“You were the one berating me about the name brands in the grocery store. You can't justify saving a quarter on cheese if you waste it on an eight dollar drink that the bartender throws away when you leave.”
“It's not the same thing.”
“It's exactly the same thing!” I looked around, afraid someone overheard me. It looked like no one had. “Besides, I never get drunk. I don't drink that much. So if I end up with three glasses of wine instead of two, it's not that bad.”
“Tell that to your liver.” He waved his white napkin above the table. “Sorry, couldn't resist. Truce. I don't want to argue tonight. Besides, this isn't a hill I want to die on, even if you've had four and not three. Drink the damn wine.” I smiled cheekily at him, and he rolled his eyes and smiled back.
When we got back home after dinner, Eddie plopped immediately on the couch after throwing his suit coat over the back of it. “I am so full.”
“Me too.” I considered going to change, but if he wasn't, I wasn't. I sat down next to him, and he put his arm around my shoulders. I leaned into his shoulder. “I liked the restaurant. It's not often I go somewhere where the goods are paraded around like that. And that they are carrying food, too.”
“Watch it, married woman,” he grumbled good-naturedly.
“Or what?” He didn't respond, so I took the initiative to drape myself over his lap. He didn't touch me, and I started to feel really embarrassed, and wished I had more alcohol.
Finally he rubbed my back. “Baby, I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think this is a good idea.”
Face flushed, I rolled off of him and stood to go change. “I'm sorry. I thought you were interested in that.”
“What? Yes, I am, just—would you get back here?” He pulled me down onto his lap, in a sitting position this time. “I look forward to you being uncovered over my knee. But I want us both to be perfectly sober at the time, okay? I don't want alcohol impairing us.”
“Well, I kinda need it to reduce my inhibitions,” I admitted, playing with one of his cuff links.
“You need to be drunk to be spanked? Schroeder, I'm not--”
“No, I need to be drunk to ask to be spanked.”
“Oh.” He shifted me on his lap so that he could readjust himself from what the conversation and subsequent thoughts were doing to him. “Babe, you don't have to ask.”
“Then stop teasing me! For crying out loud, you've been giving me a whack almost every day, but stopping there. Even me playing up the alcohol and being a brat tonight wasn't enough to make you spank me.”
“That's why you were acting like that?”
“Yes, damn it. You got me all fired up earlier in the bathroom, and then I get a single swat right before leaving. I like when you pay me attention there, all right? I don't want to have to say that again, because it's embarrassing.” I hid my head in its usual spot under his chin, glad that I stayed back from tears.
He kissed the top of my head, and wandered one hand down from hugging me to cup my rear. “For what it's worth, I rather like your bottom, too. It's a cute butt. Rather perky. Nicely rounded, with just enough padding.” I wiggled in embarrassment, and he gave me a squeeze. “It pinks nicely too, as I remember. Flushes as prettily as your other cheeks. Yes, those that are flaming red right now.”
He bent his head down to whisper in my ear. “I want to make your other cheeks flaming red, but not tonight, okay? We'll find a time. I promise. Deal?”
“Deal. Want to travel instead? We can stock up the house in London more. I love shopping for furniture back then – we get such a good deal. Dining room table and chairs for twenty bucks? Sure beats a thousand here!”
He kissed me. “Babe, we shouldn't time travel tipsy either.”
“Well you're no fun,” I grumbled. “You don't want to do anything tipsy.”
He kissed me again, and slid a hand up my skirt. “Oh, there's things I like to do tipsy. Shall I show you?” I was pleased enough to demand an encore.
***
Eddie shoving me out of bed woke me. “Go answer your phone already,” he muttered, throwing the pillow over his head.
I shoved him back onto his side of the bed, but got out anyway and went to find my phone in the living room. “Hello?”
“Hey, it's Matt. You probably already know this, but the websites are down.” I froze in the middle of turning on the lights in the living room.
“No, what do you mean, they're down?”
“I've only been able to access one or two, and those didn't even fully load.”
“Hmm, network problems, maybe,” I mused out loud to myself, flipping on the light in the bedroom. Eddie groaned from under the pillow.
“No, I can get online without a problem. It seems to just be internally where things aren't working. Oh, and I lost all my sales leads, too.”
“What?” I quit moving slowly and started quickly rummaging through drawers to find something to wear. Eddie heard the tension in my voice, and threw the covers off.
“I'm not seeing any of my contacts in the database. I came in early today because I had a guy on the East Coast wanting me to call him at seven his, and now I can't find his number. It's like there's nothing in the database anymore.”
“Is it giving you any errors? Like a few weeks ago when the database server was down?” I cradled the cell phone between my ear and shoulder and threw on panties and jeans.
“No errors – I could get into the contact management system without a problem. I take it this is all news to you? I thought you should know, that's why I called.”
“Yeah, give me a few, and I'll be right in. Sorry you'll be late in calling that guy.”
“Not a problem. You'll fix it, you always do.” I shut the phone without saying goodbye, and tossed it onto the bed. Eddie was already out and getting dressed himself.
