“Hello, this is Holden from DOP administrative building forty-seven, what do you need?”
“I’m from DAI, and I have a Code 6-18-5-5 to report.”
“Citizen data transfer number?”
“011-33-1-78-56-95-60.”
“Hold on a moment…that checks out.  Alright, now I need your operative number and the incident area number.”
“56-2-73-92-48-82 and 4-34-72-72-19, respectively.”
“Right.  And can you fax over both the Code 6-18-5-5 form and the ALLISOP form?”
“I wasn’t aware I needed those to make a report.”
“You do.  New DPS regulation.  Call back after contacting John in DPS for info on the new form, and complete the code form.”
To the casual listener, this conversation seemed as inane and boring as any other made by one Planner to another.  However, what the caller didn’t know was Holden was deliberately sabotaging the caller’s efforts, if they can be called that.  The Code 6-18-5-5 form couldn’t be completed because the Code 6-18-5-5 forms for batches of citizens had to be completed in sequential order.  This was decided, as were most things in his organization, by committee.  He knew, because he was on the committee at the time.  The clogged pipeline of forms all but ensured this would be going nowhere fast.
And the ALLISOP form?  He just made it up on the spot.  A last line of defense.  He didn’t give a last name for John, and there were literally thousands of employees in the Data Protection Subdivision.  Given the rapidly changing nature of jargon and processes, and the general cluelessness of any given employee on any given day, the caller would never be the wiser.
Holden never felt guilty about this kind of thing.  He knew exactly what he was disrupting, and in fact, the report the caller was trying to file was about him.  This was just another day at work, obscuring the truth and hiding behind bureaucratic nonsense, all in the name of serving the public interest.  He’d been doing this for years.
One would be surprised that Holden was a Planner, were they to know the details of his childhood without the details of his life as a young adult.  When Holden was eight, he was in an automotive accident. 
A malfunctioning computer and spike in packet loss had conspired against him.  On a two lane road on the edge of a cliff, the car didn’t send its location to the DOT network.  When this happens, correctly functioning cars extrapolate the possible positions of the vehicle as to avoid a collision.  The other car, however, just reset its map data, acting as if the other car wasn’t there.  Because it didn’t recognize the existence of the other car, it moved to pass a semi-truck on the road.  By the time the vehicle Holden was in transmitted its position once more, it was too late. 
Both computers instantly recognized that if there was a head-on collision, that there was a 79% chance that all people would die.  The car that was passing couldn’t come back into its lane because it was aside the semi-truck.  Holden’s car couldn’t swerve off the road to the left without hitting the semi.  But if either car veered off the cliff, both the semi-truck and the car still on the road would have come away completely unharmed. 
In situations like this, decisions are made by the car occupant’s VTS score, which stands for value to society.  As a child, Holden’s score was low.  His father’s had been torpedoed by a brief escapade with drugs in his teenaged years, and his mother’s was affected by her years-long period of unemployment.  The other car’s occupant was a state senator. 
The resulting crash killed Holden’s parents and broke almost every bone in Holden’s body.
News outlets didn’t see it that way.  Headlines everywhere praised the system for saving the senators life, and after all, who could argue with that?  Highway fatalities had gone down from sixty-six thousand per year to four hundred per year.  Holden was too young to understand the logistics of it all, he just knew that his parents died because the system wasn’t good enough.
Not even three decades later, he was working as a Planner, deciding and updating VTS scores.  The formula used was long and complicated, but the largest factors were IQ, career, lineage, fertility, political affiliation, criminal record, age, and disabilities.  A few factors were subjective enough to allow for room for change if a Planner saw fit.  All it took was a well-placed bribe to raise your score by an entire order of magnitude. 
VTS scores were used for almost everything, from hiring selections to medical care.  It had been so long since they were implemented by the DOP that the only people who had but vague and fuzzy memories of before were now old and senile, to the point where their opinions mattered little to the overall culture.
Holden did think about how his decisions affected people.  After all, that’s why he made them.  To affect people’s lives.  It was one of the few ways he derived satisfaction from the day to day grind.  One of his more recent victories in this sense was when he managed to remove his neighbor Chuck from his life. 
Every day previous, he and Chuck had the same type of “conversation”, every morning, as Chuck would wait for him on his lawn, and ambush him as he walked to his car.
“Ah, Holden.  You got up an hour early today!  Trying to make it to a big meeting, I imagine?”
“Yeah,” he lied.  He was to trying to leave before Chuck was awake.
“Well I can understand that.  Did you hear about what happened to poor Jenny last night?  Real shame, that is.”  At this point, Chuck was standing in between Holden and Holden’s car.
“Uh-huh.  See you later.”
“Hank was shocked.  Almost everyone couldn’t believe it. I was thinking maybe you and me could do something for Jenny, like maybe…”  At this point, Holden stopped listening, and just nodded his head silently in the vague hope Chuck would stop talking at him.  Of course, no such thing occurred until he closed the car door.
