Git Sync Murder

Chapter 3

3

It’s not that Dale hated people. His attention deficit disorder just made understanding them difficult.

Facial expressions? Dale had a good guess at what they meant, most of the time. Unless he was tired. Or overwhelmed. Or unless he’d been looking at people all day, and the part of his brain that was supposed to figure out what that exact twist of the lips and furrow of brow meant had kicked off its shoes to nap.

Words? Dale understood people talking just fine. Until he got tired, and had listened to too many people, and then he had to painstakingly listen to every sound that came out of people’s mouth and assemble those noises into syllables, then words, then meaning.

He could concentrate for hours. Days, even. Once he got himself focused, he could understand incredibly complex structures, from a computer’s internal memory registers all the way up through the web browser displaying a video of the cat toppling out of a box. When he dropped into hyperfocus, a minuscule slice of the world revealed its inner secrets.

But interrupt him, and his whole brain fell apart.

When humanity had migrated from trees to caves, ADD had been a useful trait for the tribe. He’d be a great hunter, able to focus on every tiny detail to stalk whatever Great Horned Dinner was native to his area while staying alert for critters further up the food chain. A few hours of predatory success, and the rest of the time you’d chill by the fire and brag about your latest triumph.

The modern world had little call for such hunters.

The convention hadn’t even started, and the fragile house of twigs Dale called his mind already quivered with stress.

The lobby grew louder as the crowd thickened, their voices echoing off the gleaming floor and glass exterior walls. Perfume clashed with cologne, both losing to after-work staleness. Dale had expected thin attendance until after five or so, but obviously people had left work early to attend. A queue grew at the registration desk: people in business suits, others in T-shirts that only other nerds would find funny, and a surprising number of young women wearing embarrassingly little.

Dale didn’t think of himself as a prude, but every time some college-age woman sauntered past the booth wearing only a Princess Leia chain mail bikini and a smile, or the woman in the white plastic strap thing from The Fifth Element, he couldn’t help blushing to his armpits and turning to focus his fumbling fingers on cables and connectors.

Fortunately, he had a lot of work.

Rick, DNS’ database thug, had used actual network performance data to program some interesting network visualizations, but they relied on correct connections between the demo machines. Dale spent a good fifteen minutes on his knees under the tables, crawling back and forth testing cables and connections until he discovered that the switch they brought had a whole bank of bad ports. One of the flat screen monitors had a loose HDMI connector, which wasn’t shocking—Detroit Network Services made it a business practice to purchase inexpensive equipment and replace it at the first sign of failure. The whole company was designed to route around damage. Dale reminded himself to not call it a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Crap where prospective customers might hear.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t brought a spare monitor.

They had brought duct tape, however.

By the time Dale had the demo running correctly, he’d sweated through his T-shirt. His knees ached from kneeling on the floor, and his shoulders burned from heaving equipment. The hotel lobby was pristine, and he’d wiped down every piece of gear before loading it into Will’s van, but somehow Dale’s hands were dirty and his face felt grimy. He even had dust on his glasses, glued there by dots of sweat.

They’d be lucky if the Willow Tree Inn Janitorial Assault Squad didn’t sound an alarm and converge on the display for excessive grunginess. Dale had a niggling suspicion that if he didn’t get cleaned up soon, he’d find himself assailed by a gang of bellhops with long handled brushes and a bucket of soapy water.

By five o’clock, though, all three monitors displayed constantly updating maps of the Detroit Network Services network, demonstrating how the network coped when a piece of fiber or a rooftop wireless interconnect failed. Dale had to admit, the blue and yellow flows of simulated data were entrancing. Rick was a jerk, but he knew how to make pretty videos.

Finally, Will studied the table. “Looks good,” he said, dusting his hands against each other. “All we have to do now is keep it tidy, and talk to people when they show up. Whatever you do, don’t let people leave garbage on our table. The con suite’s right up there.”

“Right,” Dale said. What am I supposed to do if someone sets half a drink down on top of a server? Yell at them?

Will leaned close enough for Dale to catch a whiff of his cologne. What was that smell? Some kind of fruit? His voice dropped to almost a whisper, barely loud enough to hear above the surging crowd. “By the way, I think you handled Mr. Chester well. He won’t be the last person who asks you about Ottawa this weekend.”

Dale shivered. “How many people do you really think remember that?”

Will shook his head. “How often do people get murdered at a tech con? It was big news in our circles. The biggest news since Reiser, at least.”

Dale couldn’t help a grimace.

“Dale…” Will sighed. “I know you don’t like the crowds. I know you’d rather be communing with Clang. But dealing with people is a skill. It’s a skill people can learn, and it’s a skill you in particular need to learn.”

“I can deal with people just fine,” Dale lied.

Will shook his head. “Practicing this weekend won’t hurt you, then.”

It just might, Dale thought.

The best part about working for Will was that he hired people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. The worst part about working for Will was that he tried to help the people who worked for him. Sometimes Dale didn’t feel like an employee, but rather a pet project adopted out of the Humane Society’s Employee Pound.

A skinny man in a Blue Oyster Cult World Tour T-shirt, with shimmering blonde hair running straight down to his waist, paused to stare at the display flickering on the table in front of them.

Dale found himself so eager to break the uncomfortable conversation with his boss that he took a step towards the man. “Hi! We’re Detroit Network Services, and we’re sponsoring the con suite this year.”

“Hi.” The man’s eyes didn’t leave the flatscreen monitor.

