The zenith angle (28 page)

It got worse. Even inside American national borders, you couldn’t wrap computers in the red-white-and-blue. Eighty-five percent of the hardware was owned by private industry.
Multinational
private industry.

Multinational private industry that
had gone broke.

The computer and telecom industries were on their knees. They had lost legendary, incredible, colossal amounts of money. They had lost diamond-mine, mountain-of-gold heaps of money. They had tried to build a commercial for-profit Internet. There was nothing commercial about the Internet any more than there was anything national. That was why it was called Internet instead of Internet Inc.©‰.

The Internet belonged to a world of the 1990s, a Digital Revolution. The people in the 2000s were way over the Digital Revolution. They were deeply involved in the Digital Terror. The nervous system of global governance, education, science, culture, and e-commerce, it was all in a spasm. It had all broken down in a sudden terrible panic in the last mile. The last mile stood between those great, big, fat, global, huge, empty, terrifying fiber-optic pipes, and the planet’s general population. The Net had not just broken. It had been abandoned, cast aside in fear and dread. Because the movie companies, and the telephone companies, and the music companies had suddenly realized that their

“intellectual property” would not remain their property for one pico-second, when everyday people all around the world could click, copy, and forward all their movies. All their music. All their calls home to Mom. And the people did that. The children of the Digital Revolution were a swarm of thieves. More people had used Napster than voted for the President of the United States. Nobody paid for that music. People didn’t pay. The people were free. In a world like that, there wouldn’t
be
a music business. There wouldn’t
be
a movie business. There would be no such thing as long-distance charges. There would be no long distances. There would be no business. Nothing but
it,
the Net. And the horror of that freedom could not be endured.

So the Information Superhighway had just
stopped.
Stopped dead with its sawhorses and construction lights still up, like an incomplete overpass. A titanic physical investment. Dark fiber. Not lit up. In receivership. Gently rotting in the mellow ground.

Business could not save itself from the situation it had eagerly brought on itself, this world of free and open access. It could not spare the effort and revenue to reinvent itself as a safe, secure, comforting, for-profit utility. There was no such thing as a computer “business,” really. Racing into cyberspace was not a business enterprise, any more than the long-dead Space Race had ever been a business. Money fell out of it here and there, but that was not its point. It was a tremendous, wrenching effort in pursuit of the sublime. People aiming for the Moon, touching it for a golden moment, and being left with massive bills and rusting gantries.

There was some software business around. There was Microsoft, which was a monopoly. Microsoft was never secure, because of the hatred. Microsoft was hated everywhere, despised, mercilessly attacked. Sabotaged, tormented, humiliated. Microsoft was a
pathetically vulnerable
monopoly, because every hacker in the world who knew anything at all about computers understood how to attack Microsoft and its products.

Microsoft’s operating systems had never been built to resist the focused hatred of every alienated hacker in the whole world. No single system could ever bear up under that level of focused intellectual assault. It was like trying to save Saigon when everyone in the whole world was Viet Cong. There were not just dozens of holes in Big Bill’s code but
thousands
of holes. The patches of the holes wrecked the code, quite often. The patches of the holes had holes. Some of Microsoft’s holes were unrepairable even in principle.

Bill had more money than anybody in the whole wide world, but Bill didn’t have enough money to save himself. Except for the Microsoft operating system—a monopoly—and the Microsoft Office Suite—another monopoly—every other venture Bill had tried lost huge amounts of money. There were a couple of really pretty nice Microsoft computer games that made a little money. That was about it. The biggest competitor that Microsoft faced wasn’t even a business. It was a new and terrible thing in the world. It was Open Source, a thing that frightened Microsoft so much they regarded it as a cancer. Open Source aimed to eat away Bill’s empire and replace it with a swarming, leaderless ant pile of global hackers. And Open Source wasn’t a government any more than Open Source was a business. There was no one to negotiate with. There was no one to cut a deal with. There was no one to regulate. There was no one to bomb.

You could bribe them. But you could never bribe all of them. You could sue them, arrest some of them, but that really looked stupid, and besides, they were probably living in Finland. Everyone claimed they wanted secure computers. Everyone was terrified of the consequences of the lawlessness, which were very bad and getting steadily worse. Viruses. Worms. Scam artists. Porn. Spam. Denial-of-service attacks. Organized crime. Industrial espionage. Stalking. Money laundering. The specter of infowar attacks on natural gas pipelines, aircraft control systems, dams, water reservoirs, sewage systems, telephones, and banks. Black horses snorting and stomping in the stables of the Digital Apocalypse.

