The Troupe's switching stations were cheap-ass little Malaysian-made boxes of recycled barf-colored plastic. They cost about as much as a pair of good shoes.
There wasn't a single human being left in the world who fully understood what was going on inside those little boxes. Actually, no single human being in the world had ever understood an intellectual structure of that complexity. Any box running a million lines of code was far beyond the direct comprehension of any human brain. And it was simply impossible to watch those modern screamer-chips grind that old code, on any intimate line-by-line basis. It was like trying to listen in on every conversation in a cocktail party bigger than Manhattan.
As a single human individual, you could only interface with that code on a very remote and abstract level-you had to negotiate with the code, gently, politely, and patiently, the way you might have dealt with a twentieth-century phone company. You owned a twentieth-century phone company-it was all inside the box now.
As you climbed higher and higher up the stacks of in~ terface, away from the slippery bedrock of the hardware grinding the ones and zeros, it was like walking on stilts.
And then, stilts for your stilts, and stilts for your stilts for your stilts. You could plug a jack in the back of the box and run like the wind of the wind. Until something crashed somewhere, that the system's system's system couldn't diagnose and figure out and override. Then you threw the little box away and plugged in another one.
The Troupe's system was temperamental. To say the least. For instance, the order in which you detached the subsystems mattered a lot. There was no easy or direct explanation as to why that should matter, but it mattered plenty.
Jane kept careful professional track of the system's in-congruities, its wealth of senseless high-level knots and kinks and cramps. She kept her notes with pencil and paper, in a little looseleaf leather notebook she'd had since college. Mickey the sysadmin and Rick the code grinder had given Jane wary, weary looks when she'd first started working seriously on the Troupe's system, but she'd more proved her worth since then. -She'd resolved screwups, seizures, and blockages that had had Mickey cursing wildly and Rick so mired in code that he staggered around camp like a blacked-out drunk.
The difference between hacking code and hacking in-was like the difference between a soldier and a diplomat. Certain crises would only yield to a political solution.
Jane kept her notebook inside a plastic case, glued to underside of Jerry's connectionist simulator. This was safest storage place in camp, because Jerry's simulator ,s the Troupe's most valued machine. The simulator was only box in the crowd of them that actually impressed.
The U.S. government had gone nuts over climate regulators during the State of Emergency, pouring money into the global climate modeling at a frantic rate that im;ed even the Pentagon. Boxes like Jerry's were Brob -Jerry's lone system had more raw computational power than the entire planet had possessed in 1995.
Officially, Jerry's system was "on loan" from the SESCollaboratory, a research net in which Jerry had fairly good standing, but nobody was going to come and repossess it. No~y but the Troupe gave a damn about Jerry's box, really. It was stone obvious now that the problems of climate modeling simply weren't going to yield to raw computational power. Power wasn't the bottleneck at all; the real bottleneck was in the approaches, the approximations, the concepts, and the code.
Jane opened her favorite laptop, dragged the system monitor onto it off Mickey's sysadmin machine, and checked to see that all the instrumentation was safely down. Peter, Greg, and Martha had been on the job: all the towers were off-line and down now, except for the telecom tower. They always left the telecom for last. It made more sense, really, to take down the security system last, but the perimeter posts were pig stupid and paranoid little entities that reacted to any sudden loss of packets as prima facie evidence of enemy sabotage. Unless they were petted to sleep first, the posts would whoop like crazy.
An icon appeared on Jane's screen. An incoming phone call-to her own number. Surprised, she took the call.
A postcard-sized video inclusion appeared in the upper right-hand corner of her laptop. It was a stranger: clean shaven, sandy-haired, distinguished looking, close to forty maybe. Ruggedly handsome, in a funny, well-groomed sort of way. Oddly familiar looking. He wore a shirt, jacket, and tie.
"Hello?" the stranger said. "Is this Juanita?"
"Yes?"
"Good," the stranger said, smiling and glancing down at his desk. "I didn't think this would quite work." lie seemed to be in a hotel lobby somewhere, or maybe a very nicely furnished office. Jane could see a lithograph behind his head and a spray of leaves from an exotic potted plant.
The stranger looked up from his console. "I'm not getting any video off my side, should I shut down my video feed?"
"Sorry," Jane said, leaning forward to speak into the laptop's little inset mike. "I'm getting this off a laptop, I've got no camera here."
"Sorry to hear that," the stranger said, adjusting his tie.
"Y'know, Juanita, I've never actually seen you. I was quite looking forward to it."
The stranger had Jerry's ears on the sides of his head. Jane could scarcely have been more surprised if he'd had Jerry's ears on a string around his neck. But then the bump of shock passed, and Jane felt a little cold thrill of recognition. She smiled shyly at the laptop, even though he couldn't see her. "This is Leo, isn't it?"
"Right," Leo Mulcahey said, with a gentle smile and a wink. "Can we talk?"
Jane glanced around the command yurt. Mickey and Rick were both in the bath line. They usually gave her a while to work alone before they'd show up to run diagnostics and start lugging machines to the trucks.
"Yeah," she said. "I guess so. For a little while." It was the first time she had seen Jerry's brother. Leo looked older than Jerry, his cheeks thinner and a little lined, and she was shocked at how good-looking he was. His head had just the shape of Jerry's head, but his haircut was lovely. Jane had been cutting Jerry's hair herself, but she could see now that as a hair designer, she was dog meat.
"I understand you've been talking with Mom," Leo said.
Jane nodded silently, but Leo of course couldn't see her. "Yes I have," she blurted.
"I happen to be in the States again, at the moment. Mom's been filling me in on Jerry's activities."
"I didn't mean any harm by it," Jane said. "Jerry hardly ever calls your mother, but he doesn't mind if I do it... . Sorry if that seemed intrusive on my part."
"Oh, Mom thinks the world of you, Juanita," said Leo, smiling. "Y'know, Mom and I have never seen Jerry carry on in quite this way before. I'm convinced you must be someone very special."
"Well..." Jane said. "Leo, I just thought of something-I have some photos on disk here, let me see if I can pull them up and feed them to you."
"That would be good." Leo nodded. "Always feels a little odd to speak to a blank screen."
Jane punched up the digital scrapbook. "I wanted to thank you for helping me find my brother... Alejandro."
Leo shrugged. "De nada. I pulled a string for you. Okay, two strings. That's Mexico for you... walls within walls, wheels within wheels... . An interesting place, a fine culture." He looked down again. "Oh yes. That's coming across very well. Nice photo."
"I'm the one in the hat," Jane said. "The other woman's our camp cook."
"I could have guessed that," Leo said, sitting up intently. He seemed genuinely intrigued. "Oh, this one of you and Jerry is very good. I didn't know about the beard. The beard looks good, though."