I ducked into the bathroom, using the facilities quickly and brushing my hair and teeth. Servers didn't care how I looked, but bosses did. And Kinerian, because today was the --
“Fuck!” I slammed the hairbrush down on the counter with a curse.
“Babe?” Eddie stuck his head in the door. “Don't forget a shirt.”
“It would have to be today of all days that the servers go down. Just my luck.” I put on the bra and t-shirt Eddie handed me, and went looking for the phone in the covers.
“Kyle, wake up, damn it,” I cursed into the phone at my sys admin. “Why I am getting calls about the servers not responding?”
“Huh? I haven't gotten any alerts. Hold on,” I heard him fumble his cellphone, probably looking for missed calls from the monitoring software. “No, nothing.”
Eddie took the keys from my hand. “I'll drive,” he mouthed to me, and I nodded and followed him out to the car.
“Well, we're not getting complaints about things working. Get to the office. We can't let things be not running smoothly today.”
“What's going on today?”
“Just get your ass in,” I snarled, and dialed Josh, the next on my list. He, as well, had no idea of anything going wrong, and couldn't understand why it was bad today.
“Just chill, Schroeder. I'll be in in an hour, and we can get it fixed.”
I looked at the clock on the dash before closing my eyes. “We have less than two hours until the press release comes out.”
“What press release?”
“Is everyone living under a rock?” I screeched into the phone, and Eddie winced next to me and put a hand on my knee to calm me down. “The buyout, moron. It goes through today.”
“Oh, how about that. I knew it was some day around now, just not when. This is a good thing, right?”
“If the servers are up, yes,” I snarled. “I'm at the office now. Just get here as soon as you can.”
Eddie dropped me off in the front of the building, knowing that I didn't want to take the time to walk from a parking space. Please let there be nothing really wrong, I thought as the elevator slowly ascended. Please let Matt
have just played a practical joke on me.
One look at my office computer proved otherwise. The only time I ever rebooted it or turned it off was over the weekends, and it was currently powered up, the amber glow of the monitor mocking me in the dark office. I quickly logged in and fired up a web browser.
Sure enough, most of the websites weren't responding. My fingers flew across the keyboard, and I logged into the production web server to find an utter lack of files.
“What the hell...” I breathed. “We've been hacked.”
I navigated around the directory structure to find that some files did still exist. The headers of three of the websites were still there, and checking those sites, were still responding. A sneaky suspicion hit me, and I started ransacking through the stacks of paper on my desk.
“Will light help?” Eddie flipped the light switch as he entered my office.
I ignored him, but found what I was looking for now that there was light to see by. “What page was it...page ten. Aha!”
“Aha what?”
I again didn't respond, but went back to my keyboard and went hunting in the database. Flipping my attention between the document next to me and the monitor, I ignored the ringing phone of yet another person waking up and seeing there was a problem.
“Son of a bitch!” I finally yelled, sitting back in my seat, covering my face with my hands.
“Schroeder, I've been patient enough. What is going on?” Having given up on waiting for me to speak, Eddie came around the desk and peeled my hands off of my face so that he could look me in the eye.
“I don't have time to explain. I have to restore the data.” I pushed him away, and leaned back over my keyboard.
“How can I help?”
“Stay out of my way.” He wisely retreated out of the room. “Okay, restoring from the backup tapes will take ... four hours or so. Copying from staging should only take a few hours, and then we can be restoring to a different drive at the same time... yeah, that'll work...” My blood chilled when I logged into the staging server to see it completely void of all website and database files.
“Oh, this is not funny anymore.” A quick look at the development server showed that it was deleted too. “Son of a bitch!” I cursed again, and threw my stress ball out the door, barely missing Eddie on his way in with a can of Coke.
“Okay, enough.” He trapped my arms on the arms of my chair, and moved his face an inch from mine. “Take a deep breath, and calm down. What is going on?”
“I--”
“Schroeder, breathe.”
I took a couple deep breaths. “There, happy?”
“Not yet. Calm down.”
“I can't be calm,” I forced out through gritted teeth. “Some bastard deleted all the data.”
“Can you restore from backup tapes?”
“If you'd get out of my way, yes.”
He gave me a warning look, but removed his hands from holding me down. “Drink, you could use the sugar.”
I frowned a few minutes later, having had problems accessing the server dedicated to making backups. “Want to see the server room?”
Eddie jumped up to follow me since that room hadn't been on his tour when he was here before. He looked around in the tiny room while I logged into a console.
“Why are there sprinkler heads above the rack?”
“They were there when we got here,” I answered absently. “This room wasn't meant for servers, if you can't tell. The sprinklers are supposed to be disabled.” He shuddered; he surely hoped so. Water and expensive electronics didn't mix very well.
“Bloody fucking hell.”
“Schroeder?” He hadn't heard me swear this much in...well, ever.
“He deleted the entire operating system.”
Eddie considered several nouns in that sentence, then picked the one that seemed the worst. “He?”
“Didn't you read the technical documentation I gave you?” I asked, exasperated. “Alan obviously did.” I got up from the console and headed back towards my office, speaking to him over my shoulder. “We mapped it all out for him.”
“Mapped what out?”
