So I had been showing Miles here how to trip from one planet to another, specifically to Xios. Someone must have told him there was a Node on Xios. It wasn't me, but I will, for a price. The buzzer on the door bzzzed and a guy in a tie came in and talked to Robert.
"He's over there." Robert pointed at me.
I handed the controllers over to Miles, "Okay kid, I gotta take care of something else, it looks like." Miles palmed me twenty bucks and went back to playing the game. I slipped the twenty in my pocket nonchalantly and greeted the suit. "Can I help you with something?"
"Hi, I'm Larry Waterford. I dropped off that old game system for repair a couple weeks ago." He held his hand out to me and I shook it.
"Which one? We get a lotta stuff in here." I shrugged my shoulders at him.
"Here's the ticket the fellow over there gave me when I brought it in." He handed me a bin number.
It was the ancient system that I had spent so much time on. "Oh yeah, I remember this one all right. It gave me quite a fit to fix. Well, actually the console was not in too bad shape. I just replaced a capacitor and tuned up the motherboard and added a new fan. The games on the other hand were all scratched up." I scratched my head and tried to remember where I had put the box. "Ah yes, here it is under here."
"So you couldn't get the games to work, then?" he asked.
"Oh no, I didn't mean that. I cleaned them and resurfaced them and all of them worked but this one here." I pulled out the broken disc and showed him. "You see these two cracks here go all the way through the disk. I tried everything but couldn't save this disk." I rummaged through the box for the new version I made him.
"Oh well," he interrupted. "At least some of them still work."
"Hold on, I wasn't finished yet. As I said, I couldn't get this disk repaired. So, I copied it and hacked the encryption code into my Sequencing system at home and found where it was damaged. I rewrote the game code where it was scrambled, re-encrypted it, and then copied the file back onto this disk here." I handed him the disk. "It plays great! You can't even tell where I spliced the code."
"You mean you reverse-engineered the game and fixed it?" Mr. Waterford asked.
"Uh, yeah if you say so." I just shook my head and handed him the box. "If you have any more problems with it, just bring it back to me. But it should work fine for a while. Who knows with those old systems like that."
"I hate to ask this, but what do I owe you?"
"Let's see." I took the ticket and scanned it. The computer rang up the total repairs and parts. "That looks like eight dollars for the parts, thirty-five for the labor, taxes, blah blah blah . . . comes to forty-six dollars and forty-four cents. All our services come with a thirty-day guarantee and you can buy a ninety-day one for fifteen dollars. You interested?"
"Not really." He shook his head no.
"All right then, forty-six forty-four."
"Just one more question," he said, and paused.
"Shoot."
"Uh . . . how did you find the bad code and how did you know the difference in the good code and the bad code? There must've been millions of lines in there for a video game." He seemed perplexed about what I had accomplished, as if it were too much for any good Sequencer.
"Oh that. It's really kinda simple. I generated a couple of different codes for that. One of the codes was a couple of Agents that would crawl through the code from beginning to end, the other would allow the Agents to run the code in small increments. This enabled the Agents to make an assessment of when blocks looked similar to other blocks, if there were random or unusual blocks, and if they would execute feasibly or not. Then the Agent would highlight the code in my text editor. Simple stuff for any Sequencer—besides I already had the Agent codes. I just had to modify them some. All in all it took about a week and a half to finish the code breaking and repair."
"What software did you use for that? Telescript2 or Obliq2 or LotusScript4 or what?" This guy must've known something about Sequencing but he sure didn't look or act like a Sequencer.
"None of those—too clunky for me. I have my own platform that I use. It's sort of similar to the old Linux platform I guess. And the code, well, it is most similar to the old Multi-Agent Markup Language," I responded.
"You ever worked on this level of coding before?" he asked.
"I used to work on router code and stuff back before . . . uh, here." I motioned to the repair shop but I wanted to say, The Rain. I felt sad all of a sudden.
"I see. Uh, what's your name again?"
"Steven, Steven Montana," I replied.
"Well, hey Steven, thanks and good job." He left.
What an odd fellow, I thought. He was about five nine with neatly cropped black hair wearing black pants, white shirt, and tie. He carried himself more like an engineer or a business manager than a programmer. I meant to ask why he wanted that old thing fixed so badly. Heck, the repair bill was more than that thing was worth, but I forgot.
A few days passed and Mr. Waterford came back to VR's and had some interesting questions for me.
"Steven, hi." He sounded excited. "How are you?"
"Doin' all right I guess. Havin' trouble with your game again?"
"Huh . . . oh, no. I came back to talk to you. Do you have a minute or perhaps I could buy you a burger or something?" Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.
"Uh, man I'm straight, but flattered," I replied.
Waterford looked at me and started chuckling. Holding up his left hand and pointing out his wedding band he said, "Mr. Montana, I assure you this is purely business. I might have some more, uh, lucrative possibilities for you than this place."
"Okay. There's a sandwich shop around the corner, you're buying." Didn't hurt to listen, especially for a free meal.
"Good," he said. "Lead the way."
"Hey Robert, I'm takin' my lunch break now. Be back in a bit." The little blue-haired punk just grunted and nodded at me.
