The Stranger: Chapter 4

The Stranger

Chapter 4

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Sara lay silently in her bed in the early hours of Friday morning, under a bedspread that made it look like a giant Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. She was not sleeping, because she had unfortunately decided to watch the rest of the prior night’s news broadcast, and she couldn’t get the resulting images of human violence out of her head.

“Aaarrrrggghhh!” she suddenly heard from the next room over. “I’m late!”

This was followed by the sounds of a door being barged through, a bowl for cereal quickly being filled and even more quickly emptied, the inevitable choking sounds that resulted from that, an utterly indescribable set of further sounds originating with Jeff’s bathroom, various drawers being riffled through as he got dressed, and finally the front door of the apartment being swiftly opened and slammed shut, all of this accompanied by repeated cries of “I’m late!” and various exclamations as he accidentally slammed into one wall after another. No expletive more severe than “Damn it!” was ever uttered.

Once the sound of the squealing tires from Jeff’s car had faded away, Sara looked at the clock next to her bed. It was 7:30 am—she had three hours before she needed to give her presentation to Mr. Agnew at TeachWare Corp.

Sara got up, put a robe over her sleepwear, and made her way to the kitchen, where, after much contemplation of ingredients, she finally managed to make herself breakfast.

She retrieved her trusty iPhone and consulted it for the embroidery order she had received the day before. After a bit of meditation, she picked up a hoop frame from a shelving unit filled with embroidery designs, along with a pre-cut square of white fabric. The fabric was attached to the hoop, and the hoop was attached to the embroidery machine. Spindles of thread colored pearlescent white, flat black, magenta, yellow, and two shades of orange were fitted into place. A cable was used to temporarily attach the iPhone to the machine, and this was used to transfer the appropriate pattern for the order into the machine’s memory. Finally a button was pressed, and the machine clattered to life, beginning to trace a magenta-colored circle upon the white fabric.

On the way back to her room, Sara saw that the door to Jeff’s bedroom wasn’t completely closed. She stood there hesitating for a few seconds, before finally deciding to open the door and walk inside.

Jeff’s bedroom was a significantly smaller version of her own, with the bed partially located in what was once the walk-in closet in order to make room for the rest of the furniture. The bedspread made the bed look like a giant Andes mint. There was a large map of the world on the wall above the bed, and on the facing wall were photographs of deep space and posters by M. C. Escher and Jimmy Cauty. There was a rack of audio-visual equipment to match what was in Sara’s room, and a small desk with a PC on it. An office chair was positioned in front of the desk. On top of the highest shelf of the desk was a stuffed animal in the form of a little purple dragon, wearing a shirt, waistcoat, tie and academic dress coat, plus a pair of wire-rim glasses. As with her glimpse of it the day before, the figure was turned so that he was facing the wall instead of the room. Laying on the desk itself next to the computer monitor was Jeff’s NetFlix selection: the serial “The Daemons”, from 1970’s Doctor Who.

Sara spent some time examining the contents of Jeff’s bookcase. Science fiction was represented by the odd mix of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick and H. P. Lovecraft, and fantasy by The Lord of the Rings and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. There were the standard reference works for a budding author, as well as a couple of books on the history of western animation. But the majority of books present were works of children’s literature: a substantial selection from L. Frank Baum’s Oz series, The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little by E. B. White, The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle and Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien, among many others.

Unable to find anything else useful in her quest to understand her brother, Sara left Jeff’s room, closing the door behind her. She returned to the embroidery machine to check on its progress: two magenta eyes now graced the white fabric, and the machine was busy filling in the outlines of a stylized sun that was placed next to them in the design. It was completed in the time it took Sara to get dressed.

Removing the hoop from the machine and the fabric from the hoop, Sara carefully used a pair of sewing scissors to liberate the three parts of the design, with borders provided to allow them to be sewn into the stuffed animal representation of Princess Celestia that they had been created for. They were placed into a padded envelope with pre-printed address labels. She’d go to the post office on the way to Jeff’s office. Putting on a white sweater, she left the apartment.

# # #

A half-hour later, Sara arrived at the office building that held TeachWare Corp., as well as three other companies. The building was a dull tan-colored object that looked like it was meant to be a brick in a giant’s reproduction of the Great Ziggurat of Ur. She was fairly sure that the dents in her car would buff out.

