Fred woke without opening his eyes. He'd become a very light sleeper in recent weeks, which enabled him to avoid letting on that he was awake.
Casually, he rolled over and slid his hand under his pillow, feeling for the artifact of his other recently-developed affectation.
A brief panic flashed through Fred's mind when he couldn't find it. When the lights flicked on, his blood ran cold.
"It only works if you sleep with your hand on it," said Kramer.
Fred opened his eyes and looked in the direction of the sound.
Kramer sat in the chair across the hotel room. The lower part of his left leg was balanced casually on his right knee. In Kramer's right hand was a gun Fred didn't recognize. Kramer's left hand held Fred's "pillow pistol".
Neither weapon was pointed in any particular direction. Instead, both of Kramer's hands hung a little slack, pointing the ends of the barrels at the floor and letting them drift lazily.
"It's not a bad idea, Fred," said Kramer, "but the execution is all wrong. A gun under your pillow only works if you can go from asleep to awake and drawn in a single fluid motion."
"I'll try to remember that," said Fred.
"If I'd been here to hurt you, your little 'roll and reach' maneuver would have forced my hand."
Kramer gestured in the general direction of Fred with his left hand, being careful to keep the piece aimed at nothing in the process.
"It's a good thing I'm not," he added.
"How do you keep getting past security?" asked Fred. "Those are federal agents in the next room."
Kramer smirked. "I have to admit," he said, "it's getting harder. Those guys are going to have some nasty headaches in a few minutes."
Fred shook his head. Without thinking he reached up to rub the sleep out of his eyes, then he froze, peeking at Kramer without moving anything but his eyes.
Kramer chuckled. "It's okay. I'm not startled by sudden movements or anything."
"What do you want?" asked Fred, as he tried to rub the blur of midnight from his eyes.
"Samantha knows something," said Kramer. "I think you know it, too. I want to know it, as well."
"I bet you do," said Fred. "I don't think you're going to hurt me to get it, though."
"Oh?"
"Well, you saved me from that guy?"
"Did I?"
Kramer tapped his right index finger against the trigger guard of his pistol. After a long while, he said, "Let me give you some advice." Then there was another long pause.
"Well?" asked Fred.
Kramer pursed his lips and nodded. "Stop making assumptions," he said.
"I don't get it."
"If you don't really know but you can only really imagine one answer, it's probably not the one."
"You're saying...you didn't save me?"
"I'm not saying that."
"You're saying you did save me?"
"I'm not saying that."
"You're saying I don't really know what you're after?"
"That's right."
"Why would you tell me that, if you're not trying to help?"
"That's the question. Assuming someone is helping because they did something helpful may seem reasonable but it is an assumption."
"So what do you want?"
"I think Mike is working for someone. Someone you probably wouldn't like very much, if you found out who it was. I want to know what Samantha knows - what I think you know, too - before Mike can find out and deliver it to his handler."
"So you are on my side?"
"Maybe I'm not and I want you to think I am. Maybe I am and I just want you to think differently."
"Your friends will be waking up, soon, and I'm sure they'll have plenty of questions for you when they do." Kramer stood and began to walk toward the door.
Ask Kramer grasped the handle of the door leading to the hallway, Fred asked, "What if I don't help at all? I mean, anyone...either way."
Kramer paused with one foot out the door. For a moment, he seemed frozen...like a robot whose processors were all simultaneously in deadlock. He looked down and smiled. Then gently placed Fred's Glock on the TV stand, just within his reach.
"Then get used to keeping your hand on the gun under your pillow every night for the rest of your life," he said.
Just before the door closed, obscuring Kramer from view, he added "However long that may be..."
Showing posts with label interintraco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interintraco. Show all posts
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Saturday, January 19, 2019
The Infinitely-Thin Tightrope
Mike didn't understand what was happening. That was nothing new.
What was different was that he didn't understand his own actions.
He hated Samantha. He despised her arrogance. He found her personality repugnant. Most of the time he interacted with her, he spent thinking he could never see her again and be happy about it.
Conversely, he loved his wife and young son. When apart, Mike often found himself wishing he were with them rather than doing whatever he was doing.
