The remaining 21 percent of his time was taken up dealing with customers. This being Knez Mihailova, a notable proportion of the customers were well off. Miloš had quickly noticed that there was no apparent correlation between wealth and intelligence. The richer the client, the more they struggled with their smartphones. Almost all had mastered turning the device off and on. Beyond that, most could usually manage phone calls, WhatsApp messages, SMS, and playing music. But even these simple functions still baffled some.
Miloš pondered long and hard as to why people were so stupid, but he struggled to come up with any answer. It didn’t really bother him. Quite the contrary — their incompetence provided him with endless entertainment. Whether selling a new phone or just swapping a SIM card, he had ample time to install the custom malware that he had written which acted as a Remote Access Tool (RAT). The customers, of course, had absolutely no idea what Miloš was up to. Nor did the service providers, nor did Google or Apple, who had created the environment in which Miloš liked to play.
Instead, the customers squealed with delight when Miloš got their shiny new phones up and running and demonstrated how to play Flappy Bird which, again to his surprise, they considered to be some form of achievement (here I differ from Miloš as I believe that Flappy Bird is irritatingly difficult and that Miloš underestimates his facility with this game — of course, by his standards the Flappy Bird trick is indeed unremarkable).
Having safely built his RAT a new lair on the customer’s device, he would stroll back home across Studentski Trg and down Dositijeva before he arrived at his father’s large, ghostly apartment.
Here he would start remotely scanning the contents of his latest victim’s phone. His favorite sport was going through WhatsApp. He had noticed early on that people were invariably less discreet and less inhibited on WhatsApp than they were on their normal messaging apps.
He calculated that 73 percent of users talked with disarming frankness about sex in their exchanges. Roughly 18 percent would regularly send explicit photographs or videos of themselves. These were not always what one might expect. One middle-aged man sent short videos of himself eating breakfast naked. Miloš concluded that the recipient was another man. The morning fare consisted of a bowl of fruit. After the recipient had viewed the video, he would send back one word — the name of a new fruit. And the next morning, the sender would once again sit at his breakfast table, but with the new fruit.
Miloš watched this ritual for about a week before getting witlessly bored. But it did give him a few days of contemplation. Whichever way he considered it, intellectually or emotionally, he simply couldn’t grasp why anyone would derive the least pleasure from this activity, although, he noted, the fruits were ever more exotic, and it had inspired him to track down and sample a passion fruit. Not as easy in Belgrade as you might think, even these days.
Blackmail, threats, and passive aggression were almost ubiquitous on the WhatsApp exchanges. Again, this perplexed Miloš. Why were people so unpleasant to each other? What satisfaction did they derive from this? And did his relative calm mean that he was too ordinary?
In truth, he knew he was far from ordinary, but the vicious and cruel emotional habits of so many humans were still something he could not fathom.
Leaving aside the monstrous intrusion into others’ privacy, his examination of the phones was vital to sustaining Miloš’s good humor. Ever since his mother died when he was fourteen, his emotional life had all but atrophied. His father, whom he suspected of having had a role in his mother’s death, showed no interest in Miloš whatsoever. Recently, Miloš had been researching his father’s past to discover that his rise to wealth and notoriety had coincided with the eleven years of Miloševic’s turbulent reign.
The more he understood his father, the less he liked him. Yet he was entirely dependent on him financially. His father barely exchanged any words with Miloš. But he was generous and did not use money as a tool to blackmail or control his son. There was always food in the house, and on those rare occasions when Miloš asked for something extra, his father gave it to him without hesitation. But in exchange, his father made it clear that he wished to have no relationship with his son beyond this. Miloš was alone.
Miloš sometimes came home to find his father entertaining his rather crude, unpleasant colleagues. There was business in the air, but Miloš didn’t know what, nor did he inquire. Sometimes, instead of a business colleague, the visitor would be an impressionable young woman draping herself around his father. Just as he couldn’t quite understand the stupidity of wealthy people, he was dumbfounded that any woman who was more or less his own age would want to engage in any kind of sexual interaction with his father.
One spring morning, Miloš was at work alone. No colleagues, no customers. He smiled and settled into his chair to explore the Farm in the American Midwest. He had received intelligence that aliens had recently landed. He suspected they may have been preparing for an all-out attack. Again, he was called upon to save the earth from executors of the dreaded Supreme Intergalactic Court.
In the distance, he spotted one and began to creep toward the target with exactly the requisite stealth to ensure that the alien wouldn’t be alerted to his presence. His finger was on the trigger of his laser grenade launcher — the alien perfectly in his sights. Hit this guy and Miloš will have delivered perhaps a fatal blow to the aliens’ tactics of establishing their forward base in North America. But accuracy was everything…
“Good morning.” The interruption caused him to lose his balance. The alien’s head turned. Miloš had no choice but to cut, run, and lose most of the data from the session.
Inside he was seething.
Then he saw the customer. Never had anger dissipated with such rapidity and such sincerity. If this is a dream, Miloš thought, then let me never wake up. Unlike so many young women Miloš had observed, there was nothing artificial about her. No hair dye, no spray-on tan, only the merest hint of makeup, the most discreet jewelry, deep green eyes set in features symmetrical enough to launch a thousand Xenonauts.
Miloš had to close his half-open mouth consciously. It had momentarily suffered an unexpected attack of lockjaw. Pulling himself together, he inquired how he could help her.
As effortless as she was in her appearance, so was she in verbal exchanges. “Why, thank you. I do hope you can sort this out. My iPhone appears to run out of power in less than an hour. Is it time to ask for an upgrade?”
“Normally, madame,” said Miloš before clearing his throat, “I would suggest that you invest in an expensive upgrade. Under pressure from my superiors, you understand. But, in all honesty, you probably only need to replace the battery. It’ll take an hour or so, but once I’ve done it, it should be as good as new.”
“That is so very kind of you,” the woman replied.
“You’re most welcome,” said Miloš with exaggerated politeness.
She pulled the iPhone out of her back pocket, placed it on the desk, and then with those green eyes seizing Miloš’s gaze, she gently waved goodbye. “See you in an hour…”
As he examined her iPhone, unrestrained desire surged through Miloš’s body. The phone requested a code. He tapped in 0000 and the lock screen dissolved to reveal the woman’s secrets. Notwithstanding his sudden infatuation, he muttered his familiar rhetorical question, “Why do they make it so easy?”
That evening, his usual saunter turned into a breathless sprint down Dositijeva. Once home, he kicked off his shoes and walked quickly through the large, empty apartment until he reached his bedroom. He switched on his computer and immediately accessed the phone remotely.