Honestly, for a second there I thought my hearing had gone. "My little IBM against that monster? How, forchrissake? There're twenty-six million—"
"We'll have to do something not very nice. Since the Japanese aren't used to hackers, those bearded malcontents in firms who screw up business computers for spite, these workstations aren't buffered off sensitive parts of the system. We are now going to exploit that trust in Japanese culture. We're going to organize these terminals, hook them to your computer, and then direct that network against the mainframe downstairs. Something no Japanese would ever dream of doing." She got up and went down the row clicking on machines. "There's a list of names in my office, there by the phone. Can you bring it?"
"Coming up." I fetched it. It was a temporary "phone book" of the staff on the floor. She took the list and went back down the line of stations, typing something on each keyboard.
"What are you doing, Tam? This is crazy."
"It'll just take a second. Everybody here has a password to sign on to the mainframe, but it's just the name of the person." She came back to the first workstation. "Now the mainframe thinks ten people just signed on to the system. We'll use these terminals to try access codes on the main computer. Your PC will control them so that each terminal hits it with two codes and then the next one goes on line. That way we'll never get kicked off. It should get around the 'three times and you're out' filter downstairs." She began frantically typing again.
"What are you doing now?"
"We could try alphanumerics sequentially or randomly. I think randomly is probably better. It'll be faster. So I'm writing a little program for the mainframe, a random-number generator. It'll start making up random access codes of MX followed by a letter and six digits and sending them to your PC downtown, which will immediately feed them back in pairs to these terminals. Out one door, in another. Maybe that will fool it."
"Christ, woman, you've got a criminal mind. Is this the kind of stuff you teach at NYU?"
"What's your number downtown?" She was typing away again.
I wrote it down and handed it to her. "I don't have the foggiest idea how you're going to be able to swing this."