Insider X (6 page)

“Sky Maiden”, Birdie Caldwell,
gave her thoughts on a competitor’s product:

This game is so bad, I’m not going to waste my sweet honey breath telling you how terrible it is.  Just take my word for it.  Save your money.  This game belongs in the loo-loo with the rest of you know what.

So did
Morris Brown,
whose gamer’s handle was
“EbonYWarrior”:

The graphics were pretty weak, but the thing that really got me about this game was that it fritzed out on me halfway through.  I’d just gotten to the next level, and then my screen blinked and the game reset.  Don’t waste your money.  They need to get their SH%T together and fix this glitch before hawking it on the public.  There… I’ve dropped my KNOWLEDGE.  Use it or lose it.

Na’s hands hurt from typing so much today.  And her bottom?  Don’t even get her started on that travesty.  Sitting on a metal foldup chair for 12 hours?!  If there was a hell, this was it.  She used to have a cute rounded bottom.  Now?  Now it was like a pancake.  Cow bottom.  Moo!

She needed a hug.  (((H)))

There.  All better.

Na glanced over at Jing-Wei to see what she was writing.  She caught the fake name Jing-Wei was using.  It was
Lucy “sweater-lover”.
  Jing-Wei, Na had noticed, had a tendency to use nicknames directly related to whatever she was writing about.

I realy like this sweater.  It warms me up and makes me hapy.  I like this sweater mor than one I bought at GAP.

Na leaned over.  “Use the spell check app I gave you,” she whispered.

“Oh… thank you, Na.  I forget.  I mean, forgot.”

“Don’t worry, you’re doing great, Jing-Wei,” Na whispered.

 As simple as the post Jing-Wei was writing, it was actually a HUGE improvement over the posts Jing-Wei used to write.  Na tried giving her tips when she could.  For certain products, Na told her, it didn’t make sense to use related nicknames. 
Toilet cleaner lover, tampon lover,
and
hemorrhoids lover
were probably not good nicknames.  Jing-Wei was catching on, slowly but surely.  The English spell check app Na discretely downloaded for Jing-Wei definitely helped.  Otherwise Jing-Wei’s spelling was atrocious.

Na had also offered the English spell check app to Chun, but Chun had just hissed, 
Keep that away from me.  And don’t let him see you doing that.

Chun, the robot cop.  ([(  She was a stickler for rules.  Not that bossman had written that rule on the wall.  He didn’t say no English apps allowed.  Or no memory sticks.  But Na didn’t kid herself.  She didn’t advertise what she was doing.  She knew bossman wouldn’t approve.  And if he caught her, if he found the memory stick she kept hidden under her clothes, then Na would be in a bad place.

A very bad place.  She didn’t like to think about that.  No.  One time was enough.  She could still feel his icky hands feeling her up, when she closed her eyes sometimes.  Hush!  Go back in your box you ugly monster.

Bossman.  (x_x) 

Ugly ugly brute!

Okay.  Breathe.  You’re a big girl.  It’s not like it was the first time such a thing happened.  She was over it.

Anyway…

That English app.  It could help everyone here.  Not that bossman gave a stinky sticky pen about improving anything here.  Na had peeked at some of the others’ posts, accessing places she shouldn’t be on the network.  She’d seen their silly nicknames they used over and over:
Kitty lover, cat lover, cat owner, cat fan and owner…

Hello!  Really people?  What did they all think?  Everyone in America owned cats?

Crazy.  Everyone knew that Americans owned more dogs than cats.  But…

Where was she?  Cats?  Dogs?  What was she talking about?

Quiet.  Too much talking!

English app.  Right.

Everyone had a quota.  250 reviews or blog posts per day, and it went up from there.  None of them were fluent in English.  At best they were like children.  Short, basic sentences.  Terrible spelling.  Too many giveaways that English was their second language.  Or third.  Or third and a quarter—that would explain it.  They knew only a quarter.  And she wasn’t talking dimes, wooden nickels or lucky pennies.

