Note: 20 chapters! Oy oy oy! I had never intended the story to go on this long! (Not that I'm complaining.)
I'm mentioning the I60 a lot, I know. It has nothing to do with my annoyance towards a real life laptop from an otherwise reputable tech company (that has since been taken over by another brand). The laptop's one flaw is an absolutely lousy heatsink that can't wick away heat fast enough from a Core Duo T2500 and an ATI Mobility X1400.
The I60 does have an important place in the plot. You'll see. :)
Thank you for your patience!
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One Year and Six Months Prior
An hour later, I eased the car—my new car, for however long that lasted—into a parking space in front of a squat, three-story office building; a glistening monolith of stone tile and dark green windows. I turned off the engine. Leaned back in my seat. Took a deep breath, drained the last of the tea from the paper cup in the cupholder.
"I'm here," I said.
"Good," John's voice crackled. "Want to go over anything before you go inside?"
"No. No, I think I'm good."
"Remember, you're there only to watch. Take pictures of interesting things with your phone, if you can do it without people noticing. If anything happens, get to safety and call me."
"What happens if this Horstmann Sarim guy tries to kill somebody or something like that?"
"Call me, get building security. Intervene if there's no choice. Life or death situation only, Robin. You're getting better at your hand-to-hand combat—but you're not that good yet."
"Should've brought my gun," I grumbled.
"Robin, are you prepared to shoot someone? To kill them?"
"Not really," I admitted.
"Then your gun stays at home. Relax, Robin. I just need you to keep eyes on Sarim."
I swung down the sun visor and checked myself in the mirror. Mussed up my hair once again, just for good measure. Added a little lipstick—a brighter, redder hue than I usually liked.
"Say," I said. "What are you gonna be doing while I'm in there?"
"Oh, the usual," John said, sounding nonchalant. "Researching Horsy. Looking up his criminal record. Testing his back door lock and going through all the stuff in his house."
I shook my head, slung my laptop bag and purse over my shoulder, pushed open the door, and stepped out into the cold morning.
"All right," I said. "I'm going in."
The walk to the front doors felt very long. The warm lobby was spacious, sparse; lots of abstract art and peculiar angles and thin, spindly plastic chairs. The square blue-and-white Connetrix logo was displayed prominently on the back wall, accompanied by large, blocky letters screaming the company name. There was a curved reception desk, and behind that desk sat a young man, maybe twenty-five years old. He had mousy blond hair, gray eyes, and a crisp white shirt with thin, vertical blue stripes. The desk dwarfed him.
"Hi," he said, smiling. He wore braces. "Welcome to Connetrix. I'm Darryl. How can I help you?"
"Um, I'm—I'm the new girl," I said. "Robin—Robin McCartney." I chuckled weakly. The nervousness wasn't an act. "Where am I supposed to go?"
"Oh!" he said. "Melissa said to expect you. I think I have the note here...no, maybe here..." He squinted at a long, ragged row of sticky notes hanging from the inner lip of the reception counter. When he got to one of them, he plucked it off with a flourish. "Yeah. Okay, I'll have her down here in a jiff. You're, um, a bit late. Have a seat. Want a cookie? We got cookies."
I looked where he was pointing, and sure enough, there was a plate of cookies next to a water cooler.
"Yeah, sure. I'll go for a cookie."
I snagged one of the cookies off the plate, sat in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, crossed my legs, and waited, waggling my feet out of anxiety.
Eight minutes and three stale chocolate-chip cookies later, the lift chimed and the steel door slid aside. A woman stepped out of the lift, saw me, and walked over to where I sat. Her short black pumps clicked on the tile floor with each step.
"Hi," she said, holding out her hand. "You must be Robin. I'm your supervisor—Melissa Lee."
Melissa Lee had skin the color of creamy coffee and long, nimble fingers, one of which bore a golden wedding band. She had short, curly black hair that was trimmed close to her head. Hazel eyes. A fine gray suit jacket and flowing skirt. The smile on her face was infectious and, as far as I could tell, genuine. She looked like she smiled a lot and meant it each time.
My fingers trembled when we shook hands. Such long fingers!
"Hi," I said. "Sorry—um, sorry, Miss Lee, I know I'm late—"
"Oh, don't mind that at all. Come on. I'll show you around." She tilted her head towards the lift and we stepped inside. She pressed the button for the third floor. The door grumbled shut. There was the muffled sound of a hydraulic pump and the cab began to shudder upward, vibrating beneath my shoes.
"So," Melissa said. "I read your resume. Glad to see you know your way around Samba. Our old Skylight 2000 fileserver can't keep up anymore and we really would like replace it with Samba on CentOS. Jackie will want to talk to you about that."
