Distraction - Bruce Sterling [90]
“Forgive me for asking, but how did you come by these programming skills?”
Hamilton nudged his chin with the handle of his cane. “Learned them from my dad, to tell the truth. Dad was a big-time coder on Route 128 before the Chinese smashed the info economy.”
“Are you a professional programmer, Kevin?”
“Are you kidding? There aren’t any professional programmers. These losers who call themselves sysadmins nowadays, they’re not programmers at all! They just download point-and-click canned stuff off some pirate site, and shove it into the box.”
Oscar nodded encouragement.
Hamilton waved his cane. “The art of computing hasn’t advanced in ten years! It can’t move anymore, ’cause there’s no commercial potential left to push it. The Euros have settled all the net protocols nice and neat, and the Chinese always pirate anything you publish.… So the only guys who write serious code nowadays are ditzy computer scientists. And nomads—they’ve always got time on their hands. And, you know, various white-guy hacker crooks.” Hamilton yawned. “But I have a lot of trouble with my feet, see. So coding helps me pass the time. Once you understand how to code, it’s really kind of interesting work.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you? I feel very much in your debt.”
“Well, yeah, there is one thing. I’m chairman of the local neighborhood watch, so they’re probably gonna bother me a lot about this shooting incident. It would be good if you could come over later and help me reassure my tenants.”
“I’d be delighted to help you.”
“Good deal, then.” Hamilton stood up with a stoical wince.
“Let me see you out, sir.”
After Hamilton’s shuffling departure, Oscar swiftly transferred the contents of his laptop into the house system and set to immediate work. He sent notes to Audrey Avizienis and Bob Argow in Texas, urging them to run immediate oppo scans on his neighbor. It was not that he distrusted Kevin Hamilton—Oscar prided himself on his open-minded attitude toward Anglos—but news so wonderful seemed very hard put to be true.
At 11:15, Oscar and Greta took a cab to Bambakias’s office in Cambridge. “You know something?” she told him. “This suit isn’t as stiff as it looks. It’s really very cozy.”
“Donna’s a true professional.”
“And it fits me perfectly. How could it fit so well?”
“Oh, any smart surveillance scanner can derive body measurements. That was a military-intelligence app at first—it just took a while to work its way up to haute couture.”
They sped across the Longfellow Bridge, over the Charles River basin. Yesterday’s snow was already half gone to slush on the slopes of the Greenhouse dikes. Greta gazed out the taxi window at the distant pilings of the Science Park. Donna’s hired girls had done the eyebrows. Sleek, arched eyebrows gave Greta’s narrow face a cast of terrifying intellectual potency. The hair had real shape to it now, and some not-to-be-trifled-with gloss. Greta radiated expertise. She really looked like she counted.
“Things are so different here in Boston,” she said. “Why?”
“Politics,” he said. “The ultra-rich run Boston. And Boston’s rich people mean well—that’s the difference. They have civic pride. They’re patricians.”
“Do you want the whole country to be like this? Clean streets and total surveillance?”
“I just want my country to function. I want a system that works. That’s all.”
“Even if it’s very elitist and shrink-wrapped?”
“You’re not the one to criticize there. You live in the ultimate gated community. It’s even airtight.”
The office of Alcott Bambakias was in a five-story building near Inman Square. The place had once been a candy factory, then a Portuguese social club; nowadays it belonged to Bambakias’s international design and construction firm.
They left the cab and entered the building. Oscar hung his hat and overcoat on a Duchampian bottle-rack tree. They waited for clearance in the first-floor reception area, which boasted six scale models of elegant Chinese