by Leigh Adams
And yet, Kate thought, here she was, with a thick sheaf of paper just sitting on the side of her desk, ready for anybody to come by and pick it up.
Four
Since Kate had always come into the office just a little late, she had made it a firm rule to leave a little later. She didn’t really know which specific circumstances set off her episodes and neither did her doctors, but rush hour in the Virginia suburbs was just asking for trouble. It was a simple fact that her day was less likely to be derailed if she restricted her driving to times when she knew she would probably be alone—or close to alone—on the roads.
Today she was just too fidgety, and the longer she worked on the Robotix project, the more fidgety she got. On the surface, Robotix’s problem was perfectly ordinary, the bread and butter of a computer security firm. The world was full of companies that were exactly what Robotix appeared to be: very good at what they did but completely clueless about the ways in which they were vulnerable to cyberattacks and hacking.
Every once in a while, there would be some big story in the media that would make everybody nervous. The 2015 hack of Anthem/Blue Cross had been like that, with hundreds of thousands of data sets—names, addresses, Social Security numbers, mothers’ maiden names—scooped up in a massive identity theft operation that left everyone it touched open to total financial ruin. These companies would start to twitch, and Almador’s offices would be jam-packed with new projects, all of them demanding rush results and total safety.
But . . .
Computer companies were not usually among Almador’s clients. Granted, Robotix was not exactly a “computer” company, but it had to know enough about how to construct and operate digital systems to make its domestic robots function, and that ought to mean it knew enough either to protect itself from hacks or to have a security firm on retainer to protect from hacks.
She got out her standard checklist and started to work her way through it. She logged into Robotix’s system. The password she’d been given wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t unbreakable either. If somebody really wanted to break it, they could. She looked around at the products section and found herself staring at all kinds of really neat stuff: robots that cleaned pools, robots that mowed grass, robots that zipped around your driveway and cleaned up gravel—even one robot that claimed to be able to iron shirts.
“Boys with toys,” Kate muttered to herself. The prices were completely ridiculous. The pool-cleaning robot rang in at more than $1,800. The lawn mower topped $3,200.
So robots weren’t exactly practical solutions for everyday maintenance problems yet. Anybody who could afford to buy these things could definitely afford staff.
By the time lunch came around, Kate was both starving and very tired, but she couldn’t face going down to the cafeteria for the latest take on California rolls, quinoa salad, and gluten-free vegan wraps. She called Molly in and asked if she’d mind going down to the cafeteria and bringing her back something recognizable.
“A cheeseburger would be good,” Kate said. “But I’m not expecting miracles.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cheeseburger in our cafeteria,” Molly said.
“Just bring me back something resembling food,” Kate said. “Oh, and ask Ben Jarndice to come in for a minute. I want to double-check something.”
Ben was a very new hire. He was also very bright, dedicated, and considerably more skilled than half the people above him.
Ben got to her office before the food did. He came bopping in without bothering to knock and threw himself into one of those swivel chairs that dump most people on the floor.
“So,” he said. “What’s up? I don’t believe you dragged me in here to find out the latest in the Ozgo case.”
“Is that still all anybody’s talking about?”
“It’s all anybody’s talking about, and it’s all anybody’s looking at on their computers,” Ben said. “I tried looking into it myself, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. Kevin Ozgo was in the army with Rafael Turner, who died in Iraq, and he was in love with Chan Hamilton, and Chan took Ozgo in and let him live at her place, and—it’s like a soap opera. Nobody around here would even care if Chan wasn’t Richard Hamilton’s daughter.”
“I know,” Kate said. “But you’re not going to get any help from me. I don’t understand it either. And I’ve got a more practical problem at the moment.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to find out if this is as lame as I think it is.”
Kate pushed her chair away from her computer terminal and gestured toward the screen. She had Robotix’s commercial website and its internal system up, but she had logged out of the internal system so that it was now demanding a username and password.
“I’m not expecting you to actually give me the username and password,” she said. “I just want to know if you can come up with the general rule.”
“There’s a general rule?”
“Oh, yes,” Kate said.
“No randomly generated stuff that changes every forty-five days?”
“Not from what I can see from the material they sent me.”
“Well, that’s their first problem right there,” Ben said.
The food came while Ben was still flicking back and forth across the commercial site, stopping every once in a while when he became intrigued by one of the robots and flicking away quickly when he saw the price. When the food came in, he looked over at it and said, “Why do you eat that stuff?”
The food was today’s version of a gluten-free vegan wrap. It could have been rendered edible by the addition of bacon.
Ben had made his way to the “About Us” page.
“Here,” he said. “History of the company.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
Ben sat back. “It’ll have the name of one of the robots in it,” he said. “My guess is that they’ve gone either for the first one or the best-selling one—or the first best-selling one. There will be Roman numerals that are some variation of the founder’s birthday, or the day the company was founded, or—does this guy have a wife or a girlfriend?”
