commentary time: Second Wind
Commentary time, for the longer of my Yuletide fics.
My recipient's request was: Any character, "Do we really need them anymore? Go nuts." Which gave me a moment's pause, but then I thought of a way to make it work.
Second Wind
The title's from a Todd Rundgren song/album. In LJ-stalking my recipient, I noticed that she mentioned picking up one of his songs on iTunes, so I took the gamble that she'd place the reference. Also, it fits with the fic as a whole.
Bishop was right, in one of his comments at that bank sneak before Cosmo showed up. The other guys are getting too old for this - other than Mother, who's generally too paranoid to do the part that involves running around inside, so that's not much help.
Carl's pretty sure Bishop was joking, when he said that, but it's still pretty clear that he was right. Carl's been doing more of the fast inside work since then. He doesn't blame Bishop and Crease for needing to slow down, not in the least, but - well, there's only so much of this he can do by himself.
There are certain complications to Carl being the youngest of his coworkers. Chief among them: He'll have years of viability ahead of him when everyone else is due to retire.
They're probably going to have to find more people, to keep the business going beyond the foreseeable future. Where they're going to find anyone else, never mind fit them into the already-tight budget, Carl has no idea, so he doesn't mention it.
After all, considering how the other guys found him, they just might stumble across the right person by accident.
***
It doesn't take very long at all for Carl to mistrust America Online. He's not about to leave the ISP he found, since it's not a bad deal at all for what he needs, but it's always a good idea to know what the competition looks like, so he digs up some information.
Sure, there's a lot to be said for bringing the Internet to the world at large, rather than just the government. But their Terms of Service are incredibly restrictive, the idea of charging for the service by the hour would bankrupt him in about two weeks at the outside, and from what he can find out, they don't seem very prepared for working on a network that's not tied to phone lines, if that ever becomes an option.
I hated AOL, the one or two times I had to use it. Not to mention all those '1000 hours FREE! *All crammed into 45 days, so you have to spend 22 hours a day online.' CDs; I don't know how many Mom's taken into school for use in art projects. Stands to reason that Carl, with his stronger background in computers, would find the practical problems.
And then there's the little matter of how badly the AOL people handle Usenet. They couldn't use it properly if the protocol hit them upside the head, so far as there's protocol for much of anything on the Internet.
As I was eight at the time, I don't actually know from Usenet; I have Wikipedia to thank for that detail. XD But again, it's something Carl would definitely know.
It does get him thinking, though. With access opening up to more and more people, this thing's primed to explode into prominence. That means there will be businesses that want to establish an online presence, if not businesses that are primarily the online presence. And there are definitely people out there who will see this giant network as a challenge, as something to break down and turn to their own ends.
Carl would be one of those people, if it weren't his job to stop them. He's good at thinking ahead, when it comes to computers; it's part of what got him in so much trouble in high school. (Of course, that got him into the best job in the universe, so it had its plusses.)
He'll have to think it over and figure out how to sell the idea at work.
***
Bishop's skeptical, when Carl first brings up the idea, but he'd half expected this to be a tough sell.
"Look at it this way. We could do all of that work from here. Saves you guys the trouble of all that running around."
"I don't know, Carl. There's not much of a market for this."
Carl shrugs. "Not now, maybe. But I'd say the odds are good there will be. And you'll end up with people who wouldn't think to set secure passwords on their information on their own, and large monetary exchanges, and all the usual stuff."
"Probably true, considering how often we see the same mistakes in ordinary business."
"Exactly. Can't hurt to be the first people there, can it?"
"I'll have to think about it," Bishop says, but the pause before he does tells Carl the idea's probably going to be a go. Even if it takes a while to build up to, they'll probably branch out to virtual security testing before the end of the year.
***
Carl's not dating Mary anymore, but they still talk sometimes; both of them need to talk to somebody they don't work with, every now and then. It's good for their respective sanity.
I can never decide whether Carl and Mary would actually work as a couple, once they got past the initial date. In this case, I settled on 'we work better as friends,' and... well, they *do* need friends outside of work.
As time goes by, Mary has more and more stories about the government trying to track down people who coded computer viruses. That only tells Carl he was on the right track with suggesting the guys get into the virtual business early.
