Tag: Stephanie Roderick

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Narrative

At the Highest Level

Reginald Waite read through the proposed news brief a second time, wondering why it was even on his desk at all. He’d pretty much let Shepardsport Pirate Radio operate on its own, and certainly had never attempted to exert any sort of censorship authority over it.

Yes, Autumn had submitted that initial news brief after the Kitty Hawk Massacre to him for review, but it had been as much a courtesy because at the time she was still his guest here, not a permanent part of the community. Once she’d come to him with the idea of establishing a pirate radio station to get the real news out, he’d trusted her judgment as news director and never tried to micromanage her.

On the other hand, most of what she had been covering fell into the category of partisan politics. After he’d run the helmet-cam videos of the Massacre on U-Tube for the world to see, the worst abuses had been reined in.

What Autumn’s news brief described was nothing short of gross malfeasance of duty, being systematically covered up. Unfortunately, it was not hugely surprising — with so many people falling severely ill, it was inevitable that children would be left with no parent at home, and no close relative nearby.

But why did government agencies in several states feel such an intense need to disrupt the informal care arrangements that a lot of these children had worked out with their friends’ families? Legally speaking, they would be on shaky ground, especially if the parents were incapacitated as Dr. Thuc’s sources were indicating, but as long as nothing happened, it made far more sense to leave well enough alone and save state resources for where they were needed most. Certainly a reasonably safe home was preferable to this business of herding all these kids into gymnasiums and classrooms filled with cots, more akin to an emergency hurricane shelter than a foster home.

And to think that it probably would’ve gone unnoticed if Betty Margrave’s niece hadn’t maintained contact with an old friend from Houston. Did someone force that girl to write that stiff, stilted message, or had they simply confiscated her phone and written it for her? However it had come into being, it was so off that it actually managed to be more suspicious than if they’d left well enough alone.

Having someone from IT hacking into state child welfare office computers was irregular. However, given that it was done under the direction of the head of Safety and Security, it wasn’t like the Mallory kid had taken a wild hair to do it on his own.

On the other hand, Eli was a Shep, Betty was married to another Shep, and Autumn was the daughter of a third Shep. This was getting pretty en famiglia here.

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Narrative

Hacker Wanted

Work was the best way to keep the mind occupied, Steffi Roderick told herself. There was no telling how long it might take her brother to notice the e-mail he’d sent here, especially if communications were so snarled that his voice mail wasn’t even engaging and calls went to a busy signal.

And there was always plenty of work around the IT department, even when they weren’t trying to debug someone else’s equipment remotely. She had several projects she needed to touch base with people on — not necessarily urgent things, but still needing accomplished, and soon.

So when her phone rang, she assumed it would be Matt, finally calling her back. Which made it rather embarrassing when the caller proved to be Betty Margrave, calling from the Safety and Security offices.

“I’m looking for a hacker.”

Steffi’s guts clenched with dread. “What have they broken into now?”

“No, it’s not that kind of trouble. I need someone who’s skilled at getting into systems. My niece has been keeping in contact with a friend in Houston, and this friend’s family has been having some serious problems. We just got a text from her that just doesn’t seem right.”

As Betty read the text, Steffi had to agree — there was something fishy about the wording. Like an adult trying to sound like a child, and coming across more like what they thought a child ought to be saying rather than how kids really talked.

“So you’re trying to find out where that message came from, and what’s really going on with this Amy.”

“Exactly. Right now I’m not sure how much I can trust any of my old contacts on the ground down in Houston. I’m thinking we’re going to need to take a look inside some systems we’re not exactly welcome in. Which means I’m going to need the best hacker you can get me.”

The best hacker Steffi knew would be Toni Hargreaves, but she was over at Grissom City, and from what Betty was saying, this job didn’t sound like the sort one could do from verbal descriptions and texted screenshots. Lou Corlin had a lot of raw talent in the area — he’d been instrumental in setting up their streaming server — but he had that Chaffee tendency to be a straight-arrow. Even with the chief of security giving him the go-ahead to get into those systems, he wouldn’t feel that sense of no is a technical challenge that was essential to this kind of hacking.

