Hey, it’s an immature market.
The rationalizations have not actually begun yet—Randy’s still sitting in the sultan’s big conference room, and the meeting’s just getting up to speed.
Naturally the early adopters are not going to be your regular joes.
Tom Howard has taken the floor to explain his work. Randy doesn’t have much to do, so he’s imagining tonight’s conversation in the Bomb and Grapnel.
It’s like the Wild West—a little unruly at first, then in a few years it settles down and you’ve got Fresno.
Most of the delegations have brought hired guns: engineers and security experts who’ll get a bounty if they can find a flaw in Tom’s system. One by one, these guys stand up to take their shots.
Ten years from now, widows and paperboys will be banking in cyberspace.
Magnificent isn’t the word you would normally use to describe Tom Howard; he’s burly and surly, completely lacking in social graces, and doesn’t apologize for it. Most of the time he sits silently, wearing an expression of sphinxlike boredom, and so it’s easy to forget how good he is.
But during this particular half hour of Tom Howard’s life, it is of the essence that he be magnificent. He is going blade-to-blade with the Seven Samurai here: the nerdiest high-octane Ph.D.s and the scariest private-security dicks that Asia can produce. One-by-one they come after him and he cuts their heads off and stacks them on the table like cannon-balls. Several times he has to stop and think for sixty seconds before delivering the deathblow. Once he has to ask Eberhard Föhr to make some calculations on his laptop. Occasionally he has to call on the cryptographic expertise of John Cantrell, or to look over at Randy for a nod or shake of the head. But eventually, he shuts the hecklers up. Beryl wears a not very convincing smile throughout the entire thing. Avi just grips the arms of his chair, his knuckles going from blue to white to pink to a normal healthy glow over the course of the final five minutes, when it’s clear that the Samurai are withdrawing in disarray. It makes Randy want to empty a six-shooter into the ceiling and holler, "Yeeehaaw!" at the top of his lungs.
Instead he listens, just in case Tom gets tripped up in the briar patch of plesiosynchronous protocol arcana, whence only Randy can drag him out. This gives him some more time to survey the faces of the other people in the room. But the meeting is a couple of hours old now, and they are all as familiar to him as siblings.
Tom wipes his sword on his pantleg and thwacks his big ass resoundingly into his leather chair. Minions scurry into the room bringing tea and coffee and sugar/fat pods. Dr. Pragasu stands up and introduces John Cantrell.
Sheesh! So far, the agenda is revolving entirely around Epiphyte Corp. What gives?
Dr. Pragasu, having developed a friendly relationship with these California hackers, is pimping them to his big money contacts. That’s what gives.
This is very interesting from a business standpoint. But Randy finds it a bit irksome and threatening, this one-way flow of information. By the time they go home, this assemblage of shady gmokes is going to know everything about Epiphyte Corp., but Epiphyte will still be in the dark. No doubt that’s exactly how they want it.
It occurs to Randy to look over at the Dentist. Dr. Hubert Kepler is sitting on the same side of the table as he is, and so it’s hard to read his face. But it’s clear he’s not listening to John Cantrell. He’s covering his mouth with one hand and staring into space. His Valkyries are furiously passing notes back and forth, like naughty cheerleaders.
Kepler’s just as surprised as Randy. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who delights in surprises.
What can Randy do right now to enhance shareholder value? Intrigue is not his specialty; he’ll leave that to Avi. Instead, he tunes out the meeting, opens up his laptop, and begins to hack.
Hacking is an overly glorious word for this. Everyone in Epiphyte Corp. has a laptop with a tiny built-in video camera, so that they can do long-distance videoconferencing. Avi insisted on it. The camera is almost invisible: just an orifice a couple of millimeters across, mounted in the top center of the frame that surrounds the screen. It doesn’t have a lens as such—it’s a camera in the oldest sense, a camera obscura. One wall contains the pinhole and the opposite wall is a silicon retina.
Randy has the source code—the original program—for the videoconferencing software. It is reasonably clever in its use of bandwidth. It looks at the stream of frames (individual still images) coming from the pinhole camera and notices that, although the total amount of data in those frames is rather large, the difference from one frame to the next is tiny. It would be altogether different if Frame 1 were a talking head and Frame 2, a fraction of a second later, were a postcard shot of a Hawaiian beach and Frame 3 a diagram of a printed circuit and Frame 4 a closeup of a dragonfly’s head. But in fact, each frame is a talking head—the same person’s head, with minor changes in position and expression. The software can save on precious bandwidth by mathematically subtracting each new frame from the previous one (since, to the computer, each image is just a long number) and then transmitting only the difference.
