"c181" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burt Andrew - Noontide Night)

12:25 P.M., Wednesday, February 2, 2000
Halifax, Nova Scotia

Nate hummed "You're in the Army now, Mr. Jones" as he waited in the uniform line, naked but for crutches, a towel, and his goosebumps. Naked because (they'd been informed by a week-older recruit) some joker had interpreted "time is of the essence" to mean that they should waste not a single precious second. So they were hustled from physical exam through a quick shower and into the uniform line without being given time to dress. In fact, their civvies had been whisked away as if they were contaminated. Allegedly they'd be delivered back to their bunks, but Nate doubted he'd ever see his 501's again. A guard laughed and said to kiss them goodbye. "It'll keep you girls from Going Mitnick." The government had apparently been wary of programmers ever since the military had cut a deal with imprisoned "superhacker" Kevin Mitnick. Once on the FBI's most wanted list, he'd eventually been caught in 1995 and was behind bars when 2000 rolled around. The government cut a deal for his programming assistance. Undoubtedly sore that he'd been held over four years without a trial (though purists noted that fourteen months of this counted as time served on other hacking convictions), once released he was true to his historical modus operandi: a week after he was out—he vanished. "Going Mitnick" had become the CyberCorps term for AWOL. Word in the barracks was that you'd never see your civvies again since that just made it easier to go Mitnick. The physical exam had been a joke. A room full of buck-naked, pudge-bellied, pasty-skinned programmers was not a pretty sight. At least the balding guys didn't have to worry about their looks. The buzz cut before the physical had rendered everyone democratically equal. When someone said "draft all the programmers," someone else had taken the word "draft" a little too seriously. At least, rumor had it, that because of the time pressure they would be spared the traditional six weeks of mud-sloshing, backpack-humping basic training. Nate wasn't sure whether to thank—or blame—Congress for their alleged micro-management of the CyberCorps. Each branch of the military had their hands full with their own problems, so Congress made sure to loan them a few spare bureaucrats to oversee the reputed million programmers drafted. All he knew was he was feeling an awful lot like Gomer Pyle would be walking by any moment muttering Surprise, surprise. Nate scrutinized the size card he'd carefully filled out with his measurements. Morgan had hastily scrawled a couple numbers. Of course, whether Nate was a 32 or a 34 waist did depend on how they measured, what the fabric was and how much it would shrink, and he preferred trousers with a long rise, not to mention— A clerk with heavy eyelids handed Nate a stack of olive drabs simultaneously demanding, "card please." "Hey, how do you know they're my size? You haven't even looked at my card!" "They fit. Next." Nate moved aside, waiting for Morgan, and began to dress. "Look at this," Nate said. "These are a 36! And only a 32 inseam. Christ, I need at least a 34..." He held up the trousers, several inches short of his ankles. Presumably the military was having supply problems. But he didn't dare argue. The clerk gave him a cow-like glare anyway. He probably had access to Nate's medical records and would make sure he'd be scheduled for another rectal exam if he wasn't careful. He'd heard about this Army crap. Nate cinched his too-large-at-the-waist pants tight with his regulation belt. They poofed out in what might almost have looked fashionable, except that nobody else looked the same. "What'd you get?" he asked Morgan. Morgan dug around for the tags as he dressed. "Same size as you." They joined the continuous herd trickling to the next building, through a chill fog that was setting in and blotting out the weak sun. He wondered how Russ was doing, holding down the fort. Nate hoped they'd eventually get to make phone calls. The next wooden building was set up with rows of hard benches, their paint peeling, and dull gray tables. "What's in here?" Morgan asked the matronly woman in a Canadian Army uniform. "Aptitude testing. Fill in from the back, sit over there," she pointed. "Going to find out which of you hotshots get to fly keyboards or dig latrines. Test begins on the hour." Nate looked at his watch, showed it to Morgan. "Half an hour!" Nate said, hushed. "I heard some of us will be teaching crash courses for newbies, trying to make programmers out of plowshares, or however that goes. That'd suck. Think we'll get net access? We can always claim we need it to do our job. I'm really jonesing for my 2600.com fix. You ever go to 2600.com? You into hacking at all? I remember once, I—" Nate realized he was motormouthing, and shut up. This whole time on the planes and waiting around, nobody had really engaged him in conversation. Being a typical introverted programmer himself, he hadn't tried to strike one up. Now, with the