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(COOLLIST) Crossed Lines, a short story
<< I was inspired last night to work on a short story. I had thought
<< of trying to fix the quantum computing story I did back last spring,
<< but a new idea came to my mind. 2300 words later, here it is. This
<< is a first draft, and I've not done any rereading yet, just spell
<< checking. Yes, the main character is based a lot on me. Yes, it is
<< fiction. Please give me all sorts of feedback. If I can polish it
<< enough, I might even try to get it published somewhere.
<<
<< Oh, one other technical thing. Due to a drive space problem on
<< yak.net yesterday, the volume 1 (CL) archives are down right now. I'm
<< going to try to restore them, and they should be available later this
<< week.
<<
<< Thanks, Ben
CROSSED LINES
a short story by Ben Combee
He had been working on a paper for the software engineering conference
all day, and he felt quite happy, sitting with his laptop in his
comfy, yet underfurnished apartment. It was quite a thrill convincing
his manager to let him stay at home so he could be productive, and
between the bouts of daytime television and trips down to check the
mailbox, he had managed to produce about five pages of text describing
an incredibly boring system for managing software configurations
across networks. Even more remarkable was the intensity and
excitement that came across in the paper. But now it was 4:20. He
needed to rest. The spell check had turned up no flaws, and he would
have to wait until he got to a proper computer to format it all up and
e-mail it to the submission committee.
Brad's telephone decided to ring at this moment in time. It wasn't an
unusual ring. In fact, it was within all normal tolerances of the
standard telephone ring that all Americans have been conditioned from
birth to respect. Brad performed the proper Pavlovian response of
standing up, going to the source of the sound, lifting the receiver,
and saying a greeting. He said, "Brad speaking".
In retrospect, the pause was infinite and vibrant. It was something
that you could not fail to notice but that you often did. In a normal
conversation, a pause like this would serve as a time for people to
breath and rethink their thoughts, but coming before any conversation
had started, as it did, it seemed unnatural.
Two seconds after the "ing" in "speaking", a voice, female but not
feminine, made the disjointed reply, "Is this Mr. Oltorf?"
"Yes, may I ask who is calling?"
With a rehearsed and disinterested tone, the female other began. "Hi,
this is Sarah with A T and T. Are you doing well today? I would like
to talk to you about your long distance carrier. May I ask what
company currently provides your long distance services?"
Brad thought for a moment. <<Why would she care about my LD carrier?
Oh, she is with the death star people, that's why? Hmmm... what
should I tell her to get the best deal? Sprint really isn't that
competitive... maybe I should pretend to use LCI so I can find out
about Rategate?>> "I'm currently with MCI."
Milliseconds later, Sarah's voice intruded again. "And sir, may I ask
why you switched to MCI?"
<<Ooh! A trick question...>> "For the frequent flyer miles."
Sarah abruptly ended things. "Thank you sir for your time." The
reorder signal that came over Brad's speaker was his clue that the
conversation was over. He stared at the phone for a moment, pondering
why characters in films always seemed to look at the phone before they
hung it up, then he hung the phone up.
* * * *
After a brisk walk by Town Lake, he reentered the apartment, hastily
keying in the alarm code to the sound of "beeep beeep beeep". There
was a light blinking on the green exterior of Brad's $20 answering
machine. The white caller ID box next to it also indicated that there
had been a call while he was out. It didn't indicate much else, as
the display read "OUT OF AREA". That usually meant that the call was
a telemarketer working off a direct connection to a long distance
carrier where the whole idea of a phone with a fixed number was
discarded in the name of efficiency. Brad had never actually seen an
"OUT OF AREA" call, they just came to him when he was away like Santa
and the Easter Bunny. The answering machine provided no extra clues;
how much can you get from silence followed by a shrill "If you'd like
to make a call, please hang up and dial again."
* * * *
Two weeks later, Brad left work early. He was starting to get fed up
with the daily grind and he was rather tired. <<Tired in the same way
that all working cars are tired>>, Brad thought and chuckled. He
entered his apartment to the usual beeps and bloops, noticed that the
microwave was telling him "RESET" rather than the usual time, and
proceeded to go and enter a slightly less accurate than wished for
time, first pressing CLOCK, then entering 4, 4, and 1, and finalizing
it with the flourish of the START key.
