The Idiot Tax

"Hello, Melissa," it greeted her in a slightly tinny voice.

"Hey there, Max. Is the Commissioner ready for him?" she asked, thumbing back at Jared.

"Please, go in," it announced.

Jared followed the lawyer through the doors as they opened automatically, closing just as softly as the pair entered the office. One look at the furniture that adorned the office, and Jared knew that this guy was used to dealing with money. Lots of money.

The main feature was a prominent dark oak desk, decorated completely down the sides and front with ornate carvings, looking like it belonged in the Oval Office. Along one side wall was a library of books, with a moderate sized screen that currently showed a virtual fish tank. The back and opposing side wall were floor-to-ceiling glass windows, with a spectacular view that looked out towards the ocean, with the blue sky and beach as a backdrop.

The Commissioner looked like Alfred Hitchcock, a rotund and balding older man with a pair of glasses resting on the bridge of his larger than average nose. He looked up from the smaller screen on his desk, smiling at the pair as they entered.

"Hello! You must be the efficiency guy, from Acme?" the man asked, walking around his desk and extending his hand.

Returning the gesture, Jared shook the large man's sweaty hand. "Yes, Sir. Jared Stone."

"Edward Monahey, Commissioner of the ALC. Have a seat," he said, indicating the chairs in front of his desk.

Melissa was turning to leave when Edward interrupted, "Melissa, please stay. This won't take long."

The pair sat down, and he got right into it. "The main reason I wanted to see you before you got started, is to let you into the real reason you're here. I'm sure your board told you that this case could amount to billions of dollars being involved, right? This remains between the three of us, but I'm concerned that someone has been stealing from us. I don't have any hard evidence, which is why I came up with this idea of an efficiency check."

"Sir, how would someone steal from the lottery? Aren't the results made by random ball drawings?" Jared asked.

"Yes, that's true. There are three machines total, two used during each drawing. Have you ever seen a live broadcast of the results?"

"Once, and of course I didn't win," Jared replied with a chuckle.

"Heh, that's funny," replied Edward, no humor in his voice. "Anyhow, it's supposed to be foolproof. We have the machines under 24/7 armed guard and video monitoring. So, if there was any tampering, we'd know about it.

"About two weeks ago, I was in the studio for the live broadcast that night and noticed something a little odd about the balls in one of the two machines. It looked like the normally white balls had a more eggshell creamy color to them. After the drawing, I moved closer to the machine but by then the balls had stopped spinning and looked pure white again. I couldn't explain it then, still can't."

"Have the balls been examined since?" Jared asked.

"Of course. I told our stage manager, Tara, about it. She said she'd investigate, and last week gave me her report. She said there was nothing wrong with any of the balls' color, but they'd given them all a complete cleaning and replaced any that were showing signs of aging."

"But... you don't believe her?" Jared ventured.

"I have my doubts about her report, but also doubt that she's the mastermind behind any plot to steal from us. She's already a rich woman. She married into money after we hired her, and dear old hubby ended up dying in a freak skiing accident. Poor bastard was buried in an avalanche. Anyhow, she told me that she enjoyed working here and wanted to continue, even after her resulting windfall."

"But what does any of that have to do with me? What is it that you think we will be able to find?" Jared probed, steering his client back on topic.

"I need you to quietly look through our computer systems to make sure we haven't been compromised. Clara, our head of IT is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met, but she hasn't been made aware of the ball issue yet. Melissa, do you want to fill Jared in on what you and I have done so far?"

"Sure," Melissa replied, having sat and listened to her boss speak. "After the balls had been cleaned, Edward asked me to quietly look into the last few payouts, to see if there was anything that tied the winners together somehow. At first, I thought he was nuts, but he's my boss, so I did a quick check of the last three winners. I haven't found much, but the winners do all seem to be older in age, and the drawings were all manually picked instead of quick-picks."

"Okay, I'll bite. What's the percentage of those still being submitted?" Jared asked.