"Yeah, Skylight 2000 is kinda old," I said, scratching the back of my head. "Uhm, what hardware is it running on now?"
"Hah." She rolled her eyes. "Dual Titanium-III CPUs, I think, on a hundred Mbit port."
I winced. "Oww. That's like, last-century."
"Exactly."
The lift door parted. We stepped out into an office area that was considerably less high-tech than the lobby below. Several clusters of computer desks were scattered around the room. Cables snaked across the floor between the desks. The cables had been duct-taped to the dark blue carpet. Judging by the way the tape was pealing at the ends, the tape had been a permanent fixture of the office for quite some time. All the monitors were mismatched—some beige, some gray, some black, even a few CRTs—and there were at least three different colors of rolling chairs in the room.
There were about twenty people in the office, maybe twenty five. Most of them were hard at work at their computers, although I could see from here that the two young guys in the back were clustered around a monitor that was prominently displaying a certain popular web site devoted to cat pictures.
Melissa Lee pointed out a few of the workers nearest to us. Some of them waved; a few walked up to shake hands. One of the workers, a shy young kid that was probably just out of college, held my hand just a little too long. A foolish grin was plastered on his face, which was framed by messy locks of black hair.
"Hi," he said, stretching out the syllable. "Uh, I'm Andrew. But—but you can call me Andy. Everybody does."
"Hi, Andy," I said. I was too nervous to get into much of a conversation, and a few seconds later, he sulked back to his workstation.
Melissa said, "There's Jackie." Melissa pointed to a woman with bright, messy ginger hair that went all the way down to her butt. "She'll want to talk to you later. Now, let's show you the server room."
She guided me up to a door with an RFID card reader. Taking a card out of her breast pocket, she held it against the scanner, which beeped. The door clicked open.
As far as server rooms went, it wasn't too unusual: lots of noise, lots of heat, lots of computers and networking gear mounted in lots of tall racks. Massive silver air ducts loomed overhead, leading to three air conditioning units mounted against the nearest wall. A river of cold air spilled from vents near the floor and pooled around my legs. The drone of the air handlers and the high-pitched whine of the servers stung my ears. Melissa had to raise her voice.
"You good with hardware, Robin?" Melissa asked.
"Uh, kinda," I said. "I mean, I've built a few computers..." That hadn't been in my script or resume, but it felt like it was a safe assumption to make.
"Good, we'll make a hardware tech out of you. In a month you'll be sick of SabreBlade servers. Shoddiest equipment I've ever seen, and we're still under contract with mTech. See that server over there?" She pointed to a fat, matte black server, about six inches thick, mounted in a rack a few feet away. There were a half-dozen network cables snaking away from it. "It needs rebooted at least once a day."
"What does it do?" I said, eying it curiously.
"It's our Nagios monitoring server. Doesn't like the high load. A lousy piece of shit, if I do say so myself. The server, I mean. Well, Nagios too. It's always spitting out warnings of doom and gloom about security breaches and all sorts of other false alarms. You good with Nagios?"
"Um, no," I said.
"Shame. No one around here is. Except Sarim—and speak of the devil, here he is."
I decided right away that I didn't like Horstmann Sarim. There was something about him that had all my instincts whispering "don't trust him." I couldn't figure it out. He seemed like a nice man: he smiled when Melissa introduced us and shook my hand firmly, not letting go too soon but not letting his grip linger either.
Mama had always said that you could judge a man by his handshake.
But then again, she'd also said that a cup of tea a day kept illness at bay, and then my little brother had gone and gotten himself pneumonia.
Sarim had a fringe of white hair around his head and his beard was snowy to match. His hands were large and strong. He wore tan slacks and a simple white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. No tie.
Melissa said to Sarim, "I was thinking we could see how well she knows her way around Red Hat, maybe have her help you install and configure some of the new rack servers."
"Well..." he said. He hesitated. "I guess we can try her out tomorrow. You know Kickstart, Robin?"
"Sorta," I said, scratching my head. Really, I knew how to use it perfectly well, but I wasn't supposed to be acting like I knew everything. "I've, uh, played with it before."
"Good." To Melissa, he said, "I gotta get back to configuring the edge router...bring her in tomorrow."
Melissa nodded and Sarim disappeared among the rows of computer equipment.
I was shown a few other interesting sights in the server room—including two other servers that needed rebooted several times per day and an extremely crotchety gigabit network switch that had once caught on fire (and had the scorch marks to prove it). Halfway down one of the aisles was a cheap plastic fan tilted back against a chair to provide spot cooling for a rack of overheating equipment.