threat of a Test looming before him, he recognized a fear reaction he hadn't felt since he was a child. My God, he hadn't had test anxiety in years. College tests were all a breeze; if he blew one, so what, he knew he'd graduate. Not since he'd taken the gifted and talented program entrance test in junior high had a test mattered. This was The Test. He'd overheard two recruits talking about it on the plane. To prevent playing dumb from buying you a ticket home, failing the test got you assigned to basic training and then the nastiest jobs the Army had to offer. You could retake the test any time, of course, in case you'd suddenly obtained binary enlightenment. They'd made it sound on par with prison, which, in some sense, it was. Punishment for not being what they thought you were. Nate felt empathy for those almost certain cases of mis-identification, people drafted who didn't know squat about computers. Nate's hand began shaking at the thought of day long physical labor. Some muscular guy like Morgan would be okay, he thought with envy. But think it through, Nate, he said to himself. What Morgan said, about the terrorists. There'll be a war. The Chinese will try to take over Taiwan. This is their perfect opportunity. Maybe they already had, and the government wasn't telling us. He'd be shot at. His throat tightened. Shot at. Shot. He'd already cheated death by flying lead once. He knew he couldn't again. What if he couldn't remember something simple? He visualized the cover of Sedgwick's Algorithms textbook. Could he remember the algorithm for balancing a B-tree after an insertion? No. Oh God. What if they asked that. He'd never really understood it in the first place. He tried to visualize the algorithm in the book. But like trying to remember a piece of paper from a dream, the memory was a blank page. Nate was hot. Dizzy. No, there must be some mistake here. "Excuse me," he asked the proctor, half-rising from the bench. "What do you mean, 'dig latrines'?" She snorted. "You think the Army's going to let you go if you flunk your test? They've got to motivate you boys to do your best. Now sit down." "Hey, don't worry." Morgan patted him on the back. "None of us are going to dig latrines." "Do you remember the B-tree balancing algorithm?" Nate asked. His voice sounded squeaky. "Sort of. Something about pushing a new node up, or something." "Oh God." He knew. Nate was sunk. Nate looked around him, at all the other faces. They knew too. Look at those smug, pretend looks of concern. They wanted him to fail. There were probably only a fixed number of slots for programmers. They had to weed out the chaff, only he wasn't chaff, he was— "Take it easy there, my boy," the older guy on his other side said. He looked like a used-car salesman, plastic smile, feral eyes, face drawn thin from a bad facelift, a sneering mustache. Somehow he'd managed to get a uniform that fit him crisply, like his crisp gray mustache. He introduced himself as Dick Littlefield. They discussed programming for a bit. Dick lied like a salesman. "You know that C++ object oriented programming language?" Nate said he did; quite well. It and its descendants, like Java, had been among the most commonly chosen languages for projects for years. Dick nodded as if they were too small for him to concern himself with. "Maybe I'll pick up a book and learn 'em over a weekend." Morgan clucked. Nate sensed he was equally offended by the assumption they were that easy. It had taken Nate years to become proficient in them. Dick returned to the original topic. "Well, son, you just keep your paper turned where I can see it, and ol' Dick will check over your work." He winked. "Cheat?" Nate whispered. "I don't think so." But the suggestion acted as a needed slap in the face, focusing Nate's mind on his indignation rather than abject fear. "Can you believe that guy?" he asked Morgan quietly. Morgan shook his head. He proceeded to distract Nate with tales of New Zealand. He'd skin dived coral reefs, windsurfed the Taranaki coastline, and hang glided off Stanwell Tops in Australia. The time passed until the proctor suddenly cut the rubber band off a stack of exams with a loud snap. "Do not open the test booklet until I say. Use only the number two pencil provided. You have one hour. If you finish early, close your booklet and sit quietly." Nate expected a sheet of computer circles to darken with answers. Instead, when he received his booklet, he could see inside that there were blank spaces to actually write in answers. Surely the test-scoring software wasn't date-sensitive. How were they going to score this by hand? Why would they want to score these by hand? Maybe they hadn't had time to design multiple-choice tests. Maybe they had such distrust of software right now they felt it best to avoid it. Whatever the reason, it added another human point of failure that Nate feared would land him in the latrine squad. "Open your test booklets and begin." Inside, fears worse than Nate's worst were realized. The test measured nothing relevant. Nate knew he was a crack programmer, but