Overclocked | Page 3

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
home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn't make a fuss, so she
didn't remember it. And she was right, too -- he had logs that showed
that after 1AM, nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the
cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity -- AKA Felix's Law.
Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn't been able to
fix it from home. The independent router's netblock was offline, too.
The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker
had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center
and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who'd stood
atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards
who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.
His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it override the
stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy
speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly
called.
"Hi," he said.
"Don't cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice."
He smiled involuntarily. "Check, no cringing."
"I love you, Felix," she said.
"I'm totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed."
"2.0's awake," she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in
her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of
the office, shouting, *The Gold Master just shipped!* They'd started
calling him 2.0 before he'd finished his first cry. "This little bastard was

born to suck tit."
"I'm sorry I woke you," he said. He was almost at the data center. No
traffic at 2AM. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to
the garage. He didn't want to lose Kelly's call underground.
"It's not waking me," she said. "You've been there for seven years. You
have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You've paid
your dues."
"I don't like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn't do," he said.
"You've done it," she said. "Please? I hate waking up alone in the night.
I miss you most at night."
"Kelly --"
"I'm over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet
dreams."
"OK," he said.
"Simple as that?"
"Exactly. Simple as that. Can't have you having bad dreams, and I've
paid my dues. From now on, I'm only going on night call to cover
holidays."
She laughed. "Sysadmins don't take holidays."
"This one will," he said. "Promise."
"You're wonderful," she said. "Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over
my bathrobe."
"That's my boy," he said.
"Oh that he is," she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the
data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the

retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil
power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room
sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the
inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It
sighed open and gusted the airlock's load of positively pressurized air
over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.
It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins
maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was
given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives.
Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It
was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans,
bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.
Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies
were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and
grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He
threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent
racks in the back of the room.
"Felix." It was Van, who wasn't on call that night.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. "No need for both of us to be
wrecked tomorrow."
"What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30
and I got woken up by my process-monitor. I should have called you
and told you I was coming down -- spared you the trip."
Felix's own server -- a box he shared with five other friends -- was in a