Banker's Hours Another day on the farm.... I always check the access log before I open my office door. I run a RoomScan and wave my Sniffer over the desk and chair. It pays to be careful, especially after what happened to Dan last week. He WAS falling behind, and he WAS making the whole group look bad. But still, a Frager under your chair is a tough way to get reassigned. Tore the heck out of his next performance review. Who could have run that Op? Barbara? She got the office and a raise out of it. But she was onsite that week. And she would have needed an accomplice--you can never trust them, I know from experience. Jerry? Our Respected Leader, trying to get the group back on track? As if he had the chops to get past Protection. Unless the Company is involved. Now that's a disturbing thought.... Anyway, I sit down and log-in through security challenges until I get to my work space. I could Telcon from home and have less worry about the office environment, but it takes forever to deal with the protocols. Even then, some of the data is restricted to office links. So, when you get down to it, it's really easier to brave the street. Higher data rate, too. Plus I can stay in contact with internecine events that could cut off my credit supply. My current project isn't all that interesting. We build plugins that wake up auditors when someone attaches stuff to the credit flow. Some of it's pretty sophisticated, but automating greed doesn't really enhance my clock rate. I do have a few ideas I'm keeping to myself, just in case the Company decides to rightsize me. My group's Eddy-analysis just went into beta. There's a message from one of our Field Engineers in my e-mail. So hey, today we may have got one for you. The transaction cross-check got a blip at about 11:15 but there were no bells and whistles up in control. I saved all the logs for you in the usual places. Happy hunting. B. This particular guy is pretty sharp, but he keeps doing things like that. It would be nice if he got used to saying where the usual damn places were, so I didn't have to go hacking around in my Base to find them. I tell him: Thanks, dddduuudde.... I left a beer for you in your usual e-mail slot. Bang. Bang. Eddys run huge numbers of transactions through phantom accounts for very short periods, like milliseconds. They raise the average balance so the owner can collect more interest. Usually, somebody notices that their float-constants have dropped and gets suspicious. So we go poking around in the transaction-rates looking for peaks. My group's latest addition to the state-of-the-so-called-art is a trans-rate correlator that has some chance of distinguishing between normal high-volume and an Eddy. One thing to check for is identical amounts being posted and debited in adjacent time-slices. That's what our happy FE just caught. Except the rate threshold hadn't triggered a report flag. Not a good sign. I rummage around in the outputs and come up with some theories: Yo, Bubba. How about you take two tweaks of the time discriminator window for that account set and call me in the morning. On my front I'll patch in an amount averager module. Maybe they split the trans so the rates wouldn't trigger. Don't overexert. You looked a little weak on that last message. Your Fiend I put in that last part because I know this guy is into some heavy lifting in his spare time. He looks way too polished. I patch the module onsite and send a trace report to the group, so Jerry will know I'm doing something besides playing Super-Pong with his token. Then I check my ProbLog assignments and come up with a message from one of our older installations: We are having trouble with one of the delta flow modules installed in the Blue Level system. The records are attached. Can you have someone contact me. Thank you. Susan Susan was on the internal training team when we did the install. She's quite a piece of work and I made sure she got my extra-special attention. It almost paid off. Our e-mail ran hot and heavy as the system went in, and after the acceptance test I was sure she was going to give me her home log-in. Then one day she just signed off I check out the records she sent along and find that one of their Drip monitors is acting spastic. The usual Drip diverts minute amounts from a lot of accounts, in hopes that the reduction in any one account will fall below the stochastic thresholds and not be noticed. Susan's professional problem is a delta-flow detector that's dipping into the accounting noise before it locks on. Suze! Long time. Things aren't the same here without you.... Looks like the bad guys are catching up with our smarts. I think the business noise levels are going to need hipper filtering. Somebody here is working on a sharpened Crutchfield Chaos algorthm. I'll keep him in the loop. I'm going