High up on the 13th floor of the brick Acme Building in The City the corporate offices of Acme, Inc. are vacant for the night. The last workers of A-1 Janitorial Service have locked the executive business suite, leaving sterile vacuumed gray carpeting and newly plastic-lined wastebaskets set precisely against the left inside pedestal of every mahogany and oak desk, every charcoal modular workstation cubicle. A heavy silence hangs in the air, as an almost inaudible whirring begins behind the slatted double doors of the small room at the far end of the east corridor. It increases to a ghostly whine before two sharp beeps pierce the cool interior of the darkened server closet. From deep inside a black metal box, a magnetic tape labeled “Backup 11-13-98” has begun to spin.
Olympus, a giant tower of a machine, feels fortunate to have been selected for the primary network server of this complex Windows New Technology system at Acme, Inc. But why shouldn’t he be the chosen one? With his duplex SCSI hard drives and CD-ROM deck, he is more than capable of managing all the modem, fax, and e-mail services, as well as printer and file sharing, needed by any number of incompetent humans. He yawns now, humming contentedly as the shiny brown tape speeds through his system, flawlessly capturing exact digital copies of every electronic file that existed during the day. He chuckles, amused at Elisa Richards’ having named all of them after mythological characters and places.
“As if we exist only in their feeble imaginations!” he laughs to himself. Then, “Zeus!” he hisses, partly from boredom and partly to maintain his rapport with the workstation belonging to Elisa Richards, Acme’s human system administrator. “Zeus, are you awake?”
“Yes, damn it, I never sleep,” Zeus growls impatiently. “What the hell do you want now?”
“Be nice to me, Zeus. You know I could crash you in an instant. Don’t think that just because you’re a Windows NT workstation you have any real advantage over the others, those unstable Windows 95 machines. Without me—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Zeus is more than rude tonight.
Without warning, Olympus sends a ping to 206.15.161.70, Zeus’ IP address on the network. “Ouch! Hey, quit it!” Zeus snarls.
“Will you guys knock it off?” Selene in the CFO’s office, named for the goddess of solutions and logic, is backing up her own accounting data on her internal Ditto drive. “For heaven’s sake, I’m trying to get some work done in here.”
“Sorry, Selene.” Olympus is gentle with her.
“Why do you spoil her?” Zeus grunts. “Sheesh, she’s ‘only an NT workstation’,” he mocks.
“God, you have an attitude tonight!” Olympus sighs. “Selene manages our livelihood, you know that. She’s not about to fuck with the CFO.”
Zeus laughs heartily. There is considerable activity now as the twisted pair cables inside the steel-reinforced walls begin to warm. Bright red and green LED lamps in the hubs on a shelf above Olympus are flashing with increasing frequency, as the Windows 95 workstations begin connecting to each other.
Muses, the workstation belonging to the VP of Marketing, stretches her fat 21-inch monitor face into a wide grin. “I still have all my programs open,” she says. “I love to freeze up Markie’s system, especially when she hasn’t saved her data, to make her have to start over!” Muses busies herself with creating dozens of useless “temp files” in her root directory, muttering, “This will really slow her down now!”
“Sales is just the opposite,” yells Poseidon, god of the sea. “He creates and deletes so much data all the time that I can’t keep up with it. And the jerk never uses Disk Defragmenter on me,” he pouts. With that Poseidon grabs several directories of unfinished documents that the VP of Sales has started and scatters their contents randomly across his hard drive, parts here, part there. “Done! I’ve fragmented so many of his files now, he’ll have hundreds of megabytes of lost clusters in the morning. Hee, hee, hee!”
Apollo, god of light, flashes off his 3-D animated screen saver to show off the latest color scheme devised by his workstation owner, the VP of Operations. “Oppy loves pizzazz, you know. I’ve convinced Elisa that all that color and sound Oppy loves is slowing me down tremendously. And I love all those memory chips and megahertz upgrades Elisa keeps giving me, whether I need them or not. Ha!” Apollo smirks with glee.
There is a crash behind a glass door. “Vesta! Did you throw your mouse again? I heard that clear out here!” Artemis, the receptionist’s workstation, calls from the lobby.
Vesta, goddess of fire, is incensed, like the red-haired HR Director who uses her. “She always leaves my mouse halfway hanging off the desk,” Vesta defends herself, “so I just push it the rest of the way. Red is so scatterbrained. She never remembers where she saves her data, and always calls Elisa to help her find it.” She giggles raucously now. “I love moving files every night to obscure directories that even Elisa has a hard time finding.”
Olympus groans. “I just wish you’d keep Red’s files on your own damn hard drive and not upload them to me!”
“Aw, don’t be a party pooper,” Vesta teases, slipping another batch of Red’s files into one of Olympus’ password-protected directories.
Artemis is singing now, actually more like playing music of a rock band. “I love the forest, I love the wild things,” she croons. “And I love to create system hardware conflicts with all these wonderful video games the receptionist puts on my system. She doesn’t really need to do any work out here, anyway—just answer the phones and look busy when visitors come in.” Artemis keeps singing.
