(Revised 11/22/2022)
"Devo" here.
We saw a comment posted on another short which inspired this "tail" (no, not "tale").
If it seems familiar and obvious to you because you've already read
The Card Game
, which involves the same characters, this one aims at the idea from the other side.
This is meant only as a humorous sideline, and a bit of a diversion from our normal stuff, even though the characters are in several stories now.
The origin story of these characters is related in
It Only Took Twenty Years.
If you've not read that one, this short won't make much sense.
I hope you enjoy:
Look the Other Way
Friday, June 5, 2020
"Jeez, Will!" said my VP of IT Security, holding his hand up, visibly requesting I curtail my interruption, "but this can only make sense if you let me finish."
"Okay. Start from the beginning. I'm still not tracking because you ran right past me. Explain it to me like I'm in kindergarten."
He took a deep breath, then folded his hands with his fingers laced together in front of his laptop keyboard.
Everyone in the room remained silent and focused. We'd all been summoned to the emergency meeting by my chief information security officer, Nick Recker.
"Two days ago, our cloud service firewalls alerted an uptempo in hits on a particular probe packet which was identified by the NSA late last week. They advised the security community that they suspect a new campaign is originating from either Russia or North Korea.
"So, we started gathering data and sending the port-knock packets into the honeypot for analysis. We noticed they were all coming from onion router exit nodes. Making sense?"
"Yeah. I'm following."
"But that's when it started getting weird. Julia, the really sharp gal who works my Sec-Ops group, noticed a pattern in the TCP handshake sequence numbers, okay?"
"If you say so," I said. I barely remembered the basics of the protocol, even though I was an expert troubleshooter decades before. Different job responsibilities required different focus, and I hadn't ridden that particular bicycle in more than a decade.
I noted Nick fidgeting in his seat.
"She'd noticed the same pattern in our security monitors but didn't realize what she was looking at yet."
I was becoming chilled to my core. "Whoa. Are you telling we've been compromised?"
"Yeah, Will. Probably during last month's cut-over between the old data center to the new one, but there's more to it than that," he continued.
He reached for a cable at the center of the table, then connected it to his laptop. "She told me the patterns of the numbers reminded her of RGB bitmaps. You know, X/Y coordinates and colors?"
I was too fogged to follow the specifics. I was quaking inside.
"She watched and collected the patterns until she saw the same pattern repeat again and again. Kinda like in that old Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey movie about the aliens.
"She plotted them all, and came up with this," he said, pointing at the screen I then turned to face.
I think my heart failed to beat the entire time it took my CISO to bring the image up. I envisioned myself being summarily shown the door after being dressed down by the CEO and board of directors for allowing a nation-state to gain access to our systems on my watch as CIO of a twenty-billion-dollar enterprise.
When the image appeared, my heart didn't resume beating until my brain made sense of what I was looking at on the huge OLED display.
"I'm going to kill you," I groaned over my shoulder.
All seven of my direct reports, including Nick, burst into uproarious laughter.
The screen displayed a portrait of me. It was an old one, presented as a meme. The picture was the one which was printed on the first ID badge I'd been issued when my employment at the company began.
"HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" was boldly written underneath it in the "Impact" font.
My heart started beating again, but it took me a few more moments to allow myself to chuckle, then full-on laugh with them.
"You okay, Will? You looked like you'd seen a ghost," Nick asked with a broad, accomplished-looking smile on his face.
"Wow. Every single one of you are evil incarnate!" I laughed. "That was cruel!"
"Cheryl really wanted to be here to see it," Nick said, referring to the CEO of Extecha.
"She did send her regards, though," he added, flipping to the next slide.
"
Gah
! Will you all please just stop?" I whined in embarrassment.
It was a photo of her holding a print of the same mugshot in her hands, looking at it with a doting expression with her other hand against her cheek as if I were her long-lost grandchild. I thought I looked like the absolute child I appeared to be when I'd graduated from college.
"How'd y'all even get that picture?" I asked.
Nick chuckled. "C'mon, boss! I'm your CISO. I can find anything."
I turned to face him.
"Just kidding. We asked the manager of site security if they had older badge photos of you, and he shot it to me within an hour."
It didn't surprise me. Employees' badge photos weren't kept behind lock and key. They were even used in our corporate internal directory website. I was only surprised, though, that they archived older ones for so long.
My administrative assistant wheeled in a cart carrying a small cake, a half-gallon of Bluebonnet French Vanilla ice cream, plus disposable bowls and spoons.
The cake was decorated with the exact same juvenile-looking photo.
"Elaine! You traitor! You were in on this, too?"
"No, Will," she said innocently. "It was my idea."
I laughed. "Wow. Nothing on my silver service anniversary last year, and now this."
Everyone gave me a congratulatory handshake or a "professional" hug.
