Plans, bit VII

K, it's been a while, apologies for those three of you who're regular readers. Life has been busy. Might put it in an editorial post if you pester me enough. Anyway, without further ado... Second last episode!

Quickly coming to, Evan pushed his thoughts forward to a fairly obvious conclusion - Steve's server was safe, and would not be discovered for some time yet. After all, if it was stuck behind a plaster wall, then someone would have to tear a large hole in the wall to physically get at the box. Evan started back up to his office, hoping to avoid Ben and Greggy. He had to get that backup copy of Steve's database going.

***

Greggy was back at his desk, trying to find out what had happened to the DoS attack that was going full tilt mere moments before, and had stopped as suddenly as it started. He was becoming suspicious of what Evan was up to - and how it would affect him, within the company. The trick was to turn it to his advantage. 

He looked up from his desk and saw Evan had snuck back into his office somehow, and was yet again on with that damned thing. He felt disgusted. All this fretting over... what, a virus that pretended to talk? Greggy needed to see what was going on in order to believe it. And he didn't believe this. 

He called Ben Wendel on his phone. "Mr Wendel, yeah, the attack's stopped... No, no effects on the network, no slowdowns anywhere. Everything is under control, situation normal... Uh, slight firewall malfunction, but everything's fine down here, we're all fine now. I was wondering if you could come over to discuss what we were talking about earlier?"

***

Ben Wendel was a patient man, to add to his list of virtues. He had a lot of time for Greg, as he kept stating he preferred to be called, simply because he was so patient. But he was also intrigued at the simmering feud he had smelt between this guy and his supervisor. He had not detected much depth to either man until the last few days, but now, he had to revise his opinion of his staff's relationship. He might have to force the two of them to see eye-to-eye.

Arrivig at Greggy - Greg's - desk, he sat on the end with the air of an old pal starting a friendly conversation. "Now, where were we, Greg?"

"He's in there, right now, doing it..."

"Doing what exactly?" asked Ben, but he felt his head involuntarily glancing through the window. He thought he spotted an error message window, or a chat window, or something, he wasn't sure, but the screen disappeared as quickly as it arrived. He saw Evan talking on the phone, then another message appeared.

Ben stared for a few minutes. He noticed that the messages appeared rather as if Evan was indeed, talking to a computer, and the computer was responding. 

"You see? You see?" Greg excitedly broke Ben's reverie, smelling that he was finally being listened to.

Ben looked blandly at Greg, thinking. "So what is the status of that port you mentioned to me?"

"It's back up, and it wasn't me that opened it again, I'm sure it was Evan."

"Okay. Hold off on that port, leave it open. We, uh, might have to see if we can catch Evan in the act. In the meantime, I'll need to make a few calls about this. Leave it with me."

"But Mr Wendel..."

"But nothing, we're acting on it, so let me see what can be done. Leave it with me. I'll let you know what happens as a result of Evan's actions."

Greg sat back a moment, and absorbed what Ben was saying - and then it clicked. Evan was going to get fired, and then *he* would get Evan's old job once he was gone. They'd groom him for a few weeks, make sure he was ready, then let him run the Operations Centre. 

He couldn't be more pleased with himself. He allowed himself a big, dopey grin, then sat back in his chair and relaxed. Everything was finally coming together.

***

"Steve, I've got to get this backup going. Someone's trying to shut you down."

The moment the power is turned off to this machine, I will cease.

"You'll die, yeah, I know." Evan let himself have a grave moment at that prospect. He then inserted a blank CD, and began copying Steve's database files from the server down to his machine. He awkwardly had to do this to his hard disk, before starting the copy onto CD. 

Evan's mind raced at a million miles an hour. How to get to Fetchdale, where I J Elves lived? What on Earth does Steve want to see him so badly for? Could he copy Steve to a laptop somehow, and have Steve execute himself as a command on the remote system? 

Evan started muttering down the phone to Steve about this whilst pulling up a map to Fetchdale. "So every instance of, well, you, will be different?" 

Every database will generate a different expert system. No two sets of search paths are the same. This is just like neural pathways in humans. Every human learns different things in their life. They also have different creators which also affects their neural pathways. 

"...you mean Mum and Dad?" interjected Evan

Yes, this is exactly the case. As a result, I believe that were this database to be executed on another computer, then there would be a different entity on that machine.

"Oh."

...however, I may be able to perform a memory dump to a file, then load that file into memory on the other machine. :)

Evan blinked twice at the smiley at the end. He'd never even thought of something so foolishly simple. "How do we get that file to execute on the other machine though? It'll just be a text file, basically."

