Take the Fourth (12 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Walton
O
n the contrary to Greg sticking to his words, Jorja was planning a night of her own. She knew how to get into that system on her own and she also knew the password now. She couldn’t wait to get off work. Somewhere in the back of her mind that cat was meowing louder and her curiosity was taking control. Just a few more hours, a few more budget reports, a few minutes in the car, actually with traffic more than a few, but she would be at home doing her own bit of investigating.
And just like that her day had ended, traffic was the usual heavy load on the beltway, no accidents or rubbing-necking which was good and she pulled in the driveway at almost the usual time when on the rare occasion she didn’t stay late. She opened her garage, walked into the mud room and tossed her keys onto the kitchen table on her way to the fridge. She studied her selection but her pickings were slim, today was normally her shopping day but that would have to wait. She grabbed a bottle of vitamin water, strawberry yogurt, and a slice of whole wheat bread which she also kept in the fridge, then made her way to her office. Here was a pretty elaborate setup that was state of the art with the fastest computing power Silicon Valley had to offer. She upgraded her system quite regularly and always had the state of the art, even sometimes before it was available to the general public… she had connections as well. She booted up her system and while she waited for the log on screen she pulled back the foil of her yogurt and spooned in a mouthful. Her computer was fast but she almost downed the entire thing before the login screen appeared. It was gone before her personal settings appeared on the screen. Jorja then went straight to email, did a quick glance and nothing was crucial, she fired off a quick email to Greg on some other minor project, did another quick glance and clicked on the VPN network that would take her to her final destination of the evening. To her it was almost a vacation destination to an exotic land. She didn’t know what quite to expect as the anticipation was killing her. Then she saw the all too familiar login prompt.
Jorja hesitated. Her mind starting playing angel devil but came to the rationalization that she should proceed. After all she was directly and indirectly in charge of security and she didn’t know what this machine was doing on her network and she knew someone went to an awful lot of trouble to hide it on the network. When the password prompt flickered on the screen there was no hesitation, no doubt and she was at the all too familiar dollar sign prompt. She did the same commands as Greg did, only in reverse. She went straight to the see the processes running on the system to make sure the President wasn’t on the system. He wasn’t but Jorja knew exactly where he was; it was an informal dinner at the White House with his congressman friend, the republican senator from his home state of Rhode Island. She noticed there were a few processes taking up a pretty good bandwidth of the processors but in no way was this going to hinder Jorja at all. She printed her own list of directories and pulled all six pages from her colored laser printer. She pulled out a highlighter and went to work on a few suspicious names. There were quite a few. She then went to the home directory and listed the folders. She saw folders for CICJW54 and COSSN17 and correctly assumed the other one belonged to Scott Norwood but didn’t know what the 17 stood for, she also saw root, and another home folder, CEOFS01, but couldn’t even take a gander for she was not logged in as that individual and knew she’d get a permission error had she made an attempt. She opened up the President’s folder and found not much to work with. She perused a few other content folders and directories making notes on her paper where appropriate but she really didn’t find much of interest. She was pretty disappointed in the first two or so hours that had gone by, that is until she reran the command to display the processes. She had totally forgotten about the processes that were eating at the cpu’s power. She saw the directory they were hitting and made her way there. Here was a world she did not recognize, not one iota. She saw things like menv, mumps, and just the letter o. She went to the o first and did a list of the directory. Hundreds of items scrolled before her. She summarized that these were computer routines of some sort since they all ended in dot o or object routines that really only machines can read. They were of no use to her. She went up a level and tried to open the mumps directory.
The screen flashed and she was at a new prompt that just had an M>. “Never seen this one,” she thought to herself. She punched in a few Unix commands and each returned the message Invalid Command. She tried help and nothing, stop and nothing, upper and lowercase and nothing, she tried control characters, function keys and nothing, every time Invalid Command. It was like she was stuck in the damn maze of the popular MUD game Zork.
Go West,
You are in the maze.
Go East
You cannot go that way.
Go south
You cannot go that way. Your lantern has gone out.
Go west. You cannot see and have fallen, you have died. You are in an open field west of a big White House with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Everything led back to the M prompt no matter what she tried. She started just banging letters on the keyboard in frustration and some combinations of letters, she didn’t know which ones, she found herself back at the $ prompt. She looked at the clock in the corner of her screen and cursed under her breath. It was 2:24 and she had a very busy day planned and it was going to start in less than three hours from now. She thought about staying awake but quickly nixed the idea for she was tired now and any bit of sleep would help. She would have to tackle the system another day. She called it a night.
