The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [39]
The room had a holy hush over it. They were totally with him. Jeb was beaming in the PowerPoint screen glow.
“In the CCIAB, we do have one great advantage. We don’t need to rely on anybody’s lame industry vendors, because, in the CCIAB, we actually understand code. So we can build, and we will build, our own Grendel supercluster. Grendels are made from obsolete PCs, but clustered in parallel without any von Neumann bottlenecks.”
Another nice screen.
“For about a hundred grand, we will own a new federal system with more raw computational power than the entire Commerce Department. And, in the short term, that system will be very, very secure. Because no hacker anywhere has invented or found any security holes for Grendel distributed supercomputation code. There are maybe ten guys in the whole world who understand that code. They are all loyal American computer-science academics, and they are all real, real busy.”
A hand went up. It was a late arrival, a skinny younger guy with a battered laptop on his knees. “May I ask a question, sir?”
“What?”
“You, Dr. Derek Vandeveer, you’re one of those ten guys?”
“Yeah. And I know the other nine. Who are you?”
“Well, I’m a Web journalist, and—”
“Meeting adjourned!” Jeb bellowed, lurching to his feet.
Van was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking hard about streams. Van had always wanted to do something useful and important with streams, because streams were inherently superior to the conventional structure of files. Van was planning to implement distributed streams within the Grendel. That was overkill, really. There wasn’t a kode-kid, cracker, hacktivist, or even intelligence agency in the whole world that could break into a Grendel. But a Grendel running streams—man, that would be beyond all coolness.
Blinking occasionally, Van thought about streams. He thought about streams seriously, and then, very, very seriously. Eventually, Van became aware that someone was pounding on his apartment door.
Surprised, he sat up and pulled on his pants.
Van had rented his Washington apartment point-and-click off a real-estate Web site. Van had been in a big hurry to find a place in Washington, and the street was close enough to a telecom central station to get himself an ADSL line. The rooms had looked okay in the GIF file. In real life, the apartment was tiny and reeked of insecticide. Van’s apartment had ugly walls of exposed yellow brick, a lot of peeling Formica, and a foul layer of oily grime on the kitchen walls and ceiling. The toilet wobbled in the bathroom.
The Web site hadn’t talked at all about the neighborhood, either. Van’s neighborhood was sinister. Van now kept his grandfather’s ray gun handy beside the door. The people who knocked on Van’s door usually wanted to sell him crack cocaine, or themselves.
Van removed his glasses and placed his right eye to the peephole. Out in the dim, ratty hallway stood a skinny girl with a big nose, dark eyes too close together, and black, frizzy hair. She wore a strange little frock of greenish-looking, all-organic, undyed cotton, and carried a shapeless fabric purse. She looked like a Girl Scout who’d sold all her cookies and taken up panhandling.
Van undid three large brass locks and opened the door on a length of steel chain.
“Dr. Vandeveer?”
“Huh?”
“I’m your new secretary. Can I come in?”
Van considered this. It was unexpected. “Can I see some ID first?”
The woman showed him a plastic-coated mag-stripe card with an embedded photo. The card had a nice red lanyard. The card identified her as “Fawn Glickleister, Executive Assistant, CCIAB Technical Services.”
“Huh,” Van said.
Fawn held up a different badge, still in fresh shrink-wrap. “I brought your badge, too, uhm, Derek. These badges are new. You haven’t been to work in three days.”
“I am working,” Van insisted, stung. “I just can’t do any meetings with anybody right now.”
“Can I come in please? It’s kind of scary out here!