The Passionate Mistake (2 page)

If big companies like this were all about true efficiency, she wouldn’t have to be there at all. She co
uld set up her tablet to record then leave the meeting and come back and collect it later. But it wasn’t like that. No one wanted to see employees working smarter, not harder; especially go-fers, who weren’t supposed to be smart; to reason through their workload and design systems to save time. Go-fers weren’t supposed to think at all. Others would mark her as arrogant if she scraped through the bare minimum in a group setting. And in a group setting they might whisper about her to each other. The whole point was to generate no notice. Just to blend in.

Of course this would allow her the chance to steal another password with almost zero effort. She supposed that was worth the tyranny of another meeting where she must not speak up, let alone dominate the dialogue as she would in
any
other context.

As she went past Jay’s unguarded computer she scanned
the area with a surreptitious glance, then a more thorough rotation, finding herself alone; obviously his team was already on their way to the meeting. She stuck her USB stick in the port of his computer and paused to wait for the flashing to stop, apparently fussing with the shoe lace of her sneaker, propping it on his desk amidst the encircling glade of real palm trees. Some of the fronds almost brushed the work surface. So impractical.

Flash
flash flash flash and done.

In the large meeting room p
eople took seats or stood around the oval table, casually, with a bunching towards one end of the room where the wall screen was lit and ready for the first presentation. Beanbags were scattered on the floor there, some of them occupied by programmers who sat with laptops or tablets, legs out straight in front of them, like teenagers lounging around in their bedrooms at home. No rules, no discipline. When it came to the small stuff, the only rule was ‘anything goes’, at DigiCom.

Sure enough, it only took Cathy
three minutes standing over the dozen people seated near her to get a new passcode. Francine’s. She wouldn’t have chosen Francine out of a desire for vengeance – that would be petty, and pettiness was abhorrent – but she couldn’t say she was displeased. Francine did have a patronizing way of dealing with inferiors; inferiors like Cathy. Or more precisely, inferiors like she thought Cathy to be. In reality Cathy could eat the Francines of the world for breakfast.

Francine
relished the chance to order someone around, to direct them. And when she had explained with towering condescension the project on which she was working – despite Cathy having never enquired – and then topped off her offense by giving a grating little laugh and saying, “I don’t spose that makes much sense to
you
though, does it?” she had nearly worn the cup of coffee Cathy was ferrying at the time.

No, she didn’t want to punish
Francine, but if she incriminated her as a person sniffing around secure areas of the network and got her into trouble . . . well, that would just be unfortunate, wouldn’t it?

Cathy
opened the meetings application she had been sent when she first arrived at DigiCom, made a note of all the attendees and their seating arrangements then flicked the tab for record. Keeping her strokes on the screen’s virtual keyboard very light to avoid disturbing the sound pick-up, she got back to work.

She felt the little surge of excitement as she entered
Francine’s password. This task was more exciting when in the room crammed full of the company’s people than alone at her desk. She rolled her eyes at her own thrill-seeking tendencies. She was virtually living on stress and adrenalin these days, in between the maddening spells of boredom.

No wonder
she was nearly going insane, with tension coming and going like a pendulum swing. Who wouldn’t?

In seconds she was
deep in the network, working on the firewall again. She found the tag linked to the unauthorized search query – stupid of her, she should have scanned for that first – and told it Francine was authorized, which it accepted without demur. Her search query – with a slightly tweaked script in case her previous one had been logged and sent a red flag to the system – netted a dozen files that looked promising.

Trawling through one, she appr
oved the elegance of the script. It was written by an expert programmer; though hmmm, not bug-free. She altered a pair of pathways that could cause the coder trouble down the road, an absent-minded action, just because she could.

She paused to t
ake a quick glance around the room, checking for any threat, but she was ignored. The man at the front of the crowd now was quite a good speaker and he held the interest of his listeners. Dave. It was her job to know everyone, so know them she did. Dave Carter, flaccid belly overhanging his pants, one hand resting on the top of the mass as it jiggled along with his laughter at his own joke. Others laughed too. Yes, a good speaker. She didn’t like his code though. Weak. Too many keystrokes to say too little. He needed to pare back.

She scanned sideways and
her attention was caught by the boss, sitting to Dave’s left, alternately listening and swiping at the screen of his own tablet. From her angle she couldn’t see what programs he was in. She was curious. Michael Summers was his name, and him she watched too much. Watched him almost obsessively whenever she encountered him, in fact, though she did her best not to. He was certainly charismatic enough. Even when quietly listening to someone else talk he drew attention; a natural-born leader.

H
is tablet looked fragile in those square, muscular hands with veins roping all over them. Big capable hands. Mmmm. Good hands. The rest of him was big too. Broad shoulders under a smoky blue polo-neck shirt, dark blue denim clasping large, shapely thighs. When he shifted to lean back in his chair his shirt draped conveniently over his pectorals and flat abdomen. Convenient for someone checking him out, that is. Her gaze wandered dreamily back up to his face, and she almost bit her tongue.

Without moving his head his eyes were now on her, a dark
, penetrating gaze that made her hot all over. Certain she was blushing, she pretended great interest in what Dave was saying. He was theorizing about the need parents had for an application to track their offspring’s whereabouts and show their location on a map.

