Take the Fourth (15 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Walton
“What?”
“That’s how many distinct tax ID’s are in this database at the moment.”
“That’s about half of the all the numbers.”
“How do you know that?”
“More useless facts in that brain of mine, there are roughly two hundred eleven million active numbers in the social security database. Looking back that range makes sense now. Seven seventy two was the last area, the first three positions, that the social security admin issued. Nothing beyond that.”
“Makes sense, no zero zero zero area either, so this is a demographics file of some sort.”
“Looks that way, I don’t recognize any of the other numbers in my portfolio, they are not bank account numbers, or credit card numbers and looking at this, the first numbers are all different and sequential to a point, my tax ID second, the third and fourth numbers seem to change but there are a lot of duplicates.”
“That first number, you’re right, sequential, let’s start at the beginning”
6070685194
, 462752203,—77.05853462219238, 38.909001254076514
6070685495
, 462752203,—77.05853462219238, 38.909001254076514
6070685799
, 462752203,—77.05853462219238, 38.909001254076514
6070686098
, 462752203,—77.05853462219238, 38.909001254076514
6070686399
, 462752203,—77.05853462219238, 38.909001254076514
6070700089
, 462752203,—77.05853462219238, 38.909001254076514
“So this first number, it’s always ten digits right?”
“Right.”
“Is that some sort of a timestamp or something?”
“Sure, it could be, wait… wait… look… . the last five digits get close to eighty seven thousand but not quite… in fact it never exceeds eighty six thousand four hundred, they get close, but none over that mark… . Fuck me!”
“What?”
“Eighty-six thousand four hundred.”
“Yeah?”
“The amount of seconds in a day.”
“Talk about your useless knowledge… so what does that mean?”
“You were right, it is a timestamp, the last five digits are the time… one being one second after midnight, thirty-six hundred is one a. m., and eighty-six thousand four hundred is midnight… . the first five numbers are the date.”
“Date?”
“Yeah, date, in mumps, it’s a Julian date, days since a specific date.”
“If these are Julian dates, shouldn’t those numbers be bigger if using the unix epoch… are they truncated?”
“Yeah Unix stores its dates as seconds elapsed since January first nineteen seventy, but no, mumps has some weird date as its starting point, something around the mid eighteen hundreds… let me check on Wikipedia for an exact date.” Meanwhile Jorja just looked at the numbers on the screen, “O.K. here it is, January first eighteen forty-one.”
“Strange starting date.”
“Yeah, told you, it has something to do with a hospital and the age of a patient, the originator of the language just picked an arbitrary date that he deemed safe as to the oldest person alive at the time and their birth date.”
“I get it, so everyone’s birth date would be valid in a database, do me a favor, what is the last entry associated with my social?”
“Just a sec… . here it is… . six one five seven zero eight six four one nine two”
“Can you do a date conversion for me?”
“I think there is an algorithm that can help us in this program… by the way, who did you say you got this from?”
“I didn’t, just a friend.”
“Uhuh, well looks like there is a function in here, I hope it calculates leap year correctly… . O.K. here it is… . hmmm… today’s date.”
“Technically it’s yesterday’s date, it’s after twelve… but, but what the hell is this other information and why is there an entry in this thing using my social for just before midnight?”
“Good question but look at this, not only is there an entry in this thing for your social security just before midnight but it looks as though there is an entry in here on your social security every five minutes… . hold on… wait… . yeah look at this… six one five seven one one two three three… . that’s about three minutes ago.”
“What the hell? Why place an entry every five minutes, that’s… hold on… . that’s two hundred and eighty-entries per day . .wouldn’t one suffice?”
“It could be some simulation thing.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, like a game or something.”
“Not sitting in the hills of Virginia under the protection of the CIA it ain’t.”
“True, it could have something to do with actuary tables or…”
“Or what?”
