Hello, Mr. Major General (1)

Chapter 123 - Shortcut

“You can crack it in a day?!” Deepak and Rohit exclaimed at the same time. “The Europeans changed the channel encryption key for the Copernicus System after the Americans announced that they had cracked it. You’ll have to crack it all over again—are you sure you can do it in a single day?!”

The password for something as secure as a sat-nav system could only be cracked by a computer with a massive amount of processing power.

The Harvard School of m Engineering had cracked the channel encryption for the GSAT-7 System with the help of a supercomputer running 24/7.

They would have been waiting for years by the time Shehnaaz’s dinky little laptop managed to do the same.

Sidharth had lifted his head in surprise upon hearing what Shehnaaz had said, and was now watching Shehnaaz calmly with his dark eyes. They were separated by a computer screen, but Shehnaaz could feel his gaze bore
through her, all the same.

Shehnaaz forgot how to breathe. She lowered her eyes, not trusting herself to look at Sidharth again, and said,
softly, “Miss Shruti’s website has the original record of the signals from the Copernicus System. The amount of data seems overwhelming at first glance, but that’s only because there’s a lot of clutter and noise in it. If we can eliminate the noise, the amount of data we need to process will be massively reduced, which means the computing power required will also be reduced. My laptop…” At this point, she paused, raised her head, and looked directly at Deepak, who was sitting in one corner of the video feed on her laptop. She said, laughing, “Brother Deepak modified it. It has nothing on an actual supercomputer, but it’s still a lot more powerful than the average computer.”

Sidharth looked sideways at Deepak, who was sitting beside him. “You modified Sana’s laptop? Why didn’t I know about this?”

Deepak wished he could run over and clamp a hand over Shehnaaz’s mouth.

She had promised him she would keep it a secret from Sidharth!

How can you just snitch on me like that?! Deepak’s thought anxiously.

He should have known better than to trust Sana to be able to keep a secret from Mr. Shukla. She had readily spilled the entire can of beans, without even waiting for Mr. Shukla to ask her about it! The child was utterly spineless in front of Mr. Shukla.

Deepak inwardly swore at both Shehnaaz and Sidharth as he shook his head vaguely and said, “Me dumb dumb, me know nothing…”

“Pfft!” Rohit scoffed at Deepak’s ridiculous attempt at playing dumb. Did he really think that would be enough to get Mr. Shukla to let him off the hook?

Sidharth gave Deepak a cold, withering look. He rose from his seat and said, “You’ll stay up with Sana and help her crack the encryption. You’re not allowed to sleep, not until you have the password.” With that, he left the room.

Deepak immediately replied with a loud “Yes, sir!” He made a face at Shehnaaz. “My dear Sana, you sold me out.” He laughed wearily.

Shehnaaz saw that Sidharth had left, and was immediately a lot cheekier than she dared to be in his presence.

She returned Deepak’s funny face with one of her own. “Yup, I betrayed you. What’re you gonna do about it? I have no secrets from Uncle Sid. You should have known better, Brother Deepak.”

Shehnaaz’s cheeky act was endearing; Deepak could not find it in him to stay angry.

“Oh forget it, I forgive you. So what do you want to do?”

Deepak smiled, shook his head, and quickly got down to business.

Shehnaaz’s eyes lit up. She quickly explained to Deepak, with the help of a chart, what she had in mind.