"About five percent of all large payout drawings are submitted manually. Statistically speaking, only one in 20 drawings should be won with manual picks. The winners were all verified, and winnings were paid to real people. I wasn't able to find anything financially linking them, other than the common factors I've already told you."

After a few seconds of silence, Jared nodded his head. "Well, it sounds like we've got our work cut out for us."

"I need to stress that this task is only for you. The others from your team know nothing about this, and it needs to stay that way. If you have any questions about this, make sure to ask either myself or Melissa directly. Oh, and try to enjoy Miami while you're here," the large man said, fake smile plastered on his round face.

Melissa walked with Jared back to her office, stopping in the kitchen to get a bottle of water. She led him in and shut the door behind him, locking it. She directed him to a seat in front of her much less impressive desk and got a very serious look on her face.

"Look, Jared, I'm sorry about all the subterfuge, but you have to understand. The security of this game and the money that we handle is supposed to be the very best. We are regulated by the government, even though we are actually a for-profit organization. Sure, they take a huge amount of tax from each payout, but there is still a large amount payed out, and we always get a nice portion of that."

"Okay, that all makes sense, but why get us involved? Is this some kind of coverup?"

"That's a harsh word," she replied evenly. "We aren't trying to cover anything up, we just don't know if we've even been robbed, let alone who might have done it. You are here based on extremely circumstantial evidence and my boss' gut feeling. I need you to keep this investigation as quiet as possible until we either find something solid or nothing at all. At that time, we can get whatever authorities involved that we need to."

After assuring her that he'd do as she asked, Jared returned to the cubicle area he'd been given to work from. When he got there, his co-workers set down their own tablets, and each turned to face Jared.

"So, Boy Wonder decided to grace us with his presence," Henry remarked.

"Oh... Eat shit, Henry. You know I'm only here to baby sit you," Jared tossed back.

Henry looked serious for a second, then broke out in laughter, as Sam barely smirked. Jared had worked with these two on several of their last few jobs and got along well with them. He had gotten used to their unique personalities. Sam was basically a workaholic, and Henry thought himself a comedian.

Sam turned her head, "If you two Neanderthals are quite finished, some of us have some work to get done."

"She's right," Jared agreed, as Henry was already turning his chair around to face his tablet again. He opened his own tablet and got connected to their network, beginning his investigation.

Jared logged into the provided corporate messaging system and noticed that he already had a few pre-populated contacts listed. Edward, Melissa and Clara all had entries, as well as two that he hadn't yet met. After poking around with a few basic search algorithms, Jared decided that their network security was pretty good. He'd seen tighter systems, but theirs wasn't the worst either.

Jared wanted to dig a little deeper, so he sent the IT manager a message.

Clara, could you spare a few minutes to show me around your application environment?

He drummed his fingers on the desk for a solid minute until he got a response.

Come to my office

I have time now

The short walk to her office only allowed him a few seconds to think of what he wanted to discuss with the stunning IT manager. He entered her office as she was staring at one of her three screens, touching and moving things around on it.

"Please, shut the door and have a seat. I'll just be a second."

Jared did as she asked, and then she turned to him with a smile. "So, how was the big boss man?"

"It was a pleasure to meet him. To be honest, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised at how nice he was."

"Hah! That old goat?" Clara's smile faded, "Sorry, that wasn't very professional of me. I just meant to say that it must be different for a visitor than an employee," she said, recovering her beaming smile.

"Yeah, so anyway, I was wondering if you could give me a quick summary of your systems and which are critical to the game itself."

She nodded and began explaining. "We have everything hosted in-house, to try to avoid any possible outside interference of the game or our finances. Our three main systems are the one that runs the game drawings, the one that handles all twelve billion tickets for each event, and the system that runs all of our in-house applications, such as the messaging one."

"I thought the drawings were done completely at random?"

Clara rolled her eyes slightly before responding. "The balls are picked at random, but there is a system that still runs all the machinery, as well as controls the broadcast media. That same system also handles announcing the results to all our vendors and partnered locations. You know, all the big billboard signs have to be updated somehow."

