Read Online Concrete Underground (2010) by Moxie Mezcal - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Moxie Mezcal
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curling his fingers into a circle and jerking it back and forth rhythmically while digging his tongue into the inside of his cheek to mime a blowjob. Lily fumed silently, not daring to fire back at her boss.
Max let out a small chuckle and led me by the arm to the far side of the room, which was dominated by a wall of video monitors, mixing boards, and other heavy-duty A/V equipment. The monitors displayed feeds from the surveillance cameras in the main art galleries. Six people sat in a row in front of the monitor bank, each wearing a pair of headphones that were plugged into the mixing consoles and presumably wired into the microphones upstairs.
Three of them were clustered in a group, obviously drunk and having a laugh. They giggled and commented back and forth playfully on what they were seeing and hearing.
Another was a serious young woman who was watching with a furrowed brow and scribbling notes furiously. Venturing a guess, I decided she looked like an anthropologist or sociology grad student doing research for some kind of dissertation or whatever it is that people who actually went to college do.
The man at the far end was obviously getting his jollies off. All of his monitors were tuned into cameras showing young women, and he had one hand buried discreetly under the mixing desk.
The man at the central console was older than the rest, with salt-and pepper hair and a strange blue birthmark on the bridge of his nose that was shaped kind of like a question mark. He sat back in his chair as if to take in as much as possible; he looked like a king surveying his kingdom. I stepped in for a closer look. His eyes darted to and fro quickly, jumping from one screen to the next in a seemingly random sequence.
I felt Max move in behind me. "That's Ben Garza. You should step back. Watchers rarely like it when they're the ones being watched."
I picked up one of the free headsets, which was plugged into a jack labeled Confessionals , and raised it to my ear. A woman's voice came through sounding raw and sullen, as if she had been crying. There was something familiar about it. She said, "I wonder if I ever even had a chance of being happy. Like if I had made different choices, if I hadn't fucked things up so bad, would it have made a difference? I wonder if there's some other world out there, some alternate universe where I ended up happy."
I realized why it sounded familiar - it sounded a lot like Lily. I looked back over my shoulder and saw her sitting next to Columbine. The two of them were laughing wildly, each holding a martini glass, as they chatted like good friends.
I glanced back at the video monitors and caught a brief glimpse of one of the feeds, a grainy, monochrome image washed in blue. It showed a man sitting on the edge of a bed in a nearly empty room. A digitized numeric display in the bottom right corner read: 00033 .
I suddenly felt light-headed and took a couple steps back from the console, letting the headphones drop from my grip. Max reached out a hand to help stabilize me.
I closed my eyes and tried to regain my bearings, muttering, "Jesus Christ, the bum was right."
"Pardon?"
"I met a bum on the train a couple days ago - wild orange hair, crazy blue eyes. He said he used to work for you and was ranting about how you were spying on people."
Max smiled indulgently. "Spying implies a violation of trust, an assumption of privacy that is betrayed. We made no secret about the surveillance methods upstairs, so there is no assumption of privacy. Our equipment is in plain sight, and many of the art pieces themselves used it as an integral part."
"In other words, you 're saying it's okay to invade someone's privacy as long as you give some notice, however perfunctory."
"I'm saying that privacy as you understand it has become an archaic concept."
I smirked. "Of course you would say this. You've made selling your customers' private information into a business model."
Max scoffed, then responded in a
Max let out a small chuckle and led me by the arm to the far side of the room, which was dominated by a wall of video monitors, mixing boards, and other heavy-duty A/V equipment. The monitors displayed feeds from the surveillance cameras in the main art galleries. Six people sat in a row in front of the monitor bank, each wearing a pair of headphones that were plugged into the mixing consoles and presumably wired into the microphones upstairs.
Three of them were clustered in a group, obviously drunk and having a laugh. They giggled and commented back and forth playfully on what they were seeing and hearing.
Another was a serious young woman who was watching with a furrowed brow and scribbling notes furiously. Venturing a guess, I decided she looked like an anthropologist or sociology grad student doing research for some kind of dissertation or whatever it is that people who actually went to college do.
The man at the far end was obviously getting his jollies off. All of his monitors were tuned into cameras showing young women, and he had one hand buried discreetly under the mixing desk.
The man at the central console was older than the rest, with salt-and pepper hair and a strange blue birthmark on the bridge of his nose that was shaped kind of like a question mark. He sat back in his chair as if to take in as much as possible; he looked like a king surveying his kingdom. I stepped in for a closer look. His eyes darted to and fro quickly, jumping from one screen to the next in a seemingly random sequence.
I felt Max move in behind me. "That's Ben Garza. You should step back. Watchers rarely like it when they're the ones being watched."
I picked up one of the free headsets, which was plugged into a jack labeled Confessionals , and raised it to my ear. A woman's voice came through sounding raw and sullen, as if she had been crying. There was something familiar about it. She said, "I wonder if I ever even had a chance of being happy. Like if I had made different choices, if I hadn't fucked things up so bad, would it have made a difference? I wonder if there's some other world out there, some alternate universe where I ended up happy."
I realized why it sounded familiar - it sounded a lot like Lily. I looked back over my shoulder and saw her sitting next to Columbine. The two of them were laughing wildly, each holding a martini glass, as they chatted like good friends.
I glanced back at the video monitors and caught a brief glimpse of one of the feeds, a grainy, monochrome image washed in blue. It showed a man sitting on the edge of a bed in a nearly empty room. A digitized numeric display in the bottom right corner read: 00033 .
I suddenly felt light-headed and took a couple steps back from the console, letting the headphones drop from my grip. Max reached out a hand to help stabilize me.
I closed my eyes and tried to regain my bearings, muttering, "Jesus Christ, the bum was right."
"Pardon?"
"I met a bum on the train a couple days ago - wild orange hair, crazy blue eyes. He said he used to work for you and was ranting about how you were spying on people."
Max smiled indulgently. "Spying implies a violation of trust, an assumption of privacy that is betrayed. We made no secret about the surveillance methods upstairs, so there is no assumption of privacy. Our equipment is in plain sight, and many of the art pieces themselves used it as an integral part."
"In other words, you 're saying it's okay to invade someone's privacy as long as you give some notice, however perfunctory."
"I'm saying that privacy as you understand it has become an archaic concept."
I smirked. "Of course you would say this. You've made selling your customers' private information into a business model."
Max scoffed, then responded in a
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