Breakers by Paul Elard Cooley SMASHWORDS EDITION * * * * * PUBLISHED BY: Shadowpublications.com on Smashwords Breakers Copyright © 2010 by Paul Elard Cooley All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. Smashwords Edition License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work. * * * * * Breakers When I checked my email through TOR, I found the order embedded between geologic layers of spam. Even on a pirate bay account, the massive sedimentary layers of junk threaten to crush useful information into useless bytes. You'd think that the same spammers who use pirate bay's servers would be a little more courteous. But this is what I have to do deal with. The order was simple. Male. White. Twenties. I'm used to getting more explicit instructions; every now and then, I get an order that's anonymous. Usually there's a name attached. A dossier. Bare information about the delivery. Sometimes, I just get told anyone will do. When there's a screening process, it makes life much easier. The Breakers do the research, I get the order, and the mission is on. I take off my robe, put on a pair of weathered jeans and a white collared shirt. I grab the keys and head out the front door into suburbia. I don't live in the city, you see. Have to keep work and my life separate. It's the only way to stay sane. My ex-wife hated suburbia. She wanted the city-lights streaming through half-closed blinds, the sounds of traffic and the immediacy of the clubs and restaurants. She left me for meals and dancing with strange men smelling of sweat, cheap cologne, and vapid one-liners. I think she's very successful in those circles--she always was somewhat of a whore. I drive through blocks of cookie-cutter houses, watch the sprinklers come on with the dawn, and yawn into my coffee. It's not a gated community, but it might as well be. We're so far away from the city that none of the gang-bangers or burglars have found us yet. Just getting to the freeway takes 20 minutes. As I pass the last HOA sign and turn onto the freeway, I can feel the tightening in my stomach. It's not the job--it's the traffic. NPR has another report on Darfur, another jackass on the radio talking about how it's a global crisis but the United States has a moral obligation to lead an effort to stop it. I yell into my coffee this time, but remind myself it's just a voice, talking but saying nothing. The traffic crawls. I try and get over one lane, but an SUV refuses to acknowledge my presence. In final desperation, I swing the car over, cutting off a large pick-up truck. It honks and I can see the driver in the rearview mirror, flipping me off. I smile at him, waving my hand. One of these days, one of these fuckers is going to rear-end me. Or block me. And then I'll have to deal with it. But I have miles to go. And three different freeways to crawl. A turn signal these days is a sign that you are not be let in. Or maybe it's the fact I drive a nondescript Civic, immaculately clean, but hardly noticeable to the drivers in their large, gas-guzzling trucks. Either way, I learned a long time ago that sometimes you have to stop asking for permission, and take what you need. An hour goes by. NPR has started to repeat itself, so I kill the radio. The guttural chuffing from an 18-wheeler beside me causes my teeth to grind. Dentist says I have to stop that. I want to tell the dentist there are worse things in the world than losing your teeth or recessed gums. But he wouldn't believe me. Not even in their business of blood and bone, the serration of their tools, and the grinding screams of their drills, would they understand. I take the last exit into the warehouse district. Yes, I use my turn signal--I'm a prick, but not rude on purpose. Some of the buildings are abandoned, the recession driving them out of business. Or maybe it was the cheap Chinese imports. Doesn't matter. Old, weathered signs marred with bullet holes announce long gone companies. Their logos have welding torches on them, or emblems of shirts. Some have simple open boxes. But all of them are dirt-covered, lifeless. I pass a couple of delivery vans out on their march to deliver goods, or to service someone's plumbing or housing needs. The city is filled with old houses being demolished, new ones put in their place. But regardless of their age, there's always something broken, a dysfunctional machinery marching from the store to the consumer to their homes. I think one day we'll all be mechanics of some sort or another. Or delivery men. There will be nothing else for us to do. My small building is up ahead. I check the rear-view, making sure no one is behind me, but I turn on my signal anyway. A left turn and my car is in the short driveway and facing the thick, rusted, steel door. A press on the controller and the door slowly raises with squeaks and groans, revealing darkness in its wake. With a sigh, I make my way inside not even bothering to turn on the headlights. I know this place well. Always park my car in the same place. It can be blacker than a politicians heart and just as devoid of light, and my hands still know how to move into the short space at the end of the building. Routine might be the last functional machine. With the car parked, I turn off the ignition, open the door, and step out into the darkness. I leave the keys and my wallet in the car-- no point in taking them with me. In silence, I move to the small desk set in the middle of the room and flip on its light. The banker's lamp comes to life. I have my eyes closed, but the light burns through my eyelids anyway. I