Chapter One
Statistically, somewhere in the early hours of Christmas morning, more people are asleep than at any other moment during the year. Me? I'm working.
And I love that the world is quiet. That's less people to bother me, and more thickness for the walls of darkness and solitude that surround this place. As the off-hours network manager, I'm typically alone in my duties, and I don't have to manage much of anything. I don't have to train people, or deal with customer issues. All I have to do is make sure our extremely expensive network doesn't go down or lock up or implode when nobody else is around.
With today's technology, that means I spend the vast majority of my time sitting around and browsing things online. I'm pretty sure I've seen the entire Internet. I used to cover my tracks by deleting my connection history from the network log, but, one week I forgot… and nobody cared. I quickly got the sense that nobody was even looking, and, if they did, they wouldn't give a crap about the browsing history of the off-hours network manager.
I mean, realistically, what else was I supposed to do? Cooped up in this half-dark, half-rainbow server room, alive with the breath of endless banks of computers and the cooling system needed to keep it all from melting… I used to joke to myself that my ultimate responsibility here was to literally pull the plugs out of the walls if the air conditioning ever stopped working, something no software could ever do, and something a monkey could have managed - but my little joke ceased being funny when I realized that was actually, probably, most likely the case. I'm a glorified button pusher.
Once I'd seen the entire Internet, I grew bolder. I began looking at files on our own network. I had excuses lined up if anybody came to ask what I was doing… but nobody ever did. We did quite a bit of work with military contractors, and it was rather astounding to sift through bid documents, designs, and plans that dealt in the billions of dollars. It was all protected and encrypted, of course… except I was the acting network administrator. Score one for the network being far too big for anyone to lock down perfectly.
There were files, emails, and logged communications from practically everywhere, and a few places I'd never even heard of. We weren't military, or governmental, but we did business with them all. VPs discussed third-world coups over lunch, accountants logged tax tricks that were clearly illegal but heavily obfuscated and ready to be pinned on patsies hired for the task of taking the fall, and soldiers emailed their families back home.
That was the thing about these memos and emails. Unlike the swarm of crap on the Internet, they were real. One soldier's email chain ended two months ago, and the subsequent data linked to his widow trying to get money out of our insurance department despite their best efforts to renege on the payout. These were real people being churned through the system. Was that widow asleep somewhere right now, ready to fake her way through Christmas morning with her daughter, or was she still awake, with anger and despair gnawing at her?
I mean, I had access… and the system was the system… and I knew it was inevitable. Alone in here ad infinitum, I'd eventually do it. Why not now?
I closed the widow's insurance payout ticket, taking it away from the current person assigned to it, then reopened it without an assignee… a simple matter. With a few manipulations, I created a fake employee in a department with a redundant sounding title. Then, I sent it on over to pay processing… doubled the amount… and marked it as Approved. It was nothing to a gigantic corporation, but everything to a single person. As a final act, I deleted all traces of my actions.
Huh.
That was it.
Maybe what I'd done was illegal, but it seemed… the morally right thing to do. She'd be getting an email confirmation before she woke up. That seemed like a Christmas present and a half.
And I couldn't be caught, in any case. There was simply no trace in the system that I'd had anything to do with it, and hardly anybody knew I existed anyway. The system was the system, and if, through some impossible feat, a mid-level manager noticed an issue, he'd simply pass a ticket up… to me.
And that ticket would most certainly be lost in the shuffle.
I felt oddly great for a little while, until I realized… everyone's asleep. If ever I had an opportunity to do more like this, and get away with it, it was now.
I delved deeper into the files, looking specifically for military communications with signs of distress.
Somehow, I think I knew it the moment I saw it. The message log hung there in emptiness - alone, like me. Nobody had read it, and nobody was even aware of its existence. It was encrypted in a unique way, and hidden by rare system priorities. No users had the rights to access it, and the file had no traceable origin. This was a message intended to be read by no one.
But the access process did exist within the system, even if nobody actually had the rights to it.
I couldn't resist.
The Portal in the Forest Page 22
