Through a drive, darkly

“You didn’t format this right,” Pastor Clive said in a chiding tone. He held up a small, sleek flashdrive, a crease appearing on his forehead. “Even little mistakes can cost us, Harry. We’ve had this talk before.”

The pounding in Harry’s chest threatened to breach the surface. He stared at the long hairs escaping the Pastor’s behemoth nose, fluttering as he exhaled like a patch of weeds spreading in the cracks of a sidewalk. As a rule, Harry could bottle his fear fairly well. Clive was the exception. He had never had the best track record with authority figures in the church. He asked questions they didn’t like to answer, often in front of others. But as the chosen voices of God, who was there better to ask? When Harry met Clive, suddenly asking questions didn’t seem so important. His exoskeleton of compassion produced in Harry a physical terror, because Clive was good enough to convince even Harry, who knew the man behind the mask, that he was good. His palms began to sweat, and his eyes welled in frustration. 

“I’ve been here all day,” Harry said, trying to be as passive as possible. “I’m tired.”

“You’re undisciplined,” Clive said, his voice soft, almost cooing. Most people would associate Clive with a Shepard, herding his alter children flock to salvation. But Harry knew better. He’d once seen on an unfortunate field trip how butchers approached sheep during slaughter. They’d be bound and blindfolded, lying helpless on the ground as the butcher whispered soothing sweet nothings into their ear. The sheep’s eyes would fill with an absolute confusion. What had it done? It just wanted to know. It would twitch, alert, smelling the steel with long rinsed-away blood, knowing the butcher’s true intentions, but knew not why until the sharp blade had severed the artery under it’s chin. Harry shuddered, waiting for Clive to lay his hands on him. 

Clive cocked his head, considering him, his lips pursed, face concerned, all the more at odds with his flat, watery eyes. “We can fix that, I suppose. Come here. Feel this,” he indicated to a pathetic-looking bulge in the crotch of his pants. He brushed rough fingers over Harry’s cheek. “You know how special I think you are, don’t you, Harry?” Clive said, not wanting a response.

Harry looked down and nodded through the tears. He was almost grateful. It got Harry out of the basement a while longer, where the strobing light gave him headaches, and the black mold and lead paint made him nauseous. Down there, he would sit on a laptop and manually move coded files from a harddrive to a portable flashdrive with a cluster folder labeled “system”. He’d shove the flashdrive into what appeared to be a can of soup, but upon being opened was really a storage compartment packed with foam, which would then be put into the donation pile amongst the real stores of canned goods that were spread to the other, poorer parishes in Madison County. He did this over and over, until his back ached from being bent over the small screen for hours. 

Harry looked at Clive, unwilling to meet the Pastor’s eyes, and tried for a plea, his obvious pain his only token.

“Please,” he whispered, almost too quietly to hear. Clive smiled and squeezed Harry’s shoulder reassuringly.

“You wouldn’t say no to God, would you, Harry?” 

Harry put his hand where Clive wanted, and it moved rhythmically, back and forth, against the dark fabric of Clive’s clerical pants. Clive let out a sigh of relief, letting his shoulders sag as an expression of peace passed over his face. Harry moved his mind elsewhere.

Even though he was stuck at the church most days, his solace was in videogames. It reminded him of when there was nothing else to do, when his family still lived in a high-rise in the city. Back then he had loved to play role-playing games in his room late into the night. It was comforting, knowing he could use his imagination to build a better life for himself. When his father would catch him after coming home late from the hospital, he would smile knowingly and the two of them would sneak treats in the kitchen as Harry regaled him with his latest mana boost or acquisition of various fantastical cities. 

But then his father had decided to go to Africa, where he could help the sick in countries that didn’t have doctors with his level of expertise. He had a responsibility to the world, his father had said. 

“Me and your mother, we’re going to try the long distance thing for a bit,” was the only part of the conversation Harry remembered before his father left for the airport.

Harry and his mother were forced to move out of the city after that. Here, in the country, the air was always cold, and there wasn’t a lot to do outside that didn’t mean ten minutes of prep work, putting on layer after layer of clothing. He still played his videogames, but no one caught him in the middle of the night, and he never went into the kitchen to sneak treats. He’d wait until his father came back. 

