Note: This was originally published as a twitter thread in 2019.
Fade in.
Dade arrives at a skyscraper and checks his watch. 7:55am. He has to ride 31 floors to get to his meeting, and 5 of the building’s 6 elevators are broken. As he realizes he’s going to be late, he lets out an apathetic sigh and joins the crowd waiting for the elevator.
Cramming into the elevator, Dade hears a familiar voice shouting from behind him. “Hold the door!” Joey shouted.
Camera pans to a much older looking Jesse Bradford.
“Still letting your mama dress you,” Dade says, as Joey forces himself into the already overcrowded elevator.
The elevator doors close, bringing the screen to black. Cut to a windowsless conference room. Half-assed corporate security posters don the walls. A projector is pointing to the wall opposite the door, with a graph titled “Vulnerabilities by Type.”
Around the table are the familiar faces of Kate Libby, Ramon Sanchez, Emmanuel Goldstein, and Paul Cook. In the corner of the room is a much thinner Penn Jillette. Joey Pardella enters the room shortly after Dade, letting the door slam closed behind him.
Dade checks the clock, 8:07am. Everyone spends the following several minutes spouting out general “Mondayisms” about how they wish it were still the weekend and how there isn’t enough coffee in New York City to deal with an 8am Monday meeting.
By the time the chatter dies down, it’s 8:25am. Dade brings the meeting to order and they go around the room discussing the latest results from their vulnerability scanner.
Time lapse of several months of Monday morning vulnerability meetings, the graphs looking similar, but the magnitude of the numbers getting larger and larger.
Fade out.
Fade in on a giant room, TVs mounted on the slanted ceilings all around the room with various graphs and animated maps of the world’s cyber attacks. As the camera pans down, an endless sea of grey-walled cubicles come into frame.
Various Garfield and Dilbert comics can be seen adorning the desks of our beloved hackers. Stickers from the latest hacker conferences lie scattered across their desks. There are a variety of ergonomic mice and keyboards, and 2 small buttons indicating this is a “sit/stand” desk.
The camera pans up from the various desk tops so that we might see the screens of our protagonists. Each character has a laptop plugged into a docking station and two 24" monitors, perfectly aligned at an ergonomic level, according to an ergonomics certificate on the wall.
The screens that were once full of terminals and floating equations and looming translucent towers used to explore the file system were now overflowing with Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint windows stacked atop one another.
The clock strikes 5pm and someone in the cubicle farm had rigged up an alarm that lets out a loud cheering noise and starts playing “Closing Time” by Semisonic. Everyone packs up their laptops and heads towards the elevators.
“I can’t wait to go home and get away from computers for a bit,” Paul mentions among the chatter of overjoyed employees.
“Remember when we used to like computers?” Ramon says, with a hint of joking in his tone but an underlying seriousness that everyone can relate to.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things,” Emmanuel says, the enthusiasm of 5pm draining from his voice.
The elevator doors close on our once passionate hacker crew.
End credits roll.