Boy Wonder

Me?  I'll have a Steakman Martini. Dry. Up. With olives. I like olives dressed in martinis. Yeah, it has to be Steakman.  Believe it or not, there's a difference in gin.  My brother tried to educate my palate to Sharpbeam and Cathay but my tongue refuses the education.  The only martini that tastes right to me is a Steakman.

You don't carry it?  Then, I'll have a beer.

The local's fine.

Would you turn on the HV? Yeah, HNN. They'll be broadcasting from the White Dome today. Can't miss this one; it's a first in human history. They're going to excommunicate a guy from the human race.

Thanks. Looks like we've got a few minutes till the big event.

So, how do you like this place? Been working here long?

Yeah, I've been here a couple of times. Whenever I stay at the Hotel Perseus, I drop by. Has a special feeling for me, you know?

I was program manager for this place. We did this one and two other bars in the hotel.  We did the VR. Actually, to say 'we' did them fixes too much credit on myself and most of the others. After all, we had the Boy Wonder on our team and he did the design. The rest of us just filled in on the stuff he didn't want to do.

The Boy Wonder's a hell of an engineer. Came out of a tiny school over on Greenfields. It's an ag school, mostly, with an engineering college thrown in to earn accreditation. Burbank U. They're mostly known for their space hockey team. Won the GCAA a couple years in a row. The Boy Wonder played right wing.  Too much energy to be a goalie; couldn't sit still for any length of time.

Yeah, it's quite a game. Orbiting arenas and 3-D instead of two; jets on the players' hips instead of skates on their feet, inverted the goals in opposition, the team sport to top all team sports. Takes an extraordinary mind to keep people above and below you in mind. You have to constantly re-orient yourself top to bottom from offense to defense. The Boy Wonder has that kind of mind;  it's what makes him such a hotshot engineer.

Why do I call him the Boy Wonder? It started on our first program together. We worked at Wellsper Systems, part of the Starbus Corporation. Wellsper's major line is stabilization systems for space stations and satellites but they have a minor in IT to help them make smart stabilizers. That's what we did, Scott and I and the rest; we built controllers.

Our first job together was a rush-job controller for the USG's  Crab Pulsar Orbiter. Had to design and produce that baby in less than a year. Getting a processor to work in that environment took state-of-the art engineering which is where the Boy Wonder fit in. Just out of school, he didn't know the combination of technology and schedule was impossible. He took the GAL-STD-1750N - it was just off the drawing boards in those days - and built a rad-hard nanoprocessor that's still ticking today. 
Three-hundred-fifty-thousand lines of code playing on radiation-harderned electronics and we did it in ten months flat. Forty-three engineers, thirty-five of them software guys. Scott wasn't the technical director but the engineer who was knew enough to back off and let Scott have his way. As program manager, I just stayed the hell out of both their way.
Well, mostly, I stayed the hell out of Scott's way. I learned pretty fast that if I let him go, let him do it his way, we'd have a better chance of getting it done. He pulled it off, too. Twenty-seven years old at the time. Everyone else on the team was at least five years older and five years senior. That's why I called him the Boy Wonder. You ever notice how engineers aren't thought very much of? I mean, take Einstein. Household name, right? Or Chomsky or Hawking?  Theorists. Theorists make the history books and the talk shows. The guys that do the work, you never hear about them. If there was justice in this universe, they wouldn't be excommunicating the Boy Wonder today; they'd be enshrining him in an Engineering Hall of Fame or opening a new wing of the Smithsonian dedicated to his work.
He's just an engineer, though, so they're going to excommunicate him.

