In waking hours, Lindsay was willowy and graceful, carrying herself with an almost regal bearing and an aura of understated elegance. Her finely chiseled features and impeccable skin belonged in a European luxury car commercial. But despite this, she had never been an angelic, or even particularly attractive sleeper. Lindsay rolled her face grudgingly across the pillow when Heath burst into the dark bedroom. Her hair was matted, mouth hanging open like a salmon on ice at the butcher shop, heavy slumber weighing her eyes. “Lindsay!” Heath yelled. “Linds we’ve got to get out of here. They’re coming for us!”
She smiled slowly, as if thickly beginning to comprehend that a joke was being pulled, but not quite sure she wanted to play. “Who is…” she sighed, wiping at a strand of sweaty hair.
“I’ll tell you. Just. There’s no time! Lindsay, come with me. Please! Now!”
Heath wasn’t real sure who was after him – Sciron corporate security, the regular cops, or maybe a mob of geeks like himself in flannel and Pearl Jam t-shirts, bloodthirsty over his betrayal. They knew where he lived, of course, would look for him here first, and were likely close behind. But he had thought it imperative to grab Lindsay, and hoped there was enough time. Though Lindsay wasn’t innocent – her second-biggest mistake having been simply sticking with him – Heath knew this wasn’t her mess and felt a panicky guilt about dragging her in. It was him they chased through the cold night, but he couldn’t just run away and leave her to be found. Maybe she deserved to be dragged out of bed by goons, and then have to stammer and plead with them to believe that she knew nothing about her husband’s secret life. But tonight wasn’t her fault. And it wouldn’t be right to just leave her. If they hurried, they might survive together.
Heath felt a curious remorse at having disturbed her, but that was quickly smothered by his anger, coursing adrenaline, and the stark urgency of survival. Lindsay slipped from the bed, her muddled confusion hardening fast into anxious, fractured purpose. Without protest she jerked herself into sweats, frantically stuffing the hem of the little silk camisole she slept in down the waistband. Heath threw her one of his hoodies from the floor as he gathered a ball of clothes. With an efficient poise that Heath admired since she could have no idea why she was doing any of this, Lindsay had filled a backpack with clothes and toiletries in under a minute. After zipping the pack, Lindsay clawed for her wedding ring on the nightstand with an urgency and relief implying that the ring was the final, crucial survival tool she had almost forgotten. Heath watched her slide the glittering diamond and gold band down her slim finger with a mix of pride and pain. He glanced out the window, then seethed: “sorry, Linds, it’s time. We’ve got to go!”
Heath took hold of his wife’s slender wrist as she tugged on her second Ked, hopping as he pulled her behind him. “I got you into this,” he panted, “I’ll get you out.”
He had left the car running. The suburban street of low-slung 1960’s mid-century ranches near the bay that had once sheltered the solid, middle-class families whose dads worked in San Francisco and San Jose, but now sell to disruptors, visionaries and angel investors for two million dollars, was quiet, but Heath feared his pursuers could be waiting anywhere. Lindsay said nothing as they got in the car; curious, Heath thought, for a woman who took a generally dim view of spontaneity. He admired her in the sallow dome light against the cold, black, night sky, tenderness swelling in the heart that had pounded non-stop since just before midnight. He switched the headlights off, rolling cautiously down the silent street. “Keep an eye out,” he told her. He was glad to have an ally, but quickly became seized by an icy dread that he should not trust his striking wife either. Heath cursed the paranoia that was biting him from one side, pinching from the other, and choking from behind. They threaded stealthily through side streets, past darkened strip malls and empty parking lots, to slip finally on to the freeway.
Heath turned the headlights on, but had no idea where he was going. “They killed Moto,” he told Lindsay finally. He was still unsure who “they” were, but quite sure that his wife had no idea who Moto was.
