Who: Tony and Merlin What: Work Stuff When: Recently Where: Stark Industries Warnings: Low/None Status: Complete
Merlin wasn’t sure what to make of being invited to Tony’s office, for a start his boss hardly ever used it and secondly he never organised meetings. Not even with people like Merlin. So he was intrigued and a little worried, though he’d done nothing wrong at all.
Knocking on the door he pushed it open, “Uh they said you wanted a word boss?” he said with a smile.
“Merlin!” Tony said, still sitting behind his desk and staring at the glowing computer screen. He was wearing his glasses, something he rarely did, and was pretty focused. His tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. “Come on in! I need your help with something.”
There were a lot of employees in the company that Tony didn’t know, but his Head of IT was a pretty important one.
“My help? Alright” he said entering the room and crossing to where Tony was sitting, he couldn’t think what his genius boss could need him for but he was more than willing to help. Especially now that his paranoid brain could shut up. “So what are you working on?”
“I got the suggestion that we should have an anonymous feedback program for Stark Tower, and I set up this,” he turned the computer’s screen so that Merlin could see the program he’d thrown together. But because he was Tony Stark, the program was pretty freaking fabulous. It was foolproof. “Well, someone suggested putting a garden on the roof. I’m getting less anonymous feedback that the garden is a popular idea, so I need to know who should be in charge of said… garden.” He paused. That was a lot of uses of the word ‘garden’ in three sentences. “I need help cracking into my own system to figure out which IP address logged the anonymous feedback.”
Merlin looked at the code, the fact that Tony had just thrown this together was pretty amazing. Merlin would have gotten there but definitely not in the short amount of time Tony had, but then that was why his boss was the genius. Merlin tapped the screen and scrolled through it all, “Well you definitely did a great job of making sure it was anonymous” he said, “We won’t get at it through the code. Maybe we can narrow down the terminals...” he said tapping a few things into the system and bringing up a mapping of all the computers in the building. After all they had to access the system and even with the code it was impossible to completely hide all the keystrokes.
Tony could code. That was part of what made him Tony Stark. But he hired brilliant people for a reason--and watching Merlin’s face as he started sorting through this problem was a reminder of why. Merlin was an expert when it came to networking, and this was partially a networking problem.
“You think we can at least narrow it down to whichever server this guy was using?” Guy or girl. Didn’t really matter to Tony. Everyone was a ‘kid’ around here.
“Give me enough time and I can narrow it down to which computer” Merlin said, identifying the computer instead of the user was a lot easier and the rest they could do with time stamped camera footage. “Is there a reason we aren’t just asking the person who suggested it to come forward?” he asked as he tapped away.
Most of the regular employees at Stark had computers assigned to them, so if they found the computer, they were likely to be able to find the employee. That was Tony’s theory, anyway. If Merlin could narrow it down to the actual computer that was used to make the anon feedback, then Tony could figure out who should be in charge of the garden on the roof. He was pretty interested in watching Merlin do his work.
“Let’s get started.” Tony said, and watched. “...I posted it on Valarnet. No bites so far. I know the overlap between Stark Employees and Valarnet users isn’t that large, but… Well, I wanted to see if you could do it, too. Call it ego. I wanted to see if you could crack my code.”
Merlin was fairly sure he’d probably be able to get more by emailing out a message just to Stark employees but he refrained from saying so. Obviously more was going on and with Tony’s next words he discovered what.
Chuckling he shook his head in amusement, “I know better than to try cracking any code you write” he said smiling wryly at his boss, “I find ways around it instead” He finished writing his own code which would search for a certain pattern of keystrokes - essentially finding out which computer had been used to access the feedback program and type in the word garden. Had it been Merlin he would have used a hot desk so the computer wasn’t as easily tracked to a user. But that was Merlin.
“I knew there was a reason I kept you around.” Tony teased, watching while Merlin worked. It was interesting watching someone else moving around his code, coming up with ways around he hadn’t thought of himself. It was enlightening.
“Interesting. You’re bypassing most of the code here.” Tony leaned in, curiously.
“Of course. I told you, find ways around it rather than attacking it” Merlin smiled, “I know how you write there will be a million hoops to jump through and I’d still hit firewalls, it’s easier this way. Not perfect but close enough” It would do the job which seemed to be what his boss wanted.
“Smart man.” Tony said. He watched Merlin’s fingers for a moment, then leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Print that, would you? I’ll narrow it down from there and find who I’m looking for.”
“Of course” Merlin said, doing as instructed and moving to the printer as it whirred to life. “If you need anything else just let me know”
“That’s great for a start.” Tony said, giving his Head of IT a smile. “Thank you.”
“Anytime” Merlin told him with a nod handing over the paper, happy he’d been able to help.