Whatever the case, Na was operating on an entirely different level from any of them.  She was now having to do 600 reviews or blog posts per day, which was almost one per minute.  She knew what bossman was doing upping her quota each week.  He was just hoping she’d come up short one day, and would have to see him in the back room.  But that wasn’t going to happen.  Never.  Ever!  She had Facebook to save her.  And she was on the home stretch… almost out of here.

Na glanced at Chun and Jing-Wei again.  Both were absorbed trying to meet their quotas.  Jing-Wei’s was 267.  Chun’s was 302.  Details that Na was not supposed to know.  Just like she wasn’t supposed to know how to do what she did all the time.  She pulled up three viewports on her computer.  If Chun or Jing-Wei glanced her way, they’d just see a jumble of work in progress.  One was a screen shot of a review Na already did.  Another was a webpage of a blog site.  And between the two, minimized so that it was impossible to see what type of site it was, was a third viewport.

It was a viewport of something entirely outside the rules.  Coloring outside the lines.  No more crayons for you, little girlie.  You are making a mess.

Yes, she was.  :P

Na used her peripheral vision to confirm bossman was still over by the fan.  She definitely didn’t want him seeing any of this.  Not that he would know what it was, but he’d know it was probably something Na shouldn’t be doing. 
Duh.  Like that took a rock scientist to know.

It wasn’t a webpage to do a review or a blog post.  It was a viewport of the back office system that ran the network.  Na did some trolling of her own.  She clicked various folders, opened sub-folders.  Pulled up files.  Went looking for files with certain extensions.  She opened up several hidden folders and found files that could be it.

She’d been doing this for weeks.  Trying to find what was enabling the system to bypass the Great Firewall.  She’d already done searches on other days that had pinpointed where she needed to be looking.  She was getting close, she was pretty certain.  Any of these files could be doing it.  She already had her memory stick plugged in her desktop, which was under the table.

She dragged and dropped some files on her screen, copying them to her stick.  Once that was done, she went to
preferences, history,
and a few other spots to do some cleaning to remove any trace of what she’d just done, and then closed out.

Now, for that other bit of business.  She pulled up IDF’s webpage.  It wasn’t their main page that spoke about their company.  It was an administrator portal, not related to the public website at all.  She typed in a name and password.  It was a default, zero-day vulnerability, which had no patch, because no one knew about it.  And bingo!  She was in.

Okay.  Time to find stuff.

She had gotten so much faster, and knew exactly where to navigate, what files to click on.  It didn’t hurt that the dummies at IDF labeled files with intuitive titles.

Skunk works_EMex

New_proto_demo1_EMex

EMex_specifications_all

She’d already learned from her anonymous client that “EMex” was a valuable commodity.  Her anonymous client, who went by the hacker handle,
Shawshank,
was paying top dollar (well…
euros
) for anything and everything that said “EMex”.  She copied a few dozen new files with that name.  It was enough to fill up her stick.  That was 16 gigs of new stuff that she now had to sell.  She logged off, closed out, and disconnected her USB connection.  Very discretely, pretending she was itching her leg, she reached down under the table and pulled out her memory stick.  She slipped it under her clothes, and put it in its normal spot, inside the hem of her underwear.

Okay.  Pretend to work.

Na moved her mouse, and typed a few words of gibberish on her keyboard.  She looked at her computer clock, and saw she had five minutes till the bell.  Thank goodness.  She didn’t feel like working anymore.  She’d completed her quota, and she was pooped.

“Na!”

The voice startled her.  Na looked over at bossman.  He wasn’t by himself anymore.  Three men were standing next to him.  A chill went through her.  When had they come in; from what door?  She hadn’t even seen them enter.  She realized she’d gotten so absorbed with what she was doing that she hadn’t even noticed them enter.

That was scary.

But not as scary as what she was seeing now.  All three men were dressed the same.  They had on suits. 
Oh no.

Bossman waved his hand.  “Come here, Na!  These men talk with you now.”

Na swallowed the lump in her throat.  She rose from her chair.  She tried not to shake.  She hoped her legs hadn’t fallen asleep from sitting so long.  She wasn’t a tiger, but a song bird now.  The men in suits watched her with serious expressions as she walked towards them.

Run, Na, run.  But there was nowhere to run.