Mike loved his wife and hated Samantha yet he kept finding himself in Samantha's bed. He wanted to be away from Samantha as much as possible but found himself wondering what was the deal when she grew cold and distant.
Samantha had become a ghost walking in human skin. She was pale and jumpy. All the time. She was secretive about what she was doing and for whom.
Mike wondered how badly Kramer had scared her. Was she broken? Would she ever be the same?
...and, most of all, why did he care? He still despised her. She was a disgusting human being...but he also cared.
It was bizarre, having such conflict of feelings.
It was a warm summer's evening. The sun was just barely set, leaving a reddish-amber glow in the sky and casting a thin gray veil over everything.
Mike took a deep breath, absorbing the dryness, warmth, and fragrance of the newborn night as if it could replace the disturbing thoughts running through his head.
He flipped his key around in little circles by spinning his index finger inside the keyring.
It was a disturbingly-quiet walk across the parking lot. No sounds to drown out his thoughts. Just his footsteps on the pavement.
When he got to his car, he barely swung his keys a little too far and they spun off his finger. There was a little "ting" sound as they bounced off the door of his brand new Audi - a birthday gift from his wife - and an abbreviated jingle when they landed on the ground.
Mike sighed and looked closely at his door.
"For fuck's sake," he said. "Really?" The shiny new paint on his shiny new car was marred.
Mike sighed and started to bend down to get his keys but something raised his hackles and his spine stiffened. He narrowed his eyes and peered around without turning his head.
"God damn!" he shouted, leaning in to poke at the fresh ding on his door.
Mike spun around to face the other direction and raised his fists in the air, then repeated: "God damn!"
Quickly, he scanned the parking lot. There was nothing there but he couldn't shake the uneasy feeling.
Eventually, there was nothing to be done about it. He bent down for his keys and, when he stood up, nothing happened. He shrugged.
"Maybe I'm getting paranoid, too," he muttered.
Mike pushed the button to unlock his car. A satisfying "click" told him it was going from locked to unlocked.
He got in the car and started to drive. Everything was dead. It was a quick drive to the parkway, which was basically empty.
Mike decided to really open up his new car and see what she could do. He slammed down on the accelerator and pushed the speed...fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour.
"Not too fast," said Kramer from the backseat. "You probably don't want to get pulled over, right now."
Mike wanted to jump out of his skin but maintained a semblance of outward calm. He cleared his throat. "Maybe I do," he said. His voice trembled, betraying his veneer of confidence. Nevertheless, he took his foot off the accelerator.
Kramer was barely visible in the rear-view mirror. He was dressed in black from head to toe. Unless you looked closely, you probably wouldn't even notice he was there. He chuckled softly.
"It might not go well, for either of us," said Kramer, light glinting off the rim of his glasses as they passed under a streetlamp. "Even if it did, there would be questions. They'd want to know where you were, recently. They'd want to check with your wife."
Mike pondered the not-so-hidden meaning for a moment, then set the cruise control. "Where are we going?" he asked.
"Just keep going, like you always do."
"Okay."
They drove in silence for a few minutes. Kramer made no effort to continue the conversation.
Eventually, as he was pulling off the Parkway and onto surface streets, Mike asked, "What do you want?"
"It's simple. Samantha knows something. I need to know it, too."
"What makes you so sure?"
"I've been watching you. All of you."
"What makes you think I'll help you."
"That's simple, too." Kramer's teeth shone, revealing a little sneer. "For one thing, I recorded some highlights of your most recent little sleepover with Samantha."
Mike's cheeks reddened. "And?" he asked.
"...and I think you two like each other. Underneath all the hate, that is."
"So?"
"So her life's in danger until whatever she knows is in the right hands."
"Your hands are the right hands?"
"I think they are," said Kramer. "What does Fred think?"
"Your car is dirty. Let's get it washed."
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Eyes in All the Shadows
It took several minutes for Adam to regain his composure.
Through his entire crisis, they had not looked away from him. Their expressions were frozen. They simply waited, like a family listening to a doctor rattle off technical details when all they really cared about was the prognosis.
