Cosmo’s tapper slab was still plugged into a block on the desk. Each evening Stypek touched it to summon his gomog, and each evening Daley the Gnome boasted of having ejected it from the slab. If the gomog failed to return, he would not be leaving this universe soon, or perhaps ever.
What Stypek thought about that changed from hour to hour. He had spent some wistful moments on the edge of sleep the previous night remembering the dubious pleasures of his homeland: finding useful spells in garbage heaps, eating stewed squid, sleeping in drain pipes, studying ancient books until his eyes burned, dodging zombies, running away from angry magicians…
Yes, he supposed that there could be worse fates than being stranded in a universe like this. Here he had been given fine clothes and the best food he had ever eaten. Carolyn’s meals were sublime, especially those containing meat from an animal called a spam, which his own world was not fortunate enough to offer. She had gifted him with sacks of delicacies that any nobleman in the realm of Trynng would kill for: Doritos, Cheetos, Pringles, Ruffles, and sweets baked by elves. Even the protective charms were delicious. Carolyn had offered him a sack of edible talismans called gummies that would ward off bears. They seemed to be effective; after three days he had yet to see a bear. A small jar of similar talismans was either made from flint stones or deflected them away. (He would learn when he finally worked out the secret of opening the jar.) No matter. With the protective spells he had carried with him mapped to inexplicable or useless things, Stypek would gladly arm himself against local hazards however he could.
The hazard he most feared, of course, was to be discovered. Judging by his dreams, Jrikk Jroggmugg was searching for him. Hiding from magicians was evidently a tougher business than he’d thought. Worse, without his gomog, fleeing to yet another universe would be impossible, whether Opportunites remained in his wereglass or not.
With the Sun long set and the evening meal now unlikely, Stypek opened a sack of Doritos, and turned his mind to the night’s tasks. Cosmo had handed him another tapper that afternoon and told him to study what it contained. Stypek touched its surface. No gnome appeared, but only an unmappable message:
Polling for accessible video displays…
Without warning, a slab over the desk that was almost as large as the desk itself burst into light and music. Stypek leapt up and almost dropped the tapper, which itself remained dark and mute. On the large slab were words that he could now read:
Cosmo Klein’s Lectures on Computing
Volume 1: Fundamentals
The words lingered for some seconds, after which a simulacrum of Cosmo himself appeared, standing in a large room near a wooden podium. He seemed younger, his hair more gray than white, his face less lined, but his smile no less broad.
The simulacrum dropped some papers on the podium and began to speak. “Welcome, class! I’m Cosmas Damian Klein, Ph.D. Call me ‘Cosmo’; doctors fix hemorrhoids.”
Doctors were what he’d once known as ‘adepts.’ Stypek would have to ask Carolyn what the stuttered word “hemorrhoids” meant. The impression he got was somewhere between “persistent low-level annoyances” and “bloody nuisances.” Ah! Of course! It was a technical term for the sort of machine that Cosmo had fixed the night that Stypek arrived.
A much fainter impression, that the word signified “pocket bread,” must have been semantic noise.
No matter. Cosmo stood in front of the pedestal. He raised one hand in the air. “So. We’re going to begin at square one. And this is square one, as it was put by the great Ted Nelson: A computer is a box that follows a plan. The box is what we call ‘hardware.’ The plan is what we call ‘software.’”
Stypek nodded. A computer, then, was a species of hemorrhoid.
Cosmo waited for the insight to sink in, and continued. “A plan is a series of steps. Each step is one small task that must be performed before going on to the next. It’s like a “to do” list that you write before you go off to run your Saturday morning errands: First, you fill up the car with gas. Then you stop at the cleaners and drop off your laundry. Then you go to the supermarket and pick up some food for the week. Then you stop at Home Depot and buy a bag of charcoal. When you’ve finished all the errands on your list, you go back home. You’re done! That is, you’re done until next Saturday!”