***
Whoever killed Moto earlier that night had staged the scene with deliberate care. Heath found the thin old man dangling from a rope strung to an exposed beam in his eclectic corner of Sciron’s high-tech glass and steel Silicon Valley workspace. On the surface it was meant to look like a suicide, Heath figured. But they had left clumsy, childish, maddeningly simple clues meant to tell Moto’s followers that this tragedy was intentional. His battered bicycle helmet, festooned with scarred Ramones and Buzzcocks stickers, and recognizable to anyone on the Sciron campus, was crammed backwards on his head. The desk of the well-known neat-freak was strewn with trash. Most chilling of all was Moto’s whiteboard; there in an approximation of the old man’s jittery, stilted penmanship was scrawled: Net Riders Meeting Tonight. The Net Riders were exposed, Heath realized as he stared at Moto’s lifeless frame, his gut twisting. Someone knew what Moto was doing, and wanted it stopped. This was both a murder, and a message.
Fuyuki “Moto” Yamamoto was said to have written greenscreen code in many Palo Alto garages with the vanguard of the digital revolution back in the day. His intuition about consumer behaviors in the dawn of Big Tech was revered as prescient. Silicon Valley lore said that it was Moto who told Steve Jobs to keep his logo simple, and his wise counsel that guided socially awkward prodigies to evolve dial-up chatrooms and forum threads into social networks. Moto’s association with Sciron in the early days helped secure millions in venture capital, solidifying the foundation for its current dominance of the digital space.
The business card that the old man had once handed Heath, then a dorky and obscure company coder simply said:
Moto
Vision Proselytizer & Chief Agitator
“Mind if I join you?” Moto smiled then, seeming to know the answer, when he sat down out of the blue with Heath one day at Sciron’s outdoor cafeteria on the company’s sprawling, sun-dappled campus. His long ponytail, equally black and pewter, the snowy Vandyke beard elongating his face, and the little round specs shielding heavy-lidded eyes gave Moto the look of a tired revolutionary.
That this legend knew Heath’s work at Sciron, and even claimed to admire it, dumfounded the young engineer. “I’d like to mentor you,” Moto told him. Heath couldn’t believe his luck; simply sharing a single lunch with one of big tech’s founding fathers was an experience any wonk in Silicon Valley would tweet about for years, but Moto had inexplicably offered Heath friendship and patronage. “I may need a favor from you sometime, too,” Moto chuckled without further explanation. Word spread about the old icon’s interest in Heath, and he quickly found himself the fastest-rising programmer at the world’s fastest-rising tech giant, culminating a year later in a leadership role on Sciron’s ground-breaking social media app, Confab. He and Lindsay were able to move from their one-bedroom in San Jose to the outrageously-priced mid-century ranch in the suburbs, add a retreat in Tahoe, score VIP passes to Bonnaroo and Coachella, and enjoy many other excesses that billions of Confab clicks and likes paid for. All courtesy of a whispered-about connection to a funky, cerebral old Asian man he would meet only infrequently.
The night he found Moto murdered, Heath had stayed late at Sciron headquarters. He did this often since landing on the Confab team, much to Lindsay’s consternation, though she hardly mentioned it anymore. Sick from committing corporate sabotage, and stunned by a betrayal he never saw coming, Heath wandered the deserted office hoping for Moto’s calming reassurance, but instead found him dead. A shadow on the open catwalk above evaporated with a clomping of footsteps the instant Heath turned in horror from Moto’s lifeless form. He heard a burst of urgent footsteps draining down the stairwell towards him. Instinctively he retreated, charging through vacant cubicles, over couches and beanbags, around whiteboards and video towers, foosball and pool tables. Sciron’s techy, collaborative, democratic workspace was empty except for cleaning crews who shoved vacuums across the floors, their piercing, unbroken drone hollowing out his skull, and intensifying his panic.
“Hey! Stop!” yelled a security guard from the end of a hallway. Heath couldn’t chance trusting him, or slowing down, so skidded out an emergency exit, careening into the chilly darkness and tripping the exigent howl of the security alarm. He ran through the parking lot, crouching for cover behind the few cars interspersed on the yawning concrete expanse. Under the yellow fluorescent dome, he made out two figures sprinting madly after him. Instinct propelled him toward his car. Chopping footsteps ricocheted off the pavement as grunts and labored breaths came louder in the chilly dark. Heath found his car and dove into it, a gunshot tearing open the night as he slammed the door.
