The Infinity Program
by
Richard H. Hardy
* * *
Seattle, WA
Published by Camel Press
PO Box 70515
Seattle, WA 98127
www.camelpress.com
www.richard-hardy.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design by Sabrina Sun
Contact: [email protected]
The Infinity Program
Copyright © 2014 by Richard H. Hardy
ISBN: 978-1-60381-933-6 (Paper)
ISBN: 978-1-60381-934-3 (eBook)
LOC Control #: 2013954432
Produced In the United States of America
* * *
To my wonderful wife, Mary Anne Hardy.
Also, special thanks to Catherine Treadgold and Emily Hollingsworth for their outstanding contributions to The Infinity Program.
Chapter One
When he first heard of Harry Sale, Jon Graeme had just started as a technical writer at HTPS Industries. During a software release meeting, one of the senior analysts mentioned Harry’s name and rolled his eyes. All the programmers either groaned or shook their heads, their disgust fully evident.
Matt O’Reilly, the senior analyst, turned to the newest member of the staff and said, “You’re documenting the CRN software, aren’t you, Graeme?”
Jon, who at age twenty-six was one of the younger employees, nodded. He had not missed the mocking edge in O’Reilly’s voice. He was aware that his rugged, blond, boyish good looks didn’t inspire the kind of respect he’d hoped for in this too-bright, socially awkward, and snarky group. He just had to trust that he’d win them over eventually.
“We’ll need all the DLNs in an appendix to that document.”
Jon looked puzzled. “DLNs? I’m not sure what you mean.”
O’Reilly smiled with condescension and said, “Device Location Numbers. There are some forty devices scattered throughout the U.S. that use the CRN software. We’ll need the DLN of each.”
Jon still looked confused. “How do I get the DLNs?”
“Well, you better see Harry Sale for the answer to that one,” O’Reilly said.
“Jeez!” said one of the programmers on the opposite side of the table. “The kid’s been here just a few days and you’re already throwing him to the wolves!”
As the whole table roared with laughter, Graeme wondered what he had gotten himself into. He felt perspiration trickle down his back. HTPS was located in a business park about fifty miles from D.C. As in every other East Coast company during the dog days of summer, the air-conditioning was turned up high, but the cool air wasn’t enough to prevent flop sweat.
After the meeting, Jon Graeme fired off an email to Harry Sale, asking for the DLNs, and received a prompt reply: “Too busy today. See me in my office early Thursday morning.”
Jon’s first impression of Harry Sale was formed in the hour before their meeting.
It was 7:45 a.m. on Thursday morning. Jon had just stepped off the shuttle bus in front of Building C when he saw a man running madly down the middle of the road. The man looked disheveled and unkempt. His hair blew in a tangled mass around his head and his arms flailed wildly in the air. As the shuttle bus began to inch forward, he continued to run straight at it, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Stop the bus!”
But the bus did not stop until the man ran straight into it.
Jon looked on in disbelief as the crazy man dropped to the ground and began to crawl under the front of the bus. The driver jammed on the breaks, swung open the shuttle door, and jumped out onto the curb.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!?” the driver shouted.
A group of people had gathered near the bus, watching the spectacle. Jon turned to the security guard standing next to him.
“Who is that lunatic?” Jon asked.
The security guard chuckled. “That’s Harry Sale, the one and only.”
Soon, Harry Sale crawled out from under the bus and Jon saw what the mad dash had been about. A small, orange kitten was in Harry’s hands. It looked only about six weeks old. A slim, young woman who had been watching from the sidewalk ran forward and took the kitten from Harry’s hands. They exchanged a few words Jon couldn’t hear.
Half an hour later, Jon was walking through the upper level of Building C, a temporary security pass pinned to the pocket of his shirt. It was the first time he had ever been to this section of the building and he was amazed by the difference in the level of security. In the place of sleepy-eyed guards with nothing more than a badge to identify them, there were uniformed sentinels with guns and communication devices hanging from their belts. With a quick glance about him, Jon saw that there were five of them in this immediate area. They were all young looking and he couldn’t help but feel they were checking him over, assessing him as a potential threat. They were obviously paid to be suspicious.
When a set of double doors swung open, Jon saw the reason for all the security: Big Moe, the largest Hyper Computer on the East Coast. Jon had been briefed about it during one of his initial interviews. The machine had cost HTPS Industries $125 million. It could achieve better than three trillion floating point operations per second, or, as the engineers termed it, three teraflops per second. The electrical bill alone, just to run the thing, was over $100,000 a month. And of course, the salaries paid to programmers, such as Harry Sale, were astronomical.
In his quick glance into Big Moe’s domain, Jon saw bank after bank of units, each the size of a large refrigerator, as far as the eye could see. Just before the doors swung shut, he saw a large sign in the entryway to the area: NO CLASSIFIED DISCUSSIONS BEYOND THIS POINT. Jon wondered if he would ever get in to take a closer look at Big Moe. As though reading his mind, a security guard accosted him while he stood by the double doors.
