Page 1 of Filthy Little Fix
CHAPTER I
ONE
LEO
I have a fern.
The head of HR ran an experiment with my department. Said that personalizing your workspace—your six-square-meter gray cubicle—boosted productivity. My left-hand coworker taped a poster to the wall, and my right-hand coworker lined up a few depressing miniatures from some children's game to remind her of all the joy that had been wrung from her by capitalism.
My personalization is a fern.
Taking care of a fern was the best idea I've ever had. I get out of bed because a fern doesn't water itself. I talk to it. I release CO2 by spitting out words it doesn't understand near its leaves to help it turn greener. There's a scientific basis for it. My right-hand neighbor said,they're social like us, then.They form attachments, like us. I think it's a dumb comparison. I told her there's a chemical reaction when we stroke them. Since then, she strokes my fern every day when she thinks I'm not looking—she believes my fern has a central nervous system.
I didn't say what chemical reactions are being triggered.
Going to work is tedious. Rows upon rows of tiny, gray, and, most special of all, my own personalized cubicle. I come inevery morning, water my fern, and face a sea of gray cubicles stretching into the monotony. The rest of it—sitting in front of that relic of a computer from 2001 with its radioactive CRT monitor, being milked to fill out Excel spreadsheets—was just a side effect of my primary function: keeping a fern alive. The IT section of my contract mentions all sorts of technical stuff, but the most technical thing I've done is solve ridiculous, homespun problems. Nicole didn't understand why the printer wouldn't turn on or connect. I said, "I wonder why, Nicole?" and she said, "Chad gave it a virus." The printer was unplugged.
The midday turnstiles are the trumpets of a reverse apocalypse. They seem to announce that I can soon return to my life—far from big corporations and managers with gelled-up combovers.
Chad surveys the office sometimes, or pretends to. He spends most of his time away from the rest of us—far from the cubicles, lounging somewhere above the chaos, because he's above the little people. He's just a little less little. He has his own office, and the door has Chad's name on it—a silver plaque that would be ripped off at the first opportunity to get rid of human resources. I support getting rid of them. Getting rid of Chad.
"Leo, my champ! We need that bug report for yesterday, okay? Counting on you!"
Sure, Chad, I'd love to spend the rest of my miserable existence hunting for syntax errors in your shitty code.
What I actually say is, "No problem, Chad."
Chad went to watch half-naked women dance on TikTok in his office, with his door closed and a sign hanging on the knob saying how busy he was—while I search for where he forgot the semicolon. Where he didn't close the damn bracket, which variable he forgot to define. Chad makes the kind of mistakes any programmer would, just as he makes mistakes like a 14-year-old playing hacker after graduating from YouTubetutorials. He doesn't automate anything. His code is as ugly as his comb-over—long, crude, and painfully repetitive, like a bad haircut that won't grow out.
He's glued to some woman dancing on TikTok, the same tired loop blaring from his open office door, while I hunt through his maze of forgotten semicolons and brackets. A trap song that loops endlessly, repeating like all the feeble functions in that code. I hear it from my cubicle. My neighbors wear headphones.
My fern is the only thing that seems to thrive.
The final beep of the turnstile at six p.m. echoes like a herald of freedom—yet it's just a brief, false escape from this cage. The air outside is polluted but smells better than Chad's overpowering spray deodorant.
On the bus, humanity squeezes together in its collective misery. Tired faces, empty stares. Just another worker stuck crawling through all this shit.
My home is like any other. Not much furniture—mostly secondhand, poorly made—and not much personality. I don't care about houses. Dull colors and small rooms.
I rip off my tie—the worst part of office work—and unbutton my shirt. I drink water and take an expired pill with a black-box warning from the drawer. I open my laptop.
The laptop is the most expensive thing you can find in the house. If you consider the symbolic and sentimental meaning of home, mine is in it—in this machine of ones and zeros.
I never open any window in full screen, and the laptop's built-in camera remains permanently covered. What I do at home is secondary to caring for the fern.
It's not for the money. I'd shit on it if I didn't need it to live.
It's for the adrenaline.
I'm good at what I do, and it isn't reviewing ridiculous code.
The current client doesn't want much. Security breaches are my specialty, and ripping secret information from encrypted systems isn't that hard, most of the time. And the boredom, Chad's cubicle, it invades my head now and then. The same security protocols with the same loopholes. When I say I do this for the adrenaline, I mean itwaslike that in the beginning. Something new.
Now, more of the same. Security protocols just need to get better. I need a real challenge.
I'm known for this, for breaking any and every kind of system. Finding the breach, dismembering it, and ripping its guts out with my bare hands. I've searched for bigger and deeper problems and gotten into some fucked-up things. Bad people. Thefts, scams. Wars between mafia families.
So why has no one ever caught me? No one's ever knocked on my door, beaten me to death. Not a single punch, not a mark.
