The Gift by Dave Donovan Read Free Book Online Page A

consider his obligation met and wait for Web to find him. Under the circumstances, he chose a different course and knocked. Sam did not want to give Web an excuse to kick him off of the team.
    “Enter.”
    Sam did. Web was seated behind his desk. Jack was with him. They both stopped talking and looked at Sam as he entered, waiting for him to brief them.
    Sam stopped a few feet into the room, “We attempted to execute the program. It didn’t run.”
    Web let the silence linger before asking, “What do you propose for next steps?”
    “Dan is looking for portions of the message that may serve as better input to my script. He’s also going to have a member of his team review my code. I’ll be doing that as well. As soon as I get back, I’ll start the process again and try the new programs as we build them.”
    “Do you think that’s wise?” Web asked.
    “I think it’s a continuation of a decision that’s already been made," Sam replied.
    “For better or worse, you’re right about that, Sam. Keep me informed.”
    Sam may now be a civilian, but he recognized a dismissal when he heard one. He left without another word.

    Sam looked at Dan in frustration, “This isn’t working.”
    “No, it’s not," an equally frustrated Dan replied.
    They had been working on building a functional program for several hours. Throughout that time, each of them had had what Dan liked to call mini-epiphanies. At first, it had been exciting. As the clock ticked down and they continued to fail, the reality of the stakes in play became an increasingly heavy burden upon each of them. It was too late to bring in more help. There just wasn’t time to explain all the steps they’d taken to get to where they were. It was up to them. They knew it and so did everyone else. Unfortunately, they were running out of ideas.
    “Maybe they did overestimate us," Sam said, almost to himself.
    “I don’t think so. Let’s talk it through again," Dan replied.
    “Okay, but let’s do it in the break room. I need to get away from here for a while.” Sam stood, stretched and headed out of the conference room. Dan followed. Neither of them said a word along the way. When they arrived, Sam grabbed a couple of bottles of water from the refrigerator, handed one to Dan, opened his and took a long drink. They sat down at one of the tables furthest from the door. Their silence continued as each man tried to break out of his own mental loops in order to determine where they were going wrong. Finally, Dan spoke.
    “Our logic is sound. I’m more convinced than ever that you were right. There is a program in there.”
    “I’ll grant you that our premise appears to be sound. Unfortunately, our approach to the problem is clearly flawed," Sam responded.
    Reading emotion on Sam’s face was difficult. Dan had known him long enough not to need such clues. “We don’t have time for self-recrimination, Sam," Dan said gently. “Let’s start with the first piece, the header. Your first script found a number of them in the message because that was what you wrote it to do. You initially made an assumption about where the header portion ended based on a series of null terminators. We’ve since invalidated that assumption by finding enough duplicate copies of the file fragments to allow us to overlap them and keep the consistently common data. Your approach to finding the next pieces was sound, but because you were starting with the wrong end point to the header, you were finding the wrong matching starting point to the next piece of the file. That problem fixed itself when we addressed the first one. Since then, we’ve found enough duplicated examples of every matching portion to convince me we’re putting the right pieces together in the right order. I was concerned about knowing which piece was the last, but your observation that the eighteenth piece was a mirror image of itself was ingenious. When we excluded the mirrored data on the last run, I really thought