slowly raise them like blinds, breathing deep as the light covers my retinas. When I blink, I can still see the bulb's afterimage, like a small sun that blinked into existence at the desk. Blinking as if from the remnants of sleep, I sit down at the table and power on the 'puter. It dances to life quickly--gotta love solid state drives. The LCD sparks up and asks for my password. I type in the password and the near silent computer thinks for a moment, and then blazes with colored icons. It always takes time for the interface to come up. Decryption slows the machine down, but you can't have enough security these days. Being a breaker requires security, paying attention to detail. One slip, and the machine will know we exist. We can't afford that. When you become a breaker, you learn these things, as if you don't already know them. I spent a lot of years in the clutches of the machine's distractions, but there's only so long you can go before you realize it's a trap. If you have any intelligence at all, you figure out there has to be more than going to a dead-end job, paying taxes, making some fat bastard rich, and enabling the machine to keep grinding for one more day. Breakers know better. I know better. Once I reached enlightenment, the breakers found me. Through my blog, my posts, my screaming into the void looking for some kind of reason, some kind of answer. Once you become a breaker, however, there is no more preaching. You have to remove yourself from any public forum. If it weren't for the fact I have to live somewhere and actually pay taxes, I would have ceased to exist long ago. I have no credit cards. No bank account, voter registration, or subscriptions to anything. If it can't be paid for in cash, I don't need it. The Breakers pick up the other necessities...like internet access, the warehouse, the car payment, and everything else I need to live. The internet link comes alive and I bring up the electronic interface. I learned how to crack the local cable company's system a long time ago. Pirate Bay can be very useful when you're looking for some tech help. Long rows of service calls scroll at the touch of a finger. There are too many service calls to count. I dive into the internal forums and search for what I'm looking for. And, of course, I find it. Customers are irate when their shit goes down. They pay money for service, and the great malfunctioning machine eventually shows its true colors leaving them dissatisfied and robbed of their refuge. Without cable tv and the internet, their life machines break down completely. Distraction is at the heart of the global machine. Distraction is what keeps us from noticing the broken world around us. The machine is politics. The machine is the guttural ravings of the disillusioned, demented asshole on the radio saying shit that barely makes sense. The machine is being told what to think. The machine gives you your opinions. It makes decisions for you. It robs you of choice, and you're happy for it. This freedom we have is all an illusion. The true freedom is not thinking. Not worrying. The machine gives us our distractions while it robs us blind. Mankind may never accomplish anything ever again. But the machine will. I think the machine accomplishes more every day, driving us further into our mental slavery. Another long sigh, and I troll through the comments. This is where the service men write their rants, communicate with one another. What the average machine-indoctrinated customer doesn't know, is that their "service" is predicated on their communications with these service men. If you are an asshole, you get bumped down the list. If you're nice, offer them coffee or other refreshment, you will always end up at the top of the queue. Service men remember--it's part of who they are. They are robbed of all but the ability to choose how well they want to do their jobs and when. Reginald Brothers. Unlikely name. "Pasty faced, drug addled fuck" one of the comments says. "Works nights. Unpleasant." I smile. I grab Reginald's account information and search to see if there's a current service call for him. There isn't. With a couple of quick keystrokes and clicks, I've got a map to his house as well as his phone number. Then I do what I always do--I "interrupt" his service. His cable television just crashed, his internet blocked from the global machine. No communication to the outside world. I start a Skype connection to his home number, and hit the call button. The droning ring hits three times before an annoyed man answers the phone. "Yeah?" "Hello," I say in a high pitched voice, "this is Greg Myers from the cable company. Our system indicates you have an outage?" "No fucking shit," Reginald replies. "My fucking talk show just died and I can't get to the internet." "I'm sorry for the inconvenience, sir," I say in that same voice. I can hear him on the other end of the line, breathing in rapid chuffs. "We're going to send a service person immediately." "Damn fucking right you are," the man snarls and the connection ends. I shake my head, place a phantom service order into the system with a fictional service-man name. I have dozens of these. I have a script that actually transmits the information straight into their database. And today, I'm going to use Robby Perington. I've never used Robby before, but it's time I take him for a stroll. I print out the map to the house, log off the machine, waiting for the encryption to finish locking down the information stored on the solid state. The computer goes dark. I grab an old keyring off the table, and