OUTAGE COMES WITH A COST
...lastly, Dr. James Caster, 41, a native of Columbus, passed
away as a result of injuries sustained in a collision with a
municipal bus. The doctor was a Senior Research Consultant at
Vervicom Software, where he had spent the past decade. The doctor
was no stranger to unlikely circumstances, as it was a software
glitch which guaranteed him employment at the software giant.
Prior to employment there, he oversaw the department of
engineering at the State College for several years. He is
survived by his brother.
It wasn't Grant's best work. After days of interviews - some,
admittedly, more bizarre than others - he'd found his painstaking
notes and research reduced, as usual, to under 100 words. But it
had been printed and he had a new lead to follow up on.
For once, he was in the office early in the morning. Stephan had
been trying not to stare at him all day, and failing. Anders
acted like he was having a heart attack, and then berated people
for not calling an ambulance. It wasn't like Grant to be in
early, and the entirety of his co-workers seemed to make it their
mission to remind him. He didn't care, though, primarily because
he had a lead. A very, very interesting lead.
He'd spent several hours on the phone, doing some research. He'd
called Patrick back the instant he'd arrived at the office and
finished fending off people's jokes.
Patrick hadn't wanted to talk - the number Grant had from his
caller ID had been the programmer's cell number, and he'd had the
cell at work. All he'd been willing to say was ``Look into Henry
David. I'll call you back.''
Henry David. The first thing to spring into the reporter's mind
was Thoreau, but he couldn't possibly see what a 19th century
author had to do with his story. Nevertheless, he kept looking.
It was in an article on Henry David Thoreau that he found what he
was seeking, in a very roundabout way. The writer had been one of
the first environmentalists, thus - as the article pointed out -
lending a poignant irony to the supertanker disaster of years
before....
Grant felt the near irresistible urge to smack himself in the
forehead. He'd just been talking about this with Rose the night
before, he'd covered the story for the Gazette. The supertanker
Henry David had, six years prior, run aground and spilled an
enormous amount of oil. While it hadn't been on the scale of
disasters such as the Exxon Valdez, it had still been notable.
Rosetta remembered it, after all, and he was sure that her life
wasn't the only one that it'd had an impact on. Hell, it'd
started his career.
Why was Patrick telling him to look into it? He pulled up his own
story on the incident:
At 11:35pm, the Henry David supertanker ran aground in southwest
Washington, spilling an estimated million gallons of crude oil
onto the shore. While the numbers don't seem as shocking as other
oil spills, locals have seen scenery, tourism, and their very way
of life threatened by the now-deadly waters....
....Captain Dennis Tesser insisted on the competence of himself
and his crew. ``Our only mistake was believing what the
instruments told us. Corporate bought a new GPS system for all
our ships, and when it said we were on course we had no reason to
doubt it.''
Grant frowned. GPS? He glanced through the rest of his story, but
at the time he'd written it the more likely suspect had been
Captain Tesser himself. Everyone at the time, himself included,
seemed to think that blaming the instruments was nothing more
than a convenient excuse. The GPS never came up again in his
writing.
He hated to admit it, but he was going to have to rely on better
reporters than himself. He turned back to the Internet and looked
for news stories following up. It was difficult going - the
company that owned the tanker was tied up in litigation with the
town they'd ruined, and those stories were drowning out any
retrospectives he might hope to find on the incident.
By early afternoon, he was about to give up. He'd glanced over
page after page of search results in legalese. Court filings,
stories about Supreme Court rulings, appeals court denials,
punitive damages being changed, etc. Finally, in a fit of
desperation, he clicked on one of the stories about the legal
process.
The town of Waldport initially seemed to have a sympathetic case:
Here was a city of only a few thousand people, most of which
relied on fishing and tourist trade for their livelihoods. The
oil spill - to this day not entirely cleaned up - ruined much of
that. Yet the goodwill toward them took a heavy blow when the
town revealed an enormous list of people it intended to sue.
Haskell Oil topped the list as would be expected, but such
mutually exclusive choices as Captain Tesser and Vervicom
Software, makers of the GPS that he blamed for the accident, did
little to help their credibility....
