Xochitl sighed and dropped eye contact with the young woman in front of her.
“Xochitl. So-chee. X-O-C-, oh, never mind.” The food runner will butcher it anyway. “Just use Fontaine, okay? I can answer to that.”
“Sure, Miss Fontaine. That's one naked chicken burrito, wet, with cilantro and fresh jalapeños, a side of chips and queso, and a large unsweetened tea. Can we get you anything else? Chocolate chimi for dessert?”
Xochitl, still looking down at the register, barely registered the question but recognized the Upsell Voice enough to shake her head and grunt dismissively. When she realized that she was staring at her own reflection in the polished stainless steel of the cash register, she shook her head again to clear it and made a motion to hand the cashier her debit card.
“Okay, that'll be $8.27.” The cashier took the card, not bothering to flip it over to look at the signature on the back, nor to compare the embedded photo to that of the cardholder standing in front of her. “Debit or credit?” The cashier swiped the card without waiting for an answer.
Xochitl sighed again and pointed at the debit keypad on her side of the register. A quick left-to-right glance didn't reveal anyone too interested, so she jabbed her PIN into the device. Her receipt printed almost immediately, and she had grabbed it and was on her way toward the drink fountain within a few seconds after that.
Ahh, technology – Enabler of the antisocial.
Xochitl filled her plastic cup with ice past the lip, repositioned, then flipped the tab on the tea dispenser. She sighed again when she saw that her assumption had been right – the tea in the urn was still hot enough to immediately melt most of the ice in her cup.
Lame!
She stopped half-way and added more ice, hoping there would still be some by the time she got to her table. She started to turn away from the fountain, but then thought better of herself and put her tray back down to take a quick swig from her cup. At least this time they hadn't put the sweet tea in the wrong urn. Gag.
Grabbing her tray, she turned again and scanned for a good table. Since it was mid-afternoon, the place was almost entirely empty. She weaved her way through the mess of chairs, tables, and debris to head for the booth in the corner away from the front windows. She sat in the same area whenever they came here, so she knew Brian would have no trouble finding her.
Before she sat down she dropped the order number tent on the outer rim of the table and slid her drink, napkins, and utensils into place next to it. She walked her empty tray over to the nearest garbage stand and pushed it into the appropriate slot. A sign with a mustachioed jalapeño and a habañero in a sombrero admonished her to not throw away baskets.
On the other side of the island was a hot sauce bar, which she skimmed looking for anything marked with a black and red skull and crossbones. (Again, of course, a jalapeño's skull.) She grabbed a paper cup, filled it with the red chunky substance, and made her way back to the table.
She zoned out before her back hit the booth, so when the tray clattered down to the table in front of her she jumped visibly.
“Freak much?” Brian unloaded the tray and made a similar excursion to the garbage and hot sauce bar.
“Jerk.”
“Me? You were the one off in your cave. I even brought you your food, so how am I the jerk?”
Xochitl looked down and saw her burrito in front of her. As she always ordered it naked, no tortilla, it was a bit more than a stretch to call it a burrito. Brian always referred to it as “BurritoMass” and then proceeded to make lame puns involving DNA, RNA, cloning, and Star Trek transporter malfunctions. Dork!
“It was sitting on the counter when I ordered, so I thought I'd be nice and bring it over before the next ice age.” As he put his order number tent next to hers on the table he couldn't help but look up at the counter to make sure his lunch hadn't suffered the same fate.
“Nice. I guess minimum wage isn't the great motivator it used to be. It gives me a warm fuzzy to think that just anyone had access to my food.” She paused to dump out the paper ramekin of hot sauce onto the BurritoMass. “Is it just me or have we been eating an awful lot of burritos lately? How many times in the last week?”
Brian chuffed. This was his way of communicating that her question was somehow wrong.
“Two since Monday, and four in the past seven days.”
There it was: her usage of the word “week” was too ambiguous, possibly meaning both calendar and duration. Xochitl rolled her eyes in response.
“Either way, that's too many. And it's been a different place each time. This city has entirely too many burrito joints.” She began to mix her BurritoMass and couldn't help but giggle as the opening verses of Macbeth ran through her head. She gave up after a few seconds of Brian ignoring her.