Feeling smug, Brad wandered towards the phone. As he reached for it,
it called back to him, its joyful cadence. Having been conditioned by
weeks of caller ID, Brad looked down before lifting the hook. OUT OF
AREA. <<Either the call is from Tokyo where they have run out of land
to develop anything, or its a telemarketer.>> Taking a chance, he went
ahead and lifted the phone to his face.
Silence.
More silence.
Brad made a point of not speaking, and so did the other end. After
five seconds of this, the click of the phone's innards resetting made
Brad replace the receiver to its wall hook. A victory against the
commercialists had been scored just then.
* * * *
Brad liked to stay up very late on Friday nights. He would come in
around 12:30, watch his tape of the X Files, Space Ghost Coast to
Coast, and Dennis Miller, maybe catch up on e-mail, and then get to
bed.
A corrolary to this is that he liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings.
He liked this much more than the staying up late, although they did
seem to be linked by some casualty loop.
At 10:15 A.M., six hours after Brad had begun dozing, the phone rang.
Brad stumbled out of bed, slipped on a pair of house shoes, got up off
the floor, kicking the shoes away, and made his way to the kitchen,
hitting his knee on the bar stool. He picked up on the third ring and
expelled a hoary "what is it?"
In his half-dream/half-awake state, he didn't notice that moment of
silence. If he had, images of fundamentalist school boards and
Georgia legislatures might have come to his mind. Instead, he spent
the moment trying to get his eyes to open.
Vision and a cheerful voice arrived at the same time. "Hi, this is
Sherry. Am I talking to Mr. Oltorf?"
"Yes."
"Hello, Mr. Oltorf. I'm with Sprint and I'd like to ask you a few
questions about your telephone service. Could you tell me what
carrier you currently are using?"
An apparent anti-lucidity field about Brad prevented him from talking
with the usual wit and aplomb. He just uttered, "em cee eye."
With an invisible smile, the Sherrie at the other end of the copper
circuit closed in. "Now sir, can you tell me how many dollars do you
spend a month on long distance?"
<<Well, my last bill was $50, so take off $15 for local service,
giving me $35, then remove the discount that I had meaning that the
$35 is doubled to $70, but take away a little cause its not really a
50% discount, its more like forty, so I'll just say>> "sixty dollars."
Sherrie, with the cheerfulness of a Prozac daquiri, replied "Well, Mr.
Oltorf. Did you know that you can save even more money with Sprint
long distance?"
"I'm currently paying seven cents a minute to call home. Can you beat
that?"
The smile left Sherrie's voice as she replied "No, we cannot beat
that."
Click.
* * * *
Buried on page 27 of Internet Communication Week was a story about how
the large telephone companies were all moving to intranets for their
internal documentation. They were excited about the prospect of
reducing costs and providing better customer service through the use
of open technology.
On page 36 of Teleconnection, a sidebar noted that many of the large
LD providers now contracted out to smaller telemarketing firms their
cold-calling business. The smaller companies were provided adaptive
scripts that provided responses for 90% of the questions they would
get from the people they called. These scripts were prepared by the
telecom companies and then distributed on a contract basis to the
smaller firms.
* * * *
Brad saw both of these one morning as he plodded through the magazine
pile that had collected in a box in the corner of his living room. He
had three green tubs stacked up there. The top tub for the finished
or neglected newspapers to collect until recycling. The middle tub,
about half full right now, collected magazines the Brad had read and
decided to keep. The bottom tub, overflowing, was the incoming basket
where magazines went after a two-day currency period if they had not
been read yet. Brad tried to work through that one every week, but it
always seemed to get the best of him.
Brad woke up early this Tuesday morning because the previous night, he
had fallen asleep at 7PM. This was due to him having stayed away
until 5AM on Sunday night which was related to his oversleeping Sunday
morning. With the extra pre-dawn time, Brad laid back on the futon
and read.
He also thought. Why did these two blurbs stick in his mind? Over a
cup of artificial chocolaty drink, he had an insight. Minutes later, his
massive, dark green computer with the spray on texture booted up, and
he was on the web.