“Please tell me you're not that dense. I thought you were Mr. High and Mighty Technical Consultant?” I snapped my fingers in his face. “Keep up.”
Realization finally dawned. “You said all but a few sites were down. The documentation said that you monitor based on not only a website responding, but giving back a certain phrase in text. He specifically kept that phrase in place, and deleted everything else so that the monitoring wouldn't go off.”
I nodded, and slid back in my chair. “He did the same with the database. Truncated all the tables but the ones we look for individual records in, and kept those specific records.”
“And one of the questions we asked you guys while evaluating was what your backup scenario was.”
“Yep. He took them all out. Deleted the operating system so we have to rebuild the linux box before restoring from tape. That'll take most of the day. Deleted both staging and development, so we can't copy from there. Face it, we gave him a road map to destroy the company. And today's no coincidence,” I added. “He wants to screw with us and ruin the buyout.”
My phone rang, and I recognized Joseph's cell phone's number. This wasn't going to be a fun call. I picked it up and launched right in to what I had found, not giving him a chance to start yelling at me. Eddie's look of pity was getting to me, so I turned around and faced out the window so he couldn't see me start to tear up.
“I'm sorry sir, he's royally screwed us. We can see if anyone has an older copy of files saved on their personal computers, but past that, we're at the mercy of however long it takes Kyle to rebuild the backup server.”
“Can't you just put the drive in one of the other servers?”
“No sir, the rest are Windows machines. The tape drive isn't compatible.”
“Why isn't that server backed up?”
“Sir, the odds--” my voice cracked, and I swallowed the lump in my throat. “The odds of this happening were slim. Any day to day data loss we could have covered. This... this was an insider's knowledge of our network. The hacker--” I wasn't going to blame Alan by name, but I knew it was him-- “knew our network structure, knew our server setup, knew what we monitor, and what actions we would take. He covered them all. There's no way we could have known, nothing we could have done.” I grabbed a tissue from the box on the window ledge.
“What about that online backup system you wanted to get?”
The tissue fluttered to the ground as I whirled around in my seat. “Ohmygod, I forgot about that.” I held the phone away from my ear as Joseph shouted at me. “I'll call you back, sir.”
“Schroeder?”
“Not now, Eddie,” I snapped at him, hurriedly going online to login to the storage system. A few clicks later, I sat back, happy. “Thank God.”
“You got it restoring?”
I nodded, and dialed Joseph back. “Sir, mission critical sites will be back up in about half an hour. If you can authorize me to tell Kyle to shut off internet access for the rest of the office, we can use the entire pipeline to download the rest of the sites in...maybe one to two hours, instead of four or five.”
“Absolutely,” he told me instantly. “Get them up, do whatever it takes. Who do I need to call on this, the police?”
I mouthed the word to Eddie, who reached his hand across for the phone.
“Good morning, Mr. Maloberti, this is Edward Valenti-Kirby. The FBI handles cybercrimes. I have a friend at the Bureau; would you like me to give him a call to expedite matters? Certainly, sir. See you when you get here.” Eddie came around the desk to hang up the phone, and stopped to give me a long, hard kiss.
“You were wonderful, babe.”
I trapped him in my arms, and he knelt down next to my chair. I scooted to the edge so I could hug him fully. “Eddie, we need to go.”
He looked at me in confusion.
“I d
on't think I wrote that note to myself to get the online backups.” My eyes met his, and mine were on the verge of panicking. “At least, not yet. I thought I had forgotten that I wrote it because of the concussion that weekend. But now – if I hadn't gotten it, we would be totally hosed today. I think we're supposed to go back right now and write that note to me.”
“Whoa, that's...whoa.” He pulled out me arms and paced, running a hand through his hair. “Our future selves put the note in place so that we could go back to put the note in place? That doesn't make sense.”
“I don't know how to explain it.” I downed the forgotten can of Coke, relishing its caffeine. “It just seems right.”
“We could go back there and see the note written. You may have done it and just forgotten,” he warned me.
“I don't think we can take that chance. What if we break history by not going?”
“How do we even know when to go?” He asked, bewildered by the entire concept.
“I know, remember? I found the note the Monday after we were at my parents.”
He knelt back down next to me, taking my hands in his. “You sure about this?”
No. Yes. No. “Yes.”
The trip was brief – no note had been written yet. I wrote it down quickly and we returned home, trying not to think of the paradox.
The office finally filling with the other technical staff kept me from thinking about anything other than the hack. Eddie wandered off to call his buddy at the FBI, and I called a mini-meeting of the tech staff to fill everyone in.
“So until we hear from the FBI, we all should be hands off,” I concluded. “I don't want to do anything that will affect their investigations. I also don't want to hurt us with the buyout release in--” I looked down at my watch, and grimaced -- “an hour and a half, so we need to get sites back up. I've been on my computer this morning, and have the downloads going; I say everyone else should stay off of their workstations just in case.”
“Can we go home?” Josh asked.
I glared at him. “No. Go to the break room and watch tv or something. Just stay off of a computer. Kyle, go get the bandwidth reallocated.” He nodded, and left the room.
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