***
“So who are these ‘Net Riders’?” Lindsay asked.
“Actually, I’m one,” Heath mumbled, eyes glued to the rearview mirror. The same two headlight pinpricks had been burning in the glass for the last few miles. He sped up to ninety, then slowed to fifty, the car behind maintaining the same trailing distance of about twenty yards. Impulsively, he jerked the wheel to veer off the interstate and onto an eastbound four-lane state highway. His pursuer took the same exit, only more smoothly. Lindsay slapped Heath’s arm in reflexive rebuke at being jerked around in her seat, then noticed his cold eyes on the rearview mirror.
“Are we being followed?” she asked with a sick-sounding resignation.
“Maybe.”
The road ahead was wide open given that it was close to two AM. Heath floored it.
“My god,” Lindsay squealed, clutching her throat and stomping her Keds to the floorboard, pumping hard on an imaginary brake.
The other car accelerated, pulling within feet of their rear bumper. It was a Camaro, Heath noted with defeat, darting glances from the snarling grille filling his mirror to the road ahead. Much stronger and faster than his chunky four-door, high-roofed gas-sipper, the kind favored by tech-heads like him, with an engine no bigger than a Fitbit. He weaved wildly through the sparse traffic, hoping to be noticed by the Highway Patrol. But then he regretted this idea, remembering Sciron’s clout, and chumminess with politicians. He grimaced again at his inability to distinguish friends from enemies.
“Heath I can’t do this,” wheezed Lindsay.
“Hold on Linds,” Heath soothed. A mile up, he saw the silver tube of a tanker truck glistening in the illuminated reflections of gas station and fast food signs near an upcoming exit ramp. He remembered a scene from a Michael Bay movie and headed at full speed toward the truck, the Camaro glued to him. Just before the imminent rear-end collision, Heath swerved into the left lane, around the tanker, the Camaro following. Pulling just even with the truck, he punched the gas and jerked the wheel right, throwing them in front of it, Lindsay’s guttural shriek twinning with the tanker’s screeching brakes and the throaty death wail of its bleating horn. With the enormous, angry tanker nearly mounting them, close enough to smell its acrid diesel fumes and have its headlights fill up the car like someone had flicked on strobe lights, Heath hit his brakes and whipped them onto the last few feet of exit ramp, fishtailing on the sharp, banked curve as the Camaro shot by in the left lane, going too fast, blocked by the lumbering truck.
Shaken and numbed, Heath and Lindsay moved down the ramp and through the canopy of glowing roadside neon, past the slumbering In-N-Out and tranquil Texaco, eventually snaking into a neighborhood. He knew the Camaro would double-back at the next exit, or report their location, so drove briskly, but had no idea where to go. Eventually they came to a darkened laundromat tucked up on a hill, with a commanding view of the road. Heath parked in back and shut off the engine, slumping finally in his seat with a cathartic sigh.
“I think I peed myself a little bit,” Lindsay confided.
“Glad I packed clean drawers,” said Heath, as he considered how to explain this all to her.
***
On one hand, it all started with twenty minutes of X-rated cellphone video of a thirtyish former child TV star posted online by her ex-boyfriend. Amelia Kinsley had starred for years on a cable sitcom for teens called Taylor’s Big Secret. She played Taylor, an ordinary high school band geek who was also a math prodigy frequently called on to decipher high-stakes algorithms for the government. Taylor lived, evidently unencumbered by parents, in a Brooklyn loft with Miss Feeney, the ditzy housekeeper whose absentmindedness and frequent zany schemes to woo Matt Hardiman, Taylor’s government handler, left the girl and her sassy best friend free to get into crazy hijinks. For reasons clear to everyone but the viewer, Taylor had to keep her two lives secret, and this duality led to weekly mix-ups, mistaken identities, and brouhahas that always ended with Taylor crossing her eyes in befuddled comic campiness and uttering her catchphrase: “so I’m a genius, but I never saw that coming!”
