8. Literature Cited

What else could I do but wait? With the exception of his hearing, I had only ever seen Vice once a year since getting foster families. Now with time running out, it was as though he was trying to get in several more years' worth of torment while he could—not that I thought that he knew when my deathdate would be, but the coincidence was suspicious. Now, whether he intended it or not, I found myself looking over my shoulder at every turn, wondering when his next act would be. It made me jumpier than ever, and I couldn't focus on my work because I always felt the other shoe was going to drop.

I picked at the Pearson case. Half of my assignments could be finished in a flash if I was pressed to get them done, but it was trivial at this point because anyone could do desk work, with minimal risk. The tough part was getting in new hires for agent footwork, since many who were willing were in half-life—itself a problem for liability reasons but also because disclosure protocol dictated a necessary discrimination that only encouraged lying in order to get the job.

Like I had done.

While I was procrastinating, my postbox blipped. I looked up to see an undisclosed sender address, which perplexed me because the network was supposed to be secure, with no external access. Though I was relatively familiar with programming and hacking, I was hesitant to open it without IS support.

"Rothe," I buzzed.

"What's up?" she replied, yawning.

"You sound like you're falling asleep over there. Want something big to do?"

"Big?" She sounded skeptical. "You're on Pearson, aren't you?"

"Yeah, but I just got a restricted internal post. What can you tell me about that?"

It sounded as though she had fallen out of her chair. "Restricted?"

I frowned. "That bad?"

"There's no protocol that allows for unsigned senders within the network. Let me see it before you do anything, and I mean let me get over there."

What felt like moments later, I heard squeaking in the hall from Rothe's sneakers. Unbelievable— "How did you get here from Chesapeake so quickly?" I asked after picking my jaw off the floor.

"I took 355. Where's this post of yours?"

I pointed to the suspect header. Rothe stared at it for an uncomfortably long time, as though engaging it in a staring contest. Finally, she took my tablet from me. "Huh. No touchpad?"

"I got tired of it. Settings are lefty, by the way."

"Hey, I'm ambidextrous. I'm awesome like that." She clicked the post and brought up its signature headers. "This... I don't know where it originated, but it's definitely not an internal post. Something's wrong."

"What should I do?"

"Nothing. Leave it. If I can borrow your station—"

I shrugged. "Have at it. I'm twiddling my thumbs until active duty comes up again."

"You prefer active duty?"

"I prefer doing things that no one else can or wants to do. It makes me feel useful."

She smirked at me. "I guess I know the feeling." She checked the transfer logs for my station against the transfer logs for the last several hours. I wasn't quite sure what she was looking for, but I didn't want to interrupt. "Here."

I glanced over to where there was a blanked line.

"Someone managed to break the RAID protection and erase every instance of who sent this from where. No, this could actually have been done internally as well—in fact, someone with clearance would be able to do this more easily than an outside attacker." She sighed in defeat. "Without this data, we don't know even that much. It's speculation at this point until we can run an undelete on the whole thing."

"For one post?"

"Well, this is a potentially serious threat here. If this is an external attack, who knows what could happen if it's left unchecked. However, all of our people would be on this like white on rice. If this is an internal job..." She scratched her head in bewilderment. "Internal, that means we could have double agents letting people in whenever they want."

"What should I tell Rush?"

"Rush needs to know that security has been compromised, but I need Gourley, Fender, Rasnake, and Kwasigroch to get on this immediately!"

I started to buzz Rush, but Rothe stopped me.

"Let Evans know first, he's the head of IS. That'll be much faster than calling all of them individually."

I nodded, dialing IS, but... "My mobile's not responding."

She held out her mobile without thinking. I took it and tried again, but no response. What was going on?

"No carrier. It's like we're in a dead zone now."

"What?" She grabbed her mobile from me and picked at it, then took mine and did the same. "That's ridiculous. Our federal satellite network is absolute top of the line. There's no reason we shouldn't be in range."

I had the mental image of a gigantic series of IABMs taking out all of our satellites, but there was no way—NO WAY—a single group working alone could afford the funding to invent interatmospheric weaponry, much less any that would have a vendetta against me specifically.

"What about the network?" I asked. "Can you get a direct link to anyone?"

"I don't know if I want to risk it. With malicious code, the best thing to do is not to do anything that might access it or anything it might compromise until the code is quarantined from the rest of the system."

Fantastic! I was rendered helpless yet again. What a terrific way to push me into early retirement. "Great."

