She snuggled down in his arms, still a little offended. “No.”
“Can we slice into a fiber-optic cable somewhere?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Utilities in Phoenix are underground.”
“Dang it.”
“‘Dang it?’ Seriously? You sound like—”
“An Iowa farm boy?”
“Yeah, I guess so. But with a British accent. Dahng it.”
He mused, “Can we break into the university computer lab and steal some mainframe time? I saw the campus whilst we were driving here from the airport.”
“No, I was only an underclassman, and they deactivated my college ID card when I dropped out.” Break in? That got her thinking. “But come to think of it, I do know of a place with fantastic, crazy high-speed internet for commercial streaming, and it’s connected to a flippin’ enormous server farm that feeds directly into the river company with all the servers in the world.”
Tristan craned his head to look at her. “Yeah?”
“The GameShack store I got fired from. If we didn’t need the hardware, I could log in from here because I have admin access for their system. I stuck a mirror program on their computer at work a year ago so that I didn’t have to go in every time Miller didn’t know how to do something. Sometimes when other CSRs couldn’t handle some of the tech support, I’d log in from home and pinch-hit. That asshole didn’t even pay me when I worked from home. If it were just uploading to their system, I could do that from my laptop.”
“But the store has higher capacity?” Tristan prompted.
“It has a huge fibre-optic broadband internet service because we often have several people doing video chat help in there, plus all the stores are hub connectors for the game streaming platform.”
Of-freaking-course.
Colleen snapped her fingers. “And that’s why they’ve never gotten rid of the brick and mortar stores, because they’re hubs for the streaming platforms. But every one of them, including the one I worked at, has a fiber-optic cable the size of a dachshund coming out of the floor. It’s integral to the franchise operations terms of service contract.”
Tristan’s blue eyes were lighting up. “That would be optimal.”
“And it’s Saturday, so the stores in that strip mall will close at five instead of nine at night. Starbucks closes at seven, and the grocery store shuts at ten. So, the whole complex will be deserted by eleven.”
“That’s good.”
She grinned. “And Miller is such a stuck-up dork that he’s probably strutting around the store and preening at the reflection of his racist tattoos in the window instead of realizing”—she grabbed her purse off her computer desk and dug around in it until she came up with her jangly keychain—“that he never got my key to the store back when he fired me.”
27
Upload
Colleen
Do you know what Colleen Frost was?
Colleen Frost was a trustworthy, responsible country girl from Winslow, Arizona who was just trying to put herself through college and do a little better.
Do you know what Colleen Frost was not?
She was not a Mission: Impossible-type superspy who dangled from cables and sneaked into high-security fortresses to steal international government secrets.
That became devastatingly obvious when Colleen slowed her junker car to park right out in front of the GameShack store until Tristan had hissed at her to keep driving around to the alleyway where the truck dock was.
When they got out of the car, Colleen looked straight down at the gravel under her tennis shoes and then waggled her fingers at a small black box under the eaves. “The security camera saw us.”
Tristan hurried around the car and to the back door of the store. “If all goes well, it won’t matter. Anonymity Plus will scan the previous footage and blur or randomly morph your facial features.”
Inside, it became even more glaringly obvious that Colleen was as inept as a flopping fish at stealth stuff when she deactivated the security system and twisted her key in the lock just like she’d done several times a week for years and then strode into the dark storeroom where she kicked a steel garbage can across the entire length of the cement floor. It clattered like a machine gun in the dark until it finally stopped.
She gripped Tristan’s hand, and they both held their breath.
The silence resumed.
A green light still blinked on the security system control panel by the door.
She turned to Tristan, a flood of apologies in her mouth, but in the pale glow of the stockroom computer screen she could see that he was holding his finger to his lips.
So instead, she nodded and whispered, “Oops.”
He nodded and mouthed, Good girl.
Okay, so their plan hadn’t been ruined yet. Time to carry on.
They stole through the dark storeroom to the faintly glowing screen of the computer. They’d agreed earlier it was a much better option than the ones in the retail area that were in full view of the windows overlooking the parking lot.
Colleen easily woke it from sleep mode because her former boss, Miller, had indeed been too lazy to change the password, and they gained access to her account because he’d also been too much of a slacker to purge the biometric data. She just touched the fingerprint scanner, and it popped to life.
And because Miller had been too lazy to get his flabby white butt into the store at the opening and stay until closing every day, Colleen’s account was an admin account. She could access not only the GameShack store she worked at, but also GameShack’s corporate high-level dashboard, giving her access to the video chat help desk, the videogame streaming network, and the CurieCoin central exchange.
According to the usage graph scrolling beside the CurieCoin central exchange link on her dashboard, which kind of looked like a stock price history, the value of CurieCoin was climbing nicely.
Huh. Not bad for a gaming token-turned-cryptocurrency.
The really weird thing was that not only were the CurieCoins being purchased and redeemed on the GameShack gaming platform as usual, but the stock of CurieCoins in the GameShack central exchange, which was sort of like Fort Knox for CurieCoins, was a really high number, like a thousand times the amount of CC’s that were in circulation.
She checked, but they all had properly established blockchains, which meant they were real.
GameShack shouldn’t be hoarding them up like that.
A bank wouldn’t keep 99.9% of its cash sitting in the vault. A bank would lend it out at interest and keep circulating the money. Keeping that extreme wealth locked up and inactive was both weird and financially stupid. It was the virtual equivalent of stuffing the money in a mattress instead of putting it in the bank to get interest.
GameShack would have been a financially solid company instead of a rickety has-been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy if they’d lent that wealth out at a standard interest rate.
Weird. Huh.
The dashboard also showed a graphic of every GameShack store worldwide, and Colleen hadn’t realized that there were a smattering of outlets in countries other than the US. Tristan was looking over her shoulder at the thousand or so thickly clustered dots that each represented dozens of people whose livelihoods were entangled with the company's survival.