It is important to process things. Process enough, now, then compartmentalize, then process some more, later. That's what he'd learned in his years doing what he did for a living.
He allowed himself a moment to wish she hadn't found it. He let himself worry about the enormity of the news. He spent a few seconds worrying about his own safety and allowed himself to dwell on the ramifications to his mission.
Then he noticed two blank faces staring at him intently.
He allowed himself a moment to wish she hadn't found it. He let himself worry about the enormity of the news. He spent a few seconds worrying about his own safety and allowed himself to dwell on the ramifications to his mission.
Then he noticed two blank faces staring at him intently.
Through his entire crisis, they had not looked away from him. Their expressions were frozen. They simply waited, like a family listening to a doctor rattle off technical details when all they really cared about was the prognosis.
It was one more burden on his shoulders. Two civilians - real civilians, not "civilian" contractors, like himself - who depended on him to carry this the rest of the way.
Their lives were in his hands. Samantha had made it that way by finding the data leak and sharing it with him.
Their lives were in his hands. Samantha had made it that way by finding the data leak and sharing it with him.
Before speaking, Adam took a moment to reflect on the trust Samantha had placed in him. How could she know he was not a part of whatever she found? He could easily have just lied to pass her clumsy little test of authenticity.
As it stood, he didn't have to.
As it stood, he didn't have to.
She had taken a calculated risk. The United States is a big country with a lot of people. It had a big government, also with a lot of people. Statistically-speaking, Adam probably wasn't a traitor. So, she probably just played the numbers.
He began slowly, choosing each word carefully. "You've shown me a lot of trust in sharing this," said Adam. "I won't lie. This could get ugly."
"What's our next move?" asked Fred.
Adam pursed his lips and tried to focus on his chin for a minute.
"I have to think about what to do, next.," said Adam. "This is the kind of problem you can't just report to your commander. It has to be handled carefully..." he reflected on that for a moment and guffawed at the understatement. "Very carefully," he clarified.
Samantha's eyes glistened in the dim light of the closed room. "You don't know who to trust?" asked Samantha.
Adam shook his head. "I don't even know how you decided to trust me."
"So what do we do, now?" asked Fred. He swallowed a gob of nothing then added: "I mean right now."
Adam nodded. "Yeah. Okay. Action items. Stay safe. That's your main job," he said. "Stay safe."
"How do we do that," asked Samantha. "Are we going to some kind of a...a...safe...place?"
Adam shook his head ever so slightly. "Noplace is safe from something like this," he said. "Safe actions is what you need...not a safe place."
"What are those actions?"
"Behave exactly as you did before you found this," said Adam. "Go home, spend time doing the things you did.
"See your girlfriend, Fred. Keep investigating the problem from home in ways you think we don't see. Samantha, keep arranging for your...uh...sleepovers.
"We need to safeguard ourselves because what we know is too valuable to risk losing. That said, we need to quietly and slowly adjust our routines to reduce potential leverage. Create distance...distance keeps you and the things you care about safe.
"No matter what we do, though, there is a chance that things will go south. We need a plan to ensure what we know isn't lost. Ideally, one that ensures our safety. Even a stalemate that stops the leak and keeps us safe is a win, at this point."
"So what's that?"
"I don't know, but I'll start making arrangements for your escape if things get bad."
Adam could see he was losing them. He tried to force a smile but both Fred and Samantha seemed to recoil at whatever emotion he actually rendered.
"What's our next move?" asked Fred.
Adam pursed his lips and tried to focus on his chin for a minute.
"I have to think about what to do, next.," said Adam. "This is the kind of problem you can't just report to your commander. It has to be handled carefully..." he reflected on that for a moment and guffawed at the understatement. "Very carefully," he clarified.
Samantha's eyes glistened in the dim light of the closed room. "You don't know who to trust?" asked Samantha.
Adam shook his head. "I don't even know how you decided to trust me."
"So what do we do, now?" asked Fred. He swallowed a gob of nothing then added: "I mean right now."
