Take the Money and Come

Chapter 2: The Tech Goddess of Black Earth

Chapter 2: The Tech Goddess of Black EarthBlack Earth Mining Technologies was the sort of company that the general public had never heard of. All of their products were sold to high-bidding oil, gas and coal manufacturers that were only a little more visible than they were.

If you asked the employees, they would tell you that it was a good place to work. Perhaps a little secretive, perhaps a little strict, but the job security was worth the constant signing of non-disclosure agreements. When the energy sector had started laying off workers by the thousands, Black Earth had boomed. They were a lucky bunch, and they knew it.

Olivia was the first person in the building that morning, save the armed security staff that waved her through their checkpoint at the door. She often was, because fixing computer and networking problems was a lot easier when the people who screwed them up in the first place weren’t around.

She passed the mirrored elevator, barging into the stairwell and skipping down the steps to the basement with her earphones in, her hair bouncing behind her. She knew she needed to cut it soon, or the short afro would start getting caught every time she stuck her head inside a CPU. She’d already found flecks of dust in it after work the week before.

There were three fingerprint scans between the glass-filled front lobby and her tiny office. She opened the door and immediately threw a worn, dusty hooded jacket over her smart blouse and business slacks. Corporate had long ago decided that the dress code needed to apply to their IT wiz, even if half her job involved crawling around on the floor looking for power cords. The server room was all hers, though, so she allowed herself the warmth of the hoodie.

She had the same freedom when it came to her workspace. Nobody ever entered the server room but her, so her desktop could be covered in pictures of cute dogs instead of corporate photos. Her desk included an uplifting little display of various geeky memorabilia, from little three inch Star Trek figurines to a stress ball shaped like a Pokemon. Some of the other employees liked to joke about her ‘dungeon’, but in reality is was her retreat.

Her desk sat in front of the door, a long cavern of softly whirring servers behind her. The room was kept frigidly cold for the benefit of the computers, so she pulled the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands as she sat down and waited for her station to boot up. She held her paper coffee cup in front of her face to breathe in the aroma.

The computer finished booting up with a soft beep, automatically pulling up all of the programs she used on a daily basis. There were several new service tickets, but she already knew which one she needed to deal with.

Doctor Parker was the kind of man who considered himself too important to follow the basic rules for computing on the company network. He regularly made changes he shouldn’t, at which point something would stop working and she would have to fix it. On top of everything else he was paranoid as hell, changing passwords so often that he could rarely remember them.

Unfortunately for Olivia and every other support staff in the building, Black Earth seemed to agree with the good doctor’s assessment of his own importance, and nothing was ever done.

The ticket he’d sent the day before read: “Can’t download this file.”

No indication of what file he meant, no mention of an error message. She’d left the previous day in a tiff about it, cursing his rudeness and lack of basic communication skills. In the light of that Monday morning it only made her sigh.

“Not worth the fight.”

She accessed his computer remotely, making sure he was connected to the network as well as the internet. Everything seemed in order until she checked his disk space.

It immediately became clear that the problem wasn’t with the network, but with the hard drive. A huge chunk of storage had been partitioned off and encrypted, leaving little space for the rest of his files. She felt a flash of anger that made her want to bang her forehead on her desk.

This wasn’t the same as switching his network settings. Partitioning and encrypting this hard drive went against every rule in the Black Earth security handbook. They worked in a government-regulated industry, dammit, and everything they did had to be tracked and reported in one way or another. Olivia growled in frustration. She just knew he’d find a way to blame his stupid mistake on her.

She spent an hour taking apart the partitioned section, sent Parker an email with a list of the policies it violated and went to work on her other duties. After making sure everyone’s equipment was functioning properly, she went straight to lunch.