That's going anything but smoothly, of course. There's less Whistler can do to help, Crease doesn't have a natural knack for computers, Mother's worried about how many people might be able to track him down through these things, and Bishop... well, he's got his own reservations about the whole thing, not to mention most of his knowledge base is about thirty years out of date. Still, they're making some headway on how to go about virtual sneaks, and more people are asking for them.
It couldn't all be sunshine and puppies. That's too easy, and the characters would have their own issues with online work; I'm sure one of Bishop's reservations is that Cosmo might try to hire them yet again.
It's giving Carl an idea for how he can stay in this business when the other guys have to stop, even if he can't find other people to do the face-to-face work.
***
There's really not much else Carl could do for a living, other than what he's doing now. It's an unfortunate side effect of being expelled from high school; since Bishop offered him a job after reporting his hacking exploits to the principal, Carl never bothered formally finishing his education. Besides, with a black mark like that, he's not sure anyone else would want to keep him around.
So really, it's just as well he likes being paid to hack into things and occasionally pretend to be someone else. He may have fallen into the best possible job for his skill set by accident, but it's turned out pretty well, all things considered.
My personal backstory for Carl is that he was trying to make his grades look a little better for college-transcripts purposes - which he didn't necessarily *have* to do, but it looked better than handing over Cs in most of his classes due to not paying attention. He just picked the wrong night for it, as per canon, and the rest is history.
He knows there's no way in hell that running a business is actually as easy as Bishop makes it look - something to keep in mind, since Carl's most likely either taking over this one or striking out on his own, eventually. Between that and the code noodling he's got to do for the virtual sneaks, he comes up with a few programs that might make life a little easier, once he gets to that point.
The dot-com boom's got them in pretty good shape, all things considered. Since they already took the time to feel out the trickier bits of online security testing, they're in good shape to handle those requests, when they come in. That reputation for starting prepared gets around, and has an unexpected bonus: Job offers are coming in from companies based on the other side of the country, who claim they can't find comparable service closer to home.
It's pretty good, even though they all laugh at the one from the music industry wanting help to slow down file-sharing. Carl would love to point out that there's really nothing lost unless someone's selling the files, in which case people wouldn't really call it sharing, but he doubts they would listen.
I figure Carl would love Napster.
***
By the time Bishop decides he really is too old to keep working, Carl's got nearly ten years of experience in the field, the dot-com boom is looking more like a bubble every day, and the consequences of bankrupting the Republican Party are really making themselves felt.
Thought that crossed my mind as this plot bunny began to take shape: If the RNC is bankrupted in 1992, they don't have the funds to stage a takeover of Congress in 1994. The effect snowballs from there.
Of course, they sort of did four years ago, since there wasn't anyone organized enough to effectively challenge Clinton's try for a second term, but this election's a lot more interesting to watch. There are three candidates on the table - three major candidates, that is, along with the usual handful of people who don't get much press - and one of them's actually running on middle-of-the-road policies.
If Carl had to guess, he'd say McCain's going to pull this one off. But naturally, the only way to find out is to see it through on election night.
Three-party presidential campaigns intrigue me on the whole, and I think if McCain had had a crack at it in 2000, on a moderate platform, he could've taken it. In my mind, the tickets are Gore-Lieberman and Bush-Cheney, like the real world saw, and McCain-Elizabeth Dole.
(I even dug up a 2000 electoral map, with vague intentions of recoloring it to figure out the exact breakdown, but I never got around to doing that. Yes, I'm a dork.)
In any case, he was right that running a business is nowhere near easy. He's always been one for a good challenge, though, and he can bounce ideas off the guys any time he needs to.
When he starts looking for more people, he almost asks Mary, but decides against it. She enjoys what she's doing, and it's probably better for both of them that they're not doing the same job; makes it easier for them to gripe about work, for one thing. He does ask if he can call her for more free-range advice, if he needs to, and she's fine with that idea.
Carl does find a few more people who are good at the job, both the real-life and virtual aspects. He figures there's no harm in doing real-life security testing, as long as people want it done, and for all the dot-com bubble is beginning to burst, the demand for virtual sneaks isn't going away entirely.
But that only makes sense, really. As long as there are businesses, there will be people who want to undermine them, so someone's got to figure out how to stop them before they succeed.
Human nature. If you're told you can't have something, you want it more. If it's in your best interest to keep other people from taking what's yours, you'll hire someone who can tell you how to protect it.
It's not easy, but Carl wasn't expecting easy. He was expecting interesting, and that, at least, shouldn't ever be any trouble.