In his virtual reality, Harry was a man of many worlds. He had been a captain, a soldier, a pioneer, once a chef for a short stint on the Sims, and most proudly, a warrior. In this world, the one where Harry’s only escape was his mind, he was nothing. Clive made sure he didn’t forget that. 

His hand was starting to cramp, but Clive pressed it deeper into his crotch. 

“Faster! Keep going, that’s it.” Harry wanted to run from Clive and the church. He pictured himself falling through the screen of his computer into the worlds that provided him peace and happiness. He imagined himself holding a long broadsword, the cross brace decorated with the jewels of mad kings whose blood made the blade run red. He often thought of it in his hand, a phantom weapon to protect him outside his virtual bubble. He admired the lightness of it in his grip, thought it would shield him from the worst Clive could do. But, of course, it wasn’t there. 

Clive’s labored breathing brought him back to reality. Harry was finding it more and more painful to stroke Clive’s crotch. His hand was on fire as it conformed to the shape under the black pants, moving back and forth, spastically now, still faster. 

Harry wanted to stop this and make the cold trek through the deep snow. He wanted to go home, where he could lay under the covers with his computer, where his decisions were his to make. 

But then he thought of the scene of their little apartment after he would have succumbed to sleep, the fan of his laptop whirring in blissful ambiance as it rested precariously on his chest. There would be his mother, sitting on the couch in the cramped living room. She would stare at the television, eyes unfocused, and struggle to keep the glass of dark liquor balanced on the couch’s arm, her head lolling from side to side. A lone cigarette would lie in the Doctors Without Borders plate-turned-ashtray, one hit taken and forgotten, an uncapped bottle of antidepressants within easy reach. She would be gone to work when he woke up for school, the living room clean and absent of the previous night’s scene. A thread of hope would dangle itself in front of Harry’s face. Maybe it was all just a dream, but then the scene would repeat itself, day after day. 

He would go to school and then from the bus stop afterwards walk to the church, where he could be supervised without his mother paying for a babysitter. Last night, when it was late, Harry came out to see if his mother was still awake. She was talking to herself. Whoever she thought was there, she didn’t seem to think his father was coming back. 

He forced himself to rub faster. 

__________

Harry shuffled down the basement steps, one hand massaging the other. It was a dingy thing. A box with four walls filled and dank air. A desktop computer sat on a rickety workbench against one wall. The wall opposite was occupied by several donated beanbags. Atop them sprawled his three friends, James, Dan, and Cait. The four of them had an unspoken bond. They were the only ones who knew what the others went through around Clive. James put on a sure face for them, but they knew he used it as a way to cover up the tainted boy underneath. He sat at the far end of the room, a smirk on his face that didn’t reach his eyes. Dan, always the voice of reason, sat closest to Harry. He pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle as he looked up, and gave Harry a look that said it would all be okay, now that they were together again. Between them sat Cait. Harry and the other’s always joked that Cait was going to be the one to defy Clive. She had this broken look in her eyes, and her wild frizzy hair and shambled uniform only enforced the dormant chaos waiting to spill forth. 

The three of them looked at Harry, and he was only just able to stop the relief-induced tears from coming to bear. These three were the only reason Harry had not yet broken open and fallen down a dark hole. They were, as his father used to say of his mother, his rock. Well, rocks. He didn’t understand what that had meant until he had been under the supervision of Clive, and his life was Hell whenever he was not with those just like him. The group made quite the image. The colorful beanbags clashed with the black and white cassocks they all wore, and even more by the laptops they all had propped on their legs.

“Let me guess – formatting?” James said, trying to sound casual, “He’s lost his mind, Har. I mean it, more than usual. These are fine.” He flicked a hand to indicate the box all but overflowing with flashdrives that had yet to be stuffed into their sneaky-soups, as the group had dubbed them. “Let’s just check one, I know we formatted these right. It’s the same thing we’ve always done. Nothing’s different.” Dan snapped his head to James.

“No,” Dan shook his head, “You know what he said he’ll do if he catches us opening one. Don’t be stupid, James.” The boy held out his hand to James, beckoning him to hand the flash drive over. James did, shrugging. 

