Overclocked | Page 2

three times -- on my tenth birthday, on his fiftieth, and when Ma died. It had been two years since I'd last seen him and he was in bad shape. A prison fight had left him with a limp, and he looked over his shoulder so often it was like he had a tic. I was embarrassed when the minicab dropped us off in front of the estate, and tried to keep my distance from this ruined, limping skeleton as we went inside and up the stairs.
"Lanie," he said, as he sat me down. "You're a smart girl, I know that. Trig. You wouldn't know where your old Da could get a printer and some goop?"
I squeezed my hands into fists so tight my fingernails cut into my palms. I closed my eyes. "You've been in prison for ten years, Da. Ten. Years. You're going to risk another ten years to print out more blenders and pharma, more laptops and designer hats?"
He grinned. "I'm not stupid, Lanie. I've learned my lesson. There's no hat or laptop that's worth going to jail for. I'm not going to print none of that rubbish, never again." He had a cup of tea, and he drank it now like it was whisky, a sip and then a long, satisfied exhalation. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
"Come here, Lanie, let me whisper in your ear. Let me tell you the thing that I decided while I spent ten years in lockup. Come here and listen to your stupid Da."
I felt a guilty pang about ticking him off. He was off his rocker, that much was clear. God knew what he went through in prison. "What, Da?" I said, leaning in close.
"Lanie, I'm going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone. That's worth going to jail for. That's worth anything."
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Introduction to When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
I've changed careers every two or three years ever since I dropped out of university in 1990, and one of the best gigs I ever had was working as a freelance systems administrator, working in the steam tunnels of the information age, pulling cables, configuring machines, keeping the backups running, kicking the network in its soft and vulnerable places. Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the century, and if they're not busting you for sending racy IMs, or engaging in unprofessional email conduct it's purely out of their own goodwill.
There's a pernicious myth that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war; while that Strangelove wet-dream was undoubtedly present in the hindbrains of the generals who greenlighted the network's R&D at companies like Rand and BBN, it wasn't really a big piece of the actual engineering and design.
Nevertheless, it does make for a compelling scenario, this vision of the sysadmins in their cages around the world, watching with held breath as the generator failed and the servers went dark, waiting out the long hours until the power and the air run out.
This story originally appeared in Baen's Universe Magazine, an admirable, high-quality online magazine edited by Eric Flint, himself a talented writer and a passionate advocate for open and free culture.
Listeners to my podcast heard this story as it was written, read aloud in serial chinks after each composing session. The pressure of listeners writing in, demanding to know what happened next, kept me honest and writing.
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When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth
Originally published in Baen's Universe, 2006
When Felix's special phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, "Why didn't you turn that fucking thing off before bed?"
"Because I'm on call," he said.
"You're not a fucking doctor," she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed's edge, pulling on the pants he'd left on the floor before turning in. "You're a goddamned *systems administrator*."
"It's my job," he said.
"They work you like a government mule," she said. "You know I'm right. For Christ's sake, you're a father now, you can't go running off in the middle of the night every time someone's porn supply goes down. Don't answer that phone."
He knew she was right. He answered the phone.
"Main routers not responding. BGP not responding." The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn't care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.
"Maybe I can fix it from here," he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.
Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. "In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here." This time she was wrong -- he fixed stuff from