After a few minutes, Melissa led me back out to the main office and showed me my desk. Aside from a legal pad, a lonely unconnected network cable, and a power strip, the surface was bare.
And it was right next to Andrew's workstation.
"We'll get a computer up here tomorrow," Melissa promised. "In the meantime, you can use your laptop. There's not much for you to do today. I'll give you our intranet portal URL—the portal has docs on the network and the dev tools. I'll be back in awhile with your temporary password. Okay?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Awesome, Robin," Melissa said. She patted my shoulder. "Glad to have you here." She took a pen from Andrew's desk, wrote down an IP address on the legal pad, and pushed it towards me.
"Be back in awhile," she said, and she walked away.
I sat down in my chair, exhaled. The chair squeaked, but I didn't mind—I was glad to be sitting. The laptop case strap had just about worn a groove in my shoulder. I put it on the ground, unzipped it, and pulled out the laptop and power supply. I set them on the desk, then shoved the laptop case and purse into the footwell of my desk.
Opening the laptop lid, I connected the power supply, clicked the network cable into the port on the side, and pressed the power button. It was only then that I realized that this wasn't my laptop. I had grabbed it off the desk in "my" apartment and stuffed it in its case without realizing what I was doing.
It looked like one of my laptops, sure. By some cosmic coincidence, the laptop was an IFT I60—a very popular but sadly discontinued model of the infamous IFT Thinkbook. About three-quarters of an inch thick; heavy; matte black, with thick gray metal lid hinges. A row of status LEDs just beneath the screen. A large, silky touchpad with mouse buttons that actually moved when you pressed on them (and didn't require a billion pounds of force to click). A soft, responsive keyboard.
The laptop had even been stripped of the irritating shiny stickers that usually besieged the palmrest—"Titanium Mobile CPU Inside" and "Graphics by videoQ" and all that nonsense.
But the long scratch on the back of the lid was missing.
The laptop flashed the IFT logo on the screen, then switched to the bootloader. A moment later, I saw Linux kernel messages scroll past, blocky white text on a black background, as it booted. The screen flashed again and I was faced with an unceremoniously dull login prompt. It looked generic. I couldn't even tell what variant of Linux was running.
And, I realized, I didn't know the username and password to log in.
Hesitantly, I reached for the keyboard, but before I touched it, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. New text message.
From: (Unknown Caller)
user: root
password: VAj3xKloss2mjfnHF73wJNItMDCBnTvbxuOlytxUzik=
Change password and configure as you please.
"John, John, John," I mumbled as I typed in the password. "You just had to give me a root password like that."
Several seconds later, I was faced with a very plain desktop with a solid black background. A simple menu bar ran across the top of the screen. There was a drop-down menu, and next to it were some common application icons: a web browser, a terminal window, a text editor, and a file manager.
I clicked the drop down menu and gasped. This laptop was loaded. Every security tool I could think of was present, and then some. But I still didn't recognize this variant of Linux.
"Nice laptop," a voice said in my ear. I jumped.
"Sorry!" Andrew said, leaning away from me. He had rolled his chair over next to mine. "I'm just—I'm quiet, you know? Like a ninja."
"A ninja?" I said, raising my eyebrows.
"Uh, yeah. I'm sneaky. Everybody around here knows it."
"Uh-huh," I said. I started a terminal window and began to enter the root password again so I could change it to something more memorable. Andrew was sitting a little too close for comfort. I glared until he got the hint and looked away so I could finish entering the rest of the password.
When I was done, he started talking again. "Really though. The I60. Love the I60s. Except that—that heatsink thing, never really liked that much. And the model is kinda old these days—I mean, two gigahertz? Come on. And the Titanium Mobile Duo is only a 32-bit CPU. But besides that, it's great, you know? Just great. Especially if it's loaded with three gigabytes of RAM. Is that thing maxed out?"
"I think so," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the monitor as I opened Firefox and browsed to the IP address Melissa had given me. The company intranet splash page popped up at once.
"I had an I42 once. You know, the ones with the loose GPU? Man, that happened to me, right in the middle of the semester, you know? GPU melted right off the motherboard, I was like, my God, I wanted to give the thing a eulogy. Then I felt bad, because it was my fault, I was playing video games and the chip just got too hot. It felt like murder, you know?"
"Yeah." I could tell that this motor-mouth wasn't going to hush up anytime soon. I wasn't sure what to do. See, if I'd been back at Landis, I would've put him in his place with a few choice words from my acerbic tongue, but here, I was supposed to be a new intern. And by definition, interns were supposed to kiss up to the other workers, not get all snappish with them.
