Free Roo'd by Joshua Klein Page B

drives and arranged them in the case he'd rolled out the bag and plugged in. The OLED overhead had a good wide viewing angle, so he could see it pretty much anywhere from the inside of the tent, and after a few minutes of playing with it he'd set it up as a light. It cycled through some color patterns he'd pulled from an old UCLA psych lab, stuff designed to enhance productivity and encourage calm thinking. A short while later he found that Tonx had given him root on the cluster in his room, and that the cluster was heavy; his brother had scored some powerful machines. Fede grinned in the dim light of the tent, appreciating both that Tonx trusted him enough to let him have complete Admin privileges and that the boxes he was going to play with were respectably badass. He set up some background daemons and routed their output to run along the edge of the OLED. They would keep him informed of the cluster's resources and monitor other users, if any. Then he synced his goggles and chord to the OLED and set his gogs for medium opacity. Now when he looked at his workspace, floating over his field of vision, the OLED sat behind it, slowly pulsing and cycling through the color tests. His status charts were lined up neat, his buffers clear, ready to go. He set up a few compile jobs and keyed in a script to let him drop them onto the OLED instead of in his immediate vision, and went to work.
    His first task was homework. He'd already sketched out what he thought he wanted the virus's executable to look like, but he didn't know nearly enough about handling data sets of that size. A few search agents later he found that the National University of Laos was getting a lot of rep for their statistical analysis approach to genome-related data processing. Most first-world corporations were ignoring the actual number crunching in favor of predictive programming and fancy guesswork using chaos theory and quantum computing, but Laos was sufficiently backwards to be breaking new ground on the topic. Fortunately most of their scientists were from L.A., so he didn't have to worry about running the coursework and research papers through a translator. It was tough work, though; the math was way over his head and he had to cross-reference the pertinent parts of undergrad courses from other universities for most of the afternoon to get up to speed.
    Fortunately Universities were set up as huge reference corpuses. Since the work Laos was doing was based on fairly common math (albeit math deemed impractical for use due to the computational power required) Fede was able to find a bunch of FAQs and tutorials arranged by relevance to the learning methods he liked to use. They were highlighted in order so he could jump back to the example problems illustrated in the coursework. Fede knew it was incomplete knowledge at best, but it meant he could transfer it into code, which was the problem at hand. It was a delicate balance - if you ignored too much you were bound to misapply the formula and not know it, and if you didn't skim over enough you could spend the rest of your life researching. But figuring out what was important and how to apply it was what Fede did. It was what he was good at.
    Six hours later Fed's eyes were burning and his back was sore, but he had the basis of the Laotian formulas he'd need. He'd completed the fifteen sample sets used in their quarterly exams and walked through at least eight introductory tutorials. He flipped up his goggles and rubbed his eyes, keyed off the OLED and crawled out of the tent.
    It was quiet, the only sound the gentle hum of the air intake ducts high in the walls overhead. Fede stretched into empty space, reaching for the ceiling and smiling. He bent and reached for his feet, wiggled his toes and his fingers, crawled back into the tent. He tore a single-serving sack of juice from its foil string and ripped open a nutraceutical bar. Old fashioned, yoghurt-coated. He pulled a stack of shirts out from his bag and