meeting like this

dup - dip - dup - dup
the sound made it's way to his ears even if he tried hard not to pay attention to it. the new girl had brought in her equipment and set up close to him. no way around it now. he had to talk to her and find out what it was. so he got up, switched his display over to secure mode and walked over.

she was deep into the maze, doing a rapid search and path job, when she heard someone approaching in the real world. putting the flow to one side she looked up and saw the guy with the black jacket. she had noticed him when she came in, something had caught her attention and she was sure he was the one the boss had both warned her about and praised as the best on the team. naturally she had taken one of the vacant seats close to him when she set up earlier that morning.

...and he said we must speed up if we can't stop

Steps

He got back to his appartment late, but returned to the office in the night. He had an idea. Fortunately the system was back up for testing - the border had been patched for now, and the night was filled with testprograms running through the basics. Basically anything that had already been tested during the last month had to be redone, just in case somthing had been corrupted by the breach.

His new approach was a "step back and forward again" approach; he would tell the system to choose one of the opertaions door (usually 0001 to 1000, or 1 to 8 in the old decimal notation) then backstep into the room and test a random data or path door. That way he hoped to speed up the base testing by an order of magnitude or more.

Now, it was time to get it started...

...and he said it is getting to close, we need to do something soon

Back

It turned out to be a large hole in the border. The main team all had to extend their shift to close it properly, as the second shift was but straight on testing the other parts of the border for similar faults. He was relieved that it was not his job to fix or to design the border in the first place. For tonight someone would be getting a rather unpleasant visit from the EncFo. Mistakes were tolerated. Minor bugs viewed as regular occurrences. But a major re-working of the border this late in the cycle?

His test had gone pretty well, everything behaving as it should - except for the "incident" - and he could look forward to new and long runs over the next days. Provided that the main team got the border back up. Otherwise everyone would be on training and design for the time it took. And that would probably mean EncFo would make another visit.

...and he said nothing, just sat there

Bordering

It had come at him from his left. Flying low, close to the ground and avoiding his radar. Somehow it had made it all the way in to the main paths. It should have been stopped at the border. That was why they had spent so much time on building, testing and rebuilding that border. But now, somehow, it had made it inside. And now he was struggling to deal with it without loosing his place in the Textron. Minutes or hours passed by. Always hard to tell inside on a run, with things happening every nanosecond of "real" time.

Finally it moved away, back the way it had approached him, and he sent out a beacon. Hopefully the sentinels would pick up the trace, find out where it got in and allow him or the others on the team to analyze the breach later. If it was the only one that had got through that is. Otherwise the sentinels would be closing down the border and the system shortly. Maybe he would have time to finish the test. He was almost halfway when it came at him, so he prepared to go the last bit before tracing his steps back.

...and he said sometimes things just happen. But sometimes they don't