Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [29]
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Stephanie’s offices were on the fifty‐second floor of the King Building, one up from Biostock Acquisitions. The place was quiet now. O’Hara, the boss, had drunk his traditional democratic Friday drink with the staff then caught his own helicopter out to Albany. After he left the staff had begun to drift away to begin their own weekends. Stephanie waited around, wearing her streetcoat, joking about waiting for her date and maybe being stood up. When the last of the staff had gone she sat back down at her Apollo work station, switched it back on and booted it up again.
The company logo appeared before anything else. Not the words ‘Butler Institute’, but just a bold image consisting of a fat friendly cartoon bumble bee and, beside it, a human eye.
It always looked to Stephanie as if that bee was flying directly towards the eye, ready to sting and blind.
As the operating system woke up on the Apollo the company logo faded and a customized screen greeting flashed up for her. Then the computer presented Stephanie with a desktop featuring all her current paperwork. For ten minutes Stephanie did legitimate work. If anybody looked in on her she would just be working late. But nobody looked in.
After ten minutes she saved the document she was working on, a routine report on stock problems. Then she went into her applications folder and triggered an icon labelled ‘BGSW’.
Stephanie watched it flash as the process awakened and shot away into the background of her screen.
She went back to working on another report, concentrating on the phrasing, losing herself in it so she didn’t notice the passage of time. She was doing only basic word processing but her machine had slowed down appreciably since she’d started the new process. ‘BGSW’ stood for ‘bug sweep’. Stephanie had sent Bugsweep scurrying around the network to make sure no one was watching what she did on her computer. She worked on the report for another twenty minutes while the process waited and monitored activity. Just after midnight a small cheery icon popped up on her screen. A smiling pink cartoon elephant with a knot tied on his trunk. The cartoon elephant’s tail twitched and a little word balloon appeared reading ‘Don’t forget Mom’s birthday! Oct 27th!’ The image had been pirated from a genuine piece of commercial software, a kitsch memo‐pad utility she’d bought in a Mexican souvenir shop. But now it was being used as a coded message by Bugsweep to tell her that the system was clear. Stephanie saved the documents she was working on, then dumped the word processor. Only now did she begin her real work.
Bugsweep had finished and the system had snapped back to its normal response time. But not for long. Stephanie was about to unleash the Ferret.
Bugsweep was one of the goodies Stephanie had brought with her when she’d left her job at Texas Instruments. The Ferret was another. They were both software packages which had been developed for defence. Both were outgrowths of AI research – artificial intelligence – and used particular AI techniques. But the Ferret was considerably more complex than Bugsweep.
Stephanie moved her cursor to an icon showing a dripping dayglo green syringe and double‐clicked on it. It was the trademark of a popular piece of virus‐busting software. The