You sat people down and you explained what computer insecurity really could do to them, and they got really, really scared and upset. They wanted something done about it. Until they figured out what effective security really meant for them, what it would do to them. Then no one really wanted secure computers. No one at all.

The spies didn’t want to fix the holes in computer security. Spies liked to spy on computers. Cops didn’t want to fix the holes in computer security. Cops liked to wiretap computers, and to grab them, open them up, and examine them right on the spot. Customers didn’t want to fix the holes in security. Customers didn’t want to ride a little motor scooter weighed down with a ton and a half of cumbersome locks and chains.

Scientists understood how to lock code down, but they hated intellectual property. The military was sincerely good at really securing computers. The military excelled at defense. But they adored attack. The American military excelled at infowar, cyberwar, and electronic warfare. They were always making up horrible new methods of breaking, smashing, subverting, and violently destroying the whole works.

Business couldn’t do much about it. Business was broke, it had already died at its post. And on the far side of the dead dot-coms, the dead pipes, there was Wi-Fi. If the Internet was the child of Cold War nuclear warfare, then Wi-Fi was the child of the Special Forces. Wi-Fi was all about little military-spec spread-spectrum radios. Secret radios. Tiny radios. The very kind of thing that Delta Force liked to carry way behind the lines of enemies (and allies).

Wi-Fi was just getting started, and when Van thought about it, it filled him with chills. Wi-Fi carried data that was
fast, cheap, anonymous, wide-open,
wireless, portable, great big bleeding menaces to data protection, to intellectual property, to information security, sold in shrink-wrap packs as if they were bubble gum . . . Wi-Fi was a
nightmare.
The stuff coming down the pike was
worse.
It was like it was evolving
on purpose to make a secure life impossible.

Van shifted Ted from his right hip to his left. Someone tapped Van’s shoulder. It was Tony.

“Van,” he said, “want to introduce you.”

An older man. White mustache. Glasses. Balding. Blue shirt, brown slacks. A conference ID on his lanyard.

“Jim Cobb.”

“Dr. Cobb!” said Van, almost dropping his son in astonishment.

There was no such thing as a Nobel Prize for computer science. James Cobb had won a Nobel Prize anyway. He’d had to share it with a Swedish physicist. Everybody knew that when it came to Swedes the Nobel committee had a soft spot the size of Stockholm.

“The Bell Labs Concurrent C superset,” Van gushed.

Cobb smiled. “That’s funny. Nobody talks about that much, these days.”

“I wrote my thesis on that.”

“The press always wants to talk about the photonics,” said Cobb. That was what he had won his Nobel for—he and the Swede, who was his electrical engineer. “You never get the time of day for the work that you loved best.”

“That superset paper in ’79, that was the best,” Van said, knowing that it was true.

“You know the best way to have truly great ideas?”

“How?” Van blurted eagerly. He was talking to a true-blue genius who had had at least seven genuine, world-class great ideas. A phenomenon.

“Have a hundred, and throw away ninety-eight of ’em! Haw haw haw!”

Cobb was laughing, but Van sensed in his gut that Cobb had never gotten over the anguish of it. Cobb had loved those ninety-eight lousy ideas with just the same passion as the two, or five, or seven, that had saddled him with his immortal fame.

“That way you handled synchronization conditions in Grendel,” said Cobb.

“Yeah!”

“Where the capsule structure supports inheritance.”

“Exactly!”

“I liked that,” said Cobb. “That was cleverly handled.”

Van wanted to sit on the floor. James J. Cobb had praised him. James Cobb, who knew the behavior of semiconductors down to the atomic level. A top-notch theorist with “his head right down in the bits.” A true grand master from computing’s heroic age.

In Bell Labs, guys like Cobb didn’t even bother with the borders between disciplines. They were the wizards of the coolest, tallest ivory tower around. Guys who did physics at breakfast, electrical engineering at lunch, and programming after dinner. Bell Labs had originated the transistor, plus UNIX, C, and C++, and the Karmakar algorithm. The little R&D crowd at Mondiale could only dream of the colossal achievements at Bell Labs.