"Is that Linux?" he said, leaning closer. "Is that—that looks like XFCE. No, it's too plain. Not that plain is bad. Plain is fast, you know? Like a jet. Gotta love a girl that knows how to squeeze every last drop of performance from a laptop."
The look on my face must've been quite a sight, because when I glanced over at him he quickly held up his hands and added, "I'm just sayin'...!"
I sighed and said, "Look, I gotta read these docs." I motioned to my laptop screen. "I'll show you the laptop later, okay?"
"Oh, right, sure!"
Andrew rolled his chair back to his terminal, leaving me alone to read. Or to pretend to read.
I opened up a terminal window and started wget in recursive mirror mode, telling it to fetch every document on the intranet and download it to the laptop. I gave it a little random delay between documents and limited the bandwidth to a few hundred kilobytes per second, but it still finished the job in less than five minutes. While it did that, I explored the network a little.
First, I looked at what sort of IP addresses the laptop had been given. To my surprise, I found both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. Not many places used IPv6 on their networks. I tried accessing the Internet—the firewall allowed it.
Sloppy security, I thought. Would've thought it wouldn't let me do that until my laptop was registered with a DHCP server.
I went back and browsed the documents. The doc on the company file server had an IP address in it. I tried accessing it. It rebuffed me with a password prompt—and I didn't have my password yet. I bookmarked the IP address and moved on.
A few minutes later, Melissa returned with a sheet of paper. My password and account information had been printed on it. She showed me the section of the intranet portal where I could change my password. (I'd found the form ten minutes ago, but I didn't want to tell her that.)
When I tried to put in a new password, it returned an error.
"We're sorry, but your password must be between four and eight characters in length and can only contain the following characters: a-zA-Z0-9".
"Really?" I said.
"Yeah," Melissa said. "It has to be compatible with the legacy systems."
I cringed as I typed in a weaker password, using all eight characters available to me. I had to remind myself: You're only here for a few days...you're only here for a few days...who cares if it can be cracked in just a few minutes...
After Melissa walked away, I tried accessing the file server again with my new credentials. This time, it obediently delivered a share list.
Oh my god. Are they sharing the whole hard drive?
"Oh, for heaven's sake..." I mumbled. Sure enough, I had read-only access to every file on the hard drive—including the configuration files.
Which had admin passwords embedded inside for the network authentication server.
Glancing around to make sure no one was watching, I casually copied the files to my laptop. It took awhile, even though the files were tiny. The server must've really been loaded.
While I waited, I explored the laptop more. I finally found a file in /etc that claimed the laptop was running a version of Arch Linux, but I had no idea what kind of graphical interface was layered on top. The system package update mirrors were hosted at IFT under a directory called minerva. I checked for security updates—old habits died hard—but there were no newer packages available.
As I tentatively explored the laptop and the Connetrix file server, I noticed that the laptop fan was running on high. The vent at the left-rear of the laptop was like a hair dryer.
Aww, really? Don't tell me this laptop has the heatsink flaw too.
I accessed the internal sensors. Groaned. 85C for Core0, 88C for Core1. The first thermal trip point had already been passed, and the CPU had throttled each core down to 800MHz (from 2GHz) to protect itself from overheating.
And that made things slow, especially the way I liked to multitask.
My cell phone buzzed again—incoming call. I answered it without looking at the screen. I knew who it'd be.
"John," I whispered, turning away from Andrew. "You had all the laptops in the world to choose from, and you had to pick a first-revision I60."
"I thought you'd appreciate it some familiar hardware, Robin."
"Yeah, well, I'm familiar with the way the I60 likes to overheat and shut down because IFT was too dumb to put in a proper heatsink until three hardware revisions later."
A pause. "Is the laptop giving you trouble?"
I refreshed the temperature sensors.
"Oh, no, not at all. Unless you count the CPU being nearly hot enough to boil water, I mean. Look, can you swing by my—er, Elizabeth's apartment? Take the I60 there and drop it off at home."
"Won't that one overheat as well?"
"Nu-uh. I modified it. There's a two millimeter thick copper plate over the CPU to draw the heat towards the fan. And the south bridge has a real heatsink, too. So now it's a real laptop. It's lasted me all through college."
"I'll get it. It'll be waiting for you at your apartment. How is your first day at work?"
"Not bad," I mumbled, glancing over my shoulder to make sure Andrew wasn't listening in. He appeared absorbed in his work. "Met some new coworkers...got my network credentials...Sarim makes me nervous. I dunno why. But I'll be working with him tomorrow."
