Crazy Seduction(erotica)

“But you did receive documentation outside the legal terms of the contract. That issue must be resolved before further transactions. It’s outlined very clearly in the contract.”

Dawes scowled at Hall. “Sign the form.”

“I’ll need two witnesses as well,” Mahati said with a smile.

With an angry expression on his face, Maurice signed the tablet. Wallace and Stephen were the witnesses.

“I could just say you forged my signature,” the CIA Director snapped.

Mahati tucked away the tablet and faced the group. “The signature plus your biometrics the tablet recorded while you faced its camera are incontestable in court.” She turned to Henry. “We may proceed.”

The Directors were watching her uncomfortably as she’d handled them all quite effectively. Henry did his best to hide his smile.

Instead, he nodded and looked to the podium. There was a server rack standing next to it with a blade server installed. He turned to Dawes. “Who on your team will be doing the application install?”

The Director gestured to someone sitting in the center of the lowest row. A slim woman in her mid-thirties moved to join them. “This is Billy James, our Network Security Specialist. Billy, this is Henry Gable.” Henry was surprised by a name that didn’t match her dour expression. She was remarkably unremarkable in her grey suit jacket and slacks over a white dress shirt and black shoes. Dishwater blond hair worn short, pale hazel eyes, and thin lips, there seemed to be no spirit in her eyes. He had the eerie sensation he was addressing one of VRL’s artificial workers.

Henry forced a smile onto his lips, and they nodded to each other. He pulled a memory stick from his pocket and handed it to her. “This is the software for Homeland Security and your documentation. Did you build this test bench server?” he asked her.

“Yes. We couldn’t get the network cards you specified in time for the demo,” she said with no inflection in her voice.

He frowned. “Let’s do a quick check under the hood to see if that’s going to be a problem.”

Henry walked over to poke around in the server’s device manager interface. He dropped to the command line and ran some test scripts. After reviewing the output, he sighed.

“We can do the install. We can do the configuration. We can even do some mild testing, but we can’t do any true performance testing. These NICs are going to tank if we put them under heavy load, and they will lock up at maximum load.” Henry explained to the Directors and Billy.

“What’s a NIC?” Wallace asked.

“Sorry, a Network Interface Card,” Henry explained. “You need to use the ones specified in the documentation and have spares on hand.”

“I understand the install is quick. We’re all busy men. Let’s get this going,” Dawes asserted impatiently, obviously still smarting from Mahati’s win.

Henry nodded to him, then to Billy. She walked to the podium and had the large projection screen on the wall behind them displaying the test machine’s interface.

He faced the audience again, and they settled down. The Directors of their separate agencies went to sit with their people. Someone brought Mahati a chair to sit in at the room’s side, so only Henry and Billy were at the front.

Henry picked up the wireless earpiece and microphone. He slipped it on and pressed the power button.

“If you can hear me, please raise your hand,” he said with a tight throat.

All of the guests raised a hand.

“Great. Hi, I’m Henry Gable. I’m the CIO of VRL Investments in Manhattan, New York. I wrote the software I’m going to demo the installation and configuring of this morning. It-It’s based on the code my brother Stanley designed.” He gestured to the server rack. “The test bench is currently configured with network cards that are not optimal, so we won’t be doing any performance testing.” He looked to the woman on the stage with him. “Ms. James has the software on the memory stick. Go ahead and insert that, and let’s get started.

Billy held up the memory stick, then they got to work.

With the woman’s assistance, they installed the application and configured it. Instead of seven minutes, it took about fifteen, as Henry described each step to the audience.Nôvel/Dr(a)ma.Org - Content owner.

“That’s it. Functioning firewall. Simple so far, right?” Henry said, looking at the faces, and no one was arguing. He nodded to himself. “Okay, now let me take you through the functional menu.”

He asked Billy to take them through the menus one at a time as he described the features. The room was mostly silent as they took in the information and made notes. When they reached the end of this part of the demo, he scanned the audience and saw a few impatient faces.

“So far, it looks like a nicely featured interface, but you’d like to see it in action, yes?”

A few people actually called out yes. Henry smiled and turned to Billy. “Can you display the external web address for the firewall up on the screen?”

