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Narrative

The Digital Dungeon

A single computer’s cooling fan wasn’t that loud, but the big fans that cooled the rack servers produced a curtain of white noise. Here in the main Shepardsport server farm, surrounded by rank after rank of rack servers, someone could be talking a few feet away and Steffi might not even hear them.

Even the click of the KVM switch was muffled as she worked her way down the rack of blade servers. Normally this sort of thing would be handled by someone much lower than the head of IT. However, after the trouble they’d been having, the possibility that malware had gotten through their security systems again was alarming enough that she wanted to check things herself.

She was almost done with the rack when the text chime sounded on her phone. She started to reach for it, then checked herself. SMS was asynchronous and could wait until she got this rack of servers checked.

Finished with the task, she took a look at her messaging app. What was with this cryptic message from Toni Hargreaves? It wasn’t like her to write such an evasive message

Or was it from Toni? They’d been having some problems with spoofed texts of late. It wouldn’t be impossible to get someone’s contacts list and make it look like a message came from a trusted friend.

Steffi decided she’d better ask Jack. He was one of her best security guys, and would be able to tell if her phone had been compromised, or if the settlement’s SMS servers had been hacked.