Wild Fyre (5 page)

“Come on, Maco,” Ed said. “Leave the employment worries up to me. You said the same thing last year, and everyone here has all the work they want. Are any of you hurting for work?” Ed scanned the group. Everyone shook their heads. “Trust me—everyone at this table has skills that are recession-proof. Now if we have an apocalypse that takes out all the world’s power, we might need to have a different conversation.”

“You can’t take out the power. I mean you can, but people will always find a way to make power,” Dale said.

“Yeah, but once the power comes back, I’m not sure computers will be high on the list. People would be subsistence-farming, or hunting,” Jim said.

“Wait, why do you assume the apocalypse would disrupt commerce?” Kevin asked. “I’m not sure why everyone would have to feed themselves from their own hands.”

“What’s your definition of apocalypse?” Jim asked.

The door slid open again and the waitress entered with a tray of food. As she distributed the plates, the conversation stopped abruptly. Each person arranged and prepared their food in silence. The waitress gave a slight bow to the table and turned to leave.

“Thank you,” Ed said.

Ed glanced around at the people of his table as they focused on their food.

Of anyone, Jim ate most carefully. He seemed to evaluate each grain of rice before deciding if it should be ingested.  Maco only truly looked happy when he was deciding what to put in his mouth. Kevin worked his way through his food from least to most desirable. Lister seemed to want to try different combinations of each element to see how they tasted together.
 

And Dale ate normally. He looked like a perfectly normal person as he ate. Ed prided himself on being able to spot truly brilliant people. With Dale, he would never have guessed the depth of the man’s intellect.
 

Dale could integrate any software systems and create a working, stable result. A company would have a team of experienced engineers struggling to stand up a web commerce and fulfillment system and Dale would come in and solve all of their problems single-handedly. Dale saw things differently. He saw solutions that everyone else would call obvious only in retrospect.

Ed smiled at Dale. Both of them knew better than to try to have a conversation while the group ate. Sushi seemed to demand all the attention from men like Jim, Lister, Kevin, and Maco.

After the food was eaten and the plates cleared, the conversation resumed slowly. Jim gave a lengthy review of a movie that none of the others would likely see. Maco described a new networking threat that he had recently spotted. Once he had fully documented the incident, he would publish to a blog that was read by security professionals around the world. Aside from the people at the table, perhaps two other people in the world knew the handle that Maco published under. When he presented at security conferences, Maco wore a mask. When the conference was held in DC, Ed helped Maco find an actor to present the work.

The lunch broke up slowly. Kevin distributed the phones and people tucked them into pockets. Dale was first to leave. He had a meeting to attend. Kevin and Maco left together soon after. Jim and Lister sat in silence while Ed payed the bill.
 

“Well, gentlemen,” Ed said, “We’ve got the room for another forty-five minutes, so I was thinking about catching up on a few emails before my afternoon appointment. You look like you’re waiting to talk about something—should I find another place to work, or...”

“I asked Lister to stick around so I could ask him some questions about stocks. I don’t mind if you stay,” Jim said. He looked at Lister.

“Of course,” Lister said. “I’ve got no secrets to tell.”

“Excellent. I’ll keep quiet,” Ed said. He reached under his seat and pulled out his bag with his laptop.

“I’m working on my own stock trading interface,” Jim said to Lister. “What do I need to know about regulations and stuff?”

“Not much, really,” Lister said. Lister was more of a math guy than a programmer. He knew enough to keep pace with the software people, but he often shied away from technical conversations because he didn’t know all of the vocabulary those guys used. “You need an account with your broker and they’ll have an API you can patch into. I’ll send you email with some starting points.”

“No,” Jim said, “no email. I don’t want anything to trace back to you if I run into problems.”

“Oh?” Lister said.

“You know, there are all kinds of laws and things. I don’t know what I’m doing, so I might make a mistake. I’m okay pleading ignorance if they come after me, but if you’re involved... You’ve got to keep your reputation clean, I’m sure.”

