The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) (6 page)

Meanwhile, over in the programmers’
area, Jim was just putting the finishing touches on a sweet piece of code. It
was designed to support a new set of automated microscopes for a scientist
named Dr. Leonard Bender. The problem was sticky, but his script worked well
and now he wanted to show it off to David, his team-leader.

“Hey David, do you remember that code
issue with the Bender microscope array?”

No response. He began launching rubber
bands over the wall.
“Hey Dave, I finished the Bender script,” he said firing another one and
watching it ricochet satisfyingly off the ceiling tiles over David’s desk.

David, who had been concentrating on a
problem of his own, finally gave up and answered.

“Ok, Jim let me see.”

Jim sent the data on his screen over to
David’s terminal.

“Oh, yeah; that was a great idea. I see
what you did with the results storage, and access area. Very cool.”

Dave had been working on this problem
for several days before assigning it to him. He had read Dave’s code, and could
see the flaw was in the approach. It was clear he was the better programmer,
but Dave had been there since the beginning, working his way up.

He liked David well enough, and enjoyed
his job at IntelliHealth, but would always prefer to work outside the ‘team’.
They only slowed him down. He imagined himself as the ‘hired gun’ of the
department, and more or less he was treated that way. So he let Dave take the
lead, but he took the spotlight, solving the hardest of their problems.
’And doing it with style,’ he might say.

Years ago, Jim attended MIT but had
found himself expelled when he hacked into the Dean’s files to get his
daughter’s phone number. She was outstanding. They had only dated briefly, but
long enough for him to brag about getting her number, and it caught up to him
when they broke up.

After that he transferred to Stanford,
and kept a low profile.

His first real job was with the
International Space Program.
Respectable, but dry. Then he got his chance to join IntelliHealth.
Now in his thirties, he was single and powering though life on a rocket bike
that ran on virtual testosterone.
He was enjoying his life a lot.
He shot another rubber band over the wall.

“Jim!”

CHAPTER 4
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we
can perform without thinking of them.”
 
- Alfred North Whitehead

The following morning Ryan proved again
to be quicker than the elevator.
Faster now for two days running.
He owned that silvery bastard.

Working at his desk he quickly found
his way around the files on the network, and began actually looking into the
data.

To get started, he focused on the data
associated with the treatment errors, the ‘data collisions’.

There were gobs of it.

He wasn’t sure how much was in a gob
exactly, but he knew it was far too much for a single person to explore. He
wanted to narrow his interest. He was confronted with a theme that seemed to be
growing here, the answer is here, but what is the question?

So far he understood that sometimes a
patient received an erroneous treatment, completely inconsistent with their
condition. He wondered if the treatment was a valid treatment, or just a random
string of treatment vocabulary. It might be something indicating a hiccup in
the software.

Within the collection of recorded data
errors, he searched for research applications used in current treatments.

The results returned were in the
thousands.
He shortened the time frame to the last six months, and he got back over 800
instances to choose from. He randomly picked one that sounded interesting,
‘Reverse Gene Sequencing for Predicted Correction of Hereditary Color
Blindness’.
His screen filled with hundreds of records, each record having enormous numbers
of information fields.

Selecting just one record, he scrolled
to the right, and then down. As he moved about, he found some fields were
filled in with readable information, but most were masked with a lot of odd
‘X’s.

Ryan backed up, and selected another
treatment, this one titled, ‘Common Cell Signaling and Deactivation for
Hemophilia.’ He thought he’d read about this; it had something to do with the
correction of blood clotting issues in children.

He performed the same steps and found
himself again staring at a screen with fields upon fields of masked data.

After several more attempts he began to
conclude that the information was simply protected. He needed to talk to David,
and get the skinny on why he couldn’t see what was in the fields.
Ryan got up and headed over to the programmers’ area.
When he arrived, he still couldn’t get over what a wreck it was. He was
guessing that the culture over there was intended to be sensitive to comfort
with an emphasis on promoting creativity. A lot of companies were trying this
now. The world of programming and art were merging.
’Maybe it worked, maybe not’, he thought.

Smiling, he remembered how Mr. James
had quickly retreated from this spot.

He stepped over a pillow, which must
have fallen from inside a cubicle where a girl lay face down on her keyboard.
Ryan picked it up from the walkway and carefully placed it on her desk.

Moving onward, he saw that David was
not in his cubicle, and nowhere to be seen. Ryan felt stuck, but as he turned
to leave he heard a voice say, “Hey Ryan, how’s it going?”
It was Jim from yesterday.

“Hey Jim, I was looking for David, is
he around?”

“Yeah, but I think he’s in with Ben
right now,” he said, “Can I help?”

Ryan smiled.
“Yes, maybe so,” he said, “I’ve started looking at some data in the data
collision directories, but I don’t really understand what I’m seeing.
Everything seems to censored with a lot of big ‘X’s.”