to have to get permission to put a full monitor on your account set. It'll be a drag on performance, and probably take a special session of the Directors to attach, but it shouldn't take too long to calibrate. Write early and often. MS Once, to find a Drip, I actually had to add up all the transactions in the entire set. Doing that with chips optimized for non-linear differential equations took forever. Funny how some things change. I go back to my regular bell-whistling on some ComLink monitors. Comlink scams look for accounts that can be changed without disturbing the check-sums. I'm working on Switches and Bleeders right now, because they use the same techniques to corrupt different data fields. Bleeders redirect individual transactions while they're on the wire, changing the destination account numbers by a digit here and there. A switch looks perfectly fine, but maybe a little unusual. Say, one day the customer has a huge craving for caviar and champagne. Or the source and destination accounts get swapped, and a little extra drains out, but only now and then. The trick is to have smarter usage-analyzers than the bad guys. We can access an entire account history and do a better flow-analysis than just about any hacker. But it sucks down a lot of cycles to catch a Corrupter, so most of the time the Bank just lets them go as 'processing errors'. While I'm fiddling with one of my CredVent transforms, I get an incoming from Susan. My hopes blip. Briefly. Hey Mikie. Sorry I didn't write, but you know how things are.... I'll get the ball rolling on this end so maybe it'll only take an Act of God to put in the monitor. I was hoping it was just a glitch in my system. XO Susan Damn straight there's a glitch in her system. But I already tried to fix it. Ok thanks. Lets get virtual for a pizza or something. MS I don't expect an answer any time soon. All of this is routine nonsense, but I'm pretty proud of my Sniffer. It goes one or two better than the usual Bug-N-Bombs that only recognize unauthorized electronics. The Sniffer can detect organics. The janitor passes, because he's usually too pumped on HappyGass to be a threat to anything. Besides, he gets a double-cavity search before being allowed on the floor. If people I tend to trust or--not to put too fine a line on it, am indispensable to--show up, the Sniffer cross-checks if they've been around on legitimate business recently. Of course, the friendlies-list changes pretty frequently. All in all, the Sniffer gives me a significant advantage, and it's saved my ass once or twice. I would build them for sale, but that would nullify my edge. It's hard to get a start in business these days. Well, the day drags on. There's some rumbling in the building. Maybe a management shakeup. But no new OrgChart is broadcast to our node, so it probably doesn't affect my project. Management politicking is beyond Byzantine. One division or another is always getting what appears to be the upper hand, and then sticking it to the rest of us. The preferred penance is a new Request for Comment, or, if the ascendant division is in Operations, a new approval form that needs to be signed by someone no one has ever heard of. I guess we all need to do our part to keep the red tape lubricated. They usually leave Engineering alone, because they know we can peek at their account numbers. When something does hit our fan, we mostly find out because Jerry starts demanding a new status report. The 80/15/5 rule applies here: 80% of requests, if ignored, will go away on their own; 15% will be superseded; 5% will actually have to be done. I can usually spot the 80-percenters right away, but ferreting out the rest is an art for which I have no time. So I keep a library of possible reports. And I have a status-generator program I got off the net. The StatGen makes up a slick-looking package with graphs, charts, tables, and time-lines. A mondo serious document, with more pages than anyone will ever read. Right before the executive summary, with its bullet points and easy-to-read fonts, I have a section from "The Penal Colony". Fifty copies handle everyone in the division above the level of Slide Rule Mechanic I. No one has ever complained--I like to deliver my content on time and under budget. Lunch time rolls around. I use the cafeteria slot to get my randomized meal. The trick here is to double-check for substances some wacko might have inserted just for fun. The QuickAnal takes a minute or two longer and costs a bit more, but the confidence boost is worth it. Any dip-wit could put something weird in the supply pipe just for the HackerPoints. After lunch there is a project meeting. These are always held by Telcon to minimize flaming. The hallways are pretty safe, but getting a group of my co-workers together in a single room can still be