Jared laughed. "Yeah, I got it. Sorry if I insulted your intelligence there, I just don't know all the inner workings here yet. So, where do you house all the hardware?"

"Up on the fourth floor we have our clean room. The floor is shared between that room and the Commissioner's office. Would you like to see it?"

"Sure, that sounds great, thank you."

**********************************************************

Jared had seen some fancy computer hardware before, but what they had in their clean room was nothing short of amazing. Where most systems had a very industrial looking housing, theirs looked more like luxury furniture or artwork than high-end computer systems.

The clean room was brightly lit and contained the three massive polished white towers, with clear windows on multiple panels to see the hardware inside. Along one wall was a desk that had a smaller version of the others sitting on top. Jared had seen systems like this in numerous demonstrations online, but never in person. He walked between the large towers and smiled in wonder.

"Like what you see?" Clara asked with pride.

Jared turned to face the dusky beauty, smiling wide. "Absolutely the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"We just had these Gibson's upgraded to the new Zero-Cool processors, along with some cooling upgrades to the housings."

"Wow, that's awesome! I still love the fact that they named stuff after that character. Still one of my all-time favorite old movies. You know, they say that the original founder of Gibson Hardware was one of the actors in that movie? No one seems to know for sure, at least as far as I know," he paused, rubbing his chin. "How much memory does each system have?"

"Each system has three pools, with 1 Petabyte in each pool. Within the system, two pools are shared with the processor and one is dedicated to the interconnects. Each system is interconnected with our NoOptics backbone, as well as directly with each other," she answered. "And yes, I'd heard the same thing about Gibson. I could tell you the truth about the owner, but then I'd have to kill you."

The pair chuckled as Jared continued slowly walking around the towers.

"I've just recently upgraded our own network to the NoOptics gear. That stuff is so much better than the old 10-Terabyte, fiber-based optics we used to have," Jared replied enthusiastically.

The two continued their deep discussion about the hardware, comparing notes about various features and configurations they each worked with. They left the clean room and went back to her office, where they continued going over the function of the systems and which component of each did what.

Before Jared even realized it, his stomach announced the fact that he hadn't eaten anything since he'd left Chicago. Clara laughed as he blushed, then he smiled and just shook his head. Just then, Melissa knocked and then walked in without waiting for a response.

"Hey, you hungry, Jared?" the blonde lawyer asked.

"Hah, my stomach must have growled loudly enough for you to hear through the walls!"

Clara snorted behind her desk, as Melissa stood smiling.

"I was thinking we could go grab dinner and I could finish giving you that tour I was supposed to do," Melissa said.

Jared stood and turned to Clara. "Thank you again for showing me around. I'll let you know if I have any other questions, okay?"

"Sure. Go, enjoy your dinner."

**********************************************************

A few minutes later, Jared and his escort were walking on the beach, talking quietly. She was leading him through the sand and towards an outdoor restaurant that bordered a section of the beach, as she probed him for his first impressions of the ALC.

"Now that we're away from the office, tell me what you really think. What are your first thoughts about what we discussed in Edward's office?" she asked.

"Well, I haven't had much time to dig yet, but I get the feeling that Clara is proud of the systems she maintains. I did a quick security check of the network and didn't find anything major. There were some simple issues but nothing that would be at the scale you or the Commissioner mentioned."

"Any idea how long you think it will take to find something?" she asked, as they got close to the restaurant.

Melissa opened the door for Jared, smiling as he entered before her. The hostess was a well-dressed android standing at a podium, and after they assured it that they wanted to sit outside, the pair found a semi-isolated table and resumed their discussion.

"I'm not sure. I will start looking at logging to see how the systems operate and go from there. If I find anything suspicious, you'll be the first to know," he promised.

They kept the conversation light after that and enjoyed their meal. When Jared got back to his room, he quickly undressed, put on a robe, and sat on the edge of the bed to call his girlfriend. The screen sitting next to the bed lit up with her smiling face.

"Hello, handsome," she purred upon answering.

"Hello, yourself, gorgeous," he replied.

