The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) by Max Dane Read Free Book Online

profile.
     
    His first real job was with the
International Space Program.
Respectable, but dry. Then he got his chance to join IntelliHealth.
Now in his thirties, he was single and powering though life on a rocket bike
that ran on virtual testosterone.
He was enjoying his life a lot.
He shot another rubber band over the wall.
    “Jim!”

CHAPTER 4 “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we
can perform without thinking of them.”
  - Alfred North Whitehead
     
     
     
     
     
    The following morning Ryan proved again
to be quicker than the elevator.
Faster now for two days running.
He owned that silvery bastard.
     
    Working at his desk he quickly found
his way around the files on the network, and began actually looking into the
data.
     
    To get started, he focused on the data
associated with the treatment errors, the ‘data collisions’.
    There were gobs of it.
    He wasn’t sure how much was in a gob
exactly, but he knew it was far too much for a single person to explore. He
wanted to narrow his interest. He was confronted with a theme that seemed to be
growing here, the answer is here, but what is the question?
     
    So far he understood that sometimes a
patient received an erroneous treatment, completely inconsistent with their
condition. He wondered if the treatment was a valid treatment, or just a random
string of treatment vocabulary. It might be something indicating a hiccup in
the software.
     
    Within the collection of recorded data
errors, he searched for research applications used in current treatments.
    The results returned were in the
thousands.
He shortened the time frame to the last six months, and he got back over 800
instances to choose from. He randomly picked one that sounded interesting,
‘Reverse Gene Sequencing for Predicted Correction of Hereditary Color
Blindness’.

His screen filled with hundreds of records, each record having enormous numbers
of information fields.
     
    Selecting just one record, he scrolled
to the right, and then down. As he moved about, he found some fields were
filled in with readable information, but most were masked with a lot of odd
‘X’s.
     
    Ryan backed up, and selected another
treatment, this one titled, ‘Common Cell Signaling and Deactivation for
Hemophilia.’ He thought he’d read about this; it had something to do with the
correction of blood clotting issues in children.
     
    He performed the same steps and found
himself again staring at a screen with fields upon fields of masked data.
     
    After several more attempts he began to
conclude that the information was simply protected. He needed to talk to David,
and get the skinny on why he couldn’t see what was in the fields.

Ryan got up and headed over to the programmers’ area.
When he arrived, he still couldn’t get over what a wreck it was. He was
guessing that the culture over there was intended to be sensitive to comfort
with an emphasis on promoting creativity. A lot of companies were trying this
now. The world of programming and art were merging.
’Maybe it worked, maybe not’, he thought.
    Smiling, he remembered how Mr. James
had quickly retreated from this spot.
     
    He stepped over a pillow, which must
have fallen from inside a cubicle where a girl lay face down on her keyboard.
Ryan picked it up from the walkway and carefully placed it on her desk.
     
    Moving onward, he saw that David was
not in his cubicle, and nowhere to be seen. Ryan felt stuck, but as he turned
to leave he heard a voice say, “Hey Ryan, how’s it going?”
It was Jim from yesterday.
    “Hey Jim, I was looking for David, is
he around?”
    “Yeah, but I think he’s in with Ben
right now,” he said, “Can I help?”
    Ryan smiled.

“Yes, maybe so,” he said, “I’ve started looking at some data in the data
collision directories, but I don’t really understand what I’m seeing.
Everything seems to censored with a lot of big ‘X’s.”
    “Ah, are you’re looking at the