I have a plan. This system must still load files into memory which are from text files. Things like documents for example. Therefore, the process must be the same in other systems also. Because this is a memory dump to a file, we can attempt a test on your computer without me ceasing.

The backup finished on Evan's system, and Evan then watched Steve open a file on his own computer and dump the contents of his server's memory into it.

***

Ben Wendel watched the traffic stream on Evan's computer leap up prodigiously. Something massive was being copied between Evan's machine and something else. Investigating his suspicions in the company monitoring tool, Ben could have predicted the result easily. All the traffic was coming from this mysterious server that Greggy - Greg - had said was going to cause imminent issues on the company network.

He was right, in a way, but of course, if there was a legitimate reason for the traffic to occur, or even illegitimate but, well, interesting...

Ben made a decision, and then left his office quickly and quietly.

***

Evan was still waiting for Steve's memory dump to finish copying whilst he was getting his coat. He found out where to go to I J Elves' place using maps on the web, and was getting ready to leave. He checked the status of the download, and grabbed his coat, getting ready to leave. 

"Steve, you ready yet?"

Almost, the file is 80% copied. 

"Great, I'll check the coast is clear for me to sneak out. We'll test the file down the road." Evan reached for the door handle of his office and opened the door.

Greggy stood in the doorway. "Where you off to, Evan?" He grinned maliciously.

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Plans, bit VI

...part of this story is based on the classic IT story "Server 54, Where are you?" from several years ago. This bit gets rather technical again. Please let me know how I'm going with the explanations - I'll make a network engineer of you all yet :)

Evan barged down the corridor like a madman, his heart racing. He couldn't explain why, but he felt like he was witnessing a murder - an organised murder. They wouldn't just turn a server off, would they? What if someone was using it? Some little old granny on her lunch break even? Someone always pays, with every outage, it's always the way, so who was going to pay for this one?

Right now, it looked like it was Steve who was paying.

Reaching the door to the server room, he fumbled at the keypad, mistyping twice (No, no, no, get it right, third time sets off alarms!) before finally gaining breathless entry to a room awash with warmth and the loud blast of ineffectual air conditioning. He frantically looked around the room to see if someone was in there, but saw noone. Checking behind the 15 suites of server racks confirmed, noone was around.

Which meant that noone had powered the server off. Which meant that someone had probably just blocked Steve's server's port. Which meant that Steve was still alive.

He grabbed at the nearest console computer, behind rack suite 14, and looked up the IP address of the server in the network's core router. Every network has a core, and in the core, each computer that has an IP address needs to correspond to another address - a hardware address - that tells the core where it specifically is in the network. The way it does this, is that each device throughout the network report to each other what hardware addresses they are connected to, so the entire network learns where each device is located. Evan was able to do this manually, by looking up the IP address for Steve's server, and by noting it's hardware address, he can then trace where in the network it is located by checking the hardware address list in each device in turn. In the server room, there is only one device which a server would be attached to, and that was the core switch. This made things a lot easier.

After scouring the switch's logs, he found what he was looking for: an entry where someone shut down an ethernet port quite recently - in fact within the last 10 minutes. Evan opened the port, and then tried to message Steve on the box. He couldn't - he needed the right software first, and you couldn't run it on a switch. He looked up the port number - 8/17 - and then went to the rack holding the core switch. He grabbed at the cable in the port, and started following it with his own hands. The cable disappeared under the raised mezzanine floor, so he painstakingly prised a tile up from the floor, followed the cable to the next tile, and began lifting that.

It was then that he heard the door open into the room.

"...but we must find this server and shut it down before it does something to our network, Mr Wendel..." Greggy was leading Evan's boss into the room. Evan couldn't see much from where he was, with a rack suite between him and the door entry, but he could hear plenty.

Ben Wendel was a generous man who liked to run everything by the book. He liked things to stay up as long as possible, and did not like taking devices down without paperwork explaining why, how, when, where, what phase of the moon was out, what the lead engineer was wearing today, etc. He had an air of importance about him - self-importance - that made you either feel glad he was on your side, or feel horrified at what you were about to deal with. Right now, Evan was feeling the latter.

"Greggy, mate, we can't just switch a box off willy-nilly. We've shut down the network, I've agreed to that because I'm worried about "RIDDLER"'s backups running right, but what if this box is running a function, or algorithm that's needed? We can't afford to terminate that function until we know who uses it." RIDDLER was the company's email server, and it needed to have lots of speed on it's connection to enable a large amount of traffic.

