Driving Code

"What do you mean no residential address?" Aldo hated coders who thought keeping the important bits in wetwear meant job security. He'd need to remind them at his Monday morning team meeting that if his job was subject to off by one errors, so was their job.

"I shouldn't even be showing you this." Laura locked her screen.

"I can't believe the --" Aldo had enough ingrained years to catch himself from swearing at the last moment, at least when talking to HR wonks. "Look, the market is going to eat us alive tomorrow if we don't get this fixed tonight before Anonymous gets whiff of our blood. It's not just my job, it's yours too."

"After the 2015 Yahoo! Legislation, my hands are tied."

Aldo slammed a chair out of his way and it ricocheted down the alley between cubicles until it caught on an ethernet cable and crashed onto its back. Just because some Yahoo! boss showed up on the doorstep of one of his direct reports and squeezed fifteen shots into the poor schlock, it didn't mean there weren't times you were supposed to overlook the law. He had control of his emotions. Aldo stepped over the fallen chair.

His workspace had the team's spreadsheet opened with the row containing Bill's phone number highlighted, but he hadn't answered the phone when Aldo called. He ran his finger down the column of FindMyPhone passwords. Good thing the company issued corporate phones. It'd left the team no choice but to provide Aldo their passwords.

A flag representing Bill's phone moved along Highway 80 away from their offices. Catching Bill would take hours. Aldo looked at the code, but it wasn't just that it was Hungarian notation, it had two layers of macros that resulted in the code looking like something encrypted. Aldo shrugged and grabbed his car's fob.

The team might think he was past his prime, but Aldo had hacked his Audi to disable the speed governors and cleverly inject false position data into the DMV's database spew so they wouldn't send a speeding ticket based on logged data. He engaged the automated driver, and gave Bill's current position. He'd update it when he got closer.

#

Tailing Bill hadn't been enough to get him to pull over. Aldo had needed to pull in front of Bill and slow down like some LA police chase until Billy took notice and pulled over to the side of the road.

"Hey, bossman. Didn't see you. Must be serious stink to get you chasing my tail."

"Your code has gone haywire. It's the financial transactions routine. It's stripping money off the foreign exchange."

"No biggie."

"Losing us cash each time it goes through. If Anonymous gets wind of this, it'll fund their operations for a good six months."

Bill shrugged. "Nothing I can do. IT regs don't let code junkies through the VPN."

"I've got VPN on the dash. Get in the Audi."

Once Bill had pulled up the code, made a one character change and committed it and pushed it out to the production servers, Aldo grabbed his sleeve before he could disappear out of the car. "I want to see that it works this time."

"Hold your pants." Numbers spun on the real-time display and Bill flicked his finger at several numbers. "See that, bossman. It's working."

For the first time in hours Aldo took a deep breath. He would have a job tomorrow. Bill was about to slam the door shut. "Wait. Where do you live, if you're all the way out here and not home yet."

Bill scraped his foot on the rocks on the shoulder. "Couldn't afford a house, so the car is all I got. Put it on autodrive and get out of the congestion charging zone and drive all night. Anything else, bossman."

"No, no." Aldo started to plan how he'd pitch this to the VP. He'd find the angle where he'd appear to be the hero. He pulled the door shut and ordered the computer to call an extended management meeting for tomorrow morning.