The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [111]
AFTER DIGESTING BREAKFAST I FIND I’VE LOST my appetite for socializing. I figure I could probably poke my nose all over the ship and make a nuisance of myself, but I’m not sure I want to jeopardize my tenuous status as a guest quite so soon. The real James Bond would be swarming through the ventilation ducts by now, kickboxing black berets overboard and generally raising hell, but my muscles are still aching from yesterday’s swim and the nearest I’ve ever gotten to kickboxing is watching it on TV. Billington’s fiendish plot is very well thought out, and the box he’s slotted me into is dismayingly effective: I’m simply not a cold-blooded killer. If Angleton had sent Alan Barnes instead, he’d know how to raise seven shades of shit, but I’m not a graduate of the Hereford advanced college of mayhem and murder. Bluntly, I’m what used to be called a boffin, and these days is known as a geek, and while I know all the POSIX options to the kill(l) command, doing it with my bare hands is beyond my sphere of competence. I’m still having guilt attacks whenever I think of the guy offshore of the defense platform, and he was trying to make stabby on my ass at the time. So if I can’t do the Bond thing, all that’s left is to be true to my inner geek.
I slouch downstairs and go back to my room, where, on the TV, Thunderball has just about gotten round to the bit when it’s all going pear-shaped and Largo pushes the panic button on his yacht and it turns into a hydrofoil. I shut the door, wedge the chair under it, plug my cummerbund into one USB port and my bow tie into the other, then do a quick in-and-out with the power cable.
While the usual messy list of device drivers is scrolling up the screen I check inside my wardrobe. Sure enough, someone’s transferred my luggage from the hotel. The suitcase I took to Darmstadt has finally caught up with me, because presumably one of the perquisites of being employed by a mad billionaire with designs on global domination is that he has a gigantic logistics and fulfillment operation dedicated to ensuring that nothing is ever missing when it’s needed. I pull on a fresh pair of black jeans, a faded Scary Devil Monastery tee shirt, and a pair of rubber-soled socks: I feel much better immediately. It’s as if my brain is slowly rebooting, just like the Media Center PC. It might all be for nothing if the bloody thing isn’t networked, but you never know until you try to find out; and I might be suffering from acute cravings for unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, but at least now I know why. It’s like finding out that the reason your machine’s running slow is because some virus-writing spod from Maui has shanghaied it into a botnet and is using your bandwidth to spam penis enlargement ads across the Ukraine; it’s a pain in the neck, but knowing what’s going on is the first step to dealing with it.
The boot sequence is complete. It’s amazing what you can cram into a memory stick these days: it loads a Linux kernel with some very heavily customized device drivers, looks around, scratches its head, spawns a virtual machine, and rolls right on to load the Media Center operating system on top. I hit the boss key to bring the Linux session front and center, then have a poke around. If anyone interrupts me, another tap on the boss key will bring the brain-dead TV back on-screen. I hunker down and take a look around the /proc file system to see what I’ve got my hands on. Yep, it definitely beats duct-crawling as a way of kicking black beret ass.
It turns out that what I’ve got my hands on is annoyingly close to a stock Media Center PC. A Media Center PC is meant to look like a digital video recorder on steroids, able to play music and do stuff with your cable connection. So it’s a fair bet that there’s some sort of cable going into the back of the box, I reason. The box itself is pretty powerful—that is, it’s roughly comparable to a ten-year-old supercomputer or a five-year-old scientific workstation—and when it isn’t spending half its energy scanning for viruses or painting a pretty drop-shadow under the mouse