"Are you stealing my soul with this?" Who: Bob Howard, Mo O'Brien What: Talk Geeky To Me (Rescuing a Sea-soned hard drive) When: Late Monday night, 5/14/12 Where: 20 Civic Center Plaza, Santa Ana Rating: Rated M for offenses against technology. (Worksafe, albeit with some salty language.) Status: Complete.
There were not, in fact, very many things Bob Howard regarded as holy, but the preservation of technology was –
Well, it was definitely right up there, whether or not it was, in fact, the only thing, or the holiest.
So if Bob was going to hurry, it was going to be when he discovered that a vital piece of technology was at risk of truest death. Such as, in fact, when a Scottish national member of the California Bureau of Investigating Something-or-other solemnly informed him that he was, indeed, the only hope of salvaging a drowned-and-frozen hard drive. Thank goodness her office was only about twenty minutes' drive from his, in Irvine; of course, he'd forgotten to calculate for the added time necessary to make it through security with all the tools he needed on a daily basis in order to stay alive, especially when the building's security was so reduced due to the late hour.
"Oh, please, please forgive me eventually," he was busy muttering to himself as he hustled down the hall, once all his equipment was, once again, safely ensconced in his messenger bag, tucked protectively under his arm. "Now, which office was it, again –"
Eventually he took to rattling doorknobs, to see which would open, and then which one had a dog who would answer to his query of "Mo?"
The one that had the dog in it, though, was the office with the door that was open.
As soon as the rattling began, Bob could easily hear the dog down the hallway -- starting to howl in tune with the rhythm of the doorknob noises. Along witht the howling, a distinct Scottish, "Shush!" rang out.
The howling stopped.
Or he could stop rattling doorknobs and just hurry up a bit, he supposed, feeling foolish. "Er, hello?" he tried calling, as he continued hoofing it toward the howling door.
"Sorry about him," Mo replied, guilty, as she stepped out into the doorway of her office. And there she was: classic red curls, six feet tall, combat pants and a fancy blouse. She was wearing big hoop earrings and had a ring on almost every finger.
One hand was around the collar of a reasonably sized Irish Setter, who she was pulling backward from running out into the hall to go 'meet' the new strange person, which likely meant something along the lines of 'jump up on and lick in the face.' " You're Dr. Howard?"
She'd seen his picture in the dossier, but still.
"No, I'm Bob, Dr Howard is my sister," came out instinctively. After all, Bob had said it so often, over the years, mostly to be silly – but, well, the higher processes of his brain weren't entirely functional at the moment anyway, what with how it wasn't every day he got to see someone quite that stunning up close and personal, so probably it was just as well.
"Bob it is -- like I said, Mo's fine, try not to call me Dominique and we're good -- anyway, the evidence room's this way," she said, and attempted to shove the dog back into the office and shut the door on him.
He whimpered, and she gave in at the last moment, looking the sort of guilty that often results from canine guilt-trips.
"Er," Mo continued, "unless you don't mind meeting Jan first?"
"That's this fellow?" It took Bob a moment, of course, to finish shoving all his bagged techie goodness around until he could crouch, briefly; the important thing was less about making sure his knees could bend and more about making certain he wouldn't tip over and land arse-over-teakettle on top of a laptop once he did. But since he was reasonably well-balanced, he didn't mind offering the dog a hand.
The other one, of course, was hovering behind him, ready to hit the ground to brace himself if several stone of dog were suddenly added to his center of gravity.
Jan was, at least, a reasonably attractive specimen of his breed, and a well-trained one to boot; with Mo's hand still on his collar, he took a couple of hesitant steps forward and then took a good sniff of Bob's hand.
Followed by a lick, and a low-in-his-throat questioning bark.
"That's basically a request to pet him," Mo explained, "but you don't need to, of course --"
"Nonsense! I might be here a while," Bob answered, cheerfully petting. Petting meant he wasn't getting knocked over. That, he could handle.