Hell yes, I know what he did. He gave FTL to the Trapezioids and they have selfishly declined to share that gift with humanity. The Traps are more than willing to let us lease space on their FTL vans; they're just not willing to show us how it's done.
I know why Scott did it. That's something they're not likely to talk about today while they have their little party.
The truth of the matter of the matter is that FTL is a Phroen achievement. Everyone knows the Phroen use mental and physical quantuum entities as propellant. No one knows how they do it.  No one until the Boy Wonder.What the Boy Wonder did was to decipher the engineering behind the Phroen implementation  and then reproduce it mechanically.
This bar we're sitting in is the first step in the process.  The virtual reality that enfolds us as we sit here is a crucial aspect of the Boy Wonder's FTL drive. It was while we were working this job that Scott - you know that's his name, right? Scott Townsend? - it was while we were doing this job that he got the idea of how to do Phroen FTL.You wouldn't believe what we had to do to get this job. Remember I told you good ole Wellsper's main line of business is space station and satellite stabilization devices? Those systems depend on gyro technology, momentum wheels, stuff like that. They make smart wheels now but the management at Wellsper has never been comfortable with the processor side of the business. The Engineering Directors tend to come out of the mechanisms side of the house and processor technology seems more like black magic than engineering to those guys.
The Request for Proposal came out of North Ascension-Rockpit, the prime for the Hotel Perseus. Wellsper has a long history of working with the NARks.  In fact, that job I told you about, the Crab Pulsar Orbiter, was a NARk contract.
Scot’s first look at the RFP for the Hotel Perseus VR bars convinced him we could use the GAL-STD-1750N to pull it off. We wouldn't need a radiation hardened model and that would lower the cost considerably.He had the system designed before we finished writing the proposal.
That's when things first started to go wrong for the Boy Wonder. Our beloved Directors at Wellsper got cold feet. We'd never done VR before. They weren't at all sure about risking the company fortune on some new gizmo that none of them understood. Mechanisms, remember?
That was my major contribution. That's why we program managers get the big bucks. I hauled Scott out of that bid/no-bid meeting and sent him back to his cubicle.
That's another thing that drove Scott crazy. He'd pulled off a major coup with the Crab Pulsar Orbiter but company policy is that only senior engineers get private offices and to be a senior engineer you have to be with the company at least ten years. Scott got a cubicle.
I went back into the meeting to point out to those idiots that while we had never done VR, our sister division over on Boeing's World was a universal leader in the field. What's the good of having all that technology in the family if we didn't use it? The Directors understood that logic. Well, they really understood that here was a way to transfer responsibility for the project from themselves to the sister division but they gave me the okay to go talk to Wellsper IT. If I could get their support, we could bid the job.
Getting Wellsper IT to go along was a kick. Not-Invented-Here is their major product. Sure, they'd go along with us as long as we didn't need any of their resources and - most importantly - as long as we didn't endanger their patent on fluorine-based nanoprocessors. At the time, the rest of the universe was still using carbon-based models and - rightfully so - they were jealous of their product.
Unfortunately, the GAL-STD-1750N Scott wanted to use is carbon based. My management and the management of our sister division wanted us to use the Wellsper 1000A; Scott wanted to use the –1750N.The only way to pull it off was to do two proposals, the primary and an alternate. It was a hell of a dance I danced selling an alternate proposal and I earned my salary convincing the Directors we had to do both versions to be sure of winning the job.
I told Scott the NARks would not want to tie themselves to Wellsper proprietary technology and would - if we could win - select the -1750. The Boy Wonder bought my logic and threw himself into writing another proposal. They will never admit it but by the time Scott finished writing, he knew the Wellsper 1000A better than the geniuses at Astronics who designed it. He pointed out its strengths and weaknesses in words so subtle that Rockpit's evaluators were drawn to the -1750 and never knew why.
We won the contract. Needless to say, NARk wanted the -1750. Needless to say, our management was in schizophrenic ecstasy. A 25 million credit contract is hard to refuse but, gee whiz and golly, could we really do it? After all, Wellsper IT was screaming their heads off that there was no way in hell it could be done. They had to say that, of course. Anything else would mean their own design was not the only answer in the universe, the thought all their marketing was based on.
We did it. We put the VR in this bar and the other two bars in this hotel and the systems work flawlessly. Anybody wandering in thinks  he's back home, sitting in his favorite ambiance, surrounded by the fauna and flora that make life worth living. The other patrons in the bar are muted into denizens non-threatening and non-offensive so that, for the brief period of time a patron indulges, that patron is made thoroughly comfortable.
And you don't need to don goggles or any other techno-gizmo. You identify your species at the door and the system follows your movements around the bar surrounding you with a holovision reality that is as real as anything else in the universe is real.It's an engineering delight, a hell of an accomplishment, and it was Scott's design. Three years, one-hundred-fifty engineers, and you - my friend - get to work in the best bar in the universe.