Mr. Agnew was waiting for her, with not only a copy of the contract, but also a certified notary public. The notary’s certificate was produced, inspected, and found to be legitimate, as was the sum of money being held in the unlocked suitcase that Mr. Agnew was carrying. The first draft of the contract was found to contain four separate loopholes whereby Mr. Agnew would be able to put Sara into a state of virtual slavery, to which Sara responded by displaying the rather fragile thumb drive containing the only copy of the presentation, a second thumb drive of the same type, and how very easily it was to crush that particular type of thumb drive into fragments with your bare hands.

After that demonstration, a second, heavily altered second draft of the contract was produced and after further scrutiny, was duly signed and notarized, after which the suitcase and the thumb drive were exchanged.

The notary was dismissed, and Mr. Agnew turned to take the elevator up the executive floor. He stopped when he saw Sara signing up for a visitor’s badge instead of leaving. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I intend to stick around, in case you have legitimate technical issues with your new presentation,” she told him. “You have my number.”

Mr. Agnew threw up his hands in surrender and entered the elevator.

# # #

The IT floor of TeachWare Corp consisted of a space not much bigger than Smile Chinese, divided up into a couple dozen tiny little chest-high cubicles. Circling the floor and taking up all the valuable window space was a series of larger cubes—these with head-high walls—for the higher-ups. The floor was cold, not quite cold enough so that your breath became visible, but not much warmer than that. That was to keep the temperamental computers and test servers running at optimum efficiency. The comfort of the employees was decidedly secondary to that.

In the exact center of the floor was the break room, and that is where Sara found Jeff, wearing a dark green jacket with a “City of Winters” patch sewn on. He was sitting at one of the two tables in the room, his attention focused on a softcover book. Stacked next to him was the day’s paper, and before him was a nearly empty pink cardboard box from a local bakery.

“Hold on a minute,” Jeff sang to himself off key, as he reached for the last pastry from the box. “Just one more jelly donut. They’ll never miss it...no, they’ll never miss it!”

Peering over Jeff’s shoulder at his reading material, Sara was able to see an illustration taking up a whole page, depicting a little girl and a chicken examining a mechanical man. The large-type caption underneath read “This copper man is not alive at all.”

“Scribner!” a voice called out.

Jeff quickly shoved the book inside the newspaper before responding. “Yes?” He raised an eyebrow on noticing the presence of Sara.

“The build’s just about ready to test.” The speaker was a stout man with a permanent smirk and a pencil-thin mustache. He walked up to the table and snatched up the book Jeff was reading. “Oz? Really?” he asked in disgust as he dropped the book to the ground. “What are you, some kind of pedophile looking for good lines to lure victims into your van? If you want people to think you’re normal, Scribner, you should read normal, decent books. Like Fifty Shades of Gray.” He walked out without waiting for a response.

“Nice guy,” Sara said sarcastically. “Does he make the stuff you test?”

Jeff took a few deep breaths to recover his composure before replying. “Yeah. That was Sam—he’s the chief programmer, and Mr. Agnew’s son. Nobody really likes him.”

# # #

After exchanging the book for a small wrapped package at his tiny cubicle, Jeff led Sara to one of the more prestigious ones. A placard identified this as the working space of B. Sykes, Chief System Administrator. The cubicle had been heavily vandalized by crepe paper and confetti, the universal office punishment for working on your birthday.

The middle-aged man sitting inside the cubicle was trying to simultaneously follow two monitors filled with at least a dozen different digital gauges and meters tracking the network and software usage by the company. He was middle-aged, with shoulder-length brown hair. His short-sleeve shirt revealed powerful biceps marked with tattoos of knotted ropes.

“Happy birthday, Brian,” said Jeff. “I don’t think you’ve met my sister Sara yet.”

The man turned around and stood up. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said, bowing formally to Sara. “I’ve heard so much about you from your brother.”

“Oh!” said Sara. “Well, I’m pleased to meet you as well.” She held out a fist that quickly opened into a hand.

Brian looked at the hand oddly for a second, before deciding to shake it.

“Here,” Jeff said abruptly, shoving the present into Brian’s hands.

“Aw, you didn’t have to do this, Jeff,” Brian said, turning the present over for a few seconds.

Sara looked around at Brian’s cubicle, trying to make out the parts of it that were not present on birthdays. A calendar showed him to be a fan of the Oakland Raiders, and a few miniature cars showed his love of NASCAR. There was a framed photo of a ranch house out in the country mounted on one of the cubicle walls. Another frame contained a child’s painting, of what appeared to be a partly cloudy day—as seen from above the clouds. Another child’s painting showed the full-size version of one of Brian’s miniature cars, along with its proud racer in his jumpsuit.