"Trust your instincts, Robin. Don't let your guard down. Do you need anything else?"
"Nah. I'm good."
"Call me if you need me," he said, and the line went dead.
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I signed out at 5PM, drove "my" SUV to "my" apartment, took the lift to the sixth floor, and unlocked my door.
"Hi, John," I said. I kicked off my shoes, worked the band out of my hair, and closed the door. "Something smells good."
He was sitting at the tiny dining table. Motioning to a paper bag in front of him, he said, "Chicken with vegetables; chow-mien; egg flour soup. I'd make you dinner, but I can't stay long."
"Aww, that's sweet," I said. I set the laptop bag and purse on the bed and walked over to the table, sitting down across from John. My stomach grumbled. I reached for the bag and started pulling out take-out boxes, napkins, and a pair of chopsticks.
"Your laptop's on the desk," he said. "I'm sorry, Robin. The I60 was my idea. My computer guy wanted to go for something newer."
"Hey, it's fine. All the new IFT stuff is lousy anyway. I'll just swap out the hard drives." A puff of steam greeted my face when I opened the container of chow-mien. I dug in.
"Now," John said, "tell me about Connetrix. Did you see anything unusual?"
"Besides unusually horribad security setups? I think I got the admin password for their network auth system."
John raised his eyebrows, smiled. "Nice."
"Mmm," I said, poking at the chow-mien with my chopsticks. "This is good. You want some?"
"No, thanks. Already ate. Did you see Sarim again today?"
"Nu-uh. I probably will tomorrow though. He gives me the creeps. Dunno why."
"Trust your instincts. Who else did you meet today?"
"Melissa Lee—my boss. She's nice. Seems to know what she's talking about. And Andrew." I snickered. "Motor-mouth. He's at the desk next to mine and he has absolutely no filter between here and here." I pointed to my head and my mouth.
"Did anyone act suspicious? Wary of the new employee?"
"Nah. Everyone seemed happy to see me. The two guys in the back were a little too happy to see someone female and breathing, actually. I could feel their eyes on my butt."
"If they give you any trouble, you can always call me."
"That'd scare 'em straight," I said, laughing. I stuck the chopsticks into the mass of noodles, smoothed back my hair and said, "You know what? I need tea. You want some tea?"
"I'll pass," John said. "Gotta go in a minute. But I want to make sure you're comfortable being undercover. You can back out any time."
"No way!" I said, waving my hand in dismissal. There was a silver tea kettle next to the hot plate in the kitchen. I filled the kettle with water and started it heating. "It was fun. Really, it's fine. I'm enjoying it. It's like an adventure." I turned around just in time to see John drop a fat envelope on the table.
"Your paycheck for the day," he said. "Just remember, you're not Indiana Jones. Play it safe."
"I will."
"We'll talk tomorrow, Robin. I have to go stake out a house."
"Bye, John," I said. He left.
The hot plate was about as effective as a candle. While waiting for it to heat the water, I walked back to the table and picked up the envelope. Opened it.
Jesus Christ, I thought. I was stunned. There's...at least two thousand dollars in here.
Stupefied, I sat down and stared at the envelope until the tea kettle began to whistle.
I ate dinner, sipped my tea. Ducked into the bathroom to slip off my daywear and wrap a nightgown around my body. (I was still wary of that damn camera.)
Before heading to bed, I sat down at the desk and ran my hand over the closed lid of the laptop John had brought from my apartment. The deep scratch ran from one corner to the other. It went all the way down to the metal of the lid.
I flipped the laptop over with care, intending to swap out the drives with the one in the laptop John had gotten for me, but I realized I didn't have my screwdrivers. I searched the desk drawers and found a tiny case of tools in the second drawer down. I removed a screw from the underside of the laptop, popped off the side cover, and slid the drive out. Took the other laptop from its case, removed its drive, and slid it home in my I60, screwing the cover back down. Flipped the laptop over again. Opened it. Pressed the power button. Logged in. Fired up the thermal monitoring app and ran a few applications to heat the CPU.
The temperature never went past 50C.
Satisfied, I left the laptop to charge and headed for bed. Slipped under the sheets. Clicked off the light. Braced myself for the darkness, hoping that the charger LED on the laptop would be enough to dispel the shadows.
But I hadn't needed to worry. Across the room, plugged into one of the electrical outlets, was a little nightlight, just like the one my little brother had used. It glowed gently, an amber beacon in the dark.
John had installed a nightlight in my apartment. I wouldn't be lost in the darkness tonight.
Smiling to myself, I shed the nightgown beneath the sheets, tossed it to the foot of the bed, and curled up to sleep.
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