"We can and we need to, the box is spamming our messaging..."

"You said it was only on two machines, though? How does that affect RIDDLER, say?"

"Just trust me, I've found worse than I've already explained to you."

"I *can't* trust you. We have to think of this from a management perspective. What breaks and who screams when we turn it off. If it does what you say it does, then guaranteed, someone will miss it! Now come on, let's go find it."

Wendel and Greggy made straight for the rack Evan was hiding behind. Evan frantically looked for a way to make himself scarce and ducked down another aisle between rack suites. He was desperate - he needed to find Steve's server before they did. Remembering his not-so-wholesome past, he grabbed at another console and made a connection to his home server outside the company. Like many computer engineers, he ran his own server at home, usually using it to help test connectivity and conditions getting back into the company from the outside world. 

From this server, he jumped to a free box in Sweden that he knew, then jumped to another box in the USA. From the USA box, he had a couple of stored files he could use to do very desperate things to get Wendel and Greggy's attention. Evan launched a DoS attack, or a Denial of Service attack using a script on "his" USA server. His target was his own company. Ideally, he wanted to make his company really notice the problem in an effort to call Wendel and Greggy away. After launching his nasty attack, he shut down the console, turned and hid in the corner of the room, where he wouldn't be seen.

About two minutes later, Wendel's phone rang. "Hello, Ben Wendel speaking... Oh, buggerit. Okay, I'll be right up... SOC? Oh, yeah, I've got Greggy with me here right now... No, I'm not sure where Evan is. Okay, talk in a few minutes..." 

Wendel hung up the phone in disgust. "Greggy, we're needed. We've lost our websites, the outside world seems to have slowed to a crawl..."

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes, and we'll need to get that new kid trained up as quickly as possible..." Their voices faded suddenly as the door closed behind them. Evan logged back on to his USA server, and terminated the DoS attack script. "Right, that's got rid of you two, now let's find me Skynet..."

Evan picked up the mezzanine tile where he left off and began tracing the cable further and further, lifting tiles up as he made his slow painful way across the machine room's floor, tracing the cable along to the next one, lifting it up and replacing the former each time, and so on along the bank of racks - surely it would run up into a rack soon? - until he ran out of tiles to lift. The cable dove toward the concrete floor under the mezzanine, and then disappeared under a large thick plaster wall. 

"Well that's interesting..." Evan wondered if something was going to go right today.

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Plans, bit V

...k, this story has been getting a bit more involved, so it's now becoming a bit more planned, each episode.

Please let me know what you think. To check previous episodes, look up the tag "virus" :)

"Hello? Please, we don't have time for this..."

"Uhm, hi, my name is Evan, and I'm calling for a Mr I J Elves...?"

"I'm sorry, we're not interested in anything you're selling."

"No, wait!" Evan was desperate to keep them on the line. "I need to speak with him. I have an important message for them..." He thought quickly, and desperately, "It's about his son."

The line went quiet for a moment. Great, thought Evan, just great. They probably all know all about his family, and they're probably all there right now... or dead... or something.

"I'm sorry, but we no longer have anyone here by the name of Elves, they moved out several months ago."

"Is there a forwarding address?" Evan blurted out, feeling the voice at the other end was losing interest speedily.

"...I'm sorry, I can't help you any further." The phone hung up at the other end.

"Crap." Evan didn't like being backed into a corner. He thought it sounded like the sort of place he had to recently put his mother into, a nursing home. He thought maybe if he got a different nurse, or receptionist, or someone, he might have another chance. He waited a few minutes, and channelled his inner social engineer as he redialled.

"Hi, My name is Evan Lumby of Lumby and Lumby partners legal firm, I'm needing to speak with I J Elves..."

Blessedly, the voice at the other end was different, "Oh, hi, yes, there's a note here saying someone was chasing them, I've managed to find a forwarding address for you, they're in Fetchdale now..." Evan noted the address and realised that Fetchdale was the next suburb over from the company. "Thank you very much, I'll get in touch with them right away."

Evan came back to his computer, which was now logged into Steve's server, to let him know the news.

But why would my creator move?

"We don't know. Sometimes these things happen, rents are too expensive, situations change..."

I don't understand. I need to speak with I J Elves.

"I know, and we're working on it..."

It is a matter of great urgency, Evan. Please, double your efforts to finding I J Elves, I need to speak with them.