little here related to those skills. "Define the acronym COBOL." What did it matter if he knew what it stood for or not? He skipped past the other COBOL questions. He'd never learned that programming language, and that would be evident. "Using the HIPO technique, show the design for a batch oriented add/delete/change transaction system. Write the skeleton of the program in Ada" Oh shit. HIPO technique? Ada? He dimly remembered that was some archaic kind of IBM thing. He'd studied Booch's object model. And Ada—had anyone ever used that programming language? He'd always thought of it as sort of stillborn. "Draw a flowcharting 'input' symbol." Who learned flowcharts any more? Who had written this exam, a blue suit from the 1950s? He suddenly understood how they would score this: Some clueless drone would compare the exact words and pictures Nate put down with those on their answer key. No room for deviation or alternately correct answers would be allowed for. Of course, the questions themselves had nothing to do with modern programming skills. A few questions he recognized, such the lone question on the UNIX operating system, writing a trivial command to list the logged-in users in alphabetical order. Or the single question where he could circle the syntax errors in a four line C language program to add two numbers and print the result. A token Microsoft Windows question about the registry. Yet 80% of the questions were about languages and operating systems either dead or that he'd never heard of. FORTRAN IV. RPG. APL. 360 Assembler. JCL. If these petrified skills were what Uncle Sam needed, old Uncle was going to have an awful lot of computer-literate latrine diggers on his hands. Nobody Nate knew had learned this stuff for over twenty years. Nate knew how to program, and he was damn good at it. He could probably pick up enough of the older languages to fix them, if that's what was necessary; especially working as part of a team. He could rewrite them in a modern language even faster. But this test wouldn't reveal that. He glanced over toward Dick's paper. He was ready to cheat. Anything to avoid being shot again. Dick must have sensed Nate's peeking—he swung his arm around to guard his exam. Apparently this test was right up Dick's alley and he felt no need of "checking" Nate's answers or vice versa. The proctor snapped the table in front of Nate with a riding crop. "Eyes front, recruit!" Nate shook with rage. Or dread; he wasn't sure which. He closed his exam and slammed his pencil down on top.

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Chapter 18.1

12:25 P.M., Wednesday, February 2, 2000
Halifax, Nova Scotia

Nate hummed "You're in the Army now, Mr. Jones" as he waited in the uniform line, naked but for crutches, a towel, and his goosebumps. Naked because (they'd been informed by a week-older recruit) some joker had interpreted "time is of the essence" to mean that they should waste not a single precious second. So they were hustled from physical exam through a quick shower and into the uniform line without being given time to dress. In fact, their civvies had been whisked away as if they were contaminated. Allegedly they'd be delivered back to their bunks, but Nate doubted he'd ever see his 501's again. A guard laughed and said to kiss them goodbye. "It'll keep you girls from Going Mitnick." The government had apparently been wary of programmers ever since the military had cut a deal with imprisoned "superhacker" Kevin Mitnick. Once on the FBI's most wanted list, he'd eventually been caught in 1995 and was behind bars when 2000 rolled around. The government cut a deal for his programming assistance. Undoubtedly sore that he'd been held over four years without a trial (though purists noted that fourteen months of this counted as time served on other hacking convictions), once released he was true to his historical modus operandi: a week after he was out—he vanished. "Going Mitnick" had become the CyberCorps term for AWOL. Word in the barracks was that you'd never see your civvies again since that just made it easier to go Mitnick. The physical exam had been a joke. A room full of buck-naked, pudge-bellied, pasty-skinned programmers was not a pretty sight. At least the balding guys didn't have to worry about their looks. The buzz cut before the physical had rendered everyone democratically equal. When someone said "draft all the programmers," someone else had taken the word "draft" a little too seriously. At least, rumor had it, that because of the time pressure they would be spared the traditional six weeks of mud-sloshing, backpack-humping basic training. Nate wasn't sure whether to thank—or blame—Congress for their alleged micro-management of the CyberCorps. Each branch of the military had their hands full with their own problems, so Congress made sure to loan them a few spare bureaucrats to oversee the reputed million programmers drafted. All he knew was he was feeling an awful lot like Gomer Pyle would be walking by any moment muttering Surprise, surprise. Nate scrutinized the size card he'd carefully