“Oh, it was only $5,” Jeff said to Brian, before catching himself. “Wait, you’re not supposed to give away the price, right? Um, you can open it.”

“Don’t ever change,” Brian said with a smirk as he got to work on the present. That smirk then turned to a look of confusion as he pulled a lead fishing weight out of the wrapping paper small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. “You know I don’t fish, right?” Examination showed the pear-shaped object to have a thin crack running around its equator.

“It’s not for fishing,” Jeff explained. Taking the weight into his hands, he twisted the two halves to separate them, revealing the object to be hollow. Out of the weight spilled a couple dozen tiny lead pellets. “You can control exactly how heavy this is by putting more or less pellets in, and you can hide it in your pocket,” he explained. “I’ve got one exactly like it in my own pocket,” he said, patting at a small bulge in his jacket.

“I don’t get it,” Brian said.

“It’s a lot less conspicuous than a top, don’t you think?” Jeff asked.

“Oh!” Brian exclaimed. He held out his hands to receive the exploded parts of the fishing weight. “I get it.”

“I don’t,” said Sara.

“Brian and I really became friends when we both happened to go to the same showing of Inception,” Jeff explained, “and we really got into ways of telling that you’re trapped in somebody else’s dream. The idea with the weight is if you never take it out of your pocket, then the dreamer won’t even think to include it, or if they do they’ll get the weight wrong, and that way you’ll know for sure.” Then he seemed to realize that what he was saying sounded kind of crazy. “Not that that sort of thing actually happens,” he added rapidly. “This is just for fun.”

“Really?” Sara said with a crafty grin. “Why don’t you humor me and check to see if you’re in a dream right now or not?”

Jeff shrugged. “OK.” He reached into his pocket and pulled it back out in a fist. He shook the hand a bit while looking at it. “Nope, it weighs the same as I remembered it,” he said as he put the unseen object back.

“Shoot,” Sara said softly. “Well, it was worth a shot.”

“Scribner!” bellowed the voice of Sam Agnew. “Get your butt over here and earn your paycheck!”

Jeff scurried towards the voice so fast he reminded Sara of a spider suddenly caught by the bathroom light.

Brian picked up an iPad with the same monitoring software running on it. “You don’t want to miss this,” he told Sara as he led her in the direction Jeff had gone. “Some of the programmers think that your brother violates the laws of causality when he really gets in the zone. Vivian thinks he can read our minds—she’s a bit funny in the head.”

# # #

All two dozen IT workers had gathered around the workbench where the test servers and PC were located. A lone office chair sat before it, and at least in Jeff’s eyes it seemed to have a spotlight on it. With a mental sigh, he sat himself down and picked up a clipboard containing information about the software build he was to test. After studying it for a few seconds he put it down, cracked his knuckles, and got to work. Simultaneously, the programmers leaned forward.

Jeff brought up a web browser and the login page for the test version of TeacherHelp v.1.148a. This was the first page he would try to break.

He entered a test teacher’s login with a deliberately bad password, and got the correct error message.

He put in a made-up login and password, and got the correct error message.

He tried putting in no login and password, and was correctly reprimanded.

Then he entered a login with no password, and was let right into the system.

“Um...oops?” said a small woman with an immense head of hair, making herself a note on her smartphone. “I’ll get right on that.” The name on her badge identified her as Vivian.

“We didn’t even touch that screen on this release,” a programmer named Mark commented to another named Chu.

“Bug must have just slipped in somehow,” Chu replied. “That’s why he always tests everything.”

Jeff quickly methodically made his way through the entire application, touching every screen logged in as first a teacher, then an administrator and finally as a parent. He eventually reached the report card screen for parents of middle-school students, which was the only one that was supposed to be changed. He found a couple of bugs here, compared to the dozen he had dug up in other screens.

Sara noticed that an odd sort of jerkiness had come into Jeff’s actions as he became more and more absorbed by his work. He moved his head and arms like they were being controlled by an incompetent puppeteer. And this proclamations of bugs were chirped out in a purely mechanical manner. He appeared to have completely tuned out the words or actions of anybody around him.

Thus, for example, he completely failed to turn and notice the appearance of two men in the room: a tall fellow in a yellow suit with a cowboy hat, and Mr. Agnew.