The release of the sextape was a sensation, especially among Heath and Lindsay’s generation of now-adult former fans of Amelia’s show who remembered adolescent crushes or fantasy friendships with the ingénue actress. Celebrity schadenfreude and raw, carnal, nostalgia-fueled fascination had driven Heath to find the video on a site called Sketchy Jerry’s Basement deep in the web’s unseemly bowels. He and Lindsay had been drifting a bit, and he thought the naughty thrill might help them re-connect, or even light a spark. Lindsay was dismissive at first, but after a bottle of wine expressed curiosity about whether the now mature Amelia Kinsley, once always described as “fresh-faced,” “pert,” or “perky,” had “hagged out” or “gotten saggy” since her Taylor years. With tipsy impulsivity, they watched the video one Friday night on Lindsay’s tablet. Heath had noticed then, but quickly forgot, the User Agreement preceding the video. To his IT-structured mind, the User Agreement was lengthy and onerous, but also cleverly offered-up. The wiseguy who programmed it had arrayed the agreement as blocks of text obscuring the image of a nude Amelia in an awkward freeze-frame from the sextape where her eyes fluttered and seemed to cross, mocking her former, wholesome campy image. Twelve individual tiles packed with miniature text dissolved when checked and agreed-to, revealing the full image beneath, the last block uncovering the start button to the video.
Lindsay folded her arms across her chest and frowned. “So we are going to get killed because you wanted to see some stupid actress naked?”
“You wanted to see if she sagged!” he hissed. “I was just along for the ride.” They sat in the darkened car, both staring at the white wedge of light washing the laundromat’s dirty concrete wall just beyond the windshield. Heath took his wife’s silence as acquiescence to moral equivalency, if not middling superiority. “It was on your tablet, remember?”
She rolled her eyes and huffed mightily, shrinking and huddling tight against the car door.
***
Whenever Moto dropped by Heath’s cubicle, it was always unannounced, and frequently awkward. Heath still harbored geeky fanboy reverence for the tech legend, and there was always a lingering apprehension that Moto might call in the favor he was owed for making Heath rich.
“So, I see Confab is now the most-used social networking app in the world,” Moto said with an edge of sadness that implied this was actually a bad thing.
“So they tell me,” Heath laughed, unsure why the ultimate tech insider was stating something that everyone in the industry knew, and had been celebrated at Sciron headquarters last month with a lavish, all-employee open-bar celebration headlined by Jack White.
“Have you looked at the User Agreement for your Confab app?” Moto asked.
“Not really. I have a guy who handles all that.”
“Do you trust him?”
Heath thought it an odd question, but Moto smiled as if he already knew the answer. “I guess,” said Heath.
“Read it thoroughly,” Moto said. “Then give me a shout. I want to talk it over with you.”
Heath stayed late that night to read the User Agreement for the social networking app he had programmed. He knew that Lindsay would be furious – again – not only that he had left her home alone, but more because he dodged her dramatic sighs and wounded lectures by not calling to tell her he would be late. He had abandoned her too often since his promotion, to write badass code and boss around dorks from across the globe, but his preoccupation with work, and her disappointment, were both by now uninterestingly predictable. Space had compounded between them. The couple found themselves sometimes sitting in the same room, but not talking, each barely aware of the other, sometimes watching the same movie, but one thinking they had seen a slasher flick, the other a rom-com. By 10 PM he was already deep into the weeds of the Confab User Agreement, and a few more minutes was not likely to change the stony silence he would come home to.
