Xenotech Queen's Gambit: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 2) (28 page)

Chapter 31

“I’ve learned how to use my spam filter pretty effectively.”
— Al Yankovic

“Have a few more Kalamata olives,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott. “They’re delicious.”

I’d already tried them and she was right. I selected a small additional serving with a deep bronze spoon and moved them to my plate. I didn’t want to fill up too soon since lunch at the Classical Caf
é
on the top floor of the museum promised to be a treat. Dr. Liddell-Scott, Perry, Dr. Urradu and I were seated at a round table reserved for the curator. We were clearly in the best seats in the house. Our table was directly beneath the center of the domed ceiling and warm light from a bronze, wheel-shaped chandelier made it easy to see and appreciate our meal.

In the center of our table was a thick round loaf of whole wheat and spelt bread, scored into eight wedges. I cut though the scored indentations with the sharp knife designated for that purpose and served wedges of warm bread to my dining companions and myself. The bread had a robust, nutty flavor and I sopped up a bit of the oil from my olives with the point of my wedge. Then a pair of servers in Greco-Roman servant’s garb brought us bowls of salad greens topped with some sort of vinaigrette dressing. I recognized less than half of the leaves in my bowl.

“What are these?” I asked Dr. Liddell-Scott, pointing at the unfamiliar greenery.

“Mint, coriander, parsley, pennyroyal, arugula, mallow and thyme,” said the curator. “With a bit of chopped leek, feta and pine nuts. It’s from Columella’s
Re Rustica.”

“First century of the Common Era,” added Perry.

“Though I preferred his
De arboribus
,” chimed in Dr. Urradu.

“I like the recipes from
Apicius
, myself.”

I’d made some of the simpler dishes in the early Roman recipe collection attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius, a Roman gourmand and noted sybarite, and didn’t want to be left out of the academic one-upsmanship.

“Then you’ll like the
libum
cakes with honey we’re having for dessert,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott.

“They’re one of my favorites,” said Dr. Urradu. “Kori makes sure the chef serves them when I’m having lunch with her.”

“Then we’re beings of similar tastes,” I said. “
Libum
cakes are one of my favorites, too.”

The Nic
ó
sn smiled, but seemed a bit shy. He was rather young and I wondered if this was his first job since he’d earned his doctorate.

“How long have you been at the Carlos?” I asked.

“Just a few weeks,” said Dr. Urradu. “I’ll be working with Dr. Liddell-Scott over the summer. She’s going to help me turn what I’ve learned from my finds in the Euphrates valley and Cappadocia into a book.”

“You couldn’t be in better hands,” said Perry. “Terpsichory was one of my very best students. I’m proud to have been her thesis adviser.”

“You pushed me hard, Perry,” she said, “and taught me well. I’m glad to pass your wisdom on to the next generation of scholars.”

Perry’s chest puffed out, but his expression didn’t get supercilious, like it had at the airport. He was smiling at Dr. Liddell-Scott. Dr. Urradu looked like he wasn’t quite sure what to say. I came to his rescue.

“Where did you get your PhD?” I asked.

“Neue Staddam University.”

That was the top academic institution on Nic
ó
s. I was impressed.

“It was a wonderful place to study,” he said. “I worked with a first rate faculty at NSU and could connect to scholars in my field at other institutions across the planet.”

I’d only been on Nic
ó
s once, and just for a few months, to take a training class on high speed networking. Nic
ó
s had an incredible backbone network with yottabyte speeds and I envied how downloads seemed to be completed almost as soon I pressed the button to trigger them.

“High speed access must have been difficult when you were out in the field here on Terra,” I said.

“No,” said Dr. Urradu. “I was able to get a congruent uplink directly back to NSU with one of my department’s portable remote routers. I’d never have been able to get all my photos and data back to the cloud on Nic
ó
s without it. There aren’t many Terran Internet Service Providers in Kurdistan or the mountains of eastern Turkey.”

I nodded agreement. There was a pause in the conversation while we enjoyed our salads, then Perry and Dr. Urradu started discussing whether or not Nicósn influences in Mesopotamia had been felt as far west as Asia Minor. There was a lot of gesturing with salad forks from the other side of the table. I overheard Dr. Urradu telling Perry that he’d send him detailed photographs of curly-bearded Assyrian statues recently excavated in Cappadocia.