“Mister Hoskins,” Agnew said with some desperation, “I’m sure I can tell you about any aspect of the company that was not included in that excellent presentation of mine...”

Sara fixed Mr. Agnew with a glare of death, which he apparently failed to notice.

“I don’t need to waste my time with words, Agnew,” Mr. Hoskins replied in a Texas twang. “I mean to see how this company I sunk so much of my money into is doing in person. Like that fella over there.” He pointed at Jeff.

“The response time on the Administrator Financial Statement screen appears to be slow,” Jeff observed out loud. “Could I get a simulated load test?”

It took a second for Brian to realize that the request was aimed at the system administrator and database administrator, the former of which was himself. “Right!” he exclaimed, pulling up somebody else’s chair and sitting down in front of the web server. He logged in and started up a program to simulate strong network traffic. Beside him, Walt the database administrator started a similar program to simulate database traffic.

Mr. Hoskins looked questioningly at Mr. Agnew, causing him to break out in a sweat.

“It’s...ah, routine maintenance!” Agnew exclaimed.

“It looks a lot like testing to me,” Hoskins teased. “Thought you said your programmers were so good they didn’t need testers.”

“Oh he’s a programmer—he’s showing off his own work. Now why don’t we head back and—”

Hoskins pulled a rolled-up annual report out of his back pocket and started to look through it. “I think I saw this fellow in the employee photo.”

Jeff logged back into the system as a school administrator and asked the system to generate a financial statement for him. The system responded by freezing solid.

“Definitely a spike in database traffic,” reported Walt, reading the information being returned by the server.

“It looks like it’s pulling in the whole country instead of just one specific school,” Jeff speculated.

“Yeah, that’s probably it,” said Sam nervously. “I’ll get right on it.”

“This behavior is still rather off even if the entire financial dataset is being pulled in,” Jeff said with frown. “Maybe with a code trace—”

“Oh, I can track that bug down, easy,” Sam quickly said. “No need to trouble yourself with it.”

“No, no, I’ve got this,” Jeff said, bringing up the company’s proprietary debugging tool in another window and using it to display the part of the code that was causing the current delay. As he stared at the code, he seemed once again to enter into a type of trance, mouthing opcodes to himself as he scrolled downwards much faster than anybody should be able to scan, much less read.

“Now hold on!” Mr. Hoskins exclaimed, holding out the annual report to Mr. Agnew. “This here says that this guy is the janitor!”

“Typographical error?” Agnew replied desperately.

“Now hold on, what’s this?” Jeff murmured to himself. “It’s calling D74F3.DLL. What’s this DLL doing on the server? It’s not part of the install. I’m going to decompile it.” He brought up a second debugging window.

“That part’s experimental; it’s not even accessible,” Sam said in a cracking voice, slowly backing away from the others and towards the door to the elevators. “I think you’ve done an excellent job, Scribner, and we should all take you out to lunch. What do you think guys?”

“That’s being called from the license fee screen,” Chu said, pointing at each of the two debugging screens, “and that looks a lot like the code I wrote to interface with banks in my last job, but our software is not supposed to talk to banks, so what does it actually do? The entry condition is never going to be true.”

“Just like I said!” Sam exclaimed from the back of the room.

“Excuse me a second,” Hoskins said darkly, turning to follow the departing programmer.

“No, there is one set of circumstances...” Jeff murmured, logging out of the application. “I need the web and data clocks to be set to 12:15 pm on a Saturday, and to trick the servers into thinking they are running in live mode.”

“OK, you got it,” Walt said after a minute.

“Ditto,” reported Brian.

Jeff logged in as the assistant secretary for Skyline High School in Salt Lake City. He tapped the space bar five times, and the tab key twice. An Administrator menu appeared.

Mr. Agnew blinked. “Assistant secretaries shouldn’t have access to that,” he observed.

From the Administration menu, Jeff brought up the Fee Payment screen.

“Assistant secretaries shouldn’t be touching finances,” Mr. Agnew observed.

“The Schedule Payment button is on the wrong side of the screen,” Jeff said.

“Hey, that’s right!” Chu exclaimed.

Jeff used the tab key to demonstrate that there was an additional invisible button in the place where the Schedule Payment button was supposed to be. He used the mouse to click it.

A new screen came up, labelled “Transfer”. The screen had a single field to enter an amount, defaulting to one dollar. There were two buttons: “Per School”, and “Cancel”.

