Brief Note: CUBE FARM works on the basis that the events of FFVII began 20 December, 2000, and that Dirge of Cerberus took place during mid-July of 2003.
Cube Farm
Entry One: Kickback and Relax
The Intelligence Department didn't have a set location. In the HQ, it had a core set of offices, where the leading team worked. The undercover agents, however, it shuffled around both HQ and the globe— whatever their covers required. When multiple agents worked on one project, the WRO shuffled them so they stayed together. That was about all the consideration they received.
The poor, poor bastards whose bosses didn't work in HQ moved around completely at the whims of their covers. They were utterly unconnected to any specific location.
This month, Yuffie's cubicle was in the Law-Enforcement Liaison Department. Unlike other times, it was isolated. She was posing as a LEL, and the cover wasn't just good, it was damn near unbreakable. The other agents in her division were all convinced that she had transferred in from Wutai.
"Hey! Ish!"
Ish. Short for Ishikawa, the surname of her new name— Yuri Ishikawa. Yuffie turned to face whoever had called her.
Ah, Sharon Kelser. A redhead and it was natural, too. She had a wicked temper and a truly devious sense of humour, according to her source in the squad.
"Congrats on your promotion, Ish. From open desk to three solid walls in just a week."
Yuffie smiled, her lips twisting into an expression more wry than happy. "But now I'm chained to a desk."
"You'll get used to it. And if you don't," here, Kelser's grin turned mischievous, "just prank people until you don't want to leave the office."
Yuffie sniggered. "In other words, turn into you."
"Basically, yeah. This office could use more people like me."
"Wouldn't that be Cruelty To Helpless Deskmonkies? That falls under the Cruelty to Animals act of 1990, right?"
Kelser laughed. That red, red mouth opened very wide as she did so. "Helpless deskmonkies? Stick around another week."
She smirked. That was true. The people around her weren't in Intelligence, but they were far from helpless. Most of them had been on the police force or in other paramilitary organizations. She wasn't working with a bunch of slackers.
"Will do," she said, knowing that in all likelihood, if the information showed up today, she'd be transferring into another division within three days.
She smiled, pushing past Kelser, taking a seat at her cubicle. The PC turned on, and she logged in as YIshikawa. Her password— BaReNtAiN— showed up as a series of question marks on the screen. Once she knew nobody was looking over her shoulder, she pulled up Linksys.exe, a program designed to link this computer with her other hard drives.
Let's see, there was the laptop at home, as Yuri Ishikawa was earning the lowest salary in LEL, and also her real PC, which she kept tucked in a corner of Reeve's office.
Linksys.exe showed up as a tiny option window, with three sequences of text boxes: two, then two, then two. No text appeared in the window, not even a submit button. The textboxes lacked labels, and any text entered would appear as a question mark.
In the first box, she entered "YIshikawa," then entered "BaReNtAiN" in its companion. She typed "TheConformer" and "WATERpaGODa" in the second pair of text boxes, and finally entered "YKisaragi" and then "aLlcreAtiOn" in the last two. The alternating caps were security measures.
Any computer program that searched for passwords had to work through the entire alphabet, starting with "A" and ending with "Z." It would try the minimum number of characters with only one letter, in all capitals. "AAAAA." If that password failed, it would try "BBBBB." So on and so on, trying letter combinations until it reached the password it was looking for.
The longer a password, the longer it would take the program. If the formatting of the password was somewhat out there— such as alternating capitals or randomized lowercase— the program would take even longer.
Linksys.exe would allow for 12 tries before shutting down and refusing to start again.
Once she had entered all her user names and passwords, she went to the second text box in the first pair. She tapped the enter key twice. In the space between the first pair of boxes and the second, a blue progress bar appeared. Not a word explained what that box meant.
Once the blue bar was full, she moved onto password two. This time, a green bar showed up. When the bar was full, a message window popped up, saying, "Connected to Computer A."
Tapping enter twice for password three created a yellow bar.
When all the bars solidified, she pressed a red button that appeared in another message window.
She was now logged into all three computers.
She opened up the documents necessary to push all of Ishikawa's papers. After a moment, she blinked. The back of her neck tingled, and she turned, a half-smile planted on her face even as her other finger moved to the tiny knife stored under her keyboard.
In her cube's open door-gap stood a fairly tall, dark-haired man. His eyes, however, were an amazing shade of green, and they damn near glittered as he watched her.
"From working to wary in less than three seconds. Not bad," he said, the syllables heavily accented. They came out at a brisk pace: every word clipped and measured.
It was a hard contrast to the primarily-Midgarian sounds she usually heard.
"You shouldn't scare people like that, Baker."
"Call me Chris, or at least Christopher. I insist."
She eyed him, mock-suspicious. "You need something, don't you?"
A tiny paperback book whipped out of his pocket. He revealed his thumb, stuck in between two of the pages to keep his place, then handed it to her.
She looked down at it. The page consisted of an 18x18 grid of squares, some with pencilled in numbers, some with numbers inked by the company, and some with pencilled question marks.
A sudoku puzzle. Baker had a funny way of doing it, too. Instead of filling in each sequence of one through nine, he attempted to find every one, then every two, then every three. So and so on, until there were pretty well nine spaces between any number he'd pencilled in.
"I'm stuck," he said, shrugging. "You do these, right?"
"Sometimes. But I stick mostly to nine-by-nines. Easier." She looked at it, hemming and hawing until finally she said, "I can't help you. Try filling in complete strings and not just pieces."
He shook his head and sighed. "Nobody understands my method."
"You're damn right I don't. And you're freakishly uptight about it, too. Have fun. Stop caring if you're right or wrong."
He blinked. "What?"
"You do it in pencil, idiot. Do you go back in and ink the ones you solved properly?"
He blinked some more, then cleared his throat. That very green gaze roved over her cubicle, looking anywhere but at her. "Well, yes," ahem, "sometimes."
"Stop worrying about it so much. Do it in crayon or something."
"And doing it in crayon will help me solve them?" This time, he eyed her.
"No, but relaxing will." She made 'go away' motions. "Get out of my cube if you don't have anything else to ask."
He smirked. "Actually, I do."
And it was then that Yuffie realized the evil that was Christopher Baker. He was plotting something, she could tell, but she had no idea what and it was infuriating.
"What?" She folded her arms across her chest.
"Was it you or Kelser who cancelled my newspaper subscription on grounds that we can't security check paperboys?"
Yuffie blinked. A somewhat large bead of irritated sweat gathered on her left temple. "Are you kidding me? It was probably Kelser."
"Devious woman."
"We can't security check paperboys, by the way. It was dumb of you to try that in the first place."
He glared. "Whose side are you on, here? Good or—"
"—awesome. I'm with awesome."
And with that, she turned back to her PC.
26 June 2006