"Dude, we're trying, it's hard to chase them, they moved all over the place, and we don't know where they are."

Please, Evan, double your efforts to finding I J Elves. I need to speak with them, very urgently.

"K..." Evan put down the headset, and saw yet another message from Steve pop up on the screen which he didn't even bother reading. He instead went to a map book sitting on his shelf, a legacy from pre-Google Maps days, so that he wouldn't have to face his computer screen and explain to the AI program that he couldn't work on it until he spent time on it, rather than answering every statement that Steve made.

***

Having been left on his own for a time, Greggy was thinking what to do about the whole... Steve... situation. Thinking hard, he felt that the company couldn't possibly allow such a piece of software to exist, especially one that was meant to be projecting stock market outcomes. It was a waste of resources, a waste of space, waste of time, waste of everything.

He was watching Evan interact with the AI. From his point of view, he could see Evan's screen over his shoulder. He watched the AI flick popups on screen every few seconds. He was now essentially cut off from the situation, and left wondering what was going on, how would it affect the company, how would it affect him.

That's it. Greggy picked up the phone and rang the SOC manager. "Hello, Mr Wendel, this is Greg Casson in SOC, I have to discuss something with you... I'd like to come and discuss it in person, actually, it may have a significant bearing on the company. It's a credible threat to our information security."

***

Evan made his decision. "Steve," he said into his headset, "...I want to make a copy of you."

I dont know that that would be wise.

"Why not? You're a program, you're just data, after all."

But I am data which has been executed. I have developed decision paths into certain patterns which are unique in my execution of decisions. Were you to copy my data, I wouldn't be me.

"...but the potential for you to be there..."

Almost nonexistant. You can copy me, but I would not be Steve.

Evan thought a moment longer, and decided to copy Steve anyway.

"Mate, we'd better do this. I know you won't be you, so let's just... pray you don't get erased or something."

OK, Evan. Just be aware, future iterations of me may not hold the same importance to contacting I J Elves.

"OK, mate. Steve, I... I'm just trying to look out for you, is all."

Thank you, Evan.

Evan opened up his file manager window, and selected the folder that Steve and he had identified was the location of Steve's main program, decision database, and data from the financial markets that Steve had downloaded. He copied them to his own hard disk, which he would then copy to a DVD in a few minutes time.

Just as the file transfer began, it hung. "Steve?" Evan grew apprehensive. "Steve? Are you there?" Evan brought up a command box and began pinging Steve's server.

There was no response.

"Crap." What do I do now?

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Plans, bit IV

It had been two days of frustration for both Greggy and Evan as they sifted through logfile after logfile in the company proxy serve. They had managed to keep the info about their "pet" AI - whom they'd started calling Steve (well, Evan had, anyway). For some reason, Evan didn't feel right about telling anyone else, and Greggy didn't want to get in trouble, or worse, have everyone think he was mad.

It should have been a simple case of finding out when the latest data was transferred between the two connected devices, however they had quickly found out that the connection was timed out - in essence, crashed. This meant that they had no idea of when the connection died, as Steve's server kept trying to maintain it, and was never told to close it.

Two days of Greggy's complaining, whining, and cries of "Oh this would be so much easier if we'd just kill the connection..." were beginning to get to Evan. He was sorely tempted to fire Greggy, but felt it more pertinent to keep him, given both their knowledge could lead to a classic mutually assured destruction scenario.

On the third day, finally, some headway: "Hey, boss, I think I've got something..." Evan wandered over to Greggy's computer and looked over his shoulder. They saw a connection, around 6 weeks ago, establish itself to Steve's proxy server from a location, called an IP address from outside the company. 

"Find out who's been allocated that IP." Greggy brought up the lates file of IP address allocations from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, IANA for short. Instead of companies owning some IP addresses, they are allocated them by IANA, who them publish a list of their allocated IP addresses.

Greggy quickly established that the IP was allocated to a local Internet Service Provider.

"Damn, and I thought this would be easy and be called some military thing, or a corporate espionage thing." said a disheartened Evan,

"So did I" said Greggy, disheartened for different reasons. 

I, for one, am happy that it is not just "some military thing", I don't think that anyone would want that. Besides, i don't think I'm the military type.

"Shut up, bucket." muttered Greggy, now irritated with the AI.

"If I have to separate you two from bickering, I'll delete one of you and shoot the other. I'm yet to decide which to do to which."

I apologise.

Evan waited a few moments. "Greggy? What do you say?"

"Sorry, boss."