Stypek’s mouth dropped open. Phyl Yzyptlekk had begun his education in magic precisely the same way! He recalled the formidable spellbender’s words vividly, from when he was barely thirteen: “Boy, this is the Great Secret, a secret that magicians would rather remain hidden: Magic is not a mystery. Magic is comprehensible. Magic operates by rules that can be learned.
“Magic is compulsion that accomplishes some action. Beneath the surface, it is simply a force that follows a plan.
“The plan is called a ‘spell.’ A spell is not a mystery to those like us who can scry its structure. A spell is a larger action that contains a series of smaller actions, each of which may itself be a series of yet smaller actions, all compelled by the prime mover of magical force, which magicians draw from the Third Eye. When a spell is cast, the actions making up the spell occur in sequence. Then the spell is done, until it is cast again.”
Like, next Saturday! Yes! Stypek dug into the sack and placed another Dorito in his mouth, crunching its delicate structure and savoring the rare spices that made it so wondrous. Yet as indescribable as the pleasure of Doritos surely was, the pleasure of understanding that came from Cosmo’s words was greater…and greater still the thunderous ecstasy that he felt as the truth grew clear:
I can do this!
The hours flew by. Stypek stared at Cosmo’s simulacrum on the slab in rapt attention, committing its wisdom to his flawless memory. At some point his eyes began to cross, and soon afterward he awoke in his chair, startled. The large slab had gone to sleep. The Moon had set. Dawn could not be far away.
Still, it had been more than enough for one night’s study. So far, software resembled magic far more closely than he’d dared hope. Both were plans of action that generated some sort of results. Both came out of the minds of adepts. Magic was singular and self-contained, being in one indivisible power a sequence of commands and the prime mover to be commanded. Software was the plan but not the prime mover, and could be created and bent only within the machines called computers. Daley the Gnome was thus not a spirit but simply a thinking, speaking creature formed of software, just as a gomog was a thinking, speaking creature formed of magic—formed of magic, of course, until it entered a universe where magic did not exist. Then it mapped to software, and was now the same sort of creature that Daley was.
The question of what powers a gomog could retain in this universe beyond thinking and speaking was still open. Later, later. The question that had been answered was a more pressing one: Could he make a living here, by bending software? Or—dare he think it possible—by creating it himself?
Oh yes, and a delicious possibility it was, too. Stypek paused and sniffed the silent air. Spam! He opened the door to his room, and on the landing outside lay a china bowl with a sheet of some transparent material like flexible isinglass stretched across it, and a spam stew within. A note written on a small piece of yellow paper clung to the bowl by some sorcery—or physics—that he did not yet understand.
He flipped the lever to turn on the lights, and read:
I’m sorry I was such a witch this evening. I sent you to bed without supper. The bowl is microwaveable. It will fit in the fridge under your desk.
--Carolyn
22: Brandon
AILING was shaped like the minds of its people: nonlinear, and mostly unpredictable. Brandon took the stairs because he knew where they were. The building had an elevator, but to find it he would have to ask Pyxis. Or not ask Pyxis. Any second now…
“You should have turned left at the reception desk. Then you should have turned right immediately after the men’s room for forty-two feet to the break room. If you’d done that, you would have found the elevato
r at the rear of the building, along the hall that branches at seventy-five degrees from the west entrance of the break room.”
Brandon whacked the rectangular lump inside his suit jacket with his left elbow.
The second floor was no less chaotic, but at least he knew the trail to Cosmo’s office from the stairwell. Turn right past the restored Pac Man console, then soft left at the sixty-degree branch in the three-way junction, past the framed drawing of Max Headroom, and soft right at the birdcage.
He peeked into the cage as he strode by. No dead birds this time.
Soon he stood in front of a redwood door that matched nothing else in the building, carved with motifs borrowed (he had been told) from the old Lord of the Rings films.
The assistant’s panel pulsed and cleared. “Good morning, Mr. Romero! How wonderful to see you! Cosmo still has some doughnuts, and if you want anything else I’ll call in an order from Carlson’s breakfast menu.”
