Chapter 19

Oh yeah. May the gods be praised. Who’s the goddess for this stuff? What did Dave say? Aphrodite? Ishtar? Venus? Isis? Lakshmi? Shit, can’t remember. Well, just fuckin praise them all. There she is. Hollleee fuck. Tank top and braless, and wearing a jean skirt. Oh shit. The clothes do not match the face. She’s definitely pissed ... Yeah, wave them arms around. Yeah, look at that critically-dampened titty bounce. Yeah...

“Mark!? Damn it, Mark! I know you have not heard a word that I have said. You had better listen!”

Look at them eyes. Damn, they seem to change color. What is the physics for that shit? Maybe it’s unique to the refractive index changes in the front part of the iris of hazel eyes. Or perhaps ... Ouch. Mother fucker, she actually slapped me. Damn, never seen the woman so pissed. Whatever, at least my fur bags will be happy to see me.

“Mark. Why? Damn. Damn. Damn.”

Oh shit. Tears. I can’t take that shit. No, please don’t...

“Lady. I’m so sorry. No problema. I’m okay. It’s all good.”

The fuck? She’s going down ... Damn, that was close, grabbed her just in time. Did she feint? Emotional collapse? Should I take her to a doc?

“Mark. Put her in the vehicle and we will take her home.”

“Uh, what vehicle?”

“That black suburban, where Colonel Jacobs is standing.”

The colonel is here? That’s interesting ... Good she’s still with me - I can feel her arms holding on to me. Gotta get her outa here.

“How ya been doin, colonel?”

“Fine, Mark. Good to have you back. Please put Miss Marlborough in the vehicle. We need to minimize public exposure.”

What public exposure? There’s nobody but our people on the ramp. Whatever. How do I get her in? Fuck it, just cradle her and set her on my lap. Damn them tits feel good. It just plain feels right to have her against me again ... Wonder what the surf is for tonight? Probably need to wax the board. Why are her nipples hard? Can’t wait to see my furbags...

“Mark? What do you think about it?”

“It? Sorry, sir. Think ‘bout what?”

“The systems reports for the seven primary factory sites.”

“Yeah, read it on my way back. Looks like the same shit that I dictated to Sandy to type up a few months ago. Somebody did some editing and added other ideas. The sensor fusion idea was my favorite. Guessin’ that was from you?”

“It was. Do you think that they could be securely networked?”

“Ya mean, like tamper-proof?”

“Yes.”

“Electronically, it could be internally inherent to each package. The weak point is the connectivity. Gonna need some serious processor power; it’s gonna take a lot of encryption overhead. I’ve been looking at the latest shit out of Motorola. Their 68040 is gonna have an FPU and MMU. With that much processing and I/O power on some nodes, it would be tits. We could do anything if we have a small, efficient power supply and...”

“Mark, that’s all good. So we can say that it is technically feasible. Could it be fielded by my people?”

“Yes, sir. Why ya want your people saddled with the install and integration?”

“It will be OUR system, Mark. And we need to minimize the number of people outside of our department that are aware of its internals and specifications.”

“That makes sense. I’ll need to check with Janice and Sandy about my schedule...”

“Not necessary, Mark. Mister Hats has made this your priority. He wants most of the corporate sites up and running before we allow the government to get their hands on this.”

“Yeah? The old man himself is behind the push for this? Why is this shit so important to everybody?”

“That will be a conversation we will have in the near future, and at a secure site.”

Sounds like a lot more than just making a super-duper security system to me. I smell spook shit ... Finally, at the hacienda. What’s going on with Janice? Is she coming around? If she don’t stop moving around on my lap, I’m gonna pop a major boner. Really fuckin embarrassing in front of the colonel.

“I’ll get the front door for you.”

“Thanks. The code is bravo nine seven eight charlie two.”

“Now you need to change the code, Mark.”

“What for?”

Why’s he looking at me like I’m an idiot? Okay, whatever, so I am an idiot.

“Who has the code to your security system?”