Dr. Liddell-Scott took advantage of their preoccupation to bring up what I knew she’d been considering since she first heard I did tech support. She turned toward me and got right to the point.

“I’ve got two tech problems.”

“Tell me about them,” I said.

“I have to take off my academic hat and put on my administrative one,” she said, “First, for the past few weeks we’ve been having Ahriman’s own time with our email system and critical messages aren’t being sent for days at a time.”

“Give me an example.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott. “Dr. Urradu was applying for a grant from Olympia Agnew and Roger Bacon’s Lamb-Cheops Foundation for Near Eastern Studies to support further excavations in Kurdistan last week. The deadline for applications was noon last Friday. He finished the paperwork late Thursday afternoon and emailed the grant request before he left for the day. I’d stopped by to see if he needed any help and was there to watch him push SEND.”

I hadn’t known such a foundation existed, but then I put two and two together. Roger Joe-Bob Bacon, the Pyr from the Waffle House who owned Khufu, Limited, must have intentionally partnered with Olympia Agnew, the Greek shipping magnate, just to pull off a pun. I didn’t let on that I was in on the joke.

“Let me guess,” I said. “The people at the foundation never received Dr. Urradu’s proposal?”

“That’s right,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott.

“Are you telling my tale of woe?” asked Dr. Urradu.

He and Perry shifted to join our conversation after the Nic
ó
sn realized Dr. Liddell-Scott was talking about him.

“Yes, Durra,” she said, using the familiar form of Dr. Urradu’s name. “Since Jack’s a technology expert, I thought he might have some insights.”

“I’ll try my best,” I said. “Please tell me what you did on the day you worked on the grant proposal,” I said. “I’m particularly interested in anything you sent by email.”

Perry was looking on with more interest than I’d expected to see from him on a technical topic. Maybe he really was coming around.

Dr. Urradu glanced up and noticed that it was past two o’clock. All the other diners had finished their meals, so we were alone in the caf
é
, except for the servers. The Nic
ó
sn academic looked more at ease talking about his tech problems without a public audience.

Then the next course was delivered to our table. It was Egyptian this time—slow-cooked fava beans with garlic, garnished with sliced hard boiled eggs. Hummus and pita bread came on the side. I was glad I didn’t have a
glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase
deficiency. Fava beans caused anemia in men with that genetic condition and I needed all my red blood cells in good working order.

None of us at the table started eating. Perry and Dr. Liddell-Scott wanted to see my investigative methods in action and Dr. Urradu was trying his best to document what I had asked for.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Buckston,” he said, “so much has happened since then, I’m having difficulty remembering.”

“Maybe I could go to your office and review your emails after lunch?” I said.

“Perry and I will be reviewing Durra’s research notes with him after lunch,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott. “Can you do it now?”

They were relegating the tech guy to sit in front of a computer instead of letting me stay for the rest of this delicious lunch? That didn’t make me happy. Dr. Liddell-Scott saw the change in my face.

“No, no,” she said. “Sorry. I meant can you do it
here
now?”

She pulled out her phone and gave it a few simple voice instructions. Curtains slid noiselessly back from a section of the caf
é’
s wall. A server brought a wireless keyboard and mouse to Dr. Liddell-Scott, but she waved him to give them to me.

“No,” I said, “Please give them to Dr. Urradu. He needs to log into his email.”

While the Nic
ó
sn was navigating to the right place with a browser and providing his credentials, I tried the fava beans with garlic. Lucky me, they were even good cold. The servers brought out another course—a platter of hot roast chicken and dates flavored with dill, mint and mustard. I promised myself I’d enjoy some of
this
dish while it was hot.

“Here it is, Dr. Buckston,” said Dr. Urradu. “I’ve scrolled back to last Thursday afternoon.”

I served myself a chicken breast and a few sweet dates, then passed the platter to Perry.

“Looks pretty typical, except for a high level of spam,” I said, examining his inbox while cutting off a morsel of chicken and half a pitted date with the edge of my fork.

“That’s the
other
problem I wanted to talk to you about,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott.

“Let’s focus on the first issue for now,” I said, popping the savory chicken and bit of sweet date into my mouth. I chewed and looked thoughtful, to buy myself time to think.

“Switch to your Sent Items folder, please,” I asked the Nic
ó
sn.