After a moment, however, he stopped, and straightened, and was still looking up to look at her, and smiled, and said, "So! You were saying about the evidence room – which way, was it?"
"Yes, right." Now that the dog was satisfied, Mo could more easily shut him in her office; he went willingly, and Bob got an appreciative look for it. From the human, even, and not just the dog. "Down this hall --"
She walked rather quickly, but not with such speed he'd lose track of her.
Besides, her shoes were noisy enough he could have followed her even if she did walk fast enough to outpace him – but she was, at least, polite enough not to keep him nearly-running. "So now that we're in person, are you going to tell me anything more about this?" he asked, tagging along.
Mo looked surprised, for a second; then she was laughing, shaking her head as she did so, which tossed her hair and earrings about a little bit. "I'd forgotten I hadn't! I'm sorry -- a teenage boy was left in the trunk of a car, which was then driven into the ocean, I wish I were kidding. This laptop was also in the car. When it was retracted it was both soaked through and extremely cold to the touch."
As she talked, she swiped a card through a card reader next to a door marked, unsurprisingly, 'EVIDENCE ROOM 3.' Seeing as how they were on the third floor, the number at least followed logic.
OR DID IT? – asked Bob's internal monologue, which had a tendency to insist upon needlessly doom-filled vaguely pretentious commentary. Such as, for instance, that.
Bob looked, in fact, rather queasy, keeping close to her. "Where in the car was the laptop?" he asked faintly, desperately hoping the answer wasn't 'under the body, in the trunk'.
"The back seat, in what we assume was the victim's backpack," said Mo as she opened the door and let Bob go in first, thankfully providing an answer for him that wasn't 'under the victim.' "We haven't been able to ask him yet, of course."
The evidence room really looked much like what an evidence room on television would look like, only minus a person at a front desk, and there were no gates or cages. Just boxes, and tables. On the big table in the center of the room was -- well, it still appeared to be a Dell Inspiron 15R, but it was obviously waterlogged.
And then Bob forgot that a total babe of a redhead had let him in, and was busy sweet-talking the laptop into not hating him forever for not telling them to keep it frozen longer.
Logically enough, he probably should have waited until he'd signed some sort of paperwork that told him he really would get paid, or something that said when he started work on it, but – well, he had a higher calling than governmental paperwork; he spoke for the technology, dammit! And the poor, poor computer needed ever so desperately to be rescued and restored and heard and forgiven for getting soaked through.
Quite some time later, Bob stopped long enough to look up to see if he could, in fact, find Mo, if she was still there, and maybe ask her if there was coffee somewhere.
She was, but it appeared as if she had left and come back; she was at one of the other tables working on a different laptop -- this one a Hewlett-Packard model G7, thirteen inches. Mo was also drinking from a mug, which was at least a good sign.
When she saw that he'd paused, she inquired, "So, can you get the data off it?"
"What?" Bob blinked, hazily, giving the mug a longing look. "Oh. Yeah, it's going," was a much vaguer answer, if maybe a positive one; he waved haphazardly at the tangle of wires and technology infesting the table, now, and then scrubbed at his bleary eyes with the other hand. "Coffee?"
"It's tea," she said, first, sounding a bit distracted, and then -- "Oh, but we do have a coffeemaker, it's in the break room, if you want me to take you."
What? Leave? But –
Bob's own laptop attempted, in its laptopian way, to be reassuring at him that it had this, he could go, it'd be cool. Weary, he pushed himself away from the table, almost-but-not-quite falling as he realized that his foot had long since gone to sleep. "Coffee," he repeated, this time in a tone that said he was agreeing. That was good, right?
"My apologies, you're not used to these hours," Mo said, naïve to the ways of the geek as she led him down a different hallway to the breakroom; it was, at least, a really nice break room with the fanciest of possible Keurig machines and a couple of couches.
Once Bob had callously burned his way through about four of the K-cups, he felt much better equipped to talk; finding milk had helped, too. "It's not the hours," he answered vaguely. "It's more – usually, the room I'm working in is personally equipped, see? I don't have to leave."
