A corpo guy like him doesn’t understand the first thing about what the tech guys do, but when he sees Gillian’s face go pale, he knows something real bad is happening.
‘What?’ he asks, walking around to see what Gillian is looking at: a dozen windows with a whole lot of alphanumerics.
Gillian just shakes his head, open mouthed.
‘Did the banking software break down again?’ he asks, already knowing it isn’t that, or Gillian would have just rebooted it.
‘Cascade,’ Gillian mumbles, his attentions transfixed to the windows on screen.
He can’t make out that anything untoward is happening. Just looks like a lot of numbers going up and down.
‘Have we been hacked?’ he asks. ‘Do I need to call legal?’
‘You need to call…’ Gillian trails off. ‘Not just a cascade it’s a-’
‘What’s a cascade?’ he says, his nerves agitated by Gillian’s horror.
‘Code is tearing itself apart,’ Gillian explains. ‘Everything is getting exposed.’
That’s not good. That’s actually catastrophic. ‘For which part of the system?’
‘All of it.’ Gillian turns to him for the first time, sweat beading on his brow. ‘It’s an avalanche. I can’t stop it.’
He thinks of all the illegal shit the company has done over the years. All the illegal shit he has done over the years. All of it exposed, no longer protected within their watertight system.
‘I think I’m going to call my lawyer,’ he says.
Paddy Dobson
17th August 2022