prohibitively costly. A few months ago Robert managed to turn the carpet in his office into an oxidizable compound with stuff he got past the detectors in a lunch thermos. He sprayed two of my compatriots who'd disagreed with his opinions about formatting, and sparked them with his Stunner. Alice got badly burned at that meeting. Robert got off with a reprimand, because he didn't damage any data. They've had Telcons ever since. Today's is the usual glepsch of progress reports, attempted morale boostings, and covert threats of bene cuts if we don't make up the work lost when that nerd Alan erased Monique's report-generator source code, because she sent e-mail to everyone complaining about his SysAdder response times. He thought he'd covered his tracks by making it look like a silicon crash, but we've got more levels of AdminTrace than even he knew about, apparently. He got boosted. They didn't even let him pick up his armor on the way out. Monique and I had to disassemble the RepGen and regenerate the code. I helped more than we let on, so my product rate is down. The boss thinks I'm goofing. But I know they don't have anyone else on tap, so I'm cool. And Monique owes me one, which never hurts. Since the Robert/Alice-flame incident, we don't do design or code reviews, either. The costs are just too high. After the meeting I am putting the finishing touches on my module when the Telcon bleeps again. Hell, the meeting's over, now what! I connect, "Yah." "Hey, Mike, it's Jimmy." "Jimmy?" I hate it when people call me Mike. "Yeah. Susan told me you were gonna run something up for us." I remember the guy. Site support. Incapable of overriding a default icon without yanking a wire out of the wall. Definite manager material. "I thought I told you never to call me here..." "Ha." But at least he wasn't sure if it was a joke. "Look, what can we do to get this rolling? I can load up anything you need." "Well, what I NEED is permission from the Directors." "Yeah, yeah, Susan is working on that. But can't we get a little something in place? I'd like to learn a bit more about how it works. I can help." Great. Now I need this guy's help. "I could send you the files, but like I said, we can't do much until the go-ahead." "Cool. Send it and tell me what to do." How do people miss the point so easily! Maybe I don't make myself clear? Oh, well. "O.K., here's what you need." I click the analysis file over to him. "You just have to drop it into the Triggers directory, and then when the time comes..." "Where's the Triggers directory!" "On the Blue Ops system, where it's always been." He IS getting on my nerves. "I don't see it." "Here, just pop me online for a minute and I'll do it." "But I'm not supposed to let outsiders..." "For Bill's sake, you wanted help. I don't need this." "O.K., O.K....There you're in." "Thanks so much." I found the directory. "See it's under Systems/Operations. There." "Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting. "I'll just drop the file in." I install the file, and, as a matter of course, leave myself a little backdoor. Just in case. "Hey, cool. Let me just make myself a note so I don't forget where it is." "You do that." "So how come we put it in Triggers?" "Because it's a damn trigger." "But why?" "When. You. Track. Some. Thing. Some. Other. Thing. Has. To. Start. Up. Every. Time. It. Happens. That's. A. Trigger." Dickhead. "Oh, yeah..." He looks like he is getting the drift of my mood. Finally. "Hey, sorry to bother you. Hope we can work together again." "De nada." I drop the connection before he can launch a new brainstorm. Now what WAS I doing? I hate being distracted like that. That's why I use e-mail. If that guy does make manager, and he can't possibly keep this job much longer, there'll be major problems all around. Then I get an evil little idea. I have that backdoor over there. I normally just use those ratholes if I need to update something or fix a permission, but I could be more creative.... I could send some nasty e-mail to Suz, from this dweeb. She would report it. He would deny. They would investigate. And find some questionable material from her on his system. A little black mark would appear in his PersRec file, and he would probably disappear. It would be doing everyone a great big favor. And not hurt my self-esteem, either. I make up a couple of red herrings to store on his disk. Jimmy, Call me anytime. Susan and Jimmy. You made my evening. XXX Suze And the shall-we-say trigger message: Hey. Suze, I love the sexy response times you have on your home system. I'll send your log-in out to my friends. Hope we can connect...real soon. Jimmy Of course, for all I know, it might be true. In which case she wouldn't take the bait. And I don't even want to think about her response times. I bounce the messages off our print