Executive

…79

Louie had been working steady for more than thirty hours, running on stale coffee, cafeteria donuts, and adrenaline. An entire night of efforts had finally made him successful in cracking the codes needed to delete the images of Alex and her car from the drone system library of images. He had to do this offline though, to prevent the appearance of what he humorously called the black, unmarked cars arriving in the middle of the night. Even if he was doing this from inside the NanoLance building, he had attempted, repeatedly, to break the codes of the drone control system. This type of attack triggered the hard-coded security systems that the company had in place, running on each computer. No doubt about that. As he had removed the network connectivity before he started his work, this computer was yet to communicate the attack to the network and trigger the widespread alarm.

Of course, there was little he could do without connecting it back to the network. So far, he was only able to achieve the deletion of Alex's images from the library. It had only taken him fifteen hours to crack that encryption. Unacceptable. Nevertheless, this wasn't over yet. He had to connect the computer to the network and save the changes to the mainframe. And that would trigger the security alarms… He would have three, maybe four minutes until someone walked through the door to get him.

He took a sharp, deep breath, and inserted the network cable into its wall plug. The network was quickly acquired, and the computer displayed a connected status message. He clicked on the "save" button to make sure the deletion of images would be permanent and reflected on the main self-guidance server.

The screen returned an error message; not what Louie had hoped for.

Unknown Error: Code 054578. If this error persists, please contact your system administrator.

"Shit! Oh, no, no, no, no," Louie said, slamming a desperate fist against the desk. He re-entered the command to save and got the same error message. And again. Not many options were left. He pulled the computer's power cord out of the wall plug, grabbed his jacket and coffee mug, and stormed out the door. Maybe there was another way to fix this.