The Confab User Agreement was boilerplate except for:
- 14U.1.13 granting Sciron permission to monitor any and all content created or shared by User on any device that had ever accessed the Sciron architecture
- 29S.4.31 allowing Sciron to notify User of content flagged “suspicious, concerning, or otherwise problematic (as defined by Sciron)”
- 32K.11.2 making content so-flagged per 29S.4.31 the sole property of Sciron upon notification
- 35C.7.19 stipulating User Privacy was subject to the laws of the sovereign nation of Aquillos (a Polynesian island-state wholly owned by one of Sciron’s founders)
Before Moto could get his bike helmet off the next morning, Heath was waiting. They strolled the verdant Sciron campus, Moto telling Heath what he knew. Sciron had begun placing the Agreement in front of popular apps like Confab, confident that it would be glossed over. “Accepting the agreement triggers the spying program to run,” Moto explained. “It looks at everything the user has ever done, on any device. It’s the first link in a dirty daisy-chain.”
“But I wrote the Confab code,” Heath protested.
“Your own company hacked your app – in order to blackmail their users.”
The duped but consenting user’s data was combed for their compromising activity, their cringe-y, sordid, or shameful not-my-finest-moments. Then came a discreet but dunning e-mail about all this regrettable stuff, a few of the seamier items included as examples. An emissary reached out to soothe the panicked user with an offer to expunge their digital footprint of these bad decisions and poor choices – for a fee. No one had to know.
Heath had a sick hunch. He rushed back to his cube, tapped keys to enter a digital backdoor in the Confab architecture, added his Network Administrator credential, and stared dejectedly at a few rows of digits, backslashes, and lowercase letters glowing emerald against his black screen. Sketchy Jerry’s Basement was a thinly-disguised Sciron beta site. Download of the Amelia Kinsley sextape was governed by the same User Agreement. All his wife’s personal data was now the property of his employer.
***
“Oh god,” Lindsay gagged, covering her mouth while her torso convulsed, as if about to retch.
Heath watched a car meander down the street, following its taillights, wondering if it was the Camaro.
“Can’t you just erase it?” she cried, her tone somewhere between a plea and an order. “You’re the best coder ever,” she added more softly. “Can’t you just…”
Heath inhaled, his stomach tightening, doubts about what he should, or should not say next swirling in his mind like the flies swarming the fluorescent light on the side of the building in front of them. “I did erase it,” he said evenly, despite a tripping heart.
He watched her relax, then cleared his throat. “Tonight was a tough night for me, Linds. Moto got killed. I got shot at. Was in a car chase. I sabotaged Sciron’s blackmail scheme and got a lot of greedy billionaires pissed off. And I destroyed the digital evidence of my wife’s affair.”
Lindsay had beautiful eyes, lively, sparkly pools that he once imagined floating in before diving deep to tickle her soul. She had a little bullet for a chin, and a jaw that shot back hard and straight right to her ears, as if shaped by a sculptor’s chisel. But when she heard what he had said, Lindsay’s clear eyes drained to cloudy silt and her sharp, taut jaw fell open like an errant mailbox door.
Three sharp raps came at the window, their menacing ricochet strident and paralyzing. In the elongated shadow, all Heath and Lindsay could see were two thick hands cased in black gloves.
***
“I’ve got a little group of guys who know everything,” Moto had told him. “Couple VPs, a Board member, marketing guys, programmers like you. Honest, decent, cyber vigilantes. We’re not idealists, we know the internet only exists to make a buck, but we can’t bear to see what we built turned into a criminal enterprise. I call us the Net Riders. Kind of like that old show Knight Rider. I don’t know, it just sounds cool,” he chuckled. “Sciron’s leaders – guys I’ve known for years and thought I trusted, aren’t satisfied with just being number one. They figured out how easy it would be to make billions off their user’s little embarrassments – posts people regret, 3 AM drunken texts, dirty pics, websites they shouldn’t have clicked. You could see the greed taking over and things got dark fast. That’s when I’d had enough. I like money, don’t get me wrong, but this isn’t what I signed up for. And I don’t think you did either. My guys – the Net Riders – tried to stop it internally, but couldn’t. We have no choice now but to expose it before a lot of people get hurt. Here’s the favor I need, Heath: re-write your Confab code to bypass the User Agreement. Re-hack your app. That stops the whole blackmail train dead, and keeps the users safe until I can spill to the media. Now, understand – if you do this, Sciron will figure it out and come after you hard. But your fellow Net Riders will protect you. Are you in?”
