> FILENAME i_do_this_all_the_time_01.mmem
> TIMESTAMP 1461501540
> BEGIN PLAYBACK
It was very risky business, trying to infiltrate the Miyao Municipal Intelligence Office.
It wasn't enough to steal a card and try to kitbash one at home. One needed to be
thorough. Municipal Intelligence used most of the basic protections for ID Card security that the private sector used—holographic coating, watermarks, laminate. Cheap, yet effective, and rather annoying to fabricate.
And that was just the visual aspect. One's ID Card also doubled as their access to the building. The magnetic strip was a harder aspect to fake than the card itself, that was for sure. And for a local intelligence organization, Municipal Intelligence was
surprisingly thorough. Anyone trying to gain illicit access to the building would have to do a lot of work.
Such a person would probably have to remotely crack the in-house software of one of the MMIO's card-printers (without being detected) and acquire a blank copy of the machine; perhaps from the point of distribution. That, in fact, was a large vulnerability in their security—their card printing
software may be in-house, but the
hardware was a common commercial product. Even GOZO used it. It wouldn't be
too difficult to backfill the printer software with a bit of intuition and a compromised laptop.
After filling the card with bogus personal details, they would need to imprint the magnetic strip with appropriate access controls. The machine which did
that was physically attached to the building, locked in a secure area and disconnected from the Internet. It was also the only one of its kind in the world. In order to obtain the imprinting software and magnetic patterns, one would have to do something ludicrous, like remotely access the work computer of MMIO's card security technician during maintenance.
And that didn't even touch upon the biggest challenge: Municipal Intelligence was
small. They were tight-knit. They
talked to each other. It would only take one person noticing a suspicious log for the entire building to go on high alert, but that in itself was actually irrelevant. If someone didn't recognize you, it wouldn't matter if you had a perfect ID with an attached database entry and fabricated work details. Because a worker for MMIO could not just—
poof, appear out of nowhere. It was ludicrous. You'd be caught in less than a minute.
The MMIO Complex was probably the most secure place in Miyao, and its Cyberdefense Division was the
most secure building in the MMIO. If you weren't supposed to be there, it was basically impossible to get in, at least during work hours.
Which was why Seraphine Yamigawa, Senior Analyst and Chief of Operations of the Cyberdefense Team, was happy to know that she
was supposed to be here. No worrying about fabricating identities or making up access data or any of that nonsense. This was her work. Her home away from home.
This was
right.
And oh, it was nice to be back, even though she had enjoyed her month-long vacation.
So she took her ID badge, and swiped it against the RFID scanner next to the building, and waited to be allowed in.
She heard a loud beep. Something flashed red. "Hooold it." Her way was blocked by a security guard. His name – Tetsubo Namashita – flickered on his badge.
"Tetsu-chan! It's good to see you again," Seraphine said, grinning politely.
"I… I'm sorry?" His eyes went unfocused for a moment. His face lit up in recognition. "Yamigawa-san! I hardly recognized you! Glad to see you're back from leave. How's your brother?"
"He's doing… well. Thank you" Seraphine tried to smile. "I'm hoping Yamaha Senior High doesn't coddle him as much as I… did."
"Pahhhh. I wouldn't worry. My sister's son goes to Yamaha. It's not a bad school at all, not at all. Certainly better than most public schools." Tetsubo nodded reassuringly. "Now uh… the door is giving me an alert, could you try it again? Must be something with the scanner."
She did. The man flinched as the door control system sent a blip to his earpiece.
"Yeah, no, that didn't fix it. Argh…" He groaned, and touched a button on his suit radio. "Gate B to Control, message, over."
"Gate B, send it."
"Yeah, uh… the door is rejecting Yamigawa-san's badge, please advise."
"Say again?"
"The door won't let Yamigawa-san—you know, the uh, the spook—through. Credentials are failing at the gate."
"Ah. Yeah, I can check that. Wait one… uh…"
There was a short pause.
"...yeah, I have no idea why the door's rejecting her. Just—just let her in. Do a manual override. We'll tell Records to send a temporary pass to her office."
"Roger." He clicked his radio shut, typed a few commands into the terminal next to the gate, and the light next to Sera flashed green. He gestured down the hall. "Sorry about that, Yamigawa-san. I'll yell at the Maintenance Team for ya, next time I see 'em."
"Oh, don't be hard on them. I'm sure they're busy with their own things." Sera giggled softly.
"Damn right. It's good you got here when you did, Yamigawa-san."
She tilted her head. "Oh? Why's that?"
