gone_byebye | A trail of aching derrières- next time they'll be more thoughtful

The door opens onto an expanse of asphalt, steel, and glass. Nearby a sign reads:

WELCOME TO WHITE FLINT MALL
BEST PRICES IN THE DC AREA

4708 BETHESDA AVENUE
CHEVY CHASE, MD

It's a big parking lot, with the mall itself only visible off in the distance. Ray gives it the squint-eye before turning to the others. "Okay, people," he says. "This is it. Johnny says it's underground. Egon's best estimates indicate three miles down. Are we good?"

Current Music: Kick In The Ass, Moxy Fruvous

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From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Matilda looks from the man to K and back again, ejects the shades*, and waits for this to get interesting.

The Cute, meanwhile, senses an opportunity and cranks it way up. Her tiny adorable smile - laced with a hint of mischief, perhaps, but no more than is to be expected of a spirited young girl with nothing to do at the moment - shines like a veritable beacon of cuteness.

*They land in her bag unobtrusively after a very speedy flight. Hooray for quick-thinking telekinesis.

From:

gone_byebye

The poor guy doesn't stand a chance. "Uh," he says. "My name's Dave O'Connell, I'm a junior analyst in Alphonse Jannot's division- um, who is this, please?" He crouches down to get to eye level with Matilda. "I don't think I've met you before..."

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Matilda sees no reason to lie, being from another universe and all.

"I'm Matilda. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Dave." She puts out her hand to shake hands with them, smiling easily as though she greets random strangers in the halls of this place regularly.

The Cute is having a field day. It turns up the dimples a notch.

From:

k_in_black

K knew Matilda would rise to the challenge. He just wanted to see how she would do it.

Way to go, kid.

"Yes, Matilda's our latest recruit, and let me tell you something, Dave, this young lady is going places.

Blowing your facility sky-high for one thing.

"Junior analyst, right. Everything looks fine here. Now if we could just have a look at your workstation? Sorry to rush you, Dave, but we have a full docket today and time's a-wasting, if you know what I mean."

From:

gone_byebye

"Wow. So you guys followed up on that northeast sector lead after all, huh?" Dave grins and shakes hands with Matilda before looking up to K. "Sure, right this way- this is for the quarterly audit, isn't it? We're all fully compliant down here, but I know how it goes."

Behind the door is probably the biggest cubicle farm anybody, and I mean anybody, has ever seen. Dave starts wending his way through the passages, past the fellow zooming a red stapler around through midair, between the empty cube ("that's Bogdanov's place- he's out sick today") and the cube with the young Indian man in it who gives the impression of not having slept in the past seventy four hours, and then turns sharply to the right. "Not much farther," he says.

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Matilda does her best to look cute and professional at the same time, with mixed success. As she follows, she checks her bag to make sure that none of her explosives are showing.

From:

k_in_black

K's seen many things in his exceptional life, but few more horrifying than a cubicle farm this big. Even when he squints, he can't tell whether that's a wall in the distance or just a blurred, office-gray horizon.

O'Connell isn't slowing down, so the Man in Black passes the time by glancing in cube after cube, only missing a step when he sees a young guy in glasses, munching popcorn from an 'Encom' bowl as he types out code. The sign on his cube wall, "Klaatu Barada Nikto," is a nice touch.

"Hey, Alan?" a voice calls from another cube. "Think I could have some of your popcorn?"

"Yeah, sure."

Notcing K looking at the screen, Alan looks up. "Can I help you?"

"I don't know, slick," K shakes his head. "Your program's name isn't selling me. 'Tron.' Too generic. You need to have something distinctive. Like 'Velcro' or 'Frisbee.' Something that'll stand out."

Alan glares. "I like 'Tron.'"

"Oh, hey," K puts up his hands. "Just a suggestion, don't mind me." And the next moment, it's as if he was never there.

Except for Alan sitting back in his chair, staring at the screen and thinking, "Frisbee. A frisbee. Yeah, that's a good idea...."

