Technocracy of War, Part 3

They had moved Pete that very hour to temporary solitary confinement. While it meant missing breakfast, this was one of the saner things, keeping informants away from the general population. In two days, Peter found himself being marched down that long underground tunnel with the handful of stuff on him when he was arrested, along with some paperwork, in a clear plastic bag. The baggy orange coveralls had been replaced with a half-way comfortable denim outfit.
Thought they called it “the Farm” it was simply a nicer unit with private rooms, far less austere, behind the steel doors. Peter seldom saw the light of day, partly by choice. During his time in solitary, the burning necessity of catching his nemesis only grew. With it came a clarity of purpose and a fiery focus. He knew the best play was to hit the ground running.
After just a few hours of reviewing the Bread code base, he was quite surprised. While Brandon Breeze was no code jockey, he was quite the software architect. The same clean BSD code had been reworked with a less general purpose. Rather than some high performance secure server, it was narrowly structured with an obvious purpose. The first thing he did was port two drivers from his previous work in NetBSD. He submitted them as patches to existing modules, then begin digging deeper.
The work rules for the Bread Project within the prison system were pretty generous, and he was hardly the only hacker working all hours, barely stopping for basic bodily functions. But instead of wasting all his time on the IRC channel boasting of his “leetness,” Peter was actually comparing notes with all he had known. All the noise he had heard while still a devotee of NetBSD and OpenBSD was apparently just that — noise. Despite his reservations, he found himself liking the Bread Project.
So much so, he realized this could easily become the vehicle for tackling his enemy. Having discovered security holes which were slow being fixed in the other BSDs, he was gratified to find his security patches were rather quickly accepted for Bread, and his credibility as an honest contributor grew rapidly. Perhaps it was because there had not yet been a public release and things were still in rapid development, or perhaps he was a big fish in a small pond, but for whatever reason, he was being moved closer to the inner circle of project leadership. He was determined to take full advantage of this.
So he also ported several automated tools for security auditing the code. He wrote one himself, based on his experience with the cracker. The first day, it found five flawed sections of kernel code. Two were simply parsing errors, but three were apparently back doors. After running further tests, he submitted patches. Within hours he was flamed by some of the more long standing developers. He had expected this, and sent up the chain a coldly rational detailed analysis. Not once did he respond to any provocations and loaded terminology. Only much later did he learn a couple of developers had been kicked off the project that day, and sent back to the prison general population. Then again, he was hardly surprised; some of these folks really were crooked. He was hoping to put his nemesis there.
In just a couple of months after moving to minimum security and beginning to work earnestly on the Bread Project, Pete was surprised when he was called to the front desk because a visitor showed up to see him. He had warned his family and friends not to risk their own legal hassles by having much contact with him. There were too many horror stories. But this was someone he knew only by name and position: Jennifer Runston, the head security guru, and general operations manager, for Bread OS.
In the private interview room, he hardly dared to hope he wasn’t dreaming when she spoke the words “early release” in his ears. He knew Breeze had that kind of pull, but had completely forgotten himself in the single-minded task of building a weapon against his one enemy.