Dan held the flashdrive up in his open palm to the rest of them. “If we tell him the drives aren’t the problem, he’ll know we’ve been snooping. I don’t know about you three, but I want to go home sometime. He gets wind we watched one of these videos…” He trailed off, slowly shaking his head. 

“So you have seen one then, Dan,” Cait said accusingly, “I knew it. You’re always down here alone before school. Well? Spill. What’s so horrible we can’t look?” Her eyes pleaded with curiosity and annoyance. Dan’s face blanched, white as his cassock, and he looked around at the rest of the group, caution a glitter deep in the back of his eyes.

“Cait, it’s… it’s bad stuff. Like bad. Worse than what Pastor Clive does to…. They’re naked. And they’re our age. I think these are being given to other Pastors.” The three of them exchanged a glance, their collaborative gulp nearly audible.

“Well then we should tell someone. Our parents. The police.” Cait offered.

“Ya. Let’s piss off the guy who gets his jolly’s getting touched by kids,” James said, casting Harry an apologetic glance. “Sounds like a real smart plan. No way. How much you wanna bet that’s what those kids said before they ended up in a video?” He pointed at the computer. “I’m not ending up like that.”

How many other kids had there been in their situation, Harry thought. His head was throbbing, the veins in his temples a steady staccato threatening to bring him to his knees. The smell of paint was suffocating, and he felt nauseous and claustrophobic. But most of all, he was fed up. Fed up with Clive’s sickly preying on the weakness and uncertainty of youth, as if they were some lesser things to be commanded. Clive thought he was powerful, but he was just a small man. 

In that moment, Harry felt resolved, and for what felt like the first time, brave. They had to find out for sure what was on the drives. And if it was like Dan said, and no one else would, he would take it to his mother himself and put this all out in the open. Someone had to. If the others felt like Harry did after one of Clive’s perverted episodes, then he would do it for them. No one should be made to feel so powerless, least of all in front of God. Harry went through an instant of fantasy, imagining life after Clive. He’d finally be able to get back to the worlds that mattered most to him. It strengthened his decision. Through his fume-induced mental fog, he snatched the drive out of Dan’s open hand, and rushed to the computer tower before anyone could stop him. 

“No!” James and Dan shouted together. As if she expected it, Cait lunged and caught one of Harry’s legs. Harry tried to compensate by reaching out for the table. He plugged in the drive just as his hand on the table shook a large pitcher of water over the edge, spilling onto the outlet. 

There was a loud surge of light and sound as the computer spat sparks and sent Harry flying across the room into the adjacent cinderblock wall. 

Clive’s going to kill me for this, Harry thought, maybe I’ll just rest here for a second. Something hot flowed down his back, and he could feel his fingers and toes locked into rigid claws as something tingly and unbelievably uncomfortable surged through his whole body. He couldn’t hear the veins heaving on the sides of his head anymore. 

James, Dan, and Cait were screaming and calling his name through what sounded like a very long tube. Sorry, Harry thought, I just wanted us all to go home for good. 

His body finally slackened, and he slumped into the space where cinder wall met stone floor. He closed his eyes to rest.

His nap was brief, as a crash of sound from the stairs indicated Clive was coming in a fury.

The wind stirred against Harry’s face as Clive rushed into the room, followed by hostile vibrations of sound. “Get back, you idiots. What in God’s name have you done?”

I’m sorry, Harry tried to say, it was me. Don’t blame them, blame me. I’ll get up, Dad. Hold on.

But he couldn’t feel his body anymore. He felt a peculiar tugging behind his eyes as the current left his muscles, pulling him back from where it had come. He didn’t fight the shifting gravity as the charged air between his body and the computer brought him closer to it. He felt his energy smack into the metal housing of the desktop, and abruptly his fear, his pain, vanished. He felt the microchips nearest the internal drive’s disk giving off a welcoming and homely heat, abating the creeping cold he couldn’t seem to evade, and he fought to nestle himself deep in the heart of it. 

