Fiction: Cute Chick

[davidgillon]

This is something that popped out of my head a month or two back. It's too slight and too odd a length to do anything with, so have a short story to speed the quarantine by:

Cute Chick

The thing about being a cute chick in a wheelchair is people don’t expect you to be a thief. So when I rolled up to the security desk at De Santis Finance in the middle of the night, the guard’s reaction was to smile, not reach for the alarm button.

“What can I do for you, little lady?”

I hid the wince. I’m short, but paternalism still rankles.

“Hi,” I said brightly. “I’m from Intelligent Technology Solutions; one of your computers just sent out a mayday and I need to do some running repairs.”

De Santis had outsourced tech support, and I was wearing the right logo on my polo shirt, together with an ITS security badge. The logo I’d printed and ironed on myself, the badge was courtesy of a couple of hours in Photoshop for the front and then parking myself outside the ITS office and pinging passing badges until I got a field service tech whose chip I could clone onto the badge blank. RFID chips have made my life so much easier, no more pick-pocketing ID badges off belts or lanyards to swipe their mag strip.

“I don’t have any work order down for anyone from ITS.”

“You wouldn’t – Mr De Santis’s computer sent out its mayday an hour ago. If it’s telling the truth, we have about an hour before the drive trashes itself.”

“Mr De Santis’s computer? I’m not sure….”

“Look, best scenario, it trashes itself, De Santis gets in, hasn’t lost anything, because back-ups, but it takes an hour to get someone from ITS over, then a couple-three hours to rebuild it from the backups. He has a shitty day, so everyone else has a shitty day. Worst case, he doesn’t back everything up, because it’s awkward to backup when you’re air-gapped from the net because ‘security’, so he gets in, finds he’s lost irreplaceable stuff, or his porn collection, and the company has a shitty year.”

The line about De Santis’s porn collection cracked the guard up, which was good as it stopped him wondering how an air-gapped computer sent out an SOS.

“I still can’t let you look at anything,” he said.

“Don’t need to look at anything,” I told him, reaching behind me into the backpack hanging off my chair and pulling out a black box with half a dozen blinkenlights. “See, no screen. Just need to plug the drive from his computer into this for five minutes and let it check it out. Green light right there, I’m out of here. Red light there, I have to connect a blank drive up to the backside of this and clone the drive. Take about 20 minutes tops.”

The guard sighed and pointed me at the ID card terminal, “Swipe in.”

Five minutes later I was in De Santis’s very plush office and Mike the security guard was lifting the PC’s base unit onto the desk for me. Which beat me having to sit on the floor to do the job.

I swung the base unit open, and didn’t bother pulling the solid state drive, just popped its cable off and substituted one of my own to link it into my black box.

Mike and I chatted while we waited for the lights on my box of tricks to stop blinking. By the time they did I’d learned he had a wife, a kid, and a girl on the side, and fended off the inevitable question about why I was in the chair.

Eventually the randomly blinking lights (I programmed them that way) wound down to a single glowing green light.

“False alarm,” I told Mike, unplugging and putting things back the way they had been. “No need to do anything. We’ll schedule a full health check on Mr De Santis’s computer, but that’s me done for the night.”

Mike walked me out, and as the De Santis doors closed behind me I cranked up my speed and headed for my car, grinning like a thief.

“Got it,” I told my fence as I sat in the parking structure, stripping my solid state drive out of its disguise. “Full copy of De Santis’s hard drive. I doubt they’ll even realise I was there.”

Sometimes it’s good to be the cute chick in a wheelchair.

End