filled out with his measurements. Morgan had hastily scrawled a couple numbers. Of course, whether Nate was a 32 or a 34 waist did depend on how they measured, what the fabric was and how much it would shrink, and he preferred trousers with a long rise, not to mention— A clerk with heavy eyelids handed Nate a stack of olive drabs simultaneously demanding, "card please." "Hey, how do you know they're my size? You haven't even looked at my card!" "They fit. Next." Nate moved aside, waiting for Morgan, and began to dress. "Look at this," Nate said. "These are a 36! And only a 32 inseam. Christ, I need at least a 34..." He held up the trousers, several inches short of his ankles. Presumably the military was having supply problems. But he didn't dare argue. The clerk gave him a cow-like glare anyway. He probably had access to Nate's medical records and would make sure he'd be scheduled for another rectal exam if he wasn't careful. He'd heard about this Army crap. Nate cinched his too-large-at-the-waist pants tight with his regulation belt. They poofed out in what might almost have looked fashionable, except that nobody else looked the same. "What'd you get?" he asked Morgan. Morgan dug around for the tags as he dressed. "Same size as you." They joined the continuous herd trickling to the next building, through a chill fog that was setting in and blotting out the weak sun. He wondered how Russ was doing, holding down the fort. Nate hoped they'd eventually get to make phone calls. The next wooden building was set up with rows of hard benches, their paint peeling, and dull gray tables. "What's in here?" Morgan asked the matronly woman in a Canadian Army uniform. "Aptitude testing. Fill in from the back, sit over there," she pointed. "Going to find out which of you hotshots get to fly keyboards or dig latrines. Test begins on the hour." Nate looked at his watch, showed it to Morgan. "Half an hour!" Nate said, hushed. "I heard some of us will be teaching crash courses for newbies, trying to make programmers out of plowshares, or however that goes. That'd suck. Think we'll get net access? We can always claim we need it to do our job. I'm really jonesing for my 2600.com fix. You ever go to 2600.com? You into hacking at all? I remember once, I—" Nate realized he was motormouthing, and shut up. This whole time on the planes and waiting around, nobody had really engaged him in conversation. Being a typical introverted programmer himself, he hadn't tried to strike one up. Now, with the threat of a Test looming before him, he recognized a fear reaction he hadn't felt since he was a child. My God, he hadn't had test anxiety in years. College tests were all a breeze; if he blew one, so what, he knew he'd graduate. Not since he'd taken the gifted and talented program entrance test in junior high had a test mattered. This was The Test. He'd overheard two recruits talking about it on the plane. To prevent playing dumb from buying you a ticket home, failing the test got you assigned to basic training and then the nastiest jobs the Army had to offer. You could retake the test any time, of course, in case you'd suddenly obtained binary enlightenment. They'd made it sound on par with prison, which, in some sense, it was. Punishment for not being what they thought you were. Nate felt empathy for those almost certain cases of mis-identification, people drafted who didn't know squat about computers. Nate's hand began shaking at the thought of day long physical labor. Some muscular guy like Morgan would be okay, he thought with envy. But think it through, Nate, he said to himself. What Morgan said, about the terrorists. There'll be a war. The Chinese will try to take over Taiwan. This is their perfect opportunity. Maybe they already had, and the government wasn't telling us. He'd be shot at. His throat tightened. Shot at. Shot. He'd already cheated death by flying lead once. He knew he couldn't again. What if he couldn't remember something simple? He visualized the cover of Sedgwick's Algorithms textbook. Could he remember the algorithm for balancing a B-tree after an insertion? No. Oh God. What if they asked that. He'd never really understood it in the first place. He tried to visualize the algorithm in the book. But like trying to remember a piece of paper from a dream, the memory was a blank page. Nate was hot. Dizzy. No, there must be some mistake here. "Excuse me," he asked the proctor, half-rising from the bench. "What do you mean, 'dig latrines'?" She snorted. "You think the Army's going to let you go if you flunk your test? They've got to motivate you boys to do your best. Now sit down." "Hey, don't worry." Morgan patted him on the back. "None of us are going to dig latrines." "Do you remember the B-tree balancing algorithm?" Nate asked. His voice sounded squeaky. "Sort of. Something about pushing a new node up, or something." "Oh God." He knew. Nate was sunk. Nate looked around him, at all the other faces. They knew too. Look at those smug, pretend looks of concern. They wanted him to fail. There were probably only a fixed number of