“That’s true,” Lister said. “But it would be difficult for you to get into any trouble. You have to work pretty high volume before anyone pays attention to you. Some guy with a regular account isn’t going to raise any flags.”

“That’s good to know,” Jim said. “I just don’t know what to expect.”

“If you’re thinking about doing anything high-speed, you can forget it,” Lister said. “There are too many regulations and big players in that game now. Your success is measured by how many feet of fiber is between your machine and the Exchange.”

Jim smiled. “No high-speed trading for me,” he said. “I just don’t like the web interface for my broker. I’ve only got a few decisions to make each week, but it takes a ton of clicks to get it done.”

“What kind of trading do you do?” Lister asked.

“Options stuff. On indexes.”

Lister frowned. “Be careful with those. You can get stuck holding a bunch of dog indices pretty easily. People love options when the price stays the same, but as soon as they drop, you’ve sunk your equity.”

“I know,” Jim said. “This is play money. I’m not gambling my life’s savings or anything.”

Ed started to tune out the conversation as it dove into the specifics of how Jim would interact with his broker. Ed smiled to himself. Jim and Lister would have never become friends if it weren’t for Ed’s influence. He brought this group together and introduced them. Ed saw their commonalities and understood that even these men who were completely absorbed in their digital worlds would benefit from the occasional face-to-face meetings. Some of them, like Kevin with his monthly board game club, were natural networkers, but Jim and Lister were from different worlds.

“Okay, I’ll try that,” Jim said. He nodded to Lister.

“See you in two weeks,” Lister said as he stood to leave.

When he was gone, and had slid the door most of the way closed, Jim turned to Ed.

“Can you recommend a local server farm?” Jim asked.

“Local, local? Like you would drive to? I don’t know,” Ed said. “I can find out.”

“Would you? That would be helpful.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to use those guys that Kevin uses? They’re in Texas but he has a great relationship with them. I’m sure he could get you a sweet deal, and they do all the administration. You don’t want to have to go down there at three in the morning because a fan burned out, you know?”

“I’ll need physical access pretty often,” Jim said.

“That could cost you,” Ed said. He had known Jim for a long time, and knew fairly well what Jim earned in a year. Most of Jim’s work came through Ed, after all.

“I’m okay,” Jim said.

It would take a while, but eventually Ed would find out that, at that moment, Jim was well more than “okay.”

# # # # #

 
AfternoonOneMonthBeforeJim();

/*****

June, 2013

Ed was killing time, flipping through a magazine and letting his eyes close for longer and longer. It was a habit he meant to break—how could he afford to waste time when his body gave him daily signs that it wouldn’t last forever? But sometimes in the afternoons, when the sun came in through his office windows, Ed didn’t feel motivated to do anything.
 

“You here?” a voice called from the outer office. Ed used to share the space with another recruiter. Now he had an empty reception area. Maco appeared in the doorway.

“I hit the buzzer, but nobody answered. I had to follow a delivery guy through the door,” Maco said.

“Yeah, the buzzer broke. You should have called,” Ed said. “I thought you were coming tomorrow.”

“I had a minute, and I was right up the street working for the man.”

“Oh, right,” Ed said. “Give me a minute and I’ll get your money.”

“I know your safe is under the desk, Ed,” Maco said. “Everyone knows.”

Ed tilted his head down and fixed Maco with a look.

“Okay, okay, I’ll step into the hall. Jeez,” Maco said.

Ed closed his office door before rolling his chair back to get to the safe. He used the safe because it had come with the office. It’s not something he would have bothered to install. When he had Maco’s envelope, he opened the door.

“Here,” Ed said. “You know they’re still going to send you a 1099. It’s not like this money comes tax-free or anything.”

“Yeah, I know,” Maco said. “But you’d be surprised how difficult it is to get your hands on a bunch of cash without a dozen cameras picking up video of the transaction.”

“And why is that important?”

“They’re always watching,” Maco said. “Lets say I appreciate having some cash with serial numbers that aren’t linked to me.”

“If they’re tracking you, then they’re tracking me,” Ed said.

“Then they’ll be tracking whomever I pass this cash to,” Maco said.