“People are finally figuring out that if our ancestors were able to live off of the same basic ingredients for thousands of years, they can't be all that bad. Rice, beans, veggies, meat. Besides, I've seen you eat. Words like “voracious” and “frenzied” don't do it justice. You'd think a burrito had done you wrong in a previous life.”
He got up, before she could retort, and walked off to track down his missing lunch.
Xochitl snarked at him as he left, but simultaneously took the opportunity to stab her fork into the mass and start eating. She'd never admit it, but Brian was spot-on in her description of her eating habits. The most accurate way to describe it would probably be to say “she ate like a growing teenage boy”. That is, she ate almost anything and everything, and in large quantities, and often, and generally didn't think twice about it.
Despite her mutant diet, Xochitl Green was about as average as they come. At 26, she was neither athletic, nor chubby, but an average that meant “I'm lucky I don't have to work out”. She was maybe on the tall side of average at 5' 8”, but that may also have been because it seemed that everyone around her was tragically short. Her Mexican and Celtic heritage had produced thin hair that wasn't so much “jet black” or “inky black” or even “raven black”, but was probably most easily described as just “matte black”. Her eyes were a similarly unremarkable shade of blue.
The Celts had won the dermatological battle in the gene war, so she was a tad on the pale side with freckles only a half-shade darker and mostly unnoticed by everyone except Brian. The Mexicans had left a parting gift, in that she didn't sunburn like a Celt. The Celts, displeased at this, cursed her with an inability to tan. This produced a skin tone that most people figured could always just use an hour or so more out in the sun.
Brian, however, was a bit further down the scale than Xochitl. That's not to say that he was ugly or in any way unappealing, just that his adjective would probably be “stereotypical”. Stereotypical Geek, that is, and all of the trappings that come with the title.
His skin was noticeably paler than Xochitl's, and when combined with his wavy but similarly pale blonde hair, placed him more in the “zombie-esque” range. The fact that he constantly seemed sleep-deprived and had the characteristic dark circles around sunken eyes only reinforced that image. The only thing he had to help him out was the fact that he'd probably eaten a few too many burritos and spent too few hours on an elliptical machine and had earned himself a padded frame. He probably couldn't have looked any more like a Network Administrator if he'd tried.
Xochitl was a third of the way through her burrito by the time he got back. He made a point of accidentally brushing the unused order number tents onto the seat of the booth as he put his plate down on the table. He chuffed and she grunted in agreement. Xochitl continued to vacuum her food directly from her plate while Brian ate at a human pace, and the two continued mostly silent that way for the next 5 minutes. It was Brian, of course, that finally spoke up.
“I was thinking about the peer-to-peer problem that you've been ranting about lately.”
Xochitl slowed her eating for a few seconds to show that she was listening.
“On the one hand, I see what you're saying. You want your music or your TV or your movies or whatever, and I agree that it sucks that you have to buy them new each and every time you want it in a different format – LP to cassette to CD, VHS to LaserDisc to DVD to Blu-Ray, and so on.”
His spork jabbed circles into the air between them as he talked. This went unnoticed by Xochitl, who would have seemed to be recovering from a decade-long liquid diet given her intent devotion to the solid food in front of her.
“However, I can also see the other side, in that if I'm an artist or whatever, I still want to be able to make a living, so I'd like to be able to at least make sure that I'm not getting totally screwed.”
Xochitl showed that she was at least listening by making a “fair enough” shrug to signal him to continue.
“iTunes still has a few kinks, but has already shown that people will buy the media if it is reasonably priced, be it music or video or whatever. So here we are. The future is within sight. The masses want the media, the artists want to make a bit of cash and be heard, and we just need a way to get from Point A to Point B and keep everyone happy along the way.”
The condiments and utensils on the table were rearranged maniacally as he illustrated his point. Xochitl was pretty sure the artists were represented by the Tabasco and the masses were the Cholula, but she might have had it backward.
“And thus we get to your favorite part: control. Digital Rights Management is a dumb route as it can never keep up with the times, and it's so draconian and untrusting. And I pity the fools that are buying the DRM-enabled CDs now that won't be able to use them as anything more than coasters in 5 years, let alone 10, because nothing can read them. They are the 8-tracks of our generation. And honestly, playing the artist here, do I really have a right to tell you how many copies you can make for yourself? That's just greedy. As long as you don't start selling the copies, what right do I have to say otherwise?”
