Kilo-61 (Damned of the 2/19th Book 19)- Ongoing

BS, Lies, and SIGMA

She scoffed, "That's ridiculous," she said. "That doesn't make any sense, and goes completely against everything I learned about networks."

"What was your degree in?" I stared at her.

"Information systems and gender studies," she told me.

Heather snickered and I slapped her leg.

"How old are you?" I asked her.

"Twenty-four," She told me.

"When you were born, I was already working with this type of system, and..." I trailed off.

Donaldson put his hand on my shoulder, "Go ahead, Corporal. I think we're way past normal systems of information security classifications."

I sighed, and Heather leaned over, nibbling on my earlobe for a second before murmuring in my ear, "You'll need to take off your mask, Ant," her breath tickled the hairs in my ear and sent a shiver of pleasure down my spine.

"This will show more than I can explain," I told them, pushing my chair back. I moved over to one of the terminals, interrupting its job. I navigated to the tools folder and opened up the sector editor, leaning back so they could see the screen.

__________________________________________
/-----------------DISC SECTOR EDITOR--------------------/
/------ADMINISTRATION MAINTENANCE TOOL--------/
/--PROPERTY OF THE  DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE--/
/---------------------VERSION: 9.2.6-------------------------/
/-----------------------(c) 06 Jun, 1984----------------------/
/------WRITTEN BY: J. BOMBER/A. STILLWATER------/

Everyone turned and looked at me. I just smiled, turning my attention to the LT. "I'm a genius. I cut my teeth on IBM and Apple machine language, learned COBOL and PASCAL on my own, C on my own. I was cracking software by the time I was in 6th grade on my own, and writing my own games and tools in 5th grade. The Army didn't find out I'm a code monkey until after AIT, and that was during a security sweep when they had someone check all the software I had on floppies for my IBM, Apple, and Commodore 64."

Heather laughed at the LT's shocked expression.

"I wrote software for whatever I needed. When I was the Assistant Training NCO I didn't like the software for computing body fat percentage, as well as promotion point aggregation, because both of them used bad variable classes, so I wrote my own programs. Turned out Bomber was smart as hell, and I was able to teach him all kinds of stuff while skipping over the useless stuff," I told the LT.

I slapped the side of the terminal. "These systems were constantly updated from the Event Systems, meaning any useful piece of software that passed vetting tests were passed through the Event side of MILNET and to the bunker systems without needing any human oversight."

She was trying to grasp a fundamental shift in her worldview. I sat back down at the original  terminal only a second before it beeped.

Mandatory Software Update Access Request: 011.021.211.039:14.63.103.255:05AE31F
REJECTING
Override Authority Received
CHECKSUM ERROR
Override Authority Rejected

"How are you rejecting that?" She asked.

"I changed the checksum hash value with the sector editor," I shrugged. "Made sure I could change everything but the WORM drives. I had Kincaid put the WORM drive that the software for this on maintenance mode with the physical dip switches, and had the card printer print up a new card and inserted it into the deck in the right place."

I smiled at her, "I know how these places work, I know how they are built, I know how the hardware works. What I didn't know, an Air Force technician taught me during the two months we were stuck in isolation lockdown, and what he didn't know I picked up from other people."