My recipient's request was: Any character, "Do we really need them anymore? Go nuts." Which gave me a moment's pause, but then I thought of a way to make it work.
Second Wind
The title's from a Todd Rundgren song/album. In LJ-stalking my recipient, I noticed that she mentioned picking up one of his songs on iTunes, so I took the gamble that she'd place the reference. Also, it fits with the fic as a whole.
Bishop was right, in one of his comments at that bank sneak before Cosmo showed up. The other guys are getting too old for this - other than Mother, who's generally too paranoid to do the part that involves running around inside, so that's not much help.
Carl's pretty sure Bishop was joking, when he said that, but it's still pretty clear that he was right. Carl's been doing more of the fast inside work since then. He doesn't blame Bishop and Crease for needing to slow down, not in the least, but - well, there's only so much of this he can do by himself.
There are certain complications to Carl being the youngest of his coworkers. Chief among them: He'll have years of viability ahead of him when everyone else is due to retire.
They're probably going to have to find more people, to keep the business going beyond the foreseeable future. Where they're going to find anyone else, never mind fit them into the already-tight budget, Carl has no idea, so he doesn't mention it.
After all, considering how the other guys found him, they just might stumble across the right person by accident.
***
It doesn't take very long at all for Carl to mistrust America Online. He's not about to leave the ISP he found, since it's not a bad deal at all for what he needs, but it's always a good idea to know what the competition looks like, so he digs up some information.
Sure, there's a lot to be said for bringing the Internet to the world at large, rather than just the government. But their Terms of Service are incredibly restrictive, the idea of charging for the service by the hour would bankrupt him in about two weeks at the outside, and from what he can find out, they don't seem very prepared for working on a network that's not tied to phone lines, if that ever becomes an option.
I hated AOL, the one or two times I had to use it. Not to mention all those '1000 hours FREE! *All crammed into 45 days, so you have to spend 22 hours a day online.' CDs; I don't know how many Mom's taken into school for use in art projects. Stands to reason that Carl, with his stronger background in computers, would find the practical problems.
And then there's the little matter of how badly the AOL people handle Usenet. They couldn't use it properly if the protocol hit them upside the head, so far as there's protocol for much of anything on the Internet.
As I was eight at the time, I don't actually know from Usenet; I have Wikipedia to thank for that detail. XD But again, it's something Carl would definitely know.
It does get him thinking, though. With access opening up to more and more people, this thing's primed to explode into prominence. That means there will be businesses that want to establish an online presence, if not businesses that are primarily the online presence. And there are definitely people out there who will see this giant network as a challenge, as something to break down and turn to their own ends.
Carl would be one of those people, if it weren't his job to stop them. He's good at thinking ahead, when it comes to computers; it's part of what got him in so much trouble in high school. (Of course, that got him into the best job in the universe, so it had its plusses.)
He'll have to think it over and figure out how to sell the idea at work.
***
Bishop's skeptical, when Carl first brings up the idea, but he'd half expected this to be a tough sell.
"Look at it this way. We could do all of that work from here. Saves you guys the trouble of all that running around."
"I don't know, Carl. There's not much of a market for this."
Carl shrugs. "Not now, maybe. But I'd say the odds are good there will be. And you'll end up with people who wouldn't think to set secure passwords on their information on their own, and large monetary exchanges, and all the usual stuff."
"Probably true, considering how often we see the same mistakes in ordinary business."
"Exactly. Can't hurt to be the first people there, can it?"
"I'll have to think about it," Bishop says, but the pause before he does tells Carl the idea's probably going to be a go. Even if it takes a while to build up to, they'll probably branch out to virtual security testing before the end of the year.
***
Carl's not dating Mary anymore, but they still talk sometimes; both of them need to talk to somebody they don't work with, every now and then. It's good for their respective sanity.
I can never decide whether Carl and Mary would actually work as a couple, once they got past the initial date. In this case, I settled on 'we work better as friends,' and... well, they *do* need friends outside of work.
As time goes by, Mary has more and more stories about the government trying to track down people who coded computer viruses. That only tells Carl he was on the right track with suggesting the guys get into the virtual business early.
That's going anything but smoothly, of course. There's less Whistler can do to help, Crease doesn't have a natural knack for computers, Mother's worried about how many people might be able to track him down through these things, and Bishop... well, he's got his own reservations about the whole thing, not to mention most of his knowledge base is about thirty years out of date. Still, they're making some headway on how to go about virtual sneaks, and more people are asking for them.
