This is an excerpt from a new kind of project for me. Profile is a serial thriller about identity, the Internet and what happens when we trust companies to tell us what is and isn’t true. I’m going to treat the whole process – from writing through promotion – like a lean startup; more on that later.
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I huddled in the dark, under the wooden stairs leading out to the backyard, the metal of my unsheathed flash drive digging into my thigh. I could hear them in the house, opening drawers and moving furniture. They spoke to each other in a low murmur, an indistinguishable bassline while my Spotify playlists ran their course in the background, silently pushing unknown songs to my Facebook profile.
Through the clouds, an aircraft’s engines announced its descent.
I knew I would have to run. My backyard was surrounded by tall fencing on three sides, the result of neighbors jealously guarding their privacy. If I was going to make a break for it, I would need to climb over on one side, and I wasn’t sure if I could make it without drawing attention to myself.
Creaking floorboards. Inside, the men were moving from room to room. I wasn’t sure how many of them were, but it sounded like five at least: enough to keep guard while the others looked around.
From the glimpse I’d had of them when I looked through my bedroom window and seen them marching towards my house, they were police of some kind. They weren’t uniformed, as such, but each wore an identical suit, and each of them had been reaching for something as they approached my front door. It could have been phones, or documents, or anything, but I didn’t want to risk it. Particularly now as they’d forced their way into my home.
My breath caught the reflected light from the house in front of me, hot clouds of condensation reaching out into the cold of the night. I realized I was panicking.
“He’s still here,” one of them said, his voice urgent and raised enough for me to hear. “His phone’s on the network.”
The wifi! I whipped my handset out of my pocket and pushed down the power button to turn it off. Its screen lit up the yard, turning the grass and my weeds unnatural shades of blue and orange as the men ran through the house in an avalanche of heavy footsteps, down to the back door to find me.
Quickly, I set my phone on a ten second timer, and threw it over the fence to my left as hard as I could. Panting, my heart in my throat, I scrambled past the trashcans and garden debris to the alley beside my house, flung my back against the wall, and waited.
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