“But this whole “poisoning the well” thing that's been going on lately is interesting. You said that there are companies that all they do is do man-in-the-middle attacks on the P2P swarms?”
Xochitl nodded and did her best to snort with a full mouth.
“But I thought most modern P2P protocols were resistant to that sort of thing?”
Xochitl did an “eh” frown followed by a “mostly” shrug and continued to chew.
“So explain it to me, then. What's the point?”
Brian resumed eating to show that she needed to talk for a while as his burrito was beginning to congeal. Xochitl swallowed enough of the food in her mouth to allow her to speak and still eat at the same time.
“Yeah, distributed hash tables and all that rot make it mostly tamper resistant. But I guess the point is to discourage the freeloaders and waste their time. When someone downloads a bad piece, they have to download it all over again. To make things more complex, many P2P protocols allow you to download chunks of data smaller than pieces.” She preemptively cocked her head and held up a finger to ward off the impending raised eyebrow.
“A piece, in P2P terms, is the smallest unit of data that has a pre-generated hash signature associated with it. It's an atom. You might assemble the atom out of protons, neutrons, and electrons, the chunks, but until it's a complete atom you can't really do anything with it. So the problem is that if you take one chunk from one guy and another from another and so on and put them together to make a full piece that you can verify, and you see that it's bad, you can't tell which guy is sending you bad data because the hash signatures only verify the whole atom, not the chunks.”
“There's even some guy that's using some big iron to come up with hash collisions to do more than that. He spends days generating a bogus piece with the same signature as a good piece. He uploads his bad piece and others pass it on until someone actually notices the problem by listening to the MP3 or watching the movie or whatever. But in the time it takes to generate a single hash collision for a specific file a ton of people have already downloaded the unaltered original. That's why the current focus is more on frustration than corruption.”
“Okay. So these bad guys are hired by the artists –”
“Not the artists, the corporations. There's a difference.”
“Right, sorry. The bad guys are hired by the corporations to just sit around and pretending to be part of the swarm and upload bogus data to anyone they find?”
“Yep.”
“That's weird. Won't users just figure out who is sending the bad data and set up firewall rules to block them?” This time it was Brian that waved off Xochitl's response. “Yeah, I know that your average user has no clue and doesn't even know what a firewall is, much less how to configure it. But I have to figure that at least some people do.”
“Yep. Some.”
“But that's got to get pretty unwieldy, managing all of those hostile IP addresses.”
“Right. And it's compounded by the fact that the bad guys are doing this from hundreds, if not thousands of machines.”
Brian held up a finger and cocked his head to stare at the ceiling for a second.
“Wait. Have they started using the zombies yet?”
“Not yet. Let's hope they don't figure that one out.” Xochitl shuddered at the thought of literally millions of unpatched, unmaintained, virus-laden computers being fed instructions from the bad guys, all while the clueless users continued to buy gold-plated knitting needles off eBay, blissfully and tragically unaware.
“Adaptive firewalls and filters are being maintained that list bad guys like this and allow people to stay up to date through a sort of collaborative effort. When a new set of bad guys come online, people notice a spike in the bad data and submit the IPs to a centralized database.”
Brian frowned, obviously not impressed.
“Yeah, I know. It's not a great solution. Good people accidentally get blacklisted. Bad people go unnoticed. Everyone has fights about who is good, who is bad, and how much of a difference there is between the two. It's ORBS all over again. But that's where I hit the wall. Short of using the zombies to attack the bad guys, which is a little aggressive for my tastes, I'm out of ideas.”
“Right, and that's where Brian, hero to the little people, comes in to save the day.” Xochitl couldn't even be bothered to snort a response to this. “You need a trust network.” Xochitl did deign to snort at this, however.
“You're not going to go all “Semantic Web” and “Web 2.0” on me, are you?”
“No, no, no. No buzzword bingo. I'm completely serious. I had to do a couple of papers on trust networks back in my school days. They're perfect for what you need here.”
“Okay, I'm listening.” Her burrito all but finished, she had slowed her eating to a relatively human pace and was now scooping up the remnants with tortilla chips. Brian chose to not point out the contradiction in this.
“What do you know about darknets and friendnets?”
