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She eed from the bathroom and, out loud, asked Molly, "So where are we?"
But that wasn’t hard to figure out, was it? She drew athat ran south toward the hospital She had taken a left turn and that would put her in the base behind the asylu, with all of the offices and stuff
Alanced around at the computer workstations and suddenly had a revelation that made her feel like Neo in The Matrix, the first tiained the power to stop bullets
This was the nerve center of the quarantine, before the governuring out which workstation she wanted was an easy choice--there was one that had three monitors attached to it She held her breath and hit the power button It came up, and she wondered howoff of a generator, but the guys in charge of putting gas in it or whatever were gone There was nothing to do for it, but to work fast
The system booted and a network password box came up At this point the question was howdifference between getting through one password and getting through three--getting through three would be much easier
She was, after all, at the workstation--she wasn’t trying to break in remotely (which she couldn’t do, but she knew people who could) and in the world of computer security there is a threshold of just how many passwords a human can remember Give them one, and they’re fine Two, they’re probably still okay But give them three--say, one for the workstation, another for the network, and a third for whatever application they use--and they’re going to have to start writing the creaky desk drawers and found the big one in thebut a box of ballpoint pens and a single Post-it Note with a list of nonsense words and characters The first would be the username, the rest would be passwords
And just like that, she was in She tried to ra that made her yelp with joy
This computer has Internet access
Holy crap She didn’t even knohere to start
She nervously checked both of the locked doors--still no sounds from the other side--and settled in at the workstation The first task, she decided, would be to get a sense of the layout of the system, and what exactly she had available to her She found what they were using for e-es in the in-box with attachments--status reports and equipment requests and lots of other standardized fores about sound--reports and experiment results about frequencies and modulation and terms she had never heard before, like "infrasound" The staff were sending audio clips back and forth, and huge walls of analytical text referring to theibberish She’d have to set all that aside for now, she could spend weeks trying to get through it all
She next found a program that, when she clicked on it, took over all three screens, filling theoing on in most of them--you wouldn’t know they were live if not for the occasional bit of trash that would blow into view--but they were clearly of the exterior of the hospital quarantine
She got out of that, and found a separate application that gave her a full aerial view of the hospital grounds, rotating slowly just like the gun-ca to hit "Esc" to back out of it, but suddenly had the irrational fear that if she hit the wrong key, she’d see aout of the bottom of the screen and blow everybody up After a littlewas controlled elsewhere, whichlike that from a keyboard, you’d want a control stick and all that She was just watching the feed as a spectator--