On the way out, he practically bumped into a fifty-something prune-faced personnel chick. One of his personal skills was the ability to flush beet red at will. He did so, stammering something about the wrong door to her disapproving face before disappearing into the men’s room. He stayed there until his heart stopped trying to jump out of his ribcage.
He’d spent the past week typing in scripts while trying to avoid getting caught. Vitapetroni could sharpen the memory using hypnosis-boosted mnemonics, but the information decayed quickly. The more information you tried to remember, the faster it decayed. It had to be right, because programs with misspelled commands or the wrong punctuation didn’t work too well. Since he couldn’t get any other storage media inside, he had to be the storage medium. It gave him headaches. Well, that plus enduring way too many bad jokes about script kiddies from Sunday.
Now he began pulling those scripts out and turning them loose. It took him three tries to find one that would let him into the security desk’s log file. He added a “time out” for Cally that was right before shift change. The left hand rarely knew exactly what the right hand was doing.
He set a pass code cracking program to work on the doors to the subject rooms and the doors on their routes out. It took the right pass codes as well as a badge swipe to get through some of those places. Every once in a while, the cracking program would give him an action message. When that happened, he consulted a list of Tommy’s instructions for contingencies, picked what he devoutly hoped was the right option, and went on.
He got into the permissions tables in the database right away. The cracking program ran common passwords against the three accounts with the highest level of permissions after the DBA’s. They would all belong to upper management, and one of them sure as hell would choose something stupidly obvious. The user names and password parameters he’d gotten from a run at the development database at the beginning of the week. It carried a full, recent image of the production data, under the default system manager account and password as set by the software company. Sunday hadn’t counted on that, he’d just told George to try it first. Good physical security often made people slack about data security — after all, if nobody could get in the front door anyway, why bother? At each level, the best data security system in the world was only as good as the slackest user or operator.
Once into the production database, the cracking program neatly cleared all the alarms in the log files, triggered by large numbers of failed login attempts. Also as Sunday had predicted, the automatic failed-login lockout feature had, apparently, been turned off after one too many incompetent managers had complained about it. He still would have gotten in without those particular stupid organizational tech mistakes, it just would have taken a little longer. He had ten more cracking scripts he could have run that exploited various security holes in that combination of operating system and database.
When he’d asked the cyber what if eleven attempts wasn’t enough, the big man had just broken down laughing. “If they were that technically competent, they wouldn’t have bought that piece of shit security software for their locks. Yes, I’d stake my life on it.” And he had.
Thinking of Tommy, he did the minor manipulations to get the systems running the cell cameras to give him access so he could find the guy. Even though the cyber had sworn it was minor, and it probably was for him, this was George’s hardest task because it couldn’t come canned as a script. He had to actually understand what he was doing in the system. He’d spent hours practicing with the different possibilities for how they were managing the data feeds and what the vulnerabilities were in each. The complicated part, the reason simple scripts weren’t enough, was that he had to determine which of the nearly identical cells was which on the floor plan. It didn’t do a damn bit of good to find Tommy on an observation camera and then not know which room he was looking at. He was still afraid of messing it up, to the point that he was sweating by the time he finally found the right cell.
Great. The guy was wrapped up in a fucking sheet. Until they could get him changed, that was going to be a major hazard.
George’s last violation of the computer systems for the day would be changing his own records in the permissions tables to give his own badge access to every door in the building. Retrieving the cyber would be his own task, since his badge was the only genuine one. A purely cosmetic badge wouldn’t crack that door. He stuffed a small, extra-thin roll of black duct tape from the gym bag into his pocket. He’d be passing through some of the doors Cally and Papa would need. A small wad of tape back in the hole for the bolt and its latch would almost, but not quite, engage. He never taped across the top of a hole because it was too visible. The door monitoring system had come with an alarm that triggered if the bolt did not connect with a plate at the back of the socket. As with many security measures, when it became a nuisance to the people who worked there, the feature was disabled. New security features came and went, but human nature endured.
Erick Winchon was one of the few people who was actually comfortable on the crowded Boeing 807 passenger liner. He would have been equally comfortable riding in coach — or so he told himself. He habitually rode first class. It was a horrid waste of space and the primitive, grossly inefficient, hydrocarbon fuel, but first class was a status display among Earthers. Earther humans did not respect a person who did not display the proper status behaviors. He deplored the system, of course, but regretfully bowed to its necessities.
The Darhel, though they had started on the Path with a great handicap, understood the leadership value of such displays on the less enlightened. They used it to great effect in reinforcing their own species’ rule of the Wise. Granted, their selection process was imperfect, but considering their starting point, Darhel civilization was quite an achievement. Winchon admired them greatly.
He shook his head, looking away from the fluffy piles of clouds underneath the plane. The problem with airplanes, besides being slow, was that they tempted passengers to too much woolgathering at productivity’s expense.
“Misha, connect me with the convention hotel, please,” he instructed his AID.
“Yes, sir,” it replied.
He had no doubt that Ms. Felini, his capable assistant, had done everything possible to ensure his arrangements were correct, but there were other people who would be implementing those arrangements. He had learned the hard way that with Earthers outside his own company he had to check behind them, multiple times, or some incompetent somewhere would ruin the assignment. It amazed him that Earther humans could quote an aphorism, Murphy’s Law, as part of a casual acceptance of their own failings. Back home, if he had pulled any one of the many stunts he had seen on Earth, he would have been on half-meals for a week. Indowy children, and the humans they raised, outgrew such incompetence by the time they were half grown. True, there had been losses among the adolescent humans, but the results in the adults had more than justified the expenses wasted in raising the failures. Besides, fewer would be lost each generation as civilization continued to develop. Eighty percent was a phenomenally commendable success rate for the Indowy foster groups, especially with their own broods to raise. The survivors had bred to cover the lack, and more. Second generation humans raised by human breeding groups were proving the first serious test of the system. It was, as expected, not without problems.
There he went, woolgathering again. Odd that a human phrase for inefficient daydreaming came from a functional, useful — however primitive — task. One more Earther perversity.