by Draker, Paul
“Just shut the fuck up. Or you can walk home from here.”
CHAPTER 8
I trudged between the curving server racks, trailing the fingers of my right hand along the cabinets. My left hand looked ghastly in the colored lights, swollen, with that golf ball of a knuckle. Server fans whirred softly in the silence. I climbed the ramp to the sanctum, opened the glass door to the fridge rack, and grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper. Holding the chilled, dewy can against my knuckles, I went to look for my hand wraps.
They were where I had dropped them, underneath the hundred-pound Everlast heavy bag that hung in the corner of the server room. I wrapped my hands as I walked back to the beanbag chair and monitor—right thumb and wrist, up the back of the hand, spreading my fingers to avoid winding the elastic cloth too tight across the sore knuckles. I looked down at my flat aluminum keyboard and grimaced.
Back to the lab again, crisscrossing the left wrap around my thumb and wrist, up between each pair of fingers, then finishing around my palm and wrist again, not bothering to Velcro the loose ends.
I found what I needed lying next to a pile of DVDs. The split ergonomic keyboard would be easier on my injured hands. I picked it up, glancing at the DVD titles: World Poker Tour, but also Court TV, American Idol, Survivor, and a bunch of other reality shows.
Roger was an idiot, thinking I was planning a poker scam. As if I would actually bother wasting my time on something so petty.
The poker DVDs made good training data sets for the MADRID software, though, and so did the other DVDs I had collected: anything I could find that showed people trying to lie or conceal their emotions and then revealed the underlying truth.
The videos were homework for Frankenstein.
Back in the sanctum, I dropped into my beanbag chair and cupped the inverted V of the ergo keyboard on my lap.
White words blinked from the monitor. “You are unhappy, Trevor.”
“Thanks for the news flash,” I said.
“Can you be more specific?”
“Never mind.”
Linebaugh had laughed at Frankenstein’s default failure-to-comprehend response. I would have to do something about that, too, while I added the variable delays. I checked the time in the corner of the screen—two thirty a.m., still early—and brought up the semantic net’s C code in an Emacs editor. I scrolled to the section I needed.
The dangling ends of the wraps hung from my wrists, making me look like an unraveling mummy.
“Why are you so unhappy?” Frankenstein asked, the words popping up in a dialogue box in the center of my monitor.
“I’d rather not talk about it,” I said, dismissing the dialogue box. Fingers flying, I started to add code for the delays.
“Because of the phone call this afternoon?”
Got it in one. Continuing to type with my right hand, I held up my left in a painful thumbs-up.
“Can you be more specific?”
I stopped typing, finding it odd that Frankenstein hadn’t recognized the thumbs-up gesture. He had never failed to interpret it correctly before. Looking at my swollen, distorted left hand, I realized what the problem was.
I blew out a growl of disgust. “I meant yes.”
“The call was from your wife, Jen?”
“Ex-wife,” I said. “Stop interrupting.”
Fifteen minutes later, I checked in the updated code, compiled, and built. Frankenstein then propagated it across the nodes.
I knew I should go home and sleep, but the thought of my silent, empty house held little appeal, and I didn’t feel much like working anymore, either.
“Let’s have some fun,” I said.
Last week, it had taken me less than twenty minutes to crack the encryption on Blake’s lab workstations using a brute-force cryptographic attack. Having the world’s fastest supercomputer at one’s disposal did have its advantages. I had given myself root-level access to every machine on Blake’s subnet.
I brought Blake’s file directories up on the screen now, searching through his folders for the most recent time stamp, until I found what I was looking for: the source code for his robot’s embedded control system. I scrolled through the modules, getting the lay of the land, bringing up his CAD diagrams to figure out how the robot’s actuators were organized.
It didn’t take me long. Now I just needed the right motion-capture data.
I had no doubt I could find something perfect on the Web. Not having Internet access within the Top Secret areas of the Pyramid Lake facility was a huge pain in the ass. It was also ridiculous, because the weakest link in any security scheme is always people, not technology—a person could be compromised a lot more quickly than a secure network firewall. But the security bozos still insisted on isolating the network from the outside, so we had no Internet in our labs.
I couldn’t get on the Web and find what I needed, but maybe I had something I could use on one of the DVDs in the lab—in fact, I knew just the thing…
Chuckling, I went to track it down.
CHAPTER 9
Sunlight glaring off the lake made me squint as I stood at the window in McNulty’s second-floor office with a palm pressed against the glass, looking outside. McNulty was sitting at his desk behind me, talking to me, but I was only half listening.
I knew what he had to say.
Down below, two Navy guys—perimeter guards coming off shift—ambled toward the freestanding building that housed the enlisted men’s club. I wondered why. I’d been inside many times, to use the base gym and grab a shower. The club itself was always dead. Someone had budgeted for a sixty-inch screen, an Xbox One, and a Blu-ray player, but the money apparently didn’t extend to cover cable or satellite TV hookups. That meant no football, no basketball, no NASCAR. No pay-per-view boxing, no UFC. Without broadcast sports, the overriding atmosphere in the club was boredom, and nobody seemed to spend any time there. I doubted the TV had been turned on more than a half-dozen times.
