Excited Delirium Book: Chapter 2 (An OMNINet Employee)
Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 2 of the my online book “Excited Delirium”. Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index.
“Don’t forget that we have access to the credit card companies and the transaction records for this guy,” said a fairly lean and non-descript young man on what he imagined was a secure cell phone. To look at him, you wouldn’t think much, as he was one of the millions of people who wander at the foot of massive monuments to our corporate world, with an electronic Bluetooth device glued to his ear, talking like a Borg on a mission.
He was walking out of his office building and stood tall over the rest of the crowd as he pushed his way through the rotating doors. He was wearing all black, with the exception of his crisp, white shirt. Even his sunglasses were darkly tinted and kept the world from coming in.
The comments on the other end were obviously inaudible, but the response from the young man clarified his request. “I don’t care if you have to use a little currency. This is extremely – no, crucially – important. Our organization is about to go public and I want to make sure that nothing is leaked about the plans for 2008.”
These days, most people don’t observe others. They’re either afraid to or they don’t care, but if you were watching this person, you’d probably shake your head at the sheer stupidity of talking about significant corporate plans in a public space on a wireless connection that almost anyone could drop in on. With the efforts being made in the corporate world to tighten security, his carelessness seemed outrageously arrogant.
Of course, it didn’t matter to this kid because he knew that his employer owned the wireless network he was using and he also knew that, as a precaution, his employer filtered all employee conversations on a regular basis, mainly in an effort to keep their business bulletproof.
And these were big plans. He was talking about an IPO related to the OMNINet, one of the world’s largest privately-held corporations. But even that, for many, didn’t mean much because only a small portion of the population really knew what the OMNINet was or how far-reaching the organization’s tentacles reached.
The young man had walked away from the crowd while showing his frustration, finally taking a modest degree of caution. To ensure that other people stayed away, he lit a cigar, a blast of yellowy-blue smoke unleashed into the air like the fog that comes with clashing weather climates. Although it wasn’t a Cuban, the smell was dense and thickly scented. As he puffed, a thick yellow cloud swirled around him. No one would approach him now, even if he was handing out ten-thousand dollar cheques.
“I’m just a little guy, but I want to be ready when this happens. We’ve come this far and I’m not about to let these next steps go off the rail simply because some university student doesn’t like our point of view on how to run the world. Take care of the little punk and make sure he knows why he’s getting some extra attention from our friends.”
With that, he pressed the “End” button on his RIM, shoved it into his chest pocket and turned back into the building, leaving a long stub of dead and dried tobacco leaf on the ground.
The news was that an even younger person, an IT intern, had tripped across some of the careful plans being laid out by the OMNINet. He told cigar-guy that he was going to bring the story to the press. He did. He had the misfortune of bringing the story to the wrong press, a media outlet owned by the OMNINet. Cigar-guy was quickly informed and he was now speaking with Len Daniels, a ‘clean-up guy’ with Greyrock, one of the OMNINet’s largest defense contract companies.
(Note: “Excited Delirium” is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)
Did you miss a chapter? If so, click here to see all chapters or click here to go to Excited Delirium: Prelude.
Excited Delirium by Liam Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at www.exciteddelirium.ca.