Vandaag is het Rabbit Hole Day. En ook poeziedag in België. Dit is wel geen echte poezie, maar toch kom, het is tijd voor een verhaaltje. Het is trouwens alweer een tijdje geleden.
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Flipping open the cover of his new laptop, the guy at IT moved in to the meeting room. Afraid of what he might find, he started his mainframe session and logged on. “Damn” he said aloud, this can’t be happening to me. While he was checking the logs, his telephone rang. It was the guy from the DC again.
“Hello!”, he answered quickly, suspecting that this would not be a friendly call.
“Yeah, it’s me again. Your job is taking all the resources man, I have to kill it right now or the whole damn machine is going down soon.”
“Noooo!”, the guy at IT yelled. “You do that and I’ll f*ck*** kill you!” Knowing that when the operator would do this, the whole operation would be in danger. He just hoped that it could end smoothly, before the machine went down. Little did he know, that somewhere on the other side of the globe somebody was making sure that things would not happen the way he had hoped for.
Far away in Tokyo, some IT nerd had plugged into the grid. Normally this kind of privilege was only meant for higher class IT officers or “window people” as the lower class used to call them. But Haruka had always been a rebel. She ignored the rules, she was tired of waiting to upload her code when traffic on the grid was low. She plugged in whenever she wanted to, where she wanted to, for as long as she wanted to. This time it was in the main lobby of a low class hotel in the middle of Tokyo. Most of the window people were doing their power-naps, so the grid-connection was reasonably fast during this time of the day. As soon as she was plugged in, she logged in to the mainframe of Straight Banana MegaCorp., the only software company left on the main land of Europe. Being on the other side of the globe, this meant passing though the Great Firewall of China, which controlled every connection to The West. Well, nearly every connection, there was one proxy they hadn’t found out about yet. It must have been the only working Atari ST left in the world, and it was hooked to the grid! A left over from a previous job she had done, somewhere in the heart of Hangzhou. Getting in to SB-MegaCorp‘s mainframe was a piece of cake, they were running a 1988 version of the OS she had helped writing. It was full of security leaks. “This is 2066 guys, you must be joking”, she whispered to herself. Spotting the batch-job in the huge job-queue took most of her time, as she didn’t know the name of the IT guy that had submitted it. It was the huge CPU-usage that gave it away. “This must be the one”, she thought, while she was looking at the stream of vulnerable company data being transferred onto her laptop.
The day was over, his batch-job wasn’t… He ordered another beer at Straight Banana‘s canteen, somehow sensing that he would need it. Before he could sip the first sip, he saw a line in the logs that hit him like a baseball bat in the hands of a very experienced baseball batter. Haruka had made a mistake, the worst mistake a hacker can make. Her intrusion into the SB-MegaCorp‘s mainframe had been detected. Immediately he started looking for other traces of her presence. By the time he knew what she was doing, it was too late. He was just about to shut down her Atari ST proxy as the batch-job he had submitted nine and a half hours ago ended with no errors. The next second Haruka was off-line, there was nothing he could do any longer. Never in his life had he felt more miserable than now. Not only had he just performed the most expensive batch-job in the history of SB-MegaCorp, an act that most certainly would require some serious explanation to his superiors, but also had some top-class Japanese hacker stolen all data of the new AI-Databank System they were about to launch next month.
He could already see the scenario unfold. The data would fall into the hands of Hangzhou’s ICT-maffia, Straight Banana would cease to exist within a month and he would be to blame. This would mean the end of all IT activities in Europe, and the start of a new time. A time everybody in Europe feared. It had happened before to North America, South America, Africa and Australia, now Europe was on the verge of it’s very own Dystopian Era.
(to be continued… maybe… who knows)
Voor diegenen die nu even hun wenkbrouwen fronsen, geen nood, ik ben niet gekker geworden dan anders. Het is Rabbit Hole Day…