7

IDF

“THIS IS JUST from the last six months,” said Hu.

On the wall screen were a series of graphs.  Hu clicked to the next slide.

“Where we will be in the next six months,” Hu said, flashing another smile of blinding white teeth.  That was a $30,000 mouth, if Marks had ever seen one.  Probably spent half his bonus on it.  Well… a fifth anyway, knowing the guy’s compensation structure.  The guy was SVP of Public Relations, Human Resources, and Consumer Insights.  Real mouthful of a title that was actually a clever cover for his real gig.  Marks and Lip knew the deal.  Hu was a card carrying member of the PLA.  One of their typical plants they inserted in companies that were dumb enough to locate here.

Johnny Two-cakes’s write-up on the guy had been over two pages.  Hu had quite a resume.  Lots of job hopping in service of his country.  Hu had worked for an interesting cross section of companies.  Six month stints and less in most cases.  His tenure, eight months at IDF, was one of his longer running assignments.  Seemed his specialty was companies in transition; companies that had just recently located offices to Chengdu.  Hu had adopted the cover as being a fixer.

Problems with the city?  Or certain officials?  Hu was your man.  The last kernel of info on the guy was a footnote.  But Johnny Two-cakes thought it worth mentioning.  In one of Hu’s previous jobs he’d been fired for misuse of company computers.  It took some digging on Johnny Two-cakes’s part to find the full story.  Johnny Two-cakes, if anything, was diligent and thorough with his briefs.

Apparently that company, which had located a branch office to Chengdu, had a large media room.  One entire wall was LCD TV screens.  Those could sync up with the corporate office in the United States.  It was a high-tech setup, and was used for video conferencing.  Seemed Hu liked to use the room at night, when the other employees were gone.  But he didn’t use it to web chat with the States.  He would stream in porn and show it on all the screens.  One night he forgot to disconnect the video conferencing feature.  It was 2 AM in Chengdu.  But in Milwaukee it was 1 PM and a meeting was in session.  Bunch of folks in Milwaukee ended up getting an eyeful.  Not a pleasant image for any of them.

Lip had his own commentary. 
“Drum roll please.  Call him… The Fixer.”

Marks had to give Lip credit.  His partner was all business (not a wisecrack from him, yet).  They were listening to Hu’s spiel.  Right now Hu was having fun of a different sort.  Acronyms.  Man was spouting them off like a machine gun.

Speaking of those rounds...

Somewhere down some evolutionary chain Marks was convinced some former grunt had gone the corporate route and brought his alphabet soup with him.  Which begged the question.  Which came first?  The chicken or the egg?  Military with BDUs, PT, SDIs…?  Or corporations with
EBITDA, EBITDAR, ROI, SKUs…?

It was at that moment the door to the conference room opened.

“Ah… I am so sorry, gentlemen,” the man in front said, walking in with a grin and a swagger.  “Langdon Sweetwater.”

“Shawn Carter,” Lip said, half rising out of his chair to accept the offered hand.

Marks stood and waited his turn.  “McKinley Morganfield.”

“Excellent, excellent,” Sweetwater said, having to look up to take in Marks, as Marks swallowed his entire hand.  And ‘swallowed’ was the correct term.  Langdon’s hands were tiny.

“We’ve been looking forward to this.  Hope Hu didn’t steal any of my thunder.”  Sweetwater gave a disingenuous chuckle.

The man next to him introduced himself, as well.

“Scott Meade, CFO.”

More handshakes.  That done, they took their seats.  Sweetwater, looking country club relaxed in a sports coat and polo, sat at the front of the table.  Hu handed him the PowerPoint clicker.  Meade, to Sweetwater’s left, sat rigid in his chair.

Marks knew the details on these two, also courtesy of Johnny Two-cakes.  Both had gotten law degrees and MBAs at the top shops.  Sweetwater: Harvard.  Meade: Yale.  These two “suits” (the suit thing was optional nowadays) were what were called Alphas in the corporate world.

The paradox of that equation never ceased to amaze Marks.  In his world these two would be dog food.  But they weren’t in Marks’s world now.  Here, paper beat rock.  And Marks knew plenty about paper.  The paper men were always those that made the “difficult” decisions.

