why don’t you.’
‘I will,’ said Spads. ‘I need to come in.’
‘You’re the software boy that Agatha was phoning me about, I reckon.’ He looked up from his reading spectacles, a string tie on the frames looped around his neck.
‘I’m Spads.’
‘So you say.’ His white stubby beard twitched in amusement, the lines of his mouth crinkling as he wiped an oily hand on his overalls, before extending a palm towards Spads. ‘You look more like a Gerald Cuthbert to me.’
Spads hand was uncertainly reaching out to shake the proffered hand before he realized what the old man had called him. ‘How did—?’
‘Hell, boy. You think Frank Ludington’s my real name? Half the people down here’ve got fiction stamped on their passports. The office feels more like a witness protection scheme than a crown protectorate most days.’ He snickered.’ Maybe when people say you got to go underground , this is what they mean, eh? Firehall being around long enough for that saying to have originated down here. Well, someone call me Gerald, I’d get me a new handle too.’
Spads swung the dead billionaire’s monitor around and landed it on the bench, not taking his eyes off the rumbling mass of hard drives. ‘The tube train brings old drives in here, too?’
‘Every week, regular as taxes,’ said Ludington. ‘Just like us, eh, boy? Too useful to be thrown away, just needs to be forgotten. Tucked away, until the day come again.’ He lifted up a hard disk; an aluminium case tied with tight plastic cord marked ‘Ministry of Defence S.O.D’. Secure Only Disposal . Using wire cutters to slice away the plastic, Frank tossed the tie into an open bin bag and placed the drive on a moving belt that looked as though it should be rotating sushi dishes. The belt ended up at the far end of the room, an industrial arm on a wheeled platform marked Honda Automotive picking hard disks up, slotting them into the shelves and plugging in a network connection for their contents to be sucked into the office’s system. Green recycling crates lay in front of the shelves, and every so often a network connector would disengage, another robot limb trundling across and covering the disc in a lead box – a quick whining magnetic discharge to wipe it – and then the erased drive tumbled down towards the collection boxes.
‘So, you’re the fool that’s been choking our pipe with Brazilian data packets? Bandwidth down here is kind of thin, in case you haven’t noticed. Sir Christopher Wren didn’t exactly design this royal hidey hole with optical cabling and wireless relays in mind, the internet not being so popular back in the seventeenth century.’
Spads flexed his arm, working out the creaks from carrying the screen and pointed to the wall’s shelving. ‘Where does the data go that you’re mirroring?’
‘You really are a coder, aren’t you? All this time here, you’ve never walked down to the office’s mainframe level? Like nothing you’ve seen before. Homebrew kit, just to keep things interesting. Non-standard, to minimise leaks. Big old prehistoric cabinets, solid-state drives and a Linux fork that’s the Galapagos Islands as far as any system evolution you’d recognize. All the paper files are captured digitally too, before they’re incinerated. Quite a sight to behold. An OCR scanning line that can chop a telephone directory and read the data in less time than it takes a man to spit.’
‘Just like us,’ said Spads. ‘Filed but not forgotten. Not completely, anyhow.’ He had been meaning to investigate Wren’s underground palace. But physical complexity confused him sometimes. He often found it easier to ignore than explore. In the old flat in East London where Spads had lived for the first twenty years of his life, he had only ever walked the same route to the bus stop. Never explored the maze of roads that led off his street, never ventured through the parks and squares nearby. It always embarrassed Spads
‘I will,’ said Spads. ‘I need to come in.’
‘You’re the software boy that Agatha was phoning me about, I reckon.’ He looked up from his reading spectacles, a string tie on the frames looped around his neck.
‘I’m Spads.’
‘So you say.’ His white stubby beard twitched in amusement, the lines of his mouth crinkling as he wiped an oily hand on his overalls, before extending a palm towards Spads. ‘You look more like a Gerald Cuthbert to me.’
Spads hand was uncertainly reaching out to shake the proffered hand before he realized what the old man had called him. ‘How did—?’
‘Hell, boy. You think Frank Ludington’s my real name? Half the people down here’ve got fiction stamped on their passports. The office feels more like a witness protection scheme than a crown protectorate most days.’ He snickered.’ Maybe when people say you got to go underground , this is what they mean, eh? Firehall being around long enough for that saying to have originated down here. Well, someone call me Gerald, I’d get me a new handle too.’
Spads swung the dead billionaire’s monitor around and landed it on the bench, not taking his eyes off the rumbling mass of hard drives. ‘The tube train brings old drives in here, too?’
‘Every week, regular as taxes,’ said Ludington. ‘Just like us, eh, boy? Too useful to be thrown away, just needs to be forgotten. Tucked away, until the day come again.’ He lifted up a hard disk; an aluminium case tied with tight plastic cord marked ‘Ministry of Defence S.O.D’. Secure Only Disposal . Using wire cutters to slice away the plastic, Frank tossed the tie into an open bin bag and placed the drive on a moving belt that looked as though it should be rotating sushi dishes. The belt ended up at the far end of the room, an industrial arm on a wheeled platform marked Honda Automotive picking hard disks up, slotting them into the shelves and plugging in a network connection for their contents to be sucked into the office’s system. Green recycling crates lay in front of the shelves, and every so often a network connector would disengage, another robot limb trundling across and covering the disc in a lead box – a quick whining magnetic discharge to wipe it – and then the erased drive tumbled down towards the collection boxes.
‘So, you’re the fool that’s been choking our pipe with Brazilian data packets? Bandwidth down here is kind of thin, in case you haven’t noticed. Sir Christopher Wren didn’t exactly design this royal hidey hole with optical cabling and wireless relays in mind, the internet not being so popular back in the seventeenth century.’
Spads flexed his arm, working out the creaks from carrying the screen and pointed to the wall’s shelving. ‘Where does the data go that you’re mirroring?’
‘You really are a coder, aren’t you? All this time here, you’ve never walked down to the office’s mainframe level? Like nothing you’ve seen before. Homebrew kit, just to keep things interesting. Non-standard, to minimise leaks. Big old prehistoric cabinets, solid-state drives and a Linux fork that’s the Galapagos Islands as far as any system evolution you’d recognize. All the paper files are captured digitally too, before they’re incinerated. Quite a sight to behold. An OCR scanning line that can chop a telephone directory and read the data in less time than it takes a man to spit.’
‘Just like us,’ said Spads. ‘Filed but not forgotten. Not completely, anyhow.’ He had been meaning to investigate Wren’s underground palace. But physical complexity confused him sometimes. He often found it easier to ignore than explore. In the old flat in East London where Spads had lived for the first twenty years of his life, he had only ever walked the same route to the bus stop. Never explored the maze of roads that led off his street, never ventured through the parks and squares nearby. It always embarrassed Spads
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