Page 2 of Insidious Threats
He hurried inside as the wind blew a smattering of snow into the lobby behind him and yanked the door closed. As he sipped his hot chocolate and waited for the elevator, a persistent thought—the thought that had been dogging him for months and that dragged him out of his comfortable bed in his warm apartment at this indecent, predawn hour—looped through his mind.
What the devil was wrong with Mjölnir?
Gar was a talented software developer with a particular gift for debugging. This statement wasn’t arrogance or pride; it was a fact. He knew it. Everyone knew it. After all, that was why Rosen, that weirdo from Pinpoint Partners with the cringy title—data tracking evangelist and application integration sherpa or guru or whatever—had specifically requested Gar for this project. Pinpoint was some kind of silent investor in the tech company that employed Gar. Gar neither knew nor cared about the details. But his supervisor, the acerbic and anxious Antonia, cared. She cared a lot. And she’d taken to hovering.
Gar couldn’t work his magic with someone standing behind him, peering over his shoulder, second-guessing his decisions, and fretting. He needed solitude, loud French metal music, and assorted snacks. Also, hot chocolate. Unlike the stereotypical computer programmer or coder, Gar didn’t survive on a steady stream of energy drinks or cold brews. His go-to drink was hot chocolate made with full-fat milk and topped with a healthy dollop of whipped cream. In the dead of summer, he swapped out the hot cocoa for a cold glass of chocolate milk. The son and grandson of dairy farmers, he came by his beverage of choice honestly.
The elevator dinged, the doors whooshed, and he stepped inside the car. He stared blearily at his distorted reflection in the highly polished metal doors as the compartment rose to the third floor. He wasn’t a morning person—not by any stretch. He did his best work late at night. But so did Antonia. And if she wasn’t lingering around his desk, asking how it was going, then she was pinging him at home, well after midnight with incessant requests for progress reports. Managing his manager had become a distraction. So Gar had started coming into the office before sunrise to get a few uninterrupted hours of work in before she started peppering him with questions. Not that the new schedule was making any difference. He was still utterly, hopelessly stuck. Flummoxed, even.
The elevator came to a stop and the doors parted. Gar sighed and stepped out into the quiet hallway. The motion-sensing lights clicked on, and he shuffled toward the bullpen where the coders, programmers, software engineers, and developers all worked together in a jumble. He suspected this arrangement had originated because the human resource team in charge of seat assignments didn’t know enough to differentiate one computer geek from another. Unintentional or not, it had been a stroke of brilliance. The layout encouraged the worker bees to bounce ideas off one another and to get fresh perspectives and different spins on their projects.
But even access to the bullpen brain trust hadn’t helped Gar tease out the problem with Pinpoint Partners’ pet program. He flopped into his chair and powered up his computer.
Across the room, Petra Vukovic glanced up from her code. She kept her earphones on but raised a hand in greeting. He lifted his hot chocolate in a return salute before turning his attention to the program that had become his nemesis. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been wrestling with the blasted thing when Petra wandered over. Long enough to have drained his drink, leaving only a skin of dried milk clinging to the edge of the mug.
"What are you working on?" Petra raised herself onto the filing cabinet, where she perched like a bird.
At some point, while he’d been immersed in the code, she'd removed her hoodie and tied it around her waist. Her sleeveless tank top showed off her defined upper arm muscles, distracting him from her question. He realized he was staring, and his face heated as he pulled his eyes away from her toned biceps and triceps.
“Uh, sorry. Still trying to figure out what’s wrong with Mjölnir.”
“That thing. Why’s it named Thor’s hammer?”
He shrugged. “No clue.”
She drew her eyebrows together. “What’s it supposed to do?”
“It’s an AI-powered algorithm that’s supposed to predict a person’s shopping habits with unmatched accuracy so companies can serve up the perfect ad.”
“Lovely. Now even the robots work for our capitalist masters.”
He couldn’t tell from her dry tone if she was joking or about to launch into another one of her socialist rants, so he quickly went on, “And it does that—sort of. But in addition, for no apparent reason that I can see in the programming, it also volunteers a prediction of the user’s propensity to commit one of any number of felonies.”
Her pierced left eyebrow shot up. “Felonies, really?”
“Well, crimes. But, yeah, so far, they’ve all been felonies.”
“Wouldn’t most people’s likelihood of committing a felony approach zero?”
“You’d think so. Or, at least, hope so. But according to Thor’s trusty hammer, pretty much everyone has a criminal hidden inside them.”
She blinked at that. “And you can’t find the string that’s making it happen?”
“No. I’m ready to rip my hair out. The only possibility left is that the trigger is so deeply buried in the AI’s ‘brain’ that it only activates when the algorithm is already running. You know?”
“Gar, bro, if that’s the case, you know what it means.”
He didn’t, though. He shook his head, confused. “No. What?”
She held his gaze steadily. “It’s a feature—”
“—not a bug,” he joined in.
She hopped off the filing cabinet and brushed off the seat of her dark jeans. “Yup. I’m going to the kitchen. You want a coffee?” She eyed his mug. “I mean, another hot cocoa?”
“No, thanks.”
Usually, he’d tag along, savoring the minutes with her in light of the not-so-secret crush they both knew he had but neither acknowledged. But her words had shaken something loose. “You go ahead.”
