Friday Fiction: FileKiller
How to change a life
This is a sample of the Friday Fiction posts I plan to do every Friday, for paid subscribers only. As the About page explains, these may be short stories or longer works broken up: just something fun to read over the weekend. I’ve made this short one available to everyone so you can see the kind of thing that would reach your inbox on a Friday if you threw in a few quid to support me.
Today’s story is from It Will Be Quick. I had a concept in mind, one which scared me. Then I built a character to go with it.
FileKiller
Trina peeled back the tissue paper and inhaled fresh plastic, canvas, chemical cleanness. She trapped the scent in her lungs. 3mm negative soles. She would be the fastest.
They must stay enclosed and perfect until the first trial. A glance revealed the shelves were packed. Bottom drawer then. But that was also crammed. Lives so full cannot be sentimental. She lifted the first box of photos. “1991” it said in cracked glitter pen. She knew the contents. Labels save looking. Running shoes in one hand, memories trapped in red-speckled amber on the other. She weighed them up, then dropped the box of photos into the steel bin; they clanged, hollow, the echo faded because everything fades. Sound is a dead thing. By the time you hear, it’s already over.
The trainers were neatly placed in their perfect space. The drawer closed smoothly.
That night was a date. Mezze.
“Good choice,” Malcolm said. “I like sharing.”
She smiled. That wasn’t the reason. No dish overstays its welcome.
“What’s your favourite thing to do?” he asked. The glint in his eye reminded her of olive oil.
“Winning,” she said.
Later. He got dressed in silence.
Every man is ninety per cent disappointment.
Maybe she should have said running was her favourite thing, she thought, while pounding down the canal-side path to work the next day, breaking in the new shoes.
Running. A lie? Her favourite thing, yes. But she hated it too.
It was a means to an end. Like people. Like possessions. You have to have them. You have to do it. You have to play the game to fit in, to be a good girl. And she was fucking good. Playing the game is pointless unless you win.
She ran faster, feet heavy but bouncing back with every step, using the world’s hardness to get ahead. Never give up. She overtook the person in front and kept going, breathless but smiling with lungs burning tight.
Knuckles rapped on the office door frame. “Hey you,” Malcolm said, distracting her from her screen.
She turned the display off and faced him. He looked better with clothes on. Without smart outfits men were just dangle bits and hangups.
“What?” she asked, frowning at the interruption.
“I just wanted to say thanks for last night.”
“No problem.”
“Fancy going out again tonight? Since it’s a Friday there’s no need to get up early tomorrow. I like to lounge in –”
“I’m going to be busy this weekend, unfortunately.”
“Oh.”
Maybe he was waiting for her to speak. Damned if she would.
After a pause he added, “You look great today. Your hair, your …” But he lost it. The cockiness. It was easy to manipulate people to the outcome you wanted when their emotional impulses and egos were so predictable.
“Really,” she said. “Thank you.”
During another awkward silence his smile completely evaporated. “I like the idea of us,” he said. “We’re heads of the two biggest departments. It makes sense. And yet you’re the only person I know who can make ‘thank you’ sound like ‘fuck you’.”
The way he was looking at her: at first expecting a reaction to what he thought was a joke; then realising that he’d hit the nail on the head and the spark was both imaginary and dead. Just to make sure there was a zero per cent chance of it ever catching fire again, it needed grinding under her heel.
“I tweaked and submitted my draft proposals for the next financial this morning,” she said, tapping her blank screen but holding his gaze. “It’s being considered at the moment. The plan would need the IT budget as well as a chunk of provisional spend. I showed that it was possible.”
“But that would mean we couldn’t do my projects! We need a new CMS and training and – oh. I told you about my ideas. Last night.”
“Sorry, Malcolm. I always win.” She held thumb and forefinger to her forehead in a letter L. One zap of the Loser symbol was all it took for him to storm off.
Men. Ninety per cent disappointment. But ten per cent useful.
“Yes. I’ll work on it this weekend.”
She hung up and savoured the buzz, the relief, tighten/relax, opposites co-existing, fighting for dominance, just like hate and love.
The CEO confirmed that she had it. It was clear. Her report was the best.
She packed her bag to go home and was locking up her office when Eduardo appeared with his usual wide smile. A programmer from another department who was seconded to hers for one day a week, and an occasional running companion.
“No training tonight?” he asked.
“Taking a car from the pool. Somewhere I need to go on the way home.”
