The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [6]
“We never knew the French were still hanging around in there, until Vandeveer started looking. Nobody ever asked our permission to come and go. It’s just the old-school Net. They just linked up to us, and whenever they moved, nobody ever unplugged them.”
“So who is carrying the damn flag here, them or us?”
“That’s the big question, and so far, luckily, it’s still us. In hackerspeak, we ‘own’ them. I mean, I’m no Derek Vandeveer. I don’t hack, I’m a conceptualist. But with this traceroute map in my hands, yeah, basically I am their Internet. With a little work, I could pose as their system administrators, and download every confidential file they’ve got. And if they catch on to this bad-security situation, then that’s much worse, of course. Because then they would ‘own’ us.”
“I get it now. Cut to the chase. Who knows about this mess?”
“I do. And Derek Vandeveer. And now you, Mr. Chairman.”
“Let me drive.” DeFanti took the Dot-Commie’s laptop. He spooled across the clustered tangle of Net connections. Vandeveer’s map was the size of a bathroom carpet: tens of thousands of machines, spreading from busy hubs and linked into long, snaky webs. The networks were neatly labeled with pop-up company names and numeric IP addresses. DeFanti’s Internet backbone company ran straight through the body of it, like the cloudy spine of the Milky Way.
The Internet backbone business was never an outfit that DeFanti had taken seriously. Running the Internet was a high-tech hobby for computer geeks. It was a favor he’d done to put a nice smile on the face of the National Science Foundation. But by now, 1999, in terms of market cap, it was by far the biggest part of DeFanti’s empire. It had never, ever cleared one dime of profit, but the day-traders had it figured for the next Ford or General Motors. They were insane. The whole world had gone crazy.
DeFanti owned a cable company that owned movie studios. He owned a big, solemn news magazine that could make or break presidents. But in cyberspace and according to the NASDAQ, this makeshift wad of broadband fiber optics was bigger than Godzilla. And if the market believed it, well, then such was reality.
Everything on Vandeveer’s map was piled up on DeFanti’s backbone. Even long-forgotten outfits, like Wife Number Three’s little leather-goods store, a toy he’d bought the woman to keep her out of trouble. Here was his older son’s ridiculous adventure-canoeing outfit, making some bucks off the yuppie Green idiots who loved malarial jungles in Borneo. Everything.
“This son of a bitch knows more about us than we do about ourselves! How the hell did he find the time to draw all this?”
“He didn’t draw it at all. That map graphs all those connections on the fly.”
“Nobody can do that.”
“Vandeveer does it. Van wrote that graphics program himself.”
“Who is this guy? He’s a menace! Where did you find him?”
The Dot-Commie was hurt. “We’re a gifted generation, all right? Van was my roommate once.” The Dot-Commie brandished his MIT Beaver graduation ring. “I hooked Van up with his girlfriend—his wife, that is. Mrs. Vandeveer. Dr. Vandeveer that is, because Dottie has a Ph.D., too.” The Dot-Commie smiled in the bluish light of the laptop. “They’re very sweet people.”
“Do we have anything useful on this guy? Like a leash, for instance?”
“Tom, please! Van is on our board. Van gets big comps and preferred stock. That’s a very sweet deal for a little guy like him. He never does board work for anyone else. He joined us as a personal favor.”
“Okay, so you kissed this hacker on the lips. And for that he gives us this?”
“We need this! This is what he does! Van would never cross us. Van’s a straight-arrow R&D type. He’s the classic white-hat hacker.”
DeFanti scrolled across the tangle with angry flicks of his thumb. The map was a marvel. Not a marvel for himself, though. It was a marvel for federal investigators, industrial competitors, or divorce lawyers. It had unbuckled DeFanti’s pants and