The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) by Max Dane Page A

Ryan stood up
while Ben came inside.
     
    “So how are you? Are you getting
familiar with how we do things?” Ben said.
    “You bet. I’ve become familiar with the
computer network, and I’ve taken my first stab at probing the information in my
project. In fact, I’m starting with a method suggested by one of your
programmers, and I’m hoping to get some good results this afternoon.”
     
    Surprised and pleased, Ben said,
“That’s great Ryan. The people I have supporting you are actually quite good. A
couple of them are really too good to be here.”
    “I do have a question about the
information I’m working with; much of the data is encrypted, and I can’t tell
what it is I’m looking at.”
    “What do you mean, ‘encrypted’?”
    “Come around here and I’ll show you.”
As Ben walked around Ryan’s desk, he pulled up one of the records he had been
looking at yesterday.
    “You can see that most of the fields are masked with a lot of ‘X’ characters.”
Ben nodded and walked back around.
     
    “Yes, that’s going to be a sticky issue
to be sure. The amount of data, and I’m assuming you’re referencing the
research side, is huge, even for just this Facility. Much of what is there is
unknown even to my department.”

Ben sat down in one of Ryan’s chairs.
”You see it has always been the philosophy of IntelliHealth, that Information
Services must protect and serve the research data with the highest possible
care, but we are not always allowed to know the content of that data. Our
department has been quite successful so far.”
     
    “I understand,” said Ryan, “But it does
make this particular project a little harder. I should say though that one of
your programmers, Jim Safe, had a very clever idea on how to get around this
wrinkle. He suggested comparing data from a single field against many records.
So we aren’t interested in the exact entry, instead we want to know if any of
the entries look different from the rest. In other words, if all the entries
are apples, we compare 10,000 records looking for an orange. It’s the strategy
I’m trying right now.”
     
    “Sure, excellent idea. Jim is one of
the ones I was talking about, he’s very, very sharp,” said Ben. He chuckled lightly, “He knows it too, but don’t let his ego
put you off, Jim’s a good man.”

“He seems to be genuinely interested in the project,” said Ryan.
”Excellent that sounds like a promising start.”
    Ben got up to leave, but paused when he
got to the door.
    “Ryan, would it help if I could make arrangements for you to visit with some of
the scientists and general researchers? Maybe they could shed some light on the
matter?”
    Ryan thought it was a good idea. He
wasn’t sure what they could tell him, but it was certainly worth a try.

“Yes, please do Ben. I’d like to meet them and get their take on the problem.”
     
    “Ok then, it’s a deal. I’ll make the
arrangements right away. Watch your mail for an invitation to go up and meet a
few. It sounds like you’re doing really well Ryan. I’ll talk to you again
soon.”
    “Thanks, Ben.”
     
     
    While he was thinking about it, he sat
back down and checked his mail. There was a response from Jim. He opened it and
saw the results of his 12 searches. There were 12 separate lines each with his
search criteria stated, followed by ‘Comparison of 10,000 instances yielded no
aberrations’.
     
    Annoyed, he printed the results page,
and took it with him to Jim’s cubicle.
    Holding up the page Ryan said, “Hey
Jim, I got your results. Really? Nothing at all showed up on any of them?”
     
    Turning around from his monitor, Jim
said, “Morning Ryan. Yep, I doubled checked them. The code is good. The results
are solid. This was the exact same thing that happened to me when I tried this
too.”
    Ryan stared at the page.
     
    After a short pause he thanked Jim for
the help, and walked back to his office to think about it some more. He had
been