Start the Chase by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman [Buchman, M. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

4

Jeremy had slipped in sideways to set himself up.

Now, three days after their lunch together, he opened the login, keyed down his hacked identity, and was welcome.

He wanted to do a fist pump, but he knew that it always looked stupid when he tried it in the mirror at home. And with Penelope being the only other person in the basement tonight, he desperately didn’t want to look stupid.

Everyone else had gone home. They were on call if something crashed that the automated recovery routines couldn’t anneal but, for now, it was only the two of them.

He had double-masked their IP at the start of their run into Microsoft through two offshore server farms. Switzerland and Iceland were the most secure routes in the world for shedding his true identity and point of origin. He then added a pitifully slow connection through Poughkeepsie, New York; he didn’t need speed to simply show Penelope around but he wanted to guarantee their obscurity.

On cue, Penelope had opened up an entry point in a low-priority Boeing email server with a password she didn’t explain the origin of. None of its alarms would be triggered as long as they didn’t touch any of the data. But their signal now passed through to the Microsoft server as coming from a legitimate business partner.

It had taken him three nights at home to build up the nerve to login on his father’s computer. Once in, he’d added himself as a departmental superuser with full privileges. Then, using those privileges, he’d erased any footprint that it was his father’s account that had been used in the creation. He was now Bright_Copper_7-17.

“Hey!” Penelope practically shouted.

“I used Bright Copper for Penny.”

“Duh! Nobody uses that nickname. That’s what my parents call me, I hate it.”

Jeremy didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t change the username now. And he technically couldn’t change the password either. He’d set it to auto-update using an algorithm he’d designed so that it would never twice be the same. No one could use the account if they didn’t know his update pattern and what had been used on the previous login.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I just thought that—”

“What’s with the 7-17?” Penny did not sound happy.

Jeremy hung his head and whispered, “July seventeenth. I’d been here three weeks. It was the first time you said more than hello or goodbye to me.”

“And you remembered that date?” She slitted her eyes at him.

“It was a Tuesday afternoon. You had a packet of cookies and asked if I wanted one.” It sounded impossibly lame now that he’d said it aloud.

She tipped her head to study him but he couldn’t meet her eyes. Instead, he watched the waterfall of her hair swing out over her shoulder, the monitor’s glow caught in it like silver highlights in the flow of obsidian. He still hadn’t found any other material that came close to describing its texture.

“You’re sweet, Jeremy,” she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “I guess I’ll have to bring cookies more often.

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