by Melissa Good
Dar shook her head and started typing. “I’m going to tell Mark to find someone—I don’t care if it’s the goddamned cleaning supervisor— and get them those files.”
“Jesus.” Kerry set the cups down in the console between them and paid for the coffee, then rolled the window back up and pulled back onto the street. “That’s ridiculous, Dar. How could that have happened between last night and this morning?”
“We got fired between a Saturday morning and afternoon, Ker.” Dar finished her note and sent it. “Actually, that’s kind of a relief because this guy was no good news for anyone.” She picked up her coffee and took a sip.
Kerry headed down the road that eventually led to the White House. “Yeah, but who knows how long it’s going to take to get it fixed now.”
“Do we care?”
Kerry glanced at her. “Dar, don’t pull that on me. We both know you care.”
Dar sighed.
“Of course you care. You built that whole system byte by byte.” Kerry softened her voice, seeing the sudden tension in Dar’s face. “C’mon, hon. You put a lot of blood and sweat into it. You were damn proud of that design and so was everyone else.”
“I just keep getting the feeling you think I’m an idiot.”
“What?”
“I think you want me to keep way clear of them. That it was a mistake to work those files.”
Kerry was silent for a few minutes as she turned into the administrative gate to the executive building. “Yeah, maybe I do,” she admitted. She rolled down the windows and took Dar’s and her own identifications into her hand. “Maybe I’m so pissed off at them because of how they dissed you. I hope they all go down in flames no matter if some of our customers suffer.”
“Morning, ma’ams.” The guard took their ID respectfully. “Be right back.”
Dar relaxed back into her seat. “Sorry Ker. You’re probably right.” She rested her elbow against the arm rest and her head against her fist. “It’s like a knee jerk.”
“I know.” Kerry reached over and patted her knee. “Let’s wait until later to fight. We’ve got enough on our plate right now.”
“Go right through there, ladies.” The guard handed them their IDs. “You’re expected. Park in that first lot and it’s the second gate, right hand side.”
“Thanks.” Kerry smiled at him then rolled on when the barrier lifted. “Let’s get this show on the road.” She drove inside and found a parking spot and then they got out and gathered their things.
It was cool and overcast and she was glad she had her suit jacket on. Kerry followed Dar up the path to the gate that was opened readily to admit them. “Good morning.”
“Morning, ladies,” the guard at the gate said. “Can I direct you somewhere?”
“No, we’re okay,” Dar said. “Thanks.”
They entered the building and Dar led the way down the hall to the briefing room she was becoming familiar with. The administrator sitting at the entry desk glanced up, then focused attention on them. “Good morning.”
Dar fished out one of her new cards and handed it over. “I think I’m expected.”
The woman took it and looked at it, then consulted a book on her desk. “Yes, Ms. Roberts, you are. You can go on in and set up. Mr. Bridges is in a briefing right now, but he’ll be back down in a minute.”
She glanced past Dar to where Kerry was patiently waiting. “Are you—”
“With her? Yes,” Kerry said in a deadpan voice. She gave the woman a smile and followed Dar to the big conference room, which was empty and quiet.
Dar put her messenger bag down and pulled her laptop out. She sat down near the front of the table and opened the hatch in it where the connections to the overhead projector were.
Kerry took a seat next to her and simply sat waiting, knowing enough about Dar’s prep methods not to bug her with inconsequential talk.
The admin came in and opened up a roll up cabinet in the back, exposing urns of coffee and other liquids. “Please help yourself,” the woman said. “The technical committee is on its way down and if I were you, I’d get a cookie first before they get here.” She gave them both a smile and left.
“I don’t think I can get down any more coffee,” Kerry said. “My
kidneys are going to come out my ears.”
“That’s an attractive thought,” Dar murmured, obsessing over her keyboard.
“I love you, too, honey.” Kerry got up and went over to the credenza, selecting a glass and a bottle of fizzy water and bringing them back over to set next to Dar’s elbow. Then she resumed her seat and half turned as the door opened and people started to file in.
Mostly men, but two were women. They all had the slightly harassed and impatient look of people who had too much to do and were being asked to stop doing what they had to do in order to listen to someone they didn’t know about something they didn’t care about.
Kerry was used to the look. She’d seen it enough times in conference rooms at ILS. She gave them all a brief smile as they settled into chairs, some detouring over to the credenza with low, muttered words to each other.
One of the men had sat down next to her. “You the people doing the new system?” he asked.
“Yes,” Kerry said, extending a hand. “I’m Kerry.”
“Paul.” He took it and gripped firmly. “So is this going to work?”
“It’ll work.”
“Not like everything else lately?” Another man took the seat next to him and was leaning against the table. “Our whole reporting database’s been down for three days. Last thing we need is some new complicated thing that craps out.”
Dar looked up from her keyboard and peered at him. “The statistical analysis collator? That’s down?”
“Uh oh,” Kerry muttered under her breath as she swung around to face Dar. “I don’t think we’re supposed to know about that.” She mouthed silently.
Dar lifted both hands in a shrug and put them back down. “Is it?”
