The mantrap is two doors with a booth between them, and the second door does not open until the first has closed and the floor of the booth has weighed one person and the badge has matched the weight on file. It cycles at three every night. Badge, a contractor's, revoked, in the safe. The floor logs a weight. The second door opens. The hall camera shows the door open on an empty aisle, and the badge logs out through the mantrap at ten past four, weighing the same.
I am the security lead at a data centre and the mantrap is the thing I would put my job on, and I have.
The mantrap.
A booth between the outer door and the hall. You badge the outer door, you step in, it closes, the floor weighs you, the system checks the weight against the one taken when your badge was issued, and if it is within tolerance the inner door opens. Two people in the booth and it does not open. No badge and it does not open. Wrong weight and it does not open, and I get a call.
At three it cycles.
The cycle.
Outer door, badge read. The badge is a contractor's, revoked in 2018, and it is in the safe in my office, in an envelope, because revoked badges are kept for a year and this one was kept longer because nobody cleared the safe. Outer door opens, closes. Floor reads a weight. Eighty two kilos. The weight on file for that badge is eighty two. Inner door opens. The camera in the hall shows the inner door open on the aisle and nothing come through, and the door close.
Ten past four, the same, the other way. Eighty two kilos out.
An hour and ten minutes in the hall. Every night. Whatever it is weighs what he weighed and goes where he went and comes out when he was done.
What has been checked.
The badge. In the safe. I have had the safe open at three with the badge in my hand while the reader logged it at the outer door.
The floor. Recalibrated. It weighs eighty two kilos of nothing.
The booth, at three, by me, in it. That is not supposed to be possible, one person in the booth stops the cycle, and the cycle happened anyway, with me standing there. The outer door closed behind me. The floor read a hundred and sixty. Me and him. And the inner door did not open, because two people, and we stood in the booth together, which is a space the size of a phone box, for a minute, and I did not feel him, and the floor said he was there, and then the outer door opened and I stepped out, and the floor read eighty two, and the inner door opened, and he went in.
Who.
The contractor. Cabling. The badge was his for two years. The revocation was in 2018 with a reason code that means the contract ended, and the contract ended, the customer's records say, because the contractor had died, on site, in the hall, in row F, under the raised floor, where he had been pulling cable at three in the morning, alone, which was against the rules and was how it was done, and had had a fit, they thought, and had been found at ten past four by the morning shift when they lifted a tile.
He goes in at three. He comes out at ten past four. Row F, I would guess, under the floor, doing the cable run that was never finished, because it was pulled out and re-run by somebody else, because nobody wanted to finish his.
What is done about it.
The three o'clock cycle is on the access log every night as a revoked badge admitted, which is the worst line a security log can have, and the auditors have seen it, and the auditors have asked how a revoked badge in a safe passes a mantrap, and I have said I do not know, and they have written that down, and it is in a report that will follow me.
What I do.
I run security.
A contractor in the hall alone at three in the morning is a contractor with nobody watching, and that is the rule that was broken, and it was broken by him and by us, because there should have been an escort, and there was not, and he died under a floor tile with nobody knowing.
So I escort. At three, when the inner door opens, I go through it with him, which the mantrap now allows, because it has learned, I think, that eighty two kilos and me are one entry. I walk to row F. I stand at the end of the row. I do not lift the tile. I stand there for an hour and ten minutes, the way an escort stands, with a radio, watching a row of racks with nobody visible in it, and at ten past four, when the floor at the end of the row creaks, which it does, I say, all done, and I walk him back to the mantrap.
The access log has changed. The three o'clock entry is still a revoked badge. But the escort field, which was blank for six years, has my badge in it, and the auditors have asked what that means, and I have said that it means the contractor was escorted, and they have said, by you, and I have said, yes, and they have crossed the line out of the report.