Disclosure (5 page)

Entering the main room, he came upon a scene of utter chaos. The windows were thrown wide; there was the astringent smel 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. Stil 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 cheerful y 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 smel ?”

“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 cal ed 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 wel you didn't.”

Sanders looked at the complex equipment scattered al 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 final y got the bug out of the main loop, last night at midnight. The refresh rate doubled. The system real y rips now. So we have to adjust the walkers and the servos to update responsiveness. It's a mechanical problem,” he said disdainful y. “But we'l 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?”

“Wel , 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 smal round trampoline, its surface was composed of tightly packed rubber bal s. It functioned like a multidirectional treadmil ; walking on the bal s, 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 al 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 ful y modeled in 24-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 stil 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'l 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 al . If other users in the system aren't wearing a headset, you can stil see them, too. The program identifies other users, pul s 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 al . 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 thoughtful y at the room. Cherry was tel ing 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. “Al right,” he said final y. “Now what's the real problem?”

Cherry shrugged. “Nothing. I told you: fine-tuning.”

“Don.”

Cherry sighed. “Wel , 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 al 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 tortil a everywhere in the bearings.”

“You know we have a demo tomorrow for the C-W people.”

“No problem. We'l be ready.”

“Don, I can't have their top executives throwing up.”

“Trust me,” Cherry said. “We'l 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 tal 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 hel 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 cheerful y, 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 smal television in the corner; he turned it on. He snapped the latches on his briefcase, took out a smal 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 il egal behavior.

“I have good news for you,” Bosak said. “Your boy is clean.” He pul ed 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 col ege transcripts .

. . Employment file from Data General, his last employer. Al in order. Now, the recent stuff... Credit rating from TRW . . . Phone bil s from his apartment . . .

Phone bil s for his cel ular 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 cal ed . . . Last three car rentals with mileage . . . Rental car cel ular phone, the numbers cal ed . . . That's everything.”

“And?”

“I ran down the numbers he cal ed. here's the breakdown. A lot of cal s to Seattle Silicon, but Nealy's seeing a girl there. She's a secretary, works in sales, no conflict. He also cal s his brother, a programmer at Boeing, does paral el processing stuff for wing design, no conflict. His other cal s are to suppliers and code vendors, and they're al appropriate. No cal s after hours. No cal s to pay phones. No overseas cal s. No suspicious pattern in the cal s. 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 tel 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 col ected al the files and placed them back in his folder. “By the way, you're going to get a cal 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 bil with you, or Cindy?”

“I'l take it. See you, Gary.”

“Hey. Anytime. You need more, you know where I am.”

Sanders glanced at the bil , from NE Professional Services, Inc., of Bel evue, 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 occasional y 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 il egal; 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 dol ars 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'l 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, al 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 al of us, Tom.”

“Yeah,” Cherry said, grinning. “We've been trying like hel to get you sacked, but we never real y thought it would work.”