Brian and Walt activated their tracing applications.

Jeff clicked the “Per School” button.

“Okay, this is big, this is really big,” Brian reported. “The system is accessing the financial systems of every school we’ve got a contract with, and from there to the banks the schools do business with. And now there’s a second set of packets, going from all of those banks to one specific bank...”

“First Bank of Sacramento,” Vivian said, looking over Brian’s shoulder.

The other programmers looked at her funny.

“What?” she protested. “Doesn’t everyone working in IT memorize the IP addresses used by their bank?”

“So who’s account got the money?” Walt asked.

“I reckon it’s the account of one Sam Agnew,” Hopkins announced. “Considering that this little widget on his screen just told him he got a net deposit of $24,731 from ‘Aunt Agnes’ in the past thirty seconds.” Hopkins had Sam held in place with one arm as he attempted to flee from his cubicle, while another was working the mouse to keep the screensaver from kicking in. “And if this history of Aunt Agnes deposits is anything to judge by, he must have sucked a couple of million dollars out our customers in the past year alone.”

“Dad!” Sam protested. “It’s not what it looks like! I mean who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? I was gonna give you a cut sooner or later, honest!”

“Security,” Agnew growled into his phone, “I need you to deliver one of the employees to the police. Be prepared for resistance.”

“You can’t do this!” Sam screeched. “We Agnews are supposed to stick together!”

A couple of security guards quickly arrived, and Mr. Hopkins tossed the young man over to them like he was made of balsa wood.

“You can’t do this to me!” Sam exclaimed as he was being led away. “I’m not like regular people! I’m better than you!”

Mr. Agnew sighed deeply as he turned to Mr. Hoskins. “I’ll escort you out as well, sir,” he said resignedly. “I imagine you’ll be pulling your investment out of the company after what you have witnessed.”

“Are you kidding?” Hopkins replied with a big grin. “That was the most fun that I’ve had in ages. And you ought to be giving this tester fellow here a big raise—he just saved you from who knows how many more millions, and if you get the right P.R., maybe even get you out of the company-bankrupting lawsuit that might result. I’ll tell you what, he’d better have himself a mention in next year’s annual report.” He walked up to Jeff’s chair and turned it around. “I’d like to introduce myself—I’m J. Tetty Hoskins, the primary shareholder for this little company.”

Jeff’s eyes seemed to swirl, his fingers twitching like he was still typing. “You have an immense collection of porn and have an inexplicable attraction to pictures of longhorn cattle,” he announced in an eerie voice.

Mr. Hoskins’ mouth opened in shock.

“Now see here!” Mr. Agnew said, stepping in front of Hoskins.

Hoskins took the opportunity to exit the premises as fast as possible.

“You’ve already arranged to have ten million dollars stolen from the company’s account on the day you’re forced to retire,” Jeff told Agnew. He turned to Mark. “And you’re the guy he paid $10,000 in cash to do it.”

“You can’t prove any of that!” Mark exclaimed.

Jeff looked past Mark to Walt. “You’re cheating on your wife. She knows, and she’s OK with it, because she’s sleeping with the mail lady.”

“She knows?” Walt asked.

“I knew it!” Vivian exclaimed in excitement. “He can read minds!”

“You’re hiding the fact you won the Power Ball jackpot because you fear that this job is the only thing keeping you from completely going off the deep end.”

“Shut up!” Vivian protested. “Now look at somebody else!”

Jeff looked at Brian, who fearfully stepped behind Sara.

“You—” Jeff began to say.

He was interrupted by the expedient of Sara smacking him upside the head with his Tik-Tok of Oz book. “Snap out of it!” she screamed.

Jeff wobbled a bit, and then collapsed. Brian and Sara both stepped over to try and revive him.

“Have you lost your mind, Scribner!” Agnew bellowed. “I ought to fire you on the spot!”

“You’re not going to do that,” said Brian coldly. “You’re going to give him a week off starting immediately, and you’ve going to give him that raise.”

“Or what?” Agnew asked challengingly.

“Or I’m walking out that door with him,” Brian said.

“I might be inclined to put in a donation to cover the first year of that raise, at least,” Vivian said.

Everyone looked at her funny.

“What?” she protested. “This ought to be fun!”

Comments

[devas]

ok, now I'm unnerved.

[Litho]

So who’s account got the money?

whose