Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [72]
Swan sat back from the screen, scratching her scalp with a ballpoint. The start of the program didn’t make sense. It poked around in the computer’s memory, as though trying to make a map of it, finding out things which it must already know. But it was tightly written, deliberate. The hairy bug had refined and refined the code until it was pared to an elegant minimum.
Was this program the whole point of the monster’s existence? By planting it in front of her home terminal, had she detonated its payload?
It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. If the Reds or anyone else wanted to sneak a program into American computers – or vice versa, for that matter – a hormone-secreting, Lego-obsessed Sesame Street monster was not the way they would try to accomplish it. I mean, who would think to put it in front of a computer in the first place? Or would it have waited for her to take a nap, and then clumped down the stairs to reach her machine? Or had its cloud of chemicals somehow instructed her in what to do?
Was she being used?
The temptation to fire up the program and let it run struck her, and she couldn’t be sure if it was some sort of mind control, or curiosity, or just plain exhaustion. No. She’d keep decoding the program until she knew what she was playing with.
It was instinct that told her the mainframe was running a little slowly, a subconscious awareness that commands were taking a fraction of a second too long to be executed, a change in the rhythm of the machine.
She brought up the logs on her screen. They didn’t show anything unusual – no-one else on the system, no record of anyone trying to dial in from outside.
Swan stepped out of her office and headed for a printer in the corner of the cubicles. She had inserted a command into the system that printed out a hard copy of the logs every five minutes. She lifted a handful of the blue-lined tractor-feed paper and ran her eyes over the last half-hour’s records.
There. A fourth person was logged into the system. He had immediately edited the logs when he arrived, leaving only the paper copy to give away his presence.
Look at his connect speed! He wasn’t coming in over a modem. He was talking to the mainframe through one of its terminals. Swan’s scalp prickled. He had to be right here. But where? There were around forty terminals in the building.
It took her a few more minutes, a little more digging in the system, to work out which terminal he was using. She couldn’t use the normal commands any sysadmin could use to find out who was where doing what: he would have noticed her in a moment, and fled. She finally grabbed the information from an error log, a single line written by the system when he’d made a typo.
The noise of the compute centre, the breathing of all those machines, was enough to mask the sound of the door swishing open. She could see the backs of three heads, three people working in the company’s mainframe. She knew the number and location of every terminal in the room.
She walked right up to Bob. He was so intent on what he was doing that he simply didn’t notice her. She watched over his shoulder as he patiently tried one trick after another, trying to grab root. Each time, he bumped up against one of her security fixes, and crossed off his tactic from a hand-written list.
Swan caught her bottom lip between her teeth. There was one she’d missed – he was in her account! Without a pause, he listed her files, spotted the new and huge program created by the monster, and set up an ftp session to transfer a copy of it somewhere else. She had to restrain herself from grabbing his shoulders and flinging him away from the terminal, spinning in his chair. She had to see where that file was being sent to.
He only looked up when the security guard she’d called clumped into the room, his billy club banging against the doors as they slid open. Bob froze