“Ah, are you’re looking at the data in
the research side, or the hospital side?”
 
Jim asked.

“The research side.”

“Come here to my terminal, and show
me.”

Ryan followed Jim into his cubicle, and
watched as he logged on to his terminal. Jim had six monitors of varying sizes
in front of him. They were clustered together with data alive and moving on
each one.

Jim moved the data he had on his main
screen to another, and opened up the file directories Ryan had been talking
about. Ryan pointed to a file he recognized. The screen suddenly showed a
database filled with records that pertained to a recent treatment. Each record
populated with fields upon fields, and most of them were hidden by the ‘X’s.

Pleased that Jim had been able to get
to the right place so easily, Ryan said, “So why are most of those fields
censored?”

“You mean all the ‘X’ characters?”

“Yes, exactly.”
Jim swiveled around in his chair.

“Well, that’s the research data itself.
Most of it is unique and confidential to the researchers generating or
accessing it.”

Perplexed now, Ryan said, “How can I
look for an error in a field, if I can’t see what’s written there?”

“Well that’s the tricky part, isn’t
it?” said Jim with a smile.

Grabbing a soda and leaning back in his
chair, Jim continued, “The data written in the field doesn’t matter, and it
probably wouldn’t make a difference to you, if you could see it. What matters
is the
type of data
in the field.”

Jim turned back to his terminal, but
selected a different screen, one of the smaller ones above his keyboard. He
began typing rapidly and in a few seconds generated a single line of text, with
an input field.

‘INPUT DATA HERE: _______________________’

Jim turned to Ryan and said, “Ok, Ryan type something in here.”

Not sure what to type, Ryan leaned
around and typed the word ‘blue’.

‘INPUT DATA HERE: __
BLUE
_______________
‘

Jim then added some additional code
that returned the information.
‘MY FAVORITE COLOR IS:
 
_
BLUE____
’

Jim continued, “So the alpha characters
are captured, and returned as my favorite color. But if I type a number in
there instead, this is what happens.”

‘INPUT DATA HERE:
__23_______________
’
‘MY FAVORITE COLOR IS:
 
(error
mismatch num167ad6
)’

Ryan had made enough mistakes working
with data and coding in his career to know what this was. The programmed code
was expecting alpha characters for an input, but got numeric. Not knowing what
to do, the code punted with a big fat ‘error’ message.

“I get it Jim, I understand your point.
But even so, it proves my point even more, we need to see the data in that
field to know if it’s correctly entered,” said Ryan.

“Well, ignoring the researchers’
paranoia about their data, you will find that the data is highly complex. By
that I mean that the field you might be interested in can have a non-repeating
series of alpha/numeric characters with a handful of special characters as
well,” said Jim.

Ryan sighed, “Well, that’s a new
wrinkle.”

“Sure, but I’ve looked at some of this
too, and I took a different route. I compared the information in a particular
field across 10,000 records. I believe that if one of the fields has the wrong
information in it, like in the example we just looked at, it would stick out
from the rest.”

Ryan began to understand his point. If
you picked a data field in a particular record, it would be the same field in
all the records of all of the patients undergoing that same treatment.

So it followed that if the first field
in a record, was meant for a color, and you compared it to all the records for
a specific treatment, they should all be colors. The first fields for them all
should match. If even one of them wasn’t a color it would be different from the
rest, and stick out. Therefore it wasn’t necessary to know the colors, only
that one of them was different. If he could identify a field entry that didn’t
match, they could analyze the content later.

“Jim, that’s really clever. Did you
find any exceptions?”

“Nope, not one.”

Jim leaned back in his chair again, and
smiled.

“Ok, well that’s weird,” said Ryan.

“I agree. It’s a good strategy, but so
far, it hasn’t yielded any results.”

“You’ve given me some things to think
about. Thanks Jim, I really appreciate it.”

Headed back to his office, Ryan began
to look at the problem the way Jim had. It was a strong point Jim had made
about comparing like fields without worrying about what was in them. Ryan
thought it made sense that Jim, the consummate programmer, would prefer to look
at the form of the data rather than the content. Still though, he couldn’t help
but feel that Jim’s method was missing something important. There was another
element to this picture.
Even so, it was a good start.
They would need to try this approach, very carefully, many more times.

Looking at the clock, it was time to
go; he wasn’t going to find it today.

Ryan headed to the garage and went home
for the weekend.
It was one of his best in quite a while.

It was Saturday morning, and Jean
brought Alex’s backpack to the kitchen table for the usual weekend exploration.

Mondays found Alex’s backpack nearly
empty, but by Friday it would be full again. Homework got returned, lunch
leftovers stacked up, toys got traded at recess, and notes from the school and
PTA waited to be read.
Today was no different.
Jean had just thrown away all the leftover food bits when she came upon his
take-home folder with the school and PTA notices in it.