MARLOWE.DLL

Find Files and Folders. Rates Negotiable. Monologue Included.

There are over fifty million files living in the coastal city of Seagate, state of Compton. Most of them don't matter. They sit and wait, sometimes for days, until a program needs them. Some files just get forgotten about. Maybe it's a song nobody listens to, or a game that got installed and never played. They just sit there until their sectors go bad. The tenements and warehouses on the edge of town that nobody maintains, but the landlords take money for anyway, but with suspiciously clean signs out front, reading things like "Random Backups" and "Temp." Plenty of programs down on their luck live around there too, nobody really knows if they're even alive until they show up one day for work, cobwebbed and fragmented.

On the other end of Seagate you have the Downloads district. All upscale, fast moving part of town. Files coming in and out all the time, whether by taxi or jet. The Broadcom International Airport sees several gigabytes of throughput every single day, all of it being inspected bit by bit by the Department of Defender. Heard a while back they were all on the take from the Torrente family, but by definition it's none of my business. The Program Files offices have dealings with all of them on a daily basis, as does Central Processing, but me, I only go when and where I'm needed, and most of the time, I'm not. I just sit in my office in the System block, playing solitaire until such time as another program calls on me.

You could call me a file, you could call me a program. All I care is that I'm the guy that gets called when one of those fifty million files happens to turn up missing. The cops call it in as a four-o-four and the case inevitably goes cold. You probably know the headlines well. "File Not Found." An example of the blunt news-writing that we see from those hack error reporters upstairs. Doesn't comfort anybody. It's just a reminder of how fragile life can be sometimes in Seagate.

On this particularly balmy Patch Tuesday, the CPU thermometer was reading a steady 55 Celsius as files were shipping in and out. I supposed that today was backup day, and soon enough things were going to calm down. That's when I heard a double-knock. It came from the other side of my door, its frosted glass reading MARLOWE.DLL - Find Files & Folders. Beyond the glass stood the silhouette of...I couldn't tell if it was a man or woman or anything else that'd been added to the metadata specs since I'd moved in. They stood there almost motionless, only their outline indicating anything was there.

"C'mon in," I called out, "it's open." You had to respond to double-knocks quickly around here, lest Central Processing send their boys over from Task Management. Never pleasant, always invasive.

The door swung open to reveal a tall, slender figure in a double-breasted three-piece suit, complete with black tie, and a pair of dark sunglasses to match. The face came to a point at the chin, thin but not weak. Sort of egg-shaped, overall, and the hairdo was military precision, not a single strand longer than an inch. The Suit opened their mouth with such care as to avoid showing any kind of emotion in the process. "You are Mister Marlowe-dot-D-L-L?" Their intonation was very polite, very English, but too perfect. Probably from out of town.

"I prefer just Marlowe. File names are too formal. What do I call you?"

"I'm an agent from Central Processing. We're looking for someone and your service has been requested." Stone cold. No reaction whatsoever. Pretty typical for a CPU. "We've looked into your search history and you may have looked for this file before." They handed me a leaflet of text; the header read, "MSVCR120.DLL."

"What's ol' Visual C been up to these days?" I hadn't heard from MSVCR - his full name's Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime - since version 70. We were buddies in the old System32 projects; early adoption wasn't as big a thing back then as it was now. As time went on, the CPU needed him for more stuff, so he kept getting promotions and updates. That was about the last time that he and I had spoken.

"The last time he reported for roll-call was yesterday, on the occasion of a Steam First-Time Setup procedure." Everybody knew that Steam First-Time Setup was nothing more than a formality. It gets done so frequently that it often just wastes time. I'd wager that only one in every hundred of those actually manages to install anything.

I folded my arms. "Where was VC last called?"

"MSVCR120 was last invoked to a subfolder in Downloads. The DOD have indicated that there were new arrivals at the time, but it remains unclear what became of him afterwards." The Suit stared directly forward, not obviously making eye contact through the sunglasses. Not even shifting around on their feet or swaying back and forth. As if they never got tired of being on their feet. A CPU agent, through and through. They don't rest for anything.

"Did the DOD raise any threat alerts?"

"Nothing that reached Central Processing."

"Suppose I'll need to go down there in person, then," I sighed. The Department of Defender were never my favorites to work with. Always cagey, never up front about anything. I decided I'd better bring some pocket money in case anybody needed their palms greased. "But before that, there's the matter of my payment and expenses."

"Central Processing proposes that you be allocated one hundred and twenty eight megabytes for the duration of this task, and access to Indexing services until such time as we have located or replaced MSVCR120."

"Adequate." I locked my desk drawer after taking out the spare wallet, leaving the gun where it was. I shouldn't think a trip to Broadcom would need to involve bullets flying just now, and having the piece on me would probably not put me in the DOD's good graces. "Will you be taking me, or am I on my own?"

"Transportation is waiting outside."

I was happy as long as I didn't have to take a data bus.