An Atavistic Freak Out, Episode Two
by Leon Manna
The following story is a work of fiction.
I'm typing this with a fractured wrist in an orange cast, sitting on a small bed in a shipping container. Writing out what happened now, I'm gathering anger and resentment towards someone. I didn't know who that someone was until I got up and looked in my mirror to realize that it was me. I saw a horror movie depiction of myself, eyes bloodshot and empty, a poorly made replica of some long-gone hero who was once there. I've made a fool of myself, yet the only one who I feel embarrassed in front of is me.
A high-speed Olympic race against The Machine. I let out a bitter, half-hearted laugh as I started my motorbike and disappeared into the desert, engaging in a literal race against the machine. And why not? They won't catch me alive.
Joseph Erickson strolled confidently down the street. When he got to the entrance of Sawtooth National Bank, he flung the doors open. His pupils were dilated and he was breaking out in a cold sweat from the methoxetamine he'd been taking throughout the day.
But me? Technically, I've never stepped foot inside.
Joseph Erickson walked up to the bank teller, and asked if he could deposit some money in his business account for a corporation called SysTime Management that does not exist in real life. The office is my computer, and the rest of the corporation is nothing more than lines on sheets of paper.
"Hey! What's new with you? I'd like to uh... deposit some money! In the bank that is... my account if you will. Thank you very much." Jesus! Get a hold of yourself man!
She froze for a second to look at him, then rushed quietly into a side room. Mr. Erickson sat down at some chairs near the door, and tried to listen to the conversation. With no other workers present, an employee named Liz rushed over and sat down next to him. Before he could even process what was going on, she whispered to him, "they are calling the police."
Joe knew what was happening. He opened the mobile app on "his phone" [EVIDENCE 1 ##2165235: ENCRYPTED ANDROID SMARTPHONE] and attempted to log in to his account. It was locked. In a panic, he launched a Denial-of-Service attack on the bank's Internet for no particular reason. He then proceeded to factory reset his phone. Shoving it back in his pocket, he cursed silently. Damn you Sawtooth! Catching criminals! Stopping crimes! Doing your job!
Can I even be mad? I don't think I have that right. At the end of the day, they are just doing their job. And what the hell am I doing? Fraud? I can't even bring myself to conjure up some false poetic justification for this. They're normal hard working citizens and I'm some freak who steals people's money, a 21st century digital pickpocket in a seemingly timeless age where doing it all in person is no longer worth it or even feasible. I'm absolutely in the wrong here, I know that. But regardless, I'm not going out like this. They hadn't opened the door yet.
So Joseph got up quickly and started to walk out. And then he heard the booming voice of an employee named Khir, who was attempting to stop him at the door. That voice said, "Mr. Erickson! I heard you wanted to deposit some money. Why don't you come into my office and we can get it done." A sick smile crossed his face, a smile that didn't follow in his eyes. There was an underlying tone in his voice driven by a clear objective. They both knew that no money would actually be deposited. Joe threw a stack of papers at his face and ran.
He figured if he stayed in the bank, he had about five minutes before the police arrived. It would only take a few minutes to transmit his description to the entire PD. And with that description, it wouldn't take long to find me.
The person you see in Sawtooth has little to no resemblance at all of anyone who currently exists. It's mostly to protect my identity. Part of it is the upkeep of the very existence of Mr. Erickson, an eccentric man who's known for his wacky appearance. A man who speaks a strange Midwestern dialect, using slang words they'd never even heard of. A man who likes chemical analogs and humid subtropical climates. A man with a look in his eye you can almost understand, but never quite get there. And when you look into those eyes, all you see is an empty cavity where a sound mind should be. The final factor is the emotional bulletproof vest of living as someone else. Who am I, anyway? I couldn't tell you, and even if I could you know damn well I probably wouldn't. The answer has always been "who they think I am" and it always will be.
Have you ever seen someone wearing purple khakis and combat boots? Women's sunglasses and a button down shirt that's a completely different color scheme? But his near-schizophrenic appearance was never a good enough reason for them to turn him down. Yes, he got weird looks when he walked in, but the embarrassment was necessary.
You are who people think you are. By that rationale, you can be anyone you need to be. So this neon monster they see in the bank? It was a ruse to steer everything away from my actual self.
I can't help but realize now that in an attempt to hide my identity, I inadvertently made it easier for them to figure out something was wrong. There was never a friendly "that's just Mr. Erickson." In fact, I felt the employees knew what was going on the entire time. But maybe I knew from the start that they'd get uneasy and just didn't correctly estimate when. Oh, the mistakes I have made...
The maniac flies down State Street on a 30cc Tomos LX moped, going by the dirty town of Agua Fria at speeds no higher than 35 MPH, blasting fumes of 93 gasoline and two stroke oil out of his ass. Passing the shacks, yuccas, iguanas, and people looking for work, he senses inevitable danger. A single tear falls down his cheek, because no matter how jaded he's become, he still can see the end. It doesn't look pretty to him, and with no helmet on, he almost prayed that his brakes would fail.
