Kill Process Read online

  Kill Process

  A liquididea press book / 2016

  UUID# 2C9C571B-7E30-410D-BE5F-FB7079B6DD1E

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Copyright © 2016 by William Hertling

  Cover Art by Mike Corley

  Please Note: This novel is about a survivor of domestic violence. I have minimized explicit abuse in the novel, but the story deals at length with the aftereffects, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  Please subscribe to my mailing list at williamhertling.com to find out about new book releases.

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  E-QUALITY PRESS

  The name E-QUALITY PRESS and the logo consisting of the letters “EQP” over an open book with power cord are registered trademarks of E-QUALITY PRESS.

  http://EQPbooks.com/

  PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Chapter 0

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Three

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part Four

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgements

  Definitions

  Tomo: noun

  The world’s largest social network, with more than two billion users.

  Japanese for friend.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 0

  * * *

  THE THING YOU have to know about me, to understand everything that’s coming, is that I kill people.

  It’s ten-thirty at night, and I’m hiding in the bushes across the street and two doors down from a two-bedroom, two-story home. It’s midsummer in Portland, and the temperature dropped after sunset, but it’s still too hot for the dark, long-sleeved hoodie I’m wearing to reduce my visibility. Tomorrow morning I’ll pay the price for crouching for hours on forty-five-year-old knees.

  Inside the house are Cathy and Dave. According to their Tomo profiles, Cathy is twenty-four, and Dave is twenty-nine. They’ve been together for five years. Six months into their relationship, Cathy dropped out of college in Boston and they left together for the West Coast. They rent. Cathy takes temp work, and Dave’s in construction.

  Learning these details is painful, ripping open old wounds every time. Echoes of the same story, my story, recurring with consistent frequency, like a drumbeat punctuating life. I want to bury my head in the sand and drown out the sound, but I can’t escape it, no matter how hard I try. Every case is different in the particulars, the same in the patterns.

  Cathy’s been on Tomo compulsively, visiting her best friends’ profiles. However, she’s not updating her status like she usually does. She goes through periodic gaps in posting, and when she manages a small post now and then, text analysis shows negative sentiment.

  In the social media frenzy of the last twenty years, the tech industry invented dozens of new ways to analyze tweets, Tomo posts, and blog posts to determine the mood of the poster. Originally used by corporations to measure their customers’ perceptions of their brands and products, the profiling tools now help me find the depressed.

  I wonder what my own sentiment scores would be, although I don’t possess much of an online profile these days. I keep my thoughts in my head. They’re too dangerous to let out. Fortunately no one has invented the mind police yet, although the day is coming.

  The lights upstairs blink out, and suddenly I can’t take a breath. I’m clenching my hand so tight I’ll find lingering fingernail bruises in the morning, but right now I don’t feel a thing. Terrible things happen in the darkness.

  It takes a long minute before my body forces me to breathe, and with a sharp inhale, the spell breaks. I’m not in the house. Dave is not my demon, even if he is Cathy’s. I’m an independent agent, in charge of my own self.

  The black nylon bag weighs heavy against my right side, the tools inside enabling me to do my job, and in the worst case, take personal action.

  I know better now than to consume liquids less than an hour before the stakeout. I don’t chew gum, smoke cigarettes, or carry anything I could leave behind or forget. I wait another hour to be sure they’re deeply asleep. Everything is quiet in the house.

  I’m wearing men’s Nike sneakers (20 percent market share) I bought at FootLocker (most popular shoe retailer). I’m wearing men’s Levi jeans (best-selling brand, and a different material makeup than women’s jeans). Sticking to the most generic possible shoes and clothes reduces the chance the police will profile me. At 5′6˝, I fit into a lucky middle ground: a bit taller than average for a woman, still a passable height for a man.

  DNA evidence is the kicker, of course. So I did the usual before I came out tonight: thorough shower first, clean clothes that went through two rounds of extra hot wash in a public laundry. My exposed skin got a liquid bandage product that helps prevent skin cells from flaking off. My shoulder length dark brown hair, courtesy of my Italian parents, received an extra-sticky spray that decreases the number of loose strands I’m likely to drop. The residue each product leaves is still better than shedding DNA.

  At the back door, I withdraw my lock picks from a shirt pocket. A geek rite of passage with a long history in computer science departments dating back to MIT, lock-picking was something I mastered in my first year. Of course, it’s considerably different with one hand instead of two.

  Amputees can be divided into two types: those that measure themselves by what they’ve lost, and those grateful for what they’ve got.

  Who am I kidding? Every amputee is both.

