No Loose Ends
In May of 2006, Journalspace went down. When it was back up again, members were appalled to discover that many of their entries and comments had vanished, and while a fair number were subsequently recovered, others were lost forever. Those who’d failed to make adequate backups were to regret that decision for the rest of their lives.
Needless to say, conspiracy theories began to emerge. I should like to lay those ridiculous and unfounded theories to rest.
I entered the park through the rusty iron gate and walked along the path, wiping the beads of moisture from my beard as I did so. The mixture of mist and fine rain served a useful purpose however: not only was the place likely to be empty, visibility was markedly reduced. Anyone would have difficulty following me.
I caught sight of him then, standing by the bandstand, as we’d agreed. He was younger than I’d expected; perhaps in his mid-twenties. He looked nervous, as well he might, and jerked his head up sharply as he heard my footsteps approaching.
‘John?’ I asked shortly, barely glancing at him as I drew level with him.
‘Yes,’ he muttered in reply, falling into step with me. ‘You’re Simon, then? The writer?’
‘That’s correct,’ I answered. ‘And you have something to tell me. About what happened to the Jayesse.’
‘Right,’ he said, his voice having a slight edge of hysteria. ‘Have I got something to tell you. I know why it went down. And who was responsible.’
‘OK, John,’ I said. ‘Relax. You’re sure no one followed you?’
‘Pretty sure,’ he said, looking nervously over his shoulder. ‘And you? What if someone sees us together? What if the police ask us what we’re doing?’
‘Take it easy,’ I said soothingly. ‘If the police stop us, remember the story: you’re a male prostitute and I’ve just picked you up, OK? I’m taking you back to my place for a bit of gay bondage sex. Nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘OK,’ he said uneasily, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. ‘But after what happened to Mick…’
I turned to look at him and raised one eyebrow.
‘They said it was a freak accident. That he was struck by a meteorite then crushed to an unrecognisable pulp by a herd of African elephants that had drifted from their usual migratory route from Botswana to Angola and Zambia. They said it could have happened to anyone.’ He shuddered.
‘Bill was silenced because he knew too much,’ I said calmly. ‘Dylan Rhodes can’t allow anyone to know what caused the Jayesse to go down – and what went down with it. He doesn’t want to leave any loose ends. That’s why you need to tell someone else. Once the world knows the truth you’ll be safe. We’ll be safe. That’s why you’re talking to me now, remember? Relax. Now, tell me what happened.’
John looked more resolute. ‘Right,’ he said, drawing in a shaky breath. ‘OK. Well, when the Jayesse went down it was very sudden like. The people got off and were picked up by that passing forum, the Westy. They didn’t have time to take anything with them – not even their comments or PMs. So when we brought the Jayesse back up again, they wanted to know – they wanted to know what had happened to those they’d left behind. Even if it was only to identify the bodies.’
The path had curved back round, and we were now approaching the gate again: I could see my car through the misty rain.
‘But they were told that while the Jayesse was down they’d all been eaten – completely,’ John continued. ‘Nothing left except a few fragments.’ He shuddered again. ‘They weren’t too happy of course, but they believed it. And so did I. Why should Dylan have lied? Anyway, Mick and I were part of the salvage crew, and we were the first to get to the main drive room. We tried to open the door, but it was locked – on the inside.’
I looked at him sharply. ‘On the inside? But how…’
John smiled grimly. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s what we thought. So we got the cutting gear to work and opened up the door.’
We had reached the gate. I opened it and directed John through, then round to the rear of the car. I unlocked the boot and lifted the lid.
‘I was the first through,’ went on John, more confidently now. ‘And do you know what I saw?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and put my arm across his shoulders. He looked at me, startled. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s over now.’
His eyes widened briefly as my fingernail scratched the back of his neck, and the powerful neurotoxin did its deadly work, then he sagged against me. I gently eased his corpse over the sill and into the boot, then slammed the lid down.
I pulled my mobile phone from my pocket and keyed in a number. The response was almost immediate. ‘Dylan?’ I said. ‘No loose ends,’ then disconnected.
I went round the side of the car and got in, sliding into the driver’s seat. I was now the only one other than Dylan who knew the horrifying secret of why the Jayesse had gone down, but unlike the unfortunate salvage men, I had taken the precaution of putting the details in a bank security box, with instructions for it to be opened in the event of my death. It was in Dylan’s interests to keep me alive and happy. My place in the Journalspace Top Ten was assured. With such explosive material in my hands he could not afford to do otherwise.
NOTES
The reference to ‘that passing forum, The Westy’ was because, thanks to the JS member Westy (Dorrie van Cleef) providing space on her small private forum, survivors were able to huddle together for warmth, sometimes resorting to cannibalism to survive, until Journalspace was back up again.
I still sometimes wake at night screaming. I had always written my entries in Word and copied and pasted them into the Journalspace web form, rather than typing them into it directly, so I had the originals kept locally on my PC. But the comments were a different matter. You could either expand each entry so the comments were displayed, and save the entire web page – which meant you preserved everything in the exact way it appeared on the site – or you could copy and paste the text from the comments boxes into a Word document. The former was heavy on drive space, but more faithful; the latter meant you only had the text, but was far more efficient, at a time when drive space was far more valuable than it is now. For more than two years I’d not been able to decide which method to use. I’d dithered. I’d shilly-shallied. I’d even procrastinated. But when the Great Crash of 2006 occurred, I very rapidly regretted my indecision. Some comments remained intact. Others could be recovered from Google’s cache. But many were lost forever. It was heartbreaking. Several of my entries had more entertainment value in the reams of comments than the entries themselves did. I still weep for those lost comments.
But after that I religiously copied each comment as soon as it appeared and pasted it into a Word document, along with the original entry. Even those who’d not bothered because they regarded their entries and comments as being ephemeral things, and unimportant, very rapidly realised that they meant more to them than they’d realised. It was a bitter lesson in the need to make backups.
Naturally there were some who still failed to do so, and when Journalspace suffered from its final crash in December 2008 they learned the painful lesson all over again. Ironically, it was due to Dylan Rhodes’ own failure to keep backups of user’s data that made this crash impossible to recover from. To quote one of many tech articles on the subject at the time:
The site’s IT manager had mistakenly relied on the real-time mirroring of RAID 1 as a substitute for a true data backup system. When that employee was caught stealing and maliciously overwrote or deleted the primary SQL database on his way out, the RAID 1 array did exactly what it was programmed to do: it instantly mirrored the destructive deletions across both hard drives, leaving the company with zero uncorrupted data and no external backups to restore from.
I won’t pretend I knew anything about RAID arrays – I, like most people, had a home PC, and had no need for such a thing. But as many other experts pointed out, RAID is not a backup mechanism. I suspect that Dylan’s mistake provided a sharp lesson to many others in a similar situation.
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