Free Back to the Moon-ARC by Les Johnson, Travis S. Taylor Page A

his soda and dropped the can and the candy-bar wrapper in the garbage can by the door. The IT Lady sneered at him as she looked back and forth between the garbage can and the recycle bin beside it. Paul bit his tongue to prevent him from saying the word hippie and ignored the sneer as he sat.
    “Sure. What’s up? You guys look like we’ve lost the vehicle or something.”
    “Well,” Chu commented, “in a manner of speaking, we have.”  
    “What?!”
    This time, the IT Lady picked up the discussion. “Paul, we’ve got a major security breach. One of my team began to suspect something was up last week when he noticed an uptick in outgoing data volume from e-mails, file transfers, et cetera. You know, the usual stuff. But this uptick wasn’t from any particular user or at any specific time. It was about a twenty-percent increase in everyone’s data usage. When we looked more closely, we saw that every single file being transferred was statistically larger than it should have been, given our past few years of data.”
    “Really?” He leaned forward.
    “When we moved from looking at the overall system level and began looking at specific outgoing messages, we saw that each and every message had some additional data encoded and attached to it. Sort of a hidden attachment, as it were. Then we noticed that messages were also being cc’d to an additional e-mail address. And not the same e-mail address—hundreds of different ones, not one being the same. In a matter of a few days, the extra data volume that went out of here was over a terabyte. And that was before any flags had really been raised. Had a single user been sending that much data, we would have shut him down immediately.”
    Gesling was not an information-technology expert, but he was pretty smart, and what she was describing sounded deceptively simple. Almost too simple to be possible.  
    “What data was being sent? Financial? Technical?”  
    “Good question.” Chu was quick to respond. “Technical. Whoever did this got most of the Dreamscape design and a lot of performance data.”
    “That’s the way it looks now.” Jones continued her explanation. “Yes, it was technical. Somehow, a Trojan software program was latent in all of our computers until it was activated last week. Once it turned on, it began to systematically carve up and send out selected data files from every computer in the office. It found our engineering drawings, customized software design tools, parts specifications, test reports, everything. You name it. We haven’t found a single computer that wasn’t compromised.”
    “Goddammit all to hell! I can’t believe we let this happen!” It was Gary Childers’s turn to add to the tempest.  
    “By the time we realized what was happening and cut off our access to the outside world late last night, it was too late,” Jones said decisively.
    “Hundreds of e-mail addresses?” Gesling asked. “Is there a common link? Do we know who we’re dealing with here?”
    “China” was the answer from the IT Lady. “I asked Phil.”
    Phil was on Helen’s team and was well known by just about everyone in the company as the guy you called when your system went down. He seemed to be able to fix anything. He was also an ex-hacker. When he was in high school, he was expelled for hacking the school’s computer system. When he was in college, he was arrested for hacking a computer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. There was a story about how he’d managed to get out of jail time, but Paul had never heard it.  
    Phil had always said it was because he did it just for the sake of doing it—sort of like the answer people gave when asked for their motivation in climbing Mount Everest—or for going to the Moon. He never tried to take anything or cause any problems, he just had to prove to himself that he could do it.  
    He never graduated from college, but that hadn’t kept Helen Jones from recognizing his talent and