The Deadman

The security guard glances at the guy with smart glasses, formal white shirt with an awfully stormy face. As if he’d snapped at him.

“Your ID?”

He showed his ID and grumbled underneath his breath.

“Didn’t see you around.”

“I’m new.”

“Let’s see.”

The guard scans the ID and finds the employee number and the recent time he got employed.

“Moved up?”

“Unfortunately.”

The guard tells him to go in. The employee, the new ones, enters the elevator and gets in. He’s with three employees who took a glance at him. He looks at him sullenly.

“I’m new. Working on the DB. You two?”

“Office.”

“Human Resources. Don’t remember you.”

“Because I didn’t want to be here. Hey, if you know someone named Ervin in HR, tell him, thank you for making my life hell. Sincerely, K-Lores.”

“Ah, no wonder you look like shit.”

“D-Center’s a mess. I can’t believe they’d just let anyone comment on the source code. Block comments and rarely end-of-line comments. No, I’m not going to rant at you today.”

“Good luck with that. I heard it’s going to be troublesome.”

“No. Don’t even mention that test on me. I’m going to block my ears. Listen to some oldies while the white coats do their thing.”

The two smiles wearily at the despairing face. The one that works in HR got off first. The office worker got off two floors down on the data center. The ‘new employee’ arrives at the D-Center floor where most of the engineers, programmers, and network specialists were.

First thing that he felt was the cold and the air-conditioner air mixed up with heat. The one in the front desk raises his head and then scowls. The new employee scowls back.

“Got an attitude. Who are you?”

“New guy. Here’s my new ID and all my other credentials.”

The new guy hands it over. The man at the desk took one of the ID  cards and read it out loud.

“Kato Lores, Computer Science, specialize in networking, has a lot of credentials, and recently worked in Norfolk for five years.”

“Can you do me a favor and demote me? Send me back to the local centers.”

“No.”

He hands over the documents. The new guy scowls and then taps his right foot on the floor.

“Okay, just put me in my server cage and get this over with.”

“You got a datajack?”

“No. Fuck no. Why would I want a kill switch on me? I’m not going to be a decker anytime soon, but I do have my deck. You can scan it for anything. Just let me do my job. Also, where’s the break room? Do we get coffee here?”

“We do. Wait, I’ll call Pat to ask where he’d assign you.”

The new guy glares at the wall.

“Db Manager an asshole?”

“Don't get sleep sometimes.”

“Fuck. Who thought it was a good idea to centralize the Data Center.”

“Oh, you’re new here, so you don’t know that we do DB nodes. Like an onion network to avoid security issues. Familiar with that?”

“Unfortunately yes, fucking hell.”

“Pat’s here. New guy. Needs to be assigned,” he said. “You have training, Lores?”

“Why do you think I’m here? Dumb question.”

“Seems like he does. Room 204-B. Get the credentials from Elliot and then get to work.”

He hangs up.

“That’s what Pat said. Go to Elliot. Ginger with a wreath and has a plaid tie.”

“Gotcha.”

“Welcome to this center, Kato Lores.”

“Shit.”

He takes a left and trudges forward. He spots the ginger with the plaid tie and tells him about the credentials.

“Where’s your pad?”

“New guy, remember?”

“Odd that they didn’t give you one. HR’s getting lazy.”

“I don’t know. Are they assholes here?”

“Sometimes. There’s a lot of orientation training. How’s your assembly programming?”

“I got certificates.”

“Cool. Here are your credentials. And here’s a pad. Just type in your SC-number and get to work. You should have carried a jacket, man.”

“I forgot about it. Here’s hoping I’d freeze my ass off there.”

“The servers radiate heat so there are no problems. Anyway, you should go before the Admin chooses you as his target. Guy’s stressed.”

He takes the pad with him and finds the room that he’s assigned to. He could hear fans whirling on the other side of the room. He enters without knocking, and spots a man in his thirties with a bag under his eyes, wearing a hoodie, and is squatting on the floor, with his sleeping bag next to him. The guy stares at him and blinks.

“Heard there’s a new guy. Glad that they decided to make shifts now. I was about to just take another caffeine pill.”

“You’re not a druggie, I hope?”

“Nope. If I do that, they’d have me tested and probably fired. You look like you ate shit. Must have heard the bad rumors?”

“I’m not exactly happy with this new assignment. So where’s my term?”

“You can plug it in that place. The pad can allow you access since it acts as the second authentication factor assigned to you.”

“Security isn’t tight here. Please tell me that we only handle the local network here.”

“I think so. But I heard that we have servers a few more floors down for the Govt. Data Center’s just the local network for the basic services.”

“It’d be dumb if they put them all in one network. Oh yeah, what’s your name?””

“Kato Lores. You?”

“Rene Campa.”

“How long have you been here?”

He plugs in the pad and accesses the data center and boots up the pad and the laptop he was carrying.

“Four years now. It’s alright, but some seasons are hell to work on.”

“That’s why you carry a sleeping bag?”

“Yup. You’d probably get one.”

“That is if I last long here. My position before this was comfy. All I had to do was watch civilian traffic. Now I’m stuck in a room like this. You the one that did the wiring?”

“Nope. Previous seniors had them labeled. Once in a while we had to change some things, we’d have to unplug some. There are labels so it’s not an issue.”

He squints at one of the servers.

“These are modules. Oh, AR marks.”

He synched up with the AR markings and saw intractable points that allowed the technician to know what they are accessing and where it should go.