After I sliced cake and scooped ice cream for the nine of us, we sat back at the large table where I was encouraged to reminisce about days long ago when I wore the badge which bore that embarrassing photograph. It was a good laugh, a well-deserved prank, and a great time. It made me feel pride in the team I'd led for the prior few years.
"Hey, Devo," I said, greeting my wife of three years with a kiss on her cheek and a gentle stroke of her bottom.
"Hi, babe!" she turned, smiling at me. "How was your day?"
"You're not going to believe what my team did," I began, then gave her a rundown on the trick they'd played on me.
"
Oof
," she groaned. "That's cold!" She grimaced before laughing.
"Right? I thought it was pretty funny, though," I said, bending to pick up our son who'd come into the kitchen on hearing my voice. "Hey, kiddo!" I grinned, blowing a raspberry onto the side of his neck when I hugged him.
Dawn gave me a rundown on her busy day, regretting it didn't conclude with cake and ice cream as mine had. When I showed her the picture, she laughed, taking my phone from my hand.
"Oh, wow, Will! I barely remember this guy!"
"Yeah," I scoffed. "Yet, look at you. Your first badge's photo and the one you have now look pretty much the same."
"Aw, you're so sweet," she said, giving me a yummy kiss.
It wasn't a dishonest compliment at all. Dawn looked half her age of forty-six. She was still the phenomenally well-built, raven-black-haired, almond-eyed beauty I'd distantly fawned over for almost two decades before she left the company at which I still worked.
I sat Aaron in his booster at the table, and Dawn plated the dinner I'd brought home on the way from work.
"A package came for you today," she said.
"Yeah? What is it?"
"Not sure. I didn't open it. I put it on the desk."
After we finished dinner, Dawn said, "I'm going to get Aaron cleaned up and put him to bed." She drew him from his booster and placed him on his feet.
"Give Daddy a hug!" she encouraged him.
I loved hearing those words from his mother, and I scooped him off the floor. He tried to blow a raspberry on my neck but hadn't yet figured out how. I gave him another. I'd heard my son's belly laughter months and months before, and I constantly sought new ways to elicit such joy from him. The raspberries on his neck, belly, or the backs of his knees were sure-fire successes, but I sought more every single day. A toddler's belly laugh is a silver bullet to a parent's heart.
I never thought I could love another human that way until I saw his eyes moments after he was brought into the world. The love I had for him amplified the love I had for his mother even more. She nurtured him in her womb. He was our baby boy. He was the product of my adoration of the woman I'd loved forever but refused to admit until only a few years earlier.
"G'night, handsome," I said, sending him on his way. His second birthday would be the following month and watching him walk gave me an incredible sense of pride.
I cleaned the kitchen then went to the study. I sifted through the mail on the desk, tossing about three quarters of it into the recycle bin. I put the bills in the caddie, then pulled the strip through the top of a yellow envelope which was sitting separately in the desk chair.
"What the hell?" I asked myself, looking inside and seeing something which looked like a chamois cloth. There was an envelope inside the bigger one, and I removed it first. After I untucked the flap, I removed a single sheet of high-quality parchment paper which had two simple words printed on it.
Hi there.
"Weird," I said.
I began to remove the remainder from the bigger envelope, and when I realized what it was, I dropped it on the floor, darn near certain I didn't want to be holding it, not knowing where it'd been.
It was a pair of underwear. A large pair of women's underwear, probably best described as "granny panties," fell to the floor.
"Uh, Will?" Dawn said from the door, seeing the wad at my feet with me holding the yellow envelope in my hand with a shocked look on my face.
"What the hell?" I said again.
"Did someone mail you their panties?"
"Dawn—"
"Do you have something you need to tell me?"
"God, Devo! I have no idea!"
"Whose are they, Will?" she asked with a scarily even tone.
"I … uh … um …" I stammered in defense of myself, frantically searching the shipping label and finding nothing except my name, address, and a tracking number.
I scuttled to the other side of the desk and wiggled the mouse to wake up the iMac. I brought up the shipping company's website and typed in the label's tracking number.
They'd been overnighted from…
"Huh? Lansing, Michigan?" I said.
"Will, who lives in Lansing?"
I closed the browser. "Devo. You
have
to believe me. I have no idea."
Dawn held the bravery I lacked. She leaned to the floor and carefully picked up the garment by an edge, letting it unfold. She cautiously completed gravity's job with her other hand, finding the other side of the waistband. She held them out in front of her and her eyebrows changed to mild amusement. "Sexy," was her only statement.
"Uh,
no
," I said in revolt. They were far larger than any I'd ever seen.
"3XL. Want to keep these?" she asked with arched eyebrows.
My answer was to hold out the wastebasket toward her.
She dropped them in. I took the basket out to the driveway and emptied it into the trash cart.
"This has to have been a mistake, Dawn. Wrong address or something," I said when I came back inside.
"Your name was on the label, but whatever," she said, chuckling.