"Shoot. I thought you'd have heard. No one tells
me anything, of course. But Cyberdefense has been buzzing like bees since… what, earlier this morning? Maybe last night?" The security guard yawned. "Speaking of which, aren't you late for your shift already? I know you just got off an extended leave, but still…"
Sera looked away. "I got caught up in… my morning routine. I'll make my way to the office now. Thanks, Tetsu-chan."
"See you round, Yamigawa-san." The guard waved her away, and Seraphine made her way to the elevator, slightly perturbed.
<><><>
The elevator door pinged, and Sera entered her floor. What she found there could only be described as pure chaos.
Stacks of paper, coffee, and energy drinks had piled up throughout the office floor. Technicians moved frantically between the rows of office dividers, shouting instructions to each other, as lower-level staff crowded around computer monitors and argued with each other over incomprehensible things.
As Sera tried to make sense of what was happening on the office floor, someone important-looking practically pushed past her. A middle-aged woman with simple features, wearing an armband and yelling at people with a clipboard. "Ey, you two! What are you doing?"
"
Our jobs. Can't you tell? The hell do you want, anyway?"
"I
want a bottle of morphine and a nice, stiff rum and coke—this isn't about what I
want, do you have anything new about the situation or not?"
"No. Piss off. We will
tell you when we have something good to say, Aoki-san."
"Fine!"
The woman turned to leave, but Sera stopped her, resting an arm on the tense shoulder. "Acchan, I just got here. I must have missed a memo. What is going on here?"
"'
Acchan'?" was the reply. The woman glared at her, wide-eyed and trembling. "Who the fuck are you, anyway?"
That pissed Sera off. "...what do you
mean, 'who the fuck am I'?! I wasn't gone that long, was I? Take a leave for a month and it's like people forget your name!
What the hell is going on, Acchan?!"
"What's
going on is I have a team of useless millennials in the middle of a departmental crisis, and now instead of keeping them in line, I'm wasting my time arguing with some puffed-up, paint-faced… " she paused, and her eyes went wide. "...
boss? Is that you?"
"
Yes, Acchan. It's me. It's just me. Calm down, will you?"
"I'm sorry, boss, Miku preserve me, it's been a long day…"
"It's alright. You're in the weeds. I get that. But… " Sera looked around. "...are we double-staffed or something? We have three times as many staff as there are computers here."
"Oh, it's… I was part of the morning shift, ma'am. Yesterday morning. Monday was supposed to be my day off, but… well, we couldn't just
leave things as they were."
…hmm. Fidgety eyes. Shaky limbs. Unfocused expression. That checked out. And it was completely unacceptable.
"Alright," Sera clapped the woman on the shoulder. "You're going home. You and everyone with your shift."
"What?! You can't! This—the data breach—"
"Aoki-san. To be blunt? You look like shit right now. I don't care what you're working on, you're not doing any good work after twenty-four hours upright."
"I took a half-hour nap!" she snapped back indignantly.
"Good! It'll keep you upright long enough to make it to the parking garage! You're done for the day. Who else is with you? Am I going to have to start calling up names?"
Aoki shook her head rapidly. "No, boss. Sorry, boss. I'll… I'll get everyone together."
"Do that." Sera tightened her grip on Aoki's shoulder. She fixed her with a stern stare. "...will you be alright on the drive home? I can call some taxis for you and the rest of your team. We'll valet your cars back to you."
"I'll be fine, Boss."
"I'm being serious, you know. I'll write-off the cost."
Aoki hesitated, but, to Sera's surprise, she grinned. "...back when I worked for the SDF, Boss, during the Troubles, there was a time I had to drive one of our trucks in the middle of the night, through an occupied neighborhood, after a thirty-six-hours standoff with the Imperial Guard. I'll be fine.
We'll be fine. But… thanks anyway, Sera-san."
"Alright, alright, Acchan. You can regale me with your stories later. Goodbye. Safe drive home, yeah?"
"Yeah." And she rested herself from Sera's grip. "Alright! Mizuno-san! Watari-san! Shut it down! All of you, shut it down—"
There was a flurry of movement, and Sera moved fast to find her office. She needed to find somewhere to root herself, and then she could work to make sense of things…
<><><>
"We discovered it yesterday. Right at dusk."
Sera was sitting in a cozy, bare office. At present, all she had was a spare work laptop, an old desk, a dusty leather chair, some empty picture frames, and a few fidgety-looking managers in front of a hastily-drawn whiteboard.
"Aoki-san and the rest of her team were about to head out for drinks, when one of hers noticed some suspicious network activity. Some sort of rogue program was siphoning data from the smart fridge in the employee lounge. Silly, right?" The man laughed nervously. "They… they were only gonna take an extra hours' overtime to identify and isolate it. But when they did, they realized that… it wasn't an isolated incident. Once they found one, they started to find more, with similar digital signatures. And they were 'talking' to each other."