“Damn, they must have spent a lot of time doing this.”

“Got no complaints with it.”

He accesses the terminal and then clicks his tongue loudly. He stares down the database.

“I swear to god if I see any block comment here.”

“It’s clean…  I think?”

“It’s bloated. I mean just look at this shit. For a Data-Center they sure seem to have said no to normalization of the database. Look at this shit, fifty characters, and all so that they call an entity… what the fuck is this shit?”

“It works. And do you really want to spend time adjusting it?”

“Fuck no. I’d stick to the dashboard and never go to access the source code ever again. By the way, do you have any documentation? Both soft and hard would be really helpful.”

He searches his laptop, plugs in a drive, uploads it, and then hands it to Kato.

“Proprietary software… familiar, but seems like a mess to handle.”

“The reason we have orientation.”

“So this is how the nodes are operated. You think the Govt is using the same framework?”

“Probably. Heard that it’s an old version of the database and server framework that they used to own. Security’s still top tier despite its age.”

“300 pages is a lot. They got a more user-friendly manual? Any field manuals at all?”

“Included it in the disk.”

“So you’ve been here long enough. What’s the usual error?”

“Mostly a redundancy error. There are a lot of folks trying to penetrate the firewall, but it’d be like trying to find a door in a maze inside a maze. We don’t handle security, and we’re already bogged by a lot of shitheads using the local network already.”

“Seems like there are a lot of bots being spammed.”

“50k bots an hour.”

“That’s a lot.”

“We usually ban them regionally. We then blacklist their service provider and filter them out. They use proxies, and virtual private networks so good luck finding them in this heap of trash.”

“Lots of spams, trolling, and a lot of users registering by the minute. I got a good look on the local message board. Can’t believe that it’s somewhat clean despite it all.”

“Moderators are hard at work. Not to mention that they stay on their containment boards to prevent them from spilling their shit.”

He scans the documentation and then makes a copy of it in his drive. He hands back the drive to Rene who is swaying around.

“You look awfully shit man. Do you want some coffee running in your blood?”

“I might have to. Still need to fix this before I get a nap.”

“You know what? I better get us some coffee. Where’s the break room?”

Two halls on the right. There’s a neon sign there so you’d know. Uh, already taking a break while you’re new. You really hate being assigned here, huh?”

He grins and leaves the room. He finds the neon–lit sign that was making his eyes squint and then enters. There was only one in the break room.

Kato takes a packet from his pocket, rips it, and then pours it on the mug, mixing it with the instant coffee pack they were using. He added milk and cream to the coffee cups and took them back to the server room silently.

He enters the server room and hands over the cup to Rene.

“Extra white? You add a lot more milk here?”

“You hate it?”

“Too sweet, but what the hell. You’re not bad. Hope you don’t quit on the first day of work.”

He shrugs and takes a long sip of his coffee. His free hand interfacing with the pad, server, and the laptop. Rene, who was already tired, felt his bags heavy.

“Oh man, was I exhausted too much?”

“You don’t look good. Shit, did you drink water?”

“I think it was two days ago?”

“What the hell, you’ve been living on coffee? Looks like a caffeine crash. You really need to sleep man.”

Rene held his head and then stopped working. He looks at his laptop and then his sleeping bag before choosing his sleeping bag.

“Okay, I need a dirt nap.”

“Get some rest man, I’d wake you up if any supervisor comes around.”

“Appreciate it, Lores.”

He tucks himself in the sleeping bag. After ten minutes of interfacing, Kato Lores got out of his cross-legged position on the floor and poked Rene four times and even slapped him once.

“Should be enough.”

He pulled a plug from his deck and plugged it in the main terminal of the room. On the screen, he runs a crackware application, and then opens an indexing engine to run a keyword search. On his smart glasses, he opened the documentation of their server, and ran a search while referring to the documentation as a guide to navigate.

He had access to the logged reports and with the documentation on the other hand. It was made easy with the access keys that Rene had, and after copying the event logs and the strings of codes that were commented so they wouldn't function. He copied a part of the database, mainly the tables that handled the security and what kind of access they have.

From the low-level accounts, to the personnel who held the highest ranks. Most of them were mainly assigned, but he had noticed that a certain Ernel Baldwin had higher credentials. He made a note of this person, copied his email, address, phone number, socials, and where he had recently checked in.

After two hours of work, he spent another erasing input history, and then masking them as errors that a newbie would make.

Like a fool who didn’t even know how to delete an entry. After waiting for more hours, someone finally noticed, and stormed into the server room where they found him scratching his head.

The Database Administrator who stormed inside the room scolded him.

“If you can’t do your job right then why the fuck are you here!?”

“I’m not used to this proprietary software,  sir.”

“Fuck, who recommended you? You made 149 errors in the last few  hours and now every bastard in the other server rooms wants to strangle you. Fuck, what were you thinking trying to manually input this shit in the tables directly without the password being encrypted!”

“Sorry?”

“Fuck, I can’t have this shit. You know what? You’re cut. Get out of here. I don’t need this shit right now on the server room! And wake up Rene! No wonder this moron has been making mistakes. Shit, you’re the senior here!”

Kato Lores stomps his feet and leaves the server room. He placed the pad on Elliot who could only shake his head at the new guy not lasting for a day.

“No wonder those idiots can’t stop emailing me about how hard things are here,” Elliot mutters as he went back to work and deleted Kato Lores’s access rights as an employee and updated the local directory.