?"
"What the f-"
"Do you know why CAPTCHAs are so popular?"
"Uh...no."
"Do you know what a neural net is?"
"No." Orville's voice was softer now.
"Let me summarize one of the things most computer scientists learn in about 4 to 7 years. Giving an image to a computer and asking it 'whats in this?' is a difficult problem. The brightest scientists in the world have been working on this problem for decades, but computers are still pretty dumb about it. Fortunately for you, you had a very simple use case: you wanted this program to pick out all the pictures that had girls in them-"
"Not so loud!"
"-which is a yes or no question. That kind of thing is really easy for a neural net. Neural nets work a lot like a dog. They learn. You spend a bunch of time 'training' it to recognize the kind of picture you want, and after a while it starts to guess right. I assumed you had a spider crawling the internet for pictures, so I primed it with some-"
"No," said Orville. He hated spiders.
"So what are you using it for?"
"That's classified."
"You don't have clearance."
"Yes I do, fuck face." Orville was lying, or he thought the background check for his new job was the same thing as clearance. "Fix this or give me my money back."
Dave finished the rest of his coffee as fast as he could. "When you see a picture you like, press F5. When you see a picture you don't like, press F6. And next time, read the instructions I sent you." He got up.
"How long until it starts working."
"That depends what kind of pictures you are trying to get," Dave said over his shoulder. All Dave had really done was download an open source neural net directly onto a cd, write some instructions, print an extra copy because Orville was a dumbass, and mail it to him. The entire process had taken about 30 minutes. He'd been paid $500, but Dave was still starting to wonder if it was worth it given that he had to talk to the guy.
Orville waited until Dave had left and hauled ass back to his new job. He arrived at a drab, nondescript goverment building in Trench City with two minutes to spare. Orville walked as fast as he could to the doorway without breaking into a jog, partly because he was obese and partly because he did not want to look weird or out of the ordinary. He. Could. Not. Lose. This. Job. As soon as he found out about this project he had spent months pulling favors and doing everything he could to get the job without looking too interested.
Orville shuddered to a stop when he saw the spider. It was right in front of the doorway, and taking its fucking time. Orville looked at his watch. One minute. The spider moved a little. Orville's leg shook. He looked at his watch. Forty-five seconds. He could still make it to his desk.
"What are you doing?" Maggied Pennington asked her son.
"Mom? What are you doing here?"
"I have a meeting with someone. Why are you just standing there?"
"The...mm....spider."
Maggie rolled her eyes. "Are you serious?" Her idiot son wasn't good for much, and how he'd gotten this job she had no idea. All he had to do was stay out of trouble and he'd joined one of the most controversial security programs she'd ever heard of. Maggie walked right past the spider, which turned towards Orville. "Come along now," she called after him.
Orville resisted the urge to scream, hobbled around the spider, and followed his mom inside. Then, ducked away as soon as he could. Orville got to his desk late but his supervisor wasn't around. He logged in and got to work. Tens of miles away, a 14 year old girl with cancer who was in between radiation treatments because of maximum dosage limits, was being told by the security theatre personel of an international airport that she could either go through the backscattering xray scanner, or allow an over female goverment employee that smells like mints to touch her everywhere, including and especially rubbing a gloved hand down along her pussy and up her butt crack. That 14 year old girl was sober, straight and had never visited third base (probably not what you're thinking, you dirty, dirty kids) with a boy. She chose the backscattering xray machine.
Moments later, she appeared on Orville's computer monitor. The magical, magical xray machine was basically a giant version of what boys had been dreaming about for decades: xray glasses that saw through a woman's clothing and let then see her naked. Unfortunately, the picture was all gray-bluish, but the guys he worked with had already figured out how to disable the digital blur that was supposed to appear over the boobs (if only they could magically keep it on for the males) and despite the small boobs Orville had an instant hardon. He pressed F5. A copy of the picture was saved to a secret folder. This was so awesome. He would sneek it home as soon as he figured out how to re-enable the USB drives. Orville couldn't believe they paid him for this. He oogled the 14 year old for just a few more seconds--all he could spare without drawing attention to himself--and clicked on a button that said she was safe to allow onto the plane.
The next person on his screen was a fat woman in her 40s. "Oh fuck," he said. "People that fat should be shot."
One of his work mates leaned over to look as his screen. "Yeah," he agreed.
The next person on Orville's screen was a man. He made a face, pressed F6, and then realized that the man had a bigger penis than he did. Way bigger. Orville clicked on the button which signaled to the local security at the airport that the man might have something. He would be taken aside, and, hopefully, strip searched. Fucker. Orville waited for the next person to enter the scanner.