Look, there's our beloved President coming out of the Spherical Office. See the group with him? That's Ivan Romanovich, CEO of Wellsper Universal. Behind him is Teddy Simms, Vice-President and General Manager of Satellite Systems. They're behind this fiasco.  They have to be. Otherwise, people will start asking questions they don't want to answer.
Still got a minute or two, I guess. They have to shake hands and give off-the-cuff interviews for the traditional ten minutes before they get down to business. Access, you know? The President has got to seem accessible.
So, what happened? Scott saw a glimmer. Working with VR and nanoprocessors, he thought he saw a way to duplicate the Phroen drive system. It was pretty raw. He needed to stretch the technological limits, even use the Wellsper 1000A because that's a damned fine machine even though we didn't use it here in the Perseus. He roughed it out at home and brought it to me to get my support.
At home. Seems like the Boy Wonder never stopped working except to him it wasn't work; it was play. Give him the right toys and Scott works passionately, indefinitely, and amazingly well for weeks and months at a time. He’ll take time to play with his son and, I assume, he takes time to be with his wife. The Boy Wonder rarely talks about his wife. He talks about his son and whatever he’s working on at the moment as if nothing else in the universe exists for him. I think it’s because engineers aren't comfortable with emotions. It's politically acceptable to talk about your kids but to say you love your wife is stretching the bounds. You can’t apply cause and effect to your feelings about your wife and applied engineering is all about cause and effect. I often wonder how his wife - or any engineer's wife - puts up with it.
Between us, we prepared a proposal for our management. We showed them the possibilities and probabilities and the credits spent versus the expected credit profit. They had simulatenous heart attacks on the credits to be spent. Scott needed new toys to pull this off and an engineer's toys are at the high end of the price spectrum.  The bottom line was: give him a billion credits and he’d give Wellsper FTL.
It wasn't the money, you know? A billion credits was not impossible to Wellsper. Given the right circumstances, our friend on the screen, Mr. Romanovich, would commit a billion credits willingly but Mr. Romanovich never got the chance. Our directors, ably led by Mr. Simms, just couldn't bring themselves to ask Corp for the funding.
Black magic, right? The Boy Wonder, right? Mechanisms, right? Our management just couldn't bring themselves to back the project. The risks were too great and not one of them had the technological know-how to follow what Scott would be doing or to know how well he was succeeding.
We asked for permission to take the idea to Wellsper IT and they gave us that much. Wellsper IT, however, didn't think anything Satellite Systems might propose could be of value. Oh, sure, we had pulled off the Hotel Perseus contract but only with their help and their technology. Seems they had convinced themselves we had used their work and their ideas and their technology with our nanoprocessor. It wasn't true but it suited them to think so.They threw us out.
We wanted to go to Corp but Mr. Simms felt that, if Wellsper IT wasn't interested, he wasn't about to put his neck on the line with Mr. Romanovich. Permission denied.
We fought the good fight and we lost. Program managers understand these things. I was ready to go onto my next program.  Sure, I was disappointed with the mind-set of my bosses but I was and I am very happy with the salary they pay me and I love the job.  I lost this argument; okay, maybe I'll win the next one.
Scott isn't a good loser. He doesn't believe in losing. Remember those three GCAA championships? Scott started looking for another way to get it done.
He found it at a VR convention. We were demonstrating the kind of stuff we had put into the Hotel Perseus and the Trapezioids were very interested. A couple of their engineers got Scott off into a corner trading war stories about VR and processors and dreams and possibilities. Typical engineering bull session but the next thing you know he's got them chomping at the bit and Trapeziod engineers are running off to talk to Trapeziod managers and pretty soon the Trapeziod delegation is gathered around Scott like a media feeding frenzy. They were willing to fund a prototype of his drive system.Give us a Request for Proposal, I tell them, thinking if someone else is willing to foot the bill even my management has to be willing to take their money.
The Traps sent us a RFP in record time. Old Simms, him that's up there on the screen grinning at the President's back, he nearly bust his gut. Fifth or sixth best ass chewing I ever got. He'd told us to drop the idea and he meant for us to drop it. He wasn't impressed the Trapeziods would foot the bill. Wellsper would be under contract to deliver a prototype and no one - not Wellsper, not Wellsper IT, not anyone in human space - had ever designed a FTL system much less built a prototype.
When I told Scott,.he got that look engineers get when civilians ask them how things work.  He looked at me as if I had lost my mind. A week later Scott comes into my office and tells me he has an offer from the Trapezioids to go to work. It's a good offer, three times what Wellsper is paying. They're going to call him Director of Practical Research; they've got a home for his family and schools for his son. They've got a super job for his wife and they've promised him all the toys he can think of to make his drive work.
He really doesn't want to leave Wellsper. He likes the people; he likes the town; most of the time he likes the work. But, these Trapezioid guys want him to do something worthwhile and Wellsper is still having heart attacks over VR. What else is he supposed to do?
I go to Mr. Simms and I explain to him what's happening. Simms tells me Scott is just an engineer. If he leaves the company, they'll hire another engineer to replace him. Engineers are a dime a dozen, you know. No, he will not consider matching the offer. No, he will not consider a small promotion. And, No!, Scoot doesn’t have enough serniority to get out of the cubicle. And don't ever bother him again with FTL.
Scott took the Trapezioid job and the rest is history. Wellsper served him papers reminding him he was not allowed to use anything he'd learned about their 1000A or any other patented technology but Scott knew that. It's standard in any engineering work contract. Scott was way ahead of Wellsper. What they could do with fluorine he could do with carbon and the GAL-STD-1750N was open market. No big deal. Two years and I don't know how much money later and the Boy Wonder has nanoprocessors mimicking Phroen telepathy through virtual reality.
Hell no, I don't know how he did it. I'm a program manager, not an engineer. I don't have to know the nuts and bolts, just what it does and how to sell it. From what I remember of the proposal we did, he used a combination of VR to mimic Phroen telepathy and telekinesis and hardware to translate the mental tricks to the physical universe. If I'd been his PM, I'd know; I'd have to know but I wasn't and I'm not so I don't know.
Wait a minute. The President's moving up to the microphones. Let's listen to this.

* * * *

Do you believe that? The Boy Wonder sold out humanity to the highest bidder? The Trapezioids have FTL and, like the Phroen, they're going to make humanity pay through the nose for access and it's Scott's fault? Instead of trying to find another Boy Wonder; instead of looking to see how they can adapt their nanoprocessors to do the same job Scott has his versions doing; they stand in front of the universe and excommunicate Scott from the human race. The damned fools have never asked to look at our original proposal for the FTL. They never asked me if I could help them find out what he did and how he did it.  They just throw up their hands and get nasty.
God almighty, it makes you ashamed to be human.

Yeah, another beer. I need it.

No, wait a minute. Give me a martini. I know; you don't have Steakman's. Use whatever you've got. I’ve got a lot to get over.