What it all means is that this software has a lot of built-in capabilities for comparing one image with another, and gauging the magnitude of the difference from one frame to the next. Randy doesn’t have to write that stuff. He just has to familiarize himself with these already-existing routines, learn their names and how to use them, which takes about fifteen minutes of clicking around.
Then he writes a little program called Mugshot that will take a snap shot from the pinhole camera every five seconds or so, and compare it to the previous snapshot, and, if the difference is large enough, save it to a file. An encrypted file with a meaningless, random name. Mugshot opens no windows and produces no output of its own, so the only way you can tell it’s running is by typing the UNIX command
ps
and hitting the return key. Then the system will spew out a long list of running processes, and Mugshot will show up somewhere in that list.
Just in case someone thinks of this, Randy gives the program a fake name: VirusScanner. He starts it running, then checks its directory and verifies that it has just saved an image file: one mug shot of Randy. As long as he sits fairly still, it won’t save any more mug shots; the pattern of light that represents Randy’s face striking the far wall of the camera obscura won’t change very much.
In the technology world, no meeting is complete without a demo. Cantrell and Föhr have developed a prototype of the electronic cash system, just to demonstrate the user interface and the built-in security features. "A year from now, instead of going to the bank and talking to a human being, you will simply launch this piece of software from any where in the world," Cantrell says, "and communicate with the Crypt." He blushes as this word seeps through the translators and into the ears of the others. "Which is what we’re calling the system that Tom Howard has been putting together."
Avi’s on his feet, coolly managing the crisis. "Mi fu," he says, speaking directly to the Chinese guys, "is a better translation."
The Chinese guys look relieved, and a couple of them actually crack smiles when they hear Avi speaking Mandarin. Avi holds up a sheet of paper bearing the Chinese characters:*
Painfully aware that he has just dodged a bullet, John Cantrell continues with a thick tongue. "We thought you might want to see the software in action. I’m going to demo it on the screen now, and during the lunch break you should feel free to come around and try it out yourselves."
Randy fires up the software. He’s got his laptop plugged into a video jack on the underside of the table so that the sultan’s lurking media geeks can project a duplicate of what Randy’s seeing onto a large projection screen at the end of the room. It is running the front end to the cash demo, but his mug shot program is still running in the background. Randy slides the computer over to John, who runs through the demo (there should be a mug shot of John Cantrell stored on the hard disk now).
"I can write the best cryptographic code possible, but it’s all worthless unless there is a good system for verifying the user’s identity," John begins, regaining some poise now. "How does the computer know that you are you? Passwords are too easy to guess, steal, or forget. The computer needs to know something about you that is as unique to you as your fingerprint. Basically it has to look at some part of your body, such as the blood vessels in your retina or the distinctive sound of your voice, and compare it against known values stored in its memory. This kind of technology is called biometrics. Epiphyte Corp. boasts one of the top biometrics experts in the world: Dr. Eberhard Föhr, who wrote what’s considered to be the best handwriting-recognition system in the world." John rushes through this encomium. Eb and everyone else in the room look bored by it—they’ve all seen Eb’s resume. "Right now we’re going with voice recognition, but the code is entirely modular, so we could swap in some other system, such as a hand geometry reader. That’s up to the customer."
John runs the demo, and unlike most demos, it actually works and does not crash. He even tries to fake it out by recording his own voice on a pretty good portable digital tape recorder and then playing it back. But the software is not fooled. This actually makes an impression on the Chinese guys, who, up to the point, have looked like the contents of Madame Tussaud’s Dumpster after an exhibit on the Cultural Revolution.
Not everyone is such a tough sell. Harvard Li is a committed Cantrell supporter, and the Filipino heavyweight looks like he can hardly wait to deposit his cash reserves in the Crypt.
Lunchtime! Doors are hauled open to reveal a dining room with a buffet along the far wall, redolent of curry, garlic, cayenne, and bergamot. The Dentist makes a point of sitting at the same table with Epiphyte Corp., but doesn’t say very much—just sits there with a dreadfully choleric expression on his face, staring and chewing and thinking. When Avi finally asks him what he thinks, Kepler says, levelly: "It’s been informative."
The Three Graces cringe epileptically. Informative is evidently an extremely bad word in the Dentist’s lexicon. It means that Kepler has learned something at this meeting, which means that he did not know absolutely everything going into it, which would certainly rate as an unforgivable intelligence failure on his scale of values.
There is an agonizing silence. Then Kepler says, "But not devoid of interest."
