Em

Chapter 8: Politics

IT WAS WELL BEFORE SEVEN when she finished swiping and reached her desk. No one else was in yet, not even Wai. Allison would want to speak to her, and Em wanted to make sure she at least had good notes to accompany her lack of results. She unlocked her machine and set about putting together a basic report on her method.

It didn't take her long to piece everything together. She didn't have a copy of the log files from Red 5 to show the success of Stoakley's live telephone test. Stoakley said he'd fire everything over once he'd had another look through it all. But she did have her own results from her test net on Meta-Pro's servers. They would be better than nothing. She connected to the database to check the logs.

The first thing she noticed was that her net was still running. The second was that it had found a signature while she was at the Doughnut. It must have come up with Stoakley's test too, she thought. But she realised that it couldn't have — Stoakley's test was on GCHQ's phone recordings and her servers at Meta-Pro didn't have access to that data. Her heart rate increased. The time on the log file said the match had been made at 2:12am, nearly two hours after she left the donut. It was a new match. Her net had worked!

As excited as she was, she needed to verify the result. She had to make sure that the audio capture that her net had identified actually contained a signature, and not some random background interference. The log file told her that the audio had been captured from a server for a game called Counterstrike. That was one of the games mentioned in the Five report, and its servers must have been in the live game captures she'd pointed her net at. The log also contained an identifier for the image file which gave the coordinates of the signature. She pulled up the image and found the corresponding audio file her transform script had processed.

She made a copy to her machine and plugged in her headphones. A quick calculation on the coordinates told her when the signature should occur. She skipped the audio file to roughly the right time. There were lots of explosions and some laughter. She listened to a few seconds and there it was — the clicking of a keyboard. There was no point trying to hear what had been typed, she trusted her net to get that part right.

She went back to the log file. 37_Fl3x0r. It showed which of Ratkai's settings the signature used. She'd been right; it was a fast, confident typist using both hands in the proper way. Lucky for them. If it had been a one-armed hesitant typist on a touchscreen, the net would never have found it. She felt good. Really good.

The next ten minutes were spent compiling all the information into one summary file. She wrote an email to Allison with a quick summary and included a link to the summary and the brief report on the method. She copied Stoakley in, both because she wanted him to see the net's success, and to keep him up to speed in case Allison wanted to speak to him. She sent the emails as Wai came in.

He put his coat on the back of the chair. "How'd it go at the Doughnut?"

"Not very well," Em said with a smile. "But my net here might have caught something useful."

"Well, I didn't hit anything and neither did Paul or James," Wai said. "So well done."

"Thanks."

Em locked her machine and stood up. She hadn't felt like eating earlier, but now she was starving. And a celebratory coffee seemed in order.

"You want anything from Optimal?" she asked on her way out.

Wai held up a takeaway coffee cup and shook his head.

There was a pause in the drizzle that coincided with a gap in the traffic. Em took advantage of both. Optimal was full and buzzing. Five members of staff were busy behind the counter. Em found herself absentmindedly looking for the guy with the accent while she queued. He appeared from the back office with a tray full of clean cups and plates as she reached the head of the queue. He dumped them on a draining board and turned to take her order.