The IP number popped up on the screen. “Okay, people. There is the target. Please have your people connect to this address to try to break through.” He looked to Wallace. “Director Granger, due to the poor performance of these inferior network cards, please don’t aim your code-cracker at it. You can have individuals attempt to break in.”

He looked to Billy. “Keep that IP number on the screen and please open a window with the monitoring options and open the threats report.”

The screen displayed a grid showing just a few connections attempting to breach the firewall. A few more appeared, and then a dozen more showed up. Henry looked up at the seating and saw the groups crowding around their experts as they made their own breach attempts.

As they worked on hacking or cracking the firewall, Henry left his mic on the podium and wandered over to see Mahati. “I think it’s going well,” he said, and she nodded with a smile.

“The software seems very simple and easy to use,” she admitted.

“Yes, that’s the magic. It’s the mystery underneath that contains all the wonder,” he said with a smile.

Mahati froze. “Magic?” she asked cautiously.

His eyes widened as he shook his head. “No! I was just being dramatic! It’s all science.”

Mahati just shook her head as she watched him.

“I was very impressed with how you stood up to Dawes and Hall,” he said quietly.

She smiled again. “Thank you.”

He saw the group was becoming restless, so he went back to the podium and put the mic back on.

“Any questions?”

Hands went up all over the hall, and Henry’s expression fell. So much for a quick meeting followed by much sightseeing. Henry pointed to a gentleman four tiers up as he was waving most energetically.

“Lawrence Prescott! I’ve seen the documentation on your firewall. It shouldn’t work.”

Henry just smiled at him.

Flustered, the man continued. “Page 125 shows a diagram describing how this… channel layering works, but it’s impossible.”

Billy opened the documentation on the memory stick and went to page 125. She put it up on the big screen.

The audience grumbled as they also seemed to have a problem with this.

Lawrence called out once more. “There is nothing in this that explains how you are yielding the results you are reporting.”

Henry looked to Mahati then back to the scientist. “It’s the processor.”

“Yes, we can all see the diagram refers to the processor. But they won’t produce secondary channels, as you indicate. It’s not designed to produce more than one thread,” Lawrence said wearily.

“Sure, but this chip’s quantum tunneling effect does,” Henry said as he went to Billy’s terminal and moved the document three more pages along where his diagram showed the second and third channels trapping hacker traffic.

He looked back at the audience as the room had gone silent, all eyes on him.

“Did I fart or something?” he said into the silent room.

“Did… did you say Quantum Tunneling?” Lawrence asked.

Henry nodded. “Yeah… it’s not a documented property of the chip, but it’s really handy for building these layer traps.” He looked around the room, and everyone was still staring at him. “Has no one here ever thought to measure energy consumption and output on these chips before? Waste heat doesn’t account for all of the discrepancy. It’s the tunneling effect. If you can identify it, you can utilize it for multilevel coding.”

It was like Henry had thrown a lit Molotov cocktail into their midst. The scientists exploded into two camps, those scoffing at his outrageous fantasy and those connecting the dots and shouting excitedly about the potential. Then, they turned on each other.

Shortly, the Directors approached him with their Tech Leads in tow, so Henry faced them. “Uh, I didn’t intend to start a scientist war.”

“What’s this quantum tunneling thing?” Wallace asked.

“In simple terms, it’s the potential ability for an electron to pass through a solid barrier. The chips are being designed smaller and smaller, so the barriers are thinner and thinner. An electron can move from a transistor on one side of what should be a solid barrier to another transistor on the other side. I just found a way to make that work for me in a controlled way,” Henry said with a shrug.

Robert was looking at his boss with wide eyes.

“What?” Wallace asked in annoyance, a little unnerved by the intensity of his underling’s gaze.

“We don’t have the tools needed to measure this effect, nor do we have the means to utilize it,” he said.

“That’s only because you weren’t aware of it happening. Now, you have an application that proves it works and knowledge of the processors which produce the effect. You’re smart. You’ll figure out how to measure and utilize it. Take a lesson from the astronomers. Sometimes you have to look at what’s missing to find what’s hidden in plain sight. The beautiful thing is, even when you know how it works, that does nothing to diminish the security it offers.” Henry grinned at them.