“Thanks, Carina. But no thanks.” Brandon hated doughnuts, and seeing Carina fidgeting in her panel always killed his appetite. She was a custom instance of the Pyxis GAI product, photomodded to look precisely like Cosmo’s deceased wife as she’d appeared the year before she died. The always-smiling white-haired virtual woman gestured with one hand. The door was open.
Cosmo’s office was not rectangular. It reminded Brandon of a small house he’d rented off-base near Fort Carson back in the 90s, and a large closet that appeared to consist of all the space in the floor plan that had not been allocated to anything else. Cosmo said his office was shaped like a fat version of the glyph for the British pound, with many old jokes about his ideas being real dogs.
Cosmo bustled out to greet him. “Brandon! Great to have you! Let’s go sit by the windows. It’s a gorgeous day, as Tuesdays go!” The man turned and started back around the curved hallway to the base of the pound symbol. “Don’t hit your elbows on the whiteboard—I still need to capture it.”
The whiteboard comprised the full length of the flat inside wall. In five colors of marker was a drawing of what looked like a stack of cannon balls at the center of a halo of equations. Brandon edged along the outside wall, where bookshelves rose to meet long clerestory windows. “Atoms?” He nodded toward the whiteboard.
Cosmo turned around, grinning. “Atoms? Too easy. Too small. IBM was stacking atoms twenty-five years ago. What did it get them? Heh.” He pointed at the cannon balls. “Processors! Etch cores and memory onto silicon spheres and throw them in a bucket. Put bumps and detents at the right places on the spheres and you’ve got a self-assembling hyperprocessor. Shake the bucket while you measure the impedance of the stack. The stack will tell you when all the spheres are touching at the right spots. Send a strong DC pulse through the stack and the spheres solder themselves together at the contact points. Blow air through the gaps between the spheres to drain waste heat. Mirabile dictu! 100,000 cores per cubic inch!”
Brandon scratched his chin. “How in hell do you etch processors onto spheres?”
Cosmo shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care! Lasers, nano, exotic optics, well, somebody will figure it out. Ishikawa did some early work in the ‘90s. If he were still alive he might have cracked it. Great man!”
Further down on the whiteboard wall was a similar drawing, with rectangular bricks instead of cannon balls. Each brick was roughly filled by scribbles to one of four colors, and lay at the center of what looked like magnetic lines of force.
Cosmo pointed at the drawing without turning around. “If that doesn’t work, this might. Programmable Magnetic Semiconductors! Exotic rare-earth oxide microcrystals with a pair of cobalt structures at the center that act as magnetic domains. The orientations of its domain fields force a crystal into one of four states: P-semi, N-semi, insulator, conductor. Flip the domains with an external field and program a slab of crystals into digital logic. On the fly! Need more cache, make more cache. Need more cores, make more cores. All the way down to the junction level!”
“Wow.” That at least aligned with what he’d learned of semiconductor operation at U of I. Brandon nodded. “I can picture that. When were those crystals discovered?”
Cosmo had reached his redwood desk, and gestured at the leather couch beside it. Bright morning light came through wide rectangular windows looking out on a pond thronged with Canadian geese. “Not yet. Maybe never! It’s always hard to tell. We wrote a computer model and PMS doesn’t violate the laws of physics, at least. I have a couple of boys growing crystals in solution upstairs and poking at them with a scanning tunneling microscope. We should have nanoassemblers by 2040 to glue atoms together directly. I’ll be dead but who cares! We’re all having fun in the meantime. Sit, sit!”
Brandon sat. It was tempting to write the man off as insane, but Cosmo had designed the massively parallel Tridiac processors, which were now generating 20% as much revenue in licenses as Zertek made from its copiers. If he was a loon, he was a loon that laid golden eggs.
Eccentricity was not the only issue, alas. Cosmo had been a college friend of Carolyn’s late father back in their Stanford days, and after Brandon’s Army retirement the man had greased the way to a good job near Carolyn’s home town—or what had seemed a good job at the time. Cosmo was generous and good-natured, and didn’t seem to hold the collapse of their marriage against him.