Adam nodded. "Yeah. Okay. Action items. Stay safe. That's your main job," he said. "Stay safe."
"How do we do that," asked Samantha. "Are we going to some kind of a...a...safe...place?"
Adam shook his head ever so slightly. "Noplace is safe from something like this," he said. "Safe actions is what you need...not a safe place."
"What are those actions?"
"Behave exactly as you did before you found this," said Adam. "Go home, spend time doing the things you did.
"See your girlfriend, Fred. Keep investigating the problem from home in ways you think we don't see. Samantha, keep arranging for your...uh...sleepovers.
"We need to safeguard ourselves because what we know is too valuable to risk losing. That said, we need to quietly and slowly adjust our routines to reduce potential leverage. Create distance...distance keeps you and the things you care about safe.
"No matter what we do, though, there is a chance that things will go south. We need a plan to ensure what we know isn't lost. Ideally, one that ensures our safety. Even a stalemate that stops the leak and keeps us safe is a win, at this point."
"So what's that?"
"I don't know, but I'll start making arrangements for your escape if things get bad."
Adam could see he was losing them. He tried to force a smile but both Fred and Samantha seemed to recoil at whatever emotion he actually rendered.
"You took a huge risk, sharing what you found. You could have stopped searching when you had an inkling. I'm going to reciprocate that trust. I'm going to give you my real name and the contact info for my commanding officer. Don't use either unless you absolutely need to but, if things go off the rails, head for the La Jolla airforce base. He'll get you in and keep you safe."
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Blindspot
Samantha caught herself just before the lump in her throat became obvious.
Her fingers trembled, poised over the enter key.
Time seemed to freeze.
It wasn't until her vision began to narrow that she realized she'd been holding her breath the entire time.
Gradually, she tried to let the air trapped in her lungs pass through her lips. She thought she did a pretty good job but, the harder she tried to hold her breath, the harder her lungs fought to breathe of their own accord.
"I take it you've got something," said Eddie.
Samantha's eyes darted in his direction but the rest of her body remained motionless.
He was hunched over his laptop, head cocked slightly to the right. The glow of his computer screen against his face was just barely visible in the dimly-lit room. Eddie continued to type intently. Had he said nothing, there would be no indication he'd seen something.
"Whatever it is, I'm going to find it, eventually," prodded Eddie. He patted a little black box sitting next to his laptop. "If you think you're hiding anything from me, you're wrong. So you might as well just tell me."
Fred cleared his throat and it sounded like he shifted in his seat a few times.
Samantha remained frozen. Eyes transfixed on the man she hadn't thought she'd known in the first place but whose motivations were suddenly called in to question by her revelation.
She tried to speak but her mouth and throat were so dry that her tongue felt like it was welded to the roof of her mouth.
She took a deep breath and drank a full glass of water in a single go.
Her nervousness had failed to garner any additional attention from Eddie and that only seemed to throw Samantha deeper into her self-imposed deadlock.
Finally, she parted suddenly-cracking lips and asked, "Do you," her chin trembled and she bit her lip for control. She took another deep breath and started again. "D- Do you have a...uh...a house?"
"Hmm?" asked Eddie.
"A house...apartment...condo...a shack in the woods. Someplace you stay when you aren't doing," Samantha gestured around the room at all the equipment she didn't recognize, "this?"
Eddie glanced up from his screen for a moment and seemed to consider.
"I have a mailing address, but I'm always going from one assignment to the next. Why?"
"Do you have a...uh...a base you go to, regularly?"
"What? You want to talk to my manager?"
"Yes."
Eddie chuckled, then looked up from his screen for a moment. His nostrils flared and he didn't blink. "Well," he said thoughtfully, "I guess the closest thing I have to that, for a civilian, would be the Airforce base in La Jolla, California. Call the main line and lodge a complaint."
"Is that where your mailing address is?"
Eddie sneered. "La Jolla?" He full-on laughed. "Nobody does this for the money. I can't afford to live there and I wouldn't want to live there if I could."
"I want to send you something without the base knowing. Do I send it to your Langley address?"