Mo only looked lost for a second, at least, from her spot perching on the back of the couch rather than sitting on it properly.
"Ah. Well," she said, "I don't have access to the IT area or I'd have just let you in there."
Bob perked up. Of course. "Do they have a proper setup, in there, then?" (He meant, of course, of vending machines.)
"Define it?"
"With," handwave, "machines! You know! So that we can keep going!"
"Er, yes," said Mo, weakly, because of course the information technology room had machines in it. Other than that, she didn't actually know what was in it, having only been by once or twice and not actually being able to open the door.
Bob heaved a sigh of wistful longing, for all that his eyes were still roaming about the break room to see what machines were, in fact, present there. Other, of course, than the Keurig machine, which was nice so far as it went, and had already relieved him of almost three dollars' worth of quarters. "Snack machine?" he asked, sounding hopeful.
"Snack shelf," Mo corrected, gesturing at a cabinet. "Technically, two. Take what you like; communal pot."
The refrigerator, on the other hand, was presently locked.
Two tubes of Pringles later, and another cup of coffee gained, Bob looked remarkably cheerful for someone in a government building on the wrong side of 2 AM. "Shall we?"
Mo, on the other hand, was on cup of tea number four and it appeared as if her curls were beginning to droop slightly.
"Have you got more to do?" she asked.
"Not sure yet," as answers went, was altogether too cheerful. "We might be lucky, and all the information'll be copied off by now. On the other hand, chances are pretty good it's encrypted, and I'll take a stab at the thought you've not really got a lot of time to wait for your own techies to ungarble that, either."
"Oh fuck," Mo blurted, without even getting a chance to censor herself -- she didn't actually stop to appear guilty about it, either. "Passwords. I forgot about passwords. No, we're still very understaffed and while I'm sure an intern could do it it'd take --"
She paused to collect herself, and then continued, "You don't have to do it tonight though. I mean. I'd like to sleep."
"Why don't we see how long it actually takes?" Bob asked, surprisingly gently. "I mean, it might not be protected, or it might be very badly protected, in which case it might take ten minutes or less – or it might actually be corrupted, or it might be so heavily encrypted I'll need to set up a caffeine drip before I get started, and then we can both go home and get some sleep, first."
"I'll let you give it one shot."
Unfortunately, the computer was encrypted. At least by basic password protection.
"Fuck," Bob swore, muttering under his breath, and peered at the laptop's case.
After all, the hard drive in question wasn't really in the laptop anymore.
He switched to peering at Mo, instead. "You win, I think, unless you actually know a great deal about the former owner of this," he told her warningly. "Because the easiest way to do this is just to guess the password, and the easiest way to do that is by actually knowing something about the human involved. Human error is easier to overwhelm than computer error, really it is. Promise."
"Well, as a matter of fact I do, having searched his bedroom and interviewed the family, but I'm not sure exactly what to tell you."
Mo looked doubtful; also, tired.
"Oh, anything could help," Bob tried. "Did he have a desk? Any specific point where he was usually on the computer? Bed, if not desk, or was it in the living room, that sort of thing? What would he have been looking at when he was on the computer?"
"Desk in the bedroom, yes. An extremely messy typical secondary school teenage boy sort of desk, covered in school things. There was a poster, but I'd have to check my notes --" Mo shot a look at her closed laptop, which remained closed, "As to what it was a poster of. He liked to play a lot of World of Warcraft and spent his spare time trying to make mods for it."
Which meant his password might not be that obvious, but then again, you never know.
"Well, do you know what guild he was in?" Bob pursued. "Horde or Alliance?"
"I," Mo tried, and then gave up. "Don't know what that means."
"Well, it's simple! It's –"
Bob stopped himself, with an effort, counted backwards from a billion in binary, and a few seconds later resumed as if nothing had happened. "Something I can explain later, and in the meantime, probably going to bed would be a good idea. Never mind the coffee, anyway."
It wouldn't be the first time he slept off a jolt of caffeine, after all.