From:

gone_byebye

O'Connell glances over his shoulder and waves an arm in K's direction. "This way!" he calls. "Here's my station."

He's got one with slightly higher , towards the outer edge of the farm. His work area is neat- painfully, horribly neat- and his computer has three monitors, one of which turns out on closer inspection to be a flat-screen television. "All the passwords I use conform to TIMM standards, which are naturally twenty times stricter than the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley act," he says cheerfully. "Did you want to see what happens on an unauthorized file access?"

From:

k_in_black

"Got it in one, Dave, that's exactly what we'd like to see."

K steps behind Dave while he says that, as if to get a better look at the screen while the tech types. But in fact, the Man in Black is slipping on his shades--after giving Matilda a meaningful glance to do the same.

Hmm, K seems to be drawing some kind of silvery pen out of his suit too.

"Now if you could just show my associate here what you're doing..."

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Tilda catches the look, and on go the sunglasses. She looks over at the computer screen quite interestedly - even if their purpose here has nothing to do with finding out what Dave is showing them, it's still New Knowledge, and therefore worth looking at.

[ooc: Sorry for the incredibly late reply - my internet went kerplooey and hasn't been up again until five minutes ago.]

From:

gone_byebye

"Oh, sure!" says O'Connell. "Okay, it's like this. We have to have passwords here at least eight characters long, preferably sixteen, with at least one number and one letter involved. We've got biometric scanners, of course, but those're reserved for security on specific files and parts of the file system. I'm just going to type in the wrong password so you can see what happens when someone tries."

He glances curiously over at the pen. "Hey, what's up with the sunglasses?"

From:

k_in_black

K gestures for Dave to stop talking, and in a hushed voice says, "Multi-band, RF-compatible, 10G camcorders."

K leans forward, lowering his voice to a whisper. "Brand-new prototypes. Could be the next big thing. But you never saw them, follow me? You wouldn't believe how hard Matilda and I had to argue with the R&D execs just to let you see them."

K straightens up again and claps Dave on the shoulder. "But when they realized we were talking about you, we got the green light right away. I'm telling you, Dave, you've got big changes coming."

Real, real soon.

"Now, I think you were going to explain biometric scanners to Matilda here...?"

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Matilda perks up. "Yes. You were. And a demonstration of what happens on unauthorized file access, too." She may be small, but she has a good phrase memory.

A thought crosses her mind, and she glances at the top sheet of paper on one of the neat piles adorning Dave's workspace. It flutters. With a triumphant smirk, she returns her attention to the task at hand.

From:

gone_byebye

O'Connell smiles. "Seriously? I thought for sure after I had to hand off the Stantz investigation they'd kick my can to the curb. Used to have an office, before this... Anyway. It kicks me out with the wrong password, but if I type in the right one immediately, we're good. I can't show you three fakes in a row, because three fakes in a row and my account gets locked- division policy. If you could pass me that little white box over there, the one with the grey panel in it? That's a thumbprint scanner."

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

She almost summons the white box with her eye-power - an astute observer might notice it tipping up a bit - but decides that would be imprudent and leans over to pick it up instead.

"Here you are," she says cheerfully, handing the box to Dave with an adorable smile.

From:

k_in_black

As Dave turns back to the screen, K points behind his back at the sheet of paper Matilda TK'd, then gives her a smile and a thumbs up.

Dave is never going to forget this day. Well, not until he forgets everything, anyway.

"So, Dave," K continues, "We've gone over some of the system safe-guards. How about when everything goes right?" K punches a couple more buttons on his scanner, "We'll just move on to the next section here.... Now, let's say you needed access to those critical files you were talking about?"

From:

gone_byebye

"Well, I have access to most of the sector investigation files anyway," O'Connell says modestly. "So we'll just pull up- hmm- let's see. How about some of the stuff we've been digging up out West? The Bishop case?"

He presses his thumb against the scanner as he clicks on one of the icons.