The next best would be any of several kids she’d immediately thought as probable culprits when she thought Betty was looking to take down a hacker. Every one of those kids had pulled various stunts that weren’t quite bad enough to get them in legal trouble, but still enough to warrant official attention within the settlement.

And most of them were Sheps. On one hand, that might be a good thing — Betty was married to a Shep, so there was a familial obligation.

On the other hand, Sheps were not easy to manage. And if she sent more than one, they might well get so competitive that they’d end up sabotaging each other’s work.

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Narrative

Echoes of Home

Today was shaping up to be a rather frustrating day. After a day and a half of working with the Gagarinsk IT people on their network problems, Steffi was no closer to a solution.

Having exhausted the resources of her team here in Shepardsport, she decided it was time to talk to Toni Hargreaves over at Grissom City. Back when they were both working on the Dispater team at JPL, Toni had frequently come up with solutions for problems that had stumped everyone else. More than once she’d spent so much time helping other teams with their intractable problems that she’d ended up having to pull an all-nighter to get her own code written in time.

As they were discussing the ins and outs of networking, the text chime sounded in her ear. Surprised, she pulled the phone away from her ear to take a look.

It was her brother. Call me. Dad’s got a problem.

There was nothing to do but cut her call short and try to reach her brother. “Toni, I’m going to have to let you go. I just got a text from my brother. Something’s happened, and I’d better find out what.”

“No problem. Talk to you later.” Although Toni tried to sound unflustered, Steffi could hear the catch in her voice.

Then she remembered — Toni was from Phoenix. An only child, she’d lost both parents when the old Chinese space station crashed into the city. Even after all these years, she remained a little sensitive about being left with no family but the one she’d made for herself: her husband, her children, and her husband’s various clone-brothers, most of whom lived over here in Shepardsport.

No time to worry about it. Toni was a resilient woman, and right now Steffi needed to find out what was going on with her dad. The last she’d heard, her mother was doing better after what the doctors was pretty sure was a mild heart attack, and it had sounded like she was about ready to be discharged, albeit with the requirement that she and Dad both quarantine themselves at home for three weeks to ensure neither of them had been exposed to the diablovirus.

However, when Steffi dialed Matt’s number, she got only a busy signal. It didn’t even go to voicemail, which suggested something was overloading the circuits.

On the other hand, it was also possible that he’d gotten a new phone and neglected to configure his voicemail. Matt was a good guy, but had a certain tendency to let things slide by him. And if he was calling the rest of the family right now, giving them the heads-up, it might take a while.

Whatever was going on, she couldn’t wait indefinitely. After the third attempt to connect got the same busy signal, Steffi decided it was time to shoot him a quick text. Tried to get through to you, but it’s not even going to voicemail. I’ll try to call later this evening.

Now it was time to get back to work.

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Narrative

Troubling News

Tired from an afternoon of supervising her division’s efforts to help Gagarinsk with their IT problems, Steffi Roderick retreated to her office for a moment’s respite. Might as well check her e-mail while she was waiting for her coffee maker to heat up.

She usually didn’t check personal e-mail accounts during her duty hours, but as rough as things had been of late, she figured she could make an exception. Just take a quick peek, see if there was anything that needed her immediate attention.

At first glance it looked like the usual mishmash of mailing lists and commercial pitches that weren’t quite spammy enough to fall into her spam trap. And then she saw her dad’s name on one e-mail.

Dad usually e-mails me on the weekend. Is something wrong?

Deciding that this departure from routine constituted something significant enough to be considered an emergency, she clicked on it. A guilty part of her mind was halfway hoping that the opening pleasantries meant that whatever was behind the unexpected e-mail was a happy surprise.

Then she hit the next paragraph. Sure, her father tried to soften the blow, but she could recognize minimizing when she saw it. No matter how gently you tried to put it, discovering that a family member had been taken to the hospital was not good news in a time like this.