Mo laughed again, and shrugged. "I think you've used so much brain you'll find yourself quite fine when it comes to falling asleep. Where should I store that, anyway? Is it okay in here, or -- you know what, should I just sign out the parts you need to you so you can take them somewhere you're more comfortable here, and just keep in touch with me by phone? Or text message. Not email. Sorry. You can IM me, though," she conceded, after a moment's thought.
Signing out something like this was allowed; he'd been signed on as a consultant. It happened. She knew it. He'd been vetted.
"... if I'm allowed to take the ghost drive with me," which would be nice, since technically it was on his equipment anyway, "I can probably brute-force elegantly hack in without needing the password, by setting the program to run overnight." Whatever there was left to 'overnight,' anyway. Bob looked hopeful.
Instead of answering, Mo -- disappeared into a filing cabinet.
When she resurfaced a minute later, it was with a form in triplicate that had a bunch of fancy legal words on it.
"One sec," she said, and really more like fifteen seconds later she was holding it out to him, along with a pen. "Sign where the little Xes are, please?"
"Are you stealing my soul with this?" Bob asked deliberately, holding the sheaf of papers loosely and pointedly not signing... yet.
"You can read it, if you don't believe me," she told him, with a much softer, more amused smile, "but no."
"Well, I'd hope you'd at least be honest about it if you were going to," he answered, smiling readily, and skimmed only over the first page before seeking out every other X and signing as indicated. "What did I just do?"
"You signed chain of custody paperwork."
"So if someone goes looking, and I've lost it, they know to blame me, then." Bob sighed, wryly, but it wasn't as if he hadn't encountered similar before, and besides – chances were pretty good that nobody would treat him as lethally as when he cocked up someone's Outlook calendar. "What time do I need to be back by, tomorrow?"
Mo only seemed to think about it for a couple of seconds before very simply proclaiming, "Um, sometime before one? You're not exactly on the schedule, and we'll trust you to only bill for the hours you actually worked, but other people might want to ask you questions and if you need anything from us being here would definitely be a good idea."
"Lunch, I assume you mean, and not actually one in the morning again." A wry look, there, as Bob started packing up his equipment, including the ghost of the harddrive he now had possession of. "It's all right; I'll tell the folks I'm working with at Moxzpah, so they don't expect me, and hopefully we'll have this wrapped up tomorrow by dinner, yeah?"
"That," Mo said, with a genuine grin, showing off near-perfect teeth in addition to everything else that was unfairly, if a little awkwardly, attractive about her, "would be just about perfect. And yes, I meant the one that's in the afternoon, when the rest of the staff is here."
"Well, then! Sounds lovely." Shove, shove, pack, pack, stutter to a halt: Bob's subconscious had finally gotten around to replaying what he'd said just before she last replied, and realizing that it sounded suspiciously close to asking her out to dinner. Fuck.
She didn't entirely seem to have noticed, though. Small favors.
As a matter of fact, she absolutely didn't. He was safe there, at least; it hadn't occurred to Mo to read it that way.
"Let me get Jan," she said, "and I'll walk you downstairs. Save you going through security on the way out."
"Ooooh, a back door? I do love those at least!" Bob answered, maybe a little too quickly; but on the other hand, he did like the dog, for all he hadn't really gotten to know him.
With a laugh, Mo said, "No, I'm sorry; same door, just using the exit that doesn't go through the detectors and past the guard. It's just got the barrier up, you saw it on the way in."
When she opened the office door, Jan leapt up off the floor, pretending he had not, in fact, been asleep all this time. Dogs never sleep!
(Mo laughed at him, too, as she picked up her briefcase and put his leash on.)
Once Bob had finished assuring Jan that no, in fact, he had not become an evil so-and-so who hated dogs (via a series of scritches and pets), it was time to go; and then once Bob was back in his car, driving back to Irvine, he was left wondering just why it was he so desperately wanted to ask her out to dinner, and why – at the same time – he was so desperately afraid to.