“Ah. Well, I got something for you.” He held out a USB stick.
“What is it?”
“A challenge doing the rounds. FileKiller.”
She took the USB stick off him but said nothing.
“It’s a … game. Sort of,” he explained. “One that scans the files on your hard drive. Deletes one at random if you play and only tells you what the file was after you click continue. To win you have to go through twenty rounds.”
“Deleted to the recycle bin?”
“Nope. Deleted forever. There’s no going back. Not if you want to win.”
“That’s not a game. It’s malware with a win condition.”
“I know!” He laughed. “No one should be psycho enough to play it. But they do. Just like they played Lose/Lose, which had an online high score table based on how many files people destroyed.”
“Have you played it?”
“I … no. Not got past the first screen. Couldn’t go through with it. I thought about running it in a virtual environment, or moving off my personal files first, but that defeats the point, doesn’t it? So I just closed it again. And yet … now I know it’s there … it exists and I could run it …” He stared at the USB stick she’d taken. “It scares me that I might. So I thought maybe passing it on will take away the temptation. And I know how you like to win. I’m still aching from running with you the other day. If anyone could do it, you could.” He stared at her for a second too long. A challenge? No, it was …
“Did Malcolm send you?”
The smile faded and Eduardo looked down, and nodded. “I mentioned it to him yesterday; just now he told me to show you. He said for once you’d lose. And actually, I hope he’s right. Who’d want to win at this?”
“Did he play it?”
That brought energy back to Eduardo’s face. “Ha, no! He’s definitely too scared. Made an excuse about security, but I know that look. Maybe I should just do one level, so I can be better than my boss.”
“Mmm.” She slipped the USB stick in her bag. “But Eduardo, don’t ever be his lapdog again. You’d be on the losing team.”
She made a stop-off on the way home.
“Everything’s going well, Dad.”
He was collapsed in on himself, no power any longer, could hardly even see hers through distortedly thick lenses. In turn, she burnt all the brighter, the only star that existed in the solar system of burnt-out husks in an expensive nursing home. Her very existence was a taunt, and that was good.
“I knew it would.” He smiled. Still had good teeth. Then, before she realised what was happening, he caressed her forearm with a liver-spotted hand, said, “You’re a good girl, Trina.” She flinched and withdrew, sick.
“Don’t!” she said between clenched teeth, air tight in her lungs; it was called a rib cage for a reason.
Ice cream. Holidays. Sitting on knees. Tissue paper presents. Nice dresses. Long socks. Bedtime stories.
Opposites fighting. Disgust won.
“You don’t. Ever.”
She curled up on her bed with a laptop, skimming Facebook, cocooned in pillows and blankets: her internest. But it was as boring as usual. All sorts of people asked to be her friend on social media. She normally clicked yes, left it a few weeks, then deleted them. They never noticed. If you lost touch with someone it was for a reason, they shouldn’t keep reappearing like bad smells. More than three friends was just extravagance anyway.
The final proposal for the board was almost complete. She’d add a sprinkle of unnecessary graphs, because the section head liked them. Tools to convince the simple with pretty lights and colours. She could finish it later, or tomorrow. Another hour would put it to bed. After the phone call earlier she had no doubt they’d go along with what she suggested. Persuading people was too easy. She yawned and reached for her coffee from the bedside table. The coffee was cold. She finished it anyway. Like food, it was just fuel for the body, keeping the machine efficient.
She put the cup back but it refused to sit flat. She lifted it and saw she had placed it on the USB stick. It stood out as an 8GB stranger on the otherwise tidy bedside table. “FileKiller”. Such a stupid idea.
She went back to her laptop, scrolling endlessly, but couldn’t focus. She’d been rubbing her forearm, as if removing a spot of dirt. Idle fingers and devils. She stretched over and picked up the USB stick. Such small and beautiful things, yet tough and capable of holding a huge amount of depth. She was about to slip it into a USB port, because that’s where they go, sticks in slots, when something cautioned her.
IT people. Hmmm.
Instead she used her browser to check if FileKiller existed. It did. She found a page with the original files and read the description.
The game selects 20 files from your computer at random
to win, you must delete them all
you don’t know what each file is until AFTER you’ve deleted it.
files 10 and 20 are folders, deleting them deletes everything in them
there is no undo
this game is real, and yes, it could seriously fuck up your computer/work/job/life.