“Yeah...you know something about that?” Paul asked. “I didn’t know you people were involved in that. Hell, I’m surprised they don’t have you in a little padded room upstairs getting your kneecaps whacked.”
Dar sighed. “Actually we’re not involved in it. We just know about it.” She went back to her keyboard. “And that’s all I’m going to say about that or I’ll get my kneecaps whacked by my partner here.”
Kerry looked mildly abashed. “We used to work for the company who handles that system for you. That’s how we know.”
“Oh.” Paul leaned back in his chair. “So why’d you leave?”
“They pissed us off,” Dar said. “Okay, I’ve got this set now.” She stood up, twitching her jacket straight and flexing her hands. “We just waiting for Bridges?”
“He’s getting a briefing on all the outages,” Paul said. “He’s in a bad mood.”
Kerry folded her hands on the table. “Well, hope we can show him something that makes him feel better.”
“Mm.” Dar made a low noise in her throat. “Is it too late for us to find some coveralls and cross dress? Pretend we’re someone else?”
“You’re the one who said we knew about it,” Kerry said.
The door opened and Bridges came in with two aides. He did, as promised, look like he was in a very bad mood. “Roberts!” he barked, as he came around the table. “What in the hell’s going on?”
Dar put her hands in the pockets of her skirt. “We’re about to do a demonstration for you,” she answered calmly. “Want to sit down so I can start?”
Bridges paused, put his hands on the back of the chair at the head of the table and regarded her.
“It’s not my problem anymore,” Dar said. “I know it’s a complete cock up there, but I don’t even have any way of thinking about trying to help.”
“Don’t want you to help. I want you to take it over.” Bridges tossed a folder on the table and slid it over to her. “Now. Sign.”
Kerry pul
led the folder over and opened it.
“We don’t have the infrastructure to do it,” Dar said. “You’d be in the same state until we could spool up. Find someone else—I’ll give you some names.”
The others in the room watched them, heads turning back and forth like those at a tennis tournament.
“I don’t want any goddamned names,” Bridges said. “I’ve already talked to half a dozen half-assed, nit-brained, nerd heads and you know what every single one of them told me?”
“They said they can’t do it,” Kerry said, still leafing through the folder’s contents. “And probably some of them told you to call Dar.” She closed the folder and pushed it back across the table. “Unfortunately we honestly—no bullshit—can’t do it either. You need time and a ton of facility and we don’t have either one.”
Bridges sat down in the big chair and glared at her.
“Really.” Kerry said. “I’m not making that up. If I thought we could pull it off and yank it out of ILS’s hands, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Dar turned and looked at her, both eyebrows hiking up.
Kerry saw the look and suppressed a smile. “I would. They’ve been absolute morons over the last month. I’d take that contract like this.” She snapped her fingers. “But we can’t do it.”
He steepled his fingers, tapping the ends of them against his lips. Everyone else in the room was dead silent, very still, just waiting.
Even Dar stayed quiet, her hands still in her pockets, eyes slightly unfocused.
“What do you mean they were morons?” Bridges finally asked. “They do this on purpose?”
Kerry folded her hands on the table, the light briefly catching her wedding ring and reflecting off it. “A lot of people have asked us that.
No, I don’t think they did this on purpose in the sense that they were trying to sabotage anything.”
“It’s worse,” Dar said. “Someone trying to make their mark made some changes and it went very south.”
“That so?” Bridges mused. “So it was stupid rather than treason?”
“Far as we know, yes,” Kerry said in a quiet voice.
He got up. “Go on and give your talk, Roberts. I’ll be back shortly. Everyone take notes.” He waved a hand at the room. “There’ll be a test later on.”
He motioned the two aides, who had stayed standing near the door, out ahead of him like he was shooing chickens and followed them out, slamming the door behind him.
Kerry let out an audible sigh.
“Who in the hell are you people?” Paul finally asked with a touch of awe in his voice. “Do you know who that guy is? He could have you sent to Mars.”
Dar switched the screen to her output. “Who are we?” she said. “Well, I’m Thor, God of the Internets and this is She-Ra. So I guess Mars doesn’t scare us much.” She got her remote out and moved to one side. “And on that note, let’s get this started. “
Kerry was busy typing a message into her Handspring, shaking her head repeatedly.
“THAT’S HOW THE algorithm works.” Dar clicked to a new screen. “What we did was try to write the front end to the enterprise service bus so that it was a more natural way for people to interact with the data.”
One of the women in the back spoke up. “What does that mean? Do they talk to it?”
Dar brought up the very basic, simple input screen. “I can write a plug in that’ll take voice commands. But right now it’s just keyboard.” She pointed at the woman. “C’mon up here and ask it something.”
The woman hopped right up and came forward. She put her hands on the keyboard as Dar took a step back. “Ask it...what do I ask it?” She looked up at Dar.
“If you were an analyst and your job was to find something wrong, what would you ask?” Dar had one hand on the back of Kerry’s chair. “Don’t look at me. I don’t know what to ask. I’m a systems architect.”
