Magnum Opus

On the computer screen, Roland stood up and walked into another room. As he entered the next room, another feed popped up on the screen.

"Ah, convenient timing. As you just saw, when Roland went into another room, another feed in that new room appeared on the display.

"I developed a very accurate facial recognition algorithm, which I applied to my spyware. All of the data taken from the cameras is run through the algorithm, and only the feeds with people I'm interested in are sent back to me.

"'But that sounds like a lot of work, how can your computer handle it?' I hear you ask. Well, the program is parasitic, which means it lives off the host system. Fortunately, Roland made his system overpowered like a main character in a web novel."

Veronica chuckled at her joked and looked at Maggie to see her reaction, but Maggie was staring at the screens bored. After a short hesitation, Veronica continued her explanation; this little girl was the only person she could tell.

"I know Roland has impressive security software, which includes weekly scans. The software is improving at an exponential rate, far faster than I can improve my software, so I knew my spyware wouldn't be able to stay undiscovered in his system if I didn't exploit the fact that the spyware is already in the system.

"As I'm already in the system, it wasn't much effort to find their security schedule and create a trigger so that whenever a scan is about to begin, the spyware goes into a kind of hibernation, making it basically undetectable. The only way it could be found is if someone more knowledgeable than me personally went over the system… or if someone used extremely advanced anti-spyware, but leading software companies like Roland's are about ten years away that."

Veronica turned to look at Maggie with a proud smile on her face. "So, what do you think?"

"Yeah, cool," replied Maggie disinterestedly. "So what else do you do? You can't just do this; that would be too boring!"

'I should've known; in fairness, she did say that she wouldn't understand… Still, it was nice to share that with someone.' Veronica chuckled self-deprecatingly.

"Well, I don't just watch Roland. There are several people in the office whom I'm interested in." She pressed a button and continued once the screens changed. "Take this hussy for example. Her name is Anna, and she's been trying to break up me and Roland."

Anger flashed across Maggie's face. "Why would she do that? What a mean lady, goo!"

Smiling that the little girl was on her side, Veronica said, "Exactly, she is a mean lady. I haven't done anything to her, but she's been gunning for the position of Roland's girlfriend for too long.

"I then took measures to stop her, whilst protecting Roland's company, and she thinks I'm out to get her! Outrageous. To add to that, she's even managed to convince the company's Head of Security that I'm the mean one!

"They think I don't know what they're up to, but I do. It's useless anyway; there's nothing those two idiots can prove."