“Do you have any social media presence?”
Agent Harrison nervously bit the inside of her lip.
“No sir,” she replied.
“Are any of your family or close friends active on social media? If so, are these accounts public, and would they be recognisable as being the property of these individuals?”
“I'm an orphan, sir. The FBI has been my de-facto family ever since I was accepted into the Waifs and Strays Initiative at the age of 14. Also, I'm a workaholic. No social life to speak of, sir.”
Agent Skingley nodded matter-of-factly as he wrote something down on his clipboard.
“Waifs and Strays was a great program,” he muttered under his breath.
“I am required to a provide a trigger warning prior to the next question,” he said. “Have you ever created a social media profile for a dead loved one? It could be an account that you posted on a few times and then neglected.”
When Harrison didn't immediately answer, he went on:
“I need to remind you that the person behind that door is a remorseless narcissist who was once judged too crazy for the Canadian communist party. She will use the ratio of replies vs likes on any given social media post as a weapon. Be assured, if you created a social media account for a stillborn infant, she would waste absolutely no time in ratioing that child's unbaptised soul out of purgatory and into the flaming pits of hell.”
“There's a memorial Twitter account for a school friend who died in a dirt bike accident when I was 12,” admitted Harrison. “I was admin for the account along with two of my classmates.”
“Delete it now. Afterwards write down the names of the other admins along with their last known places of residence.”
Agent Harrison took out her phone.
“What's the password for the FBI Wi-Fi?” she enquired.
“It's FBI1.”
Her fingertips darted across the buttons of the small touchscreen keypad.
“Okay, it's done,” she said.
~
The interview lasted less than fifteen minutes. Agent Skingley had barely coaxed a coffee out of the machine, outside the entrance to the cafeteria, when he was called back down.
Agent Harrison was supporting herself against the wall. Her face and neck were glazed with a sheen of cold sweat. She looked haggard as if she had suddenly aged twenty years. A few feet further along the corridor, her partner, Agent Moore was relaying the details of the interview to Deputy Director Willet.
Harrison's hollow-eyed stare connected momentarily with Skingley before going blank.
“Mittens,” she croaked.
“She set up an Instagram account for her cat,” said Moore. “Musta forgot all about it. I just got off the phone with her neighbour. The sick motherfucka, we got handcuffed behind that door, somehow managed to ratio clean through all nine of Mitten's lives.”
“I think that you know who to contact,” said Willet.
Skingley nodded.
“I'll get right on it,” he said.
~
Keffals sat in the interrogation room, smirking into the black mirror of the one-way glass. Sometimes when she did this, a man from her past, named Lucas, would stare back at her, mocking her with his presence, but not today. Today her reflection was all Keffals.
The door opened. A man who resembled Alec Baldwin walked in. He was followed inside by another man who stood sentry by the door.
“Are you here to accidentally kill me with a prop firearm?” enquired Keffals.
“I get that a lot,” replied the man as he pulled up a seat.
“They call me the Aggregator. What I do is I take all of the ratios and fractions, then I add them up to make whole numbers. Would you care to guess what I do with the remainder?”
Keffals reflection smirked back at her. Unphased by her silence, the Aggregator turned to his colleague.
“Agent Mayfield. Would you kindly hand me any small change that you have on your person.”
Reluctantly Agent Mayfield emptied his pockets. Reaching over he handed a small quantity of coins to his superior.
The Aggregator rose ponderously to his feet. His fingers fumbled with his belt, loosening it by a couple of notches. The hand that was holding the coins plunged down the back of his pants, and into the canyon between his buttocks. When he removed it, the coins were gone.
His ass cheeks began to shift asymmetrically against each other, like a pair of millstones moving out of kilter. The muffled sound of metal grinding against metal filled the silence. Finally, he paused in mid-gyration standing stock still as if he had frozen in a game of musical statues. A moment later, a shiny disk dropped from his pant leg, striking the hard floor atonally and wobbling for a few seconds, before finally lying flat.
“Agent Mayfield: Would you retrieve the object that had just dropped from my right pant leg and place it on the table in front of me.”
Snapping on a pair of evidence gloves, Agent Mayfield crouched down and gingerly recovered the butt token. As instructed he laid it down on the table in front of the prisoner.
It was a shiny silver dollar bearing the profile of Donald Trump, encircled by the motto:
The Rightful President of the United States of America.
The Aggregator allowed the coin to rest on the table long enough for Keffals to absorb the exquisite detail in the rendering of the 45th Head of State – the flabby jawline and the expectant piggy eyes of the man who had once played the role of Waldo Johnston II in a movie adaptation of
The Little Rascals.
“Okay, Agent Mayfield. You may take the coin away,” he said. “If you choose to spend it, then make sure that you do so on something that costs exactly a dollar, while also factoring tax into your purchase. This Bureau will not tolerate any leftovers in its spending plan.”
On the opposite side of the table, Keffals sneered at the agent.
“Was your circus performance supposed to intimidate m,” she said. “I'm the girl who single-handedly destroyed Kiwi Farms. I have done more for Internet safety than the Jesus and the FBI ever did.”
The Aggregator sat back down, shifting his coin-minting buttocks until he was comfortable.
“Lucas,” he said. “I'm going to call you Lucas because you are about to realise that you are dead and buried. And, when they do bury you, 'Lucas' is the name they are going to chisel on your headstone. Now, for starters, why don't you enlighten me on what you think a bug tester might do. Now, to be clear, I'm not talking about a bug chaser. I'm talking about a bug tester.”
The smirk slowly evaporated from Keffals' face. In the blackness of the glass, the unwanted likeness of Lucas was beginning to swamp her reflection.
“A bug tester is someone who tests for frailties in software, so that they can be eliminated,” said the Aggregator. “Now, imagine there's this guy who owns a website. Let's call him Joshua. And let's call the website Kiwi Farms. Now Joshua wants to test his website for vulnerabilities, but it needs to be a genuine attack rather something staged. So he thinks to himself: 'Who do I know who has a demented online presence and bags of disposable income to throw around...?
The reflection in the glass was now entirely Lucas. Keffals turned his head away in disgust.
“The silver dollar finally dropped has it?” said the Aggregator.