The actual lunch part of lunch was not that exciting, just a foot-long club loaded and a bag of Doritos, to wash it down a super-sized Mountain Dew. I hadn't had my sugar or caffeine fix that morning so I figured a couple refills on the thirty-two-ounce Mountain Dew should hold me through the afternoon. Pretty standard lunch stuff for me. The lunch conversation, on the other hand, turned out to be quite exciting.
"You see it's like this," Mr. Waterford was telling me. "That was some pretty good code decryption, hardware reverse engineering, and code writing. Just so happens I could probably use someone like you in my outfit."
"What kind of outfit?" I asked.
"I work for the United States Air Force Space Vehicles Directorate out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. We have a branch lab here at Wright Patterson. I'm the Lead Systems Engineer over the local division of the Innovative Concepts Group. We call it the ICG for short."
"No shit?"
"Uh, yeah no shit. My group does a lot of . . . uh . . . unique problem solving for various organizations and we support and conduct the development of new innovative and wild technologies."
"Hey, that's pretty cool. So what does that have to do with me?" I hoped I knew where this was going. If I was right, I knew a blue-haired and pierced punk that I was going to say good riddance to.
"Like I said, you did some good reverse engineering on that game console of my wife's. That was her favorite game back in college that you fixed. I gave it to her for our twenty-fifth anniversary. She used to play that thing all the time. I found it in the attic a while back and had been trying to find someone that could fix it. VR's is the first place I found that would touch it. My guess is because of you." He paused to check my reaction and to take a bite of his sandwich. With a mouthful he continued, "So, have you ever been arrested for anything before or done any illegal stuff? What about drugs? If you can't pass a drug test I'm wasting my time."
"Uh, no I'm pretty dull. Sequencing is my only addiction. I have some prescription drugs if that matters."
"Nah, that's fine. Okay, what about
education? Where did you learn how to do all this stuff?" He took a sip of his soda.
I proceeded to tell him about the high school science fairs and the University of Dayton and . . . The Rain. And finished up with how I ended up at VR's.
"Sorry to hear that about your family and friends. I had a lot of friends at Space Park in El Segundo and my first cousin was stationed in Ramstein. I understand some of what you went through, sorry. On the other hand, it's good that you're doing okay. It would be easier if you had finished school though. How many more classes do you need?" He seemed fairly genuine with his concerns. He would be much better to work for than Robert. I was beginning to feel underdressed and too unprofessional for this meeting. I was getting nervous.
"I believe I am six classes short. I could probably finish it up in one hard semester. Two tops. Are you seriously considering making me a job offer?"
"Two semesters sounds about right," he began. "How about this, you come and work for me as a cooperative education student while finishing your degree as fast as possible. As soon as you graduate we will move you from a co-op to an engineer at a GS-07 pay scale. That's about forty-seven thousand a year. Of course until you graduate you will be at a GS-4 bringing in about half that. The government has good benefits and insurance, so, my guess is that you would be much better off with us. Also, by the time you finished with your co-oping your security clearances might be through."
"You mean this would be secret stuff?" I was getting excited.
"Oh, I thought I had mentioned that. Is that a problem for you?" he smiled.
"No! I would love to do that kind of stuff. A real job and real pay, where do I sign?" My straw made that obnoxious noise that they make when you run out of soda. I considered getting up for more but wasn't sure if it would be good timing.
"Well, what you need to do is go to this website and fill out the electronic form and resume. Put this job number," he handed me a slip of paper with a dot gov website and some numbers on it, "in the blanks where it asks for it and use my name as a point of contact. You'll be called in for the official interview. Don't worry; you have the job in my mind. We just have to follow the rules to get you there." He paused for a second. "You might go to the web and brush up on what goes on at Wright Pat, especially in our group, and be sure to wear a tie. And . . . uh . . . you might want to get a haircut, my boss is old military and . . . well, you understand."
"Okay, that's no problem. I needed a haircut anyway." I instinctively brushed my long bangs out of my eyes.
It took about a month to get the drug testing, paperwork, interviews, and job offer letter in order. During that time I had registered for two classes the next semester and for the cooperative education program. Before school started in the fall I had told Robert to kiss my ass, collected my things, and walked out on him in the middle of a shift. I started working a couple of weeks later. I had to take out a small student loan to make it until my paychecks started. I was very happy about my situation, but my mood swings still persisted.
Finally, the first day on the job came and life was looking up. Actually the entire day was kind of hectic since I had to deal with security, social security, human resources, and I had to go through a new employee orientation, all of which took until well after lunch. The lady at the security desk took a decent badge image of me I thought. I was sportin' my new student-loan-purchased wardrobe and haircut. Of course, I got soaked by an afternoon post-Rain thunderstorm while trying to figure out how to put the security decal on the window of the classic Cutlass. That was just a minor incident. Then I spent a few minutes driving around the base looking for the Space Vehicles Directorate Building. So, I didn't actually get to my new office (get that—I actually have an office) until nearly three o'clock in the afternoon. I had just enough time to meet my boss's boss, the secretary, Alice, a few of the other employees of the Innovative Concepts Group, or ICG as they called it, and to find where they hid pens and paper before it was time to go home. I didn't even get started on things like email, software, where the printers are, and where the closest bathrooms to my office are. But in time I would settle in and be much happier than at VR's.