slots for programmers. They had to weed out the chaff, only he wasn't chaff, he was— "Take it easy there, my boy," the older guy on his other side said. He looked like a used-car salesman, plastic smile, feral eyes, face drawn thin from a bad facelift, a sneering mustache. Somehow he'd managed to get a uniform that fit him crisply, like his crisp gray mustache. He introduced himself as Dick Littlefield. They discussed programming for a bit. Dick lied like a salesman. "You know that C++ object oriented programming language?" Nate said he did; quite well. It and its descendants, like Java, had been among the most commonly chosen languages for projects for years. Dick nodded as if they were too small for him to concern himself with. "Maybe I'll pick up a book and learn 'em over a weekend." Morgan clucked. Nate sensed he was equally offended by the assumption they were that easy. It had taken Nate years to become proficient in them. Dick returned to the original topic. "Well, son, you just keep your paper turned where I can see it, and ol' Dick will check over your work." He winked. "Cheat?" Nate whispered. "I don't think so." But the suggestion acted as a needed slap in the face, focusing Nate's mind on his indignation rather than abject fear. "Can you believe that guy?" he asked Morgan quietly. Morgan shook his head. He proceeded to distract Nate with tales of New Zealand. He'd skin dived coral reefs, windsurfed the Taranaki coastline, and hang glided off Stanwell Tops in Australia. The time passed until the proctor suddenly cut the rubber band off a stack of exams with a loud snap. "Do not open the test booklet until I say. Use only the number two pencil provided. You have one hour. If you finish early, close your booklet and sit quietly." Nate expected a sheet of computer circles to darken with answers. Instead, when he received his booklet, he could see inside that there were blank spaces to actually write in answers. Surely the test-scoring software wasn't date-sensitive. How were they going to score this by hand? Why would they want to score these by hand? Maybe they hadn't had time to design multiple-choice tests. Maybe they had such distrust of software right now they felt it best to avoid it. Whatever the reason, it added another human point of failure that Nate feared would land him in the latrine squad. "Open your test booklets and begin." Inside, fears worse than Nate's worst were realized. The test measured nothing relevant. Nate knew he was a crack programmer, but little here related to those skills. "Define the acronym COBOL." What did it matter if he knew what it stood for or not? He skipped past the other COBOL questions. He'd never learned that programming language, and that would be evident. "Using the HIPO technique, show the design for a batch oriented add/delete/change transaction system. Write the skeleton of the program in Ada" Oh shit. HIPO technique? Ada? He dimly remembered that was some archaic kind of IBM thing. He'd studied Booch's object model. And Ada—had anyone ever used that programming language? He'd always thought of it as sort of stillborn. "Draw a flowcharting 'input' symbol." Who learned flowcharts any more? Who had written this exam, a blue suit from the 1950s? He suddenly understood how they would score this: Some clueless drone would compare the exact words and pictures Nate put down with those on their answer key. No room for deviation or alternately correct answers would be allowed for. Of course, the questions themselves had nothing to do with modern programming skills. A few questions he recognized, such the lone question on the UNIX operating system, writing a trivial command to list the logged-in users in alphabetical order. Or the single question where he could circle the syntax errors in a four line C language program to add two numbers and print the result. A token Microsoft Windows question about the registry. Yet 80% of the questions were about languages and operating systems either dead or that he'd never heard of. FORTRAN IV. RPG. APL. 360 Assembler. JCL. If these petrified skills were what Uncle Sam needed, old Uncle was going to have an awful lot of computer-literate latrine diggers on his hands. Nobody Nate knew had learned this stuff for over twenty years. Nate knew how to program, and he was damn good at it. He could probably pick up enough of the older languages to fix them, if that's what was necessary; especially working as part of a team. He could rewrite them in a modern language even faster. But this test wouldn't reveal that. He glanced over toward Dick's paper. He was ready to cheat. Anything to avoid being shot again. Dick must have sensed Nate's peeking—he swung his arm around to guard his exam. Apparently this test was right up Dick's alley and he felt no need of "checking" Nate's answers or vice versa. The proctor snapped the table in front of Nate with a riding crop. "Eyes front, recruit!" Nate shook with rage. Or dread; he wasn't sure which. He closed his exam and slammed his pencil down on top.


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