Hacking the Sun [Old Version]

Chapter 2.1 The White Hat I Wear

"Goliath, Inc."

While rail lines, high-tech trains, sleek aircraft, and floating houses played on separate holo-screens, a female voiceover sang exposition: "Goliath Corp., proudly serving humanity since 2021. Goliath stands at the cutting-edge of innovation through the support of advanced ALI interfacing—"

"Skip."

Green Goliath headed several menus, one hologram for each panel. From left to right and left to right, page labels: About, Housing, GTrack, Aerospace, Missions, ALI Implementation, and so forth.

Jessica rolled in her chair, toward the shelves. She pulled a tablet from the row K and hit the desktop. After powering the tablet, an ad popped: 'Back to the Future: The Re-remake now available on Tundra.' She scowled. "Gotta remember to remove that feature," she muttered. In the section labeled Library, she tapped and searched until she found the e-book labeled Essays: First Series; underneath it, RWE. She scrolled with her left hand while the fingers of her right strummed the keyboard.

Typing, typing, typing. Jessica left the Goliath net page and input characters into a command prompt. All nine panels saw lines of green alphanumerics, scrolling like lightning while she read from the e-book and chewed on a slice of mushroom pizza.

Beep. 

She looked up. Backspace. She wiped garlic on her uniform before calling the command prompt. On the first three screens, lines and lines of code glimmered off her iris. Several keys later, the computer highlighted particular strands of alphanumerics across all tables in red.

"No way." Away with the screens of code. "Call David from Goliath." The ringtone played over the profile picture of nothing but a green G. During the dial, she turned a knob on the projector.

A man in his thirties appeared before the screen. "Hello," he said collectedly, sandy face and the green hat spelling 'Goliath' on his head of short, brown hair. "Lynx," he continued, "you have something for me?"

"Remember that source code you told me was uncrackable?"

***

Computer Software glimmered after the 7th-floor elevator, a precursor to the rows of holo-terminals operated by white-collar coats. Instructions railed across a memo board, like the subheadings on a news channel, neon green sentenced under one name: Goliath. Paths on either side of the lacquered board led into a circumventing corridor with three adjacent doors. Three signs: a stick figure, a skirted stick figure, and a pointy-eared stick figure, followed by an office with the name David M. Below, Director.

David's office was spacious enough for a sofa by the door. At the opposite end of his abode lay the terminal, where he stared into the live hologram of a lynx cat.

"Five days," said the lynx, the voice of a young Englishman. "I'm sending the functions to you now." Seconds passed before the hologram molded into green line after green line of code, two separate panels, characters on both highlighted in red. "What did you say your bit value was?"