A Day in the Life As usual, when I got to the office I checked the access log before opening the door. It looked OK, so I ran a quick Double-B scan and waved my Sniffer over my chair and desk. Nothing. It pays to be extra careful after what happened to Bob last week. He WAS falling behind, and he WAS doing it in a way that made the whole group look bad. But still it was a tough way to get reassigned. Someone slipped past the protection ring that the Company supposedly guarantees for all of us, one of the major Benes for this job, I think...or thought. They put a Frager under his chair, tore him up bad, too. I'm still puzzled about who ran that Op. Could have been Barbara. She got the office and a raise out of it. But she was on site that week. She would need an accomplice, and you can never trust them, I know from experience. Could have been Jerry, the boss trying to get the group back on track, but he didn't have the chops to get past the protection. Unless the Company is in on it. This is a very disturbing idea... Just another day so far. I sit down and login through the security layers until I get to my working area. I could Telcon from home and have less worry about the office environment, but it takes so long to get through the foreign protection procedures. Even then, some of the data is restricted to office links. It's usually easier to brave the street getting here. Higher data rate too. Plus I can stay in closer contact with internecine events that could cut off my credit supply. This project isn't all that interesting. We build a bunch of widgets that interface to financial security systems and warn the bank auditors when someone tries to attach stuff like Drips, Bleeders, Switches, and Eddys to the credit flow. Some of these programs can get pretty sophisticated, but still, I'm just another cog in the automation of greed. I have some ideas for new scams I'm keeping to myself. Just in case the Company decides to rightsize me. My group is working on an Eddy analysis system that just went into beta. There was a message from one of our FE guys in my email: 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 told him. Thanks dddduuudde.... I left a beer for you in your usual email slot. Bang. Bang. Eddys run huge numbers of transactions through phantom accounts for very short periods of time, sometimes just milliseconds. They keep the average balance in the phantom really high so the owner can collect interest. Usually some big customer notices that their float-constants have dropped and gets suspicious. Then we go poking around in the transaction rate records 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 business and an Eddy. One thing to check for is identical amounts being posted and debited in adjacent time slices, and that's just what our happy FE had caught. Except the rate threshold hadn't triggered a report flag. I rummaged around in the outputs for a while and came up with some theories: Yo, Bubba. How about you take two tweaks of the time discrimination 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 that last part in because I know this guy is into some heavy weightlifting in his spare time. He looks too healthy. I patched the module on site and sent a trace report out to the group so Jerry would know I was doing something other than playing Super-Pong with his nickel. Then I checked my Problem Log assignments and came up with a message from one of our operators at an older installation. 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 is quite a piece of work and I made sure she got my extra attention. It almost paid off. Our email was running hot and heavy as the system went in, and after the acceptance test I was sure she was going to give me her real login name. Then one day she just signed off. I checked out the records she sent along and found that one of their Drip monitors was acting spastic. The usual unauthorized Drip will attempt to divert minute amounts from a lot of accounts, in hopes that the actual reduction in any one account will fall below the stochastic thresholds and not be noticed. Susan's professional problem was a delta-flowrate detector that was dipping below the accounting noise just before it could establish a lock. 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 algorithm. 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 an account set because the usual delta-flowrates were too noisy. Doing all that addition with chips optimized for non-linear differential equations took forever. Funny how things change. I put in the necessary requests to attach to the running site and went back to my regular work polishing some transmission line monitors. All the Comline scams are based on subtle data corruption routines in the transmission media. The best ones look for accounts that can be changed without disturbing the checksums. 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. They generally change the destination account numbers by a few bytes. Switches are what look like unusual but legitimate charges to accounts. Like one day the customer had a sudden desire for caviar and champagne. They might switch the destination and source accounts for debits, so a little extra gets sucked out of your account now and then. The trick with these is to have smarter usage analyzers than the bad guys. We can get access to the entire account history, and do a better credit-event flow analysis than just about any hacker. Once you narrow it down you have to double encrypt and retransmit, either on a spot check basis, or everything on the wire if you suspect something funny in a particular link. It sucks down a lot of cycles to catch one, so most of the time they just let them go as "Processing Errors." While I was fiddling with one of my credit-event transforms I got an incoming from Susan. My hopes blipped. 