THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: FARMING

I don’t look at the database no more, I just do my job. 

I made that mistake, and what I found there was no good, man. I mean, the money is good but the shit on that list, and the photo match stuff was all like demonic and shit. Like those things from heavy metal album covers. Lots of names of people I didn’t know. Lots of dates. Lots of photos of weird knives and amulets and things. Murder scenes. Two hundred photos of a book called like Vermis or something. Lots of weird shit.  

Correction. Lots of weird shit that is none of my fucking business.

I met him at the feed store in 2014. He was an old fuck with a face like the wrong end of a shotgun. Bald. Huge grey beard. Still, big. Wheezing. Smelled of gasoline. I was waiting on Stephen to do the adblock update on all the machines at Buckerfields and the old dude was waiting to buy something. 

“You know a lot about computers,” he said finally, not looking at me while Stephen chattered on the phone through the sound-proofed glass. It wasn’t really like a question. He heard me and Stephen talking, I guess.

“Yeah. I’ve been doing this stuff since I was a kid.”  

“You own your own company?”

“Not even that, man, but I get by. You need some computer help?”

“Yeah. My guy is gone.”

That’s how it started. Ten days later he drove me out towards where the old machining plant was, just on the other side of 84, right across from the new developments. A rickety old two story slouching house that someone had painted last when Carter was President maybe. 

Inside was a server farm; fifty PCs, cheap fans with vents punched through the rotting walls, and I’m thinking, bitcoin. There was nothing else in the house. Just those folding card tables and PCs and new-looking junction boxes and weird wiring and shit. 

“We’ve got a fibre hookup to the line over in the estates,” he said, trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“So. Here’s the job. 2k a month to keep this shit running. That means all-in. New computers, equipment, time, everything. No calls. No management. No extra cash. You do your job and keep it zipped. No one knows about this.” 

“What is it? Bitcoin?”

A blank look. 

“These rigs just look for certain things on the internet. They search. You don’t need to worry about that part. Just keep the lights on them green and make sure all the stuff on them is up to date.”

Okay. Whatever man. I was doing the math. 2k a month in Grant county was a fucking king’s ransom, and this shit could be set up remote so I got an alert if it went weird. Hell, I guessed the bigger danger would be if the whole place burned down. 

So it went for four years. Money would show up in my bank account (I gave him a cancelled check half expecting some scam), but there it would be, a 2k deposit from some calling card company in New York. I’d get a 1099 from them once a year. I didn’t see the old dude. I moved to a better place. Got a cool car. 

Then, I went and got stupid. It’s what people do when they have nothing to worry about, after all. One day when I was there updating the modem firmware I got to messing on the machine master, and went through the database of items the crawlers were searching the web for. That’s when I saw all the weird shit. Books and cults and murders and dates and whatever. A lot of the images looked like they were from crime scenes. Some had FBI stamps on them. 

It was funny to begin with. Someone was forking out huge money to search the internet for these funny names Yoghosot and other weird shit, and any mention of like, a French play. But then I got to the reverse image photo match folder and it wasn’t so funny anymore. I left in a hurry. 

That night, 2:30 AM, my phone rang once. I was up, and I picked it up.

“You want to know what happened to the last computer guy, you just keep on going, kid.”

My mouth clicked when I tried to talk, “It won’t happen again.”

“I know.”

And the image of the old man in Buckerfields in 2014 waiting in line to buy zip-ties, a shovel and work gloves, rose in my mind’s eye like a warning.