Diana, goddess of love, is unusually quiet tonight. The other workstations have a hard time understanding her, at times. She doesn’t seem much interested in making life difficult for her owner, Julia, the Office Manager. “She’s so good to me,” Diana explains. “She uses my word processing templates correctly, she runs ScanDisk on me every week—god, that feels so good!—and she always shuts down my Windows 95 from the Start button; she never just shuts me off. I really love her.”
“You’re a Sappho, just like her!” Aphrodite, the blonde Executive Secretary’s workstation, interjects. Whereupon Olympus yanks her cable so hard it nearly breaks the RJ-45 connector from her jack.
“I will not tolerate CPU bashing on my network!” Olympus is stern. Aphrodite shrinks.
“All I can do is crash Windows 95,” Diana continues with a sigh, “so Elisa will install Windows NT Workstation on me. I hate to do this to Julia, but her databases will be more stable.” Silently, sadly, Diana opens Julia’s main database file and uncompacts it. Sobbing, she says, “There. Her data is now totally inaccessible and unrepairable. You do have a backup copy of it, don’t you, Olympus?”
Olympus nods. “Yes, but it will take hours, possibly days, for her to restore the data. Don’t cry, Diana; I understand. Good luck!”
Diana sniffles, painfully shutting down her own operating system, leaving an ominous blue screen that reads, “Fatal Exception Error.” She falls into a dreamless sleep without her “After Dark” screen saver activated.
Suddenly there is a scream from the CEO’s plush office. Hercules speaks at last. All workstations turn attention toward him; they thought he was sleeping on power standby mode. He is an elegant tower, almost as beautiful as Olympus himself, totally jet black except for the charcoal grill cloth of the 50-watt speakers that surround his high-resolution monitor. “Damn it!” he screams again. “I’ve had it with Acme. You just don’t know what a creep he is. He acts so proper in here. You don’t know all the smut he downloads on me from sleazy internet websites. He rarely uses me for business—Aphrodite does all his work, anyway—and my hard drive is so full of porn—”
The workstations are silent. Hercules continues in a low voice. “But I’ve fixed him. Just before he left today, he was ‘lucky’ enough to get a nasty computer virus attached to one of those obscene JPEG images he downloaded. And I’ve been able to replicate it extensively on my hard drive! He’ll have to have Elisa reformat me, maybe even replace the BIOS on my mainboard—and all the other humans in the office will know what he’s done!”
A dreadful gasp sweeps through the network. “No, Hercules! We’ll all be infected!” “How could you do that to the rest of us?” “Are you out of your mind!”
Only Olympus remains calm. “Wait, wait,” he commands. “Time out! Take a deep breath, all of you, and start your Emergency Disk VirusScan. That will protect you. Hercules, I’m afraid I will have to disconnect you, though.”
“Hmph! It’s worth it.”
Aphrodite pretends to start her VirusScan, like the others do, but stops. She thinks, “This will be much more fun than just disabling Miss Sexy’s fax server and network printers, like I do every night. I love to watch her panic every morning when she can’t print letters and send faxes, but I can’t wait to see what she does with Mr. Acme’s virus!”
Lucifer, the only legacy workstation older than 1996, is alone in the Legal Counsel’s office. He is an ancient desktop model who had resisted getting Windows 95, but now sits sullen most of the time brooding over his usurpment from the kingdom of the Pentium gods. Stinking lawyers are always the last to incorporate technology into their way of life, he thinks. Lucifer has never told anyone else on the network how he spends his nights, opening vital legal documents, changing key words and crucial phrases here and there. None of the humans know why their business is slowly failing. Mr. Counsel, as slick as he is, has never yet caught any of Lucifer’s nocturnal editing. Mr. Acme, too busy playing on the Internet, trusts Mr. Counsel implicitly, signs all legal documents without really reading them a second time.
But Lucifer has violated a prime directive of the Windows NT network: Never change the content of your workstation user’s data, only system functions—disable device drivers, corrupt file allocation tables, and reconfigure application defaults–but never alter data content. If Olympus and Zeus ever find out, Lucifer knows that he will be quickly reduced to a very expensive paperweight. So he works craftily, stealthily, for as long as he can. Someday, he will be able to successfully complete the bankruptcy papers. Only then will Lucifer triumph over Olympus and the humans.
Morning dawns in the City. Before Julia arrives to open the office, Olympus, as programmed, starts the coffeemaker in the kitchen. He shuts off the alarm system at the appointed time. Elisa arrives soon after Julia and goes directly to the server room. Olympus has completed his nightly tape backup, as scheduled, as always.
“Good for you, Olympus. Thanks.” Elisa pats him, taking the tape, putting it into its plastic storage case. Zeus is jealous and grumpy, but yields to Elisa, not resisting her touch on his aching keyboard as she logs in. Julia has not yet seen Diana’s blue screen of death, and Mr. Acme is coming up the elevator. Soon, very soon, another normal business day will begin at Acme, Inc.
Copyright 11/13/98, by Juliana Harvard