“Uhh ... Bob, Rog, Suzy, and, of course, Janice. Come on in, colonel. Wanna beer?”

“No, thank you. I have a meeting with my people at your factory in two hours.”

“Okay. I’ll call Sandy and see what’s next on the schedule.”

“I would think not, Mark. Your immediate future should here in Hunington Beach, at your home. Focus your efforts towards taking care of Miss Marlborough. The last three months has not been easy for her.”

“Hasn’t been much fun for anyone. Thanks for the ride, colonel.”

So the colonel is now my shrink and counselor? Is he even married? Haven’t seen him taking care of anything but Hats Industries. What the fuck would he know about women?

“Good to see ya, little girl, but get off the rack, Nyota.”

So what’s been goin on? I’m gonna guess that the colonel has been doing most of my job. Why the fuck have they been paying me for the last three or four months? I’ve gotta be the most over-paid engineer west of the Navasota River ... Wonder how the assholes are doin back in Franklin? Probably all drunk or drugged out. Wonder if Mabs and Jimmy ever go back to visit that bucket of morons?

“Mark? Mark? What’s happening?”

“Hey, lady. How ya feel? Why don’t ya sleep a while?”

“Where are you going?”

“Was gonna take the idiot to the beach, maybe ride one or two. Wanna go to the beach?”

Oh shit, there’s that pissed look again.

“I am not, and neither are you, going anywhere. We will talk.”

“Uh, okay. What ya wanna talk about?”

“I want the truth, Mark. I want the whole story. How did you get wounded?”

“Nothing much to tell. We were about twenty or thirty clicks south of the border, when we saw an Iraqi scout vehicle coming towards our location. So we got into position on a high point and lit ‘em up when they got too close. The bullet that got me came under my flak jacket and got me on my left side, just as we finished taking out their truck. Then we got the hell outa there. That’s pretty much it.”

Shit. She doesn’t look convinced. At least she’s not looking pissed ... Interesting. She looks good no matter what, whether pissed or happy. Shit, she looked good passed out. Go figure. So why did she zonk out?

“Janice, ya doing okay? Why did ya pass out at the airport? ... Janice?”

“I am not sure. Running the company without you and Bob, listening to the news for the last three or four weeks, then hearing that you were wounded. It just kept incrementally adding to my daily stress.”

“But why did you pass out? I mean, you almost hit the deck.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps emotional over-load. Seeing you finally back, then a sudden burst of anger that you would subject yourself to such insanity ... don’t know, Mark. It was too much. But I did not care, because I somehow knew that you would keep me safe once you had returned.”

“So, you’re okay?”

“I think so. Did you miss me?”

“Every day, lady. Every fuckin day.”

Must have said the right thing, she’s smiling. Oh, hell yeah. Hell fuckin yeah. She’s getting naked ... What the fuck am I waiting for? Time to get naked and get up close and personal to those world-class hooters.

Why we gotta have this gaggle in my office? Why can’t these people just read the shit that Bob and me wrote? Don’t need more meetings. Fucking blah blah blah. I hate management. Fucking blah blah blah.

“I will guess that this office, and the office of other principles in your factory, have monitoring and recording devices?”

“Yep. We got more shit than Nixon ever had in the oval office ... Uh, yeah, probably need to do intros. Suzy, Bob, y’all remember Special Agent Johnson? He’s gonna be the Justice Department’s project officer. And Colonel Jacobs is the boss for Hats Industries physical security ... The guy in the back is the head legal guy for Hats Industries, Mister Raistron. Jonathan? Colonel? Whoever wants to start this fuckery, you’re cleared hot.”

Damn, what’s with that look Janice gave me? After almost three days in the rack, you’d think she’d be too tired to get cranked up about anything. Whoa, that’s interesting. She sure as fuck doesn’t seem to like the colonel. What’s with that? She needs to calm her tits.

