ZANEY1.TXT, The 10 MegaByte Barrettes, copywright 1993 by Dave Byter, proliferate freely. This is really Zaney's story, so I should let her tell it. One of the things that she and her friends did to make some money back during their student days was working maid service for The Government. They all changed their names to "Mary Smith", and worked the topless bars and government offices. Anyway, the "Mary Maids" got the custodial contract for the new NSS building. All kinds of government security and searches and such, even for the maids. NSS was quite worried about leaks as to what was going on in the name of "National Security". "The only tools worth having are those which you can carry under your hat. How would your friends go about it? Break in and get caught slicker than Nixon's Plumbers? That's all you can think about, trying to force your way in." Zaney was off on another of her feminist tirades, but she had gotten the files, and as it turned out, a lot more. "They can't even know that the files were leaked, since they are still right where they left them. Not mussed up, no fingerprints, no glue in the locks, none of the things that tipped them off to Rudy. Just tell me what you want, and I'll get it for you. Lessee how much of Rudy's files we got." Now Rudy was her old boyfriend, before he got caught. Even after the trial, nobody was really sure who was ARA, who was NSS, and who was both. As usual, Zaney had solved the problem in the most logical way. Rather than talking about grabbing one of them and twisting him until he skwualked, or masquerading as common criminals and pretending to steal the computers from the government offices, she just walked up to the NSS and said, "Lemmein." I suppose that that is one of the weaknesses of power everywhere. I mean, can you imagine General Jackov emptying his own ashtray, let alone mopping his own floor? There are always infiltrators, but usually all they want is money. Pay 'em well and send 'em on their merry way. Anyway, she had copied Rudy's files onto PROM fitted into her barrette, and walked out of the NSS just like she had walked in. "Yeah, they have a passion about paper. They must have had paper secrets stolen in the last war. You couldn't get a candy wrapper out of that place, let alone a tape. Ain't it just serendipity that Ben is in the PROM business? I bet I've got the world's only ten megabyte barrettes. Anyway, I'm anxious to dump this, just in case. I'm a lot happier when it's only garbage, tho I can't see how they could ever look there. But whoda thunk that an office maid would have to submit to a 'body cavity search'. Yeah, that's what they call it. Or 'BCS' when they have to talk about it officially. "Some of then really get off on it. I'm sure that most of them would *pay* Big Brother a dollar an hour for the privilege of pushing a broom for eight hours, just so that he could stick his finger in my cunt. What a disgusting bunch of slime works there. Some of the girls have made a game out of getting caught smuggling weird things out, but I think that it just encourages the ." Ben pulled the PROMs out of Zaney's hair and plugged them into his computer. I could remember the days when ten megabytes would have been a truckload of IBM cards. These things looked like jewelry. "Say, look at this. Just like I figured they would do it. They keep adding everybody's files to the end of the tape. When The Chief wants a report, they collect them all together, The Boss writes a summary, and it is all slapped on the end of the line as a new file. We oughta put a demon in their computers to call for a few extra Reports To The Chief whenever there isn't anything else interesting to do. It sure would do wonders for the computer tape business too." "Why not change a few names around. Look here where they are talking about how much longer they should keep this confidential informant. We should just put Mitch the Snitch into one of their snuff files, and let them do the job." That was Ben's neat idea, and it led to what we called the Sewer Passage leak. A leak big enuf to fill the sewer passage of Hells' Wells. Talk about the Eye in the Sky, we had the Mole in the Hole, and he was everywhere at once. Steve eventually even programmed one Eye in the Sky to take infrared photos of the McPhail's karst and dump them into our PROMs. Tiny was the one who didn't think that changing the files right then was too good an idea. "Look here. This garbage is a checksum, the sum of all the bytes in the file. If you change anything, then the checksum won't match, and they will know that there is an error. It is supposed to protect against a glitch, but it would catch tampering too. I'll bet that the checksum is stored somewhere else too, so we'll have to change both of 'em. It won't be easy, but it sure will be slick!" In that first haul, Zaney had just gotten a couple of Rudy's files, plus about ten megabytes of assorted other stuff. But Ben and Tiny took those files apart and saw how their filer worked. We could get anything we wanted. Ben eventually built the "do-diddler", so that we could diddle the files too, tho this was a lot more difficult. Rather than repeat them here, I'll just copy them as RUDY1 & RUDY2 and let you see for yourself. But we had unmasked Mitch on the first shot. I never did like that slimy little . He was always pussyfooting around, and always had such a shiteating grin when he explained why he was there. I swear that he could butter up The Devil Himself, and make him think that it was Mitch that was doing him a favor. I didn't feel any remorse when he was gone, although I think that the method of his leaving was a bit gory. Zaney just thought that it was a fitting end for a dick.