The world headquarters of Vervicom Software was the one in this
city. Grant had no idea that it had been around that long and had
that far a reach. He frowned - as a journalist, it was his job to
know such things. He checked the date on the article to see that
it had been written two years ago. Six years after the incident,
two years after lawsuits had been filed, and whatever glitches
the company had incorporated into their GPS software remained.
Grant himself could attest to that. Still, there hadn't been any
oil spills or incidents he could find that resulted from the
problems since then, so it was entirely possible the company had
hushed it up and moved on with business.
Un-hushing things like this was what Grant had become a
journalist to do. He smiled to himself. Anders had given him that
story as a way to punish him, and it was rapidly turning into
quite the expose. He glanced at the clock and frowned at the
phone; Patrick hadn't called him back yet. If Wynn was going to
put together a story on Vervicom's oversights, it was going to
have to be done with more information than just that, however. A
power outage and flaky GPS did not a conspiracy make, and Pat had
implied that there was a lot more going on.
Grant was at a crossroads, and he found himself uneasily
considering his options. He could sit back, continue researching
other incidents that involved the software giant, and hope that
he got a call from Patrick or struck gold some other way, or he
could call the reluctant informant himself and see if he couldn't
squeeze him for information.
The phone rang. Grant looked at it, frowning. There'd been quite
a bit of odd serendipity in his life of late. If Pat was calling
right as the reporter was considering calling him, it'd be that
much stranger. He picked up the phone.
``Hello?'' he asked.
``I was thinking a movie tonight.'' the voice said cheerily. It
wasn't Pat.
``Movie?'' he said blankly.
``I promise you, I will not force you to go to a chick flick with
me.'' Rosetta! Her voice sounded tinny and he mentally cursed the
poor audio quality of his desk phone. ``Just don't pick some
explosion movie or something.''
``When have I ever taken you to an action movie?'' he replied.
``Tonight, maybe. Though I'd prefer something a little more
cerebral.''
``How's 6pm sound? Can I pick you up after work tonight?'' he had
rapidly gotten back into the back-and-forth a conversation with
Rosetta required just to keep up.
``Yes, you can. And you will!'' she said, and hung up. She hadn't
even said what movie she'd like to see. He made a mental note to
check out the listings before leaving for the day.
A moment later, a petite college student with extremely dark hair
and annoyed look on her face appeared in front of his desk. ``I
hope she wrote down the number, because next time someone calls
asking for you, I'm just going to tell them I'm not information
and hang up.'' she said bluntly.
``Okay.'' Grant said in the spirit of cooperation. His business
card listed simply the Gazette's number, there had never been a
problem routing calls through the secretary before. This must be
the new one.
``You got a call while you were on the other line.'' she put a
sticky note with mashed handwriting on his desk.
``Thanks, um....''
``Morgan.'' she replied, walking off.
Had the temp agency gotten rid of their current secretary and
replaced him with someone who had an identical name but different
gender? Yes, apparently they had. Grant had to admit, that was a
new trick. They'd kept things surprising. He glanced down at the
message.
Patrick! At least he hadn't called while Grant was thinking of
calling him. He dialed the phone.
``Sorry about earlier today.'' was the answer immediately upon
picking up.
``No problem'' Grant replied noncommittally. He wasn't sure he'd
gotten the correct number, but there had been one memorable
occasion where he'd been the recipient of some very important
information by dialing the wrong number.
``It's safe to talk now.'' Pat said. ``I'm glad you called back,
Grant. Sorry I was so cryptic earlier.''
``I took the hint, eventually. Your company made GPS software for
the Henry David.''
``A bunch of other things, too. The power outage was our fault,
indirectly.''
Grant nodded, even though he knew Pat couldn't see him. He tended
to gesture while talking too - other people witnessing him do
this often thought he was talking to them. Thankfully, not many
people were left. He'd been the subject of enough ridicule for
the day. ``I think I heard something along those lines - it was a
known problem, right? There were negotiations to get it fixed
that broke down?''
``The negotiations were on track, I think.'' Pat said. ``
Management stuff, mostly, but I help with e-mail support and I
can tell you that maybe a month before that outage happened,
messages just started vanishing left and right.''
``So you've got in-house e-mail, too?''
``That's the thing, it's commercial off-the-shelf stuff.''
Patrick was starting to get excited - Grant could tell this story
was, in fact, going somewhere, despite his initial impressions. ``
Something was interfering with it.''
