Episode 17
Sharp had to admit. Seeing Nega-Isabelle was a bit unsettling. She was so flustered when they first met that he was glad she was acting more like her usual self around him now, though maybe without the Dark Lord overtones.
"Well? What do you think?" Isabelle pressed him for more feedback.
"You said 'portmanteau' before? Nice word."
"That's what you take away from all that?" Isabelle said with a bemused grin. Sharp simply smiled back.
"The tech is impressive. This entire setup is mind blowing. Makes me wish I was doing more than just network troubleshooting around here. But you said that you had a corporate sponsor? How's that working out now that Bloop bought out your startup?"
"We assume that's what's holding up the transition. Otherwise, they'd be hounding us for results."
“So, where will your wormhole lead to?”
"It's only a microscopic pinhole in the first phase. That much has already been done by other researchers. We aren't worried about a terminus at this point. Just stability and size.” Isabelle looked down and grimaced. “Besides, the wormbox uses a lot of power, so the budget only calls for the one machine at this time."
Walking backwards towards Isabelle, Sharp looked over the room-sized machine, then turned to Isabelle and asked her more about the technologies being developed. A lot of what they were doing in the WMD lab was classified, but Isabelle could describe the more common technologies involved with their operation, from rare earth magnets to transparent ALON sheets and gravitons.
"I’ll definitely talk to Darity about your IT needs. I don’t think having us on call is going to work in the long run. It’s obvious you need dedicated staff.” Isabelle nodded her head, but her eyes didn’t look hopeful.
“You only had one guy set to work IT, and he was laid off before you even got here? What was Wudgepuck thinking?”
Isabelle opened her mouth to reply, but Sharp cut her off. “No, no. Forget I asked. Wudgepuck is involved, so he probably thought he was saving money. He’d sell his mother if he thought it would save on his phone bill.” Sharp thought for a moment, then pitched his voice lower and said, “Uh, maybe we should forget I said that.”
Isabelle laughed, then looked at Sharp like a proud mother. “I’m glad you're more relaxed now after that welcoming committee. You haven’t been yourself lately. I’ve seen you around campus looking pretty stressed. Oh, and I truly am sorry about that.”
“Sorry about what?” Sharp sat his bag down by the wormbox and pulled out his tablet.
“The welcoming committee. And I heard about what happened at accounting, too. I’m sure that’s what inspired Syd.”
“Look, don't worry about it. This is my life now. I’m used to it.” Sharp looked around the workstation and couldn’t find the gear he expected.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Are you kidding me? No AR deck? And this is a proprietary OS. My bots can’t interface with it. What a pain…
“Are you sure? I don't mind helping you file the report. They were way out of line.”
“No, no. Absolutely not. I can't afford for there to be a scene. Everything I do ends up on the Internet, so I’d just like to wrap this up and go home.” Sharp could see the way her staff treated him bothered her, and he was happy to have an ally, but he also knew that even the most ardent allies would turn on him when the pressures boiled. “So just the console here on the wormbox, then another one over on the WMD?”
“Yes, just the two. Are you really…” Isabelle's voice trailed off as she looked over Sharp’s shoulder towards the observation window. A line of people had pressed their faces and bodies up against the glass. They were trying to appear intimidating, but Sharp snorted when one of them munched on a donut.
Waste not, want not, huh, Syd?
Syd pointed to his eyes with two fingers, then pointed them back towards Sharp.
“No, I'm sorry. That's just uncalled for. I’ll take care of this right away.”
Sharp watched Isabelle as she strode through the door, then turned back to the workstation island.
“Well, it's just you and me now,” he spoke aloud. “We're going to have to do this old school.”
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If configuring networks was easy work for Sharp, setting up a home router was like fishing at a pet shop, even without his AI bots to fill in all the details. He configured the workstation island, then walked over to the WMD console and set that up on the network as well. Walking back to the island along the beefy cable that connected the WMD with the workstation island, Sharp kept his eyes on the observation window. He could see Isabelle still dressing down the window warriors, but Sharp had more pressing matters on his mind.
The AI responsible for networking reported back to him that one lone machine resided on the network with an unrecognized IP address. Since he had created the wireless network himself one machine at a time, there shouldn’t be any extra machines on the network. That meant that somewhere on his network, a computer was sharing its connection. It was also probably the source of all their network troubles. His network bot told him the likely candidate was the workstation island console, which made no sense.
I never should’ve skipped dinner.
Sharp stood in front of the workstation island and scratched his head absentmindedly. There was the wormbox and its hardware. There was the old school, Zerity512 rack PC and monitor. There was the honkin’ big cable connecting the station to the WMD.
Where is the network cable?
Sharp flicked his eyes to the time on his AR display and sighed. Never did he imagine that being this close to a wormhole generator would be this boring. On his knees, Sharp inspected the island, looking for the network cable, which he found snaking from the rack PC behind the utility drawers. It didn’t join the other cables to travel in the bundle along the floor to the WMD. Instead, it dropped below the island into the floor.
“Wha'the heck…?” Sharp pulled out a screwdriver and lifted the floor tile up, revealing an unpowered ethernet hub, the kind that switched its active port depending on usage. “Old School” didn’t even come close to describing it. This was forty year old tech at the very least. No wonder they were having communication issues on the network! There was the main network cable from the cable bundle plugged neatly into the hub; there was the network cable to the workstation coming out of the hub; and there was another network cable traveling out into the dark under the flooring.
Sharp looked to his right and eyeballed where the cable was heading—right towards the observation window—yet there was no computer over there. Not one he could see.
Peeking under the floor tiles one by one, Sharp made his way across the room towards the observation window. He had come hoping to sneak a peek at wormhole tech and ended up on a cable crawl—his least favorite part of the job.
Crouched under the window, Sharp lifted up the last floor tile and made a quick intake of breath. Hidden under the floor was a Zero Carbs mining rig, lights blinking, humming away, eating up resources without corporate permission, and it had his name neatly written on it.