“Not that I know of,” Kate said.
“Here’s something I know,” Ben said. “The first of these robots is the one that cleans walls. Goes right up them. It was invented by a guy named Trey Mitchell, and he probably still heads up this company. That means the characters will have at least one star in them, if not several.”
Kate looked blank.
“Mitchell’s got a side project going,” Ben said. “Commercial space travel. He’s a complete nut about space travel.”
“That’s something I should have known,” Kate said. She looked up at the clock. “Do you know how long that took you? Given that set of assumptions, how long do you think it would take you to figure out the actual password for that system?”
“With decent equipment? I don’t know. Maybe a day. Maybe less, if I got lucky. So I was right about the general rules?”
“You were exactly right,” Kate said. “And it’s been bugging me all day. This is a computer-based company. Can you imagine a computer-based company coming up with a password this lame?”
“Maybe it’s a lucky break,” Ben said. “Maybe this was delegated to somebody without a brain in his head and now we’re going to be able to solve his problem in no time flat. Almador will get a lot of business from a new client. We’ll all look like geniuses. When bonus time comes around, you’ll get a nice big one.”
“Maybe,” Kate said. She’d given up on the gluten-free vegan wrap. She put it back in its wrapper as Ben stood up to go.
“I’ve got to admit, I don’t see what you can really be worried about,” he said. “The world is full of stupid. But you’re twitching like you’ve discovered an attack on the Pentagon, and I just don’t see it.”
“No,” Kate said. “Not an attack on the Pentagon.”
“If you don’t have anything else for me, I’m going to go back to this report I’m supposed to be d
oing.”
“It’s okay, Ben. Thanks for helping me. And maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just a matter of the world being full of stupid.”
***
Four hours later, Kate had finished her checklist and discovered that it was just as easy to get into Robotix’s product development module as it was to get into any of the rest of the system and that the product development module provided unbelievably detailed information on all the new robots Robotix had in the pipeline.
This was the problem Robotix had come to Almador for. Somebody was stealing products Robotix had in development—products that were supposed to be secret. The more Kate tested the security of the module, the worse it looked, until she finally decided that it was a miracle Robotix had any new products left to develop.
Whoever had constructed this mess wasn’t just stupid. He was almost criminally negligent.
At five o’clock, she came across the files for a robot vacuum called the Genvenix II. It was the oddest-looking one yet, with wedges at its sides as if it might be designed to fly. Drones were robots too, and they were big business these days. Kate leaned in closer to see what the thing was meant to do, and just as she did, the screen went blank.
She thought the computer had crashed, but a second later, the screen was back up, blue and forbidding, with nothing on it but big gold letters that read, “ACCESS DENIED.”
Access denied?
First there was nothing but a sieve so worthless anybody could get any kind of access they wanted, and now there was a tripwire? For what?
Of course, Robotix had a lot of proprietary information it needed to protect, but it wasn’t protecting it—except suddenly it was.
Kate started to hammer frantically at keys. She went back to the login screen and tried the username and password again. The Robotix system denied her access again. She tried it again and, having hit the tripwire again, got a black screen instead of a blue one. The tripwire had shut down her computer.
Kate got up, left her office, passed through the assistants’ office without noticing that the assistants had started packing up for the day, and headed for the closest secure computer room.
When she got there, she sat down, pulled herself up to the computer station, and started to plug in the information she’d been using in her own office and . . .
Access denied.
Access denied.
Black screen.
It didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any sense at all. A tripwire should not have been able to shut down a computer on their secure system. The system was as fully protected against things like that as any military installation.
In fact, it pretty much was a military installation. Kate shouldn’t have brought a commercial project in here at all. She wouldn’t have if she’d been thinking, but she’d been so shocked by the tripwire that . . .
The next thing that happened didn’t make much sense, either.
Harvey Ballard burst in through the secure computer room’s door, his face so red Kate thought his head was going to pop.
He was yelling at the top of his lungs.
***
The ride home in the unbearable rush hour had not set off another episode, but it had taken damned near forever. Kate looked down at the car clock as she pulled into the driveway of her Merryhall townhouse and saw that it had been nearly two hours since she’d set out from Almador, Harvey Ballard’s shrieks still ringing in her ears. She could have sat in the parking garage for half that time and probably gotten home earlier.
She flicked the garage door opener and waited a second for the door to rise before she pulled the rest of the way in. She was doing the thing she always told Jack not to do by blaming her problems on everybody but herself. But this mess was her fault, wasn’t it? She was the one who had lost her cool and gone running to the secure computers as if her life depended on it.
At least, that was Kate thought had just happened. Harvey Ballard hadn’t been all that clear.
She cut the engine, grabbed her bag, and popped open her door. The heavy inner door from the garage to the kitchen stood open, with only the screen door as a barrier between the kitchen and the garage.
Kate began to feel as if somebody had dumped a second bucket of rocks on her head.
