Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [75]
‘What’s she trying to tell us now?’ said Peri.
The Doctor looked like the cream-swiping cat. ’Bob’s mission was a success after all,’ he purred. ‘This is a copy of a file which Swan saved in coded form a few minutes ago.
Before she caught him, Bob installed a program on her system which quietly sends us a readable copy of any file she encrypts.’
‘So we get to read anything she doesn’t want us to read?’
said Peri.
‘Exactly.’
‘We’re gonna need more diskettes,’ said Peri.
The Doctor was saying, ‘In this case, I assume we’re looking at a list of the Internet sites she’s already searched. He ran his finger down the screen. ‘Which would mean...’ he began to hammer at the keyboard in earnest.
We watched as he spent a few moments breaking into a poorly guarded college computer. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Then...’
He used the telnet command to leap from that machine to another. This one had no protection at all; he simply logged into a maintenance account with root privileges. He stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘There,’ he said. One of the users listed on the system was our friend fionnuala. She hadn’t even bothered to disguise her presence.
The Doctor sent her a text message: ’You won’t find a manual because there is no manual.’
I could imagine Swan’s response – surprise, followed by hindbrain rage. Whatever she was feeling, she let none of it show on the screen. ‘Hand it over or you know who will suffer the consequences.’
The Doctor responded by sending a message to the sysop, warning him of intruders on his system. The sysadmin took the message seriously: a few minutes later, while Swan was in the middle of searching through the system’s files, both she and the Doctor were kicked off.
The Doctor glanced at Swan’s list of computers again, and compared it to Bob’s map of the net. ‘Logically, he said,’her next destination should be... here.’
He jumped to the next computer, took a moment to break in, and started searching for signs of Swan’s presence. ‘She’s set up an orderly search pattern,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I doubt she has the imagination to break out of it now. There.’
This time Swan had hidden herself from the list of users currently logged on, but the Doctor found her through the tell-tale signs of her activity. ‘None knows how to use that thing safely,’ he told her, again in a text message. ‘Least of all myself.’
Swan shot back ‘GO AWAY!!!’ It was the first time we’d seen her be anything but reptile cold. The Doctor was starting to get under her skin.
She jumped again. The Doctor followed her again. It took him two tries – ten minutes – to find the system she was on.
She was in the list of users again, working carelessly and fast, rummaging through the files for anything that might give her a clue as to what she could do with the Savant.
It went on that way for an hour. The Doctor would lecture Swan, Swan would leap away to another computer somewhere on the net, the Doctor would find her again. Her text responses became more abusive, then stopped all together. She simply could not believe that he could find her again and again, following her through the maze like Theseus guided by his string.
I couldn’t help thinking of the time I’d watched Stray Cat playing with a mouse she caught out on the balcony. Instead of just killing it, she kept patting it, or pretending to ignore it –
all to see if it had any energy left. Even a mouse can give a cat a potentially fatal bite if it isn’t exhausted before the cat goes in for the kill – I saw it go for her face more than once. Stray Cat kept her head well back, and used her paw to tap it and tap it again, wearing it down until it couldn’t fight back any more.
Swan broke her search pattern and started jumping around randomly; that only meant it took him a little longer to track her down. Outside the fortress of her own mainframe, she was less like a god of the net and more like a rabbit on the run. In the end she sent him an obscene email and logged out in disgust.
‘Are you really sure that was