The woman thought for a moment then started typing. “Tell me about anyone who wants to shoot the president.”
She hit enter and straightened, looking first at Dar, then at the screen.
A spinning star took over the middle of it and twinkled for about thirty seconds. Then typing started to fill the screen, plain white on black, san serif font.
Email: Parsed header returns “He makes me so mad I want to kill him.” Content contains keywords: hate, revenge, under the radar,
politician, POTUS. Return extended header?
The people in the room stared at it. “Is that real?” Paul asked.
“It’s real in the sense that I created a database that had random records in it with different source types,” Dar said. “It’s not real in the sense that the thing you’re looking at is a real threat to the president.”
“But...that’s the kind of thing it would come back with?” the woman asked. “Really?”
“Really.” Dar smiled a little at the reaction. “The information I used to make this test database is a dump from the actual Internet, scrubbed to remove personal information and then mixed to provide you with some hits to questions.”
“So it wouldn’t say whose email that was?”
“It would come back with a fictitious name,” Dar confirmed. “But since it’s a fictitious email, that would be appropriate. It could have originally been an email from someone who was pissed off at their SO, and the keywords could be from six different other emails.”
The woman stepped back to the keyboard. “Tell me about anything threatening Yankee Stadium.” She hit enter and they all looked at the screen expectantly.
The machine chewed over that for a bit and then started spewing out listings.
1.) Invoice: Industrial: Phosphorous, Deliver to
Yankee Stadium, volume plus 1,000 lbs.
2.) Legal: Resident: Lawsuit filed against
Yankee Stadium over parking fees.
3.) Email: Parsed. Text includes ‘going to make a killing at Yankee Stadium.’
Enter item to retrieve additional data.
There was a moment of silence. Then they all exhaled at once. “Holy shit,” the oldest man, who was standing in the back of the room, spoke up. “So that thing can just read all that stuff on the Internet and it’ll know all this?”
Dar seemed pleased. “It will,” she said. “This is, of course, a test database. It’s only half a terabyte in size and this demo program is a very simple model. The real system will be a lot bigger, a lot more powerful, distributed, and it’ll probably take longer to return a response because it will be looking at a hell of a lot more raw data.”
She regarded the screen. “But that’s the idea. It also will employ a flexible heuristic framework that will learn over time to know what to look for. So eventually it will start suggesting things rather than wait to be asked.”
Dead silence. “W...what?” Paul stuttered. “You mean it has artificial intelligence?”
Dar nodded, “It continually parses data, so it will start looking for
connections,” she said, her voice getting a touch more animated. “So if it sees, for instance, a pattern of telephone calls between places that also show deliveries of gunpowder, that’s something it will bring up as part of a generated briefing. Could mean something, might not mean anything, but the operators will have the choice to follow up or not.”
“Humans have to make the real connections,” Kerry said after being silent for a very long time. “But they can’t look at all this data. It’s like a firehose. But a computer can and it just tries to find patterns and that’s what it returns to us.”
“Oh my god,” the woman sat down. “I thought this was just an intelligence budget scam. You actually made this.”
“In two weeks,” Paul said. “You really are Thor, God of the Internet.”
“Have at it.” Dar sat down next to Kerry and waved them toward the laptop. “But remember, it’s just a demo system. I just wanted to give you all an idea of where we were going with it.”
She slid backwards out o
f the way and watched in contentment as they all gathered around her machine and started peppering it with questions, the woman finally ending up being the typist.
Kerry smiled. “Rock star.”
“It’s just a test system with a lot of spaghetti code and duct tape in there. They ask it the wrong thing it’ll probably croak.”
“Dar, stuff a sock in it. I know how long you worked on that.” Kerry poked her in the ribs. “You’re a rock star.”
Dar shrugged modestly, but smiled.
The door opened and Bridges came back in, pausing as he saw the crowd at the head of the table.
Paul turned and spotted him. “Sir! You should come see this! It’s boss!”
“Whoop de fucking hoo,” Bridges said. He pointed at Dar and Kerry. “You and you, come with me. The rest of you stay in nerdgasm.” He turned and headed back out, waving them after him. “Let’s go people.”
“Why do I suddenly wish I was an actual rock star?” Dar said as she and Kerry followed him out and the door shut behind them. “And all I had to worry about was tuning my guitar?”
“What?” Bridges glanced at her. “Nevermind. You two are going to help me solve this problem here and then we can go back to talking about whatever the hell it is that has those goops so excited.”
“This doesn’t sound good,” Kerry muttered.
“No,” Dar agreed.
Bridges led them through two hallways and up a staircase, then through a padded door and down another hallway, stiff arming everything out of his way until he got to a pair of double doors that he grabbed the knobs to and shoved them open.
Beyond him they heard angry voices. When they cleared the door and saw the interior of the room, Kerry heard Dar make a low, grunting
noise that she knew meant nothing but trouble.
It wasn’t really a curse, but it might as well have been one.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about but we’ve got our best— what the hell is she doing here?” a tall, crewcut yelled.
“She’s here to help us figure this out,” Bridges said. “Now sit your ass down.”