  Me, I’m grateful for my stump. In fact, I’ve got everything up to but not including my elbow, and that’s enough to apply pressure on the torsion wrench to hold the lock in tension, while I work the pick with my left hand. With a subtle click I feel—not hear—the last pin lift into place, and the wrench shifts. I grab with my hand and complete the turn. The deadbolt opens.

  I take a deep breath and try to ignore the growing pit in my stomach. Time for the real work.

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  I SCREAM. Not some girly scream. A full-tilt, blood-curdling yell like I’m being murdered.

  There’s movement to my right, and someone touches me. I lash out, my fist hitting something hard.

  There’s a cry of pain, then a groan. “Angie, it was a
dream.”

  I shake my head, trying to make sense of the world. I reach for the lamp, miss, and knock the alarm clock to the floor with my stump. Damn it.

  Light blossoms as Thomas turns on his lamp. He slept over. Shit, that was Thomas I hit.

  He’s lying on his back, holding his face.

  “I’m sorry,” I say automatically, still focused on the night terrors.

  “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have touched you.”

  His tone, carefully even, plainly disguises inner frustration. I glance over at him. Maybe I’m reading too far into it. He could merely be in pain.

  I curl my arm around my knees and rock back and forth. I want to take it all back, starting with the years leading up to my mistake. Sweat covers me and my muscles tremble from the adrenaline rush. Five years and still the nightmares come.

  I dip my head onto my knees and close my eyes. I wish I could be unbroken. I wish these dreams didn’t come. If I do nothing, I have nightmares about being the victim. If I kill an asshole, I get nightmares about what I’ve done. I don’t know which is worse.

  The bed shifts as Thomas sits up. “May I touch?”

  I nod without lifting my head, and he puts an arm around me. Bless this man, I don’t know how he puts up with me. He’s a saint, and somewhere deep inside I love him for that, although I can never tell him.

  * * *

  I drive to the office early, stopping briefly at Coava for a pour-over with enough caffeine to wake an entire team of software developers. It barely makes a dent in the exhaustion I feel after last night’s minimal sleep.

  At this hour, the traffic across the Willamette is non-existent, and I make it into downtown in a few minutes.

  Our Portland offices are in the Big Pink, everyone’s nickname for the U.S. Bancorp tower, where Tomo has six floors. I’ve worked at Tomo, the world’s largest social networking site, since 2002, way before my ex-husband, and I still work there now, but everything has changed.

  When I arrive at the security door on our floor, I’ve got the coffee in my good hand, my computer slung over my back, and now I’m out of hands, because my stump is no good for swiping my badge.

  I tuck the coffee under my stump, swipe my badge, hold the door with my foot, then take my coffee in hand again. I’ve done this one-handed entry ritual since I lost my arm.

  I wend my way through a mess of desks to my distant corner, a few other early risers there. By common social agreement we ignore each other until the niners arrive.

  I take a seat, plug my laptop in, and leave the headphones on the desk. I want my ears free to warn me of anyone’s approach. I’ve got my back and right side to a wall, a safe corner I usurped when I moved to the Portland office.

  The data queries I run this morning hit our backend database, spidering through social graphs and past behavior, feeding the custom algorithms I wrote to profile our users.

  When someone uses Tomo, we log everything. What status updates they saw, whose photos they clicked, what profiles they opened, everything they posted, read, uploaded, or downloaded, as well as when these things happened and where they were when they did it. Printed out, as happens when the court subpoenas someone’s profile, a user’s account history spans thousands of pages.

  I used to be Tomo’s chief database architect, employee number forty-eight. After I returned to work, I couldn’t handle the Palo Alto headquarters anymore. In some ways, my new role in the Portland office suits my needs better. I’m a data analyst, writing code that interfaces with our databases and optimizes ad placement. The job gives me the time and access I need to pore through our endless stores of user data.

  Want to know what an obsessive mother looks like? She visits the Tomo profiles of her children 11.6 times a day, every day.

  I spot drug dealers by their endless private messages, filled with dozens of varying nicknames to disguise the drugs their clients ask for. Even as fast as street names change, it only takes a few dozen messages to ferret out the connection between old names and new ones, and watch brand-new drugs come online. I can watch them in real-time, if I want. The suppliers, of course, don’t use Tomo. They’re rightfully too paranoid.

  I even watch the watchers. An FBI research analyst views thousands of profiles of people he doesn’t know each day, and he logs in and out through different accounts. We track everything, even which accounts are used on the same computer, so we can build up inferred associations, even if two accounts lack explicit connections.

  Child pervs are easy. They’re the ones viewing profiles of kids under thirteen. Tomo officially doesn’t allow kids under thirteen, of course. Still, it’s easy enough to identify them by their obsessions over music, actors, TV shows, even their word choices. There’s also the curious phenomenon of duck faces, the attempt to make sexual faces that seems to peak around twelve. I got tired of looking at them, so I wrote a duck face eliminator plugin. It detects pursed lips and replaces them with the Mona Lisa’s smile. Much more peaceful.