Xochitl shook her head.
“Okay, I'll start from the beginning. Trust Networks 101. A darknet is a private P2P network or LAN. It's like an Illuminati meeting. Unless you know someone who knows someone, you don't even know the meeting is going on, and you certainly couldn't get in if you just stumbled on it. You only connect and share with a small, known group of computers instead of anyone and everyone. Darknets are the precursor to what I'm about to suggest.”
Xochitl waved him on, tortilla in hand.
“Moving on. Your life is a trust network. Okay, maybe not your life, as you never actually talk to anyone but me.” He paused for effect and the impending eyebrow. “Instead we'll use Jim –”
“The bagel guy?”
“No, the one in Marketing who is always coming in hungover on Mondays. You've seen his cronies?”
Nod.
“Think concentric rings. Let's call him Ring 0, because hopefully he trusts himself, and his cronies are Ring 1 – people he trusts above all others.”
The Tabasco was now apparently Jim. Splenda packets became his cronies.
“Presumably he doesn't go get hammered with everyone he knows, so there's a Ring 2 – people he knows and generally trusts but not nearly as much. We could go on creating rings ad infinitum to measure how much faith he puts in the people around him and the people around those people.”
“Of course, Jim's Number One Cronie, Abe, has his own set of rings.” One of the Splenda packets was replaced by the Cholula and several brown cane sugar packets were interspersed with the others.
“Like ripples in a pond, there will be places where those rings intersect and there will be spaces in between. In the intersections are people. Maybe the person at that intersection, Connie, gets a bit more trust from both Jim and Abe because each knows the other trusts her.”
A stack of plain white sugar packets became Connie. “Conversely, if Connie says that Abe's ex-wife is among her inner ring, Connie may go down in Abe's opinion and get a bit less trust from him.”
Xochitl, not getting it, had long since finished her burrito and cleared off as much of the table as she could for Brian's condiment armada. “I mostly follow what you're saying – it's a mesh, a fractal landscape.”
“Sort of. Technically, all that is a friendnet: applying your real-world relationships to your online presence.”
“... and I presume you have a point coming ... ?”
“Merge the three things we've been talking about: a P2P network plus a trust network plus a list of bad guys. Really, the third one is an extension of the second, but we'll keep them separate for now.”
“Sounds like Friendster or something.”
“Until you add in the third part and let it take over how you talk to the rest of the world. Then it becomes just like a cocktail party.”
He continued quickly before she could interrupt.
“You're at a cocktail party. You tell your group of friends that the blonde at the door is hot, and they help you bag her. Er, or him. You come away from the inevitable smack-down and tell your friends that the blonde is a jerk and called you names, and none of them will talk to her. They'll tell their friends about the story and so on. Eventually, presuming you're at a party with a strong web of trust, the blonde won't have anyone left that will talk to her and she'll just leave.”
Xochitl was stock still, staring at Brian.
“You're not keeping one Santa's List of naughty names for the entire party because you don't have to. You just ask your friends if they know anything about the blonde. If they do, they tell you and you make up your estimation of her based on what they say. If no one knows anything, you try talking to her and see what comes of it.”
He paused to signify that he was coming out of metaphor-land and back to the real world. “It's basically like a really big friendnet. Normally a friendnet is made up of people you've met in person, but if you were careful you could learn from how one person interacts with another and make a trust estimate from that.”
Brian noticed that Xochitl still hadn't moved and began to wonder if she had forgotten how to breathe. “Xoch? Uh ... Xoch?” She blinked, but he still couldn't tell if she was breathing. “You okay?”
Xochitl made a concerted effort to raise a hand and wave an okay sign. Her back, until then stonily rigid, relaxed and her forehead dropped into her waiting upturned hand. Her other hand banged the table. Again, louder. A third time, even louder, this time enough to make Brian meerkat up above the booth to make sure that no one was staring at them. He thought she looked like she was having brain freeze, but he knew the tea here was never cold enough to retain ice, much less give her a headache. He reached out to touch her arm, but then drew back as he realized what he was doing.
“Xoch?”
Her head came up and turned toward the ceiling. He could see that her eyes were completely unfocused and she saw nothing around her. She rotated the empty hand and extended her forefinger to say “wait”.
