Free The Media Candidate by Paul Dueweke

replied Jenner.
    “Everything is quite clear,” added Sherwood.
    With these simple instructions, the
Jenner-Sherwood team launched into Project Dagger, one of the most
covert programs at COPE. They accessed whatever resources were
needed. For Jenner, this meant a team of programmers and analysts
and access to the most advanced computer systems at COPE. For
Sherwood, it meant classified data, advanced optical cubic
integration systems, a team of electrical and mechanical engineers
and technicians, and CAD-CAM packages coupled to laser and virtual
reality-prototyping machines. But beyond these toys of common
nerds, he was reborn. A control-system nerd transmuted into a
master of history’s greatest espionage tool. This was the saga for
which he had been created.
     
     

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Computer War
     
    This new task challenged both engineers and took
them deep into the technical operations of COPE. Jenner’s software
engineering talents were so exceptional they could reach full
potential only in an incubator such as this. And her new access to
the COPE computer systems was a trip to hacker heaven. She became
so engrossed in the complexity of the system software that she
frequently stayed late at night exploring the folds of COPE’s
unsung management hero.
    Her access to the COPE computers was well beyond
what she needed. The Asp didn’t understand the technical
requirements as well as she did, so when he asked her what access
level she needed, she took a wild shot and said system manager
level, the highest operating level. He bought it without question,
and she was in.
    The system manager of a large computer system is
the person responsible for keeping the system and network running
flawlessly and coordinates all software and hardware configuration
changes and maintenance. But the system manager’s most important
role at COPE was to provide for system security. The identity of
the system manager was known to only two people at COPE as a way of
further insuring their paranoid concept of security. Jenner was not
one of them.
    Jenner spent nearly every evening exploring
system-level operations to a depth that she felt only the real
system manager probably understood. During every session, she would
learn about at least one new network, database, or level of
operation that she didn’t even know existed. She kept accurate
notes in an electronic notebook in her secure file. This was the
most awesome computer game she’d ever played.
     
    * * *
     
    The networks connecting all the distributed
mainframe computers and the thousands of slave computers and
workstations all over the country were a maze of links. More than a
hundred levels and sub-levels of security classification, each with
its own list of authorized users, codes, and procedures, wove
through the computers and networks. Many classifications even
required encryption.
    The COPE computer system had been developed by
high-tech wizards smitten by a virulent disease universal in
computer jocks—the obsession to maximize system flexibility and
growth capacity. This translated to more bytes, more FLOPS, greater
speed, and more nodes than would be required by the most
imaginative estimate of the system requirements. The corollary
disease was also rampant—a computer system swells to fill all
available capacity.
    The whiz kids at COPE also adhered to another
rigid code—the quality of the documentation is inversely
proportional to the complexity of the system. In other words, the
more complicated the programming gets, the less gets written about
it. This makes it very tough for new people coming on board to know
what they are inheriting. It results from the developers pushing on
the state-of-the-art so hard that they’re always behind schedule,
over cost, and too busy to properly document what they’ve done. In
addition, computer nerds are notoriously poor writers and view
documentation as unclean drudgery that someone else might do if
they just ignore it.
    In one of