“Dad?” she called.
A figure appeared at the screen door, but it wasn’t her father, Franklin Ford. It was her son, Jack, the only decent thing that had come out of her marriage and now the local school district’s resident child genius. One of Jack’s teachers had actually called him that at a parent-teacher conference to discuss what to do about Jack’s inability to sit still in math class when he knew all the answers.
“She keeps wanting me to ‘show all my work,’” Jack had told Kate in the middle of all that fuss. “What work? I’m not doing any work. Anybody with half a brain in their head could look at this thing and know what the answer is.”
Kate had tried to tell him then that most people could not look at even linear equations and just “know” what the answer was. But that had been two years ago, and she’d given up trying to impart that particular insight.
Jack opened the screen door and came into the garage.
“You look terrible,” he said. “You look worse than usual.”
“Thank you,” Kate said sarcastically. And then, because something serious was going on, and because Jack would pick up on it, “I am worse than usual. I’ve had a very bad day.”
Jack made a face. “You mean you had one of your ‘episodes’?”
Kate could hear the scare quotes around the word. She gestured toward the screen door and the kitchen. “I take it Grandpa had a bad day.”
Jack looked back at the door. “It was a weird day,” he said finally. “It was one of those days when he talks about Grandma and about you when you were a kid. I put on music to see if it would calm him down.”
“He wasn’t calm?”
“He was sort of pacing up and down,” Jack said. “He couldn’t sit still. He wasn’t violent.”
“For God’s sake,” Kate said. “Of course he wasn’t violent.”
“He could get violent,” Jack said stubbornly. “Grandpa has Alzheimer’s disease, whether you want to accept it or not.”
“Of course I accept it!”
“No, you don’t,” Jack said, his thirteen-year-old body seeming to fold in on itself. “You’ve got some idea that Alzheimer’s is just about not remembering anything, and you didn’t look at the material I sent you. I went to a lot of trouble to get you that stuff. I was on the Internet for days. Alzheimer’s patients sometimes get violent. Some of them end up in nursing homes not because they lose their memories and forget who they are but because their families can’t handle the—”
“He knows who he is,” Kate said sharply. “We talked to the doctor. This is a very early stage.”
“This was a very early stage a year and a half ago,” Jack said. “Stages progress. I came home from school today and he was pacing back and forth in the living room and he didn’t know who I was. He thought I was somebody named Billy. Do you know anybody named Billy?”
“No,” Kate said, feeling suddenly deflated. “Listen,” she said. “If he’s . . . if he’s not all right, we should make other arrangements for somebody to be here when you get home.”
“I’m thirteen, not three,” Jack said. “I can take care of myself for a couple of hours after school.”
“Yes, sweetie, I know you can, but if he’s, uh, if he’s getting worse, maybe you can’t take care of him, and you shouldn’t have to take care of him. You’re still a child.”
“I’m not a child. And you don’t have to worry about tonight, anyway. The music did the trick. That and a little occupational therapy.”
“What do you mean, occupational therapy?”
“We’re having hamburgers and French fries for dinner. I’ve got him peeling the potatoes.”
“You cooked dinner?”
“No,” Jack said. “I just
got things out and started to get them ready. It gave him something to do that he understands. He remembers how to peel potatoes. I got out the rest of the stuff, too. All you have to do is march yourself into the kitchen and start cooking.”
“I’ll march,” Kate promised.
Jack gave her a long, hard-to-decipher look. “You’re going to have to do something about all this,” he said. “I hate to sound like the grown-up here, but somebody has to. Grandpa isn’t going to get any better. I’m not going to get any younger. You can’t keep doing what you do all the time.”
“Jack.”
“Never mind,” Jack said. “Come in and let’s get things going before he goes off again. I hate it when he talks about Grandma. I never know what to think.”
***
Franklin Ford was sitting at the kitchen table when Kate finally got inside, serenely and expertly peeling a potato. While she watched, he finished with the one he was holding. He picked up a sharp knife, cut the potatoes into long strips, and put the strips into the fryer basket at his side.
After a while, Frank looked up and smiled. There was nothing hazy or confused about his smile, but Kate knew instantly that he did not recognize her.
“Hello!” he said cheerfully. “Glad to see you. You should take off your coat and settle in. We’ll be eating any minute now.”
Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3 played in the background, and Jack had been right to put it on. No matter what happened to Frank’s memory, he never seemed to forget Beethoven. It always calmed him and often brought him back.
This information didn’t make Kate feel better. He’d taught engineering at MIT. He’d been a war hero in two separate wars. He’d spent his retirement until very recently substitute teaching in the local high schools and volunteering with the Wounded Warrior Project. He’d helped raise Jack when Jack’s father wasn’t interested. He’d spotted Jack’s intellectual abilities before any of the rest of them had known what was going on. And now . . .
Frank looked up from where he had just peeled another potato and said, “You ought to get settled in. It’s not going to be long before dinner.”