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 am pretty proud of the Sniffer I built. It goes one or two better than the Double-B's that can only recognize unauthorized EMI from bugs and bombs. My Sniffer can also detect organic molecules in the air, in fairly high concentrations so far, and compare them to samples belonging to the few people authorized to be in my office. The janitor is one, but he's usually to pumped on HappyGass to be any threat. Besides they all go through a double cavity search before being allowed onto the floor. If people I tend to trust or, not to put too fine a line on it, am indispensable too, show up, the Sniffer can cross-check if they've been in the office on legitimate business recently. Of course, the friendlies list changes pretty frequently. All in all, the Sniffer gives me a significant advantage in the corporate world, and it's saved my ass once or twice too. I would build them for sale, but that would negate the personal edge and open me up to a lot more concerted competition. It's hard to get a start in business these days. Well, the day drags on. There is some rumbling in the building and rumors of a management shakeup, but no one broadcasts a new Orgchart to our node so it probably didn't affect my project. Management politicing can get pretty Byzantine. One division or another is always getting what appears to be the upper hand, and then sticking it to the rest of us. Their preferred punishment is to require some new kind of report or request for comment, or if the ascendant division is in operations, they issue a new approval form that needs to be signed by someone no one has ever heard of before. I think some of these outfits have full time bureaucracy generators. They usually leave the engineering people alone because they know we can get a peek at their account numbers if we put our minds to the task. When some thing does hit our fan, we mostly find out because Jerry starts demanding a new kind of status report. I have determined empirically that the 80/15/5 rule applies here: 80% of requests, if ignored, will go away on their own. 15% will be superseded and become superfluous. 5% actually have to be done. I can usually spot the 80 percenters right away but ferreting out the 15% is an art for which I don't have time. So I keep a library of possible reports and run a status generator program that I got off the net. Mostly I can feed random numbers into it for responses, but sometimes it looks important enough that I have to actually answer the question myself. The generator makes up a slick looking printout full of what looks like meaningful text, with graphs, tables, time-lines, and charts. It can fill up more pages than anyone will ever read. I set it up so the last couple pages before the executive summary, with its bullet points and easy to read fonts, are from "The Penal Colony". No one has ever complained. Then it prints out about 50 copies and mails them to everyone in the division above the level of junior geek. It's worked so far. Lunch time rolls around and I go down to the cafeteria slot to get my randomized meal. The trick here is to double check the food for substances that some wacko might have put in just for fun. The randomizer already makes it virtually impossible to target food for someone specific, for instance you don't reveal your account number until after the food is delivered. But there's always the off chance that someone will try a blanket coverage, so I'm in the habit of using the QuickAnal service on everything at work. It takes a minute or two longer and costs a bit more, but the confidence boost is worth it. Some dip-wit hacker might put something weird in the supply pipe just to prove he can do it. After lunch there is a project meeting. These are now always held by Telecon to minimize flaming. The hallways are pretty safe, and everyone has to go through the weapons detectors when they enter, 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 part of the carpet in his office back into an oxidizable compound with stuff he got past the detectors in a lunch thermos. He sprayed two or three our compatriots, who were known to disagree with his opinions about widget formatting, and sparked them with his Stunner before they could respond. Alice got pretty badly burned at that meeting. Robert got off with a reprimand because he didn't damage any data and they've had Telecon's ever since. Today's meeting was the usual glepsch of progress reports, attempted morale boosting, and veiled 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 had sent email 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 then even he knew, apparently. He got boosted. They didn't even let him pick up his armor on the way out, so I guess we don't need to worry about him again. Monique and I had to disassemble the report generator and regenerate the code. I helped more than we let on, so my product rate is down. The boss thinks I'm goofing. He made a veiled reference to my delivery schedule, 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 put the finishing touches on my module and made a copy in a directory that even the Sysadders can't find. Don't want to repeat the Monique/Alan thing again if I can help it. Just to be on the safe side I always backup everything to the boss's optical box too. If that gets busted we're all dead anyway. Then it's time to get out. I check the hallway, loosen up my Stunner, seal the security lock on my office door with my thumbprint, and head for the guard station. I'm extra cautious since Aloke 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, and 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 inside the building. They know they'll end up on the street without passing the weapons lockers if any of us get damaged before we finish. Wouldn't want to run into any of them outside though. These days, outside is a hellish place if you're not prepared. There's all kinds of crazies and slime-buckets who'll pop you before stealing your CreIDt card and thumbprint. Or after, just for kicks. Not to mention all the supposedly upright citizens that are pissed off because the Bank's 'Processing Error' cost them ten chips and are ready to take it out on someone who is not so well protected. Good armor is usually enough to deter the sleezebags. High quality firepower, carefully displayed, tends to deselect you in the eyes of the guy having a bad day. I think, back when there were governments, they called this Mutually Assured Destruction, now it's Cooperation Through Superior Firepower. That leaves the random joyriders and firefight junkies to look out for. You usually hear them coming a mile away but I stay on my