“I know. Just a reminder.”
“Okay, I’ll go now.”
As he hurried down the stairs to the third floor, he felt relieved at the distraction. Cindy was right to get him out of the office. And he was curious to see what Cherry’s team had done with the Corridor.
The Corridor was what everyone at DigiCom called VIE: the Virtual Information Environment. VIE was the companion piece to Twinkle, the second major element in the emerging future of digital information as envisioned by DigiCom. In the future, information was going to be stored on disks, or made available in large databases that users would dial into over telephone lines. At the moment, users saw information displayed on flat screenseither televisions or computer screens. That had been the traditional way of handling information for the last thirty years. But soon, there would be new ways to present information. The most radical, and the most exciting, was virtual environments. Users wore special glasses to see computer-generated, threedimensional environments which allowed them to feel as though they were literally moving through another world. Dozens of high-tech companies were racing to develop virtual environments. It was exciting, but very difficult, technology. At DigiCom, VIE was one of Garvin’s pet projects; he had thrown a lot of money at it; he had had Don Cherry’s programmers working on it around the clock for two years.
And so far, it had been nothing but trouble.
The sign on the door said “VIE” and underneath, “When Reality Is Not Enough.” Sanders inserted his card in the slot, and the door clicked open. He passed through an anteroom, hearing a halfdozen voices shouting from the main equipment room beyond. Even in the anteroom, he noticed a distinctly nauseating odor in the air.
Entering the main room, he came upon a scene of utter chaos. The windows were thrown wide; there was the astringent smell of cleaning fluid. Most of the programmers were on the floor, working with disassembled equipment. The VIE units lay scattered in pieces, amid a tangle of multicolored cables. Even the black circular walker pads had been taken apart, the rubber bearings being cleaned one by one. Still more wires descended from the ceiling to the laser scanners which were broken open, their circuit boards exposed. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. And in the center of the room, looking like a teenage Buddha in an electric blue T-shirt that said “Reality Sucks,” was Don Cherry, the head of Programming. Cherry was twenty-two years old, widely acknowledged to be indispensable, and famous for his impertinence.
When he saw Sanders he shouted: “Out! Out! Damned management! Out!”
“Why?” Sanders said. “I thought you wanted to see me.”
“Too late! You had your chance!” Cherry said. “Now it’s over!”
For a moment, Sanders thought Cherry was referring to the promotion he hadn’t gotten. But Cherry was the most apolitical of the DigiCom division heads, and he was grinning cheerfully as he walked toward Sanders, stepping over his prostrate programmers. “Sorry, Tom. You’re too late. We’re fine-tuning now.”
“Fine-tuning? It looks like ground zero here. And what’s that terrible smell?”
“I know.” Cherry threw up his hands. “I ask the boys to wash every day, but what can I say. They’re programmers. No better than dogs.”
“Cindy said you called me several times.”
“I did,” Cherry said. “We had the Corridor up and running, and I wanted you to see it. But maybe it’s just as well you didn’t.”
Sanders looked at the complex equipment scattered all around him. “You had it up?”
“That was then. This is now. Now, we’re fine-tuning.” Cherry nodded to the programmers on the floor, working on the walker pads. “We finally got the bug out of the main loop, last night at midnight. The refresh rate doubled. The system really rips now. So we have to adjust the walkers and the servos to update responsiveness. It’s a mechanical problem,” he said disdainfully. “But we’ll take care of it anyway.”
The programmers were always annoyed when they had to deal with mechanical problems. Living almost entirely in an abstract world of computer code, they felt that physical machinery was beneath them.
Sanders said, “What is the problem, exactly?”
“Well, look,” Cherry said. “Here’s our latest implementation. The user wears this headset,” he said, pointing to what looked like thick silver sunglasses. “And he gets on the walker pad, here.”
The walker pad was one of Cherry’s innovations. The size of a small round trampoline, its surface was composed of tightly packed rubber balls. It functioned like a multidirectional treadmill; walking on the balls, users could move in any direction. “Once he’s on the walker,” Cherry said, “the user dials into a database. Then the computer, over there-” Cherry pointed to a stack of boxes in the corner, “takes the information coming from the database and constructs a virtual environment which is projected inside the headset. When the user walks on the pad, the projection changes, so you feel like you’re walking down a corridor lined with drawers of data on all sides. The user can stop anywhere, open any file drawer with his hand, and thumb through data. Completely realistic simulation.”
“How many users?”
“At the moment, the system can handle five at one time.”
“And the Corridor looks like what?” Sanders said. “Wire-frame?” In the earlier versions, the Corridor was outlined in skeletal black-and-white outlines. Fewer lines made it faster for the computer to draw.
“Wire-frame?” Cherry sniffed. “Please. We dumped that two weeks ago. Now we are talking 3-D surfaces fully modeled in z4-bit color, with anti-alias texture maps. We’re rendering true curved surfaces-no polygons. Looks completely real.”
“And what’re the laser scanners for? I thought you did position by infrared.” The headsets had infrared sensors mounted above them, so that the system could detect where the user was looking and adjust the projected image inside the headset to match the direction of looking.
