clips.com has a rule about the night shift. We help people with their accounts, and we do not go looking for them. It's a good rule. I have explained it on the phone to angry people many times.
At 2:31 a.m., with line four still dark, I explained it to myself. It didn't work.
"Bao," I said. "Can you see anything? Anything at all?"
He had his chair pulled up to mine. He'd been chewing the hood of his hoodie, which meant he was worried, because the drawstrings were already gone.
"I can see what the system sees," he said. "Last login was Friday at 6:11 a.m. He opened the camera. He started an upload."
"And?"
"It failed at three percent."
When an upload fails at clips.com, it doesn't disappear right away. The fragment sits in a quarantine bucket for thirty days.
Then a script deletes it. Bao had written the script. He called it the Undertaker.
"I'm not supposed to open those," he said.
"I know."
"Nobody's supposed to open those. That's the whole point of a quarantine."
"I know, Bao."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at the whiteboard, at DAYS SINCE THE SERVERS CAUGHT FIRE: 1,419, as if it might give him permission.
"I'll check whether the file is corrupted," he said. "That's a diagnostic. Diagnostics are allowed."
He typed for a while. Then he turned his monitor toward me.
The fragment was three seconds long. The first second showed the bean rows and a slice of the blue shed. In the second second, the picture tipped sideways. Then there was only sky, very pale, and the edge of a tomato cage.
At the end, there was Walter's voice. Just two words, conversational, the way you'd talk to someone in the next room.
"Well, Iris."
That was all.
Bao closed the window. He didn't say "diagnostic" again.
"The Undertaker gets it in twenty-six days," he said quietly.
"Don't let it."
"I can't stop the Undertaker. It's a scheduled job. It's very dignified."
"Bao."
He sighed and typed one line. "Fine. Stay of execution. If anyone asks, I'm testing the appeals process."
"Is there an appeals process?"
"There is now," he said. "You're looking at it."
I sat with my hands around a coffee I didn't drink. My training said one thing. My stomach said another. My training had been written by a law firm, and my stomach had been on Tuesdays with Walter for three years.
"We can't call him," Bao said. "Outbound calls need a ticket from the user. We'd both get fired."
"I'm not going to call him."
"Then what are you going to do?"
I stood up and took the card off my cubicle wall. Marigold seeds. W. Brisby, 14 Linden Street, Corby Hill.
"He gave me this," I said. "He mailed it to me. It's not account data. It's a greeting card."
Bao read the address. "That's a loophole."
"That's a man who wanted me to know where he lived."
I called the Corby Hill police non-emergency line. A woman answered on the ninth ring. She sounded like I had woken her up, and she sounded like she'd forgive me for it.
I explained. A friend, eighty-one, living alone. Nobody had heard from him since Friday.
I did not say clips.com. I did not say quarantine bucket. I said I was worried, which was true, and that I was a friend, which I decided was also true.
"Your name, ma'am?"
"Ruth Aldana."
"And how do you know Mr. Brisby?"
I thought about it. "We talk on Tuesdays."
She didn't ask anything else. She said she'd send a car when one was free.
When I hung up, Bao was typing into the chat window for Tilda. He does this when he's nervous. He says it's like poking a jellyfish to see if it's still there.
A user has not posted in five days, he typed. He is 81. What should we do?
Tilda answered in under a second. Great question! Taking a break from posting can be a sign of a happy, balanced life offline. Would you like to reset your password?
Bao closed the window. "Six weeks," he said. "She replaces us in six weeks."
"She'll be very balanced," I said.
At 7:01 a.m. the email arrived.
Subject: Quick Win! Line Four sunset plan
Hi team! Exciting news. Starting the first of next month, Tilda will handle all overnight support. Line four will be retired at midnight on the 31st. Thanks for helping us modernize!
Colby
I read it twice. Then I read it to Bao, who was eating dry cereal out of the box at his desk. He stopped chewing.
"Tilda can't do Tuesdays," he said.
"Tilda can't do anything that takes longer than four seconds."
"Tilda once told a man his account was 'emotionally unavailable.' It was a typo for 'temporarily.' He cried."
I drove home with the radio off. Marlow at seven in the morning is all school buses and people scraping windshields. Every one of them, I thought, probably had clips.com on their phone. Every one of them had a little calendar of squares.
None of them knew that one of the squares in Corby Hill had gone gray. That's the thing about clips.com. It shows you everyone's day, but only if they post it.
I drove home and didn't sleep. I lay on the couch with my phone on my chest and the ringer at full volume. My philodendron watched me from the windowsill. It was not much help, but it was there.
The police called back at 11:40 that morning.
The officer's name was Dale Henshaw. He was twenty-six, he told me later. He sounded young, and careful, like someone reading from a notepad he'd written himself.
"Ma'am, I went by 14 Linden Street. Nobody home. But I talked to the neighbor."
"Is he all right?"
"He's alive, ma'am. That's the main thing I'm allowed to tell you."
I sat down on the kitchen floor. I didn't decide to. My knees decided for me.
"He fell in the garden Friday morning," Henshaw said.
"The neighbor found him around nine and called the ambulance. They took him to Corby County Medical."
"Which room?"
"That's all she knows. I can't tell you anything about his condition. I don't know it, and I wouldn't be allowed to say."
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you, officer."
"There's one more thing." I heard a page turn.
"The neighbor asked me to pass something on to whoever was asking. She was very specific. I wrote it down."
"Go ahead."
He cleared his throat. "She said, quote, 'I've been watering, but I'm seventy-four and my knees are not a public utility. If his friend from the computer wants those tomatoes saved, she'd better come down here herself.' End quote."
I laughed, mostly from relief. It came out as more of a sob.
"Ma'am?"
"I'm fine. I'm just — she sounds like a lot."
"Yes, ma'am," said Officer Henshaw, with feeling. "She made me wipe my feet before I stood on her porch."
After he hung up, I sat on the kitchen floor for another twenty minutes. Then I got up, watered the philodendron and apologized to it. I'm not sure what for. It seemed to accept.
I went back for my Tuesday shift that night. Line four didn't ring. I hadn't expected it to, but I still looked.
At 3:40 a.m., Bao brought me a coffee from the machine. He'd pressed the button for hot chocolate by mistake. I drank it anyway.
"He's alive," I told him. "He fell. He's in the hospital."
Bao let out a breath he had clearly been holding since the weekend. He went to the whiteboard and stared at it. Then he added a small check mark next to 1,420, for no reason I could understand.
"So what now?" he asked.
"I'm off until Thursday night."
"Are you going to Corby Hill?"
"I don't know."
He looked at me. "You took the card off the wall."
I looked down. I had. I'd been holding it all night without noticing.
At 7:05 a.m., my inbox chimed again. It wasn't a Quick Win! this time. The subject line was just one word, which for Colby was an emergency.
Subject: Today
Ruth — please come to my office at 7:30. Corby Hill PD called our main line to confirm your employment. We need to talk about the welfare check.
Colby
Up next: Fourteen Linden Street
Continue to Part 3 →