Stub 6.2: Starting at the bottom

Lyle Corbin looked over at Dana Jenkins. “Are you gonna write him up?” Lyle asked.

Dana cocked an eyebrow. “Are you nuts? Don’t you remember what happened to Hobie Burk?”

“Hobie…? I think he was before my time.” Lyle said.

“Hobie was supervising the kid of one of the mid-level managers. The manager said, ‘Supervise my kid just like every other employee.’ Yeah, right.” Dana said.

“Hobie caught him away from his work-station and put him on notice. The kid complained to his mother and Hobie was transferred to Uzbekistan the next day.” Dana said.

“You think this kid would be the same?” Lyle asked.

“Worse.” Dana assured him. “This kid is a prick from the word go. His dad is OK, but even so he is way higher than the mid-level level executive who got Hobie sent to Uzbekistan. This kid would stick a knife in anybody’s back just to prove he could.”

“So how are you going to handle it?” Lyle asked.

“Just like he wasn’t here. I asked the manpower coordinator for another body to cover the work. As long as the little puke doesn’t smoke weed in areas with flammables, I don’t care what he does.” Dana assured Lyle.

Even as Lyle and Dana were discussing Hugh’s fate he was in a secluded office loading an unauthorized video game into a company computer from a memory stick. In addition to the game, Hugh was also loading a cockroach, a program that scurried into all the dark corners and crevices of the device’s memory and replicated with furtive abandon. The food the cockroaches were looking for were records.

The fact that Hugh's dad wanted him to start at the bottom, as a custodian, suited Hugh just fine. Custodians could be any place at any time.

He only needed to download his game into a few nodes and the cockroach, courtesy of an agent he met on the dark web, would saturate the system and bide its time.

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