"Hamilton, Peter F - Greg Mandel 01 - Mindstar Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

'Sit and think. They've been gnawing away at us for eight bloody months, a few more days won't kill us. But we're taking a quarter of a million Eurofranc loss per day, it's got to stop, and stop dead. I have to know the people I put on it are reliable.'
They couldn't afford major losses, Julia knew. Philip Evans's post-Second Restoration expansion plans were stretching the company's resources to breaking point. Microgee products were the most profitable of all Event Horizon's gear, but the space station modules tied up vast sums of capital; even with the Sanger spaceplanes, reaching orbit was still phenomenally expensive. They needed the income from the memox crystals to keep up the payments to the company's financial backing consortium.
The fact that he'd admitted the problem to her and her alone had brought a wonderful sensation of contentment. They'd always been close, but this made the bond unbreakable. She was the only person he could really trust in the whole world. And that was just a little bit scary.
She'd promised faithfully to run an analysis of the security monitor programs through her nodes for him, to see if the Codes could be cracked, or maybe subverted. But she'd delayed it while she went horse riding with Adrian and Kats, then
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again as the three of them went swimming, and now subverting the manor's security circuits.
Guilt added itself to the shame she was already feeling from spying on the lovers. She'd been appallingly selfish, allowing a juvenile infatuation to distract her. Betraying Grandpa's trust.
Access HighSteal.
Sight, sound, and sensation fell away, isolating her at the centre of a null void. Numbers filled her mind, nothing like a cube display, no coloured numerals; this was elemental maths, raw digits. The processor nodes obediently slotted them into a logic matrix, a three-dimensional lattice with data packages on top, filtering through a dizzy topography of interactive channels that correlated and cross-indexed. Hopefully the answer should pop out of the bottom.
She thought for a moment, defining the parameters of the matrix channels, allowing ideas to form, merge. Any ideas, however wild. Some fruiting, some withering. Irrational. Assume the monitors are unbreakable: how would I go about concealing the loss? An inverted problem, outside normal computer logic, its factors too random. Her processor nodes loaded the results into the channel structures.
The columns of numbers started to flow. She began to inject tracer programs, adding modifications as she went, probing for weak points.
Some deep level of her brain admitted that the metaphysical matrix frightened her, an eerie sense of trepidation at its inhuman nature. She feared herself, what she'd become. Was that why people kept their distance? Could they tell she was different somehow? An instinctive phobia.
She cursed the bioware.



Philip Evans's scowling face filled her bedside phone screen. 'Juliet?' The scowl faded. 'For God's sake, girl, it's past midnight.'
He looked so terribly fragile, she thought, worse than ever. She kept her roguish smile firmly in place - school discipline, thank heavens. 'So what are you doing up, then?'
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'You bloody well know what I'm doing, girl.'
'Yah, me too. Listen, I think I've managed to clear security over the monitor programs.'
He leaned in towards the screen, eyes questing. 'How?'
'Well, the top rankers anyway,' she conceded. 'We make eighteen different products up at Zanthus, and each of the microgee production modules squirts its data to the control centre in the dormitory. Now the control-centre 'ware processes the data before it enters the company data net so that the relevant divisions only get the data they need - maintenance requirements to procurement, consumables to logistics, and performance figures to finance. But the security monitoring is actually done up at Zanthus, with the raw data. And that's where the monitor programs have been circumvented, they haven't been altered at all.'
'Circumvented how?'
'By destreaming the data squirts from the microgee modules, lumping them all together. The monitors are programmed to trip when production losses rise above fourteen per cent, anything below that is considered a maintenance problem. At the moment the total loss of our combined orbital production is thirteen point two per cent, so no alarm.'
Julia watched her grandpa run a hand across his brow. 'Juliet, you're an angel.'
She said nothing, grinning stupidly into the screen, feeling just great.
'I mean it,' he said.
Embarrassed in the best possible way, she shrugged. 'Just a question of programming, all that expensive education you gave me. Anybody else could've done it. What will you do flow?'
'Do you know who authorized the destreaming?'
'No, sorry. It began nine months ago, listed as part of one of our famous simplification/economy drives.'
'Can you find out?'
'Tricky. However, I checked with personnel, and none of the Zanthus managers have left in the last year, so whoever the culprit is, they're still with us. Three options. I can try and worm my way into Zanthus's 'ware and see if they left
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any traces, like which terminal it was loaded from, whose access card was used, that kind of thing. Or I could go up to Zanthus and freeze their records.'
'No way, Juliet,' he said tenderly. 'Sorry.'
'Thought so. The last resort would be to use our executive code to dump Zanthus's entire data core into the security division's storage facility, and run through the records there. The trouble with that is that everyone would know it's been done.'
'And the culprit would do a bunk,' he concluded for her. 'Yes. So that leaves us with breaking into Zanthus. Bloody wonderful, cracking my own 'ware. So tell me why this absolves the top rankers?'
'It doesn't remove them from suspicion altogether, it just means they aren't the prime suspects any more, now we know the monitor codes weren't compromised. Whether security personnel are involved or not depends on how good the original vetting system is. Certainly someone intimate with our data-handling procedures is guilty.'
'That doesn't surprise me. There's always rotten apples, Juliet, remember that. All you can ever do is hope to exclude them from achieving top-rank positions.'
'What will you do now?'
The hand massaged his brow again. 'Tell Walshaw, for a start. If we can't trust him then we may as well pack up today. After that I'll bring in an independent, get him to check this mess out for me - security, Zanthus management, the memoxfurnace operators, the whole bloody lot of them.'
'What sort of independent?'
He grinned. 'Work that out for yourself, Juliet. Management exercise.'
'How many guesses?' she shot back, delighted. He was always challenging her like this. Testing.
'Three.'
'Cruel.'