The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [90]
“SNMP traps?”
“Oh, no, sir, for already we installed version three! We encrypted the protocol data unit, also!”
Van gazed at his new friend in deep satisfaction. “I don’t suppose you guys have agent-based packet filtering yet.”
The tech put his magazine down. “ ‘Agent-based packet filtering’? Isn’t that a theoretical solution to attacks?”
“Not anymore,” Van told him.
“Honey,” Dottie objected, walking up.
“Should I know you?” said the tech. “I know your face, I think, sir.”
“I’m Derek Vandeveer.” Van stuck out his hand.
“You are Van!” shouted the tech, vaulting from his Aeron chair. “You are the Van! Oh, sir! This is such an honor.” He ignored Van’s offered hand and lunged straight for Van’s shoes. He reverently brushed Van’s Rockports with his fingertips. “Oh, sir, I’ll never forget your paper on traceroute mapping.”
“This is Rajiv,” said Dottie as Rajiv stood back up. “Rajiv gets a little enthusiastic.”
Rajiv placed his palms together, beaming. “Oh, Mrs. Vandeveer, I should have known this is him, your famous husband, here at last! Oh, what a joy to meet you, sir. That work with Grendel you have been doing. There’s so much to discuss!”
Dottie’s face wrinkled. She was “Dr.” Vandeveer. She hated being called “Mrs.” Vandeveer.
Van stroked his beard. “So, uh, tell me, would you be that guy, ‘Rajiv23,’ who posts on Alert Consensus List?”
“Oh yes sir, that is indeed me!” cried Rajiv, thrilled to be recognized. “And what a contribution you are making on that list, sir. I forward all your notes to the Bangalore Linux Group!”
“So will you be at Joint Techs this year?”
“Oh, of course I hope so, sir.”
“Then let’s have a beer, dude. We’ll talk!” At Dottie’s insistence, Van left him.
Dottie trotted up a set of stairs to the building’s third floor, Van clomping behind her. She turned and frowned down at him. “I hope you don’t mind me boring you to death with my little GRAPE-6 simulators.”
“Oh, don’t mind that guy, honey.” Van was hugely pleased with himself.
“Derek, I get maybe forty-eight hours with you, and you would have talked to that man all day.”
“He doesn’t kiss like you do, baby.” Van gave her a sharp pat on the rump. After a moment, Dottie laughed.
Upstairs, things were much busier. Dottie greeted half-a-dozen colleagues, but after scolding him for talking to Rajiv, she was much too sheepish to chat with them about her own work. She settled in next to a console. “I guess I shouldn’t show this silly little thing to ‘the Van,’ but I’ve been working on this cluster simulation for four years.”
“Honey, I always love your demos. Just run it.”
“These GRAPE-6’s were designed for n-body problems by a Japanese physics department. GRAPE, that means ‘Gravity Pipe.’ ”
“Boot it up, sweetie, come on.”
“We’re directly integrating equations of motion into model globular cluster dynamics,” Dottie said smoothly. “We’ve had n-body codes since the sixties, but we broke loose by an order of magnitude up here. These GRAPE cards do a hundred teraflops. I’ve got the rest of the system modeling stellar evolution and mass transfer. Oh, and collision models. If we get a cluster core collapse, then the collision model really gets hairy.”
Van silently watched a black-and-white LOADING bar crawl across Dottie’s screen.
“We’re down to five or six simplifying assumptions now,” Dottie said, “and we’re spanning fourteen orders of magnitude, from the diameter of a neutron star to the size of the cluster itself . . . Okay, wait, here we go now.”
Van stared at Dottie’s screen, stunned. Of course he had seen Dottie’s cluster simulations before. He could remember them from grad school, as crude little X’s and O’s crawling sluggishly around on a plain green screen. The thing he was looking at now was busier than a swarm of bees. There were stars inside Dottie’s box, millions of stars. It looked for all the world like a Hubble photo, but alive. The stars were wildly churning in balletic interactions. Plunging. Knocking into each other. Doing orbital tangos. Looping, kissing,