The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [104]
Van had become used to government and industry people sucking up to him a little. He knew that it wasn’t personal. It was his job title that got those firm handshakes, those invitations, and all that flattering mail. He was the Deputy Director for Technical Services of the Coordination of Critical Information Assurance Board. For a brief period, mostly while stuck inside a concrete vault in West Virginia, Van had been able to assess some of their stupidest ideas and technologies, and thank God, to quickly get rid of some of them.
Van offered Ted a juicy chunk of cantaloupe off a giant cut-crystal fruit plate. Ted, who had a tiny but effective set of choppers now, went after it with gusto.
Here was a familiar face. It was Pico Yang. The unusually named Pico Yang had been a Stanford colleague of Van’s. He was one of the ten guys on the planet who understood Grendel’s operating system. Pico had an Irish wife and four Chinese-Irish kids. Pico didn’t seem much impressed by one Ted. Pico had plenty of Teds.
“You gotta tell me about this aircraft guidance demo. That sounds like a miracle.”
Van leveled with him at once. “The flight OS is crap. The latency problems are nontrivial. The multipath effects killed us. It only works on line of sight. That kludge we stuck together doesn’t even qualify as an alpha rollout.”
Pico beamed upon him. “That’s great news, Van. For one terrible moment I thought I was forty years behind.”
“It’s possible to build one that works. If you’ve got a spare fleet of satellites and sixty billion.”
“California state budget,” Pico said. “The school is taking it in the neck. Neutron-bomb buildings all over Silicon Valley. Worst financial crisis since World War II. You left California at a great time, Van. You wouldn’t recognize us if you came back now.”
“It’s tough, Pico.”
“Lots of states. Not just us.”
“It’s real tough.”
“Plus the war. I couldn’t believe it when you went into defense work, but, Van, you were way ahead of the curve. Good for you, man. Real smart move. Great job with the Grendel, too. The streams, Van. Wow. The way you handled streaming, that just knocked me out.” Pico gulped heartily from a tapered glass of white wine. “That’s a cute kid.”
There was nothing Van could do for Pico now. Maybe earlier—but not now. They had thrown Van out of the Vault because the CCIAB was on the point of expiring. Leaving the Vault was like getting paroled from federal prison. At the same time, though, for a Vault rat, that message was unmistakable. Go get lost, fella. Uncle Sam no longer needs you. You can go fry now.
There was Tony Carew over there, smiling, charming, eagerly pressing the flesh. Tony was chatting with a circle of spellbound federal officials. Tony had crashed the big party on Van’s ticket, but Tony looked completely at ease inside Erlette House. Tony looked like he attended Joint Strategic Summits for Critical Cyber-Security Practice every other Tuesday.
Van turned away from Tony and Tony’s eager new friends. No one would ever cling to him like that. Van pretended to study a large white foamboard announcing the Summit’s panel topics. “The Department of Homeland Security: A Historic Creation.” “National Milestones for Proactive Software Protection.” “A Robust and Resilient Critical Infrastructure: The National Infrastructure Assurance Partnership.” “Sharing Vulnerability Analysis Within a Competitive Environment: The Delicate Balance.” Van was not going to any of these panels, although he personally knew the vast majority of the panelists. Van had already skipped the event’s keynote. It had been delivered by the Secretary of Transportation.
It wasn’t that these were boring topics or boring people. They were a lot less boring than they had been made to sound. The stark truth was that these panels had nothing to tell Van that Van didn’t already know.
Now, finally, after months of ceaseless labor in the trenches, Van really understood what he had been up against all along.
He understood all the crushing issues that had prevented decent, well-meaning people from ever getting anything