“Cute kid,” Cobb told him. “Where’s Mom?”

“Oh, Mom’s resting awhile,” Van said. “This is Ted.”

“What, so you’re feeding the baby, changing the diapers? You younger guys are something else.” Cobb lifted a cocktail glass to his lips. Van hadn’t noticed any hard liquor at the party. Everyone else was carrying wineglasses. Apparently when you were a Nobel Prize winner at Erlette House, it wasn’t hard to find vermouth and olives.

“What’s your latest project, Dr. Cobb?” said Van.

“A year ago,” said Cobb, “February 2001, they shut down Bell Labs in Silicon Valley. First time that Bell Labs ever closed a facility.”

“Right, I heard that.” Bell Labs was Lucent now. And Lucent was very broke.

“Real focused on short-term research payoffs. I was working on HDTV. Not a lot going on there.”

“I guess not.”

“Had my own consulting company for a while, that didn’t work out. Just lately it’s missile defense.”

Van tried not to stare. Missile defense? Star Wars? The ultimate in pseudoscience phony baloney? The great Jim Cobb reduced to working on Star Wars?

Van glumly supposed that there was money in it. A huge amount of money had been thrown away on Star Wars.

“It’s not like you think,” Cobb lied. He tipped his martini rim below his white mustache. “It’s the Airborne Laser project. Air Force.”

“Oh,” Van said with a nod, “the photonic emissions.”

“To tell the truth, that’s not the part they have me working on.”

Van lifted his brows. The Cyber-Security crowd was getting a bit liquored up and noisy. Ted squirmed vigorously in his arms.

Cobb stared emptily over Van’s right shoulder. “You have to imagine,” Cobb told him, “trying to stuff one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of laser equipment into one 747 cargo jet. That’s the Airborne Laser. They need fourteen laser modules to shoot down missiles, and six of them already outweigh any jet’s lifting capacity. Chemical laser. Huge, flying tanks of chlorine, iodine, and hydrogen peroxide. The devil’s brew, that stuff. It sloshes. Oh, boy, it sloshes.” Cobb leaned way back, lifting his free arm. “You are trying to aim that giant, flying chemical laser at a rising missile that is clearing a silo . . .”

“It’s a death ray?”

“Lasers never work well,” said Cobb, wobbling back upright. “Lasers are always underpowered. Lethality is in the kilojoule per centimeter range. You just can’t do efficient optical coupling in chlorine-iodine wavelengths. There are ways to slide those pulses around, but when it comes to combining them . . .” Cobb started to hand-wave. He looked for a place to set his empty martini glass. He failed to find one. He absently tucked the narrow stem of the glass into Ted’s sweaty little fist. Suddenly Cobb was searching in his jacket. He found a business card and handed it over. Cobb’s card had an old-school ARPANET address, nothing but dots and numerals.

“Mama,” said Ted agreeably. Dottie had arrived. To Van’s astonishment, she was wearing a short black cocktail dress. Dottie had hose and heels. She had earrings that matched her necklace. Dottie gently relieved Ted of his empty martini glass. “I think I’d better get you a fresh one, Ted.”

“This is Jim Cobb,” said Van. “From Bell Labs. My wife Dottie, Dr. Cobb.”

“Oh, yes, Bell Labs,” said Dottie brightly. “The three-degree cosmic background radiation!”

“They thought that was pigeon crap,” Cobb told her, blinking.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That microwave hiss from the birth of the universe. They thought it was pigeon droppings inside the Bell equipment. So they cleaned out the horn. Then they found out that it was the universe radiating right at us.”

“That’s quite a story,” said Dottie.

“They were looking for crap and they found cosmic significance. The very opposite of most scientific endeavors!”

Dottie stared at Cobb. It was a rare privilege to hear Bell Labs humor, straight from the source. “My husband often speaks of you, Dr. Cobb. He’s a big admirer of your work.”

“Love to have you out to the BMDO,” said Cobb to Van, slurring a little. “I’d show you that COEA.”

Tony reappeared. Tony was escorting a woman who was almost certainly the most attractive woman at the event. She turned out to be the wife of a colonel at the Center for Strategy and Technology at the Air War College. She quickly took Cobb in hand, chatting at him amiably.