"Come again?" Sera leaned forward in her chair.
"Yeah, I know, right? It's downright dishonorable that we didn't notice this sooner. The… the sheer volume of data being moved around right under the noses of our ops team was huge!" The man adjusted his glasses, and started to draw on the whiteboard with a piece of chalk.
Scritch. Scritch. "We started checking every system that had a network connection with that fridge. Well, the fridge talked to the intranet router on its floor. We checked it—compromised."
Scritch. As he spoke, he drew more and more connections on the board.
"Then we checked everything the router talked to. Work computers, RFID readers, the cleaning robot. All compromised. We started looking deeper—the CCTV system. The card printers. Our own guys' goddamn maintenance tools. Compromised, one and all."
Scritch. Scritch. "And one of the data integrity guys realized, holy shit, this thing seems to be spreading like a virus.
Our own tools might be a vector. We did an experiment, factory reset one of the work laptops, made sure it wasn't there, connected it to our intranet… and boom. Infected."
Scritch.
"Is there anything in this building that
isn't compromised?"
The man fidgeted, and his friend stepped in to elaborate. "Chief Yamigawa. Ma'am. That's what our teams are presently trying to figure out, ma'am. We have to move slowly, since, whatever this is, it's capable of infecting any system that has a direct network connection. And the only way we can check if a device has been compromised is direct interface with a networked device. We already fucked up twice. This is risky business, ma'am."
"This is the crux of the problem, actually." The other guy cut his friend off. "The…the scale of this infiltration is harrowing. We don't even know where the point of contact was, if this was a deliberate attack. It's incomprehensible."
"Incomprehensible…" Seraphine repeated, as she sat back in her seat. Her eyes darted around the walls of her bare, dusty office. She took a breath, and exhaled.
"Well, I appreciate you guys' promptness and professionalism during this crisis. I have a question, though." She scowled. "
Why wasn't I told about this earlier?"
"You were on leave, ma'am—"
"Unacceptable! If the entire building's been compromised by a hostile actor, your Chief of Staff
might want to know! What did the Director say?"
"Director Fuchida? Well, he, uh…"
"We've neglected to inform him, ma'am."
Sera clapped her hands together. "Great! Just great! Biggest cyberattack in MMIO history—nobody knows about it. What kind of circus are we running here, people?!"
"Finest circus in Miyao, I'd say."
"Shut the hell up, dude."
"What? A little levity's important."
"In front of the boss?"
Sera did not dignify that bit of chatter with a response. Instead, she shut her eyes, formed a tent with her fingers, and tried to collect her thoughts. A massive data breach. Biggest compromise of protected systems since probably the 2013 ForgetMeNot Crisis. Something that seemingly spreads via contact like a virus.
No wonder Aoki-san made her team pull an allnighter with change.
Sera opened her eyes. Her two staff were casting furtive, worried glances at each other. She bit her lip.
"Okay. I don't want to interrupt your workflow in the middle of this, but I need to understand what we're dealing with. In the next hour, I want a general report on the progress of what we've done so far, and a report on the capabilities of this…
virus. Or whatever it is. One hour. Do you understand me?"
"I'll get it done in half, ma'am."
"I'll match him! You can count on us, Sera-san."
"Good. Good…" Sera tapped her desk with her fingers. "...what are your names, by the way?"
"Wha—you forgot, Sera-san?" the goofy one chuckled nervously. "It's Kentarou. I guess we never did get a chance to meet properly, since I'm usually here for the weekend shifts, I guess, ahaha…"
"Kita Murasame, Chief Yamigawa," said the straight-laced one. "I was transferred here very recently—earlier this month, in fact. Until then, I was serving as a Ship Communications Officer aboard the
Yoshino. It's nice to meet you."
"Alright. Don't let me down, you too." She opened her laptop, and went under her table to connect it to an outlet. "Get out of here."
After the two left, Seraphine paced the floor of her office, trying to make sense of it all. Incomprehensible… it was completely incomprehensible. And it happened under her watch. Her supervision. Sure, she was on vacation.
Paid leave. It didn't make the sting any worse.
She stopped her pacing, and sat back down. A thin layer of dust shot up as she hit the chair. She'd have to call the janitorial staff to get rid of all the dust—and Corporate, to replace all the damned furniture. But that would be for later. For now… she had to focus on something.
Anything.
In the end… she decided to go over the staff rolls. Re-memorize the names and faces of her people. It had been a while, after all.
A good, long while.
> END PLAYBACK
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