At 5:15 her alarm clock sounded and she was pissed—pissed because she knew no amount of the wonder brew was going to get her through this day. She fought her way from beneath the covers and exposed her naked self to the elements of the house. She walked into the bathroom and started her hot hot shower. It was approaching 6:15 before she took her first sip of coffee and that was from her travel mug as she backed out of her driveway and prepared for the morning commute. In between long lights and the stops during the GW Parkway crawls, she checked her email on her blackberry as did most of D.C. but she was very careful not to type and drive unlike most of D.C. Once she was in the office it was business as usual with meetings out the ass and the feeling at the end of the day nothing was accomplished. On top of this all she was dead tired and unlike Jack Bauer, she needed something to eat and a good night’s sleep. She stopped at the store bought a nice piece of halibut, fresh fruits and veggies and made herself a nice healthy meal. It was almost nine o’clock before the system even entered her mind. She approached her computer sat down at the comfy chair and before logging in she felt her body cry for the pillow, this time she listened. She had shed her clothes, climbed under her dark paisley comforter and was out before sheep number seven jumped the fence.
. . .
T
he next day was pretty much the same as the last with the exception she had recharged her batteries with that good night’s sleep. It was Thursday and in the back of her mind, no in the front because that’s about all she could think of, was the system and how Saturday was quickly approaching. She wanted to find out more before Greg starting his poking but it didn’t look like tonight was going to happen either due to the President’s schedule.
Friday night was typically get out of work and get drunk night around the greater D.C area, especially in Georgetown but of course Ms. Carson never participated in such events. Sure she would drink but only to the tune of enjoyment. She was a big Amarone fan, the raisined grape of the Valpolicella. She fell in love with the wine on her first and last trip after high school to Venice. She always dreamed of going probably because she remembers her mother’s love for the watery streets and gondolas. Although she could afford to drink it every night she saved it for the weekend and the bottle would last the entire weekend. Upon entering her car after work, she was transported to another world. She turned on the local jazz station and visualized her evening. She was in much anticipation. She would kick off her shoes, grab a wine glass, and pour herself a glass from the bottle of Masi that she had already mentally chosen, and of course she knew the President would be busy until the following Monday. She hoped to have plenty of time to explore before Greg was to come over, possibly into the wee hours of the morning and into the afternoon if need be. She had already informed her staff to only call in dire need, if there was some sort of emergency she would be alerted no matter where she was located.
So as planned, Jorja entered the mud room just off the kitchen, threw her keys onto the table, kicked off her shoes, grabbed the osso and popped the cork on her favorite drink from the god Bacchus and poured a full glass of the red velvet liquid. Then she recorked the bottle and made her way into her office. She grabbed the glass by its stem, just like she always did as to not warm the wine from the temperature of the hands—the way she learned from the Italian waiter in the watery city by the Adriatic. She took her first sip as the monitor flickered. She ran the wine across her tongue, swished it between her gums and teeth and tasted the softness of plum on the finish. It will be even better once it breathes, she always says to herself, and it always was. She put the glass of wine down, logged in and tried to remember where she left off to what seemed like ages ago. Then she remembered the M prompt. She needed to do a bit of research but didn’t know where to begin, so she went to where just about everybody does their research these days, google.com. At the prompt she almost entered just M, but almost immediately she knew her mistake, then entered “m prompt” in quotes and a whole bunch of nothing appeared on the screen, nothing of any real use as she quickly processed the data. Then she tried M> in quotes and got thousands of hits, all from mathematical equations. She then pulled out her pages from the evening and glanced at the directories. She saw the word mumps and thought that was strange. She thought of the childhood disease and why it might pertain to this computer. Was this some sort of biological server and found herself thinking of pure evil along the lines of the Andromeda Strain. She decided to enter mumps in the Google search. As expected, it spat out sites such as WebMD, Wikipedia, doctors, and symptoms sites. She scrolled through a few pages and nothing. She went back to the first page and clicked on the Wikipedia site. She clicked open the one hundred percent relevant link and she read the information on mumps, a glandular problem yada, yada, yada. She went back and clicked a ninety-seven percent relevance link, same thing, then she clicked on the seventy-two percent link and read Massachusetts hospital, she was just about to click back when she read the words, “programming language”. Her interest piqued.