He did and I reviewed Dr. Urradu’s list of sent messages while eating more chicken. The answer, once I saw it, was obvious. I asked my phone to slave the wall screen to its own display. Then I told it to illustrate the problem and a few milliseconds later an animation explaining what had happened on Thursday appeared. My phone got cute and instead of a simple cartoon showing a generic bulging pipe, an image of a snake swallowing a pig showed on the wall screen.

“Before you sent off the grant application, did you happen to send a large collection of photos to another professor?”

“Ye-e-e-s,” said Dr. Urradu, stretching out the syllables. “I sent some very high resolution images of Assyrian statues that resembled ancient Nic
ó
sn deities to one of my colleagues at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.”

Dr. Liddell-Scott was beginning to realize what had happened. Her eyes got very big.

“Did you happen to note the total size of the attached images, Dr. Urradu?”

“No. Does it matter?” he asked.

“Terran email systems aren’t designed to handle thirty-five terabyte attachments,” I said. “You were trying to push a very large pig through a very small python.”

I should have realized the cause of the problem as soon as I figured out that the email issues started right after Dr. Urradu arrived. Network throughput has gotten a lot better since First Contact, but the capacity of most Terran Internet connections was still measured in gigabits, not terabytes.

“So every other message got stuck behind the ‘pig’?” asked Dr. Liddell-Scott. I could see she was worried about all the important emails she’d sent that were still queued and waiting.

“Exactly,” I said. “But it gets better.”

“Better?” asked Perry.

“Uh huh,” I said. “Dr. Urradu copied another dozen researchers at universities around the planet. The cumulative size of all the attachments is more than a petabyte.”

“Kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte,” recited Perry. “They’re all Greek prefixes. What’s after that?”

“Exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte.”

“Yottabyte?” I could see Perry chewing the word in his mouth.

“Networks on Nicós measure their capacity in yottabytes,” I said. “So Dr. Urradu never had a problem sending large attachments when he was at Neue Staddam University. Terran network speeds are the bottleneck.”

“Why aren’t our networks faster?” asked Dr. Liddell-Scott.

I just looked at her.

“Oh,” she said. “Of course. Cost.”

“Right,” I said. “We’ll get there, but it will take us at least another decade.”

“That explains why it took so long for my full season of the United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities meetings to download,” said Dr. Urradu.

Dr. Liddell-Scott tried, but failed to hide a laugh.

“Can you fix it?” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I need the administrator’s password for the mail server.”

“Uhmmm…” said Dr. Liddell-Scott.

“Just put me in touch with your IT manager.”

“We don’t have one.”

“Huh?” I said.

A brilliant response.

“He quit. Yesterday,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott, “without giving notice.”

“Could you borrow someone from the university?”

“My predecessor burned that bridge years ago,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott. “They won’t even take my calls.”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Make me look good,” I said to my phone,
sotto voce.

In less than two seconds the administrator’s console for the Carlos Museum’s email server appeared on the screen.

“Was it
password
?” I whispered.

“
Password123,
” replied my phone.

No wonder the former IT manager had left without giving notice. I navigated to the right panel, identified the offending oversized message and all its copies, and deleted them from the outbound message queue. Dr. Liddell-Scott and Dr. Urradu’s phones both began to buzz like hives of bees as copies of their now-released outbound messages arrived in clumps.

“Thank you,”
said Dr. Liddell-Scott. “You’re a life-saver.”

“What eventually happened with Dr. Urradu’s Lamb-Cheops Foundation grant application?” I asked.

“The head of the Foundation knew we were applying and called me when our materials hadn’t arrived by the deadline,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott. “She told me not to worry and said I should print out a hard copy and give it to the cook at the Waffle House on Virginia Avenue near Hartsfield port.”

I started grinning.

“It sounded odd,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott, “but she confirmed that would ensure our application would be considered.”

“I’m sure it will be fine.”

I’d have to tell Roger Joe-Bob Bacon the other side of the story some day.

Our servers brought out the last course—a plate stacked high with
libum
cakes drizzled with honey. They refilled our water glasses and quietly disappeared back into the kitchen. I decided to wait to have a
libum
cake. Honeyed fingers and keyboards aren’t a good combination.

“What was your second problem?”

“Spam,” said Dr. Liddell-Scott. “It’s overwhelming everyone on my team. It takes forever for emails from colleagues to hit our inboxes and when they do, we have to wade through hundreds of spam emails to find one legitimate email. Half the time the good emails are hiding
in
our spam folders.”

“That should be easy to fix,” I said.