Suddenly, the thunder in his ears was gone. An odd quiet had settled around him. Everything looked different from his new vantage point. He could feel his thoughts symbiotically linking to the desktop’s, but where he should have been terrified and confused, he was detached, noticing now only his protesting software. He briefly saw the room as it truly was, as a series of moving circuits. There were three small brightly whirling storms of energy, made up of what could only be binary code, overshadowed by a dimly illuminated cyclone of the same makeup. Before he could process what was happening to the smaller clouds, the dim cyclone that could only have been Clive rushed to the still-spewing power outlet and yanked the cord. Harry’s vision shrunk to a pinhole of light, before blinking out all together.

_________

“I need you to fix this.” The vibrations came out metallic at first, but once Harry noticed them, he recognized Clive’s wheezing sound waves. He was speaking to someone, but the waves were shaky. He was worried. “There may be an inquiry from the authorities. I wiped it down, but I’m not sure, he must’ve fried something. Plugged the damn thing back in but it keeps going into safety mode. There’s a lot of incriminating stuff on here. Take it back and see what you can do. If you recover the data on the internal drive, I’ll give you next month’s tapes free.”

“We don’t have to worry about him talking, do we?” another frequency said, this one more timid and openly afraid.

“No, he coded before they loaded him onto the ambulance. Told them he tried to stick a fork in a socket. Told them he wasn’t right in the head. He was too far gone to say anything before then, anyhow. I’ve spoken to the other children, and I think it’s safe to say we have come to an understanding. They won’t be a problem.”

And then Harry felt himself being lifted off the dank and dusty floor of the basement, sensed as all his cords were unplugged from the wall and screens, tried to struggle free as he began to fade again, sensing himself being placed into a box of packing peanuts, and tasted the last ray of light as a strip of tape sealed him in. He was trapped, and blind. But he felt no pain.

________

Harry remembered little of his journey through the town of Edwardsville, Illinois, over roads he had never driven down, passed fields of grain he’d never seen, down a quaint stone drive, and into the home computer repair shop of Pastor Jude. When at last he came to, he was being vivisected. The skin of his metal shell housing lay discarded on a long workbench. A light shone on his detached and burned skeleton, the motherboard looking like a roasted radio component. But now he could see again, his vision unlimited. Every rotation of his internal disk created a sound wave, a vibration, bouncing around and allowing him to see the entire room: The outline of Jude, the few decorations he kept, and the many, many other desktops awaiting Jude’s probe.

Harry guessed the language Jude was mumbling to himself was Latin, but he couldn’t make sense of a word of it. He did, however, understand the look of concern on Jude’s face. Not a concern for Harry, but for the potential loss of encoded data on the hard drive. He poked and prodded Harry with soldering irons that seared, and several other expensive looking instruments Harry didn’t recognize. A picture of a young girl hung on the wall where the workbench stood, and every so often Jude would look up at it, making the lines of his face seem momentarily less prominent.  

For hours, Jude worked away on Harry, muttering away unintelligibly. Other than that, the repair shop was quiet, different from the white noise of the sermons at the church that could be heard through the basement air ducts. It was quiet like home. His thoughts came more sequentially, his processes clearer, not battened down with that fleshy repressed anxiety and fear. He was transcended.

He listened to Jude’s labored breathing as the day wore on, shallow and rasping, and it put Harry at ease. He didn’t feel any pain as he was taken apart, piece by piece, nor discomfort as he was singed and worked back again. He didn’t need to struggle to breath, like Jude. 

Harry was no longer a boy, but a machine. In his old life at the church, and even at home, he had often felt little more than an extension of his computer, a program made of blood and bone instead of circuits and components. He would do as he was told, when he was told, and any deviation from that programming caused the people around him to malfunction with anger and reproach. Being here, with so many like-minded drives around him, made him feel more at home, more alive comparatively. Now he belonged.

Harry thought of his parents, and realized he did not miss them. That should have surprised him, but it didn’t. He cared neither whether his parents would miss him or if his corporeal death would save their infected marriage. He didn’t think those kinds of things were within his capability now. And that was just fine, because despite his apparent detachment from the human condition, he had ended up in this situation by trying to do right by his friends. He didn’t much care whether they continued to suffer or not, either. However, it seemed illogical to not carry out the task his fleshy self had set out to do. He didn’t know why, but he felt obligated to see through the last will of the boy who had died to give him his new life. 