“Your paranoia has reached epic new levels,” Ed said.

“Either that, or I’m finally catching on to everything they’re up to,” Maco said, nodding. “Hey, speaking of which, did you hear about 28c?”

“No, what’s that?” Ed asked.

“Oh hell, you didn’t hear?”

“No,” Ed said. He glanced back at his computer. If Maco was this excited, some story was probably breaking right now. Then again, he would probably get a more in-depth report from Maco. Ed led Maco to reception, where small seating area was flanked by fake plants. “What’s 28c?”

“Brand new video codec. Well, I guess it could be used for any digital stream, but the one optimized for video just came out.”

“Oh,” Ed said. He was disappointed—it might be big news to Maco, but it didn’t sound like big news. “Why is that exciting?”

“Are you kidding? It’s huge. Video is a huge percentage of traffic on the net. This thing uses like a tenth of the bandwidth of H.264, and by all accounts, it looks a million times better,” Maco said.

“How is that possible?”

“They say it’s based on data patterns that are so complex that nobody noticed them. It’s like if you detected that pi repeated itself, but only after a quadrillion digits. Whoever designed this thing came up with a chunk of data you install as part of the driver. It contains seeds that it grows into archetypes. Those archetypes are then multiplied to create whatever scene is needed. The solution was always there, but the only way to find it was to crunch data on an enormous scale. They must have processed all known video to figure this thing out.”

“Tell me about the ramifications,” Ed said. He was already lost in the technical weeds, but he didn’t need to understand the “how” as much as the “why.”

“They released it free—open license, no patents. Anyone can create a compressor or decompressor and use it in their product. So as soon as the first major player jumps, like Youtube or Netflix, then everyone will go. You know how many formats Netflix compresses to? In a couple of years, everything could be this one format. It’s that good. They’ll save an incredible amount on bandwidth, servers, drives, everything.”

“What’s the downside?” Ed asked.

“None, really. It will work best on connected devices so the data chunk can be updated. But I can’t think of a device that can’t be updated anyway. I mean, that happens with Blu-ray now, where the player has to be updated to play the latest movies.”

“Put on your blackest hat,” Ed said. “What’s the conspiracy behind this?”

Maco smiled and scratched the top of his head. “I can’t believe you. You’re always telling me to calm down and to stop looking for the second shooter. Let’s see… I guess I’d want to sandbox the code and really see what’s going on under the hood before I installed the driver. But codecs are completely isolated from the machine now anyway. Even if the thing were completely malicious, what’s it going to do, mess up the decoding of your cat video?”

“So that’s the only risk?” Ed asked.

“Yeah, aside from not encoding or decoding faithfully, I don’t see a risk. The upside of this thing is huge though.”

“Because it will save bandwidth for Youtube and Netflix?”

“Not only them, for everyone,” Maco said. “Do you know how many offices I’ve worked in where they had to upgrade their infrastructure because of video? Most of them. They bring me in because their network bogs down at 9:30 every morning and I find out it’s because the sales team is all watching viral videos. And you can’t stop them—there are too many legitimate videos they need to watch for their jobs. Hell, all the training is done by networked video. Every home and office would instantly become more productive when this codec goes into wide use. It’s revolutionary.”

“Who made it?” Ed asked.

“Some company that nobody has ever heard of.”

“What’s their goal? Are they public?”

“Nope—privately owned company, from Ohio or something. They had a lawyer read the press release. Video of it was posted in old formats and their new format. That was a nice touch. It looks really sharp and it’s so fast,” Maco said.

“So they’re giving it away?”

“You know me—I’m the most skeptical person in the world, but the licensing is solid and all the code is up there for everyone to see. Even if they’ve tried to hide something in there, it would only last two days before someone found it.”

“So you—the king of conspiracy theories—thinks it’s safe.”

“I didn’t say that. I said they couldn’t hide something in there. Give the world a chance to examine the code, and then I’ll say it’s safe. For now—safe or not—it’s amazing.”

“What’s the name of the company?”

“F-Code, LLC. That’s the letter F dash Code,” Maco said.