"I'm all alone here, with nothing to do. Do you have any suggestions?" she asked coyly.

"Mmmm, I'm pretty sure I know what I'd do if I was there..."

He watched as she stood up, pulled the string from around her waist, and let the robe she'd had on fall to the floor. She lay back on the bed, moaning.

"Babe... It's so hot here, I had to take everything off... I'm so hot for you."

Jared groaned with lust, his entire body heating up with the sight of his naked woman on their bed. She continued to feed his desire, purring sounds coming from the image of Sasha as she worked her hands under her breasts, kneading the flesh with eyes closed. The sight was driving Jared mad with passion.

He quickly stood and joined her in dropping his robe, getting back on the bed and lying back against the headboard. Jared wrapped his hand around his throbbing cock, slowly fisting it up and down, showing his girlfriend what he was doing.

"Damn, Babe. Look what you're doing to me..." he panted.

"Oh my god..." she moaned in reply, her left hand continuing to caress the tender flesh of her chest, while her right slipped down her abdomen towards her womanhood. Sasha's fingers reached their destination and she immediately started rubbing herself up and down, pushing on her mound with the palm of her hand as fingers moved over the sensitive nub, towards her innermost depths.

Jared watch as she started rubbing herself hard and furiously, obviously being driven to heights of pleasure and passion. His own passion was consuming him, as he watched her on the screen. He moaned, "Sasha... So fucking good..."

"That's it... Cum for me Baby..." her image panted back in rapid breaths. "I'm gonna... OH FUCK!" she yelled out, shaking and arching her back off the bed as she came like thunder. She looked like she was being electrocuted as she shook with pleasure.

Jared moaned as he reached his crescendo right after hers began. "OH GOD! UHhhhh!" he grunted out as thick spurts of his cum shot out of him and landed on his chest and around his groin, some final bits dribbling out onto his hand.

He, too, shook with the aftershocks of the tremendous orgasm he'd shared with her over the vid. Sasha was lying with her eyes closed, hands still where they'd last been on her body, one finger still lazily rubbing her clit as she moaned in ecstasy, the other rubbing at her still erect nipple. She looked up at the screen and smiled wide at the mess he'd made of himself.

"Mmmm, just the way I like you. All fucked out and messy. Goodnight, Babe. I love you," she said, blowing a kiss at him.

"I love you, too," he replied, still trying to catch his breath.

Sasha reached over and tapped the screen, ending the call. Jared promptly got up and cleaned the mess off with a towel, heading to the bathroom to take a hydro-shower. Using pressurized air with a mist of instant-dry sanitizer, the new type of shower was both more efficient, as well as better for the skin, than classic pure water-based showers.

Jared stepped out feeling a lot better but tired, barely making it to the bed before he fell asleep. The long day had caught up with him, and he was lucky to wake up when his requested wake-up call came the next morning.

**********************************************************

"Good Morning, Mr. Stone. The time is now zero-seven-hundred hours. This is your requested friendly wake-up call," an android voice came softly from the bedside console.

"Fuck you," Jared managed to mumble into the pillow.

"Thank you for staying with us and have a pleasant day!" the voice responded automatically, disconnecting the call.

Jared groaned, then roused himself and prepared for the day. He joined his coworkers as they ate a quick breakfast in the lobby before heading over to the offices of ALC. By the time they got there, most of the employees had started their day. Jared went to the desk that had been assigned to him and got to work.

First thing he did was retrieve the user credentials that Clara had supplied him, so that he could log into each system. He first checked basics such as processor and memory utilization, and then moved on to more in-depth configuration settings for the applications and databases.

Jared took note of some things as he went. He noted that they seemed to waste a lot of storage space with older backups and files, much more than he was sure even the laws required. He noted there seemed to be user credentials into all systems for most employees, even those that likely didn't have anything to do with the maintenance of the systems.

He wrapped up his digging by about lunch time, when he decided to probe the IT manager a bit. He walked over to Clara's office and knocked on the doorframe. Clara looked over at the door, turning her attention away from her display. She hit some keys on the keypad and the display dimmed.