Meh. You’re seeking some pretty arcane knowledge if you are dredging it out of error logs. I like the needle-in-a-haystack-in-a-windstorm description.

Ya, probably should have come up with something a little more creative. But I like the idea that a huge organization’s weakness is a relatively small thing, just that most people aren’t willing to manually find it, let alone the simple access. Assuming you have to “drop a logic bomb in the backdoor (thank you swordfish)” to hack something is ridiculous. Ya, on the tech side this is way weak lol.

You know what almost every corporation’s weak point is? Electricity. Just watch ’em try to run a business without it.

Actually, given the openness of your story, getting something out of the error logs works fine, what if they had stolen and installed a competing company’s software in an attempt to reverse engineer it, and the error logs were the only way to prove it? And they had attempted to blackmail the protagonist (perhaps the simple blackmail of “We’ll fire you so fast your head will spin!”) to keep him/her silent, which clearly failed.

Or, since this has a bit of an espionage feel to me, maybe that was just the location Ori’s agency decided to hide some coded message. Gonna sequel?

Good thoughts.

Ya I’ll sequel after I find something clever in the backlogs for my character. Probably “General error 502” lol.

I agree with DoItForScience: I like the needle/haystack/wind analogy, and I would like to see a sequel—or, better yet, see it spawn off a whole crapload of sequels. (I am not exactly a computer genius, so I don’t fully understand the situation, but I like it!)

hey look in one of the most cyberpunk stories of all time hackers they found the anwser to it all in an error file.
and yes, i know, hackers is cheesy.
(and god…………yes i do own it. lol)
very driving dialouge.

you are awesome for entering my contest.

Hmm, a very near-future cyberpunk? I thought that the last line needed a bit more of a punch really, since most of the rest of it didn’t tell me anything about the world the story sits in. And as a technical note, if he knew what he was looking for he’d be grepping for it.

I assumed that he was grepping for it, it would take a human months to visually scan for one line in billions.

Fair enough, the description of it being like looking for a needle in a haystack in a windstorm suggested to me that it was a visual search — grepping for it would surely be like hunting for that needle with a strong magnet?

Two things, one, there may be hundreds of versions of the type of error he was looking for, but only one anomaly that will give him what he’s looking for. Two, the other guy is deleting the logs as he’s going, hence the windstorm, the log with the needle might get blown away.

I left out a lot of the world he was in on purpose. I decided I’d just focus more on dialog as you can tell in the subsequent sequels.

Thanks.

Hey i liked this twyst it was good, and i agree with not you hackers is all about info that came from a dump file.
You should enter again if you think you could have done better. I entered one challenge eleven times .lol

this is gooodddd

wow the comments kinda tore this up.. I think he’s a robot, scanning quickly.

I think the dialogue could use a little more… verve. I almost want the nameless protagonist to be a maverick of some sort, especially if he’s going to be killed over this.

Totally agree with the sharper dialog, I think it got better in the next episodes, you be the judge.

Nice. Agree with the qualms over dialogue, but overall a good opener, considering that you’ve sequelled… Intrigued!

Cool story. I’ve been playing through Uplink again, a classic hacking game. Lots of log deletion and modification, covering your tracks and framing other people for your work. This piece reminded me of that. :-)

Thanks for all the comments, wish I would have started the series stronger (as they get better in my opinion yet very few are reading them). Maybe I’ll try again.

Yes mjy did enter 11 times but then he changed his character to a.k.a. strong coffee. Good twyst twyst.

Was still entertaining, none-the-less.
Hard to be a judge in one story out of a series.

Premise of the story seems good tho’…

Postmodern. Lacks a certain flavour but reformatting the convo as chat might serve it best. Could pick the pace up a bit.

was supposed to be chat (which I should have revised a long time ago, but im lazy)

Funny how that all works out… Cool story.

damn twyst! i guess you had a hit here