CHAPTER 102: GOOD NEWS (2)

"What’s wrong?" she asked, concerned.

"I just got off the phone with Abigail and learned from her that I don’t need to hire an interior decorator to help furnish my new mansion, because apparently someone has already taken the job."

"Oh, um, is that a problem? I thought you would appreciate me taking the initiative. Besides, I’m taking that interior decorating class and it’ll be perfect for my first assignment. Even better, when my professor saw the 3D scans, she asked if she could use them for a joint class assignment."

Instead of going to NSU, Miranda was going to The Bailor School of Fine Arts and was taking an eclectic mix of classes that would amount to degrees in political science and hospitality. The latter included classes on how to manage large households with staff. They had not discussed all the classes she was taking, probably because they tended to wind up communication non-verbally.

"How long will this assignment take to complete? How do you plan to acquire, deliver, and install the furniture? And, most importantly, how do you think I felt having to lie to Abigail, so she didn’t think I was ignorant of what my people were doing?"

"Oh shit! I...Um, I’m sorry. I thought you would appreciate me taking the initiative to help."

"I don’t have a problem with you taking the initiative, but I do have a problem with you acting without my knowledge. I don’t expect you to tell me every little thing you do, but I do expect you to talk to me before taking any action that intersects with my business. If you asked me to let you handle the interior decorating, I probably would have said yes, assuming I liked your answers to the other questions I asked."

He struggled to stay serious because of her sheepish, "I fucked up," look; it was super cute. It felt almost like he was scolding a puppy for bringing him his slippers, only slightly damp from slobber. Still, she needed to understand that it was not okay to act on his behalf without talking to him first.

"I’m sorry. I...I think I understand. I just wanted to help."

He sighed. "There’s nothing wrong with wanting to help, but make sure you talk to me first."

"Okay."

The way she said it evoked an image of a puppy with huge watery eyes looking at him while making a pitiful, "I’m sowy," whine. It almost felt weaponized, so he checked her emotions over their connection, but she was genuinely remorseful.

"Now, what about my other questions?"

"You mean about how long it will take, and how will I implement the design?"

"Yes, that."

"The assignment is due in two weeks. And, um, I hadn’t thought about the rest."

"What did you tell your professor when you explained how you got the 3D scans?"

"Oh, I told her about accompanying Abigail for some home viewings and gave her the same cover story we gave to Ester."

"And how would you explain being involved in the actual purchase and delivery of furniture to a home you don’t own?"

"Oh. Huh. I um, didn’t think about that."

"Here’s what we’ll do. It’ll probably take at least to weeks to get the security system installed, so I’m okay with you and your class working on the interior design. As for the actual implementation, tell your professor that Abigail mentioned your class project to the new owner, and the owner expressed interest in seeing if her class could come up with a complete plan. Say the owner is willing to let her class gain practical experience implementing such a large project, but only if the professor was willing to provide oversight and quality control."

"Oh, I think that will work. Professor Welton used to do these kinds of interior design projects, so I think that will work."

"Great, then we have a plan."

Then he started to undress, "Now, I think you were making an especially enticing offer when I arrived?"

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Meanwhile, in Jack’s soul space....

From all the way in his lab, Jack heard Madison triumphantly scream, "YES!"

He and Nora dropped what they were doing and headed to Madison’s office to see what had happened. When they arrive, they found Madison hopping up and down pointing at one of her desktop monitors. The moment she saw Jack, she rushed over and hugged him while still bouncing up and down.

"We got it!" she crowed. "We got the evidence. Those bastards are going down!"

He had recently done another data import from the hidden cameras they had planted in the Cascade Marketing offices, and he assumed she had finally found something useful in the latest data dump.

Before he could say anything to her, Madison pulled him in front of her desk and pointed at a screen. On it, he could see a conference room with five people standing around a table. They looked haggard and frustrated.

Madison clicked a button, and the video started playing.

"What do you mean the backups are corrupted?!" exclaimed an older man in a suit.

"I mean, all the backups are worthless. Not a single recoverable file, just-" explained a man with glasses.

"How did this happen, James?" demanded the older man before the man in glasses could finish. "I.T. is your responsibility, so how could you have screwed up this badly?"

"As I was saying before you interrupted, Bob, the backups are not broken. They’ve been intentionally corrupted. Each tape is filled with ASCII text with phrases like, ’suck eggs’ and ’we own you’, and other nonsense. Besides wiping our servers, the hackers also overwrote all our backup tapes with nonsense. All our data is GONE!"

"I told you we should have just paid the bounty, Bob. These hackers can be vindictive. I bet that bitch we framed did it to get revenge," said a third man.

Bob turned to James and asked, "Is that possible?"

"Sure, I guess. She proved she could have accessed the servers, so it’s possible she regained access and trashed our servers and the backups," replied James.

"From jail?" asked a fourth man. "She’s still in jail, awaiting trial. The feds claimed she was a flight risk, and the judge declined to set bail."

"Shit," said Bob. "If it wasn’t her, then who was it?"

"Our data servers got wiped but our proxy didn’t and I was able to find traces of the hack in the proxy logs. It looks like they might have exfiltrated all our data before wiping our servers," said James.

"And?" asked Bob.

"The IPs listed in the logs appear to be owned by Prism Partners."

"What?! Those bastards? Are you sure?" asked Bob.

"Not 100 percent. We’d need to hand the logs over to the feds and let their experts handle it."

"Isn’t that risky?" asked the third man. "Won’t that just expose that we wiped our own server to avoid paying that hacker bitch?"

"No, they’d have to subpoena out KVM logs to discover that, and they would have no reason to do that unless they suspected it was an inside job," said James.

Madison paused the video.