She downloaded a zip file to her desktop, then opened it. The folder contained FileKiller.exe and README.txt. She opened the readme out of curiosity. It only contained two lines.
THIS GAME IS DANGEROUS.
DO NOT PLAY IT!
It sounded like something a parent would tell you. “Don’t pick things up off the floor.” “Don’t talk to the smelly kid in school.” “Don’t eat all your chocolates in one go.”
Fuck that. She double-clicked on the .exe file.
A black screen with white text opened. That colour scheme made it seem even more serious. There was a repeat of the warnings and a recap of the rules. You could quit at any time with the Escape key.
Nothing would happen yet. She read the text twice to be sure.
She clicked on “I know the risks, I accept all responsibility for playing”. Just to see.
The screen refreshed.
#1/20 – Random File
There is no going back if you delete this file,
it could be any file that is on your computer…
…but then to win, you must delete it. play, or give up (Escape key)
CLICK TO DELETE FILE
A row of paper sheets, portrayed by icons, each displayed a red question mark. The first one was highlighted with a glow, and rotated slowly.
It was waiting.
Waiting.
Waiting.
She only needed to delete a single file and she would beat Malcolm and all his department.
It rotated.
One file. One click.
It might be an important file.
But that was the point, wasn’t it? The risk. What you put on the line in order to win. There was always a cost. Otherwise it meant nothing. But that cost needn’t be one she couldn’t bear.
The waiting was the worst thing.
She clicked on the button.
The first icon changed to an image of ripped up paper.
A message appeared at the bottom of the screen.
DELETED: C:\Program Files\Windows Journal\Templates\Dotted_Line.jtp
She’d been holding her breath. She let it out.
Dotted_Line.jtp didn’t seem like an important file. She didn’t even recognise the programme. Huh. She’d won, and it was so easy it didn’t even feel like she’d earned it.
The screen had moved to the next icon, instructions repeated below “#2/20 – Random File”.
She could quit now. But what if someone in Malcom’s team also deleted a file? Eduardo might do it over the weekend. The biggest milestone was deleting one. Most people would stop there. If you deleted two, you were far less likely to get superseded.
Fine. She clicked DELETE.
DELETED: D:\historical\2014\note.jpg
What was that? She couldn’t even picture it. A scanned note, or a photo of one? It can’t have been important if she couldn’t even remember what it was or why she’d kept it. That meant its deletion was a good thing. Tidying up her hard drive. So much crud gathered if you weren’t strict with it. Things you would never look at again. Never need.
She pressed the Print Screen button on her keyboard. She could paste it into an email to Eduardo and Malcolm. She’d deleted two out of twenty. It was important that they saw what she’d achieved.
She was about to open the email program when she realised that if she sent that image, they’d be tempted to beat her. Two files didn’t seem much. They could do that in seconds. Knowing the way the clowns in IT behaved, they would make their victory score the department’s desktop background for a day. Probably put it on her work PC too, just to rub her nose in it. “A puny two out of twenty? I scored THREE!”
Bastards.
Fine. One more.
DELETED: C:\Users\Trina\Desktop\changelist.docx
Ha, that was … mmm. She’d saved that file as something to skim through for the next meeting. Still, it wasn’t a major thing. In fact, it saved her time doing an unimportant job. She could devote that time to something better. This was … well, almost fun.
Anyway, she’d done it. Faced the worst and won. She could press Escape and finish her report.
Though if she pressed Escape then she wouldn’t be able to continue. Not that she wanted to, but what if she had a glass of wine later and decided to do one more, just to make certain no one would beat her? If she closed the programme she’d have to start over. If she left it open, it wouldn’t commit her to anything. It simply gave her options. She always liked to give herself options. It was one of the things successful people did. She would do some more work then make a final decision as to whether to call that her highest score.
So she Alt-Tabbed to Facebook again and scrolled through new notifications. She didn’t even know why she did that. The list of birthdays and drunken photos and local for-sales and baby photos and images of people doing yoga outdoors and recipes and … Twitter was just as bad. Pictures of cats did nothing for her, and hashtags seemed so desperate.
Another realisation: if Facebook and Twitter disappeared tomorrow, she would let out a sigh of relief. When absence formed, something could fill it. But when things were already full, how could you fit anything new in? And without anything new, life became stale, and boring. And easy.
Alt-Tab.
DELETED: C:\Windows\Fonts\Comic Sans MS
No loss there.