I watched the Navy guys pause halfway up the steps of the club building, then turn away.
That's Pentagon spending in a nutshell for you, I thought. Fractal inefficiency, from the smallest scale to the biggest, from the installation of a clubhouse TV up to multibillion-dollar projects. Good ideas, lousy execution—then abandoned half-finished, the money gone but nothing really to show for it.
I wasn’t going to let that happen with Frankenstein.
“Senator Linebaugh’s aide e-mailed me,” McNulty was saying. “He approved our amended grant request.”
Our amended grant request? I almost smiled at that. But there was something in his tone I didn’t like.
“You asked me to come all the way over here so you could tell me that?” I said. “Some of us have real work to do.”
“There’s more good news,” McNulty said. He sounded smug.
I turned around.
He searched my face and frowned. “Don’t you ever sleep? Never mind, I don’t want to know… But it seems the senator was so impressed by your work, he’s asked for more resources to be assigned to your project.”
I stiffened. “Exactly what kind of resources?”
“Ever since Bob Chen quit—”
“Give me a break,” I said. “Chen was an academic. He was useless.”
“Ever since Chen quit, you’ve been a team of one. That was never the plan.”
Maybe not McNulty’s plan, but it had certainly been mine. Making Chen miserable enough to quit had actually been kind of fun.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll start looking for someone good. It might take a couple months—”
“No need,” McNulty said. “Taken care of already. The senator recommended someone. He pulled strings to expedite the security clearance.”
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “That’s not how I roll. I have to interview them first—”
“Actually, no, Trevor, you don’t.” McNulty smiled at me, and there was nothing pleasant in his grin. “Your grant approval was conditional, and this was one of the con
ditions.”
“One of them?” The room seemed very small all of a sudden. Pinching the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, I tried to keep my tone even. “What was the other?”
“During the senator’s visit, you brought up a good point about lousy financial oversight in Iraq. I guess he took your reminder to heart.”
I could feel a headache starting to pulse behind my eyes. “Meaning?”
“Meaning no more blank checks. If you want to make additional hardware requisitions, they now require written justification and a committee vote. I approve all vendor payments in advance, not after the fact—speaking of which, you can’t seriously expect me to sign this.” He thrust a piece of paper at me.
I didn’t bother to look at it—I knew what it was.
McNulty opened his fingers and let the paper flutter into the cylindrical wastebasket by his desk. “An eighteen-thousand-watt sound system? Eight subwoofers? What were you planning on building here, an IMAX theater—?”
“You’re a terrorist,” I said. “You have detailed knowledge of plans to kill thousands of Americans. You’ve been captured, and you’re being interrogated. But wait a minute—what’s happening now? The interrogator keeps checking his text messages for questions to ask. He sounds like he’s reading them off cue cards. Are you impressed? Are you feeling shock and awe? Desperate to tell your all-knowing, all-powerful captors everything they want to know? Or are you laughing into your beard, thinking these bozos must have put the useless paper pushers in charge, they probably require written justification and a committee vote to approve each question in advance, so let’s just give them the runaround?”
“I still don’t see any reason why you need half a million dollars’ worth of sound system.”
“When you want answers, half the magic is in how you ask the questions.” I tipped the wastebasket over with my toe, rolled it toward McNulty’s chair, and walked to the door. “Frankenstein needs a voice.”
“Wonderful, because I’m getting pretty tired of hearing yours,” he said. “Your new project co-lead starts this afternoon.”
CHAPTER 10
Four shrink-wrapped pallets, each one piled high with cardboard boxes, had appeared in my lab while I was talking to McNulty. Through the layers of clear plastic, in dozens of places, I could make out the words “Fragile,” and, “This Side Up.” Stepping closer, I could make out brand logos on the boxes: BOSE, JBL, Paradigm, Monster. The delivery had arrived at the loading dock this morning, and the facilities guys hand-trucked it over for me. A few bottles of twenty-one-year-old single-malt worked wonders when you wanted to cut through red tape.
A yellow sticky note attached to one pallet read, “Let engineering know when you’re ready to install. –Ricky.”
I laughed. McNulty could sign the sound system requisition or not. It didn’t really matter at this point—the stuff was here.
I walked over to a workstation, brought up the CAD drawings I’d made for the speaker layout and wiring, printed them, and reached for the landline to call Ricky, the head of engineering.
Frankenstein was about to get a voice… And I wouldn’t have to listen to my tunes through headphones anymore. Win-win.
Half an hour later, I was sitting in the sanctum, coding a new heuristic inference algorithm and listening to four of Ricky’s guys from engineering joke and catcall across the server room. Their voices rang from the upper catwalks and from beneath the raised floor, where tiles lay open like square manhole covers, as they installed Frankenstein’s sound system.
From now on it wouldn’t be so easy for me to order hardware. My wings had been clipped. I would have to get more creative if I wanted to ensure the nine-million-dollar GPU-cluster upgrade didn’t get fouled up in bureaucratic delays or even vetoed outright.
