Read Online Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 by Robert G. Ferrell - Free Book Online Page B

of ascension to the throne. Rexingrasha instructed his aides to screen applicants carefully and reject those who seemed to possess any significant computer knowledge. Preotimast, however, sent over an Apprentice to interview the candidates as a representative of the Magineers. The King’s aides found themselves between a rock and a hard place when the Apprentice insisted on the right to review and supersede the aides’ evaluation of candidates’ suitability. They decided in the end that they were more afraid of the Loca Magineer than a likely lame dabbling-avian monarch.
    The contest was scheduled for one month from the day the applications were closed, to give the candidates time to prepare (and to allow the King to take a crash course in hacking). Only about a dozen goblins signed up, most of them barely old enough to participate (Rexingrasha had set the minimum age at fifty, on the grounds that anyone younger than that brought up outside the Royal Family couldn’t possibly have the depth of experience necessary to rule. Preotimast agreed).
    Among the contestants was a youngish hacker of impoverished family background by the name of Carnilox. He was employed by the Royal Data Corps as a systems administrator for the Agricultural Support Services Network, perhaps the least prestigious unit of the RDC, although no less vital to the nation’s economy for it. Carnilox’s family were subsistence farmers and rock ranchers; he was proud to be serving in a job that provided them significant assistance. The ASSN kept track of harvests, requests for seasonal labor, subsidized seed allocations, fertilizer shipments, and other logistics related to food production for the kingdom.
    Carnilox was not a dedicated hacker in the deep sense of the word. He was a network problem-solver who had very few government-supplied sophisticated tools to work with, so he’d spent his career making due. This had by necessity honed both his programming skills and his ability to think outside the box—talents that now promised to serve him well in his quest for the throne.
    There were other viable contenders in Tragacanth, of course, but most of the highly skilled hackers were either too contemptuous of the establishment to have any desire to meld with it or too far underground to emerge safely. Only one of the other declared candidates had any real chance against Carnilox: a shadowy figure who went by the handle “Lempo.” No one seemed to know his real name or anything else about him. He managed somehow to convince the screeners that he was a native Tragacanthan, and he was obviously male, a goblin, and over fifty. Since these were the only conditions the king had set forth for qualification to candidacy, Lempo was allowed to participate.
    Carnilox was aware of his opponent by reputation only: as far as he knew they had never before met face-to-face. Lempo was fond of writing exploits that targeted specific computers owned by commercial concerns, then in the spirit of public service offering to plug the holes he’d demonstrated—for a tidy sum. It was a form of extortion, thinly veiled by Lempo’s affectation of Samaritanism, but as yet it was not technically against Tragacanthan edict.
    Carnilox found nothing about Lempo in person to change his less-than-favorable opinion. He seemed to be a self-centered, arrogant, crude, sociopath. However, none of this was material at the moment—all that mattered were Lempo’s hacking skills, which Carnilox knew to be considerable. One problem he had in formulating a strategy for countering Lempo’s probably superior programming abilities is that no one except the Arnoc security team who were charged with setting up the contest parameters had any idea what sort of format the challenge would take. After all, this had never been done before. There was a much better than even chance that Rexingrasha would take whatever steps he could to rig the contest in his favor; this went more or less without saying.