Page 53 of Industrial Magic (Otherworld 4)
At ten-fifty, my watch alarm went off. Time to check in with Elena. I phoned her, talked to Savannah, then returned to my work. The rest of the files on the disk appeared to be work-related. Like most professionals, Weber's day didn't end when the clock struck five, and for contract employees, the drive to translate that contract into a full-time job often means bringing work home to impress the company with your throughput. He had plenty of data files on his computer, and a folder filled with programs in SAS, COBOL, and RPG. The mind-numbing side of programming: data manipulation and extraction.
I looked at the lists of data files. There were over a hundred on the disk and I really didn't want to skim through each one. Yet I couldn't just put them aside based on assumptions about the content. So I whipped up a simple program to open each file and write a random sampling of the data into a single new file. Then I scanned the new file. Most of it looked like financial data, not surprising given that Weber worked in the accounting division of a Silicon Valley company. Then, a third of the way down the file, I found this:
Tracy Edith McIntyre
03/12/86
shaman
NY5N34414
Race Mark Trenton
11/02/88
sorcerer
YY8N27453
Morgan Anita Lui-Delancy
23/01/85
half-demon
NY6Y18923
Now, Silicon Valley companies may employ some pretty young people, and some pretty strange people, but I don't think teenage supernaturals made up a significant proportion of their staff. I found two other similar lists farther down. Three files with information on the teenage children of supernaturals. Three Cabals had been the victims of a killer targeting their youth. Definitely not a coincidence.
My sampling program had pulled off only the first eighty characters in each record, but the information in those records extended well over that. As with most data files, though, all you saw were strings of numbers and Y/N indicators, meaningless without a context. To read and understand these files, you needed a program that extracted the data using a record key.
Ten minutes later, I'd found the program that read the Cabal files. I ran it, then opened the file it created.
Criteria A: age<17; living with parent(s)= N; current location city NOT blank, current location country = USA
ID
Name
Age
Cabal
P. Race
State
01-645-1
Holden Wyngaard
16
Cortez
shaman
LA
