A Slave's Game

[Manticore]

September, 819 AS
Eight hours later.

The alarm went off. As always the noise was deafening, especially for those still in deep slumber. A man’s arm pushed forth from the covers, trying to find the offending clock in a lazy attempt to turn it off. As usual, the clock was at the far side of the bedside table, just beyond reach, forcing more of an effort. Finally, the man reached the alarm clock and shut it off.

He fell back onto the bed, sighing with his eyes still closed. He was in his forties, with short black hair. He opened dark eyes, staring at the ceiling.

"Blinds," he said sleepily. The voice recognition computer activated the shutters at the opposite end of the room. The man smiled as he saw the impressive view emerge. In high orbit above Planet Pittsburgh, New York, his stateroom aboard Doe Industries Space Port had one of the finest views available. He shivered slightly and leaned up, just now noticing the rather chilly temperature.

"Climate dry, twenty degrees!" he ordered. Almost immediately a gust of warm air enveloped him, the vents around the room changing the temperature accordingly.

Suddenly, a musical chime echoed through the room, followed by a robotic voice. “Incoming internal communication. Accept?”

He sighed and said, “Yes.”

The robotic voice was replaced with a human one, a young female’s. “Good morning Mister Moray.”

It was his secretary, Erin Fargo. She knew his schedule often better than he did, so she was sure to know he’d just woken up. Which meant it had to be something important.

“Good morning Erin. What is it?”

She got straight to the point. “The top IT guy from the datacenter down on Pittsburgh commed me just half an hour ago. He said he needed to speak with you, there’s been an incident. He said it was urgent.”

He winced. If there was a problem with the datacenter, that was a serious concern indeed, considering the valuable records and other information that were stored down there. However, it clearly wasn’t a catastrophic problem; else the man would’ve gone directly to Moray’s bosses, Mr. and Mrs. Doe.

“Fine, put him on my schedule for thirty minutes from now. Best get him a shuttle up here as soon as possible.”

“Of course, Mr. Moray. Anything else?”

“Nope. I’ll be there soon.”

---

Thirty minutes later.

---

“And you’re saying this happened over fourteen hours ago? Why the hell am I just hearing about it?”

“I’m… sorry, Mr. Moray sir. We had our most junior DBA on duty at the time and he didn’t catch it right away. Not to mention that the damn AI didn’t see fit to alert him until hours later…” The head of IT for the Pittsburgh datacenter was a heavyset man with a nasally voice that Moray didn’t particularly care for.

Moray sighed, rubbing his eyes as he tilted his plush chair back. “Please… I’m not an idiot, so don’t treat me like one. I know that once the hacker was identified and targeted by the AIs, a system notification would have been generated that your DBA couldn’t have missed if he was paying any attention at all. That leads me to believe he was either asleep at his desk, playing a flight sim, or perhaps temporarily assigned to another duty despite my specific instructions to keep a DBA on duty at all hours.”

The man’s reaction to the last bit of his statement confirmed Moray’s suspicions.

“Ah, I see. You figured the data was perfectly fine with the AIs there to watch. Let me tell you – that hacker was assuredly a human, and they just proved that even the most effective AIs aren’t enough protection for such files. This company has a strongly vested interest in keeping that datacenter secure; in fact I believe it’s the first thing listed on your job description.”

He frowned, now decidedly angry at the hapless man sitting across the expansive desk. “Now, I don’t care what you have to do – I want that datacenter secured against any future attacks, and I want it done now. I will not allow hackers to make DSE’s most secure files their personal playground any longer, and if I need to make some personnel changes to ensure that, I will. Do I make myself sufficiently clear?”

The head of IT blanched, and silently nodded.

Moray sighed. “You have a lot of work to do. Get to it.”

The man nodded jerkily, stood up, and beat a hasty retreat out of the office.

Andrew Moray watched him go, and then pulled up the man’s official report regarding the incident on his personal terminal. He hadn’t had time to read it in its entirety, but he’d wanted to catch the man’s obvious lie about his DBA’s status before anything else.

He needed to figure out what this hacker had been after in the first place, and more importantly, which files they’d managed to grab.

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