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Chapter 7
On the short drive to the coworking space, Nate’s stomach clenched and unclenched. He did breathing exercises and worked on focusing his attention on the little things in the moment: the speed limit, what other cars were doing, the direction clouds were moving, how many gas stations he passed in a mile.
The texts from Zane had come when he was almost done with his mail route.
Zane:Where are you?
Nate:Finishing my mail route.
Zane:You’ll be back soon? We’ve got a big problem. Todd’s here and we’re waiting on you.
Nate:Within forty-five. What kind of problem?
Zane:Too big to share over text.
Part of his anxiety made him great for high intensity jobs like app development. He was always thinking of worst case scenarios. This helped him problem solve as they moved through the development stage.
But it was the worst kind of trait when things like this cropped up. He should have warned Zane that leaving things open-ended like that was much worse than just telling him and giving him time to adjust. He spent the last few streets on his route sweating and fighting off dark thoughts of all the million things that could have gone wrong. Maybe he should talk more to Zane and Todd about what things would help his anxiety and which would make it worse. They might worry less and handle him better if he gave them specifics. It was never an easy conversation.
Maybe something broke.
Maybe a server crashed.
Maybe it was a really big bug.
Maybe it was a new bug.
Maybe the Tech Start Conference gave away their presentation spot.
Breathe. Use your turn signal. Check your blind spot before changing lanes. Look for speed limit signs. Breathe. Drive.
Nate struggled to keep under the speed limit. The sooner he knew the problem, the sooner he could put a stop to the negative thinking and focus on problem-solving. He could work on solutions all day long. They could get through whatever this was. He just needed to know. Zane was dramatic. It probably wasn’t that big of a deal.
But when he walked through the doors and saw Zane and Todd’s face, he knew he was wrong. “Where’s Alisa?”
“Out today and we didn’t bring her in for this,” Todd said. “Not yet. Sit down.”
“Just tell me,” Nate said, dropping into a seat at the conference table. “Whatever it is can’t be as bad as not knowing.”
Zane gave a short bark of a laugh. “You say that now…”
“Zane,” Todd said, sharply. He spread his palms on the table and turned to Nate. “Remember the discrepancies I mentioned the other day? I tracked them down and that’s not all they were.”
“Bugs?” Nate asked.
Todd’s mouth tightened. “Worse. We were hacked. I was seeing cloned accounts moving around inside the software.”
Hacked. Nate closed his eyes. Of all the bad possibilities, this was one of the worst. “What were they after? What did they get?”
“They were everywhere within the app,” Zane said. “We’ll have to see what they do with what they got, but they got access to almost everything. They could create a cloned app that would work almost completely with the same functionality by tomorrow.”
Nate let the words settle over him, picking through them to see what he could hold onto, already thinking of solutions. “Almost. You said that twice. Why almost? What didn’t they get?”
“Well, the bots we created were on a separate server. They work inside the app itself, but they weren’t accessible through this hack. They didn’t get your matching algorithm or the background bot.”
“Good. Those are unique to us and would be really hard to recreate. Are they out of the system now? Did we find the vulnerability where they got in?” Nate asked.
“Maybe,” Zane said. Nate stared at him, but Zane hadn’t met his eyes since they started the meeting.
