Example: add poi martin, karissa

You’ve spent almost a half hour staring at the TAM tutorial. At one point you take out your phone and take some photos of the screens one at a time so you can refer to the information later. You sure as hell are not going to network this impossible machine, and you aren’t even sure how you could transfer files off of it. The first USB thumb drives came out around the time this SGI was made, but there aren’t any USB ports and you wouldn’t even want to plug a thumb drive in if you could. Until you know more about this thing, you’re going to keep it fully air-gapped.

But as you read the tutorial for the 10th time you start to wonder how much of this could be real. It all sounds like fantasy, but if someone had told you a 25 year old computer connected to nothing could just know the names of the two people standing closest to it you’d have said that wasn’t real too. But even ignoring that, the rest of it, the stuff about making people like you more, just reads like the plot to a zany rom-com.

Ok, let’s get some science up in this bitch then. Hypotheses, experimentation, those other steps from grade school science class you don’t remember just now, all the good stuff. Time to do some testing... or at least some semi-educated messing around while you take notes. Science-adjacent shit at least.

Exiting the tutorial, from the main menu you hit 3 for the first time to go to the Admin Portal, where you are greeted not by a submenu, but a simple flashing underscore for the prompt, telling you to type whatever commands you wanted in directly. There is a brief list of common commands, which was a nice reminder although you remembered them from just reading the tutorial for 20 minutes like your life depended on it.

===ADMIN PORTAL===
{
Common Commands:
// full scan
// add poi
// dormant
// disable
// reset
// administrator
// help (show TUTORIAL)
}

INPUT COMMAND: _
PRESS [x] TO EXIT

You try to think of something easy to start with. Adding someone to the PoI list seems like a good plan, and for a moment you wonder why you manually add new Persons of Interest from the Admin Portal instead of from the Edit PoI menu. There might be a reason… or some programmer in the mists of the ancient past just did it that way for no reason at all. Whatever, you’re stalling now, just type what you’re kind of secretly dying to type already.

_ add poi martin, karissa
===ADD PoI SUCCESSFUL!===

The success result pops up almost instantly after you hit enter. You nod to yourself, then hit the X key to exit the Admin Portal. Back at the main screen, you select 1 for Show Summary.

===UPDATED SUMMARY===
PERSON OF INTEREST (Primary):
Hall, Jayne (AGE 29, SEX F)
AFFECTION SCORE: 60
LOVE SCORE: 13
LUST SCORE: 29

PERSON OF INTEREST (New!):
Martin, Karissa (AGE 19, SEX F)
AFFECTION SCORE: 31
LOVE SCORE: 2
LUST SCORE: 49

… what? How? And what? You do a really good involuntary impression of the Blinking White Guy gif as you try to wrap your head around what you’re looking at. You had chosen Karissa because she was friendly and you expected her Affection score to be solid, at least a 20 or so. And that’s more or less what you got. And the negligible Love score you can handle, not even a tiny crush but more like just the beginnings of a tiny, harmless crush. It’s obviously the last score that keeps catching your eye and threatening to tighten your pants. You’d have been less surprised to see a -100 honestly, and you quickly look at the photos you took of the tutorial on your phone so you can confirm that, yep, a Lust score of 49 seems pretty damn high!

But why? She’s a great kid and you enjoy your friendly little chats now and then but she’s bubbly and cheerful with literally everyone. Granted, there are very few guys around, but Karissa is a gorgeous 19 year old blond with a penchant for nearly scandalous skimpy clothing - in no world could she possibly be lacking sexual interest from nearly every person she walks by. You’re not totally delusional, you know you’re a decently attractive guy. A bit average, but you’re in adequate shape and you know women find you at least occasionally pleasant to look at. But Karissa could probably walk into a male modeling convention and leave with whoever she damn well wanted to, so unless she’s got a fetish for decent-ish looking guys exactly 10 years older than she is, you’re stumped.

This rather changes your plans. You had perhaps thought about bringing Jayne in and showing her TAM, she might know about when the old server infrastructure was removed and might even know something about the SGI box. But you didn’t want her to see, well, herself in the list. You thought that if Karissa was there, you could show her a normal set of scores and then add some random coworker to the PoI list while Jayne was there. Then you could figure it out together. It might be kind of fun to tackle this weird mystery with Jayne. You know it’s probably a bad idea, and that if she’s developing feelings for you it would be much smarter to just try to nip that in the bud, but you can’t deny your growing feelings for your best work friend. She’s your best friend in the entire city, honestly, and no one else is close. Good lord, that’s sad to think about.

As you’re sitting in the busted chair in front of the server rack, trying to ignore thoughts of the nubile Karissa slowing pulling up her barely-there sundress while she winks at you and licks her lips, you see the screen change. Standing up again, you can tell there has been another update.

==CHANGES DETECTED! SHOW UPDATED SUMMARY? [Y/N]===

Well yeah, sure, why not. Y.

===UPDATED SUMMARY===

Martin, Karissa (AGE 19, SEX F)
AFFECTION SCORE: 34 (was: 31)
LOVE SCORE: 13 (was: 2)
LUST SCORE: 30 (was: 49)

Well, that’s quite a sudden change! The interface said you could gain affection at 5x the rate for someone on your PoI list, but that yo-yoing of numbers so suddenly seems very strange. It’s only been about 10 minutes since you manually added her as as PoI. And why did her Lust score drop like that?

==CHANGES DETECTED! SHOW UPDATED SUMMARY? [Y/N]===

Ok, that’s going to be annoying. Hopefully there is a way to change the update alerts, because it’s only been maybe 2 minutes since the last one. You hit Y yet again.

