The Wired Man

12

I assumed that I had gone undetected after severing the connection to my brother. It wasn't until later I found out I couldn't have been more wrong. Rebecca Hollandsworth, Secretary of Social Protection, knew exactly what was going on. She wanted me to play the hand I had been dealt. What she didn't know, though, was I wasn't the one holding the cards.

—TWM

Entry Re: Rebecca Hollandsworth

Name: Rebecca Hollandsworth

Employment: Secretary of Social Protection

Score: 2857

Globally Unique Identifier: 0203905m-3160-48ar-tt728-4925t47reb58

Rebecca grimaced at the magazine cover. The photograph of her during last month's PR stunt had been transformed into an abomination. Instead of a baby, she was holding a writhing green octopus-looking thing. It was despicable.

Rebecca set the stupid thing down on her desk and made a mental note to call the censor division after the meeting. She never understood why Robert let that filth exist in the first place. She picked up the report she had been analyzing. It didn't make any sense; the logs didn't show any abnormal activity, but scores didn't jump eight hundred points in a night.

Rebecca took off her black suit coat and threw it onto a nearby chair. The connection was terminated, that was for certain, but with no evidence she couldn't figure out who had initiated the event. She could black bag both parties involved, but there was no guarantee either one would talk.

She went to an old filing cabinet in the corner of the windowless office and pulled out a thin bottle of rye whiskey. She poured herself a measure and took a sip. Either the logs were wrong or they had been tampered with somehow. She sat back down at her desk, and a link from her assistant came in.

"The Council is in conference room B, Secretary Hollandsworth."

"Thank you."

Rebecca tucked the report into a manila folder. She could've had them put on her tablet or stored them on the system so she could access them from her implant, but she preferred the feel of paper. She grabbed her coat and went into the hallway. The corridors in the bunker were cramped, with barely enough room for two people to walk side by side. Large pipes ran along the ceiling, and a faint whirling sound came from the generator buried deep within the concrete belly of the complex.

Rebecca turned the corner to the conference room and put her hand on the cold brass knob. Now to somehow explain this to a bunch of technologically illiterate windbags. If by some miracle she could get them to understand there still were too many questions unanswered for them to be satisfied.

Rebecca walked into the dark conference room and shut the heavy metal door behind her. Seated at the round table in front of her were six serious looking men in military uniforms, each with their gaze fixed on her.

Rebecca threw the manila folder down on the table and switched on a projector.

"Is it true?" a man on the right said. "Has it happened again?"

"We're looking into it, but from the looks of things yes," Rebecca said.

The room tensed up and the men began to whisper to each other.

"Is it contained?" a man on the left said.

"Yes, at the moment it seems the parties in question have gone dormant. The system monitors haven't been able to locate any new incidents, and the two men involved haven't given any indication of the source of the anomaly."

"Secretary, the chancellor has issued a code 3. We need more than monitoring. We need action. This cannot get out of control."

"I am overseeing it personally, and I can assure you it will be rectified as soon as we have accurate information."

"I still don't understand why we don't simply bring both men in for questioning to ascertain the details of what happened," said a different man.

"We checked into both men's backgrounds and our system specialists doubt that either of them is capable of an attack this sophisticated; it was formulated by an outside party If we act now it might scare whoever is behind it back into the shadows. So instead this time we wait. And when they strike, we will be ready."

Rebecca turned off the lights, and a projection beamed from a nook in the wall behind the table.

"Any news on the whereabouts of former Secretary Janis?"

"No. It seems that he has gone dormant," Rebecca said. "Reports from the system administrators say he's still connected, but they are having a hard time locating him."

The man who had asked the question put both elbows on the table and gave her a condescending look. "If he's still connected then how-"

"Robert built the system from the ground up. He knows every flaw, hole, and hiding place there is. If he doesn't want to be found, there's not much we can do about it."

"Cut off his MAC address then," the same man said.

"It's not that simple. Robert built specific failsafes into the core programming, and until we find and patch those out, there's nothing we can do."

When she wrestled this job away from Robert, she knew he was going to have some booby traps lying around, but she hadn't expected it to this extent. Her people had spent the past year going through the code line by line, and inside almost every file there was some redundancy code obscuring his existence. On one occasion, there was even a direct hole giving him source change access and she doubted that was the only spot. To add to the confusion, many of the programmers were handpicked by Robert, so their loyalties were questionable. The whole thing was one big mess.

"When we gave you this job, you said this wouldn't be a problem," a man at the head of the table said.

Rebecca flicked to the first slide of the projection. "Robert isn't a threat."

"How do we know that this most recent round of attacks isn't some kind last ditch revenge plot?"

"These attacks are too small in scale, and besides, if Robert wanted to I'm sure he could take down the system. The fact that he hasn't yet should tell you that he isn't the one behind this."

She knew it was a complete lie. Robert had been gone for a year now, and for the thirty years she had known him, he never went dormant. The fact that these attacks cropped up six months after his departure added to the suspicion. But there was nothing she could do until he made his move, so for now all she could do was wait and pray that when it did come she was ready.