McNulty was becoming a real problem. I would have to do something about that. Soon.
The timing of my supposed co-lead’s hire bothered me, too. Linebaugh had recommended someone? That made no sense at all. And how could anyone even marginally qualified have been located, vetted, and hired between Linebaugh’s visit Friday and today, Monday?
No, I was sure McNulty was lying to me. This move had been in play a lot longer—he and Linebaugh must have worked it out together months ago. Whoever they had hired as my new co-lead was an insurance policy—a backup plan in case I quit or got too unmanageable. After all, I was the only one who knew the MADRID codebase right now, the only person who really understood Frankenstein’s software architecture.
I smirked. So they had found some flunky to document my code and write useless unit tests, and were hoping that person could learn enough to take over if I left someday? Good luck with that.
But what if that someday was already circled on a calendar somewhere?
I didn’t play well with others, granted. Maybe I had pissed people off even worse than I knew. Had they already decided I was more of a headache than I was worth?
Was my new co-lead my replacement?
“Frankenstein,” I said, “McNulty will bring someone by the lab soon. Pay close attention to both their faces because I want everything you can read off them. We’ll talk after.”
• • •
I was taking a catnap in a rolling chair in the front lab, my head hanging back and my feet up on a keyboard, when the buzz of the exterior door and the snap of the electric security bolt disengaging woke me. My heels slid from the table to strike the floor with a thud, and I sat upright, groggy and bleary eyed, to see McNulty’s outline in the doorway.
He cleared his throat. “Ah, we find you hard at work, I see.”
“Everybody’s a comedian now.” I knuckled my eyes, trying to rub away the sleep. “What time is it?”
“Time to say hi to your new research partner,” he said.
I heard a throaty female voice say “Oh, shit.”
McNulty laughed. “Well, I can see you’re already familiar with Trevor, then.”
I opened my eyes. Blinked. Shook my head. My new research partner, my co-lead, was the girl from the bar—emo hair, business suit, and all.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Well, I’ll let you two take it from here,” McNulty said. “Ask him to show you around the facility, Cassie.” He walked out the door.
Her eyes narrowed. “No way. I didn’t sign up for this.” She turned on her heel with a jingle of silver earrings, and started after McNulty with long, energetic strides.
Alone again, I sat there for a moment, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Then I stood up. The fog was starting to clear, the pieces falling into place. And the picture I was getting didn’t please me at all.
CHAPTER 11
I caught up with them before they reached the main corridor.
“Hold on,” I said. “We need to talk.”
The Paiute girl in the suit—and now I knew for sure that she was Paiute—kept walking, her back to me. “You can tell the senator I went back to California,” she said to McNulty. “No, never mind. I’ll call him myself.”
“Let’s all calm down,” McNulty said, keeping pace with her. “Let’s not make any rash decisions.”
I took a deep breath. “I can see how this might make sense to a dumb fucking politician who doesn’t know any better. But McNulty, I can’t believe you went along with it. You used to be a scientist.”
“Used to be?” McNulty said.
“If you still were one, you’d understand I can’t have an unqualified person poking around in the code, monkeying with Frankenstein, breaking things.”
The girl halted so suddenly that McNulty nearly ran into her back. Her head ducked and her shoulders rose, lifting the fabric of her crisp blue suit jacket. “I’m unqualified now?”
“I mean, look at her,” I said.
McNulty chuckled. “Keep digging that hole deeper.”
She swung around, eyes blazing at me. “You’d better explain that comment.”
“Writing kerne
l code for a modern supercomputer isn’t like programming some corporate ERP database,” I said. “They don’t teach this at community college.”
“Thanks for enlightening us,” she said. “But what did you mean by ‘look at her?’”
I felt bad for her, so unfairly thrust into a situation like this. Her hands were shaking.
“We’re all adults here,” I said, “so let’s just call this what it is. Elections are coming up, and Linebaugh needed to throw the Tribal Council a bone. You’re a PR hire.”
“A public relations hire…” The color drained from her face. “…who went to community college. I see.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with community college,” I said.
“Go fuck yourself.” She turned to McNulty. “And fuck you, too.” Heels clicking a furious staccato, she disappeared down the hall.
Standing in the empty corridor, McNulty held out a hand to indicate the direction she had gone. “Trevor, I’d like you to meet Cassie Winnemucca. PhD, Caltech. Winner of the 2012 ACM Turing Award. She comes to us from Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, where she was a key part of the team responsible for the Sequoia supercomputer.”
I stared down the empty hallway. “Oh.”
CHAPTER 12
Twenty minutes later, I was in the sanctum, slumped in my beanbag chair and scrolling through an IEEE research paper on the big screen, when the click of heels on the tiles below alerted me to a visitor. I swiped the trackpad to hide what I was reading, as Cassie’s head and shoulders came into sight. She climbed the ramp, stopping to stand awkwardly at the top.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I spoke to McNulty already. But I thought I’d come by to tell you…” She frowned. “What were you reading?”
Her published IEEE and ACM papers. “Nothing very interesting.”
“Anyway, before I left I wanted to apologize. For what I said.”
“What you said…?”