More background: Sweetwater had been installed as CEO by the conglomerate that purchased IDF less than a year ago.  First order of business on Sweetwater’s part, after hiring Meade as his CFO—that first difficult decision—was to relocate operations from the States to here.  Marks and Lip were looking at two short timers.  Fat seven-figure payouts awaited these two.  As for the 22,237 employees that used to work for IDF?  They were back in the States in a payout line of a different sort.  That line was called unemployment.

Sweetwater was giving Lip his full undivided attention.  That body language thing they taught you at business school, what two-hundred-thousand Harvard dollars bought you.  “Now Shawn, how is it we’ve never met?”

Lip smiled.  “I was about to ask you the same question.”  Lip—give the man two points—was matching Sweetwater body language for body language.  And to think that Lip’s real alma mater (state school, which just so happened to be the same as Marks’s) cost a fraction of Harvard Man’s.  “Crimson ’91,” Lip said.  “What year was it for you again?”

“Eighty-seven.”  Sweetwater’s blue eyes narrowed.  “PP&G?”

“Ninety-nine till two-thousand three,” Lip said, not missing a beat.  The man could lie with the best of them.

Sweetwater clapped his hands.  “Ah… we kept missing each other.  Still, hard to believe we never crossed paths.  What did you think of Snowden?”

Snowden, PP&G man (not the other Snowden—who was feeding false intel to the Ruskies now).  Marks recalled the details on PP&G Snowden during their briefing.  Marks hoped Lip remembered a little of the man’s bio.

Lip looked at Marks.  “He knows Snowden,” Lip said.

Not good.  Lip didn’t remember.  Not that Marks was surprised.  They’d only been given seven hundred and twenty-two pages of background material to remember.  And if history was any guide, Lip tended to let Marks carry most of that water.

“Don’t tell me you’re a PP&G man, as well?” Sweetwater said.

“I met him at a conference,” Marks said.  “He was one of the guest speakers.”

“Snowden was presenting?  Really? Where?” Sweetwater frowned.

Marks needed to nip this quickly.  Name game was not what they needed to be doing right now.  Johnny Two-cakes and Lawrence had them covered, but not for this.

“Junket thing.  Palm Springs,” Marks said, dryly.  “
Investing into Tomorrow
.  Or something along those lines.  He gave a good speech.  5 handicap.  Likes single-malt.”

Sweetwater laughed.  “Ha!  That’s Snowden.  Looks like someone shared some toddies.”  Sweetwater shifted his position in his chair and gave Marks his full undivided attention now.  What a frickin’ card, Marks thought. 

“McKinley,” Sweetwater said.  “I like the name.  Family name?”

“Good guess.  Mother’s side,” Marks said.  He glanced at the wall screen.  Time to redirect this; get this train back on track.  “Impressive results.”

Lip finally got off his ass.  “Yes,” Lip said.  “Hu was just showing us the good stuff.”

Sweetwater smiled, and glanced at Hu.  “I knew it.  You did steal my thunder.  Yes, we’ve been busy here.”  He looked back at Marks and Lip and his eyes narrowed.  Marks was reminded of a snake.  “That’s because you guys have been leaving us alone,” Sweetwater said.

“Well, you keep posting double digit returns, and we’ll leave you alone all you want, Langdon.  But you have to tell us your secret,” Lip said.  “This growth is outstanding, particularly considering how the market has been of late.  What do you attribute this to?  Is this all from IDF’s game portfolio?”

“That and the hardware suite we just recently rolled out,” Sweetwater said.  “Not to mention the move here.  But, of course, that’s a given.  Moving to Chengdu has helped trim our costs tremendously.”

Meade shifted forward in his chair.  “We’re aligned lockstep with production now,” Meade said, acerbically.  “It used to be with any R&D decisions we had the time differential to slow things down.  But not anymore.  Now decisions are made and executed, all in the same breath.”