Even if her mother’s chest pains were just a mild heart attack as her father was saying, a hospital was not a good place to be right now. And to have to go there alone, now that family wasn’t allowed to visit… it wouldn’t be an easy situation for her mother to face, alone among strangers, not certain what was wrong with her or how serious.

And then Steffi realized she had a more immediate problem. How much did she tell her family up here? Reggie had a full plate already with everything going on, and she hated to add one more thing, especially since it wasn’t his parents. And while the kids weren’t total innocents to loss — the Moon was an unforgiving place, and more than a few of those names on the Wall of Honor were people they knew personally — they’d been relatively lucky in terms of extended family.

In any case, it was news best delivered in person, and privately. And it might be best to arrange some real-time conversation with her dad first, to make sure she had the most up-to-date information. Not necessarily FaceTime — she couldn’t remember whether his phone even had the capacity for videoconferencing — but at least a voice conversation.

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Narrative

Malware Solutions

When Spruance Del Curtin got Steffi Roderick’s voicemail, he’d assumed that would be the end of it. But about fifteen minutes later, he’d received a call from her: get down to the IT Department ASAP.

So here he was, doing his best to look the part of the hotshot Shep who wasn’t afraid of anything. He didn’t usually go down to IT, and when he did, it was mostly to drop off or pick up stuff related to the station for Lou Corlin.

But tonight it looked like Steffi had assembled most of her division chiefs on pretty much a moment’s notice. Not all of them — he knew from Lou’s descriptions that several of the hardware people weren’t. But the key systems analysts and network security people were all here — hardly surprising given they’d been working around the clock trying to restore Shepardsport’s network connectivity ever since this mess started.

Now he had to explain his theory to the real professionals, when he wasn’t entirely sure whether he was even using the correct terminology. He’d learned some of it in the course of his training on audio streaming technology, but he still wasn’t entirely sure of things like the precise difference between a gateway and an access point, or how a router differed from a hub. Not to mention that he might not even have the right term for the kind of malware he was envisioning.

However, all these people were listening to him with genuine attention. Not just the polite smile and nod he would’ve gotten back on Earth, but actually taking notes.

Of course it probably helped that Captain Waite himself was sitting at the side of the room, looking very much like Alan Shepard himself preparing for his moonshot. Being reminded that they were listening to one of the commandant’s clone-brothers, and that he had the favor of the boss himself, went a long way to keeping the adults from doing the old auto-brushoff.

Which is.a far cry from him calling me on the carpet — when was it? Already that awkward interview felt like another lifetime ago.

And then they were actually asking him questions, sometimes technical enough that he’d have to admit most of his background in networking came from his work with Shepardsport Pirate Radio. But they showed him no condescention for the admission, which truly astonished him.

However, it looked like they weren’t actually going to be pulling him into their team. Steffi reminded everyone that he was already committed to Dr. Doorne’s project, and needed his rest to be ready to meet with her tomorrow.

Oh well, you can’t have everything. Sprue did his best to look genuinely pleased as he thanked everybody. With luck, nobody would be sure whether any stiffness wasn’t just the Icy Commander peeking through.

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Narrative

For a Bit of Quiet

Reggie Waite didn’t usually eat meals in his office. Unless he was particularly busy, or had to squeeze lunch in between back-to-back meetings, he preferred to go down to the dining commons. Especially in such troubled times, it was good for people to see their leadership sitting at the head table.

Tonight he was enjoying a quiet, private supper with his wife. He and Steffi had agreed they’d keep business out of their conversation, just pleasantries and family matters. They’d even agreed to put their phones in a hush box so they wouldn’t be interrupted by incoming calls or texts. If a real emergency were to come up, Betty Margrave knew where they were and why, and her office was just down the corridor.

Even so, all good things must necessarily end. And as they pulled their phones out of the hush box, Steffi’s came on with an alert: missed call and voicemail. “What’s Spruance Del Curtin calling me about? Maybe I’d better check.”

Had it only been a few days ago that Reggie had called Sprue on the carpet right here in this office? The last few days had been so crazy that it seemed like another lifetime ago. “Put it on speaker. I want to hear what he’s up to.”

