The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [67]
Those 420,000 lines had exactly one fully documented, well-understood bug. This was totally unheard-of. The very best commercial software written to that length would have suffered about 5,000 bugs. The KH-13’s software was the dullest, least creative, most focused, most disciplined software that Van had ever seen. It scared him. It was sober, detailed, frighteningly methodical. The code’s design specs alone ran to thirty volumes.
Every single line of the 420,000 was completely annotated, showing every time it had ever been changed. Why, when, how, and by whom. Every change was rigorously linked to some severe dictation in the design specs. Literally everything that had ever happened to this vast program, down to the tiniest detail, was recorded in a giant master history. And since this code re-used some fully tested code from earlier spy-sats, the reports stretched back some thirty solid years.
There was something genuinely nightmarish about this KH-13 code. About its complete lack of inspiration, creativity, and cheerful hacker sloppiness. About its gray, sober, steel bank-vault qualities. Van realized with a sinking in his heart that this was the gold standard for the safety and security that he and the CCIAB were trying to impose on the daffy, geeky, loosey-goosey software world. In a cyber-secure utopia, all software would look just like this.
But the satellite’s coders, for all their horrifying clerkly skills, were only part of the satellite system. The secret aerospace bureaucracy that had built the KH-13 had worked on a strict need-to-know basis. This meant that no human being had ever understood the KH-13 as a whole.
There were still big black patches in Van’s knowledge, too. Any device of that size and complexity was just too vast for one human brain to hold. But Van had researched the problem with unusual methods. Van knew that he understood things about the KH-13 that were not grasped by anyone else in the world.
Van went to report his triumphant progress to Jeb. He was eager to explain his ingenious solution to someone who could fully appreciate it. Unfortunately, Jeb was not cleared for learning about the innards of spy satellites—that was one “stovepipe” that was still holding firm. So Jeb simply thanked him, congratulated him on the hard work, and gave him a new assignment.
Van was now “tasked with creating” a new, bang-up technical presentation for the forthcoming federal computer-security “Cyber-Strategy Summit” in rural Virginia. Jeb was obsessed with this conference, the golden climax of the CCIAB’s policy-making efforts. It was absolutely vital, said Jeb, that “America’s cyber-security community” should come out of this Virginia shindig with “some broad policy guidance and momentum on the ground.”
This Virginia retreat would be the CCIAB’s last best chance to gather all the major federal players, and get them to line up, see sense, split their differences, dig deep in their pockets, and all sign on together on the same policy page. Then there would be real, true change in the world. Real structure, tasking, and accountability. Finally, American computer security that knew what it was doing. Sensible. Businesslike. Orderly. Realistic.
Van had to beg permission from Jeb to report his satellite findings to some proper authority. Finding a proper authority took some time, because (as Van now realized) nobody anywhere had ever expected Hickok to find somebody who could actually solve the problem. When a good candidate was finally located inside the intricate spacewar bureaucracy, Hickok insisted on driving Van from Washington straight to Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
Hickok’s special courier vehicle had a bulging fiberglass shell, a telescoping mast, and nineteen-inch metal racks full of command-and-control hardware. Hickok’s Humvee could open links to FLTSATCOM, MILSTAR, NAVSTAR, INTELSAT, INMARSAT, EUTELSAT, and the Pentagon’s Global Common Operational Picture. On this cross-country trip, Van’s e-mail arrived for him on Navy-sponsored dot-mil satellite channels designed for