“You’re not authorized beyond this point,” he said in a tone that was a touch too aggressive.
Jon ignored his rudeness. “How do I find Harry Sale’s office?” he asked.
The guard pointed toward a door marked ADVANCED PROGRAMMING DIVISION. “Just follow the motor oil,” he said with disgust.
“Motor oil? I don’t understand.”
The security guard pointed to the floor. Jon looked down at the beige carpet and saw a dark smudge the shape of a small man’s shoe.
“Right after we got new carpet in here, Harry comes in and tracks motor oil through the place. Must have been working on his car before he came in. He’s obsessed with the thing—a ’49 Studebaker.” The guard shook his head. “His brain must be so full of computer code that there is no room left for common sense. I swear, if management didn’t need his sorry behind, he would have been fired a long time ago. Good luck.”
What the security guard told him was accurate. The oil stains on the carpet led down the main corridor and took a sharp right turn into a warren of cubicles and offices. The footprints led right up to an office that somehow looked shabbier than the rest. Harry’s nameplate hung on the side, and underneath it was a small sticker with a single phrase in large type: “I Break for Bugs.”
A man stepped backward out of the office. Jon recognized him as George Ludwig, a senior software engineer and one of the developers working on Big Moe. Ludwig was a heavyset man in his late forties, and his hair was starting t
o recede. He had a slightly undershot chin and his teeth were small and uneven.
Cheeks beet red, he sputtered, “If you ever touch so much as one comma of my SQUID code again, I will personally see that your hide is nailed to the wall!”
Jon could not believe the look of hatred on the man’s face. It twisted Ludwig’s already unattractive mug into a distorted mask.
Ludwig spun about abruptly and nearly crashed into Jon. Shoving Jon to one side, he stormed past.
For a moment, Jon thought he would be better off just returning to his own section of the building. He was rapidly reaching the conclusion that any work involving Harry Sale was hazardous duty. But, determined to do his job, he pushed on.
He coughed nervously before knocking. A moment later, a tall, beanpole of a man with an unbelievable mop of unkempt hair stood before him. The ragged, matted hair reminded Jon of Charles Manson, but Harry’s eyes were not vacant and he didn’t emit a serial killer vibe. Instead, his eyes were full of warmth and humor. There was a twinkle in them as though he had just heard a very funny story. It was hard to believe he had just been involved in such an ugly confrontation.
Jon found himself instantly liking the man, regardless of the stories he had heard.
“Come on in,” Harry said. His voice was high and reedy.
Jon took a seat on a small folding chair to the right of Harry’s workstation. He coughed again and debated whether or not he should say anything about the incident he had just witnessed.
“What’s this ‘SQUID’ that Ludwig is so pissed off about?” Jon asked, feeling ingenuous.
The twinkle in Harry’s eyes remained. “Super Computing Quantum Interference Device, or SQUID for short. There was a bug in one of Ludwig’s programs that affected the measurement of magnetic field gradients under a certain set of conditions. All I did was put in a break that would redirect the flow of control to another module to circumvent the bug.”
“Is that what the sign outside refers to?”
Harry smiled. “Exactly. I put that sign up last night because I had a feeling Ludwig would be paying me a visit.”
The glee on Harry’s face made Jon think it would be best to change the subject.
“It was cool how you saved that kitten this morning.”
“Well, good to hear. Ludwig just called me an asshole for doing that.”
Unsure how to respond, Jon coughed and looked about him, noticing a number of details that seemed out of place in a programming environment. On the wall above the computer hung a large charcoal drawing of obvious Asiatic origin depicting a bald man with an enigmatic smile on his face. It was curious how much that smile resembled Harry’s.
“What do you know about DLNs ….” he started to say, then broke off when he realized he didn’t know where to go to with his question.
Harry looked even more amused. “Only all there is to be known.”
Jon ignored the egoism in his statement and pushed ahead as best he could.
“I need all the Device Location Numbers out there in the field,” he explained.
“Why?”
Jon groaned inwardly. Apparently all the rumors about how difficult Harry Sale could be were true.
“Matt O’Reilly asked me to include all the DLNs in a document I’m working on.”
“O’Reilly!” said Harry, spitting the man’s name like it was a curse word. “I should have guessed! Well, you can go and tell that officious asshole ….”
Jon recoiled in his chair, an action that Harry must have noticed because his tone softened and that odd smile returned.
“You can tell O’Reilly not to worry his little head. I’ve written an algorithm in the load module to capture the DLN in a log file during the initial load. But just for the sake of O’Reilly’s petty little bureaucratic mind, I’ll give them to you. Are you ready?”
Jon waited for Harry to hand him a sheet of paper with the information or at least forward him the document in an email.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Get your pad out,” said Harry.