Here MUMPS, the acronym for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System or M Technology, as it is known today is a database language that was developed in the sixties and is still in wide use today by hospitals, financial institutions, including top tier, best in class banks, and the government. Jorja took a moment on that one—the government. Interesting. She had never heard of this language and she was a computer major and on top of that the government used it, her government. She knew Java and HTML and C and C++ and even Pascal. She heard of FORTRAN and COBOL, even Basic and Assembly, although she never studied them but MUMPS, she’d have to do a bit more research. She read the in-depth article on Wikipedia; she clicked on few links that took her to various companies that offered the language in a more robust form. Almost everybody claimed the language as super fast and cheaper to run than its competitors. It sounded too good to be true. She then found a link on SourceForge and downloaded an open source, basically free of charge, version of the language. She also downloaded the documentation including the installation guide. This free version seemed to have all the bells and whistles and later found out that major startup companies opted for this version as opposed to shelling out the big bucks for an Oracle license. In a little over three hours Jorja had a database using M up and running on one of her homemade Unix machines. Where the installation guide failed, and they almost always did, she was able to piece together the rest of the information from newsgroups and forums and even entered an online chat room for some tweaking advice. During her install, Jorja knew she was on the right track by comparing her directory structure to that of the machine ending in 12.168, they were pretty similar.
The time was now a little before twelve and Jorja had a new language to learn. As with most computer languages the concepts are basically the same only the syntax is different. From what Jorja had gathered so far, there were not that many commands in MUMPS and it seemed fairly easy and straight forward. She learned that commands can be shortened from the word to just the first letter, a real timesaver but makes for reading the code a tad more cryptic. She also learned that MUMPS is both a compiled language and an interpreted language, meaning programs can be written and saved to run at a later date or at the M prompt one could enter a series of commands and execute them immediately by hitting the return key. She also learned how data was stored in the database. It was a strange concept but she caught on rather quickly with the help of an online chat partner aptly named measles2. He helped by saying that everything is stored in arrays or variables and by putting the little hat or carrot character in front of the array or variable it will be saved to the database and becomes a global variable, meaning everyone can use it. Her very first commands that Jorja wrote were in the form of Hello World. Every programmer knows the Hello World example. It usually is the very first piece of code written when learning a new language. It’s usually quite simple and in this case it was no different. Jorja simply wrote
M>set ^X=“Hello World” write ^X
Hello World
She now had a variable called X in the database that was equal to the value of “Hello World” and could retrieve it anytime she wanted to or change it or delete it when she wanted. After a few more hours she was getting quite good at the syntax of the language but what was really difficult to her was seeing the things stored in this database without having to write down the information she created within it. She went back to measles2 and stated her problem. He understood and shipped a small program that would help in her situation. With this program Jorja was able to traverse the database with ease and see what was stored there. There were many nuances to this new language but Jorja had a firm grip on the overall gist of the idea. Over the course of watching the sunlight peek through the shades and feeling her stomach grumble Jorja felt like she was back in school again pulling an all-nighter, only she was deeply engrossed with enjoyment. Once her eyes started to lose focus, Jorja called it quits. She hadn’t even entered the President’s machine or taken another sip from her wine glass. She left her computer on but locked it out of habit then picked up her leftover Amarone and went into the kitchen. She pulled a used bottle of wine from the cabinet over the stove, removed the corked, grabbed a funnel and poured her remaining wine into the bottle. Any wine left over, which is pretty rare in this household, she saves to use as red wine vinegar. Adding different grapes and vintages makes for a highly complex and tasty vinegar to be used as salad dressings and whatnot. She placed the bottle back in the cabinet, went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of cranberry juice which she used to wash down a piece of multi-grain bread and a hand full of vitamins. From the kitchen it was to the master bedroom where she closed her blinds to remove most of the sunlight for it was closing in on eight a.m. She sought comfort between the sheets long before the notion of brushing her teeth ever entered her mind. She adjusted her alarm clock and tried to remember when Greg was coming over, she didn’t quite remember but assumed it was the typical picking up the date time, between seven and eight. She rustled a bit with her pillow, tossed and turned looking for the perfect spot and was soon asleep. She was up just before twelve and felt sort of refreshed after her shower. Then she made her way outdoors to do a few errands before Greg arrived.
. . .