toes. If you don't, and your reaction time is down, well that's it. The Savers will collect any spare bits left lying around and you continue living in the DataSphere until your account is empty. I guess Jerry would miss my status reports after a while. After the guard lets me into the weapons locker I put on my suit and turn on the C-Cube heads-up displays. Then I check the outside monitors, and when it looks clear I pop through the security-lock into the garage to get my Norton. A bike's a pretty dangerous thing to ride these days, but the Commandant-Sensai is built by a German/British consortium that's owned by MitsuKrupshi, somewhere up there at the top. The Japanese went full circle on their motorcycle design and bought the original from some Canadians who got the rights when the Pound disappeared. I guess I have a soft spot for old technology when it comes to mechanical stuff. I do keep it updated correctly though. Mine has at least as much armament as your typical Mercedes or Jupiter, AND it can out-run and out-maneuver any of those pigs. Any time you're on the road you have to watch out for usual dimwit-driver tricks, but the forward firepower on my Commandant can clear a path through anything smaller than a Semi. The professional drivers are too concerned with their schedules to want to hassle with the damage, so they stay clear. It's the Young-Mothers in their Volvo Assaults going to the PlatiGeons that I have to watch 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 wakeup call for these situations is an IncenDart. It pierces the first armor layer and injects a squirt of napalm that ignites between the blast shield and the kevlar upholstery. The target sees this flameball and feels the heat flash before their fire control takes over. It generally melts the cozy interior of their invincible chariot and reduces them to tears, but it doesn't do any permanent damage unless their makeup flashpoints. Wearing too much serves them right anyway. Everybody 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 stall door opener. 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. That's the most fun I've had all day.... I leave at a random time every day, and pull out at different speeds so it's less likely that someone waiting will catch me leaving. Besides I don't really have any enemies, not like some people at work. On the way home 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, and besides all the drive-through places have extra insurance for their customers. If things happen to your clientele, people don't patronize your establishment any more. Not to mention that it's impossible to transfer credits from someone damaged on your premises (one of my first programs takes care of part of that for the Bank). So I'm pretty confident doing a drive-by for some of RiBus's Other White Meat. Getting home, the RadLink on the Commandant-Sensai says the door seals look Ok 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 Que and a couple brewskis through my home ChemAnal, which is more sophisticated than the QuickAnal at work, and when they check out it's time to relax. I turn on the Surfer and watch a few hundred channels until I realize I'm done with the brews and haven't seen anything I want to stop on yet. I'm too lazy to check out another brew, so I decide to log into LinkLine to see if anyone hip is on the silicon. My DudeName is Slick-Dick. It's not really creative but it seems to attract the type of postings I like to get. I'm following up on a couple of BabeNames whose stats got me up last week. Even had a One-on-One with BabeName Pussy-Cat a couple days ago. We showed each other some Vidclips and had a good time. I thought her login was pretty silly until we got below the belt. Maybe she'll let me run one of her controls next time. I used to check into the old-timers' node just to see what they were up to, but it got boring. All they wanted to do was talk about 'back in the old days' when you actually touched people you met on the Link. One of them kept saying, "Remember lingerie," as if it was some kind of code only they knew. I think it comes from an old MTV clip. They used to arrange to meet, F2F, and fondle each others parts. Seems really twisted to me. And dangerous too. Just thinking of the biologicals that would get transmitted makes me a little 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. I had a regular Linkup going for a while with BabeName Home-Body. We would make dates to login in at the same time. She even gave me her first level password so I could see if she was on when I got there. If she was, we always switched to Private right away. It lasted until I let her have a look at my GeneDump. After that she changed her password. I guess she was really serious about settling down, the login should have tipped me. Too bad. She had some very sexy response times. There was a pretty hot message from Pussy-Cat in my in-box but she didn't respond now, so she probably wasn't on. The next message was from BabeName Randy-Girl. Impressive stats. She said she had been lurking on my nodes for a while and liked my style. Needless to say I sent a Ping out for her. By now it was pretty late so I didn't expect much, but damned if she didn't reply. We got connected to the same node and made some small talk. Then she suggested that we should go One-on-One. This girl really made her moves. Practically as soon as we switched over she asked if I wanted to see her control panel. Never a need to ask I said, just flash it up here. Nice panel too, a lot of special controls for the kinkier types. I usually avoid those but maybe in this case...well you never know. I showed her my controls and threw in a Vidclip I made up a few months ago. She replied with Vidclip that pegged my pointers. Then she suggested that we go Private, saying I could touch her panel if she could handle mine. But of course I said. So we started diddling each other's controls and before long I was ready for some serious tweaking. Then she asked for my account number. Damn, I should have spotted that right away. I cut the connection and just logged out. I'll bet she uses my Vidclip with the next DudeName. Well it was fun while it lasted anyway. And tomorrow is another day. XXX (c) 1993,96 M. I. Smith