 Previous
New Readers Start Here
Table of Contents Next
Michael was in a thoughtful mood when he got back to
the pub. He kicked off his shoes and stared out of the
window for a long time, letting the cold air flood into
the dark room. He could see the flashing lights of a
fire tender and a police car next to the park. Probably
they were just checking that the tree burned itself
out harmlessly. He glanced at the house but the lights
from the fire truck were so bright that they drowned
out everything else.
He guessed that the remainder of the evening would
be tranquil, as if some unseen force were lying low,
waiting for the authorities to go and flash their lights
somewhere else.
There was a secret here and the urge to uncover it
was too strong for Michael to resist. The next step,
obviously, would be to get closer to the house and take
a proper look. Lea would be cautious but he could probably
talk her round. He could tell that she was intrigued.
Flashing lights and power cuts were things he could
understand. If someone put a sudden drain on the power
grid they could blow a fuse or a circuit breaker. It
would have to be a very big load to wipe out the whole
village but that was just a matter of scale. The sudden
rain showers were harder to fathom. What could anyone
do that would affect the weather?
A noise behind him pulled Michael out of his reverie.
A fan inside one of his computers had a noisy bearing.
Occasionally in the night it woke him. He walked over
to his server farm and gently tapped the side of one
of the boxes and the noise ceased.
He turned on the monitor and slipped into the seat.
He had built the farm very inexpensively the previous
year and now he had a dozen machines all linked together,
sharing a single screen and keyboard.
He opened the statistics page and studied it glumly.
The project was moving ahead but progress was staggeringly
slow. Collectively the machines were fast but this particular
project, Michael and Lea's own secret, needed a lot
of machine time.
The array of computers began as a tentative experiment
but it proved to be more useful than Michael initially
supposed. His father was inordinately impressed by them,
holding them as proof of his son's technical prowess,
although, in truth, Michael had simply borrowed a book
from the library and followed the instructions. It was
no big deal.
But he played the part of the amiable geek whenever
relatives visited, welcoming them into his bedroom,
showing them the array of machines, and explaining why
a stuffed toy penguin sat atop each one. The whole thing
took no more than fifteen minutes, and if he was lucky
someone would be sufficiently impressed to donate an
old computer. Every little helped.
One inevitable question always came, usually towards
the end of the exposition.
"What does it all do?"
Michael would smile indulgently, trying to look earnest.
"It's a school science project. We're taking three-dimensional
wire-frame models and using parallel processing algorithms
and large, denormalized matrices to perform anti-aliasing
and hidden line removal to determine the best way to
make sure that we..."
It didn't really matter how he ended the sentence.
No one ever listened as far as the end. Not even Michael
knew what he was talking about. He just strung together
a bunch of terms that he'd noticed in a manual.
Previous New
Readers Start Here Table
of Contents Next
|