Jon opened his notepad and took the cap off his pen as Harry proceeded to recite the device locations from memory. Each DLN was a twelve character alphanumeric value. Harry recited all forty-two of them, hesitating only when Jon needed one to be repeated. Jon was stunned by this mnemonic feat.
Harry suddenly roared with laughter. “I’m sorry,” he said as he tried to suppress his amusement. “It’s just that you looked so completely dumbfounded.”
“Do you have a photographic memory?”
“Hell no,” said Harry. “Most of the time I can’t even remember where I parked my car. But code is another matter. I can remember every line of code I’ve written in the past two years, somehow that just sticks. After two years it starts to fade a little. It’s always been names and faces that I have trouble with. Can’t remember them from one day to the next.”
After their meeting concluded, Jon followed the oil stains back to the exit. Throughout the rest of the day, however, thoughts of Harry Sale kept jumping into his head. Whatever else Harry Sale was, he was definitely an original—quirky and brilliant. But underneath all that, it was clear that Harry was a very decent human being.
Jon worked hard on his documentation project and didn’t finish up until after six in the evening. The office was mostly deserted except for a few stragglers and the ever-present security guards. When he left the building, he caught the last shuttle bus to the Building C parking lot, which was almost completely empty. At the far end was a ’49 Studebaker. The hood was up and Jon could see a pair of feet sticking out from underneath.
Jon walked over to it. “Can I help?” he asked.
Harry Sale poked his head out and said, “Goddamned junkyard parts! Not worth a rat’s ass! Should have machined them all myself.”
He crawled out from beneath the Studebaker and scrambled to his feet. His shirt was covered with stains and there was a wide tear in his right trouser pocket.
“I’m going to machine my own parts from now on. I’ll never buy ’em out of a junk yard again.”
When he finally noticed Jon, he seemed puzzled, as though he couldn’t quite place him. “You’re that documentarian I spoke to, aren’t you?”
“Technical writer,” Jon corrected.
“Technical writer, documentarian, same difference, isn’t it? Who the hell has time to read that crap anyway? Don’t you ever feel you’re wasting your time writing stuff that no one will ever read?”
Jon had run into this attitude among programmers before and had developed a thick skin. “Whether they read it or not,” he said, “I still get a paycheck.”
“There is that.”
An odd look flashed across Harry’s face and his strange little smile appeared again. “Hey, I didn’t mean to be offensive. It’s just that I’m in a snit. I’ve had the engine in and out of this baby so many times I’ve about lost my patience.”
“Can I give you a ride somewhere?” Jon asked.
Harry paused to consider. “Well, actually, yes. You know that service station off Bloom Road? If you could drop me off there, it would be great.”
Jon gave him a ride to the service station, which it turned out was closed. Harry insisted he could just call a taxi, but Jon would have none of it. “I insist,” he said, “Just tell me where you live and I’ll take you there.”
For a while, the two of them drove in silence. Out of the corner of his eye, Jon saw Harry crossing and re-crossing his legs, trying to get comfortable. Harry almost looked like a contortionist, pushing his long, lanky frame this way and that.
After a few miles Harry turned toward Jon. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
Jon smiled. “I know, but I’m not about to leave you stranded.”
They travelled a few more miles before Harry spoke again. “You’re kind of new at HTPS, aren’t you?”
“This is my first week.”
“Well, let me warn you; there are a whole lot of assholes working at HT
PS. Not that I want to discourage you or anything.”
Jon couldn’t help but smile. “Is that your way of saying welcome aboard?”
Harry frowned. It was obvious to Jon that he completely missed the irony. They drove on in silence for a while before Harry spoke again.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“York, Maine.”
“Never heard of it.” He spoke dismissively, almost as if he didn’t believe the place existed. Harry’s disrespect for Jon’s home town made him uncomfortable. The place was so small it was barely on the map.
They drove on a few miles more before Harry picked up the thread of their conversation. “What do people do in York, Maine?”
“Well, there’s hiking and boating and wilderness trails, swimming, surfing—all kinds of stuff, if you like the outdoors.”
“And do you?” Harry asked.
“I live for it!”
Once again the conversation died. Clearly Harry wasn’t much good at small talk. Out of the corner of his eye, Jon watched him cross and re-cross his legs again and squeeze himself into the far corner of the passenger side. Jon learned later that Harry was never comfortable in a car unless he was driving.
They drove a few more miles in silence before Jon tried to re-start the conversation. “How long have you been working at HTPS?”
Harry groaned. “Seems like forever.”
“When you first started, was HTPS a lot different than it is now?”
“It sure as hell was,” said Harry as he crossed his legs again. “Those were the days, back when Doug Sanderson was still alive.”
“Was he a programmer like you?”
“Hell no! He was just the best damn engineer I’ve seen before or since. He was a hardware guy and he was just full of ideas. He was into neural networks long before Minsky even published.”
The Infinity Program Page 1
