Page 33 of Hacking the Holidays
Hold on, let’s overthink this.
“We’ve got a critical bug in our catalog system, and I thought I’d give you a crack at it since it seems to be your expertise. I’m tied up with something else that is equally precarious,” Sam said, pulling up lines of code on his screen and gesturing to it. “Books are randomly disappearing from search results. Not deleted—just invisible. The database shows they exist, but the query returns nothing.”
Why did he need me for this? The man was an expert at making things disappear right before my eyes.
“You have a blank look on your face,” Sam added.
“Sorry …” I waved it off. “I was just analyzing the problem in my head. It sounds like asynchronous operations are creating orphaned records.”
His head snapped toward me. “Wow. Yes. I was thinking the same thing.”
“Thread-safe indexing with mutex locks or semaphores will prevent concurrent access conflicts,” I said.
Sam crossed his arms and stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nobody here understands this,” he explained. “When I saymutex, people think I’m talking about an over-the-counter medication that helps loosen mucus in the airways.” He chuckled. “You just diagnosed the problem in ten seconds, without even logging in and diving deeper.”
I shrugged off the comment since it really wasn’t that difficult. “Shall we get started on the fix then?”
“Absolutely,” Sam said. “We can?—”
A tremendous crash echoed from the reference section.
Both of our heads whipped toward the sound. I could see someone had knocked over an entire display stand. Books were scattered across the floor in a spectacular cascade of hardcovers and paperbacks.
“What in the—” Sam stood to get a better look.
That was when I caught a glimpse of a person getting up, the one responsible for the chaos. It was Chloe. Right on schedule.
“Oh, no,” Chloe’s voice carried across the library like a damsel in distress, pitched perfectly between embarrassed and worried. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t see that there. Oh, my gosh, there are books everywhere.”
“Excuse me, Rose. I’ll be right back,” Sam said.
“Of course,” I said. “Take your time.”
Really, take all the time in the world.
Eleanor rushed toward Chloe, but Sam cut her off.
“I’ve got it,” he told her.
The second Sam stopped in front of Chloe to help her, I moved, my hand already pulling the flash drive from my pocket. I plopped down in his chair, rolled it closer to the keyboard, then slid the flash drive into the USB port with a click, pulling up the hidden executable on the desktop to begin the process.
INITIALIZING ...
Lines of code scrolled past as the algorithm began its work, probing authentication protocols and testing 500,000 potential credential combinations.
PROGRESS: 5%
With my eyes glued to the screen, I could hear Samreassuring Chloe that accidents happen and that it was no problem at all. I quickly glanced over and saw that they were gathering books from the floor.
I turned my attention back to the monitor.
“Come on,” I whispered to the screen.
PROGRESS: 20%
