FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

All day long he flipped through images, video, and text. He had four hours of media, an hour for lunch, and four more hours of media. While one screen displayed the content the other contained tools for mapping times, identities, drawing correlations, as well as content related to previous work by himself and others like him. Every now and then he'd put on a pair of headphones and analyze audio - verifying or creating transcriptions. He did all of this in a nondescript cubicle in a nondescript building in an ordinary business complex. His badge was very ordinary. He dressed like an ordinary office worker. There was generally always a stale birthday cake in the break room getting more stale by the moment. Sad and sickly plants languished under fluorescent lights. There were no windows. There was silence. The only odd thing about this office was that nobody was talking to anybody. That, and every computer was positioned so that the screen was not visible through the opening in the cubicle.

His public title was media analyst. His actual work was harder to define. In his mind he liked to mull over what he might like to call himself if he could say it out loud. "Sociologist Specializing in Theoretical Models of Deviant Behavior in Complex Systems," was one of his favorites. He knew that people worked in think tanks, organizations, and universities trying to do what he was doing. He also knew that without the resources available to him they would be hard pressed to come up with any meaningful theories. Approximately half of the year he spent reading, coding, scripting, and attending lectures and trade shows. The other half he spent trying to interpret the result of such labor.

On his left he would look at pictures children had sent to adults over their cell phones. Provocative nudes, ordinary selfies, genital close-ups, and even complex and orchestrated scenes or groups of classmates. He would look at image dump websites and craigslist ads. Sex-specific personals sites were often pulled up. He would often have chat rooms open - either logged or scrolling live - though none of the other users or even the server administrators would ever know he had been looking. Recently he had begun working with newly developed software. He would watch artists working on their home computers - his eyes fixed carefully on every digital brush stroke. He had actually started drawing himself, having found that spending so much time with such focus had unlocked a few clues as to how one might draw. What he watched, of course, was not Bob Ross putting in happy trees. He was examining the care and craftsmanship put into pictures of impossibly sized appendages inside unreasonably young creatures.

On his right he would glance at scrolling lists of text and numbers - debugging output, network traffic, reverse image search results - as well as static displays of telnet login screens, police and FBI database front ends, and always an open text editor with a few disjointed notes about an individual or two.

While many of his tools he developed himself, many of the other pieces of software or procedures he did not. He presumed that throughout the office there were other individuals with similar habits and methods. Looking over the shoulders of these employees might imply that they were all doing the same thing and thinking the same thoughts. The truth, however, couldn't be further from this assumption. The majority of their work, it had long ago been made clear, was meant to take place in the imagination. They carried out these ordinary observations and used these straight forward analytic tools on the surface to drop hints to local and federal law enforcement. Beneath the surface they were imagining the big picture. They were encouraged to read philosophy in their spare time - to drink in all the greatest thinkers they could. Money was deposited in their account every other week not to meet any specific metric or accomplish any specific goal. And through this model, every now and then, there would be a piece of software made available to them that nobody had ever thought was possible, or that would give the entire office a scowl of jealousy for a few days. It was their job to be struck with inspiration, and only then to act.

Most of what was produced had to do with getting the job done easier - more data and more access. Every few months there was a new model of cell phone that was under control, or a new encryption scheme broken. Every few years they had increased access to agencies and governments. The tools that processed data and made predictions tended to be buggy and difficult to understand. Nobody spoke to anybody else, so understanding someone's methodology, UI, or chosen form of readout was often impossible. Most of the software had something along the lines of a confidence index - an estimation of how useful or accurate a prediction about an individual or group was. Most of these were fairly low.

Our subject in question could have been anyone in the office - any interchangeable dark cog - except for three things. He focused almost entirely on artists, he had his eyes on the biggest picture he could imagine at any given point - to the point that he wasn't sure he was ever going to reach any of his goals - and he was probably in somebody's database in the office as a person of interest - known only as a handful of IP addresses scattered through the past twenty years.

He had been discouraged for several months that some of his software hadn't panned out with any useful predictions. He was sure he was on to something objective and verifiable. As he normally did when pure science failed him, he started to get loose and creative. He opened up a simple drawing program on the right screen and gave it the entire display. He pulled out a tablet and leaned back with his feat up on the desk. After a few clicks he had a live feed of activity on an image dumping site. It was public, it was quasi-legal, but it was tolerant of "cub porn," so long as it, like everything on that particular site, was an artist's depiction and not a photograph.

