Tuesday 11 November, 09:30
It took Jonas less than an hour to show Viktor the inside of Fjordnett, and most of that hour was apology.
They sat at Geir’s desk in the operations room because it had the biggest screens, once someone from Dahl’s team had photographed the red ones and let Jonas bring the consoles back up in read-only. The chair still had the shape of a heavier man in it. Geir’s checklist still lay beside the keyboard.
The company was twenty-one years old and wore all twenty-one at once. There was the clean new part, the cloud platform and the pipeline that built 14.2 and shipped it to two hundred customers. Underneath it, holding it up like the pilings under Bryggen, was everything nobody had ever got round to switching off.
“This is prod,” Jonas said, pointing at a tidy diagram. “This is staging. This is the build server. And this—” He hesitated, clicked into another view, and the diagram stopped being tidy. “This is the rest of it.”
The rest of it was a thicket. Old servers named FN-SRV01 through FN-SRV14, some virtual, some still physical boxes humming behind the glass in the room where Geir had died. Integration jobs that shunted patient data between the old world and the new one at three every morning. Scripts whose authors had left the company before Jonas finished school.
Viktor pulled his chair in close to the screen.
“That one. FN-SRV03.”
“Lab integration. Pulls results in from the hospital labs so the GPs get them. It’s old. It’s on the list.”
“What list?”
“Geir’s list. Stuff to migrate.” Something happened to his voice. “It’s been on there a while.”
“How long is a while?”
Jonas checked, and Viktor watched him not want to say it.
“Windows Server 2012,” Jonas said at last. “Support ended in 2023. It hasn’t had a security update since—” He stopped. “Since then.”
Viktor said nothing cutting. There was nothing to say that the boy wasn’t already saying to himself.
“Show me who can log into it.”
The permissions on FN-SRV03 were twenty-one years of sediment, nobody’s fault and everybody’s. Jonas scrolled through groups inside groups, accounts belonging to people who had left in 2011, a printer that had somehow been made a local administrator.
Then Jonas stopped scrolling.
svc_labsync
“Service account,” he said. “Lab sync. It just moves results from the hospital to—” He clicked. The cursor hung, then the group memberships rolled down the screen. He read them twice.
“What,” Viktor said.
“Domain Admins.”
Viktor waited.
“It’s a script with a login. It does one stupid job at three in the morning.” Jonas’s voice had gone up half a tone. “And somebody gave it everything. Every server. Prod. The build box. Every surgery we’ve got.”
“When?”
“Twelfth of March. Twenty fourteen.”
“Password?”
Jonas ran the query. Behind the glass the fans changed pitch and settled.
pwdLastSet: 12.03.2014 09:41
“Faen,” Jonas said softly.
Viktor looked at the timestamp. Nine forty-one on a Wednesday morning, eleven years ago. Someone had typed a password, sipped their coffee, and gone to lunch.
“They never change it,” he said. “That’s the trick. There isn’t a second one.”
Jonas wasn’t listening. He had opened another window and was reading down a column of dates with his lips moving.
“It’s been used,” he said. “It doesn’t log in interactively. Ever. It’s a robot, it just runs. But here.” He put his finger on the screen and left a print on it. “Interactive session on FN-SRV03. Monday. Last night.”
“When last night?”
“Twenty-one twenty.”
Viktor looked at the half-ticked checklist beside the keyboard, at the blue biro lying across it, uncapped.
At twenty past nine last night, Geir Solheim had been alive.