``Interfering?'' that did sound interesting. ``So someone's
compromised Vervicom's system?''
``That's what I thought, too. As far as I can tell, though, they
haven't. I shut down the network one night for a good hour,
looked at some of our code that's misbehaving right now, and it's
still broken in the same way.''
``Wait, so this... thing that's happening, it's still going on?''
Grant was writing things down as fast as they were spoken.
Pat hesitated. ``I... I mean, I know I'm doing the right thing
here, making sure people know about this, but I don't want to go
into too much detail on what we're going right now, you know? I
looked it up. Whistleblower laws protect me from telling about
the old stuff, but I'm under NDA for this new stuff. I can't
afford a lawyer to split the difference. I'm kinda hoping I won't
need one at all.''
``This can be kept as confidential as you want. I can go anywhere
from using your full name - which I'm assuming is completely out
of the question - to simply referring to an anonymous source
within the company.'' He'd given people anonymity many times in
his short career, though it hadn't often been really necessary.
He heard Patrick breath a sigh of relief. ``Good. I can get away
with getting an occasional call at work from you because you
wrote about Caster, but if you call too much they'll probably
pick up on what's going on.''
``You were telling me about the power outage.'' Grant reminded
gently. There was always a fine line when it came to informants -
push too much and they got scared away, push too little and they
vanished.
``Right, sorry.'' Pat seemed more at ease with this topic anyway.
``The point is, since the power outage happened, we haven't lost
anything. Every mail's gone through just fine, the team in charge
of patching up the power plant is going strong now, management
approval and funding's well, the whole deal is coming up roses.''
Grant tried to follow the programmer's logic. ``So everything
went south long enough for the power to go out, and no more?''
``Exactly.''
``But you were just saying that your systems haven't been hacked.''
Patrick paused. ``I don't think they have, at least not in the
way you'd normally think. There's not a person actually logged
into our system, controlling what's going on. I'd know if that
were the case, I've got isolated sniffers on all our routers. No,
I think we're dealing with a virus here.''
Grant had no clue what this technical jargon meant, but wrote it
down anyway. He tried to bring his computer knowledge to bear. ``
But a virus, that's essentially a hacker's tool, right? It's used
to gain control of the system.''
``Normally, yes, but like I said, I can keep a watch on traffic
coming and going. I haven't seen anything that looks like someone
attempting remote control. I have seen bits of code go out,
identical. This same code was in our mail system a few weeks ago.''
``The virus.'' Grant identified.
``Bingo.'' Patrick said. ``I've gone through some of the
archives, but it's damn hard to find the thing. It tends to clean
up after itself when it's done whatever it's doing. I can't find
a trace of it in the mail system now, but I know it's lurking out
there somewhere. Like I said, I'll see bits on the stuff I'm
working on now.''
``So...'' Grant was trying to put all of this together. ``You
think it's been around a lot longer than the last month or so.''
``Bingo. We've got teams of people repairing the Mason power
software, but do you know why? Because years ago there was a huge
accident caused by our code.''
Grant felt a chill go down his spine. ``About eight years ago?
People sick from radiation poisoning?''
``Of course you remember, you probably covered it.'' Pat kept
talking, unaware of the effect he was having. ``It was a big deal
then but you don't hear much about it now. That was a bug in our
software, and the plant had been contracting out to us for years
to repair it.''
Grant looked over his notes. ``The power plant accident back
then, the outage now, the tanker... you think they had the same
cause''
``Exactly. I can't prove it - that virus is slippery and vanishes
when you try to lock it down. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's
the root of all the strange things that have gone on in this
company.''
``This is quite a bit of information you've given me here.''
Grant replied after looking over everything. ``I'm going to need
to do some research of my own, of course, but this is definitely
something I can work with.''
``Okay. You can call me at this number after work hours.'' Pat
still seemed somewhat furtive, no doubt still worried over
getting sued and/or fired. ``I'll let you know if I find anything
on my end.''
With that, Patrick hung up. Grant glanced around the newsroom to
find most everyone gone, then looked at the clock. He'd have to
rush to get the listings and make it over to Rose. He glanced
down at the notes he'd taken. If Patrick was for real, it would
be a hell of a story. He was certainly in luck lately! He could
only hope that it would hold.
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