Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [12]
"I heard that."
Making a face at her monitor, Lisa said, "You were meant to."
Lisa heard Alice Abernathy laugh.
After rewriting a few more lines of code, Lisa said, "Okay, try it now."
There was a pause, though Lisa could hear the clickity-clack of Alice's fingers moving quickly over her keyboard.
"Fuck! I still can't get in."
Lisa frowned. "You sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure. It says 'access denied' in big letters on top of my monitor."
"That's a pretty good indicator, yeah. Hold on a sec." She entered a few more commands. All the computers in the Hive—including the two in the mansion—were hardwired to the overall Red Queen network, and it was a simple matter for her to provide a more direct link between her and Alice. When she was finished, it was as if they were a single workstation that just happened to have two keyboards.
Her monitor lit up with a window taking up the right-hand side of her flatscreen display. It showed her what Alice was seeing on her monitor, complete with access denied in big letters along the top. In the center of the screen were two fields, currently empty, asking for username and password.
Lisa hit F11, then entered her own username and password at another prompt. The latter was a series of numbers she had literally picked at random. Lisa had always had a good memory for numbers—she never had to write down phone numbers, nor use a speed-dial for them—so she was always able to pick wholly random passwords, always the most secure. Her username was standard, of course: LBROWARD. All the usernames were keyed to last name preceded by first initial—the latter a necessity, especially since there was a guy down in Medical named Phillip Broward. In fact, just in the Hive alone there were fourteen people named Smith, ten named Jones, six named Clark (plus one named Clarke), three named Martinez, two named West, and, oddly, three named Milewski (all three unrelated to each other).
Entering that username and password rewarded her with a series of commands and codes in another window on the left-hand side, right under the faux adorable face of a ten-year-old child that Lisa had never met yet desperately wanted to drown.
She then Alt-Tabbed over to the other window, used the trackpad located between the main keyboard and the number pad to place the cursor in the username field, and entered "AABERNATHY."
"Okay," she said to Alice, "enter your password."
This time, the clickety-clack that Lisa heard over her headset was matched by the appearance of several asterisks in the password field.
"Done," Alice said after fourteen asterisks appeared.
"That's some password."
"It's my birthday," Alice deadpanned.
"Right—when you're reincarnated in the year one billion." Lisa followed the streams of code that flew past the window on the left-hand side of her monitor, even as the right-hand side once again declared access to be denied and cleared the username and password fields.
"Fuck," Alice said again. "What's wrong?"
"You're gonna need a new birthday," Lisa said with a smirk.
"Hm?"
"Don't you always complain that you're bored shitless up in the mansion?"
"Yeah—mainly because I am always bored shitless up in the mansion."
"Then you should have plenty of time to read my memos."
"What memo?"
"The one I wrote six weeks ago that says you have to change your password every week, and anyone who goes eight days without changing it will be locked out."
"Oh, that memo. You do know that there are seven days in a week, right?"
Lisa laughed. "Yeah, but I thought I'd be generous and give everyone an extra day in case they forgot. Pretty pointless, as it turns out, since anyone who doesn't remember for seven days isn't likely to get a sudden burst of memory given another twenty-four hours, but I like to live the life of a cockeyed optimist."
"No, you just like to be an even bigger pain in the ass by pointing out that we're all too stupid to remember to change our password even when given an extra day."
"That, too." Lisa's tone grew more serious. "All kidding aside,