“Again, I am Jonathon Johnson. The Department of Justice has been working with the Defense Department, coordinating efforts to monitor international and national computer connections. There have been undertakings by the Treasury Department, whom have implemented several systems, all made by EDS, which Mark will address, to secure data traffic for the Federal Reserve Banks. Outside of that, there has been minimal governmental or industry resources dedicated to monitoring and securing connected computers, other than the intel community. Various components of Hats Industries have indicated some rather severe attempts to breach defense contractors’ computers, where the attacks’ origination were outside of CONUS. The DIA has concluded that, based on southwest intel operations during Desert Storm, Islamic and Marxist interests will increase probing efforts, targeting western systems ... Colonel Jacobs?”

“As Special Agent Johnson stated, increasing connectivity, and the advent of the complex protocols per the most recent FIPS, and from CERN, have correspondingly increased vulnerability. In short, western interests can be severely compromised.”

“Why have these new standards increased computer system vulnerability?”

“Mark, please address Mister Raistron’s question.”

Fuck me. Hate talkin to legal dweebs. Maybe he should talk to my Nyota. For a piece of bacon and a head scritch, my little furbag would tell him anything...

“Mark!?”

“Yeah ... uh, look at it this way, sir. The more complex shit is, the more stuff is on the BoM, then the more things that can go wrong. Also, the bigger you are, it becomes more easy to find you and shoot you.”

“Increased complexity? In what way?”

Shit. What the fuck, over? It’s simple physics. Go back to school and learn something useful.

“For physical objects, increasing complexity decreases MTBF; that is, decreases reliability. The more shit ya have, the more things there are that can fail. We can, to some degree, mitigate these increased failure rates by increasing system and component design margins. That’s what I did with the trackers when the colonel upped the specs. But for code, no can do. Ignoring the bullshit math of code coverage that computer science dweebs use, there ain’t no such animal as design margin for software. You can test the fuck outa your code, but once it gets over some level of complexity, there is no practical way to verify every path that your code can take. So complex software is fucked. There will always be an unexpected failure mode lurking somewhere. Shit I can crash a simple single-line ‘printf’ program just by slamming shit into memory that don’t belong there. But here’s where the stink comes from this pile of shit: programmers ain’t engineers.”

“So the American government and western industries are building a house of cards, Mark?”

“Yes, sir.”

Oh yeah, I see a question welling up from those galactic tits. Here it comes...

“I don’t understand, Mark. All of those ATE contracts you did for Xentek and Cherokee Power. You fixed a few bugs, then you were done; no further issues. Your programs were not trivial. Why can’t your methods and principles for writing software be used for the programs that connect computers?”

Damn. She’s as smart as she is hot. Speaking of hot, I wonder if I could do that again; get her off just by playing with her tits. Now that was hands-on engineering...

“Mark? Why not?”

“Yeah, good observation, Janice. There were two bodies of code for that shit, and three tiers of hardware. One was the DAQ embedded in the top rack, another was the pseudo-real-time data display for human control and interface, and then there was the headless fail-safe. The fail-safe board was zero-code. Just a board full of op-amps and TTL ICs driving a bank of thyristors. If shit went south, It shut everything down and sent a signal to the embedded DAQ system, which did it’s own fail-safe shit, then sent the error codes to the computer sitting on the test stack to inform the human. The specs, as defined by the customer, were a very narrow set of conditions that drove the design. Now lets look at the shit that looks at the stream of internet data, before it gets into a end-use computer and rattles around. While there are a protocols that define the data stream - they suck. Unless I can run a Finite State Machine that would address all possible combinations and transitions, there is no way to verify the integrity of the data coming into a computer. So we leave that task up to the individual end-user nodes, where nothing is well defined, and there are essentially no fail-safe data delimiters that cannot be cracked. And once ya get into any individual machine that has access to an internal network, the place is owned by the intruder.”

“So why can’t we simply control end-points via the backbone provided by PSI, Sprint, and MCI?”

