Spyware

“Boy, he really worked you over,” said Dr. Ingles. He stepped up and pulled a cigarette from his sports coat. Brenda watched with apprehension as he put it in his mouth, produced a lighter, then, just as he was about to light up, paused. Holding the lighter and the cigarette up, one in each hand, he gestured with them as he spoke. “When are you up for tenure, Ray?”

“Huh?” said Ray. “Umm, this year, I guess, Jim.”

Dr. Ingles fondled his cigarette, putting it into his mouth and sort of chewing on it. The tension in Brenda was evident. She hated smoking, especially in her lab. Dr. Ingles was one of the worst offenders, always seeming to forget that the world had changed and cigarettes had lost favor during the change.

Ingles nodded. “Second time at bat, eh?”

Ray blinked, wondering where Ingles was going with this. The man was rarely direct. “Right.”

Ingles flicked open the lighter, toyed with the thumbwheel. Brenda tensed visibly. He closed the lighter with a snap. “‘Very well.’ Abrams kept saying. I wonder what he meant?”

Ray felt a jolt in his deadened mind. “He’s on the approval committee this year.”

“Eh? Which committee?”

“The tenure committee,” said Ray, realizing thoroughly that he had been led down the primrose path once again by Ingles to a point of logic. Ray wondered if his students hated that approach or loved it.

“Ah, yes,” said Ingles, as if just reaching the same conclusion himself. “About this virus, Ray…”

Ray looked at him warily, preparing for yet another mental assault. Sometimes dealing with the brilliant idiosyncrasies of the other faculty took a great deal of patience.

“It seems to me that it sounds too sophisticated for a student to create. Too much work, too many different functions… I wonder what the Feds will say.”

Ray blinked and frowned. This time he didn’t follow Ingles at all.

“Well, I’ve got to go see what backups I have myself. Is the system up again yet?” asked Ingles.

“Still rebooting,” answered Brenda. “Give us another half-hour. But we won’t be online again for user access for some time. We have to assess the damage and try to eradicate the virus. The FBI will probably slow things down, too.”

Ingles nodded and headed toward the exit. Standing half-in and half-out of the lab, he lit up his cigarette. Brenda’s face reddened as blue smoke wafted into her lab. On a U. C. campus, smoking anywhere was a huge sin.

“One last thing, Ray,” he said from the door. “Don’t skip anything with the Feds. Don’t leave something out that looks bad later.”

Ray frowned and opened his mouth to ask what he meant, but the doors were already swinging shut.

***

Ray barely had time to gulp down half a tuna sandwich and a paper cup of boiled coffee before the feds arrived. To his mild surprise, only one of them had a crew cut and neither wore sunglasses. Even more unexpected, one of them was a Hispanic woman. She was the mean one.

“Agent Johansen and Agent Vasquez,” gushed Rhonda Wells, leading them in. “This is the lab where the unfortunate incident occurred.”

“Correction, madam,” snapped Agent Vasquez. “The incident only began here. It is far from finished.”

Wells blinked, then recovered his composure. “Surely, this thing will soon be under control.”

“Possibly,” said Vasquez. “But it isn’t even known how many systems are infected yet. Many feeder systems have pulled off the internet, others have yet to get the word. We have no idea yet how many are infected. They can’t connect back up without knowing the net is clean, so the damage is continuing in any case.”

Wells nodded and blinked faster. Ray hid a smile. Wells was overly impressed by authority figures. He suspected that was why she had sought to work her way up as far as possible.

“This is Brenda Hastings, she is the director of our main computer science lab,” Wells continued as smoothly as possible. Her tone seemed to indicate that the agents were on a field trip rather than conducting a criminal investigation. “And this is Dr. Ray Vance, computer science faculty.”

The agents eyed him and he nodded back. No handshakes were offered. Ray was too tired and irritated to care.

They began an impressive series of questions, quickly isolating the events of the morning. Johansen, a stocky man of medium height, recorded everything with a hand-held voice recorder. Vasquez took occasional notes.

“So it was you, Dr. Vance, who shut down the system. Why?”

Ray had known this question would be coming, and he felt he was ready for it. “Because I believed that the virus was stalling us, making it look like we could recover if we allowed the disk backup to finish before shutting down. I believe that it was using the time to infect more systems.”

Vasquez raised her eyebrows a fraction. The silent Agent Johansen frowned and aimed his recorder at Ray. The red indicator light on the device glowed. “On what do you base this belief, Doctor?” asked Vasquez.