Eddie shook his head and chuckled. "Lady, I don't know what game you think you're playing but I'm tired of it. If you want to send me something at my mailing address, I'd have to fly to Reno and drive for six hours to pick it up...whoever you don't want to know whatever you don't want them to know is probably going to notice that. Last chance, Samantha. Tell me what it is you've got."
An enormous sigh of relief escaped Samantha's lips. She felt like collapsing into the back of her chair as every tensed muscle simultaneously relaxed. "Okay," she said, "I'll tell you."
Samantha took another deep breath and added, "It's the receipts."
"First off," interrupted Eddie. "How do you know whatever it is you think you know?" He gestured at Fred and himself with his left hand and added: "We need to reproduce your findings to confirm."
"I started by analyzing short, long, and medium-length trends over the last ten years," said Samantha. "As expected, there was nothing I could find with any of our existing algorithms. The signal seemed to be just regular signal everywhere I looked. Normal shopping. Normal browsing. Normal everything.
"Like I said, though. That was expected. I figured the signal wouldn't matter. So then, I started subtracting the trends out of the aggregates, leaving me with a map of the noise and I started analyzing that, too."
"How?" asked Eddie. Fred smiled as if he knew the response.
"There are some new AI-assisted signal-processing algorithms that specialize in finding patterns in apparent noise. They can do things like highlight the outline of shapes in photographs that were taken in what we would think of as complete darkness. They hadn't helped me when I was analyzing the raw data but that's because the signal was 'too bright'...it was hiding the real answers."
"So you checked the noise?" asked Eddie. "...and that showed the pattern?"
"Kind of. It showed me how the pattern was shaped so that I could train a custom algorithm to pick it out of raw data, despite any stronger patterns."
"What did you find?"
Picking up her rhythm, Samantha answered with "Like I said, it's in the receipts."
"What does that mean?" asked Fred.
"The purchases executed through our storefront-as-a-service offering," replied Samantha. "They mean something."
Eddie was still not looking away from his screen but he nodded gently and persistently to communicate that he was listening. "What do they mean?" he prodded, as gently as his relatively crusty exterior would permit.
Samantha cleared her throat and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the conference table. "There are about two-hundred people," she said, "who always buy either zero or one of the same seventeen items on an alarmingly-rhythmic schedule."
Eddie stopped typing.
"Typically, four of them daily," she added.
Very slowly, Eddie lifted his face and turned it in Samantha's direction. His never-ending poker face remained but the sloth-like fashion in which he moved hinted at how much energy he was spending on processing what he had just heard and, perhaps, reprocessing what he had heard a few minutes
earlier.
Samantha pressed onward. "Each of the seventeen items is something innocuous and easily justified as a regular purchase, usually artisanal consumables from a mom-and-pop boutique. Following a very-complicated scrambling pattern, each shipping address gets four items a day and each of those four items seems to represent a bit."
Eddie and Fred were transfixed. Eddie had even dropped his poker face. His jaw hung slack. Samantha wondered if he knew what was coming.
"All of this seems to be about moving about one-hundred bytes a day in an incredibly-obfuscated way," said Samantha. "It took a while to crack this - which I had to do to make sure I wasn't crazy - but, after I did, I was able to decode some messages."
"What do they say?" asked Eddie.
"I don't know."
Eddie began to protest with "But -" and was immediately cut off by Samantha.
"I don't know," she emphasized the word "know," then continued with "because I can't read Mandarin Chinese and it just translates to gibberish."
Eddie had dropped all tough-guy pretense. His hand was covering his mouth. "Please, don't tell me," he murmured.
Eddie losing his cool terrified Samantha. That lump started creeping up her throat and she swallowed hard to suppress it. "I plotted a map of the mailing addresses. They're all in the D.C. area."
Fred's face went ghost-white.
Samantha's hands trembled as she pulled the HDMI cable toward her computer. Her eyes were tearing up and the room felt like it was about fifty degrees.
She was practically numb. What she was about to say next terrified her. It scared her so much that she didn't even want to think about it, let alone say it.
She put a map up on the projection.
"Langley. Most of them are in the Langley area."
Her fingers trembled, poised over the enter key.
