Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [50]
‘No way,’ said Peri. ‘I’m not sitting in some motel while you have all the fun. I’ve never been to Ocean City.’
‘Peri!’ He could pack her name with a world of irritation.
‘It’s the middle of winter!’
‘You’re not leaving me out!’
‘I’ll never understand you! First you complain about being put into danger, then you’re upset because I want to keep you out of it!’
Peri won that one by getting into the passenger seat and refusing to be budged. The Doctor threw up his hands and got into the back. I took the wheel, remembering the time my dad made me drive my two bickering cousins to Orange. I had solved the problem of their constant noise by dumping them by the side of the road and driving off, returning half an hour later to pick up a couple of very quiet kids. Thankfully we sat in a disgusted silence until Peri balled up her jacket between her head and the window and dropped off.
The Doctor spoke softly, so as not to disturb his slumbering fellow traveller, but I could make out every word.
‘Your world is reaching a turning point here, Mr Peters.’
‘How do you mean?’ I murmured.
‘At the moment, any electronics hobbyist worth their salt can hold everything there is to know about a computer in their head. They can know a program intimately, down to the individual lines of machine code – even know the system firmware which supports it just as intimately, and the hardware down to the individual circuit paths. One human being can still design an operating system, write a video game, follow all the actions of a microprocessor. They can take the same pride as a Victorian engineer does in oiling every piston and gear of his steam engine. Or a motor enthusiast, who can trace a problem from its largest-scale effects down to the finest detail of a sticking valve.’
I was pleased; not many people have seen past the geek surface. ‘I know the guys you mean. The ones with furnaces for brains.’
‘It won’t last. In just a few years, even the circuit diagrams for an oven or a car will be vast and inscrutable. Huge chunks of logic will be locked inside little black boxes. Chip diagrams will become too huge to trace or grasp. The world becomes as formalised at the microcomputer end as in systems hundreds of times the size of Bob’s Apple. Programmers will become teams, teams will become bureaucracies, the ribs of a lean harmonious system will be lost under a layer of flabby toolkits and libraries and protocols. All proper and correct and fully functional, of course – but leaving no room for the elegant shortcut, the blinding efficiency of the intuitive leap straight from the large to the small. They can do so much... but nothing with the bare-metal directness of the one who understands. It’s a dying art, Mr Peters, a dying art.’
I said, ‘That doesn’t look like a computer you’re designing back there.’
He gave me one of his small, knowing smiles. ‘It isn’t.’
I switched the radio back on, in time to catch the swirling beginning of Tom Sawyer.
We stopped somewhere near Annapolis for our first call to Bob. We had just started to lose the DC radio stations in a haze of static. I twiddled the dial, trying to find something worth listening to, while the Doctor and Peri crammed into the phone booth. She fed it coins while the Doctor shouted down the crackling line at Bob.
‘I’ve found Cobb’s account on a BBS5,’ Bob told the Doctor, his voice a mix of excitement and professional cool.
‘There was a message from him in those emails of Swan’s you downloaded. The number was in his .sig file.’
‘Ah; said the Doctor. ‘When you say “found”...’
‘Cobb was no hacker,’ said Bob. ‘His password was
“secret”! I’ve saved about half of his email onto diskettes. His account hasn’t been used for a while – Swan must not have reached Ocean City yet. In fact, she may end up not going there at all. She called her friend again to say she was going to meet someone at the Delaware State Fair.’
‘The what?’ said the Doctor.
‘It’s in Harrington. Lots closer than Ocean City. Get Chick to look it up on the map. Swan said she wanted lots of people