... and another thing I hate is Microsoft PowerPoint, which brings me back to the present.
PowerPoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic environment: one typified by interminable presentations with lots of fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissolves and soundtracks masked into the background, to try to convince the audience that the goon behind the computer has something significant to say. It's the tool of choice for pointy-headed idiots with expensive suits and skinny laptops who desperately want to look as if they're in command of the job, with all the facts at their fiddling fingertips, even if Rome is burning in the background. Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface ...
I'm sorry. Maybe you think I'm being unjustifiably harsh — a presentation graphics program is just a piece of standard office software, after all — but my experience with PowerPoint is, shall we say, nonstandard. Besides, you've probably never had a guy with a shoulder holster and a field ops team backing him up drag you into a stakeout and whip out a laptop, to show you a presentation that begins with a slide stating: THIS BRIEFING WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. It's usually a sign that things have gone wronger than a very wrong thing indeed, and you are expected to make them go right again, or something doubleplus ungood is going to happen.
Double-plus ungood indeed.
"Destiny-entanglement protocol," I mutter, as Pinky fusses around behind me and turns the fat-assed recliner I'm sitting in to face the wardrobe while Boris pokes at his laptop. As protocols go, I've got to admit it's a new one on me. "Would you mind explaining — hey, what's that duct tape for"
"Sorry, Bob, try not to move, okay? It's just a precaution."
"Just a — " I reach up with my left hand to give my nose a preemptive scratch while he's busy taping my right arm to the chair. "What's the failure rate on this procedure, and should I have updated my life insurance first"
"Relax. Is no failure rate." Boris finally gets his laptop to admit that its keyboard exists, and spins it round so I can see the screen. The usual security glyph flickers into view (I think that particular effect is called wheel, eight spokes) and bites me on the bridge of my nose. It's visual cortex hackery to seal my lips. "Failure not an option," repeats Boris.
The screen wheels again, and — morphs into a video of Angleton. "Hello, Bob," he begins. He's sitting behind his desk like an outtake from Mission: Impossible, which would be a whole lot more plausible if the desk wasn't a cramped, green metal thing with a contraption on top of it that looks like the bastard offspring of a microfiche reader by way of a 1950s mainframe computer terminal. "Sorry about the video briefing, but I had to be in two places at once, and you lost."
I catch Boris's eye and he pauses the presentation. "How the hell can you call this confidential?" I complain. "It's a video! If it fell into the wrong hands — "
Boris glances at Brains. "Tell him."
Brains pulls a gadget out of his goodie bag. "Andy shot it on one of these," he explains. "Solid-state camcorder, runs on MMC cards. Encrypted, and we stuffed a bunch of footage up front to make it look like amateur dramatics. That and the geas field will make anyone who steals it think they've stumbled over the next Blair Witch Project — cute, huh"
I sigh. If he was a dog he'd be wagging his tail hard enough to dent the furniture. "Okay, roll it." I try to ignore whatever Pinky is doing on the carpet around my feet with a conductive pencil, a ruler, and a breakout box.
Angleton leans alarmingly towards the camera viewpoint, looming to fill the screen. "I'm sure you've heard of TLA Systems Corporation, Bob, if for no other reason than your complaints about their license management server on the departmental network reached the ears of the Audit committee last July, and I was forced to take preemptive action to divert them from mounting a full-scale investigation."
Gulp. The Auditors noticed? That wasn't my idea — no wonder Andy seemed pissed off with me. When I'm not running around pretending to be Secret Agent Man and attending committee meetings in Darmstadt, my job's pretty boring: network management is one component of it, and when I saw that blasted license manager trying to dial out to the public internet to complain about Facilities running too many copies of the TLA monitoring client, I cc'd everyone I could think of on the memo — "TLA, as you know — Bob, pay attention at the back, there — was founded in 1979 by Ellis Billington and his partner Ritchie Martin. Ritchie was the software guy, Ellis the front man, which is why these days Ellis has a net worth of seventeen billion US dollars and Ritchie lives in a hippie commune in Oregon and refuses to deal with any unit of time he can't schedule on a sundial."
Angleton's sallow visage is replaced (no dissolve, this time) by a photograph of Billington, in the usual stuffed-suit pose adopted by CEOs hoping to impress the Wall Street Journal. His smile reveals enough teeth to intimidate a megalodon and he's in such good condition for a sixty-something executive that he's probably got a portrait squirreled away in a high-security facility in New Mexico that gives people nightmares when they look at it.
"TLA originally competed in the relational database market with Ingres, Oracle, and the othet seven dwarves, but rapidly discovered a lucrative sideline in federal systems — specifically the GTO5 market."
Lots of government departments in the '90s tried to save money by ordering their IT folks to buy only commercial, off-the-shelf software, or COTS. Which is to say, they finally got a clue that it's cheaper to buy a word processor off the shelf than to pay a defense contractor to write one. After their initial expressions of shock and horror, the trough-guzzling, platinum-wrench defense contractors responded by making GTO editions — ostensibly commercial versions of their platinum-plated, government-oriented products, available to anyone who wanted to buy them — $500,000 word processors with MILSPEC encryption and a suite of handy document templates for rules of engagement, declarations of war, and issuing COTS contracts to defense conttactors.
"TLA grew rapidly and among other things acquired Moonstone Metatechnology, who you may know of as one of the primary civilian contractors to the Black Chamber."
Whoops. Now he's definitely got my attention. The presentation cuts back to Angleton's drawn-to-the-point-ofmummification face. He looks serious.
"Billington is from California. His parents are known to have been involved in the Order of the Silver Star at one point, although Billington himself claims to be Methodist.
Whatever the truth, he has a stratospheric security clearance and his corporation designs scary things for an assortment of spooky departments. I'd teference CRYSTAL CENTURY if you were in London, but you can look it up later. For now, you can take it from me that Billington is a player."
Gran Turismo Omologato Now he throws in a fancy fade-to-right to show a rather old, grainy photograph of a ship ... an oil-drilling ship? A tanker? Something like that. Whatever it is, it's big and there's something that looks like an oil rig amidships. (I like that word, "amidships." It makes me sound as if I know what I'm talking about. I am to seagoing vessels pretty much what your grandmother is to Windows Vista.) "This ship is the Hughes Glomar Explorer. Built for Summa Corporation — owned by Howard Hughes — for the CIA in the early 1970s, its official mission was to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It was mated with this — " another screen dissolve, to something that looks like a stainless steel woodlouse adrift at sea — "the HMB-1, Hughes Mining Barge, built by, you'll be interested to know, Lockheed Missiles and Space."