“Hmmm I don’t know yet… I’m trying to comprehend why anyone would need this much power and storage… I mean weather simulators don’t amass this much data… this thing is churning out… . let’s see… a few quick calculations… six point six gigs every five minutes times twelve times twenty-four… that’s just shy of two terabytes of data a day… holy shit!”
“Storage is cheap these days so relax… . besides I’m sure it gets compressed and stored somewhere down the line.”
“Looking at this data, it would help if we knew what those last two numbers are for.”
“Data pointers?”
“Could be, good guess, there are a bunch of duplicate numbers, yeah maybe data points into another database… for more information… yeah those two digits could be x and y coordinates on a hard drive or database somewhere.”
“So we have a date and time, and we have a social security number, and maybe data pointers… now what?”
“I’m thinking… . if we stick to your assumption, this isn’t one of those holographic storage systems… that would require a z or third coordinate… so now I have to find a system that uses this range for storage… . maybe that will get us somewhere… we have time right?”
“All night.”
Again they went their separate ways but stayed in the same room, Greg on one computer, Jorja on another. This was not like hacking in the movies where some whiz kid took a few minutes and presto they have the world’s defense systems by the balls or drained bank accounts within seconds using some hidden back door only known by the software’s creator. No, this was actually the mundane world of hacking, the most boring aspect of hacking—research, and it took time… way too much time, even with the help of some of the world’s fastest computers. They were both methodical in their approach, reading and cross checking their facts with one another. Greg dove into the CIA’s archives on computer and software companies in search of specifications that would match the range of numbers. Jorja took a more practical approach and used the web as her tool. Jorja googled the word “coordinates” and found a bunch of hits, the first was a link to geographical coordinates and based on this she redefined her search parameters to list hard drives, then she tried databases and from there it was into the world of technologies’ inner workings.
. . .
H
is first order of business was to empty the trash cans in the two hundred and twenty eight cubes. Each cube had two cans, one for just paper that was to be recycled, the other for trash. He knew the cubes by heart. He knew if Eric Campbell was working today there would be two cans of diet Pepsi and a Subway sandwich wrapper—it was that way every day of the week. He particularly liked Chris Peterbergs’ cube for each night he would take a cinnamon jawbreaker out of his candy jar which lasted until he was finished with the cans. He noticed all the cube decorations and especially liked the primitive artwork given to the mothers and fathers by their sons and daughters. He liked the hairy fire engine in Bob’s cube and the green cotton ball clouds in Kevin’s cube and the big wide grin of a sister’s mouth with braces in Shaun’s cube and the sun’s rays shining over a lopsided house in Lisa’s cube but most of all he liked the photographs in Dane’s cube. Dane had several pictures of his daughter in various activities. In one the little blonde was in a blue soccer outfit, number 18, with her foot propped up on a soccer ball. She was with her mother in another shot, and with her older brother in another in what appeared to be a water balloon fight. Since he was the only one working this floor he would spend a few extra minutes just mulling over the pictures, sometimes even sitting down in the chair and taking a break. The little blonde girl in the pictures was what he looked most forward to each and every night… . except this night. Tonight he did his regular routine, emptied the trash cans, got his jawbreaker but when he came upon Dane’s cube his nightly ritual changed. He took down each picture and simply threw them away, he didn’t need his fantasies anymore; he already had his little girl—safe at home. He finished with the cans and grabbed the vacuum. He was done in record time. He clocked out and headed back home.
He made one stop and that was to one of those twenty-four hour mini-marts. He needed some more bananas, although a mini-mart was not the ideal place to buy a bunch, his little girl liked bananas so his little girl was going to get bananas. He also purchased an eight pound bag of ice. The kid behind the counter was bored and tried to make some idle chit-chat but he ignored his every word. He paid in cash and limped to his car. The kid behind the counter watched his every move. When he entered the car he saw the kid was watching. Before he turned the key he thought to himself, then smiled at his ingenuity. He got back out of the car and limped back into the mini-mart. He went to the wall of refrigerated drinks and perused his choices. He picked up another bottle of juice, this time it was apple and made his way to the counter again.