“We still do,” Cherry said. “The scanners are for body representation.
“Body representation?”
“Yeah. Now, if you’re walking down the Corridor with somebody else, you can turn and look at them and you’ll see them. Because the scanners are capturing a three-dimensional texture map in real time: they read body and expression, and draw the virtual face of the virtual person standing beside you in the virtual room. You can’t see the person’s eyes, of course, because they’re hidden by the headset they’re wearing. But the system generates a face from the stored texture map. Pretty slick, huh?”
“You mean you can see other users?”
“That’s right. See their faces, see their expressions. And that’s not all. If other users in the system aren’t wearing a headset, you can still see them, too. The program identifies other users, pulls their photo out of the personnel file, and pastes it onto a virtual body image. A little kludgey, but not bad.” Cherry waved his hand in the air. “And that’s not all. We’ve also built in virtual help.”
“Virtual help?”
“Sure, users always need online help. So we’ve made an angel to help you. Floats alongside you, answers your questions.” Cherry was grinning. “We thought of making it a blue fairy, but we didn’t want to offend anybody.”
Sanders stared thoughtfully at the room. Cherry was telling him about his successes. But something else was happening here: it was impossible to miss the tension, the frantic energy of the people as they worked.
“Hey, Don,” one of the programmers shouted. “What’s the Z-count supposed to be?”
“Over five,” Cherry said.
“I got it to four-three.”
“Four-three sucks. Get it above five, or you’re fired.” He turned to Sanders. “You’ve got to encourage the troops.”
Sanders looked at Cherry. “All right,” he said finally. “Now what’s the real problem?”
Cherry shrugged. “Nothing. I told you: fine-tuning.”
“Don.”
Cherry sighed. “Well, when we jumped the refresh rate, we trashed the builder module. You see, the room is being built in real time by the box. With a faster refresh off the sensors, we have to build objects much faster. Otherwise the room seems to lag behind you. You feel like you’re drunk. You move your head, and the room swooshes behind you, catching up.”
“And?”
“And, it makes the users throw up.”
Sanders sighed. “Great.”
“We had to take the walker pads apart because Teddy barfed all over everything.”
“Great, Don.”
“What’s the matter? It’s no big deal. It cleans up.” Ile shook his head. “Although I do wish Teddy hadn’t eaten huevos rancheros for breakfast. That was unfortunate. Little bits of tortilla everywhere in the bearings.”
“You know we have a demo tomorrow for the C-W people.”
“No problem. We’ll be ready.”
“Don, I can’t have their top executives throwing up.”
“Trust me,” Cherry said. “We’ll be ready. They’re going to love it. Whatever problems this company has, the Corridor is not one of them.”
“That’s a promise?”
“That,” Cherry said, “is a guarantee.”
Sanders was back in his office by ten-twenty, and was seated at his desk when Gary Bosak came in. Bosak was a tall man in his twenties, wearing jeans, running shoes, and a Terminator T-shirt. He carried a large fold-over leather briefcase, the kind that trial attorneys used.
“You look pale,” Bosak said. “But everybody in the building is pale today. It’s tense as hell around here, you know that?”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Yeah, I bet. Okay to start?”
“Sure.”
“Cindy? Mr. Sanders is going to be unavailable for a few minutes.”
Bosak closed the office door and locked it. Whistling cheerfully, he unplugged Sanders’s desk phone, and the phone beside the couch in the corner. From there, he went to the window and closed the blinds. There was a small television in the corner; he turned it on. He snapped the latches on his briefcase, took out a small plastic box, and flipped the switch on the side. The box began to blink, and emitted a low white noise hiss. Bosak set it in the middle of Sanders’s desk. Bosak never gave information until the white noise scrambler was in place, since most of what he had to say implied illegal behavior.
“I have good news for you,” Bosak said. “Your boy is clean.” He pulled out a manila file, opened it up, and started handing over pages. “Peter John Nealy, twenty three, DigiCom employee for sixteen months. Now working as a programmer in APG. Okay, here we go. His high school and college transcripts . . . Employment file from Data General, his last employer. All in order. Now, the recent stuff… Credit rating from TRW . . . Phone bills from his apartment . . . Phone bills for his cellular line . . . Bank statement . . . Savings account . . . Last two 1040s . . . Twelve months of credit card charges, VISA and Master . . . Travel records . . . E-mail messages inside the company, and off the Internet . . . Parking tickets . . . And this is the clincher . . . Ramada Inn in Sunnyvale, last three visits, his phone charges there, the numbers he called . . . Last three car rentals with mileage . . . Rental car cellular phone, the numbers called . . . That’s everything.”
“And?”
“I ran down the numbers he called. here’s the breakdown. A lot of calls to Seattle Silicon, but Nealy’s seeing a girl there. She’s a secretary, works in sales, no conflict. He also calls his brother, a programmer at Boeing, does parallel processing stuff for wing design, no conflict. His other calls are to suppliers and code vendors, and they’re all appropriate. No calls after hours. No calls to pay phones. No overseas calls. No suspicious pattern in the calls. No unexplained bank transfers, no sudden new purchases. No reason to think he’s looking for a move. I’d say he’s not talking to anybody you care about.”
