Death Match - Diane Duane [15]
“Something about a virtual field trip to the new Cray-Nixdorf-Siemens ‘server farm’ complex in Dusseldorf,” Mark said. “They’re going to run a lottery to allow some of us in there to have a look at the firmware. Like the new Thunderbolt warm-superconductor storage system.” He had a slightly hungry gleam in his eye.
Catie nodded. “Sounds like it’s right up your alley. Why should you need to enter a lottery, though? Can’t your dad get you in?”
“Not really,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. “The offer has all the usual ‘not for industry associates and their families’ disclaimer all over it. Besides, I’ve been busy….”
He trailed off a little too soon. Catie was about to ask him what was really going on when she was interrupted by a banging noise coming from the center of the room. All around her, people were making themselves chairs or lounges to sit on, and in the middle of things there had appeared, off to one side, what appeared to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A moment later there also appeared, under the Net Force logo, something that could have been mistaken for the great mahogany half-hexagonal bench in the court chamber of the Supreme Court…except that the center position was occupied solely by a young slim redheaded guy in process blue slikshorts and a LightCrawl T-shirt that presently had the message I’M IN CHARGE HERE, HONEST inching its way around his chest cavity in flashing red block capitals.
“Can everyone hold it down?” he was yelling. “We have to get started….”
Catie glanced up. “Who’s that?”
“Chair for the meeting, I guess,” Mark said.
“I knew that. I meant, ‘Do you know him?’”
“Uh, no. Hey, Gwyn…”
“Hey,” said one of the other kids presently beginning to drift over to where Mark was standing. Catie looked them over thoughtfully, for people that Mark didn’t mind hanging around him tended to be worth knowing. Either he found them intelligent, or they were sufficiently capable of getting far enough past his extreme impulsiveness and mischievousness to notice that he was intelligent. Either of these were characteristics that Catie thought were likely to be useful at some point. What was also moderately interesting was that the kids gathering around Mark all looked significantly older than he…more Catie’s age, in the seventeen-or eighteen-year-old area. Plainly they weren’t concerned about the age difference when the younger kid was as smart as Mark. Or has his connections, Catie thought. Networking is everything….
“Okay,” said the kid who had been banging on the mahogany bench, “we have some announcements first—”
“Who are you?” came the predictable yell from the floor, a ragged, amused chorus of about thirty voices. It always seemed to happen, no matter how many times they all met, to the point where it was now approaching tradition: a speaker would be shocked out of composure by the sight of all those faces and forget to introduce himself.
“Oh. Sorry. I’m Neil Linkoping. As I was saying—”
“Hi, Neil,” came the cheerfully mocking reply from the floor, about a hundred of them this time. Neil grinned and said, “Hi, crowd. Now, as I was saying…we have some announcements first….”
Groans and shouts of “Not again!” ensued. These were traditional, too, because there were always announcements. They were about the only thing that could be counted on to happen at every meeting. Neil wisely ignored the noise from the floor and started to read from a transparent window that popped into existence in the air in front of him. Catie could see the text content, in glowing letters, scrolling down through it. Near where Mark was sitting in what appeared to be an Eames chair of venerable lineage, Catie now made herself a copy of her workspace chair, itself a copy of the very beat-up Tattersall-checked “comfy chair” in the corner of her bedroom, and curled up in it to watch the proceedings unfold.
They did so with many halts, pauses, and interruptions—some genial, some adolescently crass, and some simply constituting demands for more information about one topic or another. Neil slogged his way through