“Forgot my thirst, this is what I came in here for.”
“It happens all the time, 99 cents.”
“Here you go, thanks.”
“You’re welcome, have a good night.”
“Will do,” and he limped back to the car, smiling. He was thinking, if someone was trying to hide, why would they go back into the store… very clever he thought and started the car and headed back to his little girl. By the time he made it home it was a little after three in the morning and the first thing he did was to go down into the basement and enter his watching room. The light was still on but Ripley was sound asleep with the panda bear tucked tightly under her arm. She was precious. He decided to go in… . it was time. Just before he unlocked the door he remembered something and stopped. He went back upstairs and went to the second floor. He approached with much forethought, what appeared to be a bedroom door. He opened it and entered, he didn’t turn on any lights, hoping the light from the hallway would be enough. It was, there in the corner was what he was looking for… a white wicker waste basket and back downstairs he went. He walked into the room ever so quietly. He placed the wicker basket just besides the dresser and placed the bunch of bananas next to the other food. He then brought in a small blue Coleman cooler filled with ice and bottle juice, including the apple juice. He looked around the room like he was checking if anyone was watching. He walked over to the bed and leaned over Ripley. She was beautiful. She moved and it startled him and quickly fled through the steel door. Click. Click. Click. He realized she wasn’t ready. He realized he wasn’t ready.
. . .
I
t was growing very late but neither of them wanted to quit. They took a quick break and Greg found his way to the fridge for his own personal stash of thirst quenching goodness supplied by his friend. Jorja took the time to pop a few aspirin, hoping to cure her mild headache and knowing full well aspirin’s primary ingredient was caffeine, giving her a hopefully added boost… . she took three and back to work it was. Closing in on four in the morning neither made too much headway. Jorja wanted to retrace her steps just in case she missed anything. She again googled the word “coordinates”. Again she saw the primary links on the page were geographical in nature. She spent some time going through the links, then see tried another search and some of the same geographical links were displayed, even one for Google Maps and out of boredom she clicked on it. She entered the last two numbers into google maps on a whim and waited.
-77.05853462219238, 38.909001254076514
Nothing happened. She was focusing on a blank map. She tried to zoom in and nothing happened, she zoomed out nothing happened, then she zoomed all the way out and she was looking at Antarctica. Greg happened to look over seeing Jorja starring at a green marker on the screen.
“Looking for penguins?”
“No, just bored. I kept getting links to geographic coordinates, latitude and longitudes… I still get them confused, well the numbers don’t look like the standard geographical coordinates with minutes and seconds… anyway I tried plugging in the numbers into google maps and that’s what it returned.”
“So you end up in good old Terra Australis. Tell me you never heard of latitude are like rungs of a ladder? Lat… Lad.”
“No but that’s a good one, I’ll try remember that.”
“What happens if you reverse those numbers? Those could be the decimal representation of the coordinates,” and he waited for the answer, “Zoom in… . again… . one more time.”
They both sat there in silence but mostly in horror.
Greg broke the silence first, “That can’t be, tell me that can’t be… . Fuck! Please tell me Jorja, please.”
Jorja didn’t say a word; she was too busy thinking about all the ramifications, thinking how this was possible.
“Jorja… . Jorja, please tell me this is some kind of sick twisted joke, you’re fucking with me right? This can’t be fucking possible, right? You were in the database earlier this week, you set this up right?”
Jorja was still silent. Greg went to the computer and punched up his social security number and looked at the last entry in the database. The last two numbers were almost identical to Jorja’s.
-77.058534622345, 38.90900125406733
“Jorja, why the fuck didn’t we notice this before? Those two numbers are almost identical to yours. This can’t be. Fuck it can’t be.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” she said in a soothingly calm voice, “let’s run another test before we…”
“Before what? Before we fucking panic… . it’s too late for that,” as Greg looked again at the Google map pinpointing the exact location of Jorja’s town home.
. . .