Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

“No,” the thug said. “The system must remain operational. Our investors have entrusted us with critical functions for their businesses. We cannot restrict access to our system for any reason.”

I blew out an exasperated sigh and hoped it would take the tension building in my chest with it. The cartel had hired the best defensive hacker money could buy, but it was going to be hard as hell to fix their problem if they tied my hands behind my back with their ridiculous conditions. Thirty minutes to stop an all-out AI attack with no backup, and I had to leave the system online?

I was in hacker hell.

I debated making a run for it, but the bad men positioned at strategic points around the room made that a loser’s bet. Their scarred and tattooed hands rested on the butts of enormous firearms strapped to their hips or chests, and they kept their dead shark’s eyes locked on me at all times. If I so much as farted too loudly, I’d catch a bullet.

My only option was to get to work.

I focused my mind on the quiet burble of the brain tank’s filtration pump, and my meditation practice kicked in. My thoughts slowed, my muscles loosened, and my pulse pushed blood into every nook and cranny of my overtaxed brain. The problem-solving skills that had attracted the cartel’s interest and put me in this do-or-die situation burst to life.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s make a billion dollars.”

I cracked my knuckles and raised my hands over the white surface of the desk. Illuminated keys rose through the mirror-smooth surface and adjusted their spacing and slope to the positions of my fingers. I’d never touched a keyboard like this one, but the instant my fingertips brushed the grippy, concave keys, my geek obsession with keyboards reared its ugly head.

“This thing custom?” I asked as I tapped in a command to pull up the traffic log files. “I want one. Where’d you get it?”

The thug behind me grunted but said nothing.

“Fine, be that way,” I snorted. “I’ll check Amazon after I finish cleaning up your mess for you.”

Before I could issue any commands, a terminal window flashed to life and a brief message scrolled up to greet me.

****WELCOME TO DECS 2033

****ELEVATED ACCESS TERMINAL

****>>>

I poked around to see just how highly elevated this terminal’s access was. I tried to switch to the root directory, but it was locked down. A quick search did turn up an admin directory, however, and that opened up to me almost as fast as my prom date had. It only took me a few seconds to find the traffic logs that I needed.

I extracted the logs from the network’s storage drive, encrypted them into a tidy package, and opened a terminal window to shoot it off to my tools server. I could have analyzed the traffic in the clean room, but the sophisticated analysis package ready and waiting on my remote system could crunch through it in a fraction of the time it would take me to do it manually. I could have done it even faster if they’d let me bring my laptop, but I’d just have to make do.

My shoulders tensed when I started the transfer from DECS to my remote server, but none of the thugs reacted to my breach of security protocol. Either they had no idea what I was up to or they had orders to let me do whatever I deemed necessary to clean up their shitstorm. I hoped it was the former, because I really, really wanted to leave myself a backdoor on this system. I’d never seen anything like it, and there was no way I would leave it alone until I’d pried out every one of its secrets from the safety of the island volcano lair I would build with my billion dollars.

That is how supervillains come to be, folks.

While my analysis package did its work, I ran a “who” command to find any rogue operators rampaging through the system. The massive denial of service attack had created such havoc with the DECS network’s firewalls that a whole army of hackers could be balls deep in it by now.

“Do you have a list of users you expect to be using your network tonight?” I asked the orc. When he didn’t respond immediately, I turned in my chair and stared at him. “Do. You. Have. A—”

“Who do you think you are?” the monster snarled at me.

The big boy looked pissed enough to chew out my throat and keep my skull for his new cereal bowl. He obviously wasn’t used to being talked to like this, but I was fresh out of polite. I had a job to do, and the minutes I had left before my fatal deadline ticked away much too fast for comfort. If I was going to succeed, these assholes needed to work with me.

“I’m the billion-dollar boy, tubby,” I said. “I know you want to kill me, but you know you can’t. When I ask a question, I expect an answer. If you don’t have an answer, you better fucking get one. The fact that you only gave me thirty minutes to solve this means there’s a deadline over your head as much as mine. Do you have the user list?”

My kidnapper ground his teeth in frustration and turned away from me with one hand pressed to his left ear. He mumbled something to someone and tapped his toe as he waited for a response.

I turned back to my terminal and examined the list of logged-in users. Some of the names were garbled strings of nonsense characters. Those most likely belonged to bots who’d used brute force algorithms to pound their way through the network’s login screens and make themselves at home inside the DECS network. I scraped all those user IDs into a text file and sent it off to the pattern-matching AI on my server. Once the analysis found the common pattern the bad