Dale took a deep breath. “We offer Internet service all through the Tri-County area, both wired and wireless. Including some places nobody else can reach.” What else was he supposed to say? “We do hosting, voice, telecom tandem…” Dale’s heavy tongue stalled, and his skull felt pressurized from within. They had other services, right? He worked on them all the time. “Private cloud!” You sound like a maniac. Cool it. “We have a private peer at the Chicago NAP, as well as local peers with Comcast and Level 3 and AT&T, but everyone’s got AT&T I know, plus we run the Detroit private carrier exchange over in Southfield, where all the local guys hook up, so we have really good connecctivity with just about anyone you might want to talk to.” More words bubbled up behind those, but he realized he’d babbled everything out in one long rush until he’d run out of air.

Slow it down. You’re making a bigger fool of yourself than usual.

The man gave a little nod. “Cool.” Without meeting Dale’s gaze, he turned on one heel and wandered off towards the registration line.

Well, that wasn’t a complete disaster. You scared him off, but you didn’t blackmail his children or anything.

“You’ll get the hang of this,” Will said. “If someone’s not interested, that’s okay. I had Rick make those visualizations to catch eyes. Not all of those eyes will care what we do.”

And you didn’t make a complete fool of yourself in front of the boss. “Sure.”

More people streamed through the door, letting in puffs of exhaust–tainted air that the hotel’s air handlers quickly scrubbed away. At the far end of the lobby, the queue at the Recompile registration desk had collapsed into a churning mass of eager con goers. The line at the hotel registration was more orderly, but the three clerks scrambling to check everyone in wore strained synthetic smiles.

Dale couldn’t help wondering if the convention had warned the hotel staff what sort of event they’d be holding. Science fiction conventions could get the weirdest sort of rowdy. The couple he’d tried got uncomfortable and overwhelming. Mix in a bunch of intense software engineers and system administrators, add in hardware hackers and cosplayers and filkers, and you pretty much had a Vegas buffet of highly specialized interests.

A lanky man in a white sport coat and circuit diagram tie stopped to stare at the booth monitors, his jaw set and his eyebrows drawn together as he studied the data flows.

Try again. Maybe with less stupidity this time? “Hi.”

The man pointed at the center display with his chin. “That’s not RenderMan,” he accused.

Dale had no idea what Rick had used to create the displays. What was he supposed to say? He shrugged.

“It would have looked a lot better in RenderMan.” The man stalked off towards the elevators.

As if Dale was personally responsible for the images.

Get used to it. Highly specialized interests, remember?

At the next table over, Will had struck up a conversation with a woman in a severe business suit. Dale caught a few words about tandem interconnections. A potential telecom customer? Or maybe an existing customer? Dale dealt with customers all the time on the phone, but tried to avoid seeing them in person. He trained his customers to reach him via email, but sometimes he couldn’t avoid the phone—as if he could decrypt someone’s words without access to the public key provided by their facial expressions and the way their mouth shaped the words.

The hotel’s manicured air was arid enough that his shirt had dried, but dried sweat wasn’t that much more appealing than fresh. It wasn’t even 6 PM Friday, and he already wanted to go to his room and have a shower so he could crawl into bed and do some hacking.

“Hey,” someone said.

Dale jumped. A heavy-set forty-something woman wearing a loose black T-shirt that said WHAT DO I THINK OF YOUR CODE? CUT OFF YOUR HANDS AND BURY YOUR KEYBOARD stood near one of the demo servers, looking at him expectantly.

“I’m sorry?” Dang it, I need to pay attention!

She offered a tightlipped smile that said yes, he was sorry, but she’d find a way to endure the strain. “I asked you which version of Linux you’re running?”

“We’re a BSD shop,” Dale said. “We run SkyBSD —“

But at the word BSD, the woman had spun on one heel and stomped away.

Great.

The Recompile website had advertised heavy Linux content. Dale had felt isolated at a conference dedicated to BSD-style Unix, but apparently some of the Linux fans here would actively try to make him feel like an outsider.

Not dreading the weekend got harder with every person who hurled words at him.

Dale took a deep breath to try to center himself, telling his ears to ignore the excited hubbub from the registration area and the clatter of suitcases rolling across the expensive-looking floor.

And his feet hurt. Dale suspected that they’d hurt a whole bunch more by Sunday. His sneakers had been so ratty that he’d decided to grab a new pair for the weekend rather than embarrass Will. They’d seemed fine in the store, but after a couple hours they squeezed his instep and the sides of his toes. These shoes were clearly designed for sitting.

A lanky twentysomething man, wearing tight black jeans and a T-shirt that showed off the kind of muscle definition Dale would never have, trotted out from the registration morass straight towards their booth. Maybe someone was interested in their services?

No, you know perfectly well it’s a pissed-off customer that you’ve never met before, and he’s taking the chance to strangle you in person.

Dale straightened, trying to ignore the ache in the small of his back.

Yes, the guy was jogging straight at the booth.

But he wasn’t scowling. Frowning, yes. His face was tight with… intention, maybe? Concentration? It wasn’t a vengeful customer.

Probably.

“Hi,” Dale said as the man got close enough to hear.

“I’m looking for Dale Whitehead.” Despite his scurry across the lobby, the man didn’t sound even faintly out of breath.

Not again. “I’m Dale Whitehead.” Say thanks, and tell him that solving a murder isn’t anything to celebrate.

The man blurted, “The con chair sent me to get you.”