Dark Tidings

Chapter 18 - 10 Types of People

"Computers should work. People should think," said Michael, engaging in the type of banter he'd developed to endear himself to his co-workers.

"Too right, Michael. You make the things work but I wish you could make the damned things be a bit more helpful."

"Sorry, I'm afraid computers do what you tell them to do, never what you want them to do."

Hearing the IT Support guy poke fun at computers helped people feel less threatened by the mysterious systems which seemed to be taking over their lives and, the less they felt threatened, the more they seemed to like him. But his main focus wasn't to make friends, his main focus was winning the respect and trust of senior management, and his long hours and hard work had already gone a long way towards proving himself to them. They now knew they could rely on him to get the job done.

Michael's feet were well and truly under the proverbial desk. He was well-respected, and his reputation was strong and growing. Things were going exactly to plan and, as if to prove the point, his king-of-the-geeks boss arrived bearing a gift.

"Here, Michael, I saw this and thought of you," said Mr Toner as he placed a little plaque on Michael's desk. It read, 'There are 10 types of people, those who know binary and those who don't.'

It was an old joke, but Michael laughed out loud anyway, it was always good to humour your boss. Once Toner had left, Michael scribbled 'and those who understand off-by-one errors' on a Post-it note and attached it to the end of the plaque. "Now that's a proper nerd joke," he whispered to himself before scrunching up the note and binning it. No point in having something only proper programmers would understand and, anyway, Toner mightn't appreciate his gift being 'vandalised'.

Michael was proud of how quickly he'd won over senior managers like Toner. True, he'd put in a lot of effort and the more important the person, the more of his time they'd got. After all, they were the ones who could give him what he needed. They'd already elevated his security rating, so he now had access to pretty much any system within the organisation, even his own personnel records. For fun, he made a few undetectable changes to his files, so he now had a university degree, a PhD no less, and he'd upped his salary by twelve pence a year, just to prove he could.

His new higher-level security clearance allowed him to come and go as he pleased. This meant he could be around the office at times when there were fewer prying eyes around to spot him messing with their systems because, in parallel with creating his trustworthy reputation, he was putting in place many of his plan's fundamental building blocks. He'd disabled specific parts of the Noviru hacking protection package, so he could invisibly infect the system with little modules of his own software. These modules gave him secret entry points into the key systems which, when the time came, would let him manipulate the swathes of money which swished through the bank's network.

It was all going well, and he'd achieved everything he'd set out to achieve. He was ready for the next phase of his plan.