He watched the images upload and he watched the traffic flow. After a few clicks he had an overlay on the spectacle showing individual users move from image to image as lines changing color and direction according to keywords and images chosen as well as their individual histories - their analytically derived threat level - but this overlay gave no concrete information and had a fairly low confidence in itself - it was just a way to watch a lot of data with very little attention. While this went on he started to draw ticks and squiggles in his own language - invented on the fly. As something caught his eye he'd invent a symbol for it and a way to group it with other symbols. He wasn't getting much done, but he didn't have much of an idea what to do. It just felt right in the moment. It did make him a little nervous to be working this way, and some of the "Field Agent Provided Resources" available for individuals of highest interest informed his subconscious that there was every reason to believe that somebody in some office somewhere had access to his heart rate and skin temperature, but he figured it was probably normal to worry about one's job when being avant-garde and incomprehensible. The actual reason he was nervous was that behind the dancing colored lines showing behavior interpretations of network traffic, it was a particularly good day for the particular sort of drawings he found the most alluring.

"Everyone's got a brain, a heart, and some kind of plumbing. I can't be the only one in the office turned on by some of the bad stuff," he thought, trying to keep calm. He had to stay focused to remember all his invented symbols and groupings. Watching all those artists, he really felt like part of his mind was opening up - like he was starting to understand a lot better how to think more fluidly than language should allow.

He went on like this for days. His mind was compartmentalizing. Doing the same thing day after day was honing a kind of new and potentially useless ability. He compiled day after day after day of densely packed pictures of symbols and lines - transparency overlays of colors and more shapes - overlays of lines like yarn from push pin to push pin on a madman's wall of photographs and clippings. All the while he was getting better at letting himself enjoy a stream of his drug of choice. There were days without excitement, but then there were days where there was more content of higher quality than he ever remembered from before - long ago when he would hunt for these very same images.

He would go home and masturbate furiously for hours until he fell asleep - paw covered in cum, sheets disheveled, blood pumping, heart racing, and mind floating on clouds.

Days turned into weeks. He wasn't sure if he was on to something or if it was now an excuse to watch porn. He had gone on data collecting binges before. He had done nothing but take sparse notes for months only to set to work afterward. But it felt different this time, because it was his favorite content he was looking for on his favorite site and his favorite medium. Some of the excitement had worn off, too, as he started to become acclimated to arousal and bored with release. He started to get frustrated that he lived alone and that his occupation made socializing difficult. He started to remember the years of therapy, introspection, and turmoil from when he "got over" looking at that kind of thing - a while before he landed this cushy hush hush job.

He felt himself slipping into a depression. Depression was bad for staying under the radar. Depression was bad for every facet of his job.

On a day off, he sat on a little chair on his balcony overlooking the bay. Boats were coming and going. He had a cup of tea and a book sitting on a little table. The sky was greyish blue. It was just foggy enough that the horizon was a clean, infinite sweep from sky to sea, but just clear enough to see all the people and their coming and going. He thought about his collection of pictographic notes. It was getting rather large. He wasn't sure what sense it made. He had forgotten some of the earlier symbols - their invented meaning - and he had forgotten some of his notions of how all of this would work to develop any new software tools or techniques.

He thought back to when he thought of himself as nothing more than a deviant, chained to sexual interests he didn't want. He thought about the images he had seen lately. He thought about what it looked like when artists drew these things - his work before this new obsession. Looking back on it now, he could swear he could feel what the artist was feeling.

He had always been a quiet person. He never talked to himself when he was alone. He picked up his cup of tea and looked at the ripples of reflected light from the sky. "There's a real community of them now..."

That was his last coherent memory of the day.

He woke up after what he thought were fever dreams. He was in bed, overheated, feeling sick, and confused about how he got there. He was horny. He was so horny he couldn't stand it, but he could swear he remembered fucking a cub last night... or... or not? A little arctic fox was in his memories somewhere... or was it a polar bear... A polar bear? Did he even know any polar bears? He put his hand to his head and fell back against the pillows. Nobody was there. His tea and his book were on the balcony where he last remembered them, though it was now night. He checked his phone. It was just before dawn. Memories of sex faded from his mind as the room seemed to take a sickening lurch in a twisting, falling way. He shuddered. He shivered. All the images of notes danced through his mind, one after the other in a blur. They coalesced, they blended, they formed some perfect geometry - there was a flash - and it was gone.