===UPDATED SUMMARY===
Martin, Karissa (AGE 19, SEX F)
AFFECTION SCORE: 42 (was: 34)
LOVE SCORE: 35 (was: 17)
LUST SCORE: 16 (was: 30)

Is something going on? Why is she somehow falling in love with you over the period of a few minutes while you aren’t even interacting with her? While becoming much less thirsty? Why is she thinking about you at all?

You turn off the old monitor. You will be ducking out for a bit and you should log out of the SGI server or lock Windows but there was no password set so you do the next best thing. At least now if someone walks into your office they won’t see a weird old program running with your coworkers names and “lust scores” on it. If anyone saw that Human Resources would sent a SWAT team down to rappel through the windows and pepper spray you.

Walking out of your office you pass by Jayne’s open doorway, you want to stretch your legs so you'll take the long way to see Karissa. She has her headset on so she’s probably in a phone call or a videoconference, but she looks up as you walk by and you both give quick nods. You continue down the hallway but turn into the main open area where all the tables are set up for the public health nurses to sit and do paperwork and whatever else it is they do when they aren’t roaming the streets knocking on old people’s doors. You try to ignore the occasional frosty look from a few of the nurses, but as usual you can’t help but notice that there is always a few of them who just seem annoyed that a guy is walking, reminding them that their realm isn’t entirely women. You might have thought you were imagining it but your very first day of work during your orientation one of the older managers had casually mentioned to you that you’d get used to the conversation stopping when you walk in the room and to not be too bothered by the reaction of small handful of your new coworkers.

You press on and loop around the office toward the area of the third floor where the managers have their small offices. As you approach, you see Karissa sitting at her desk, which is in a central open location so she can assist all of the managers with their clerical needs. As she sees you approaching, she gives a shocked look and then turns away, looking guilty.

“Oh hey Karissa,” you say with a smile as you walk up to her desk.

“H-h-hi there Zach,” Karissa is clearly flustered, and she blinks a few times rapidly before saying, “uh, are you looking for one of the managers? John is off-site in a meeting but Doris is in her office.” The thought of voluntarily talking to Doris McCorrister, the NIC and manager of the nurses and a definite fan of you not being around her for any reason, makes you smile thinly.

“No, just passing through,” you reply with an easy smile, “and wanted to say hi. Just stretching my legs.” You realize you sound like an idiot so you turn to leave. Maybe that interaction was enough for you to see if there is a change to the scores for Karissa, but you are no closer to knowing why your scores had fluctuated so wildly. She clearly had been surprised to see you, but if she was actively thinking of you for some reason that might explain the look.

You are just about to take a step away when Karissa blurts out, “Zach, wait!” She checks over her shoulders to confirm no one is around, then she looks back to you. She looks upset, and then softly says, “I think I did a stupid thing. I didn’t mean to but… I looked you up.”

Stiffening, you realize what she’s talking about. Most of the staff have access to a variety of health applications and databases, and as a clerk for the nursing manager Karissa would have access to most of them. If she looked you up, she may mean something as innocuous as she looked up your basic work info in the GAL (the address book the email system uses) or as invasive as your health records. The way she looks so guilty and remorseful you’re going to assume she didn’t look up your office landline in the GAL.

“What do you mean?”

Now clearly fighting tears, Karissa nods to her screen and says, “I was just curious about where you lived, I wasn’t going to actually pull your records. But then I clicked on it out of habit and saw… tabs.”

Ahh, you’re a little angry at this invasion of your privacy, but you now understand what she means. She had clearly been doing a little light snooping, searching for your name to pull up your electronic medical record. The results screen would have shown a tiny bit of info about you, which she shouldn’t have searched for of course but it happens, but when she saw the results she had actually clicked on your name and opened the full record. Then she saw you had “tabs”, that is your health record had numerous entries from a variety of sources. For most people, just the demographic tab would have a small amount of info, maybe the immunization tab would be highlighted to indicate there was information there, but most of the other tabs would be grayed out unless you had actual relevant data to see. But your EMR would have had, well, a lot of active tabs. If you were the sort of girl who would snoop on a coworker out of curiosity as to what part of town he lives in, if you saw a wealth of info just a mouse click away you’d be sorely tempted.

“Oh dammit Karissa,” you sigh. You’re suddenly as disappointed as you are upset.

“I’m sorry! But I just saw one thing and then I clicked on some of the other reports and… oh I’m so sorry! I had no idea that-”

You cut her off, “That’s enough. You did a very silly thing.”

“Ok,” she says softly, “I won’t tell anyone, of course, I feel really bad about what happened-” at your sudden frown, Karissa hold ups her hands, “but don’t worry, I closed it all without changing anything.”

Sighing again, you realize what you have to do, “Closing with no changes won’t stop your activity from being logged Karissa. And it was probably already flagged for a potential privacy breach.”

Eyes widening, she says, “Oh no, really?”

“Really. Come with me, and don’t say anything, we’re going to see Juniper.”

Karissa gasps as she hurriedly stands up, “Why are we going to see Ms. Rhee? Isn’t that the worst thing I can do! I’m really really sorry I did it, but I don’t want to get in trouble. I won’t do it again!”

You shake your head, she still doesn’t quite grasp what she’s done, “No you wouldn’t get in trouble, you’d just get fired. Unless you do exactly what I say and let me do the talking. Deal?” Eyes wide, Karissa can just nod as you leave both quickly to go to the Privacy Officer for the building.