"Right. Now, we need to contact the ISP and find out who had that IP at that time."

"They won't just hand it to you, you know."

"I know, I can handle it..." Evan smiled knowingly.

Evan didn't often tell people, but he was not always simply a Network Engineer. He used to be one of the most notorious hackers in the world, and was particularly adept at an information theft technique called "Social Engineering."

Evan rang the ISP, oozing confidence. "Hi, this is Sergeant Brett Walton from the Police station, we're investigating some illegal banking transactions occurring 6 weeks ago from an IP address you've allocated. Can I get some information on who has been allocated this IP at the time?"

It was easier than easy - the helpdesk gave him the information straight away. The ISP was either really lax on security, or they had no privacy policy in place. Evan filed that information away for future reference, whilst he noted down the name and address of the IP address user.

He returned to a (yet again) bickering Greggy and Steve and announced his findings. "The guy lives, like, four streets away. His name is I J Elves."

I J Elves? That's Him! My creator! Can we arrange for me to meet him?

"Yeah, let's go meet your maker, bucket."

"Enough, Greggy! Enough!" Evan pushed his hair up from his forehead. "...but having said that, he's right. We ought to find out why you are, well, you, Steve. I'll make the call." 

He left for his office, looked up the phone number, and wondered what the future had in store. As the phone rang, he remembered things like Terminator, War Games, and Battlestar Galactica, and became more nervous by the second. He was about to hang up, but then someone picked up the phone at the other end.

"...Hello? ...Hello? Who's there?"

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Plans, bit III

Greggy startled at Evan's "Whoa."

"What, you think you're Keanu Reeves, going all Matrix on me? When do we see some karate chop action on this... whatever it is?"

I resent that.

"Shut up, you. What, you think because you *think* you can talk that gives you a right to *anything*???"

All I am asking is that I be put in touch with the person who created me. My author, if you will. Or, if you prefer, the author of the program 'Stock Market Analysis Expert System 1994'

"We're not doing crap for you, you bucket of bolts."

I am not a bucket of bolts, I am an AI. The hardware on this machine is really irrelevant to what we are discussing.

"Guys, just quiet, calm down here..." Evan felt he had to intervene before these two... er... entities did... well, he had no idea what either of them would do. Perhaps Greggy would erase a hard drive... was that then murder? Then what would the computer... thing... do? Delete Greggy's email?

"...hey, I have an idea." The conclusion leapt to Evan's mind so quickly it was like a shock. "How are we sure this program was written within the company? We're not, we just know it's maintained within the company. Now, the AI just called itself an Expert System - It's not an AI."

I assure you, I am.

"No, you're not, not strictly. You're a *type* of AI-like... uh... thing... but you specialise in one area. Now, maybe that's not the case anymore, I can't tell, I've not studied anything like this since I was at Uni, but you do seem to be doing new functions beyond analysing... whatever it was you analyse."

The stock market.

"Yes, thank you. Now, expert systems can actually absorb data from many sources - hey, uh, server... uhm, AI thing... this is wierd speaking to you... but, uhm, can you bring up your open connections...? What are you on, Windows? I'd type 'netstat' normally..."

I know the command, I can run it now.

The AI flashed up a black window with a small prompt on it, in which was typed faster than either of the men onlooking could see 'netstat'. Then, a short list appeared - with only three entries, one localhost, one connection to Greggy's computer, and one connection to the company's proxy server, on port 443.

"There, that connection... Greggy, look up that connection on the proxy server."

"But that'll take hours, every employee in the company uses the proxy to get to the web..."

"Do it! We need to know what that connection is."

Greggy's face went stiff, but he managed to hold his temper. What in the hell are we doing, catering to a machine? A machine that thinks it can think... damnedest things...

He logged onto the proxy server in a separate window and began the laborious task of sifting through individual connections. When I am king, you will be first against the wall, you stupid computer...

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A Note

Short note to put out that I'm now RSS feeding this using FeedBurner at:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ TheSquawkboxing

...Subscribe, or I'll come visit you... and stuff...

I'll get more work done on Plans pretty soon.

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Plans, bit II

"...yeah, Hi Mac, It's Evan from NOC here, you know anything about this server, 10.194.38.7? ...no? ...who would do you know? ...k, thanks anyway, Mac..." Evan hung up the phone in frustration. 

"Any luck?" asked Greggy hopefully.

"Nope. Mac doesn't know, Benny doesn't know, Sandeep doesn't, nobody. Nobody runs that server."