There was a buzz of background noise that made it difficult to hear Sprue’s words. “…have an idea … not what we think … different kind…. something something malware…”

Reggie looked at his wife. “Is it just me, too many years of jet and rocket engines battering the old ears, or is he coming through really badly?”

“It may just be having it on speaker. This is an older phone. With everything so tight, making it work a little longer with a bit of judicious application of a soldering iron has been one fewer resource we have to find.” Steffi woke the screen. “Let me take it off speaker and replay it for you to listen.”

This time it was a little better, although it also made it easier to hear a couple of younger kids passing through whatever room Sprue was in. Maybe preschoolers, using the module corridors as a playground — kids up here learned to keep their voices down young.

However, it did enable Reggie to follow what Sprue was saying, enough to tell the kid seemed to think he was onto something. “Steffi, I think you’d better listen to this a couple of times. If he’s right, the whole IT department may have wasted two days on a completely wrong strategy.”

It just took her one listen to be convinced. “I think he’s onto something. We’d better have a talk with him.”

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Narrative

Pondering the Implications

When Lou Corlin arrived at the station to start his air shift, he was surprised to see half a dozen people from IT in the offices, their laptops connected to the station computers via Ethernet cable. He hadn’t noticed any problems with the stream when his alarm went off.

One of the IT people was talking to Cindy, so asking her what was going on wasn’t an option. And all the other IT people looked far too busy to interrupt.

Nothing to do at this point but focus on doing his own job. Back in the creche you learned that principle early, from plenty of examples out of the history of America’s early space program.

And his job was to get ready to do his air shift, and then DJ the Rising Sun J-Pop Show to the best of his ability. Not a difficult task, but one in which mistakes could have definite consequences. All the DJ’s had taken their drubbings for leaving dead air because they hadn’t adequately planned their lineup for a moment away from the broadcast booth.

While he was waiting for Brenda Redmond to emerge from the DJ booth, Lou listened to the livestream playing on the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk. The audio quality on “Blackbird” sounded fine, including the blackbird singing.

However, it wouldn’t be as good an indicator of transmission quality as it would be on a station that was transmitting via actual radio waves. With Internet radio streaming, it just meant that the stereo was getting a good feed from the streaming server, which meant only two or three routers to hop. There simply wasn’t any good way for an Internet radio station to be sure how its stream was propagating over the millions of routers across the Earth-Moon system.

And then the door opened and out stepped Brenda, looking worried. “Good morning, Lou. I see you’ve noticed the IT people up here. I don’t know if you’ve been on the Web any this morning, but Shepardsport seems to be having trouble communicating with the rest of the Internet this morning.”

Lou realized his mind was beginning to race with alarm and quickly curbed it. “What kind of problems?”

“That’s what IT’s trying to figure out right now. Stephanie Roderick thought it was a DDOS attack, but now she’s saying there’s no sign of net traffic overage. At the moment, all we can do is keep broadcasting for the local audience and hope IT doesn’t have to reboot all the servers and routers.”

“Now that would be a major piece of downtime.” Lou looked over Brenda’s air-shift notes, checking for anything he should be aware of.

Then it was time to take over the DJ booth and line up his first set of the day. As he prepared to deliver the top-of-the-hour station identification, he wondered if this were some new kind of cyber attack. They’d weathered several DDOS attacks before, until IT had put in new software to foil the software that turned improperly secured comptuers into “zombie machines” sending spurrious requests to the target servers. But information security was always an arms race between the hackers and the sysops.

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Narrative

Keep On Keeping On

All the way to the station, Brenda couldn’t stop thinking about the FaceTime call that had gone garbled and broke up. Not so much that she was worried about Drew’s safety, but what it meant for digital communications between Shepardsport and the rest of the three worlds.

And then she arrived at the front office and knew something very serious was going on. It wasn’t unusual to find a tech or two from IT working on something around here. Just about everything they were using was old stuff, and a lot of it had been repurposed in quirky ways to adapt it for audio streaming.

But to find the Head of Information Technology and two of her senior department heads in here — no, this was not a good sign. Especially the way they were talking among themselves in low voices.