Time seemed to freeze.
It wasn't until her vision began to narrow that she realized she'd been holding her breath the entire time.
Gradually, she tried to let the air trapped in her lungs pass through her lips. She thought she did a pretty good job but, the harder she tried to hold her breath, the harder her lungs fought to breathe of their own accord.
"I take it you've got something," said Eddie.
Samantha's eyes darted in his direction but the rest of her body remained motionless.
He was hunched over his laptop, head cocked slightly to the right. The glow of his computer screen against his face was just barely visible in the dimly-lit room. Eddie continued to type intently. Had he said nothing, there would be no indication he'd seen something.
"Whatever it is, I'm going to find it, eventually," prodded Eddie. He patted a little black box sitting next to his laptop. "If you think you're hiding anything from me, you're wrong. So you might as well just tell me."
Fred cleared his throat and it sounded like he shifted in his seat a few times.
Samantha remained frozen. Eyes transfixed on the man she hadn't thought she'd known in the first place but whose motivations were suddenly called in to question by her revelation.
She tried to speak but her mouth and throat were so dry that her tongue felt like it was welded to the roof of her mouth.
She took a deep breath and drank a full glass of water in a single go.
Her nervousness had failed to garner any additional attention from Eddie and that only seemed to throw Samantha deeper into her self-imposed deadlock.
Finally, she parted suddenly-cracking lips and asked, "Do you," her chin trembled and she bit her lip for control. She took another deep breath and started again. "D- Do you have a...uh...a house?"
"Hmm?" asked Eddie.
"A house...apartment...condo...a shack in the woods. Someplace you stay when you aren't doing," Samantha gestured around the room at all the equipment she didn't recognize, "this?"
Eddie glanced up from his screen for a moment and seemed to consider.
"I have a mailing address, but I'm always going from one assignment to the next. Why?"
"Do you have a...uh...a base you go to, regularly?"
"What? You want to talk to my manager?"
"Yes."
Eddie chuckled, then looked up from his screen for a moment. His nostrils flared and he didn't blink. "Well," he said thoughtfully, "I guess the closest thing I have to that, for a civilian, would be the Airforce base in La Jolla, California. Call the main line and lodge a complaint."
"Is that where your mailing address is?"
Eddie sneered. "La Jolla?" He full-on laughed. "Nobody does this for the money. I can't afford to live there and I wouldn't want to live there if I could."
"I want to send you something without the base knowing. Do I send it to your Langley address?"
Eddie shook his head and chuckled. "Lady, I don't know what game you think you're playing but I'm tired of it. If you want to send me something at my mailing address, I'd have to fly to Reno and drive for six hours to pick it up...whoever you don't want to know whatever you don't want them to know is probably going to notice that. Last chance, Samantha. Tell me what it is you've got."
An enormous sigh of relief escaped Samantha's lips. She felt like collapsing into the back of her chair as every tensed muscle simultaneously relaxed. "Okay," she said, "I'll tell you."
Samantha took another deep breath and added, "It's the receipts."
"First off," interrupted Eddie. "How do you know whatever it is you think you know?" He gestured at Fred and himself with his left hand and added: "We need to reproduce your findings to confirm."
"I started by analyzing short, long, and medium-length trends over the last ten years," said Samantha. "As expected, there was nothing I could find with any of our existing algorithms. The signal seemed to be just regular signal everywhere I looked. Normal shopping. Normal browsing. Normal everything.
"Like I said, though. That was expected. I figured the signal wouldn't matter. So then, I started subtracting the trends out of the aggregates, leaving me with a map of the noise and I started analyzing that, too."
"How?" asked Eddie. Fred smiled as if he knew the response.
"There are some new AI-assisted signal-processing algorithms that specialize in finding patterns in apparent noise. They can do things like highlight the outline of shapes in photographs that were taken in what we would think of as complete darkness. They hadn't helped me when I was analyzing the raw data but that's because the signal was 'too bright'...it was hiding the real answers."
"So you checked the noise?" asked Eddie. "...and that showed the pattern?"