head to the row of lockers on the back wall. I slide my hand around the back of the cabinet and flick a small hidden switch. That done, I put the key into the middle locker and open it. Five different blue jumpsuits hang there, each in various states of fatigue. People tend not to look at you if you are just one of the nameless, faceless people who fix the machine. They take it for granted that you are even human. Stitch a name on a piece of cloth that looks like a sign with some logo above or below, and they know you don't matter. Not unless you're fixing their part of the machine. You don't really count unless they need something from you. It's the perfect cover, really. I read stories all the time about guys dressed as service-men committing burglaries, or what they call "home invasions". Fuck. A home invasion is a robbery that takes place in the home, not some alien menace that breaks through the comfort of the machine to skull-fuck our reality. The machine. It obscures language to either terrify us, or placate us. You can guess which one "home invasion" is. These witness accounts of men in their jumpsuits, working man's uniforms, are always jumbled. It's their anonymity. Like I said, no one suspects a meter reader, cable guy, or plumber. Those who fix the machine just don't exist. Robby's jumpsuit is a little worn in the crotch, with a good film of dirt on the left shoulder. The barren space for the name tag badge is covered in velcro. I reach into a small bag at the bottom of the locker, and pull a handful of cloth strips, each backed with the nylon, looped velcro. Richard. Lenny. Fred. James. Ah, Robby. I carefully put the cloth against the velcro and look in the locker mirror. It appears to be straight and tidy. Good. I quickly take off my clothes, making sure to hang up the jeans and polo--I hate wrinkles. The jumpsuit fits like a glove. It's snug and there's no loose fabric to catch on anything. I've learned in this job that you have to be able to crawl in tight spaces, if necessary, or straddle fences. Any loose clothing and a stray nail or piece of furniture can snag you up. If that happens, you're either dead or going to prison. Prison is less attractive. With a sigh, I close the locker, lock it, and then flip the hidden switch, arming the thermite. If the cops ever find this place, they're going to get a bang if they open any of the locker doors. Call it my insurance. I can also trigger it remotely, but I don't like to think of the chances that a stray cell signal will detonate it. That would be messy. And this is the best possible place for my HQ. Work boots on my feet, I put on the cap with the cable company logo and head to the van. It's parked on the other side of the warehouse floor. I always park it here, in reverse, just to make sure its ready for a quick out. I thumb the button on the keyring and hear the click of the rear doors unlocking. Just a quick check. Roll of carpet. Duct tape. Toolbox. I open the toolbox and spread its shelves apart. Needle-nose. Chisel. Hunting knife. Silenced .22 pistol. Check. Everything right where it belongs. I close the toolbox, the rear doors, and step around to the driver's seat. The engine roars to life as the key turns and suddenly, I'm on the clock. The door slides up revealing the morning sun, and I drive back out into the world, watching the door slide down behind me. It's only a thirty minute drive to Reginald's house. Or at least it should be. But every asshole in the world is doing their level best to make it slow and dangerous. Women putting on their makeup between stops. Business men on cellphones, so engrossed in the distractions of the machine that they waver on the road, oblivious to anything not right in front of them. The machine is always there. As I drive to Reginald's I see the Mexicans caring for a lawn. Their leaf-blowers growling, mowers roaring, and the world's detritus swirling in the air above it all. They are part of the machine, creating order from disorder. The lawn is just a distraction for them, something to do during the day in the name of money, of work, the great distraction. I watch men painting a house, wondering if they know how much they're feeding the machine. They go to their paint supplier, order it, supplier mixes it, sells it. But the supplier does more than that. Supplier orders it, stocks, prices it. Thousands of people are involved in a huge series of cogs in the machine before the first drops of paint ever hit wood. They are oblivious. They seen nothing. They know nothing. They don't see the machine around them, realize they are all cogs in the machine. They just do their jobs, consume, and let it control them. I pull into Reginald's neighborhood. These are quiet streets with dilapidated houses. The yards are uniformly overgrown with grass and weeds. This is nearly as far as you can get from the HOA controlled suburbias that most people now live in. I'm surprised Reginald can even afford cable. 