For agonizing
moments she stared unblinking at Dave, until finally she dared flick her eyes back towards the boss for a swift reconnaissance. He too was looking at Dave again, his blandly interested expression unchanged. She released the breath she’d been holding. Then she went back to the program, straightening out two more lines of code before abandoning it.  It was code for populating a website with a dozen features and it was too esoteric. She wanted a program that was truly generic, and this wasn’t it.

Without
at first realizing it, she was staring at Mike again. Dark-haired and handsome as the devil. Intense and charming. He gazed at his tablet, a small furrow between his brows. He looked up and scanned the room. She ducked her head just before he caught her watching him again. But it was the others he was looking at: his programmers, not her hovering to one side of the room. He was looking at his tablet and then back up as if puzzled. Looking at Francine, in fact.

She shrugged and dismissed him from her mind
with a small effort, refocusing on the next software file, translating code with an ease born of years of practice. This was a little closer to what she wanted: an application for organizing and scheduling a busy working mother’s overwhelming workload; tying into Dave’s presentation, no doubt.

Motherhood was generic. There were billions of mothers in the world. Perhaps she had the right program. But it looked like only half of it.
A shell of user interface designed to wrap around a deeper functionality. There were chunks missing. Were they still in development? Or was there another level of data she had not yet reached?

Just like every damned program
-in-progress she’d accessed so far, which pointed to a library of source code that was nowhere she could access. It must be locked up in the Datacentre. There were no hidden rooms anywhere in the building and the only other locked section was the plushy office suite on the first floor for the Platform Division’s programmers.

She brought up her worm and sent it tunneling through the networks, searching for links
to the mothers’ program, anything she might have missed. She was distracted each time the speaker changed, and a couple of times found herself Mike-watching again, but mostly her task held her attention until the series of presentations came to an end. The subject of the meeting was the gathered thoughts of this work team on their current projects, the Inspirations. Served out to the team via auditory medium and tactile (the folders), and now they would discuss the ideas.

It was
a process that was supposed to engage the team fully. She knew the theories behind it, and it all sounded like hooey to her. Just send people an email telling them what they were supposed to do, and then let them get on with it. This sort of thing was
such
a waste of time.

Anyway the discussion was really the part of the event where
she was expected to take notes. The actual presentations would already have been emailed to everyone anyway. The debate was the soul of it.

She
disconnected from the remote server running the search and tucked her worm’s results well out of sight. When everything looked innocuous enough she put her tablet in the centre of the table for best sound pick up, then backed away and tried to look like wallpaper.

As
the discussion proceeded it was hard to keep her mouth shut. Bright as the members of the team were, there were holes and gaps in their thinking. She longed to plug them. Incompetence was difficult to tolerate. Twice her mouth fell open and she drew breath ready to speak. Twice she squelched herself. Not her place, not her role, and definitely not part of her plan.

The second time Mike
Summers caught the movement, looking at her again with his eyebrows raised. With the whole room attuned to him, it was only seconds before heads started to turn her way and the speaker of the moment stammered and paused. Cathy put her hands behind her back and looked at the floor in stony denial she had anything to contribute, and after a moment the speaker resumed, faltering slightly.

Whoops. Way to go, staying below the radar. Next ti
me she was asked to do this job she would just leave her tablet in the centre of the table and leave, and let anyone who wanted to notice and gossip about that slacker Cathy go right ahead. She’d leave now except she’d never take the chance of the tablet being picked up by someone else with those search results and the other evidence of her cracking.

As soon as things wrapped up she stepped forward to claim her tablet, ending the recording. Before she had time to move
away from the table she heard Mike say to the team leader, Alex: “Alex, who’ve you got working on the Jonas site?”

“No one yet.
Why?”

“That’s strange. The code’s been
rejigged. It’s done under Francine’s name but she was sitting right here at the time the alterations were made.”

Cathy
paused and started gathering up water glasses to give her an excuse to linger, so she could listen in.

“Big changes?” said Alex
.

“Nothing major.
I only spotted it because I was already in there having a tinker. They’re fairly sophisticated fixes to bugs we hadn’t even spotted. Not her usual coding style either. Good work. I like it. Do you think it might be Sophie? They work together, don’t they?”

“
We haven’t discussed anything about that program, but I’ll ask.”

“Do. Let me know.
They shouldn’t be using each other’s profiles though. It’s confusing for the system and it makes it difficult to assign credit.”

The men left.
Cathy moved the glasses to the water cart and followed the last meeting attendees back out, tablet tucked under her arm. She was intrigued he had spotted the changes she made. In her experience no one noticed tiny alterations like that. Not unless they were searching for a bug that had been introduced, and she had done no such thing. She’d improved the software; only subtly, but hey; If you could achieve perfection, why not?

He had some skills, she mused. She’d assumed they had hired him for his management talents, but maybe his programming know-how had given him the edge over the competition.
So he was a whiz kid programmer too. He hid his inner geek well.

Of course these days
it was rather harder to pick computer nerds out of a crowd. Computers were the dominant tool of the culture. Mainstream. You didn’t need to look like a pale, hairy creature that had just crawled out from under a rock and was blinking in the light of day in order to write software.

Look at her. She h
ardly fit the stereotype either; or at least, not when she looked her normal self. But dressed as she was, with mousy brown pigtails and an overgrown fringe, glasses (without prescription lenses), no make-up and baggy cardigan and jeans, she might just qualify for the stereotype after all.