DELETED: C:\Windows\Installer\10ee54a.msi
Digital crud.
DELETED: D:\music\E\(Everything But The Girl) Missing [Remix].mp3
Oh. She’d liked that song. But then again, she couldn’t remember the last time she listened to it. Just one of thousands. No real loss.
Six files deleted. The screen now waited for a decision on “#7/20 – Random File”.
This was so silly. She’d surely won by now. Olive Oil-Eyed Malcolm would never go any further. And yet, it wasn’t as difficult as she’d expected. She’d imagined losing critical parts of her life. Maybe there was more padding around those parts than she’d realised. What the hell.
DELETED: C:\Windows\System32\es-ES\comdlg32.dll.mui
No idea. Couldn’t be important.
This wasn’t a game. Not for the reason she’d originally thought – because it was more of a torture – but because all you had to do was click a button. Anyone could do it. Like this –
DELETED: D:\current\money\accounts\Bank\flow5-4curr.xlsx
As soon as she saw that she pressed backspace but it did nothing. There was no Ctrl-Z option. Her personal finance spreadsheet was gone. It was last year’s, but she still felt a flickering of … excitement. The file had included a record of all her online purchases over a twelve-month period. All gone, just like that. A gap in her records. A neat, rectangular space.
She took a deep breath. She should get back to her proposal. She’d made her point.
And yet she was smiling. And she was nearly halfway there.
She’d been wrong when she said this wasn’t a game. It was a game. Just not a game of skill. This was a test of courage and commitment. And she was more than equal to it.
DELETED: D:\current\odds\recipes\recipes_sweet.doc
She hadn’t got round to trying half of those anyway. She didn’t need them when she knew how to make failcake by heart.
The wording was different now. If she continued then the next time would be more than a file.
#10/20 – Random Folder
Her gut twisted. But it was impossible to separate the results of sickness from that of being at the top of a rollercoaster. Maybe they had always been the same thing.
A folder.
It could contain any number of files.
She could stop.
Why would someone make software like this?
She clicked.
DELETED: D:\photos\older\2008\odds\Ludlow December
Oh. A romantic holiday. They’d rented a cottage and gone there for New Year’s Eve. Roaring log fire. Bottles of frizzante. Sex in the afternoon. Artisan chocolates. For a second the heat returned, the fizz, the excitement … and the loss.
But exes were exes. You couldn’t go back. Wouldn’t want to. Going backwards was always a mistake. Better to keep going forwards, keep looking for what you really wanted. The next .exe.
#11/20 – Random File
Ah, back to single files. They were easy.
Deleted: a photo.
Deleted: a file she had never heard of.
Deleted: a … oh.
Oh.
DELETED: S:\central filestore\management\shared\training\services session\11-29 hea talk.pptx
Crap. That was a networked shared drive her laptop had mapped to. Trina hadn’t realised that was still connected or accessible to software or … or even who the file belonged to. It was in a shared folder of work in progress.
Gone.
Of course, there would probably be backups, and … Her heart beat faster. It was just a talk but it could have been anything in her work folders. Software for the masochist in all of us.
The screen said “#14/20 – Random File”.
Nothing had been a disaster.
She reached for her coffee, to quench the sudden dryness in her mouth, but the cup was empty.
What was she doing?
Winning. And it felt good as ever.
Deleted file #14 was a text file in a Program Files folder. The next was:
DELETED: D:\important\system backups\Firefox\bookmarks.html
The path gave her a start at first – it was the same folder branch that contained her list of passwords. A file that was itself password protected. But … it hadn’t been that file. It was just an export of her bookmarks. She hardly used them now anyway when everything was only one typed word away. One day she had looked at her bookmarks, with nested folders and lists that scrolled beyond the screen, and realised that she had been involved in a one-woman attempt to catalogue the Internet. Half the things were sites that she intended to look at later, and never did. In fact, when she’d set up the browser on this laptop, she hadn’t bothered importing them. So they were gone for good.
Terror-relief-satisfaction. A surprisingly pleasant mix, with a newness like fresh plastic and canvas, neatly packaged as a pair in a box. A freshness that felt like cleanness.
#16/20 – Random File
No reason to stop now.
#16 was another .dll file, whatever they were. She clicked again.
DELETED: D:\historical\2011\2011_diary.doc
That was a year’s worth of diary entries. She’d started keeping them as Word documents rather than paper books a year or so before that. She wasn’t fastidious about filling it in, but usually made time after big events, or occasionally did a catchup summary within it. She didn’t know why. Seeing that the file was gone for good … it was another gap being created.