Which raised the question of whether she should greet them as she came in, or just hurry past as quietly as possible so she didn’t disturb their concentration. Cindy wasn’t in yet, but given the situation with Kitty and her friend Amy down on Earth, it was possible she was otherwise occupied. Autumn had made it clear that Cindy was to be excused if Amy or her siblings needed an advocate.

And if that friend of hers is getting static from the child welfare people, she may end up needing a lot more advocacy than a teenager can provide. Heck, I’m not sure how serious they’d take me. Sure, I’m married and have two kids, but I’m still young compared to the average Houston mom. We grow up early here on the High Frontier.

Even as she was considering what to do, Steffi noticed her. “Hello, Brenda. Since you’re a little early for your air shift,” a significant glance at the clock behind the receptionist’s desk, “could you hold on for a moment?”

“Sure. What seems to be the problem?” Although Brenda was trying to keep her voice firm and professional, she couldn’t entirely suppress a little nervous quaver. That old fear that she would be in trouble for something.

“We’re having some network issues. I know your husband is posted at Slayton Field, so I was wondering if you could try to contact him.”

“I have.” Brenda explained about their attempt to FaceTime. “At first it seemed to be connecting fine, but all of a sudden it got really super-slow, like you get when you’re trying to talk with someone on a spacecraft that’s heading off to Mars. And then everything broke up, and I couldn’t connect again.”

All three IT people exchanged glances, nods of agreement. But there was nothing happy about their expressions, which meant they were recognizing that something very serious was going on.

Hardly surprising, after the cyber attack on the landers at Slayton Field. Drew had never talked much about it, which was unusual for a Shep, and suggested that it had been a particularly traumatic experience for him.

A bit of quick conferring with colleagues, and Steffi turned back to Brenda. “We’ve been thinking this was some kind of DDOS attack, since it seems to be blocking traffic with Earth. However, I’m starting to wonder if we’re dealing with a worm.”

Brenda had a basic idea of network security — everybody did, for the simple reason that everyone was at risk from having their critical accounts hacked by one or another kind of scammer. However, she wasn’t necessarily all that strong on the finer details of what distinguished different types of malware and cyber-attacks.

On the other hand, she did have a good sense of what might affect her air shift, which was rapidly coming up. “Then we’re going to be having trouble transmitting…” She gestured toward the DJ booth and the studios for pre-recording interviews and similar programs.

“If you’re worried about whether you’ll be able to do your air shift, we still have normal connectivity within Shepardsport,” a nod to the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk, which was playing the current livestream, “and the outlying settlements that are connected by overland cable to it. People here in town are depending on the station, so don’t let them down.”

With the time for hand-off getting close, there was nothing further for Brenda to do but thank Steffi and hurry back to start up Breakfast With the Beatles. Even a cup of coffee would have to wait for her first long set.

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Narrative

What Is the Matter With Those Phones?

Steffi Roderick was at the dining commons, finishing her breakfast, when her phone rang. Unusual, since most people would text first at this hour, to make sure she was available to talk.

She pulled out the phone, saw the name of the head of the helpdesk department. If. Bob were calling, something serious was going on. Better go ahead and answer.

Bob Quires was a man of phlegmatic temperament, and she’d chosen him for this job because very few things could rattle him. However, today his voice had an under tone of alarm under the surface appearance of calm. “Steffi, we’ve got a problem down here. The phones are ringing off the hook, and my people are working like a bunch of one-legged men at an ass-kicking contest.”

The expression telephones ringing off the hook had always amused Steffi. In theory it could actually happen with analog telephony, particularly if a few unusual malfunctions were to occur. But with modern digital telephony it would be logically impossible for a ringtone to be initiated during an active call instead of the interrupting call going to voicemail.

But there was no time to reminisce about how curiosity about an expression had begun her journey into electrical engineering. Right now she had a problem to solve. “What are we looking at?”

“Right now it seems to be a dog’s breakfast of problems. People getting cut off in the middle of early-morning teleconferences. Researchers unable to access datasets they need. Websites suddenly becoming unavailable or unreliable, especially financial ones.”

