Quantum Contact

Part 1

Walking into work never got old. The building was austere and imposing. The sense of pride and privilege Syd felt every day never went away. Swiping her badge and going through the metal detectors never got old. She felt lucky to work in a place like this, serving her country, doing her part to keep the nation safe. Her badge let her into a room with lockers. All personal items had to be stowed before she could start her day.

Her desk was at the end of a row of workstations, she slid her access card into the reader next to the keyboard. The screen lit up and asked for a username and password. Entering them, she was prompted for her fingerprint. The card reader had a fingerprint scanner she rested her first finger next to her ID card. Her screens lit up, and she started checking her messages.

Answering her emails and dealing with the DMs took up most of the morning. The DMs came from her team, helping them was part of her job as a supervisor. Mostly the team spent their time troubleshooting network connections and monitoring traffic on the LAN. It was boring but necessary. Most of her job was boring, but cybersecurity did have its moments. When she had dealt with the morning round of emails, she went to each workstation and checked in with all her teammates. Sometimes a DM just didn't cut it.

Back at her desk, a notification popped up. It was an email from an unknown sender. It should have been filtered out by the system, but it looked like it originated in-network. How could it be an unknown sender and also be in-network? She opened it, but the message was unreadable. It was encrypted. Shit, she didn't have time to deal with this so she moved it to a folder to deal with later. She went back to dealing with the issues that were piling up.

A few hours into her day, she went back to the email folder. She opened the message from earlier, it was encrypted, but not in a way she recognized. To be safe, she put it on a removable drive and took it to the air-gapped computer they had access to for situations like this. The computer had decryption algorithms to handle this kind of thing. It happened often enough that there was a procedure, but she hadn't had this kind of problem in months. As the computer did its thing, she went to the bathroom. By the time she got back, the program was done. However, it was still garbled, something must have gotten messed up. She set the program to run again and decided to babysit it while it worked. Again, nothing. Now she was annoyed and a little scared, this message could mean someone was trying to infiltrate the network.

Back at her desk, she tried to think, Perez, her boss poked his head around her left side monitor. He was short and the monitors were large, so it made his stealth approach work. She snapped her head back and jumped.

"I told you a million times, don't do that!"

"Sorry. I was just coming to see if you got my email."

"I am reading them now, and will get back to you."

"Good, I just want all of us to be on the same page."

"Right, go away now, I'm busy." She didn't even try to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

"Ok, later."

His visits were annoying, and she treated him with disdain. In turn, he hit on her and made stupid jokes. An equilibrium was reached when she told him that he couldn't do her job, but she could do his. No way in hell did she want his job, but she wasn't going to tell him that. The level of annoying comments dropped, but the number of emails didn't.

She couldn't stop thinking about the message; it looked oddly familiar, a pattern she recognized, maybe. There are so many ways to encrypt something, she chided herself. Even more now than when she was in college ten years ago. Why was this email sent to her? The address was from inside the agency, but when she looked up the sender there was no matching name. Several minutes had passed and DM's had popped up, people needed help with the latest render. The email would have to wait.