The Wired Man

8

Entry Re: Gary Serdinal

Gary pinched the skin of his forearm between his thumb and index finger. It didn't make any sense. The diagnostic reports said that the server group was running fine, but whenever he logged into the cluster, it lagged like hell. Something was eating up power.

Gary's terminal window froze up again, and he smashed his fist down on the panel in front of him. Nothing in the audit logs, nothing in the activity logs, he even combed the conversation logs and still nothing.

The door behind him creaked, and Gary swung his chair around.

"Mr. Serdinal?" a young man said.

"Yes, and you are?"

"Cory Billings, sir. I'm an intern with Ms. Hollandsworth's office. She asked me to find you."

Rebecca rarely came down to talk to him herself anymore. She was always sending down new drones with some ridiculous demand. Gary and Robert had always been the technical brains behind the operation, and Rebecca had been the pretty face. She was good at getting what she wanted, but when it came to the system, Gary and Robert were the kings. That's why Gary found it so amusing that Rebecca had cut Robert out. She thought she didn't need him to run the place, but she was slowly coming to the realization that she was in over her head, and Gary wasn't about to float a buoy. It was too much fun watching her drown.

"Tell her I'm busy," Gary said.

"But she said it was urg-"

"If it was urgent I would already know about it, kid." Gary turned back and grinned at the boy. "You can go now."

Gary leaned back into his chair. Soon after, he heard the sound of the door closing behind him. Thataboy, kid. Report back to mama, and let me work.

The terminal had unfrozen, and the blinking cursor gave him the go ahead. The first place Robert had always trained him to go was to the list of processes. You could determine the offender and restore the server to functionality. He typed in the process list command and scrolled to the bottom of the screen.

Total memory usage: 102 G

Only 102 G being chewed up? No way would this cause the box to lag like it did. Gary logged into the server's interface and brought up the admin panel up. The admin panel bypassed the normal shell and interpreted data from the hardware itself, so if there were any hidden processes running, it would be able to find them.

Gary remembered when he and Robert had written it. A particularly bad package of malware had taken control of a large portion of the network, and they were damn near toast until Robert had been able to circumvent the shell and install the admin panel. Those were the days long before the government bullshit, days he sometimes wished had never left.

Gary navigated to the performance tab of the panel.

Memory usage 98%

The standard memory allocation for a server on the network was 1 T. What in the hell could be eating up a terabyte of memory? Normal memory usage was somewhere in between 100 G and 300 G, depending on the load. Gary had never seen a server run at 1 T; he was surprised the damn thing hadn't melted yet.

He leaned forward in his chair, put his elbows on the panel in front of him, and looked at the list of processes. Whatever code was running had to be under either a foreign or cloned name.

After a minute of scanning the results, he found it. Process name: Unknown.

Gary smiled. "Nice try."

He entered the kill command.

Process not found.

Confused, he tried again.

Process not found.

What the hell was going on here?

Process not found.

"What do you mean process not found? It's right there."

Sweat formed at the top of his brow. If this was able to completely hijack a server, then it had probably already infected half the damn system. Nothing out of the ordinary had been reported yet, but that didn't mean anything. It could be lying dormant until it infected enough of the network.

Gary scrolled up to look at the process-started date, the same day and time as his last stock sale. He immediately shut down the terminal and yanked the cord out of his port. If this was something Robert was doing then there was little he could do to stop it, and besides, Robert wasn't about to burn his baby to the ground to get back at Rebecca. Gary bit the side of his cheek lightly and smiled. Maybe this was meant for Rebecca. The thought of her being sent to the Dregs filled him with a wave of giddy anticipation.

Gary turned his chair around and looked at the closed door. Rebecca should have known better. He had tried to tell her; he had tried to get her to listen, but she was a stubborn bitch. Couldn't see past the fact that Robert had moved beyond her. He didn't need her anymore, and she had tried to prove that he did. Well now she was going to pay, and if Gary knew Robert well enough, it wouldn't be pretty. Robert always said he never got mad, he got even, and it looked like he was about to set the scales level.