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The Custodian Conspiracy
by Rocko Bonaparte
Outside AbalTech's building B, a bunch of old, busted-up cars congregated in the parking lot. The sun had set, but the day had just begun for the janitors. They mopped the floors in the cafeteria, they emptied the garbage in the cubicles, and they made sure everything would be clean come tomorrow. It took them about an hour from start to finish. Then the real fun began.
What the other folks at AbalTech didn't know was that the brightest minds of the company were busy working there at that exact moment. They entered the cubicles, powered on the computers, and logged in as the employees. One would think security would normally pick up on this in the morning, but some janitors were busy "cleaning" in the control room. In other words, the janitors took care of the controls. They made sure everything looked nice and normal.
Johnny McGee, building B's custodial manager, used the security bridge as his office. He liked seeing everybody on the consoles as things developed. His first development for the evening was a leftover from days ago. AbalTech was developing a fly-by-wire control system for a yet-undisclosed new US fighter-bomber. The problem was simulations showed the hardware would crash if the plane went below sea level. Normally, that wouldn't happen, but if they do their testing in the right spots, that could cause some serious problems. They went beyond the specification boundaries trying to fix it. While fixing that, they botched the design even further, to the point where they couldn't even simulate anymore. Every night, the janitors struggled to plug up the problems, but the engineering staff was really good at making even more of them..
"Seems kind of odd, really," Johnny surmised, "that the people that are supposed to solve problems cause the most problems." He was in there with some new guy, getting him comfortable with things. Just like everybody else, the new guy thought signing up as an AbalTech custodian would be a great way to boost his semiconductor synthesis and manufacture expertise. What he didn't realize was he shared the building with like-minded individuals. The only exceptions were the folks in security. The only thing they liked to do was collect pre-ban assault rifles. Fortunately, they didn't pay enough attention to really know what the janitors were doing. Even better was security let the janitors operate the electric doors at the front entrance in exchange for some beer.
"Who you are about to see is a living legend." Johnny told the new guy, leaning back in a leather-padded swivel chair. He was looking over at the front entrance camera. A large man wearing bleached jeans and a denim jacket just walked into building B.
"Indian?" the new guy asked.
"Well, Cherokee, yes. We joke around and call him 'Sitting Bullshit' because he is so patient when things go wrong." In a way, he was the perfect kind of guy for debugging. He was also good to have during an argument, or a bar fight. The former because he kept calm and knew what the say, the latter because he was pretty damn big. Sitting Bullshit lived in a mud and thatch hut on a preserved corner of the local trailer park. If you weren't looking for it, you wouldn't even know he had power and a T3 line going into the hut. He had managed to get it installed underground; by himself. He imagined he would violate some 1850 treaty if the government knew what he was doing. Then again, his buddies did some cleaning for the NSA, so they were watching his back.
Johnny and the newbie met the guy inside the front entrance. Sitting Bullshit talked in a slow, deep, and calm voice. "Well, here's Johnny..." he said when they met face-to-face.
"Wolf, this is our new addition to the family." Johnny said, and the newbie did a funny little curtsey and they laughed.
"He looks like a Danny." Sitting Bullshit said the Johnny, then he turned to the newbie and asked him, "So, Danny, what's your fancy here?" The Cherokee had to stop down with his hands on his knees so they could speak level.
"My name's Seth, and I'm interested in design-to-manufacture."
"Hmm, a Seth." He said, "Canadian?"
"My parents are, yes, but I was born and raised in American."
"Hmmm, Canadian-American." he said, and that was about it for the time being. They went upstairs, and the place went dead on their arrival. It looks like Johnny is kind of a legend too -- he spent 5 years in prison for hacking into the CIA. And it was all just for shits and giggles. It looks like some CIA janitors caught wind of him, and that was the end of Johnny's hacking career. Or so it seemed. They pitied him, and found him a nice position at AbalTech. His talent made him head of building B cleaning staff almost immediately.
Johnny and Sitting Bullshit found a nice bullpen cubicle arrangement. Bullpens are shared cubicles that they usually shove the interns in. The regular employees hate bullpens since they can't readily slack off without 3 other people watching them. The janitors, knowing collaboration is key to the corporation, prefer the bullpens for their work. Then again, they only put two to a bullpen because each janitor needs at least two computers to keep themselves busy. They had barely sat down before everybody in the building started gathering around the cubicle. People stood on desktops so they could peer over the cubicle walls and see AbalTech's greatest minds at work.
"I am impressed. My favorite login and preferences are already loaded on here." Sitting Bullshit declared to Johnny, who nodded in satisfaction. They were not making contact, and barely turned away from the two monitors in front of them. The conversation was kind of eerie, like they were talking to each other through the computers right in front of them.
"They got paranoid when we fixed the last batch of bugs and password-protected the repository. Transactions for files are handled through SSH, but I just masqueraded as the manager of the testing." Johnny declared. There were many "oooh's" and "aaah's" from the place, especially since he did all this in the 17 keystrokes he had entered since logging in.
"Oh now, come on guys, you know I could have done the SSH buffer overflow exploit on the older Linux machines in the basement." and there were many nods. Johnny continued, "So when the hell are you going to upgrade the fucking machines?" Some of the crowd rapidly dispersed, seeing Johnny thought they were slacking off down there. Meanwhile, Sitting Bullshit was loading up a gate-level simulator, which was taking forever. Since he was helpless until then, he talked to Johnny.
"Hey Johnny, do they know what crashes it exactly?"
