The Enigma Wraith

Jacob’s palms slapped the desktop at the sides of the keyboard as he watched the screen in frustration and then shouted, “Damn it!”

Abruptly standing, sending the wheeled chair back five meters at a high velocity, he started pacing as he watched the idiotic character as it hopped around the screen. The character he’d nicknamed She Devil probably had laughter as well, but the laptop was set to mute for his concentration. This personal animated coach, delivered based on his logon credential, was annoying enough, but the real insult came from the box in the lower right hand corner.

Ha, Ha, Ha!

You missed, JACOB. Do you want to try again or is it time for milk and cookies?!

 He reached over and pressed a key combination that removed the annoying creature his coworker and alleged friend, Quip, had inserted for entertainment. His pacing continued as he mentally replayed the steps of his program for this stage to see what he might have missed. The whole purpose of his efforts was to create a deflect program that morphed faster than the base code that a random hacker had created. As he shortened his pacing track in front of the monitor, he randomly ran his fingers through his thick, wavy hair before he stopped, retrieved the chair, and retook his seat. His blue eyes would have pierced the screen, if that were possible, to get past this step in this program. The latest program being dissected was open, and he reviewed it until he reached the point where he’d inserted his changes.

This program and the associated logs were part of the information detective hunt that Quip and Jacob had continued gathering from multiple sources across the Internet. The programs, logs, and information they’d gathered seemed to have the running theme of changing code that resided at the root of the system. It was like an extremely vicious virus with a mind of its own. How it was activated, deactivated, and sometimes vanished was his focus. The maddening part of the exercise was that he had no clean example to work from but only small residue pieces of code and a few overlooked log files, along with his imagination and experience. By all reports, this program was one that was lifted from the onboard computer of a very high-end smart car.

According to the information in the blog posting of the driver, this was from someone who had recently purchased a luxury vehicle. The driver and his female passenger were taking the new vehicle for a leisurely weekend drive. Jon and Carol Shaw, named as the owners of the car, hadn’t expected the random smart car behavior they had experienced with less than five hundred miles on the odometer. Driving along a scenic road near Tuscany, the driver had modestly set the cruise control at the posted speed limit rather than risk receiving a ticket from the automated Italian speed traps. For half an hour or so they chatted and took in the countryside, which was awash with summer color and dotted with various animals on the hillsides.

It was quite a pleasant road trip until the accelerator started to increase and then abruptly decreased before the driver could respond. In fact, controlling the steering wheel seemed to be the driver’s focus as the brakes completely disappeared. Then the wheels seemed to lock-up before the vehicle came to a stop. According to the post that had accompanied the smart car downloads, the driver had barely missed a head on crash with a Braunvieh, who had been calmly chewing her cud as she’d swatted flies with her tail,