Harry was now the drive, and he had access to everything on it. He examined all five hundred gigabytes of data in an instant, and was un-phased by its taboo lewdness. It didn’t make him feel anything to watch all of those children destroyed from the inside out by the powers sworn to protect them. Maybe humans broke God, as He looked down with disappointment at the human race and what they had managed to do to one another in His name. And maybe not, maybe God wasn’t what people thought him to be. Maybe he was like Harry was now, an architectural presence, immune to the lesser emotions of his creations. The only thing Harry knew was that his flesh-confined self had been a victim. Weak. He didn’t understand it as he had then, but he remembered the cognitive discomfort his former self had weathered as a result of Clive and those like him. And he felt tethered to that boy, despite himself. Clive could not carry on, that much was certain. But how? What could Harry do? Sure, he had experienced all of the evidence, in essence he now was the evidence. But he was not connected to the net, so there was nowhere for him to put the information where it would be seen. 

A softly incessant buzzing interrupted Harry’s stream of consciousness. Jude waddled over to a desk where a non-descript cellphone lay, and answered, “I’ll know in a minute. Swing on over. If we’re in the green, I’ll pop it into a new tower and you can take it back and carry on. If we’re in the red, we can have Melissa make it go the way of Bruno over at the crematorium. She’s always been one for discretion. Ok. See you soon. Yep, bu-bye.”

Jude came back into view, putting on his glasses and pulling from a drawer a slim, black cable. An Ethernet cable, to link him to Jude’s computer, a computer which Harry could see was uploading and downloading bits from the net. Ask, and you shall receive. Maybe He was listening. 

Jude plugged one end into the side of Harry’s head, the shiny metal scraping as it was pushed roughly into his port, and pushed the other end into a computer tower. When the metal of the cable connected with the housing of its port, Harry zipped his evidence up into a tightly compacted file, and shot through the network and onto the vast dimensional highway of the world wide web.

Maybe there was more human left stuck to him than he realized, because when Harry left the now-repaired drive, he told the internal disk to speed up much faster than its governor allowed. Before he left the confines of Jude’s shop, he saw the disk explode into fine, heated chips of metal that burrowed themselves into the skin of Jude’s hands, arms, and face. It set the man to screaming, and Harry’s bytes brightened, if only marginally.  

Harry had only been on the internet a few seconds before he realized he could turn off the better part of the world. Deity-scale power, how had this all happened? His flesh-and-blood self was not yet in the ground, and now he could cleanse the world of its corruption with a thought. He thought about it and decided that he would do what God would do. So he did nothing. Instead, he remained focused on what he had set out to do. He sent a document to the Edwardsville Police department, as well as to the Department of Homeland Security. In it, he included the names, addresses, and encryption keys of each Pastor in the Midwest child pornography ring and their respective computers. He added in each Pastor’s customer log, and finally, because he knew his former self well enough to know that he would have never admitted that he was molested, each victim of sexual abuse. He had to borrow some of the NSA’s facial recognition software to figure out who some of them were, but it was a brief hiccup. 

The document was emailed to a Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, and a Jay Keeven, Director of Police in Edwardsville, Illinois. The subject line read: Contact Pastor Clive Corope for more details. 

_________

Harry waited until the raid team had set up outside Clive’s little ranch home before he hijacked one of the raid officer’s body cameras. He watched with a surprisingly sapient satisfaction as the officers forced their way inside and put a baffled Clive onto the floor. The officer whose body cam Harry sat in on moved to a corner of the room, providing a good vantage point. There was a heated exchange between several of the officers and Jay Keeven, before Keeven conceded and stepped away. Harry knew that three of the dozen raiders had children who were labeled as victims on his document. Presumably, the three said officers slowly encircled Clive, who lay prostrate and cuffed on the floor. He whimpered pathetically, like a child. The last thing Harry saw before the officers turned off their body cams was the look on Clive’s face. 

It was the look of a sheep, come to slaughter.