The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [5]
It was a long, dense computer image, all colored nodes and knobs. It looked like a galaxy, or maybe a globular cluster, violently ripped to shreds.
“Okay, so you’re showing this to me.”
“Tom, this is your intranet’s traceroute map.”
“And?”
The Dot-Commie sighed and changed gears. “Okay. The board of directors. Our latest member. That guy named Derek Vandeveer.”
DeFanti said nothing. He’d been having a whole lot of trouble remembering proper names lately. Not even the ginkgo helped him.
“The big blond guy. Beard. Glasses. Shy, endearing type. Stares into space a lot. Doodles whenever other people talk to him. Everybody calls him ‘Van.’ ”
“‘Van.’ Yeah, I know Van. The big geek.”
“That’s our man. Dr. Derek Vandeveer, star computer scientist, widely noted security expert. Van was a Stanford professor. He’s the VP for research at Mondiale. Van won the Turing Prize in 1994. The Vandeveer Algorithm was named after Van. Okay? We recruited Van, we put Van on our board. Because Van is our token super-geek. And Derek Vandeveer just made this map that I’m showing you.”
“I knew that crazy bastard would be trouble. Is that what this is all about? This little visit of yours tonight?”
“Tom, I love it here in Colorado. I love satellites, I love an Iridium flashing. But yes, Tom. This is an emergency.”
DeFanti levered the scope aside. “All right, then spill it.”
“Corporate networks are complex and dynamically changing. We’ve got supply-chain and legacy partnerships, mergers and acquisitions activity, and a lot of staff turnover. The people come and go, and the deals come and go. But the machines just sit there. They’re getting more and more cluttered as time goes on. It’s the nervous system of the enterprise, that network and all its connections, and it’s a living, growing thing, Tom. It’s like it’s got its own agenda.”
“Yeah. I know that. Its agenda is to break our budget.”
“Well, we didn’t keep up with it properly. We let our corporate intranet grow just like the Internet grows, like a briar patch. So check out all these unauthorized connections into our enterprise network. Look at these bad links that Van found. He’s outlined them for us in red here. They’re mostly free connections that our people gave out for handshakes and goodwill, back when the Net was still new. This is a very interesting business structure that Van has revealed to us here, Tom. I don’t think anybody has ever mapped your business activities to quite this level of detail.”
DeFanti pulled down on the brim of his new hat. “Am I supposed to like this? I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I. Tom, you divested Pacific Data a good six years ago. But there are still IP host links in our system that date back to 1993. They still tie into Net machines that are running your news magazine’s online presence, and running your charity foundation . . . Tom, your nonprofit people are incredible. Those clowns give away Internet access to everybody they know. Worldwide. They are tied into Russians, Czechs and Germans, the U.N., Gorbachev’s foundations, Jimmy Carter’s charities . . . They are tied into Greenpeace, Tom. We’ve got Exorbital and its deep-black projects tied into a network that is also open to Greenpeace. If the NSA ever gets wind of that, they’ll go ballistic.”
DeFanti peered at the densely crowded screen. “So, this yellow yarn-ball here. Which one is that?”
“That yellow one is Visual Research Labs. That’s a spin-off, too. VRL is owned by the French now. But Vandeveer’s global IP traceroute mapping has opened up VRL like a can of tuna fish. We could stroll through every machine they’ve got. Because VRL may be based in Paris now, but they’re still running their graphics code off our Sun workstations in San Diego. Not one cent do they pay us for that service, either. They’re freeloading on us!”
DeFanti said nothing. He hated virtual reality people. They were chock-full of crazy hype.