He kept going like that for the rest of the day. The hot girls were actually few and far between, and there were a lot of ugly people in that between, but the thought of going through all over those pictures later that night kept him hard for hours. He even snuck to the bathroom around 3 to relieve himself. He was in luck: there was some guy in the next stall with loud diahrea, so there was no chance anyone heard him.
That night Orville was summed to dinner before he could get to his room to load the pictures on his computer. Yeah, he still lived with his parents. His mom was into local politics and his Dad was a...something or other. Maggie Pennington was glowing that night. Marksen Lot, the government contractor that Orville used to work for, and Graywater Security, were backing her. It was almost a certainty that she would win the nomination. For mayor. Big deal. Orville tuned her out and looked at his step sister, Joss. He eyes were a bit glassy. Maybe? No, it wasn't hopeful thinking. They were super glassy.
His parents were leaving. Awesome. As soon as they were gone Orville rushed up to his room to look at the pictures. Then his laptop fucked him over. Something about image...what? He spent an hour trying to make his computer load the pictures, but really just ended up infecting it with viruses (though he didn't know that). His hardon was raging. Fuck.
His sister. Step! Step-sister. With any luck she was completely high and out of her mind. Again. Orville walked to her room and listened.
...a glass cage so I can't pretend
you hide beneath the physical
I see it coming but I can't defend
you cut so deep
my belief is gone...
Yeah, she was high. She always listened to that shit when she was high. On what, he didn't know. His parents had searched her room over and over again and never found anyhing. Orville turned the knob as slowly as he could, even pulling the door towards himself to avoid creaking. Then he cracked it open and slid inside. Yeah. She was on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. The emo music covered his footfalls on the carpet. As long as he could reach get to her bed before she noticed him, she wouldn't say anything. He made it. She was staring up at the ceiling.
"How are you doing? You ok?" he touched her forehead like he was concerned.
"I'm fine." It worked. She was all pretending not to be high.
Orville grabbed her tits. "Are you sure?"
"Uh huh."
Orville started sliding his hand up her shirt. Then the doorbell went off. "Fuck!" He ran downstairs, intent on getting rid of them. He couldn't. It was Joss' bitch friend. There was nothing he could do without getting in trouble later. "She's upstairs," he growled. Joss' friend made a face at him and went up the stairs. Orville punched the wall. Lightly, though, so it wouldn't hurt.
It ended up being a good thing that Joss' friend busted up his plans; his mom called him ten minutes later and made him drive down to the stupid dinner thing. There was someone she wanted him to meet. If he didn't go, she threatened to take away the keys to the SUV that was actually his Dad's. Orville went. His mom intercepted him in the parking lot, scolded him for a bunch of dumb shit he didn't care about, and then kept talking about this thing.
"...we're going to start off before the election, and hire them privately, to show how serious we are," Maggie told him. Then Orville met a recruiter for Graywater Security. That he did care about. Fucking mom; he finally landed the perfect fucking job and here she was trying to fuck it up. Orville said anything he could to get out of it, not caring how much he embarrassed his mom. She was glaring at him like she wanted to kill him. She might have. Her bastard son was trying to mess up her entire political career, and that was unforgivable.
The recruiter took Orville aside and continued the conversation. He talked, and also asked questions. Orville gave vague answers, until he let slip where he worked. The recruiter burst out laughing. "So that's why you want to keep your job so bad."
Orville grew red in the face.
"I think you must have misheard me when I said how much you make. Do you undertand what you can do with this salary?"
Orville shook his head.
"I'm saying you, my friend, can afford to touch. Forget those xray porn machines. The kind of pussy you can afford working for us...well lets just say they don't sell 'em on street corners.
"Where do they sell them?" asked Orville.
The recruiter patted his knee. "Don't you worry about that. I know people who can hook you up. You just gotta show up for training next week. Oh and uh..." the recruiter nodded toward Maggie. "...the expensive hookers are a hush hush kind of thing."
"I won't say nothing!" Exclaimed Orville. If the guy was implying what he hoped he was....
"Good man." The recruiter took Orville back to Maggie and announced that Orville would be joining the team. Maggie looked at the recruiter in wonder. After Orville's strange refusal, she had spent the past five minutes distracted from the conversations, trying to decide what to do about, or to, him.
"You are a miracle worker," said Maggie to the recruiter. A few minutes later, Maggie moved on; she had other proverbial dicks to suck. The recruiter gave Orville a card and left Orville there, looking around awkwardly. Orville wondered what all this was about. He knew his mom had been harping on safety for what seemed like ages now. Something about a motorcycle guy hitting some other guy on a bridge. It was all she talked about, even at home; she was so full of her own shit.
Orville would find out soon enough.
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