“Not a bad idea, Bob; at least in theory. That’s what you and me are doing now for the X25 boxes as we transition to the Border Gateway Protocol. But what about five or ten years from now? This shit is about to get wholly de-centralized. Look at where we are now. For the last ten years, the number of hosts, at least those that we can find through a vectored search, has increased three orders of magnitude. The first and second derivative of paths to end-points, hosts, and nodes will increase non-linearly. I’m gonna guess that both Sprint and MCI will fall on their ass - they will not be able to keep up with the increasing bandwidth or the computational I/O, unless they spend megabucks on infrastructure. And I don’t see the baby bells, with their ancient tech, willing to backbone for everybody much longer. Once we go decentralized, the only thing we can control is the actual pipes themselves. And that shit is akin to trying to sip from a fire-hose. That shit is huge, and can only be done at the nation-state level.”

“What computational power would be required?”

“I dunno, sir. Maybe a hundred times the equivalent of the UCSD Supercomputer Center.”

That got them outa their naps. Now that they got something to think about and they’re all riled, maybe I can go back to staring at Janice’s tits and thinking about a design for a high-speed vector tracking box. Nah, I’ll just stare at Janice for a while ... Jeezuss shit, who put this crap on my desk? I hate stuff stacked in front of my computer. And I really hate it when it gets stacked on my keyboard. Megabuck SPARC workstation, and they stack shit on it? And what’s with this other crap on my desk? And who put this shit in my book case? And where is the small table with Nyota’s blanket?...”

“Mark!?”

“Yeah?”

Geez, calm your tits, if you actually have any, woman. Maybe Rog needs to ring her bell more often.

“Those EDS monitoring systems. You and Bob installed those?”

“Yeah. So?”

Where’s my fucking calculator? That cost me big bucks. It belongs on the corner of my desk. No-fucking-where else. Who’s been fucking with my shit? Why is this meeting still going on? ... Shit, why is everyone staring at me?

“Don’t you people have something to do? ... Open the door, Suzy. Brad!? Get in here.”

“Mark, there is this new invention, called a telephone. You no longer have to yell into the abyss.”

Yeah? I’d like to yell into your ... There he is. About time.

“Brad, what the fuck is goin on here? What’s with this shit stacked on my desk? Where is Nyota’s table? Where’s my fuckin calculator?”

“Mark! Get up now and come into my office ... Colonel, please continue the meeting. We will return in about fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen mike? What the fuck we gonna do for fifteen in...

“Close the door, Mark ... Lock it ... Come here.”

What the f ... Now that was a wet one. Shit, got too much to do, to be ... Oh yeah. Good. Damn good. Oh, hell yeah...

“Feel better? More focused?”

“Yeah. But, uh, I think that the whole company could hear ya yelling, lady.”

“Acoustics, Mark. Remember the build specs for both of our offices?”

“That’s true. Uh, Janice? Not complaining but what brought this on?”

“I broke your chain of serial compulsions. You are obsessive about certain things, Mark. Disorder among your personal effects greatly disturbs you. As for the stuff on your desk, that is my fault. You should know that there is also another box of system diagrams for you to review. So you need to get to work. And I put your calculator in your top desk drawer. That stupid little machine is making you the envy of all the engineers. What was wrong with your HP41?”

“The ‘48’ is for here, and the ‘41’ is for use at home. Envy? Nah, lady, you make me the envy of the engineers; well, at least the male engineers.”

Holeee shit. Said the right thing? ... Why the fuck not? Let’s get you and those world-class tits back onto your couch ... Wait, is this why she spec’d an extra long office couch, and an adjoining bathroom?

“They fucked up the trace impedance. Again.”

“Well, just dogshit. Anything salvageable, Bob?”

“Nada, Mark.”

“Let’s go to an alternate board house. See Janice about using the one in Anaheim that ALS has sourced.”

“Will do. How long will you be at the palace this time?”

“Dunno. At least a month ... What?”

“Man, you can’t be away from Janice for that long. And the company cannot afford for her to not be away for any extended period. Come back during weekends?”