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Behind Dave's back, Tilda returns a questioning raise of the eyebrows above sunglass level combined with the same triumphant smirk she exhibited previously. If she were able to communicate clearly in words using facial expressions alone, this one might say "Yes, I can move things through these glasses, which is definitely good to know. What does that have to do with the immediate situation?" However, since she is not telepathic, it remains merely a facial expression, and open to interpretation by the viewer.

Then she centres her attention on the computer screen once more.

From:

k_in_black

One super-anal-retentive cubicle worker with stacks of papers lying around just begging to be turned into a little blizzard of disorder. But they can come to that when the time is right. Which shouldn't be long now.

Dave was on the Stanz case. No petty cruelty is too low.

K has the neuralyzer in his right hand, hanging by his side as he adjusts the settings by memory. There are many possible scenarios here. K just needs to decide which one Dave deserves most.

And then wait for Dave to finish giving access for his entire network to a Man in Black and the formidable Ms. Wormwood.

From:

gone_byebye

"-and here, see, these files represent our tracking of the NSA trackers on the communications satellites involved in running down the tip-off call. Professor Janek's chip isn't going to be on the loose much longer." O'Connell smiles. "Honestly, if it weren't for territorial squabbles we'd have stopped him a long time ago, but the NSA plays dirty pool. And then here, there's the mystery tech movements in the northeast sector- that's you, young lady, we've been keeping tabs on the unidentified movement of technology to your sector for a long time now. Mr. Jannot told you that already, though, I bet. Am I right?"

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Matilda is at first unsure of how to handle such a question, and darts a quick "I have a sector now?!" glance at K before replying.

"Naturally," she says in a tone that could not be more clear in indicating that Dave is right now the most interesting person in the world and that furthermore Matilda could easily listen to him talk about his tracking mechanisms from now until the Apocalypse. Sometimes being small, cute, and able to interest oneself in anything is all the advantage one needs.

From:

k_in_black

Wow. Look what Dave just did.

He just gave Assault Team K-Tilda complete access to the Foliage Census network.

Oopsie.

"Mr. O'Connell, I have to say you sell your talents short. Why, Matilda and I could not possibly have found a man better skilled to demonstrate the power of your network."

K waits for the light of smug satisfaction to gleam in Dave's eyes.

"And on behalf of Ray Stanz, Peter Venkman, and Egon Spengler, we'd like to thank you for giving us complete access to it."

The gleam is just starting to turn into stark terror, when K jerks Dave's chair backward, hauling him well out of reach of the keyboard.

A moment later, K's scanner is next to Dave's tower, and with the push of a button, the Ethernet card begins its last two minutes of existence as a solid object. But, not to worry, it's going to end its life performing well beyond factory specs.

Making sure Matilda has her shades firmly on, K turns back to Dave, who seems to be having a meltdown of his own.

"I know you have questions, Dave. I do. And you can find all the answers you need if you look. just. right. here."

From:

precocioustilda.livejournal.com

Matilda grins happily. Now that the pretending-to-be-employees bit is over with, she can have fun.

She has a pretty good idea that K is about to wipe Dave's memories or knock him unconscious or something equally interesting, and she makes sure that just before that happens, Dave is greeted with the sight of his nice neat stacks of paper jumping off his desk, crumpling themselves into little balls, and forming up on the floor into the shape of a winking smiley face.

She is a six-year-old, after all.

From:

gone_byebye

See Dave's face? Not so much of the terror. More of the anguish.

Absolute, utter, total, heartbroken anguish.

"Make her stop!" he wails, turning reflexively to look in K's direct.... oooh, shiny.

From:

k_in_black

Oh, look, the settings on the neuralyzer aren't quite right after all. Hmmm. *Click, click.* *Click.* *Click, click.*

Meanwhile: *Crumple, crumple.* *Crumple, crumple, crumple..."

Because K wants to be sure those little balls of paper are the very last memory Dave has before...

"Uh, Dave? Back here, Slick."

"Tha-at's it."

*FOOOSH*