First stop, Alta Vista. Search on AT&T, script, adaptive, telemarket.
Nothing. What about Webcrawler? Nothing. Lycos? Yeah, right. Excite?
Maybe... no match. Brad dug around in some Java directories he had made
and found his grail: a programmable agent web robot. Here boy... go fetch.
He logged off, hit the screen saver, and headed on to work.
* * * *
About 2PM, he got his first e-mail from the robot. It had climbed a
chain of CGI scripts out in att.net land and gotten a document about
standards for CAIS, computer adaptive interactive scripting. At 3, he
had about 50 more e-mails, detailing network protocols, pricing
schemes, and subcontractor locations. At 4, he shut down the army of
webbots that had popped up on his service provider, filed away a good
percentage of the 176 separate URLs, and prepared to go home.
* * * *
CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team out of CMU, report that
over five thousand break-ins occur on systems connected to the Internet
every year. Most of these are one-time occurrences. Many are the result
of poor system administration practices, like leaving the password file
publicly accessible of running an insecure version of the FTP daemon.
Others are due to more basic problems in the networking protocols that
connect everything together. CERT has a policy of not revealing
security holes until the vendors have patches for them. Often, CERT
never reveals some of the problems of which it becomes aware.
One major problem plaguing some web sites, especially those run on
Windows NT boxes, it that the Perl executable is publicly accessible
through the WWW interface. With a little client hacking, this opens
up the entire web machine to an intruder.
* * * *
Brad went to sleep at 4AM, ten hours after he got home. He didn't
have to deal with any telemarketing calls that evening; they hadn't
stopped their attack, they just couldn't reach him. Everytime their
predictive calling system reached his line, the buzz of a 5ESS telling
it the line was busy echoed back.
On his way to his bed, Brad had to step over several issues of 2600
Magazine, some printouts from recent issues of Phrack, and a photocopy
of a message one of the Perl net.gods had sent out trying to get
people to notice and fix a gaping security hole in their web servers.
Brad slept well.
* * * *
He left work early on Wednesday afternoon. He would have to make up
the time later in the week, but it was no problem. He wanted to get
home in time for a very important phone call.
He walked in the door, did the finger probing that made the beeping
stop, saw the "OUT OF AREA" message on his caller ID box, then sat and
waited. At 4:45, a ring erupted. Brad looked up from his book and
jumped into action. He picked up the handset and confidently said, "Hello."
Exactly three seconds later, a woman's voice blasted into his ear. "Yes,
is this Mr. Oltorf?"
"Yes, this is he."
"Hi, I'm Susan with AT&T. How are you doing today?"
Brad thought a moment, remembering the pattern he had laid out the
night before. "I'm fine, how about you?"
"I'm doing OK. I'd like to talk to you about your long distance telephone
service."
Brad smirked as he emitted the line "Wow! I was just thinking of going
back to AT&T."
"Great. So you want to switch your service to AT&T? Do want to hear about
our discount program?"
The decision tree flashed in Brad's mind... this was the crucial point.
"No, I want to know about the ducks?"
"Hold on." The line went silent for a moment, save the sound of a mouse
clicking on the remote desk. "Oh, ducks. They are birds that swim in
water and are famous for their ability to avoid moving objects. Hrmm...
is there anything else, sir?"
By this time, Brad had pulled out his crib sheet. "How are ducks
used in the telephone system?"
"Sir, what are you asking? Oh, there it is... ducks often are used to
pull cables through wetland areas. A fiber optic cable is tied to
their feet, then a man with a bucket of crumbs stands on the other side
of the bog... what is going on here? Where did this all come from?
Why in the world am I answering a question about birds? Is this some
sort of prank?"
"Yes, Susan, it is. Don't call back."
Brad put down the receiver and snickered. <<Just wait until Sprint
calls and I ask them about Murphy Brown's hair-style>>
--
Ben Combee, CAD Software Developer, cryptography fan, WWW guru
Motorola > MIMS > MSPG > CTSD > Advanced ICs > Austin Design Center > CAD
E-mail: combee@sso-austin.sps.mot.com Phone: (512) 891-7141
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