Brian was still a little freaked out, but he finally caught on that she was okay, just thinking. He'd seen her lost in thought before, but this was almost ... catatonic. He tried to stop staring at her and forced himself to look at his plate to start eating again. He found he wasn't hungry anymore andlooked back up to speak.
“Seriously, Xoch, it wasn't that good of an idea. Someone had to have thought of it before me, right?”
The finger pushed forward with a slight waggle.
Having gotten an almost immediate response, he started to unclench and feel okay about her condition. He worked to relax all of the muscles he had tensed without realizing it. He realized that she only barely heard him anyway, so he may as well shut up and clean the table.
He stood up, telling himself it was to gain better access to the entire table, but he knew it was really because he was too fidgety to sit any more. It took him a minute or two to re-stack all of the sweetener packets back in their tray, pile all of the other detritus onto his plate, do a once-over wipe of the table with an extra napkin, dump all of the garbage in the receptacle, and return to the table. Xochitl seemed as if she hadn't moved, her hand still extended to ward him off.
Brian looked at his watch, realized that they had plenty of time before they needed to be back at the office, and sat back down. He unclipped his cell phone from its belt case and thumbed through the menus. None of the servers had blown up since they left. One of the Marketroids had sent him an email telling him that the Internet was down and he couldn't get his Yahoo!. This normally would have amused Brian enough to show it to Xochitl and have a good laugh over it, but not this time. He deleted the email, knowing that if the user hadn't figured it out by the time they got back from lunch he'd just have a voice mail to remind him to look into it.
When Brian next looked up, Xochitl's other hand had come up to join its twin and both were making small movements. It didn't quite look like she was typing or conducting some unheard symphony. From the way her hands rotated and grabbed at the air, it almost looked like she was assembling something.
He went back to his email and started to filter out the spam that had slipped through his filters. It amazed him that Chinese and Russian spammers would bother sending spam to a “.us” domain. Why were there no Maori spammers? Or someone else interesting?
Finished, Brian considered playing a quick game of Tetris but then noticed the time. He locked the phone, clipped it to his belt, and inhaled, mentally steeling himself for dealing with Xochitl again.
Xochitl had stopped making the assembly movements and was sitting back in the booth with a smile.
“I can't believe no one has done this yet.”
“No one?”
“The pieces, yes, but no one has put them all together. Turning your firewall into an edge in a peer-to-peer distributed trust network? Nope. Not that I know of, and if this thing is anywhere near as effective as I think it would be, I would definitely have heard of it.”
“Huh. Cool. Think I could patent it?” His leer said that he was kidding, but Xochitl groaned anyway. “Sorry! Joke!”
They sat in silence for another minute before Brian's grin widened and a chuckle escaped him. Xochitl's eyebrow responded for her.
“Art imitating life. I've just given you the idea to bring cliques and popularity contests to how people talk with each other on the 'net. Not just “Hot Or Not”, but computers telling each other who they should and shouldn't communicate with based on reputations.”
“It'll take some doing, but I think we can pull it off.” This time, it was Brian's eyebrow that answered. “You aren't going to make me do this all by myself, are you?”
“Xoch, you know I'd love to help you, but you also know that I've got IP entanglements right now. In fact, we never had this conversation, okay? Not if you ever want this to see the light of day.”
Xochitl grimaced, then growled.
Brian had only just started working with Xochitl two months ago. The company he'd been at before was a startup that had hired him to do some of the heavy lifting on the web application that a pair of guys had come up with. The pay was good, but Brian hadn't realized it was a little too good. If he'd read his contract closer, he would have known that he was only on for a 6-month job, and that wasn't even the bad part.
Deep in the contract's fine print was an intellectual property clause – most jobs had them these days. When Brian saw the boilerplate verbiage about all of his ideas belonging to the company he glossed over the rest. What he missed was the extra part about how anything he developed within another 6 months after his contract expired would be considered “influenced by or derived from” his work on the job, and therefore also the property of the startup. It had been a Herculean effort just to get him the Network Administrator job at Xochitl's company. He only got it because he had agreed not to do any development for 6 months. Whether or not it was legal or ethical, no one wanted to get sued by a company with a signed contract and a lot of unencumbered cash.
“Yeah, they're bastards. We know this. Give me four months and I can help you out.”