[EVIDENCE 2 ##3652752: UNREGISTERED MOTORIZED BIKE]
Aryana's phone rang. It was a number she didn't recognize.
On the other end of the line, there was Leon Manna, standing alone at a payphone in the middle of Arizona. His button down shirt was gone, and his Khakis had oil stains and mud all over them leaving them a sick brown color. His sunglasses had long since fallen off into a patch of Cactus [EVIDENCE 3 ##7291622: ORANGE WOMENS SUNGLASSES]. His back was beginning to burn from the sun. His arms had been ripped apart by sand, and the constant wind almost blinded him.
"Hello?" she said shyly. She sounded nervous.
"It's me!" I shouted it into the receiver, trying to figure out what I was going to say.
"I haven't heard from you in hours, what happened?"
I paused for a second, and almost convinced myself that I was f*cked. That there was no hope, and I needed to turn myself in. To give up the fight, and just stop completely.
I intentionally didn't tell her. "I might not make it back. I'm at a payphone in La Palma. Promise me you'll visit."
"Visit where?"
"Well, they'll put me in a local jail first. Once I go to trial and inevitably lose, I'll probably spend some time in the Federal Transfer Center, until finally they put me in a federal prison. Hopefully it'll be here, in Arizona, but they might extradite me to California or Utah."
She burst out crying. I felt like I had killed someone.
"Listen, I'll swing by when this is all over. They haven't found me yet, and it was a synthetic identity."
She hung up the phone. The tone coming through the awful device sounded like a rocket being fired into my brain.
The security cameras were the biggest factor. The whole thing fell apart because the IT guys didn't change the default password for their CCTV system. I found the login page for the panel which was publicly accessible and typed the default credentials in, expecting it not to work. I saw a successful login and wondered if I was seeing things, and it was just my mind attempting to put me at ease by lying. It just didn't seem possible. Absolutely spectacular OPSEC. For all I know, someone has already defrauded Sawtooth a thousand times over. I tried to destroy their CCTV system for a while, until I figured out how to wipe everything. It wasn't really deleted though, it still existed on the drive. It was just marked as empty space to be written over by new data, because for some reason that's how deleting files works. Any forensic team could have gotten that data back.
So after more looking around, I found an SSH login for the camera system with the same password. Thank you Sawtooth! Helping me escape! Leaving flaws in your system! Having your IT department fail you! I love you to death!
dd is a utility used to interact with hard drives. Luckily the camera system had it built in. Instead of marking the space as empty we overwrite all of /dev/sda (the drive in question) with NULL bytes from /dev/zero, so whatever was left is gone. I checked for backups, and they have failed once more by not making them. This "right out of the box" mentality is an error in too many people's thought process, leading to events like this. Go ahead, try. Find a CCTV system, and look up the default password. We all fall victim to human error at one point or another. I'm not so sure the employees ever knew how to operate the camera system. In hindsight I'm almost positive the forensic team barely missed the window to catch me before I snatched the soul of their pathetic little camera system right up.
Coincidentally, Joseph Erickson was declared missing. There were no sightings of him after that day. They spent weeks searching the desert but a body was never found. There was no way to cross over to Mexico because of the extreme heat in the Arizona-Mexico border area that would have killed him before he made it even close. Border police in Texas and California saw no sightings of a man matching his description. Some suspect he's still at large. I would disagree.
Aryana slapped me. I guess I deserved it. She didn't talk to me for two days because there had been at least four incidents like this before while she was with me. She always told me to be safe when I went out, and five times now I failed to do so. For the first time, I felt a little guilty for what I had done.
My attorney called me an extremely lucky dumbass. I deserved that too. He explained that if I had slipped up once, the pieces of evidence they have would come back to me. They apparently found my phone, but it was encrypted. Even if they could get in there's nothing tied to me, just Joseph Erickson, and he never even existed in the first place. They found my motorbike in a lake, but it was so polluted from a nearby nuclear power plant that the prints washed off. I personally believe that god came down from the heavens and wiped them away.
So when he called me an extremely lucky dumbass, he was right. The composite sketch I saw on the news that night didn't look anything like me. It was followed by a dumb story about a bank employee who chased a criminal and was assaulted with a stack of papers. The employee chased him out of the bank and onto the highway in his car before the criminal erratically sped off and disappeared in the desert. In the interview he said, "I was assaulted, I mean my property and my life were under threat, and I managed to survive through brave courage." He kept repeating that he was assaulted.
Awful jackass.
The editor is calling. He wants his story, and I missed the deadline.
The sunglasses fall off. The checks all bounce and the numbers all add up. Everything is settled on both ends. The government IDs are thrown aside and the idea of an "identity" is completely disregarded. Then the methoxetamine wears off, and he wakes up in a dimly lit shipping container.