For two days, Holden poured over records from Chuck’s life.  The initial search was for items that could get his neighbor jailed.  While Holden was certain that he could find something along those lines, he was about to give up after only twelve hours.  He didn’t have the patience for such a task.  But on the thirteenth hour he finally found something. 
Chuck rode his car to work seven days a week on a route alongside a minor metro line.  Commuting with a car alongside a bus route or train track was considered a waste of community resources, and fineable by up to $12,000 a month.  There was no way Chuck the janitor could afford that, so he would have to use the metro.  To do that, he would have to get to the bus stop by 6:00 AM and could get home at the earliest by 7:00 PM.
Holden was ecstatic.  This was genius!  He would never have to talk to Chuck again.  Clicking his pen, he signed the fine authorization form, knowing that in only a few days, Chuck would bother him no more.
He knew he could change people’s lives with his decisions.  His decisions, rulings, verdicts, edicts, decrees, dictates--in his mind there was no difference.  He had established his kingdom and here he was God.
This temporary break from reality was just that though: temporary.  In the end, he was still subject to unhappiness that he had allowed to begin defining his life. Ultimately, for as much control as he exerted over the fates of others, he recognized how little control he had over his own fate. 
Every one of his requests to relocate to a different town had been denied by the Population Distribution Department.  When he planned an extension to his house, the Department of Habitation Safety forbade it. 
Holden knew he was higher up on the food chain than most, but what was the point of that when there were still those above him?  This line of reasoning brewed dissatisfaction, which fermented to discontent, aged to displeasure, and boiled over into despair.
His house was not his own.  The Department of Housing and Urban Development choose the design and he could not change it.  His diet was not his own.  The Department of Health and Human Services saw to that.  While the Department of Transportation was deciding when and where and how he drove, the Department of Commerce was deciding what he could and couldn’t buy.
For once in his life, Holden wanted something that was really his.  He wasn’t going to let anyone stop him.  Not the DHS, not the PDD, not his nosy coworkers or annoying neighbors, and certainly not the goddamn DOT.
He would do what his parents could not; he would take control of his life.
Now that he had made a firm decision in his mind, he began to plot how to get away with his crime.  He had always considered the careful manipulation of bureaucracy to be a talent of his, and this was a challenge unlike any other in difficulty and yet at the same time not too dissimilar to his other exploits.
It became necessary, as part of this plan, to change his citizen data transfer number from 011-66-1-78-56-95-60 to 011-33-1-78-56-95-60 in the process, but that itself only took pulling a few favors.  The actual hardship in that was changing all the relevant documentation in such a way that it wouldn’t be noticed or so that nothing could be done about it.
He knew that automated cars sent reports automatically to the DAI when their sensors detected a vehicle that wasn’t relaying its position to the others.  After a certain number of these error messages, an agent at the DAI would check whose car was either malfunctioning or was modified. When the agent had a suspect, they call the DOP to file a Code 6-18-5-5 report.  The onus was then on the DOP to investigate the matter.
Holden saw his opportunity when he was offered a position of the streamlining of processing all 6-18 type reports.  Although he hadn’t been blessed with a gilded tongue, he managed to convince them that such forms should be filed in sequential order.
After that came the more interesting part, at least to him. Using the old schematics he found, the tools in his basement, and the scrap he took from what the DAI marked for disposal in a nearby warehouse, he fashioned a manual steering system for his Ford 2086 Ranger.
Driving at first was sketchy at best, but after a week he could drive well enough to not raise the suspicion of patrolling police vehicles.  Nobody paid much attention to cars, they rarely did anything unsafe, so pedestrians had no respect for how deadly they could be.
Holden had never been happier.  Every chance he got, he drove.  As soon as he was out of sight, he went as fast as possible without flipping his truck.  Sure, he was risking his life, but it was finally his to risk. 
But then one Sunday, Chuck didn’t leave by 6:00 AM.
“Holden old buddy!  Why, it’s been sometime since we talked.”
“Did you miss the bus?”
“Oh no, I just took the day off.  Been one of those weeks, you know?  Ever since I started taking the bus it’s been harder and harder to get some sleep.”
“That’s too bad,” Holden said, walking briskly towards his car.
“How ‘bout we catch up sometime this afternoon?  We could round up some other guys and…”  Holden stopped listening and shut his car door.
As Chuck saw the steering wheel, first confusion and then shock flashed on his face.
When Holden came back to his neighborhood, the FBI and DOT had his entire house marked off as a crime scene.  There were agents and detectives everywhere, documenting and inspecting.  An unknowing observer might have thought they found somebody selling plutonium from their basement, but Holden knew immediately what had happened.  Luckily, they had not noticed him looking at his house through some trees.
Holden had plenty of gas in the trunk.  He turned around and drove south.  He kept going until he crossed over the border into Mexico, never to return.