"Kind of. It showed me how the pattern was shaped so that I could train a custom algorithm to pick it out of raw data, despite any stronger patterns."
"What did you find?"
Picking up her rhythm, Samantha answered with "Like I said, it's in the receipts."
"What does that mean?" asked Fred.
"The purchases executed through our storefront-as-a-service offering," replied Samantha. "They mean something."
Eddie was still not looking away from his screen but he nodded gently and persistently to communicate that he was listening. "What do they mean?" he prodded, as gently as his relatively crusty exterior would permit.
Samantha cleared her throat and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the conference table. "There are about two-hundred people," she said, "who always buy either zero or one of the same seventeen items on an alarmingly-rhythmic schedule."
Eddie stopped typing.
"Typically, four of them daily," she added.
Very slowly, Eddie lifted his face and turned it in Samantha's direction. His never-ending poker face remained but the sloth-like fashion in which he moved hinted at how much energy he was spending on processing what he had just heard and, perhaps, reprocessing what he had heard a few minutes
earlier.
Samantha pressed onward. "Each of the seventeen items is something innocuous and easily justified as a regular purchase, usually artisanal consumables from a mom-and-pop boutique. Following a very-complicated scrambling pattern, each shipping address gets four items a day and each of those four items seems to represent a bit."
Eddie and Fred were transfixed. Eddie had even dropped his poker face. His jaw hung slack. Samantha wondered if he knew what was coming.
"All of this seems to be about moving about one-hundred bytes a day in an incredibly-obfuscated way," said Samantha. "It took a while to crack this - which I had to do to make sure I wasn't crazy - but, after I did, I was able to decode some messages."
"What do they say?" asked Eddie.
"I don't know."
Eddie began to protest with "But -" and was immediately cut off by Samantha.
"I don't know," she emphasized the word "know," then continued with "because I can't read Mandarin Chinese and it just translates to gibberish."
Eddie had dropped all tough-guy pretense. His hand was covering his mouth. "Please, don't tell me," he murmured.
Eddie losing his cool terrified Samantha. That lump started creeping up her throat and she swallowed hard to suppress it. "I plotted a map of the mailing addresses. They're all in the D.C. area."
Fred's face went ghost-white.
Samantha's hands trembled as she pulled the HDMI cable toward her computer. Her eyes were tearing up and the room felt like it was about fifty degrees.
She was practically numb. What she was about to say next terrified her. It scared her so much that she didn't even want to think about it, let alone say it.
She put a map up on the projection.
"Langley. Most of them are in the Langley area."
Saturday, December 29, 2018
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Saturday, December 8, 2018
Saturday, December 1, 2018
Saturday, November 24, 2018
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Saturday, November 3, 2018
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Red Alert in a Silver Thaw
(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)
It was Fred's turn.
He could barely hear himself talk over the sound of ice being crushed under his pickup's studded tires.
It was Fred's turn.
He could barely hear himself talk over the sound of ice being crushed under his pickup's studded tires.
"I'm telling you again, Mike. I can't do anything about this until I'm in the office."
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Take a Chance
It was late and Samantha was at work, again.
Her phone buzzed, faintly vibrating against the desk and dancing in her peripheral vision. It was probably her husband, texting to find out when she would be done for the fiftieth time.
She couldn't be distracted. It was an intermittent problem and she was finally able to reproduce it. She was on the scent.
One more Ctrl+Click and she'd find that damn NullReferenceException.
One more Ctrl+Click and she'd find that damn NullReferenceException.
What she saw was repellant. She recoiled both mentally and physically.
"Fucking Kramer," she murmured. "What the fuck is this?"
Sam looked around to make sure nobody had overheard her disparage a coworker. At InterIntraCo, one could do no wrong except in making another feel uncomfortable.
She was safe.
The code was bizarre; a long, winding stretch of nonsense inaugurated by the following abstruse comment...
What "timezone bug"? Which "Sunday"?
Kramer was the worst programmer on the team. He showed up at ten thirty. He left at five. His code made no sense and nobody could ever seem to draw any connection between what he did and a requirement.
His code was so bad that nobody minded his short hours. Most people on his team wished he would leave earlier.
