tesla_bot | Welcome to Tesladyne! Science while you wait.

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Welcome to Tesladyne! Science while you wait.

The door is a free standing frame on a small plywood dais at the focus of a tremendous amount of cabling and particle emitters. The whole area smells of ozone.

"Watch the step. The platform's cheaper to replace than the floor if the focus wanders."

Tesladyne's high energy (dimensional) physics area is done in early twenty first century institutional - white walls, semi-random grid of light, but varied floor tile colors. The framework is from a school of design that favors being able to clean an area with a pressure washer, The drains are a hint. Decorations are spotty. Beyond the collection of calendars with scribbled notes and the cork board spotted with envelopes and scraps of paper it's still mostly bare. The warning signs are clear, bright, unobstructed and supplemented with signs like 'Do not look in laser with remaining eye.'

There are no windows and only one door to the rest of the facility.

"Welcome to Tesladyne."

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Asking is the equivalent of checking that the gun is unloaded when it's handed to you: Basic safety. Plus, you know, manners.

"If he hasn't taken off yet," says Robo, "I'll see what I can do."

Also, Jordan you now what that smells like. You really just want them to whimper and jibber.

"If he did take off, I can put together a tracker to." Jordan is giggling madly, ready to follow Robo.

Robo heads out past the fire fighting crews with a wave and some random spot checks.

"We're on an island," points out Robo, "First we make sure he's not still here and I reduce BBC privileges. Cutting Doctor Who from the immediate airings might help. Top Gear at least acknowledges that everything they do ends in motorhomes on fire."

The wreckage is very cyberpunk. Maybe the footage will sell to a set designer?

"I'm going to need to reschedule the demo here too."

She nods and follows, skipping after Robo... oh, Jordan never imagined a 'regular' job would be so much fun.

...This isn't normal Jordan. This is what happens when the Green Hornet goes corporate. Or what ever the term is for folding everything into think tanks.

"Having fun?" says Robo in response to the skipping.

"Try not to break the support staff by acting to cheerful, please. They're useful."

"No promises. If they can not take a little scare..." Or a little, scary girl... "...they should not be messing with Science."

Mentally she is preparing to give the guys responsible for the whole mess the fight of their lives.

"Support is more like engineering," says Robo, "It's better when the showers work, the taxes get files, those sorts of things are what support is for."

Robo heads for one of the wall phones again. This should only take a minute or two.

"I have non-intelligent service bots for that." Just she does not pay taxes, and can replace desk-meat jobbers with a Turing dynamo, an Eliza helix, and a white noise generator.

Jordan will find a spot of wall to lean on, and wait.

"I'm waiting for the Roombas to unionize," says Robo darkly.

The phone gets picked up on the other end. Finally.

"Hey Jim, we've got a potential runner. Yeah. Yeah the mess down at the demo field. No, that's not why they call it that."

A longer pause here.

"Yup. Standard watch points and bring the first guy who rabbits down to conference 'C'. There's people who'd like to have a talk with him."

Jordan just smirks, listening to this half of the conversation: she is hopeful about scaring the britches off someone.

Conference Room 'C' is offensively plain. The walls are featureless white. The table is white plastic. The floor is a single width of white linoleum. Even the chairs are white painted metal and unpadded. There is no distraction besides what you have in your own head and the other people in the room.

The available external distractions then are: Jordan, Robo, and Bob, who used to be part of the hardware team. Bob turned himself in, being as he had the sense not to run. Or the terror of Jenkins. It might have been that.

"That shouldn't have ever happened. I don't know what went wrong!"

Oh, good. It makes for speedy ~~interrogation~~ debriefing when people have to focus on a smaller number of things.

"How many simulations you ran before releasing the system for use?" Jordan is smiling.

In a most disturbing way...

Ack! Teeth!

"None! I mean-"

"Go on Bob and it better be good."

"That was a joke compile! It shouldn't have even left my personal partition Boss."

"So how'd it get to the field?"

"It was quite a joke, but it did not cause that much laughing in the end, you know?" Jordan taps her cybernetic fingers on the table.

Bob's eyes dart back and forth between Jordan and Robo.

"Bob. You aren't helping here."

"The only way it could have managed to get out is if someone else did a restore from my files and didn't follow the README."

"So you're claiming that someone broke in and ruined your code with something you'd already written."

"Um. Yes?"

Bob jerks from the sound of a PDA being slid from Robo to Jordan.

"Think you can run down if it happened or not?"

"Piece of cake." And she's not kidding: Jordan turns it on, and metaphorically dives into the computer system, looking for traces of such intrusion, checking net traffic, sniffing login signatures and tracking any clues.

It should not take long...

Tesladyne's systems aren't isolated - if they were to begin with, they wouldn't stay that way, so Robo doesn't bother - instead what they are is logged and bandwidth pinched between systems. Some of the logs actually go out on dead trees automatically and get boxed up once a week. Construction bot code updates cross referenced with logins and personnel records...

It's going to need a double check with witnesses or surveillance tapes, but Bob wasn't in the lab to move that code last night as far as the electrons say. His lab login switched the code and almost erased itself, but there's nothing in the online copies about the door unlocking for hours in either direction on the timeline.

"It seems like he's telling the truth." Jordan will show Robo her findings. "Which seems to mean we have a saboteur."

"Nghh," groans Robo, "It doesn't rain but it pours. OK, new plan. Bob, you're still locked out of everything and stuffed in a closet until we can make sense of what's going on. That means you don't get to know what comes next."

Guess what Jordan? Everyone at the lab right now was here when the problem happened, except you. Having fun now?

No, but she will.

After they are alone, Jordan will ask the question. "What now?"

...fear that smile.

"Detective work," says Robo, "I hate detective work, with people anyway. Who ever it is they probably aren't part of the long-term employees - they know enough to actually read the README."

New hires, or a break-in with a poor briefing, but plenty of talent. Neither is particularly attractive, ah well.

"Whoever it is, is not a pro: he left a hole in the flow that we can see."

"Or, it was Bob, and this is a cover-up for himself." What about that idea?

"That is part of the reason why Bob is staying in a box where we can watch him," says Robo, "The rest of it being that it looks better if who ever did this thinks we fell for the coverup if it wasn't Bob."

Robo drums his fingers on the table for a few seconds.

"Jenkins will take the external security, and I can handle the general interviews. How do you feel about digging into the digital security side?"

Assuming it wasn't moved by messenger pigeon and thumbdrive.

"Can do it probably faster than your computers can follow" Jordan grins and nods. "Get me two terminals and a desktop standalone and I will comb over bitspace for anything amiss."

"As far as I know, the saboteur might be sabotaging even more."

"Oh that's just a professional ray of sunshine statement, right there," says Robo, "I've got a few spare boxen in some of my rooms, lets get you set up."

Jordan's going to end up in a smaller room with a couple of older monitors attached to much newer processors.

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