Information Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Data was the key. It was the one
thing that everyone was after.
The alarms sounded. Technically
that meant stop all work instantly. Not
a single key stroke or click of a button or flip of a switch. Stop anything and everything you were doing,
place your hands on your work station and await scanning analysis. Further instructions would follow.
No one took the alarms too seriously.
They were always going on and off for one reason or another. Usually it was just some overly paranoid
middle manager or someone who overly enjoyed protocol and was a stickler for surprise
inspections. Work often slowed. Work hardly ever stopped.
The alarm changed pitch and tone and speed and intensity. This was a bad sign. No more work would get done this hour, and
possibly the remainder of the day. This
was going to be a very annoying work day.
“What do you think it is?” asked a voice over the cubicle wall.
A.T. stopped her typing and unplugged her audio player. Perhaps a little slowly, but she didn’t think
anyone had noticed. “What do I think it
is?” asked A.T. rhetorically. “I think somebody upstairs sneezed too loud and
set the whole thing off.”
“This is protocol 3. Something big
is happening.”
“You wish. Protocol 3 was invented
to keep the boys in the IAA happy.”
A.T. thought Protocol 3 was a joke.
It was made by middle managers to make it seem like something was done
when nothing could be. It was a way for
them to keep their job when data loss occurred.
It had to look like they tried.
Protocol 3 was a waste of time.
It made no sense. If data had
been lost, it was lost. A lockdown of
all electronic devices and broadcast signals now wouldn’t do a bit of good. It’s like putting the genie back in the
bottle. Not going to happen. If people were serious about data loss they
would have the building locked down at all times and any data incoming or outgoing
would have to be checked and rechecked before approval. But business didn’t work that way. Time was money and time waits for no man and
all that good stuff.
A.T. was a 7th level data hacker at the Verification
Center. 7th level data
hackers didn’t have to stop working during Protocol 1 or 2. Protocol 3 shut everybody down. Usually.
It was off the record and no one would admit to it, but A.T. knew there
was an unlisted 8th level.
She suspected there were also a 9th and 10th level
too. She imagined that was the
Verification Center equivalent of being CIA or James Bond or some such action
hero nonsense. But they were out
there. A.T. didn’t know what one had to
do to get that job, but it was on her personal wish list to find out. A.T. could hack most any system, including
the secure security systems down in the basement. But then there were the systems that didn’t
seem to exist. They were the basement below the basement below the buried
bunker in the ground. If there were 10th
level anywhere, they were down there.
“Is this gonna take all day? I was
about to file a very important report on the innovation reclamation project of
fact omissions on information swaps.”
A.T. was talking to the camera, but the camera wasn’t answering.
“Is that even a thing?” asked the voice on the other side of the cubicle
wall.
“Wouldn’t you like to know? Sorry,
can’t tell you 6ers anything.”
“Screw you A.T.”
Three hours later, A.T. was still sitting there with her hands placed on
the scan station.
“This is getting super annoying.
What if I have to go to the bathroom?!?”
Again, the camera didn’t care.
“You think it’s a cracker?” asked the cubicle wall.
Crackers were a hacker’s worst enemy – annoying, smug and self-righteous. All the things a hacker was, but without the
moral compass. Or at least that’s what
A.T. told herself. The big difference was that they got to work from home, didn’t
have scan pads and cameras and made a lot more money. A.T. often wondered why she put up with this
mess when she could be having so much more fun on the other side of
things. But Momma Trafalgar didn’t raise
no criminals. Today was a good day to
dream though.
No cracker has gotten into the Verification Center in the last 9 months.
It wasn’t a record, but they felt pretty good about it. Almost good enough to make that kind of
information public.
Almost.
Data was key. Data was king. Out
there on the black market of industry people did just about anything and
everything to get it. Here at the Verification Center, data was still a
proprietary principle. The IAA made sure of that. Or at least they tried to.
“If it were a cracker, they wouldn’t
enact Protocol 3. They wouldn’t want us
to know. It would be dangerous for us to
know.”
“So
what do you think it is then?”
A.T.
didn’t know and she didn’t want to wager a guess – out loud anyway. She wanted to keep her head down and avoid
any friendly fire that might be on its way.
A.T. had one private guess and that guess was that somebody made a very
big mistake and lost something very important or had it stolen, or took part in
the stealing. Which ever it was, it wasn’t
good.
Later when things died down the official report that went around the
building was that a security review came into conflict with a firewall
protection system. That made almost no
sense to anyone who knew anything about the Verification Center’s security
process. A.T. didn’t know many 7th
level hackers. The IAA kept them far
apart in the building and they didn’t get to interact too much. A.T. presumed this was another misguided
security measure. Why have us at all if
all you’re doing is making a class of security threats, she thought. If she had been able to talk, she was sure
they’d think the same thing as she did.
The official explanation was a lie.
A six hour Protocol 3 was no mix up.
Something big and embarrassing went down and no one was talking. It was doublethink pure and simple. No one was to mention it again. It was as if they had worked a normal day and
it would always be that way from this point on.
A.T. couldn’t find out what it was that had happened. She could keep an eye on the data traffic
though. There was an awful lot of
that. Traffic was coming in and out on
the information grid at a rate ten times higher than usual. You can claim anything you want in public,
but you can’t hide the flow of data.
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