Corrosion
Tendrils of smoke from a cigarette stub curl their way through the stale air of her apartment building, caught in rays of burning city light through half-closed blinds. Displays above her desk show an IRC session and a network map - a spider’s web of rings and sprawling lines - her next paycheck. The cigarette is dropped into a nearly empty mug of coffee, and both her hands return to the keyboard.
<zdm> Update on the nginx exploit?
Sections of the network map attempt to give some order to the digital chaos. IP addresses from entirely separate AS numbers sit together in their neat boxes for Payroll, Customer Relations, Sales, IT Support, Development - the interesting one.
<aphyr> nearly there, it crashes 1/3 of the time
<aphyr> not sure why
Nobody owns servers these days, not really. Since the late 20s, a few companies have owned most of the hardware on the net. Easier management, they said. Now you rent what you need, leave the legwork to them. Who needs bare metal?
<zdm> The exploit or the service?
<aphyr> service
<aphyr> my codes written into its memory by this point
Containers for your services makes them more secure; that was always the marketing behind them. People jumped ship quicker than the manufacturers could keep up, and it put a few out of business. If you weren’t in the Cloud game already, you were too late to even think about catching up. For the crackers, it was business as usual.
<aphyr> okay the new version is up on the sftp
<zdm> Fixed?
<aphyr> yeah, some canary check i needed to get round
<zdm> Good. I hope you tested it, we start tomorrow.
* zdm (~zdm@null.host) has quit #kotec
She gets up and walks across a smoky room, to the bathroom and a blindingly bright artificial light that blinks into existence as she enters. A couple of sleeping pills from the cabinet washed down with tap water from a glass, slowly replacing the caffeine in her system with a new drowsiness as she lays on top of her sofa, staring at the lights on the ceiling shifting and changing colours with the city outside. When she wakes up tomorrow it will look the same.
(C) Zac Herd 2019. CC BY-SA