Deep sighs of relief ventilate the blindingly white, plaque-free dentition of the Hygienists. Randy tries to imagine which is worse: that Kepler suspects that the wool was pulled over his eyes, or that he sees a new opportunity here. Which is more terrible, the paranoia or the avarice of the Dentist? They are about to find out. Randy, with his sappy, romantic instinct for ingratiation, almost says something like, "It’s been informative for us, too!" but he holds back, noticing that Avi has not said it. Saying it would not enhance shareholder value. Best to play one’s cards close to the vest, let Kepler wonder whether Epiphyte Corp. knew the real agenda.
Randy has chosen his seat tactically, so that he can look straight through the door into the conference room and keep an eye on his laptop. One by one, members of the other delegations excuse themselves, go into the room, and run the demo, imprinting their own voices into the computer’s memory and then letting it recognize them. Some of the nerds even type commands on Randy’s keyboard; probably that ps command, snooping. Despite the fact that Randy’s got it set up so it can’t be meddled with too much, it bothers him at a deep level to see the fingertips of these strangers prodding away at his keyboard.
It gnaws at him all through the afternoon session, which is all about the communications links joining Kinakuta to the wide world. Randy ought to be paying attention to this, since it impinges massively on the Philippines project. But he doesn’t. He broods over his keyboard, contaminated by a foreign touch, and then he broods about the fact that he’s brooding about it, which demonstrates his unfitness for Biz. It’s technically Epiphyte’s keyboard—not even his—and if it enhances shareholder value for sinister Eastern nerds to poke around his files, he should be happy to let them do it.
They adjourn. Epiphyte and the Nipponese dine together, but Randy’s bored and distracted. Finally, about nine P.M., he excuses himself and goes to his room. He’s mentally composing a response to root@eruditorum.org, along the lines of because there seems to be a hell of a market for this kind of thing, and it’s better that I fill the niche, than someone frankly and overly evil. But before his laptop has even had time to boot up, the Dentist, clad in a white terrycloth robe and smelling like vodka and hotel soap, knocks on Randy’s door and invites himself in. He invades Randy (no; the shareholders’) bathroom and helps himself to a glass of water. He stands at the shareholders’ window and glowers down at the Nipponese cemetery for several minutes before speaking.
"Do you realize who those people were?" he says. His voice, if subjected to biometric analysis, would reflect disbelief, bewilderment, maybe a trace of amusement.
Or maybe he’s just faking it, trying to get Randy to let down his guard. Maybe he is root@eruditorum.org.
"Yeah," Randy lies.
When Randy revealed the existence of Mugshot, after the meeting, Avi gave him a commendation for deviousness, printed up the mugshots in his hotel room, and Federal Expressed them to a private dick in Hong Kong.
Kepler turns around and gives Randy a searching look. "Either I had bad information about you guys," he says, "or else you are in way over your heads."
If this were the First Business Foray, Randy would piss his pants at this point. If it were the Second, he would resign and fly back to California tomorrow. But it’s the third, and so he manages to maintain composure. The light is behind him, so perhaps Kepler’s momentarily dazzled and can’t read his face very well. Randy takes a swallow of water and breathes deeply, asking, "In light of today’s events," he says, "what’s in store for our relationship?"
"It is no longer about providing cheap long-distance service to the Philippines—if, indeed, it ever was in the first place!" Kepler says darkly. "The data flowing through the Philippines network now takes on entirely new significance. It’s a superb opportunity. At the same time, we’re competing against heavy hitters: those Aussies and the Singapore group. Can we compete against them, Randy?"
It is a simple and direct question, the most dangerous kind. "We wouldn’t be risking our shareholders’ money if we didn’t think so."
"That’s a predictable answer," Kepler snorts. "Are we going to have a real conversation here, Randy, or should we invite our PR people into the room and exchange press releases?"
During an earlier business foray, Randy would have buckled at this point. Instead he says, "I’m not prepared to have a real conversation with you, here and now."
"Sooner and later we have to have one," says the Dentist. Those wisdom teeth will have to come out someday.
"Naturally."
"In the meantime, here is what you should be thinking about," Kepler says, getting ready to leave. "What the hell can we offer, in the way of telecommunications services, that stacks up competitively against the Aussies and those Singapore boys? Because we can’t beat ’em on price."
This being Randy’s Third Business Foray, he doesn’t blurt out the answer: redundancy. "That question will certainly be on all of our minds," Randy says instead.
"Spoken like a flack," says Kepler, his shoulders sagging. He goes out into the hallway and turns around, saying, "See you tomorrow at the Crypt." Then he winks. "Or the Vault, or Cornucopia of Infinite Prosperity, or whatever the Chinese word for it is." Having knocked Randy off balance with this startling display of humanity, he walks away.