Josh Roseman - The Clockwork Russian and Other Stories

Oh, I still believed. I still watched sci-fi shows, still saw fantasy and action movies on opening day, still tried to get my kids interested in Star Trek . But that was it. No aliens, no superheroes, no James Bond.

Just reality.

“Dude, where’d you get this?”

Ben — the IT guy — was in my passenger seat; we were headed out to lunch, and I’d given him the inch-thick stack of paper to look at while I drove.

“My son. His girlfriend sent him a file, and it printed out all this junk.”

“That’s crazy, man.”

“Why?”

Ben handed me his iPhone. I glanced down as we waited for a light to change. “How did you get this?”

He shrugged. “Showed up when I synched this morning.”

“Any of the numbers the same?”

“Haven’t had a chance to look that close.”

“Well, we’ve got time now.”

Ben took back the phone. I tried to listen to the radio, but all I could do was flick my eyes in Ben’s direction every few seconds. “Slow your roll,” he said. “I’m checking.”

After another couple of minutes, I tucked my car into a parking spot around the side of the Longhorn. “Well?”

“Don’t know, dude. It’s just numbers to me.”

We ordered our food and Ben slid the phone across to me. I started flipping through the pages, hoping I’d see a pattern, but nothing jumped out at me.

“Yeah, you’re not getting it either.”

“It takes time,” I said, not looking up.

“Well, your time’s up.”

The waitress was setting plates on the table. I handed him the phone. “Can you e-mail me that?”

“Whatever, dude.”

I didn’t think about the numbers until close to midnight, until I was at home on the couch, half-watching the end of a James Bond movie on Spike. The credits started rolling and I hit the saved-items button on my remote, hoping that something might be in there to put me to sleep.

Instead, all the movie names had been replaced by groupings of numbers and letters.

I snapped awake and grabbed my phone, making sure I had photographic evidence to show Ben tomorrow. I also played around a little in the DVR menu — all the options had been replaced by three-character combinations, but everything still worked normally.

Well. I couldn’t leave it alone, not after that. I shut off the TV and went into my office. Google brought me a surprising number of porn sites when I dropped in a few groupings, but there were some truffles in the mud, mostly in the form of cryptography and conspiracy websites and forums. I joined one that looked promising — one would think it would be harder to get into a community of paranoid people — and read through the thread called “THR EED IGI TNU MBE RSI NMY STU FF!” Members were seeing it in their e-mail, on their phones, even when they tried to use their GPSes. I shared my own story and a few blocks of characters from the e-mail Ben forwarded me, then went to the bathroom.

When I got back, my screensaver had kicked in. But it wasn’t the Windows logo floating serenely, like it was supposed to be. It was more of the number-letter blocks, slowly filling the screen until they rolled up and off.

I shifted the mouse back and forth a couple of times, then hit the space bar. Nothing. “What the hell?”

After a few more futile attempts to turn off the screensaver — and more than one failed three-finger salute — I flipped off the surge strip. The code — that’s what it had to be: some sort of weird code taking over my computer — blinked off.

And as it did, my phone trilled its e-mail sound.

More numbers.

Another trill. Another bunch of numbers.

And a third time.

“This is too weird.” I switched the phone’s profile to silent mode, dropped it in its cradle, and went to bed. Probably not the best thing to do, but I had to be up early for work and no amount of numbers would change that.

My alarm clock flipped on, barely jolting me out of the zombielike half-slumber I’d managed after sitting up in bed for hours, poring over the papers Sam had left… was it only two days ago? I couldn’t even remember, I was so exhausted.

Coffee. That would help. I ambled into the kitchen and started it up, then flicked on the little under-the-cabinet TV. It was only a nine-inch set, so it was hard to see at first, but soon enough I had the big TV in the living room turned on.

In the crawl across the bottom of the screen, in between stories about gas prices and the war in Iraq and the reconstruction of 35W, I saw the numbers and letters again.

A82

10F

CC5

51C

909

BA9

“What was up with the crawl this morning?”

Anna didn’t look up. “Seemed fine to me.”

“Really? Nothing strange? No errors or anything?”

She grunted. “If you count Diane misspelling a bunch of words, sure, there were errors. But nothing major.” Anna was the EP of the morning shows. If she didn’t see it, it didn’t happen. “What’s up?”

“Can I borrow your DVR?”

“If you need it.” She hefted herself out of her chair — it groaned a little in relief — and clumped off in the general direction of the bathroom.

I’d learned my lesson about sitting in Anna’s chair; I leaned against the side of her desk instead and clicked back to 6:10, when I’d seen the numbers in the crawl.

A82

10F

CC5

51C

909

BA9

28C

8A0

219

208

72A

EBB

And so on. Except now it was the whole crawl. No lottery numbers, no weather or traffic or sports scores. Just block after block of numbers and letters, each separated by our logo.

“That’s strange.” Ben had come up without me noticing and was leaning over the short wall separating Anna’s desk from the one next to it. “I missed it this morning.”

“I was up all night trying to figure out what was going on.”

“I can tell.” He peered at the screen, then slammed his hand onto the desk. “Pause it!”

“What happened?” The freeze-frame looked no different than it should, except for the crawl. “You see something?”

“Maybe.” He tilted his head to the side. “Go back a little.”

I did. “Hey, so I joined this forum last night. Bunch of conspiracy nuts talking about seeing the numbers and letters. I posted some of ours.”

He made a noise and came around, sitting in Anna’s chair. A cloud of funk rose from it, but he ignored it as he remoted into his computer in IT. “Check this out,” he said. “I think it’s repeating.”

“What?” I leaned down and scanned the screen, then ran the DVR on slow. “Holy crap. What the hell is it?”

Ben looked up at me. We were a little too close for comfort in that position, but it was the last thing on my mind. “I think it’s a message.”

Four hours later, over lunch in his little cave of an office — bagels scrounged from a sales presentation; neither of us felt like going out — we set laptops up like a game of Battleship and ran our number-letter combinations through a little application he’d written. “How long did this take you?”

“All morning.” He rubbed his eyes. “And most of last night.”

“No wonder you look so shitty. You probably slept as much as me last night.”

“Well, it took me until almost 2:00 to even think of it.”

“Why?”

He smirked. “I saw movie credits. First the names of the stars, then the crew, and finally everything was numbers and letters.”

“Was it View to a Kill ? That was on last night.”

Ben didn’t look at all apologetic or embarrassed as he told me what DVD he’d been watching, and he shrugged off me you-ought-to-be-ashamed glare. “Like you’ve never.”