The night Heath became a Net Rider, he sat late in his cube debating whether to go home and tell Lindsay what he had learned. That sharing this secret with her had been his first inclination gave him some hope that they were still partners. But sitting alone and obsessing about the depth of the valley that had grown between them quickly turned his yearning for her into despair. Re-opening the digital backdoor to put a voyeuristic eye on her personal data, to look at the photos she took, the emojis she plastered on her texts, and the soft but indelible footprint she left on her browser was a pathetic geek’s way of feeling intimacy with his own wife, but it seemed like all he had. He thought he might be reminded of their shared good times, but instead discovered how she spent the many nights he left her alone. The guy’s name was Liam, and he had abs of steel and rocked a manbun. Lindsay seemed quite charmed by him, and in the photos Heath saw she appeared spontaneous as hell. Heath knew he had carelessly granted consent.
***
A policeman stood at the car window. In the man’s thick face, ruddy from the nighttime chill, Heath saw either deliverance or a death sentence. The cop shined his flashlight around the car, lingering, Heath thought angrily, a little too long on Lindsay. He mumbled into his shoulder, and asked for IDs. “Mind telling me what you’re doing in a parking lot at this hour?” he asked.
Heath’s instinct was to tell the officer everything, to seek shelter in his cruiser. But it was impossible to know who was on Sciron’s payroll. “My wife and I were just having a disagreement,” Heath said evenly. “We were driving, and I guess we just needed to stop and talk.”
The policeman looked to Lindsay. “Ma’am?”
She nodded. Her cheeks flushed and face crinkled in a way Heath remembered, when love was fierce and every argument or misunderstanding that came between them had seemed like life or death, before they both went numb. A tear dripped from Lindsay’s eye. “I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “It’s just that… I want this all to go away. I made mistakes. We both made mistakes. I want my old life back.”
The policeman frowned, looking uncomfortable, then retreated to his squad car with their licenses.
Heath thought bitterly that as a pretty woman, Lindsay knew her power to disarm cops with a few manufactured tears, and was simply using one of her old tricks. But he wondered achingly if her words were really meant for him. There was a reason, he supposed, why he had gone back for her, despite what he knew. Just as there was a reason Moto had recruited him. Just as there was a reason Lindsay had slid on her wedding ring and followed him tonight.
He started to sweat, agonizing about the cop, a sick dread roiling in his gut that their position was being radioed to the Camaro, or Sciron at this very moment. He considered starting the car to roar away, but knew that would only make things worse. He looked at Lindsay and in his swirl of panic and confusion came a clarity that despite everything this was not her fault, and an aching wish that she be safe.
Heath put his hand on the door latch to begin his surrender, hoping the policeman would understand that it was only him Sciron wanted and would pay for, and that the cop might be convinced to let the lady drive away. But the policeman was already at the window. Absent a better plan, Heath resignedly rolled the window down, then dumbly accepted the return of his and Lindsay’s licenses into his shaking hands. “Everything checks out,” the officer said. “So, goodnight folks. This isn’t the safest neighborhood, so you should probably move along.”
“And Heath…” The policeman hesitated, seemingly unconvinced about whether to continue. “Corporate security at Sciron radioed us. Must have been monitoring our channel when I called-in your licenses. The guy asked me to tell you to head toward Sacramento, and watch for a text in a couple hours. Says the Net Riders will find you.” He shrugged, grinning sheepishly. “Whatever that means.”
They sat quietly after the policeman left, the pink-orange of dawn filtering through the car windows. Lindsay touched Heath’s hand, gently lacing her fingers between his. She sighed and crossed her eyes comically, the slightest curl at the corner of her mouth. “So I’m a genius,” she said. “But I never saw that coming.”
Tim Jones is a fiction writer living in Northern California. Having grown up in the Detroit area, he is a big admirer of Southeast Michigan’s favorite literary son, Elmore Leonard. “User Agreement” is a tribute to both Leonard’s Detroit and his current home in Silicon Valley.