It hurt to remember anything, so he gave up. He didn't want to think about it. The best possible reason for any of this was some kind of illness or injury. In his line of work there was no good option other than a concussion he dragged himself to bed after and that he should keep silent about. He went out to the balcony and gathered the cup and the book. He started a pot of coffee and opened up the book. He was re-reading The Art of War. He didn't remember bookmarking the page the book had last been open to. After three words he remembered the passage enough to be afraid it was a message from his employer, but not enough to be sure what it said. He tossed the bookmark on the counter and the book across his studio flat to the bed. After all, it hurt to remember. Keep your head down and don't ask questions.

When he went to work the next day his pictographic notes were gone. His records of site traffic observed were gone. He could get them back - it would be trivial - but the shortcuts to get that data were gone. It would've been suicide to hunt for them. He just ignored it. "Head down, do your job," he thought.

He decided to get back to more ordinary work. He started pulling up the tools necessary to tip off police. He considered it busywork. Targets were identified in a database, their activity was to be monitored, an excuse thought up, and then local law enforcement would get a simple anonymous tip. Someone's been selling weed. Someone's been talking to kids online. The police would show up and an offender deemed no longer useful would get hauled off to jail. He didn't know it, but the whole office figured this was how the bills got paid - this was probably what kept the lights on even if they were instructed not to spend much time on it if it pulled away from "the big picture."

When he opened up the list of office-shared software, though, he bit his lip hard. There was a new program available called "Community Take-Down." Software was handed up from the workers and back down from the top with a new name and icon. This one had a polar bear with an arctic fox in its jaws. "Management" were seldom so creative. It rang his spinal chord like a bell and gave him chills. First the strange night, then the missing data, now a new piece of software. Slowly, he placed the cursor over the new program to see the tool-tip.

"Instant threat assessment and enforcement notification of entire site histories - categorize and sterilize entire communities with limited parameters - 99% confidence."

With an unstoppable morbid curiosity he loaded the program. It was clean, slick and well designed. It even had an "EZ-Mode" button, currently active, reducing the number of options to just an input for a site address. His hands shook as he started to type the address he had been monitoring all this time. He only managed a few characters before he was shocked by something he had never once experienced throughout his whole career.

Someone had walked silently up to the opening of his cubicle and spoke to him. A voice. A simple, soft spoken voice. Surprise swept through the cubicles in the form of chairs, mice, pencils, paper, and maybe even a sharp breath - each of them the ordinary soft signs of life all happening now at once - the little things that other workers couldn't suppress as reactions.

"We regret to inform you that we feel you should pursue other opportunities. We thank you for your invaluable contribution to the latest software suite, but we feel your skills would better be applied in the private sector."

The walk to his car was interminable. Each step seemed like it took days. "Dead or invisible... I'm dead or I've gotta stay invisible..." he repeated the words in his head over and over. There was no precedent for what may come in the following days. There was no way to know what had happened.

On the drive home he stopped at a party supply store, a hardware store, and a grocery store. A tank of helium, tubing, and a turkey roasting bag. Each one he paid for in cash. The first people to find his body adorned it with illegal pornography. The first people to call the police were the landlord and the maintenance man. Neither of them could believe he was "one of them." He made the news.

In his own way - in a way he hadn't had time to realize - he had made the single most important breakthrough in data analysis anyone in the industry could remember. It would be attributed two decades later to a professor who was owed a favor. It broke companies. It broke governments. It defined the new world. His employers had only twenty years they could reasonably sit on the algorithms, and they made use of it in every way they could; the majority of which, to avoid suspicion, didn't save any lives.

Enormous shifts in power occurred with very few people aware that they were being manipulated. Great swaths of people could be dissected, categorized, identified, and manipulated with pinpoint accuracy, and the means of reaching an end could be spat out in seconds by any reasonably powerful computer.

Nobody would ever know that it all came from the work of a self-hating, self-controlling, self-destructing pedophile in the NSA.