"Yeah, I know. Sorry you can't do your work."

"What if... What would happen if you logged out of my account?"

"And into an administrator's? No way. Not until I get backup on this, I don't want to open up a trojan on my own."

"Or a guest account. Just so the code's not open and possibly running anymore."

"I don't think that's how it works, but I'll try." Rothe logged out of my account and logged in under a test user. As soon as the system booted, the postbox blipped. "What..." She read the header. "Undisclosed sender? Really?"

"You're kidding."

"And it's still addressed to you? On the test account?"

"Let me see."

Sure enough, it listed my assumed name as the alias for the test account's address. "How—" I scratched my head. "What if... Is this tied to my station, do you think?"

"You mean, if you were to log in elsewhere, would this still show up? I would think so, since your account isn't tied to one machine."

"Yet both accounts got this post."

"Ugh," Rothe groaned. "This is what I'm afraid of. What if I log in as me and get your mystery post? Then what? I don't want to do anything that risks the system, which could be anything until I can isolate and examine the code—which I can't do as a limited access user."

"I'll get somebody, then."

"Fine, I'll make sure this doesn't do anything."

I stepped out of my office and had barely taken ten steps when I ran into Thrasher. Oh, just what I needed. Well—he WAS a higher-ranking officer, and we couldn't reach anyone else...

"Ah, excuse me, sir?" I asked with some trepidation. "Might I ask your opinion on something here?"

He gave me an intense glare. "About what?"

"I've received a suspicious post that Rothe says is potentially malicious, to the point where it may indicate that the system has been compromised. We cannot reach anyone else on the cable or via mobile to request assistance, and time may be of the essence."

"So what do you want me to do about it?"

Uh-huh. I guessed officers didn't need to take information security testing. "Well, sir, if I were to open the post, there's no telling what it might do to the system."

"So don't open it."

"But this means I can't use my station. See, the post doesn't have any signed headers, which means someone has cracked the network or otherwise violated protocol. I can't trust that anything I do on my station is secure."

He nevertheless didn't seem to grasp the sense of urgency Rothe and I did. "So, what? How is this normally fixed?"

"Rothe or another administrator would log in to try to disassemble the code to see if it's harmful. She can't because the post appears on the test account as well as mine, though in both accounts the post is addressed to me by name."

Thrasher gave me a glare that was even more intense than usual, which I found an astonishing feat. "Let me see." He followed me back to my office.

Rothe was clicking away at a game. "I beat your record in Hearts," she teased.

"How did you do that? There's no record."

"Ha, kidding." She looked up to see Thrasher standing there and immediately straightened up. "Oh, er – sir."

He gave her a scathing glare. "What's this about a malicious post? How would you fix it?"

"Erm." She rubbed the back of her neck nervously. "As I explained to Versa, I would normally log in as an administrator, but—"

"Then do it."

"But this bit of code seems parasitic—"

"I will claim responsibility for the results of any fallout that may occur to the system as the result of your effors. Being unable to work over a piece of post is ludicrous."

I agree, I thought, but he seemed to be treating it a little too casually. Nevertheless, Rothe did as she was asked, logging out of the test account and back in under her own. As soon as the system finished booting, her postbox blipped, with the same undisclosed sender post addressed to me.

"Is that it?" he asked, giving a sneer.

"Yes. There's no benign reason it should give an anonymous name as the sender. All accounts have sender identity fields automatically assigned. These cannot—or SHOULD not—be changed or erased, but this one is."

"What's inside it?"

Rothe ran a complete debug on the post, scouring each line for malicious intent. "I don't..." Then she went into the main postbox program and did a debug on it as well, scanning for changes in the code.

"What's taking so long?" Thrasher barked.

"I can't rush security!" she complained. "I wouldn't rush surgery—this is the same kind of thing!"

He seemed unusually impatient for what I expected. Did he really think we were holding him up or something? It wasn't as though he couldn't have ordered us to find someone else to help—

"I see..." Rothe muttered, "...nothing out of the ordinary. I can double-check with Evans if we can get him down here, but I'm pretty sure this doesn't do anything. The only thing significant about this post is the implications of someone erasing the identity of who sent it.

"However, I have NOT located the cause of how all three accounts that have logged into this station has received the same post but to the account's ID in Versa's name, nor who erased the sender's ID and whether the sender was from inside the network."

"Why does that matter?"

Rothe and I both stared at Thrasher for a tense moment.

"If someone's jerking you around," he snapped, "what's the difference between inside and outside the network?"