12282 Moss. Beat to shit mailbox. Numbers faded on the curb. Dandelions taking over the walk. Mildew on the rotting wooden slats. Brick is chipped and worn, the cheap, clay color of the Mexican brick exposed through the eroding paint. What a shithole. I pull into the driveway, driving the van up across the cracked and broken concrete. The garage has faired no better than the house. I pull the van up until its side doors face the rotted fence and gate near the backdoor. I tell myself for the thousandth time not to sigh as I turn off the ignition. It doesn't work. I step out of the van and make my way to the rear doors, grab my toolbox. The back door opens. I close the rear doors carefully, not wanting to make too much noise. "Hey?" a voice calls from behind the fence. "You the cable guy?" I pause, looking through the knot-holes in the cheap wood at a single eye that stares back at me. I nod. "Yeah, that's me." The man purrs. "Good. Need my fucking web, man. Gots business to do." "Yes, sir," I say, grin-fucking him. He opens the gate, struggling with the side that drags against the concrete. I fight the urge to shake my head. All this money spent on the great distractions and the fucker's too cheap to get someone to fix the damned back gate. Oh, well. Everyone's got different priorities. He beckons me in, pointing toward the back door. I walk out of the heat and into the cool house. It's not the smell of rotting garbage I notice first, or the incredible mess of half-empty fast food containers and the hordes of flies swirling about. It's really the blank walls. Well, they're not completely blank. Cracked plaster spider webs criss cross one another, peeling and chipped paint jutting out into space. This is a shithole-shithole. The stench hits me. "Sorry, man. Been workin' a lot. Place is a mess," the man says. I say nothing. "Cable box is in the bedroom." I smile. Pasty. In his early 20's. He wears a long sleeve jersey and it's summer. I can tell by the glazed look in his eyes that the machine owns him differently than the rest. He failed the machine in the way most succeed. Instead of succumbing to the mind-numbing bombardment of reality television and meaningless talking-head drivel about high speed chases, politics, and the flash and bang masturbation of movie trailers, he's one with the machine through heroin. The stab. The rush. The absolute rejection and complete embrace of the machine. My smile grows wider. I put the toolbox down. "Yo, Robby," the man says to me, pointing at the tag on my jumpsuit. "I said the cable box is in there?" His finger strays away from me and points to the small hallway behind me. I say nothing, just stand there grinning at him. "Um, dude?" Reginald says. "I'm here to break it," I say softly. "I'm here to break the machine." He wrinkles his brows at me. The look of surprise and wonder on his face when I break his windpipe with a hard fist wipes the smile from my face. His hands go around his neck while he gasps like a dry-docked fish. I watch him as he falls over, fresh urine staining his shorts, the smell a ruthless acerbic tang overpowering the house's garbage stench. The eyes gaze at me, filled with panic. The painful whistling from his throat begins to cease. His hands fall from his neck and I watch as the eyes grow dim, and then lifeless. This cog is broken. I close my eyes and imagine the machine screeching against this latest wound. But I only hear the sound of the ceiling fan, the central air, and of birds stupidly singing outside. There is nothing else. I walk out to the van, return the toolbox, and bring a heavy rolled up bag. It's amazing the kinds of things you can purchase via the machine's internet. Body bags at 2 for 1 price. Each guaranteed to only have been used once. I get these from eastern Europe, sent to me by a remailer. Again, Pirate Bay is the greatest anti-machine in existence. Reginald is stubborn and doesn't go into the bag easily. I have time though--no one will miss this cog. This worthless piece of broken metal. I finally manage to get him inside, stifling an uneasy laugh at the dull, glazed look in his eyes. For a moment, I feel just a little sad. He could have been a thinker, perhaps. A beatnik singer. Someone who struts around the stage of life, crying for the machine's cogs to disconnect, to leave the teat of distraction, and become people again. But he didn't. I pull out my crackberry and send an email to an address at Pirate Bay, no subject, no message. I wait for the response and wish I had a cigarette. I stopped smoking years ago, once I figured out it was another of the machine's distractions. The crackberry vibrates and I check the address. It's the same as last time. I drive away from his former abode, the body stowed in the cool a/c of the van's rear. I don't need a cooler. Reginald will stay quite fresh in the vacuum sealed bag. A USMS delivery truck drives by, on its way to deliver some package. The consumers buy so much shit on the web these days, it's hard to believe the machine can keep up with it all. But I know it's trying. If there's one thing the machine is good at, it's delivering distraction. I try to ignore the drivers on the road, the honking, the raised middle fingers, the swerves of the cell-phone infested. It's past 1000 now. No more ladies putting on makeup while driving between stop-lights, no more men trying to read the paper while putting the rest of the cogs in peril. I drive to the address in silence, listening to the soft groan of the engine as it speeds up after stop signs, and the steady growl as it travels between green lights. The disposal point is a few miles away; it's not too close, not too faraway. Another breaker will take the cog. Cogs disappear. Cogs reappear. This cog might be destined for a politician's hotel room, the trunk of a studio executive's car, or a company's dumping site. Breaking the machine requires the other cogs to live in fear. It requires the large gears to grind themselves into dust. This isn't murder. This is a public service to a public that doesn't know it needs the service. We breakers, we'll make them see the machine for what it is: the chains keeping them from freedom.