Shifting Shadows

As it was, once his company’s overlords bought the stupid add-ons, they made them mandatory. Happily for Ben, the security guys would call him a day before they conducted the mandatory just-to-make-sure-you-are-doing-as-you-are-told inspections of his hard drive so he’d have time to hide the unapproved programs he actually used somewhere else. Happy for the company, too, because if Ben actually had to use the crap—he arbitrarily decided that crap wasn’t a swearword—if he used the crap they mandated, nothing on any of the computers in the company would work.

“I wrote a patch to defend my servlet container settings,” he told Rajeev. “I’ll send it to you. And why are your programmers still using servlets, anyway?”

“To a man with a hammer,” said Rajeev wisely, “all problems look like nails. Thank you for your offer of help.”

“No trouble,” Ben told him.

Like his use of unapproved programs, sharing his code with someone who worked for another company was also against his company’s protocol. Code written by company IT personnel was supposed to be shown to marketing to see if it was a viable product. But geeks had to stick together. Also, if marketing ever decided to sell some of his code, he knew who would get stuck on a help desk for it—a business that would be as unpleasant for the customers as it would be for him: he would make certain of that. Happily, since Ben was officially a database administer, better known in the IT world as a DBA, the marketing department never thought to see if he also wrote his own programming.

“How did you fix it, anyway?” asked Rajeev. “Our programmers have been trying to figure out a work-around for several days.”

“The patch hides servlet container settings from your program,” Ben told him, “then reinstalls them once the program is up and running.” If Ben had enjoyed outthinking the stupid program, he didn’t have to admit it to anyone. “I figured out the install problem, too, thank you. It was the same problem another of Prophet’s products had, and I just modified my old patch. What I can’t fix is that the program won’t run unless the password is permanently set to PASSWORD and the username is permanently TEST. Since I’m working on databases that hold the US governmental secrets of the last hundred years, you’ll understand that is not acceptable.”

There was a long silence. Then Rajeev said, very carefully “Someone hard-coded the passwords.”

“That’s what I’m seeing,” agreed Ben blandly.

There was a very long pause. “I haven’t heard that complaint before,” Rajeev said. He considered his words some more, and said, “At least not on this program.” There was another pause. “Perhaps it is because no one else has made it that far yet. I will inquire of our programmers to see if there is a way to fix this and call you back.” He paused and said, “The username is TEST?”

“That’s right,” Ben said.

Rajeev sighed and hung up.

Ben was still grinning when he sent the promised bit of code to Rajeev. Setting aside the task of making the new program behave until he got a call back, he continued his daily checklist to make sure all of his databases were running smoothly and likely to continue that way on aging servers with insufficient memory and slow processors. Galadriel was a crabby, high-maintenance server, and she’d been particularly cranky over the past few days. So he messed around with her, cleaning out a few old logs that were bogging her down.

Around him, the sounds of a giant, cubicle-filled room told him the secrets of the universe—or at least the universe of his company. He didn’t really pay attention on a conscious level, but the part of him that wasn’t a top-flight computer guru stored up the interesting bits and absorbed them.

Ben knew about the guy who was having an affair with three different women and a guy in marketing. He knew that one of the pretty young things in Web Applications was pregnant and wanted to divorce her husband before he found out because it wasn’t his child. Most people’s secrets were less salacious—things like surprise parties, wedding showers, and his DBA coworker who was running cosmetic sales from her work phone instead of doing her job. She was a crummy DBA, though, so that was okay because mostly what she did was make more work for the rest of them.

It wasn’t that he was a busybody who needed to have an ear in everyone’s business—he didn’t care enough about other people to want to hear gossip. It was that he was a bloody werewolf and couldn’t help overhearing.

All the main servers had names. Most of them were references to the usual geek favorites: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Dr. Seuss characters. The only server name that was out of the ordinary was the server someone had named Tree a couple of years ago. Word was that on the eve of transferring to Washington, D.C., a DBA who never read anything but nonfiction had named it in a fit of defiance.

Ben was in the middle of coaxing a little more space out of Yertle when he heard the voice he’d been listening for carrying over the tops of the cubicles to his desk.

Mel Dreyer was the DBA group secretary. Cute, perky, and seven stone soaking wet, she was everything he hated in a woman. Little-girl voice. Check. Sensitive. Check. Cried easily. Check. Scared to death of him. Double check.

She was prey and brought up bad memories until it was all he could do to control his wolf when she was around.

Right now, she was talking to Mark Duffy, IT Services Group Junior Vice Director. It had been Duffy’s voice Ben had been listening for.

Ben pulled himself away from his task, grabbed a book off the top of his file cabinet, and stalked out of his cubicle. He allowed the wolf he kept balled up inside him out just enough to be scary but not enough to be dangerous, a more difficult balance than usual because the moon’s song was in his blood. Full moon was soon.

Mel’s desk was at the entrance to the double row of DBA cubicles, but she didn’t get a whole cubicle. She was stuck out on the end of their row, so she could catch visitors before they invaded the DBA’s domain beyond her. They’d taken away two of the walls and left her vulnerable to whoever decided to pester her.

Ben looked at the floor as he strode by the other cubicles of DBAs. He stretched his neck and heard the bones pop, a sign that the wolf was too prominent. Control, he thought at himself, don’t want to kill anyone. Even as he thought it, the dark inside him answered, Oh, didn’t he just. He knew what it was to feel the flesh part between his teeth and the taste of hot, fresh prey.