server, dump them into my convenient rathole, run through a router loop into Jimmy's folder, set them to go off in a week with "accidental" cc's to their entire group, and erase the audit trail. Jimbo won't have a clue what hit him. Even if they decide to believe the poor doofus, some hotshot SysAdder will lose the scent in a deleted spool file. It's a great feeling to accomplish something worthwhile. At last it's time to get out. I check the hallway, loosen up my Stunner, seal my office door with my thumbprint, and head for the guard station. I'm extra cautious since Prabakar got to Alice on her way out last week. He had to know the interface spec for her module so he could finish his program, and she was being coy about it. He had his Stunner out before she could reach hers--one of the guards had to gas the whole hallway to stop him. She's had a tough time working here. Good thing you can trust the guards, at least as far as you can throw them. They know they'll end up on the street if any of us get damaged before we finish this project. Wouldn't want to run into them on the outside, though. These days, Outside is a hellish place if you're not prepared. Good armor is usually enough to deter the sleazebags who are after your CreIDt card. And high-quality firepower, carefully displayed, tends to de-select you in the eyes of the guy who just got hit with a Bank 'processing error'. Back when there were governments, they called this Mutually Assured Destruction. Now it's just Cooperation Through Superior Firepower. That leaves the joyriders and firefight junkies. If your reaction time is down, the Savers will collect any spare bits left lying around and your life in the DataSphere will end when your account is empty. I guess Jerry would miss my status reports after a while though. To avoid any unpleasantness with my co-workers, I leave at a random time every day and pull out at different speeds. That way it's less likely that someone might catch me leaving. Besides, I don't really have any enemies, not like some people I know in my group. Anytime you're on the road, you have to watch out for the usual stupid driver tricks, but the forward firepower on my Commandant-Sensei can clear a path through anything smaller than a SemiAuto. The professional drivers are too concerned with their schedules to want to hassle with the damage, so they stay clear. And the Jupiter owners just see a blur when the bike runs a circle around them. It's great what cooperative Japanese-German engineering did with the classic British design after the Pound disappeared. It's the YoungMothers in their Volvo Assaults that I have to watch out for. Most of the time they don't even know they're on the road, let alone that someone else is there with them. My favorite wake-up call for these situations is an IncenDart that pierces the first armor layer and injects a squirt of napalm between the blast shield and the Kevlar upholstery. The target sees the flameball and feels the heat flash before their fire-control takes over. It generally melts their cozy interior and reduces them to tears. No permanent damage, unless their makeup flashpoints. Everyone else is pretty polite, because they know making a mess on the highway only slows them down. After checking the tamper indicators, I fire up the Norton and click the door open. This is the dicey part. If anyone from work wants to get to me, they'll be waiting here. I start rolling slowly toward the door. The side monitors check out, so I switch on the supercharger and blast onto the street. Most fun I've had all day.... I decide to stop for some BQue. It's not in the best part of town, but then look what happens in the best parts. Besides, all the DriveBys have extra insurance for their customers: If bad things happen to your clientele... Getting home, the RadLink says the door seals look O.K., so I punch up the codes and roll on in. Just to be sure I wave the Sniffer around the stairway, but it comes up negative. I run the BQue and a couple brewsters through my ChemAnal, which is more sophisticated than the one at work. When they check out, it's time to idle my process. I turn on the Surfer and skim a few hundred channels. I used to sample the old-timers' nodes, but it got too boring. All they wanted to do was talk about the old days, when you could actually touch people you met on the Link. They used to arrange to meet, F2F. Seems really twisted to me. Dangerous, too. Just thinking of the biologicals that could be transmitted makes me queasy. Besides, how did they implement the SafeWord interlocks? Scary. But that was all before the Bank got the DataSphere working and eliminated the need. After a while, I realize I'm done with the brews and haven't seen anything I want to stop on, so I bail out for some downtime. And tomorrow is another day. xxx