“Never mind. I'll just use you for your brain. No paper trail that way.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
They sat in silence. Again. Xochitl's eyes had lost focus when Brian's cell began to vibrate. He glanced at the display, suddenly remembering how late for work they were.
“It's the Emperor. We need to get back.” He got up from the booth and for the hundredth time had to suppress the urge to offer her a hand up. He knew the correct action was to turn and start walking, and as soon as he did she got up and followed. He frowned and rolled his eyes at himself.
He really, really needed to get over her.
-----
Brian watched Xochitl get even more withdrawn and reserved over the next two months, if that was even possible, as she worked on her new project. They still went to lunch, but most of the outings passed with only the briefest of conversations, and only about mundane things such as the current world news.
Xochitl had taken to carrying a small notebook with her, everywhere, and most of her time was spent flipping the pages back and forth and scrawling diagram after diagram into it. Brian saw that the drawings ranged from what looked like social networks to Venn Diagrams to flow control logic to mathematical plots.
Xochitl had asked one or two icebreaker-type questions in the first few days, mainly looking for references and places to start. After that they had never spoken about it again. Brian wasn't too slighted by this, as he knew that's just how she was – she would immerse herself in the technology and figure it out for herself. She knew that not understanding something from the ground up was the mark of an amateur.
He'd seen dedication like this before, but not nearly as intense. When she'd been hired by their company out of college, she'd had a rude awakening. The Emperor had come to her and given her the task of building the company's web site from scratch. The kicker was that he had wanted it done in what was then still an infant language: Java. Brian had messed around with Java a bit back in college, but never got anywhere with it. At the time, it had been so new that they hadn't yet started teaching it in schools.
Xochitl was dead in the water. She asked Brian for a few pointers and then proceeded to go on a self-imposed reality exile. A month later she emerged and had Java pinned to the mat. She finished the web site on schedule and dazzled the Emperor, who never learned that she'd had no clue what she was doing a month earlier.
Until that point, Xochitl had always been a good programmer, but she had lacked the passion that had driven Brian – the passion that separates a code monkey from a guru. The passion that drives the guru to not just write code for a living, but because they must.
These days Xochitl was an absolute sponge, soaking up any language and technology she'd come in contact with. Brian's passion had always kept them even in their college classes, but now he would have to admit that her skills were on a higher level than his. Add in passion, and Brian had an inferiority complex almost overnight.
Brian enjoyed coding and picking apart problems to find solutions, but Xochitl blew him away in this. Xochitl was one of those people that you hate watching mystery movies with, because she always had it figured out in the first half hour. She once told him that she had stopped reading mystery novels when she was a teenager because by that point they just bored her. (Or, the author would just pull an Agatha Christie at the end and suddenly reveal previously unknown facts. This generally made her throw the book away without bothering to read the last half dozen pages.) She hadn't said this to brag, but with a sadness – she had wanted more of a challenge.
Xochitl was now in her cave 24/7. The woman sitting at her desk and hacking the Emperor's ideas for new features into their web site was barely even Xochitl. Brian always saw this as a kind of resource starvation: there was no way he could compete with the rampant ideas that were multiplying and filling up her head. Her Human Interface Device Driver was normally a flaky and rudimentary piece of code, but now it was running with only a fraction of her processor. The best he could do was to make sure she kept eating and getting to where she needed to go.
The worst part, to Brian, was that no one else in the office seemed to notice. They'd never really paid that much attention to Xochitl in the first place, and that didn't change now. They put in their bug reports and trouble tickets and feature enhancement requests, and they passed on their voice and email messages, and magically everything got done. Xochitl had been quietly handling things for so long, many people had stopped thinking about her as a person. Even the Emperor had stopped coming by except in the most dire of emergencies, which were very few and far between because Xochitl had it under control.
How could they not care that she was coming in with darker and darker circles around her eyes? How could they not notice that most of her email correspondence, while never all that verbose, was now almost entirely reduced to Auto-Replies and messages consisting solely of “This is done”?
But at the same time he knew that he couldn't talk to her about it. Or try to comfort her. Or in any way acknowledge the white elephant in the room. Those were the types of conversations that Xochitl simply did not have. No, he'd have to just watch and try to make sure she found her way back to them. To him.