Another release.
It reminded her of the huge market for personal paper shredders. Normal people weren’t shredding documents for security, despite what they claimed. They were doing something that fulfilled a deeper psychological need they didn’t even recognise.
#18/20 – Random File
The past was irrelevant. The challenge is always in the now. She clicked delete.
DELETED: D:\photos\older\1988\Trina and Dad in snow (year a guess).jpg
She could picture that in her mind. A blurry photo because of the wind-whipped snowflakes obscuring much of the image, caught in a camera’s flash that made the background black. And between the black and the white she stood, holding her dad’s hand. One of the photos she’d scanned during an abortive process of digitally archiving things and throwing away the originals many years ago. Another memory that could never be refreshed by gazing on something real. It would fade.
She was rubbing her forearm again, and bit back anger that she wasn’t in full control of this body, the one thing she should be, the one thing that was truly hers, the one thing … it was just for her and no one had a right, no one … She wiped her eyes with her palm. It was okay. She was in control. She was a winner. A 20/20 woman.
And she wasn’t a fucking good girl.
Continue.
#19 was another work file from the shared drive. Costings from a tender related to a recent project. It was actually a disappointment after the photo had been wiped. She’d hoped for something to follow that would feel equally purging.
#20/20 – Random Folder
Only one to go and she’d be done. Going further and further than ever before, running through the pain and the lack of breath, refusing to give in. After coming this far, it was pointless to stop now. She clicked.
DELETED: C:\Windows\Help
And she’d done it. A list of twenty deletions. A short message congratulating her. Then only the option to play again or quit.
She rolled onto her back, hadn’t realised how tense she’d been, tightly hunched over that small window. She imagined all the files disappearing. Then she looked around her room, and could picture the same in here, the virtual life somehow clearing out the real world too, pinging things out of existence, tidying up. Maybe with more space in her life she’d breathe easier. Maybe then she could start again, blank slate, fill life with something else. What, she didn’t know yet. Places, options, people. It was just a feeling. But it existed. She was sure of it. It was clear. Win to end. And end to win.
Her list of deleted files was on the screen like a score. A crazy score only a psycho would have. A momentary honour, showing she had stood up to the world. Few people would have had the courage to do what she had done. She pressed Print Screen, the equivalent of her victory lap. She could print it on a T-shirt. Wear it to work. Let the men try and stare at her tits then.
She pasted the image into a document and saved it to the desktop.
In the end even this challenge was done. She rescanned the list of deleted files. It seemed pitiful compared to the fear she’d felt. And it hadn’t deleted her new work proposal, the pending victory that would take her up to the next level.
And yet … that work proposal didn’t excite her like it had yesterday. It was running on the flat. Too easy. A place she’d reach in a few paces.
What was beyond it if she continued, running further and further than ever before, without stopping until she collapsed? What would be left of her then?
She rested her hand on the laptop lid, ready to close it. Of course, questions led to other questions.
Just idle curiosity, but how many files were there in total on a hard drive? And the work network?
Life was so easily turned into data and numbers that could then last forever, defining her past. Except that was also holding her in it. Stopping her from putting on a pair of new running shoes and heading in a different direction; not to anywhere known, but to newness. And she could imagine enjoying that run.
It was only 8.40 p.m., and she had the whole weekend.
She clicked Play Again.
Notes
This is a real game by Sophie Houlden. I read about it in an article in 2011, and was scared when I felt an insidious temptation to install it as a challenge. I also wondered what kind of person this FileKiller-type software would appeal to.
The answer came while on a Writing Women’s Popular Fiction course at Ty Newydd in 2015, led by authors Julie Cohen and Rowan Coleman. In one of Rowan’s sessions we were asked to think of a character and answer some questions from their perspective. This was what I wrote, and it led to the FileKiller protagonist.
What is your favourite occupation? Winning.
What is your most treasured possession? Nothing. Everything is a means to an end.
What or who is the greatest love of your life? Every man is a disappointment.
What is your favourite journey? Running to work. Favourite, but hates it too. She has to.
What is your most marked characteristic? Past is irrelevant. The challenge is now.
What is it that you most dislike? Aimless life or losing. Memories.
What is your greatest fear? Remembering.
What is your greatest regret? Having a past.