This time, he really stepped in it. There was a proxy class for a data store, which was responsible for storing and retrieving audience-member data for IntraInterCo's line of online marketing products.
Before Kramer's "fix", there was this method...
public Audience GetMember(string token) {
string document = store.FindById(token);
return JsonCodec.FromJson<Audience>(document);
}
After Kramer's "fix", this is how the code read...
public Audience GetMember(string token) {
string document = store.FindById(token);
if (document.LastUse.TimeOfDay > TimeSpan.FromHours(23) &&
document.LastUse.TimeOfday < TimeSpan.FromHours(1)) {
document.Hardware = null;
}
return JsonCodec.FromJson<Audience>(document);
}
Samantha slammed her clenched fist on the desk and repeated her lament. "What the fuck?!?"
The entire system was dependent on an Audience having its Hardware property be populated. Nobody checked that Hardware wasn't null because, until then, it never was.
She ran her fingers through her long, dishwater blonde hair.
"Fuck that guy," she muttered.
Click. Hold. Drag. Delete...
The cure for all Kramer's code, she mused.
A few seconds later, a green bar told her that it was safe to check in her code. She did so with one hand while grabbing her phone with the other.
On the elevator to the parking level, she texted Jack to let him know she was on her way.
Twenty minutes later, she was home and asleep. It stands to reason, she didn't notice the phone buzzing in her purse, quietly letting her know she broke the build.
On Monday, when she arrived for work, she found out what happened.
None of the unit tests failed when she made her change but an integration test was no longer passing. She always got to the office last, so everyone else had been dealing with it all morning.
Sam's cheeks flushed red.
"All the tests passed," she said.
Her coworker, Fred, laughed and said "Don't worry. We've already figured out what happened."
'What was it?"
"Kramer."
Samantha shrugged her request for more.
"Five weeks ago, he wrote some weird code. Here", said Fred. "Let me show you."
The code was in a distant part of the system that used an Audience object...
public int GetIdentificationConfidence(Audience audience) {
var confidence = 0;
// snipped
if (audience.Hardware != null) {
if (audience.Hardware.Type == HardwareType.Mobile)
confidence += 10;
if (audience.LastUse.TimeOfDay - DateTime.Now.TimeOfDay <
TimeSpan.FromHours(-1))
confidence -= 25;
}
// snipped
return confidence;
}
"I see," said Samantha. "I'm assuming nobody knows why he wrote that, least of all him. So what was the 'Timezone bug from Thursday'?"
"When he checked that in, everything was fine. Most of the time, this doesn't get hit. The Sunday before last, one of the integration tests hit that code just wrong. The setup stuff happened right before midnight and the assertion stuff right after."
A grim smirk crept over Samantha's face. "...and it just happened to be one of the confidence score tests."
"Yeah... So his 'fix' was basically to make sure his code doesn't run in the 11:30 nightly. You took it out and just happened to get hit by the same timing issue."
"So how did you fix it?" asked Samantha.
Fred chuckled and said, "The same way you fixed the null reference exception, on Friday."
Samantha jerked a little nod of acknowledgment.
They both made their pleasantries and began to drift toward their respective desks. After a few steps, something occurred to Sam.
"Wait a sec," she almost shouted. "Why did he call it a 'timezone bug'?"
Fred laughed and answered, "Oh right! That's the best part. What happened, two Sundays ago?"
Samantha shook her head.
"Daylight savings time," said Fred. "Spring forward." He raised his eyebrows as he added "Kramer."
Samantha snorted and replied "Kramer."
(continued here)
Samantha jerked a little nod of acknowledgment.
They both made their pleasantries and began to drift toward their respective desks. After a few steps, something occurred to Sam.
"Wait a sec," she almost shouted. "Why did he call it a 'timezone bug'?"
Fred laughed and answered, "Oh right! That's the best part. What happened, two Sundays ago?"
Samantha shook her head.
"Daylight savings time," said Fred. "Spring forward." He raised his eyebrows as he added "Kramer."
Samantha snorted and replied "Kramer."
(continued here)
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