That night after my first day on the job Lazarus and I celebrated and then I cried for hours. I know I was sad from losing . . . everyone I had ever known in an instant, but that had been nearly three years ago and I was getting back on my feet. I shouldn't have been so bipolar for so long, should I? The drugs were not helping. My plan was to see a new doctor as soon as my insurance with the Air Force kicked in. I already had scheduled an appointment.
CHAPTER 4
The following few days I got settled in and filled out the SF-86 security form. That thing is electronic and asked for details about my past, which had been wiped from existence by The Rain. I asked Larry (no longer "Mr. Waterford," he said) about how it would be determined if I really ever existed or not since records and witnesses to my life had all been destroyed.
"Just fill out the forms and let Defense Security Services handle the rest," he told me. "They have had these difficulties since the meteors and have found ways to get information. Also, since The Rain, as you call it, they increased the requirements for polygraphs. Expect to take a lie detector test sometime in the next few weeks."
So that was that. I was on my way to a new career, with a security clearance, even. I was put in for a Top Secret and was told to read all the documents on the so-called AFSPSEC website. I found out the acronym stands for Air Force Special Programs Security Education Community. I was also told I should look up the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual, the Director of Central Intelligence Directives, and a few other security documents that read like stereo instructions.
Finally, on my second Monday, I was set up with a workbench in a lab space and actually given a technical task to do. Larry brought me what appeared to be a small motherboard in a plastic static bag (and by small I mean about twice the size of a sticky-note) and told me to figure out what it was.
"Do you have any information on it?" I asked him.
"Sure I do. But I want to see what you come up with first." He smirked.
"When do you need this figured out? I mean how long do I have to tinker with it?"
"Take as long as you need," he said smugly. "But, uh, don't take too long." And he left it at that. How damned vague could you be?
How long was "too long" and how long was "as long as I needed"? This was some sort of test for the new guy I figured. So, I sat there for twenty minutes or more just rolling the thing over in my hands and looking at it before I came up with a plan of action. Since it was pushing four-thirty p.m., my plan of action was to go home and take Lazarus for a walk, which is just what I did.
The next morning I had a doctor's appointment with my new headshrinker. After talking with her for some time, she decided that I had developed a tolerance to the Zoloft and wanted me to try a new drug, I couldn't pronounce or spell the name, which was just out on the market. Fortunately, she had plenty samples of the drug and gave me a handful of them, since they were apparently expensive as hell. I had decent insurance now, but the deductible on brand name drugs was two hundred and fifty bucks and I sure didn't want to have to pay that.
So, I took one of the pills with lunch and headed into the base for work. That little motherboard was still sitting on my desk in the plastic baggy.
"Well, first things first," I told myself and carefully pulled the board out of the baggy. Then I took out my lab notebook and began making a diagram of the circuit. It took about three hours to get what I thought was a complete diagram for the thing drawn and each part that I could identify labeled. Then I tried to develop a block diagram of the circuit with the nonlabeled chips marked A through D; the rest of the components on the board were standard parts.
It was my guess that the board was a "onesy" and had possibly come from a multi-card chassis. My reasoning for that conclusion was that all of the leads were covered and as short as possible, and there we
re outlines in each corner of the board for some sort of mounting hardware. The short leads would help prevent interference to and from other boards mounted above and below (or beside) it in the chassis. From this assumption I drew a dotted line around my evolving block diagram to represent a chassis.
The block diagram consisted of all five "main" chips, A through E, represented as blocks of size proportional to those on the board. From the top left of the page there was a chip about an inch square, which appeared to be some sort of standard input/output (I/O) conversion chip (analog to digital/digital to analog). To the right of the I/O chip was a chip much larger, about one and a half inches across and three inches tall. I had no clue what that chip would do, but it looked similar to a main processor chip like a Pentium VI. I labeled it A.
To the right of chip A was a slightly smaller chip, about one inch square, and I labeled it B. To the right of chip B was an identical twin to chip A, which I labeled C. To the right of chip C was another I/O chip. The chip sequence I/O, A, B, C, I/O made up the top row of my block diagram. Also, all of the chips on this row were connected by a copper stripe on the circuit board. The I/O chips had what appeared to be standard serial outputs connected to them.
With the top line of the block diagram completed I then added chip D directly below chip B and then chip E directly below chip D. Chip D had copper leads to both chips A and C. There were also fiber optic cables connecting chips A to B, B to C, D to A, D to C, and E to D. Below and on each side of chip E there was a small power processing unit (PPU) board just like the type in a game console power supply unit (PSU). Each of these PPUs was in turn connected to a single transformer and fuse box that had a standard power cable input. There were also power connections between several pins on each of the chips and the PPUs and other standard components on the board. It looked to me as though there were two separate PPUs because the board was actually two systems in one. Perhaps the two identical processor-looking chips were parallel processors on a single board, or maybe one was a backup to the other. I didn't know.
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