  I know who clicks on the links about wardrobe malfunctions, and who loves their mom and who doesn’t. I can spot who’s cheating on their spouse, and who has ever thought of it. We retain those drunken chat messages forever. In short, I know everything.

  If the police had unfettered access to Tomo’s data and knew what they were doing, they’d spot the criminals in an hour. Crime would drop overnight, and it would only require imprisoning half the population of the United States.

  Angels we’re not, with the possible exception of Thomas.

  The NSA has unlimited access to our data, although nobody knows what they do with it. The raw data isn’t of much use unless you know how to find the patterns. That’s where I shine, even though my manager doesn’t understand a tenth of what I do. He still thinks I pick ads out of a database to place on webpages, although I’ve tried to explain profiling countless times.

  Of course, I’m not interested in the millions of crimes and morally bereft activities I unearth. It’s incidental, the sort of stuff anyone familiar with machine learning and a few weeks to spare could do. For the most part, I don’t give a damn. We’re all guilty of something.

  No, what I’m interested in is a little harder to find, a little more specific. My own personal demon.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  EMILY PLOPS into the booth across from me with a sigh of the world-weary.

  “You are not going to believe my morning. I’m in the middle of getting Freddie ready for preschool, and the damn cat pukes in my laptop bag. It’s not enough I still had to change a diaper. I’m already running late, so I have no choice but to bring the bag full of bile with me, drop Freddie off, and when I arrive at work, run to the nine o’clock meeting. I take out my laptop to present to the executive managers. It’s covered with a layer of stinking yellow puke and matted fur, but it’s too late to do anything, so I give the presentation and pretend everything is fine.”

  She emits a guttural yell of despair. I smile. Emily’s life is so ordinary, it makes me want to hug her. Maybe this is the life I could have had, if everything hadn’t gone awry. I’m not sure I would choose kids, but I’d like to live my life totally out there, brutally honest, without these half-lies, calculations, and suspicions that eat away at me like toxic waste my body can’t expel.

  “Did you order yet?” she says. Without waiting for a response, she reaches out an arm to block a waitress carrying food to another table. “The salad with the chicken breast on top, no skin, no cheese, light on the dressing, and coffee, lots of coffee.”

  I’m not required to talk a lot with Emily, which I like. It’s different than when we were in elementary school, when I was the fearless leader.

  “How’d the presentation go?”

  “Awesome, of course. A little puke wasn’t going to stop me. The executive team loved it, although one guy kept trying to edge away from my laptop.” She shakes her head and grabs a pickle from the bowl on the table. “That computer was only two months old, bu
t it’s not like I can wash the thing. I told my boss, who’s still pissed I forgot the last one in a taxi. ‘Blah, blah, six notebooks in six months, blah, blah.’ The hell with them, I make the company several million a year, they can damn well buy me a new computer any time I want.” She says this last bit waving around her pickle like a school teacher wielding a pointer.

  “So how’s your job going? When are they going to make you manager?”

  Of course, I don’t want to be a manager. Even when I was high up in the food chain, my role was technical, not managerial. These days, I like my quiet corner and my unlimited database access, and the last thing I want is attention. If I could be invisible, that would be best.

  This doesn’t fit Emily’s picture of the world where everyone should seize the opportunities that come their way with gusto. She wants me to once again climb the ranks of the company, but those days are over for me.

  “No promotion yet,” I say. I grab onto one exciting thing to tell her. “I discovered if you rotate an ad on a page a tiny bit, so the crookedness is imperceptible at first glance, in certain cities it increases the click-through rate. In Cincinnati, a three-degree clockwise twist increases the click-through rate ten percent. A one-degree left turn is more effective in Philadelphia.”

  I’m right on the border of where Emily accuses me of speaking a foreign language.

  “That’s exactly why you should go for a promotion,” she says, nodding. “How many ideas do you have? How many can you test in a week? One, maybe two. If you were a manager, you could farm out your ideas to an entire team and test ten or twenty concepts in a week.”

  Our food drops with a thud on the table. The waitress tears off the receipt, depositing illegible scrawl onto the table.

  “Jesus, Angie, how can you eat that?”

  I ordered the house burger, a colossal construction five inches across, with an accompanying mound of onion rings. One-handed burger eating isn’t pretty, and I’d never order anything like it with anyone besides Emily or Thomas. I don’t work out, but thanks to good genes and the occasional hike or bike ride, I’ve managed to maintain a reasonable physique considering that I mostly sit on my butt all day and code. Besides coloring my hair every month at the salon, I’m not big on appearances.