Chapter 1
1
The Willow Tree Inn looked exactly like the sort of place Dale didn’t belong.
He wasn’t sure what the lobby floor was made of. Real red-veined white marble would crack under all these feet, wouldn’t it? Maybe it was some sort of pricey synthetic tile. Whatever it was, the floor probably needed an entire squad of janitors to keep it polished to that high gleam. The air held a subtle, almost flowery perfume, maybe orchids or citrus, too weak for Dale to identify but too omnipresent to be accidental. Indirect lighting erased the shadows from the scattered clusters of expensive looking couches and chairs. The grand piano looked ready for one of those 1940s singers to croon about lost love and heartbreak and all that stuff Dale couldn’t quite relate too, because he never managed to reach a first date. A tall glass water cooler, half full of ice and with half a tree’s worth of sliced lemons floating on top, offered ridiculously tiny crystal tumblers of refreshment.
Plus, what kind of “inn” had 15 floors and twelve hundred rooms?
Dale thought of himself as a Motel 6 kind of guy. He felt most comfortable in baggy cargo pants and one of his infinite supply of computer vendor T-shirts. The Willow Tree looked like he’d need to wear his best suit to meet the dress code for the floor–scrubbing team.
He couldn’t help wondering how the Recompile Convention had arranged to take over the entire hotel for a whole weekend.
Dale had spent an hour studying the convention website. It promised to mix a science fiction con with a technology conference, sprinkling the whole thing with hardware hackers and cosplayers. He couldn’t see how these things fit together. Sure, lots of technology geeks loved science fiction, and lots of SF fans read fantasy, and fantasy and SF fans did cosplay, but wasn’t the point of a convention to spend a whole weekend geeking out about a single thing that you loved? You couldn’t do everything simultaneously. Human brains were single-threaded.
Even at midday Friday, though, it sure looked like these people were going to try.
At least the room had enough exits. The huge automatic doors were big enough to drive a mid-size SUV through, and normal-sized doors sat on either side. A corridor off the mezzanine led off to the parking garage.
It’s not that Dale planned to run away. But knowing it was an option comforted him.
The lobby doors swooshed open, admitting a gaunt woman pushing a groaning two wheel handcart stacked high with translucent plastic crates. Complicated greasy–looking mechanical shapes lurked within the crates, promising an uncontrollable outbreak of nerdery. A big–boned man in a white jumpsuit with one blue sleeve—straight out of Space: 1999—wrestled a bulky 3-D printer into the elevator, ignoring the outraged dings as the doors tried to slide shut and bounced back open. A dapper gray-haired geezer with a thin Salvador Dali mustache watched the elevator struggle in mild amusement, ignoring the weight of the fancy blue leather guitar cases he carried in each hand.
Music, too. The website had promised filking.
At the far end of the hall, four eight–foot conference tables staked off a corner of the lobby. Half a dozen people in identical black-and-white T-shirts scurried around the tables, laying out flat boxes and arranging heaps of lanyards and shirts. They worked like desperate warriors preparing the battlements for an oncoming onslaught, which wasn’t that far from the truth.
Once Friday’s work day ended in a few hours, a couple thousand geeks would converge on the Willow Tree Inn for a weekend of advanced technology, obscure movies, complicated board games, and general hard core geekery. Every one of them would hit the registration desk between work and dinner.
The thought of that teeming crowd, frustrated from work and desperate for a fun weekend, made acid singe Dale’s stomach. Relax, he told himself. None of this is your problem. You’re here to work a table with the boss. If something looks cool you can go see it, but you can spend your free time in your room watching movies and hacking.
“Hey Dale,” Will said.
Dale jumped.
“If you’re quite finished gawking, can you give me a hand with this?”
Will Qwilleran stood a couple inches taller than Dale. He carried a few extra pounds, padded over muscle torn each week from desperate hours at the gym. Will had the sort of chin you’d expect to find on movie stars, and silver gray hair that screamed corporate executive. He could wear a suit like he meant it, and he even wore expensive-smelling cologne.
If Will ever learned to speak like an executive instead of a cranky sarcastic programmer, he’d make a fortune.
Dale flushed. “Sure, sorry.”
Most of the time, Dale loved his job. Will made sure that nobody worked over forty hours a week, kept the fridge stocked with a dozen different kinds of caffeine, bought decent health insurance, and listened. Dale had previously worked for a place that thought sixty hours a week was slacking, had lousy health insurance, and provided intravenous caffeine. But Will had decided to sponsor Recompile, and had drafted just about everyone in the company to staff their booth for a few hours. Dale would have vastly preferred hacking kernel virtual memory systems all weekend, buried safe in his apartment.
In all fairness, he’d volunteered to help set up the Detroit Network Services booth before things started. He needed to scope out the convention, to prepare himself for the onslaught of people and voices, to find the doors before the crowd hid them.
The price of that advance intelligence? Sweating over setting up the booth.
Detroit Network Services was entitled to a twenty-foot square in the corner of the lobby opposite Registration, right where everybody coming down the swooping spiral staircase in the middle of the lobby couldn’t help seeing them. Some companies would have “invested” in expensive displays touting the benefits of their technology and services. Will called those displays “bogus,” and instead had covered the tables with tough blue cotton and set out a variety of equipment, intermixed with short stacks of black-and-white laser–printed flyers.
Dale had to concede, this crowd wouldn’t care about fancy color brochures. They would care about technical matters: throughput and jitter, graylisting and virtualization, peering points and border routers. The flyers offered that and more.
And there was Dale’s talk, too. The convention committee didn’t automatically give sponsors one of their precious speaking slots, but Dale had submitted his talk on DNS’s technology and the committee had accepted it. Lots of people were interested in solar powered networking, especially in an area like Detroit where some of the best buildings for wireless networking didn’t have reliable electricity.
They didn’t want the talk. They only took the talk because Will gave the convention a few thousand dollars to help pay the bills.
No, that was ridiculous. A technical conference had accepted this same talk before, without any sponsorship being involved. Even if the Recompile crowd was bored, indifferent, or outright hostile, his talk couldn’t go nearly as bad as BSD North had.
And at the Willow Tree Inn, he had his own room. His own private, personal bathroom. He didn’t have to worry about roommates getting murdered one after the other. All he had to do was stand behind the sponsor table and talk to anyone who came up to the booth.
He didn’t have to start any conversations.
Yes, there were so many people that their faces would blur together. But he didn’t have to remember any of them. He only had to pretend he remembered. He’d learned that when he was in grade school. The hard part would be sorting out one voice from the crowd, but hopefully the conference events would lure most people further into the hotel.
Dale huffed, flung the dangling con badge around the back of his neck, and lowered his two hundred ninety pounds to plug power cables into the surge suppressor. The hotel staff had unscrewed discreet plates from the floor to expose twin grounded outlets every eight feet, but Will and Dale had brought four servers, an assortment of small routers and wireless antennas, and a couple of consoles to demonstrate their geek cred. Will loathed customers impressed by glitz and glam; he wanted customers who understood what the company did. Luring those customers demanded a whole bunch of power outlets.
Over Dale’s head, a server tasted electricity and whooshed to life. The white noise flooded out the lobby’s scattered conversations, easing Dale’s tension. Relax, he told himself again. This is routine. People do this kind of work all the time. It’s not like anybody here knows who you are.
“Excuse me,” a gruff, unfamiliar voice said. “Are you Dale Whitehead?”