“Cosmo, look, I need to be quick. That new intern of yours…”
“Stypek!”
“Yes, Stypek. He’s a computer hacker.”
“Well, of course he is! I wouldn’t want him if he weren’t. Very talented boy!”
“I’m sure he is. Which makes me wonder…”
Cosmo got up from his chair, holding both arms out. “You should see him! Yesterday he was trying to describe the programming system that he uses. It’s a gesture-based 3-D IDE that allows you to build structure charts in mid-air and then compile them. It was like watching Marcel Marceau! Twist a finger like a key in a lock to dial values up and down. Poke at things to select, grab to move, slap between your palms to compress, and pinch a method name to run. Or something like that—along with a torrent of other gestures I didn’t understand. He’s B- in grammar, D+ in vocabulary. Still, it was brilliant. I must have that system! I’m going to get my people to put him into motion-capture gloves later this week so we can begin to analyze the gesture metaphors.”
“It should be on the Internet somewhere. What’s it called?”
“He called it Magic. Good name! I searched for it last night and didn’t spot it. That’s an English translation of something local, I’m sure, since the word ‘magic’ is heavily trademarked here in any context you could name. In Kaliningrad it might be different.”
“Kaliningrad?” That was part of Russia, and not good news.
“Oh, that’s just my guess. We got so involved talking about his Magic system that I forgot to ask him where he’s from. Kaliningrad is a very weird place, full of starving Russian geniuses. He’d fit right in.”
Wonderful. Brandon leaned forward and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Where is he now?”
“Oh, I sent him home last night with my University of Rochester lectures on computing and told him to watch them in his room at Carolyn’s. He needs to focus and learn the vocabulary. He’s too eager to help, and very personable. People here mobbed him! He’s already developed a bond with Dave Mirecki.”
Brandon pressed himself back into the soft cushion of the couch, closed his eyes, and released a breath slowly. Genius? To him, Stypek came across as borderline brain-damaged. Hardly world-class hacker material. Yet everyone seemed to love him at first sight—including his wife. Ex-wife. Carolyn. Whatever. And then there was the core bomb…
“Brandon?”
Brandon nodded. “I’m ok. Really. I’ve been chasing ghosts since last Friday. Rudy Amirault waved his usual carrot-and-stick in my face yesterday. The carrot is still a party at Porkadero’s if we go a full eight hours on a line start and shut it down normally. The stick gets bigger
every time. One more crash and I suspect I’ll be ‘pursuing other opportunities.’”
Cosmo leaned against his desk and softened his voice. “Opportunities are always good. Watch for them. Rudy will just think of other excuses to get rid of you. It’s obvious that he’s afraid of you.”
Brandon sat up straight. “Afraid of me! I’m failing!”
“Sssh. These walls are thin. Brandon, think about it: Rudy’s got five buildings full of assembly lines humming along 24/7 up in Merriam, tuned about as well as anybody could tune them. He’s good at tuning. He’s a hero of incremental improvement. The Board loves him for it.
“You and I know the real secret: Success happens by stepping on rakes. You’re a hero of creative destruction! You’re perfecting a whole new way to make office machines. Once you perfect it, Rudy’s in your shadow. One by one, his lines will be replaced by lines just like ARFF. Before you know it, he’ll be in Battle Creek making corn flakes!”
Brandon grinned sourly. That was a perfect challenge for Rudy Amirault. Still, to put Rudy in his shadow, ARFF would first have to succeed. “Not if the line crashes again. Unless I find the source of that core bomb, I’ll just be stepping on the same damned rake. I thought it was inside Dijana. We put her back in the sandbox. We scanned her repeatedly. Nothing. I’m keeping her sandboxed for the time being. Now I know the intruder got in through an OAF I loaned to Carolyn’s office. So…where did Stypek turn up?” Brandon crossed his arms and tried to glare at Cosmo.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 15