“Good,” Sanders said. He glanced down at the sheets of paper, and paused. “Gary . . . Some of this stuff is from our company. Some of these reports.”
“Yeah. So?”
“How’d you get them?”
Bosak grinned. “Hey. You don’t ask and I don’t tell you.”
“How’d you get the Data General file?”
Bosak shook his head. “Isn’t this why you pay me?”
“Yes it is, but-”
“Hey. You wanted a check on an employee, you got it. Your kid’s clean. He’s working only for you. Anything else you want to know about him?”
“No.” Sanders shook his head.
“Great. I got to get some sleep.” Bosak collected all the files and placed them back in his folder. “By the way, you’re going to get a call from my parole officer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can I count on you?”
“Sure, Gary.”
“I told him I was doing consulting for you. On telecommunications security.”
“And so you are.”
Bosak switched off the blinking box, put it in his briefcase, and reconnected the telephones. “Always a pleasure. Do I leave the bill with you, or Cindy?”
“I’ll take it. See you, Gary.”
“Hey. Anytime. You need more, you know where I am.”
Sanders glanced at the bill, from NE Professional Services, Inc., of Bellevue, Washington. The name was Bosak’s private joke: the letters NE stood for “Necessary Evil.” Ordinarily, high-tech companies employed retired police officers and private investigators to do background checks, but occasionally they used hackers like Gary Bosak, who could gain access to electronic data banks, to get information on suspect employees. The advantage of using; Bosak was that he could work quickly, often making a report in a matter of hours, or overnight. Bosak’s methods were of course illegal; simply by hiring him, Sanders himself had broken a half-dozen laws. But background checks on employees were accepted as standard practice in high-tech firms, where a single document or product development plan might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to competitors.
And in the case of Pete Nealy, a check was particularly crucial. Nealy was developing hot new compression algorithms to pack and unpack video images onto CD-ROM laser disks. His work was vital to the new Twinkle technology. High-speed digital images coming off the disk were going to transform a sluggish technology and produce a revolution in education. But if Twinkle’s algorithms became available to a competitor, then DigiCom’s advantage would be greatly reduced, and that meant
The intercom buzzed. “Tom,” Cindy said. “It’s eleven o’clock. Time for the APG meeting. You want the agenda on your way down?”
“Not today,” he said. “I think I know what we’ll be talking about.”
In the third-floor conference room, the Advanced Products Group was already meeting. This was a weekly meeting in which the division heads discussed problems and brought everyone up to date. It was a meeting that Sanders ordinarily led. Around the table were Don Cherry, the chief of Programming; Mark Lewyn, the temperamental head of Product Design, all in black Armani; and Mary Anne Hunter, the head of Data Telecommunications. Petite and intense, Hunter was dressed in a sweatshirt, shorts, and Nike running tights; she never ate lunch, but ordinarily went on a five-mile run after each meeting.
Lewyn was in the middle of one of his storming rages: “It’s insulting to everybody in the division. I have no idea why she got this position. I don’t know what her qualifications could be for a job like this, and-”
Lewyn broke off as Sanders came into the room. There was an awkward moment. Everyone was silent, glancing at him, then looking away.
“I had a feeling,” Sanders said, smiling, “you’d be talking about this.”
The room remained silent. “Come on,” he said, as he slipped into a chair. “It’s not a funeral.”
Mark Lewyn cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Tom. I think it’s an outrage.”
Mary Anne Hunter said, “Everybody knows it should have been you.”
Lewyn said, “It’s a shock to all of us, Tom.”
“Yeah,” Cherry said, grinning. “We’ve been trying like hell to get you sacked, but we never really thought it would work.”
“I appreciate all this,” Sanders said, “but it’s Garvin’s company, and he can do what he wants with it. He’s been right more often than not. And I’m a big boy. Nobody ever promised me anything.”
Lewyn said, “You’re really okay with this?”
“Believe me. I’m fine.”
“You talked with Garvin?”
“I talked with Phil.”
Lewyn shook his head. “That sanctimonious asshole.”
“Listen,” Cherry said, “did Phil say anything about the spin-off?”
“Yes,” Sanders said. “The spin-off is still happening. Eighteen months after the merger, they’ll structure the IPO, and take the division public.”
There were little shrugs around the table. Sanders could see they were relieved. Going public meant a lot of money to all the people sitting in the room.
“And what did Phil say about Ms. Johnson?”
“Not much. Just that she’s Garvin’s choice to head up the technical side.”
At that moment Stephanie Kaplan, DigiCom’s Chief Financial Officer, came into the room. A tall woman with prematurely gray hair and a notably silent manner, she was known as Stephanie Stealth, or the Stealth Bomberthe latter a reference to her habit of quietly killing projects she did not consider profitable enough. Kaplan was based in Cupertino, but she generally sat in once a month on the Seattle division meetings. Lately, she had been up more often.
Lewyn said, “`M’e’re trying to cheer up Tom, Stephanie.”