Like a pianist’s in full swing, his fingers flashed across the keyboard.
He peered at the screen, which fed instructions back to him,
instructions so familiar as to be rote. Jason hit four digits on the
numeric pad attached to the base of the computer’s microprocessor unit,
then he leaned forward and fixed his gaze at a spot in the upper
right-hand corner of the monitor. Jason knew that a video camera had
just that instant electronically interrogated his right iris,
transmitting a host of unique discriminators contained within his eye to
a central database, which, in turn, compared the image of his iris to
the thirty thousand residing in that computerized file. The entire
process had taken barely four seconds. As accustomed as he was to the
ever-expanding muscle of technology, even Jason Archer had to shake his
head occasionally over what was really out there.
Iris scanners were also used to closely monitor worker productivity.
Jason grimaced. Truth be known, Orwell had actually underestimated.
He refocused on the machine in front of him. For the next twenty
minutes Jason worked away at the keyboard, pausing only when more data
flashed across the screen in answer to his queries. The system was
fast, yet it had a difficult time keeping up with the fluid swiftness of
Jason’s commands. Suddenly his head jerked around as a noise from the
hallway filtered into the office. The damn dream again. Probably just
Charlie making rounds. He looked at the screen. He wasn’t getting much
of anything. A waste of time. He wrote down a list of file names on a
piece of paper, shut the computer down, rose and went to the door.
Pausing, he leaned his ear against the wood. Satisfied, he slid the
dead bolts back and opened the door, turning off the light as he closed
the door behind him. A moment later the dead bolts automatically moved
back into locked positions.
He moved quickly down the hallway, finally stopping at the far end of
the corridor in a little-used section of the office space. This door
had an ordinary lock that Jason opened using a special tool. He locked
the door behind him. He did not turn on the overhead light.
Instead, he produced a small flashlight from his coat pocket and turned
it on. The computer. console was in the far corner of the room next to
a low filing cabinet piled three feet high with cardboard packing boxes.
Jason pulled the computer workstation away from the wall, exposing
cables that dangled down from the back of the computer. He knelt down
and gripped the cables while at the same time inching aside a filing
cabinet adjacent to the worktable, revealing an outlet on the wall with
several data ports. Jason attached a cable line from the computer into
a port, making sure it was tight. Then he sat down in front of the
computer and turned it on. As the computer came to life, Jason perched
his flashlight on a box top so that the light shone directly on the
keyboard. There was no numeric keypad on which to input a security pass
code. Nor did Jason have to stare at the upper right-hand corner of the
computer screen waiting to be positively identified. In fact, as far as
Triton’s computer network was concerned, this workstation didn’t even
exist.
He slipped the piece of paper from his pocket and laid it in the
flashlight’s beam atop the keyboard. Suddenly he was conscious of
movement outside the door. Holding his breath, he buried the flashlight
into his armpit with his hand before hitting the off button. He dimmed
the monitor until the images on the screen receded into blackness.
Minutes went by as Jason sat in the darkness. A drop of sweat formed on
his forehead and then lazily made its way down his nose before settling
on the top of his lip. He was too afraid to wipe it away.
After five minutes of silence he turned the flashlight and computer
monitor back on and resumed his work. He grinned once as a particularly
stubborn firewall–an internal security system designed to prevent
unauthorized access to computerized databasescol-lapsed under his