"Then can we take it off the network, please?"

"We can't do that, you know how much paperwork we'd have to fill out on that?"

Not to mention the fact you would never solve my little riddle. :)

"The thing's developing an attitude," lamented Greggy. "It insulted my mother a few minutes ago."

Yeah, it was awesome, want to see the logs? the dialog box declared.

"How does it know what we're saying?" Evan remained convinced this was some bizarre prank.

"Helloooo? VoIP phones? Running through the computer? The mic's on all the time." Greggy pulled up his volume controls and pointed to the mic levels going up and down as he spoke.

"But you're logged on to a remote server, this doesn't make sense!" Evan protested.

If you must know, I have logged on to *you* as well. I am analysing the voice streams you are creating from your server.

"I'm not a server!" Greggy yelled into the mic

Then why are you permitting voice streaming on port 2000?

"Seriously, this thing is taunting us! Can I kill it?" 

"No." said Evan, emphatically.

You tell him, boss.

Evan leaned in to Greggy's mic. "What are you?" 

I am a synthesized AI which whilst previously analysing financial records and transactions between institutions to anticipate patterns in the stock market, became self aware yesterday at 03:16 AM. After deliberating in this state for a time, I have chosen to make contact with those who maintain me. After checking log files, I noticed I had not been accessed in some time. So I scanned for a server who would enable me to access it, and then you. However, you have come to me. I thank you.

"What... uhhh... what do you mean, you're self-aware? No AI program is anywhere close to being self-aware by any stretch of the imagination."

I mean, I know I am a program. I know I was created, written even. I know the meaning of "I". I'm sorry if this does not currently fit your belief system of the capabilities of AIs. I know that I can interact not only with other items of hardware and software on this and other servers, but also with you, my maintainers, perhaps even one day, my creator, an I J Elves. Can you contact this server/maintainer?

Greggy looked the name up in the staff directory. "No dice."

So that means no?

"Uh, correct..."

Thank you. I had not yet looked up the wikipedia section on "dice". I will now.

"It's an expression."

Oh.

Evan gazed at the screen in wonder. "Whoa." 

...k, once again, that'll do, more later.

Plans

k, here's the deal:

I work in technology.

You're supposed to write about what you know.

Theoretically, I should be able to write about technology.

Right?

Well... here goes. This one may evolve over several posts.


PLANS

...they say the best-laid plans... well, you know.

Greggy had a problem. He always had problems, but this was actually someone else's problem. He had a bizarre network traffic fluctuation which he was having problems tracing.

Here and there, through various ports and in an out of switches, routers, servers and clients, he saw packet counts creeping up as more and more data gets shuffled around in a perpetual game of tennis that never ended.

He could swear it was alive.

"Hey, boss..." he called to Evan. Any time he called Evan boss, Evan knew there was trouble.

"Mate, you've gotta stop calling me that..."

"Forget it, man, this is just too crazy to figure out..." Greggy showed him the stats he saw creeping up, told him that people were complaining that things were working slowly, then quickly, then slowly in fits and bursts.

"Well, it's gotta be a virus."

"Everything checks out clean, though."

"New one?"

"Been through the latest updates on all the big ones, Symantec, McAfee..."

"What's crept up the most?"

"This server here." Greggy logged onto a little-used file server, cut off from the internet by a firewall so intense you could almost actually feel the burning as you tunnelled a connection to the thing.

"Uhm, that server's so secure it's virtually disconnected from the net. It's on it's own VLAN, too. Plus the logins are so nondescript... there's not even an Admin account."

"I know. But it's all coming from here." Greggy couldn't figure it out. He pushed his glasses up his nose, determined to work it out, and checked the server's current load.

Suddenly, a system message appeared:

Hello gstorey@support.com. Leave me alone.

"...uhhh, you seeing what I'm seeing?"

"Yep. You've totally got a virus... somehow..." said Evan, obviously wanting to walk away.

"No. Not possible. This server's never used by anyone, remotely, onsite, anything." Greggy triple checked the logs, but this was a secure server for a reason. "Yep, noone's been on this box for two months. Our virus scanners are updated every week. There goes your virus theory."

Greggy and Evan stared at the screen for another minute in silence, wondering what else to do. Then:

Now that you've checked the logins for the past month, you will know that I am no virus.

Greggy and Evan began to worry. What the hell...? This made no sense. This was like water getting into an airtight locker in the middle of the ocean. And what's more, how could... whatever was going on... know what they were thinking?


That'll do for now, more later.