“That’s not sounding good. I’ll be down as soon as I can. In the meantime, get the traffic analysts on the job. I’m thinking there’s got to be a pattern in there somewhere.”

The conversation finished, Steffi finished the last few bites of her meal. Even after that desperate first year of the Expulsions had become just a memory, wasting food was something one simply did not do. As soon as she’d cleaned her plate, she scanned herself back out so the bots could take away the dishes and make her place ready for the next person to sit down at it.

As she walked down to the IT offices, she did some tests of her own. Although she wouldn’t be able to access the sophisticated diagnostic software until she was at her work computer, there were some basic things she could do from her phone, like checking various websites.

It didn’t take long to notice a pattern. Anything on the local servers was no problem to access. Servers elsewhere on the Moon were hit and miss, while anything on Earth got her nothing but the spinning circle.

She could think of several kinds of accidents that would produce this sort of situation. However, it was also possible that someone was deliberately trying to cut off Shepardsport’s ability to communicate with Earth. Ever since they started up the radio station and telling the truth behind the Flannigan Administration’s lies, they’d been dealing with intermittent DDOS attacks.

Although this didn’t look like a typical DDOS attack, there was no way to be sure until she could get to her diagnostic software, which didn’t run on a phone OS. But in the meantime she’d better let Betty Margrave know, just to be on the safe side.

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Narrative

Closer to Home

Steffi Roderick had just sat down at her desk and opened her work laptop when her phone chimed incoming text.

She pulled her phone out, saw it was from Toni Hargreaves, an old friend from her Jet Propulsion Laboratory days, now working in the IT department over in Grissom City. Can you talk?

Toni wasn’t the sort of person to waste time in idle chit-chat. Either she needed some help on a programming task, or something really bad had happened.

I can take a little time. What’s going on?

Cather just got a message from one of his old buddies in the San Bernardino Fire Department. Apparently one of the other guys got sick a couple days ago, and he went downhill really fast. By the time he realized it wasn’t just an ordinary stomachache, he was crashing.

Toni’s husband was now deputy head of safety and security over at Grissom City, but he’d worked in EMS for years before he came up here. That sort of work tended to forge tight bonds between the people doing the work, but it still seemed odd that they’d keep someone in the loop who’d been away for several years now.

How bad?

By the time they got him to the hospital, he was going into septic shock. According to what Cather said, it was like his organs were just shutting down. They’re thinking it’s connected with this thing that’s going around the nursing homes, but a lot of the crews have been on calls to nursing homes lately.

Steffi recalled her own aunt. She’d meant to write back to her dad and ask how Aunt Margaret was doing, but with everything going on up here, it had slipped her mind. Presumably nothing too terrible had happened, since he hadn’t sent any further messages about her condition. However, Steffi made a mental note to check up on the situation.

It’s been bad. Remember Sam Goldstein at JPL? I got an e-mail from him a few days ago about one of the senior researchers having to take time off because his daughter had been volunteering at one of those nursing homes. We both thought it was just an abundance of caution.

Which made her realize that she hadn’t followed up on that one either. Sam might be busy with his current projects, but she was sure he’d appreciate at least a little show of concern.

And then Toni’s response arrived. That’s apparently what a lot of people were thinking. Cather’s been talking with Medstaff a lot about the situation.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking with Medstaff here too. If you want, I can pass the information on to Dr. Thuc.

This time Toni took longer to respond, enough that Steffi thought the conversation was over and logged onto her work laptop, getting ready to go over some jobs in process for the Astronomy Department.

Go ahead and tell her, but I don’t know how much information Cather even has. Medical privacy and all that. I know he’s probably told me a lot more than he should’ve over the years. And I really need to get to work. I’ve got about a thousand lines of code to write for the robotics shop, and I’m behind because I was helping the guys down in Hydroponics with some issues with their pumps.

Steffi sent her old friend a quick good-bye, then opened a new e-mail window. First thing, pass the word to Dr. Thuc that it wasn’t just frail elders and homeless people dying of that bug going around. Then check up on Dad.