She did, but after both were rejected the workstation suddenly signed off. Click, out of the system.
"What's happened now?"
"More bad news. I forgot the mainframe is programmed so that you get three tries at a protected code and then it breaks the connection. That's to keep crackers like us from sitting here all day and running passwords at random. Another security precaution."
"Three chances to guess the secret word and then you're
out. Sounds like a game show." I just stood there and scratched my head. Seemed we were, to be blunt, shit out of luck. "What now, Professor? I assume there are about a hundred million alphanumeric combinations they could use."
"Close." She was clicking away at the keyboard. "So let's think a minute." She glanced back at me. "Why don't we assume for a minute that this is a MITI disk."
"Safe bet."
"So the decryptor key in the machine here would be from MITI, right, since Mori obviously brought the disk to be read?"
"Sounds good."
"You know, I was in Ken's office once, and I recall watching some of his staff playing around with the information on one of these disks. Don't know why I still remember this, but the password they used was ... I think MX something, three letters, followed by six digits. The digits were always changing, but the prefix was the same."