“Everything is better here,” Sweetwater said.  “Labor costs.  Talent pool.  Take this cutting-edge facility.  It would have cost five times what it cost to build, if we built it in the States.  But with the incentives we were given by the city to locate here, we practically built this baby for free.  Hell, we did build this baby for free.”

Hu smiled thinly.  Meade coughed.

Sweetwater laughed.  “Count on my money man to keep me in line.  Well, maybe not free, but damn near close.  Alright… enough of that.  What has Hu showed you so far?”

“You mean aside from his porn collection?” Lip said.

Sweetwater guffawed.  Hu’s face turned crimson.  Marks refrained from shaking his head.

“Which I have to add, was the best damn PowerPoint presentation I’ve ever seen,” Lip said.

“I’M LIKING THIS area,” Lip said.

They had entered another section of R&D.  Two and a half hours into the tour and Lip was showing zero signs of fatigue.  The man was an animal.  As for Marks, he was done.  Had been from the jump.  Tech speak and folks geeking out over widgets put him to sleep from minute one.

Still, Marks did his best to remain focused.  He took it all in.  Around them were people in white lab coats working diligently.  Whole place looked like a mechanic’s shop, except the floors were shiny poured epoxy—completely spotless—and the work station areas were organized to a fastidious degree that was almost as freaky as how Johnny Two-cakes organized his sock drawers back home.  Every item had its own special tiny color-coded bin with a printed label.

Lip went over to one of the work stations to observe what one of the engineers was manipulating on a screen.

“That’s hooked up to that 3-D printer?” Lip said.

The man nodded; apparently he understood English.  Marks and Lip watched as a small part was made; the extrusion process making it one tiny layer at a time.  Exciting stuff.  Like watching a dog poop.  Hu was talking with Sweetwater and Meade and didn’t seem to notice when Marks and Lip moved to a different area.

“Blink,” Marks said, under his breath.

Lip nodded, hearing the cue.  They picked up their pace.  Marks took the lead.  He had the layout in his head.  They walked past workstations and through a bottleneck area that led to a more open area.

Their advance reconnaissance, which they’d done a few weeks ago, was being put to use.  Johnny Two-cakes had gone over the digital plans with them.  Like most ops, the digital plans had been obtained using one of the usual methods.  In this case it was by hacking into the architecture firm that designed the building.

Johnny Two-cakes had told them the areas they should check out, if they were given the opportunity.  Well, they had that opportunity.  Brief as it was probably going to be.

“It’s not in this section,” Marks said, as they moved to one of the other areas.  They went to a bank of workstations near the perimeter.  The area looked deserted, except for an engineer that was working by himself at a table.

“I spy Gretzky,” Marks said.

It was off to the side on another table, behind the engineer.  It was the size of a hockey puck.  In fact, that’s what Marks would have thought it was, if he didn’t know better.  Two of them were on the table.  And a whole stack of them were on a lower shelf.

Marks and Lip stepped that way.  The engineer looked up from the table with a quizzical expression.

“I’ll gab, you bag,” Lip whispered.

“Got it.”

Lip walked up to the man and did it like a native; got right on him.  He
asked him a question;
Marks took the opportunity to reach out and palm one of the pucks off the lower shelf.  A subtle maneuver and the puck was tucked inside his jacket.

That easy.  The engineer was still checking out the pores on Lip’s nose.  Lip said some words in Mandarin and pointed towards a monitor screen.  The engineer suddenly nodded enthusiastically.  He walked over to the screen.  On it was a menu with about a dozen thumbnails of game offerings.

The engineer picked up a nearby game controller and proceeded to show them how the “puck” worked.  He made a few selections with the game controller by pointing it at the puck.  The game
Zombie Kill One
came on the screen.  It started to run through its opening sequence.  Marks had seen this game before.  It was one of IDF’s more popular games and the graphics were full of guts and gore.

Lip asked the man another question, but the conversation was done.  Marks saw that their “tour guides” had caught up to them.

“Ah, gentlemen, we lost you,” Hu said, stepping in, slightly out of breath.  “I’m so sorry, this isn’t ready for eyes, yet.  It is still under development.” Hu said some words quickly to the engineer and the man bowed his head, and turned off the device.  The screen went dark.