"Of course not, precision? Hah!"
"Well, what did they narrow it down to?"
"Some crazy guy in simulation kicked off a test to have simulate the plane going below sea level."
"Hmmm, that wouldn't happen too often, but I see. But so what?"
"Well, they are busy doing all this extra work for negative numbers, and that made the chip bigger, and fucked everything up."
"I don't like that. They should be using two's complement over there, so it shouldn't really matter." Sitting Bullshit pondered for a moment.
"Ahhh, I will bet it is not a negative number causing it."
"Really?" Everybody thought he was nuts, but the Cherokee pondered, "in going positive to negative, they must go through zero, and we all know zero is a special case." Many nods, as most of the custodians had returned, while the newer kernel code compiled downstairs. Sitting Bullshit continued, "Well, then, I bet when they get to zero, the will cause a divide by zero. Classic problems. There are dividers on the design, I know."
"Duh! That's gotta be it!" One of the custodians in the background declared, and was hushed. It was impolite to interrupt the Legends.
"The folks in management don't think it matters too much and are about to order a revert to the old code." Johnny declared, "It's funny because to do that, they have to get a tape backup stored in some fort across the country. It's surrounded by a moat and everything."
"If it weren't for folks like you, Johnny, they never would have to do that." Sitting Bullshit quipped. It was such a perceptive joke, and everybody there got it. People weren't locking away backups before Johnny went to jail, but they were within a half a year afterwards. By that time, the simulator was up, and Sitting Bullshit started writing a test by hand. That was something the engineers would never do.
"They preach automation here, but that is not always best." Sitting Bullshit declared, "they need people who can react and test on-the-fly." With that, he hit the enter key on one of his computers, and the test kicked off. It only ran 10 seconds, compared to the 46 hours needed for other tests. "It is a divide by zero." "Yatta!" Johnny cheered, "I will revert to before they made all their changes..."
"Don't you need the backup?" Seth asked.
"Silly newbie," Johnny said with a shake of his finger, "I have my own backup."
There was a group huddle, and the plan was set. Sitting Bullshit would make the hardware fixes. Johnny would revert the test files and change the time stamps to make them look new. He would also run some tests on their new design and leave them for morning. That way, all the engineers would come in and think the prior day's changes they made fixed everything. No questions would be asked as long as the model passed the tests. It was brilliant, and everybody set to work on finishing the details.
Seth just kind of stood in the middle of the bullpen, now that everybody had dispersed. He was left with the hacker and the Cherokee doing their own things. "Awww, is the newbie lonely?" Johnny asked.
"Well yes, but I can't do much until tapeout." Seth responded.
"Hmm, that's true." Johnny answered. After that, his pager went off. Johnny looked at it, and declared, "Shit."
"Hey Seth, here's a newbie job. Go over to that corner and ask for a guy named 'Kadafi.' Tell him some people are going through our trash again."
Seth wandered over to the Northwest side of the building where Johnny had pointed. He was feeling a little rash and decided to just suddenly scream, "Looking for Kadafi!"
"Here!" A head said that popped up behind a cubicle wall. Seth turned 360 degrees before realizing the guy was looking down at him.
"Johnny says there are people going through the trash again..."
"Oh, goodie!" Kadafi said with girlie glee. He was an Egyptian, minus most of the accent. He popped out of the cube and asked, "I assume you're coming with me?" Seth only shrugged, and was told to come along anyhow. Kadafi began to speak in a sarcastic voice, "Security is priority one an AbalTech. That's why we put only one paper shredder in the whole building, and expect the janitors to guard our trash!"
"Rival corporation raiding the dumpster for secrets?" Seth surmised.
"Bling bling, we have a winner!" Kadafi declared. They were walking to the back part of the building, and headed downstairs. There were some lockers in the corner, and Kadafi quickly gave the combination for one. Inside were three AK-74's and a Saiga semi-automatic shotgun. Seth got the Saiga, with Kadafi's reasoning that "Your aim is probably poor anyhow." Kadafi took one of the AK-74's, and made sure it was loaded. He also took some spare clips for the two of them.
It was quite dark out back, and it made Seth wonder how the garbage raiders were ever spotted. Kadafi seemed to know what to do -- he aimed his gun at the dumpster and hollared, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY TRASH!" Three silhoettes popped out from the top and jumped over the side. They ran around the corner ahead of Kadafi's gun, which was shouting that distinctive "pop.... pop pop .... pop." At the end, Kadafi spred the rest of the bullet's full-auto, for added affect. "They'll be back, and I'll take a prisoner next time." he said, as they went back in.
"So, kid, what's your thing here?" He asked Seth.
"I'm into manufacturing, for the most part."
"Oh, that's great. I like microelectronics myself."
"Hmm that's why you're here?"
"Well, I'm kind of a clean freak too. I hate dirty floors as much as I hate dirty projects. You can see why I'd love a clean room so much." And so Johnny's leadership succeeded in getting Seth a mentor for the time being. Everybody would later decide to keep his name as "Seth" since it seemed funny enough to them.
Everything was finished before sunrise, and everybody left with the feeling of great satisfaction. This feeling was no greater than for Seth, who felt he had the best coworkers ever known to mankind. And so went another day in the lives of night-shift janitors everywhere, making our world go around. The first engineer to come in for the morning sat down at his cube, and saw everything pass. "Hmm, that's funny." He said to himself, and went on to screw everything up again. And hence, the night-shift janitors would continue to have plenty of work to do.
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