The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [66]
Van’s new best pal was no computer whiz. He was a whiskey-drinking Alabama guy with a high school education. Hickok liked dirty jokes, heavy metal music, and reckless women, except on Sundays, when he was always in church. Hickok was the simplest man that Van had ever befriended. Hickok had few self-doubts. Hickok had no interest in complex ideas. Intellectual puzzles just irritated him. Van found something very refreshing about all this.
It took just one more thing to move the two of them from coworkers to comrades. That thing was gunfire. Guns were much more than just a hobby for Michael Hickok. Guns were a basis of Hickok’s very life.
The two of them went out two times a week, and on Sunday evenings after Hickok’s church services, drinking heavily, bowling, and firing advanced automatic weapons. They quit bowling after two Sundays, because Van was an excellent bowler and Hickok really hated getting beaten at anything. So they stopped the bowling, and cut back on the drinking. They settled on just the guns. Van was happy to learn about guns. Hickok knew plenty about them, and Van was a star student.
Van hadn’t fired a weapon since he’d plonked at rabbits with a single-shot .22 on his grandfather’s ranch. In Hickok’s company, though, Van put on goggles and ear protectors. He roared his way through Ingrams, Uzis, and Pentagon lab models with no names at all, just acronyms. Weapons like the boxlike “OICW,” the “M249 SAW,” and a futuristic, four-barreled, 15mm mini-rocket launcher from the U.S. Army’s Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts.
Hickok had incredible contacts in the world of specialized weapons testing. Hickok knew gun nuts who made Charlton Heston look like Winnie the Pooh.
Van quickly discovered that guns were extremely interesting technical devices. When Van considered the many ingenious engineering problems that had been solved by master gunsmiths, he was fascinated. It didn’t matter to Van that he was myopic and only a middling good shot. Van spent most of his time in the range stripping Hickok’s guns down and putting them back together.
Left free to get hands-on with guns, Van learned a lot. Enough to know that he could build a gun himself, if he wanted.
If he ever built a gun, it would be a digital cybergun. It would be smart, interactive, precise, speedy. It would put every single bullet exactly where it was meant to go. It would fill up graveyards faster than the Black Death.
Van found that it refreshed his mind to tinker with lethal hardware. Guns inspired Van, they got him out of his mental box. When Van returned from the firing ranges to bend his full attention onto the KH-13 spy satellite, the satellite problem cracked around the edges. Then the problem started to yield to him.
Van tossed and turned, in eighteen-hour days, and in the depths of the night. He labored through blind alleys, made wild leaps of insight. He called in a lot of favors. He gave of his very best. He worked quietly, and he worked very quickly. And then, all in a rush, it went.
The truth was that the satellite’s so-called software problems had nothing to do with the satellite’s software.
The satellite’s software was incredible. The code was built to mind-boggling, unheard-of security specs. It made AT&T switching station software—the most paranoid commercial code Van had ever worked on—look as loose and scattered as empty Schlitz cans at a beer bust.
The satellite’s software had been assembled and vetted by three hundred humorless, white-shirt-wearing, avionics-software drones in Clear Lake City, Texas. The KH-13 had three different onboard control computers, each of them independently running 420,000 lines of code. It was belt, plus suspenders,