It couldn't all be sunshine and puppies. That's too easy, and the characters would have their own issues with online work; I'm sure one of Bishop's reservations is that Cosmo might try to hire them yet again.
It's giving Carl an idea for how he can stay in this business when the other guys have to stop, even if he can't find other people to do the face-to-face work.
***
There's really not much else Carl could do for a living, other than what he's doing now. It's an unfortunate side effect of being expelled from high school; since Bishop offered him a job after reporting his hacking exploits to the principal, Carl never bothered formally finishing his education. Besides, with a black mark like that, he's not sure anyone else would want to keep him around.
So really, it's just as well he likes being paid to hack into things and occasionally pretend to be someone else. He may have fallen into the best possible job for his skill set by accident, but it's turned out pretty well, all things considered.
My personal backstory for Carl is that he was trying to make his grades look a little better for college-transcripts purposes - which he didn't necessarily *have* to do, but it looked better than handing over Cs in most of his classes due to not paying attention. He just picked the wrong night for it, as per canon, and the rest is history.
He knows there's no way in hell that running a business is actually as easy as Bishop makes it look - something to keep in mind, since Carl's most likely either taking over this one or striking out on his own, eventually. Between that and the code noodling he's got to do for the virtual sneaks, he comes up with a few programs that might make life a little easier, once he gets to that point.
The dot-com boom's got them in pretty good shape, all things considered. Since they already took the time to feel out the trickier bits of online security testing, they're in good shape to handle those requests, when they come in. That reputation for starting prepared gets around, and has an unexpected bonus: Job offers are coming in from companies based on the other side of the country, who claim they can't find comparable service closer to home.
It's pretty good, even though they all laugh at the one from the music industry wanting help to slow down file-sharing. Carl would love to point out that there's really nothing lost unless someone's selling the files, in which case people wouldn't really call it sharing, but he doubts they would listen.
I figure Carl would love Napster.
***
By the time Bishop decides he really is too old to keep working, Carl's got nearly ten years of experience in the field, the dot-com boom is looking more like a bubble every day, and the consequences of bankrupting the Republican Party are really making themselves felt.
Thought that crossed my mind as this plot bunny began to take shape: If the RNC is bankrupted in 1992, they don't have the funds to stage a takeover of Congress in 1994. The effect snowballs from there.
Of course, they sort of did four years ago, since there wasn't anyone organized enough to effectively challenge Clinton's try for a second term, but this election's a lot more interesting to watch. There are three candidates on the table - three major candidates, that is, along with the usual handful of people who don't get much press - and one of them's actually running on middle-of-the-road policies.
If Carl had to guess, he'd say McCain's going to pull this one off. But naturally, the only way to find out is to see it through on election night.
Three-party presidential campaigns intrigue me on the whole, and I think if McCain had had a crack at it in 2000, on a moderate platform, he could've taken it. In my mind, the tickets are Gore-Lieberman and Bush-Cheney, like the real world saw, and McCain-Elizabeth Dole.
(I even dug up a 2000 electoral map, with vague intentions of recoloring it to figure out the exact breakdown, but I never got around to doing that. Yes, I'm a dork.)
In any case, he was right that running a business is nowhere near easy. He's always been one for a good challenge, though, and he can bounce ideas off the guys any time he needs to.
When he starts looking for more people, he almost asks Mary, but decides against it. She enjoys what she's doing, and it's probably better for both of them that they're not doing the same job; makes it easier for them to gripe about work, for one thing. He does ask if he can call her for more free-range advice, if he needs to, and she's fine with that idea.
Carl does find a few more people who are good at the job, both the real-life and virtual aspects. He figures there's no harm in doing real-life security testing, as long as people want it done, and for all the dot-com bubble is beginning to burst, the demand for virtual sneaks isn't going away entirely.
But that only makes sense, really. As long as there are businesses, there will be people who want to undermine them, so someone's got to figure out how to stop them before they succeed.
Human nature. If you're told you can't have something, you want it more. If it's in your best interest to keep other people from taking what's yours, you'll hire someone who can tell you how to protect it.
It's not easy, but Carl wasn't expecting easy. He was expecting interesting, and that, at least, shouldn't ever be any trouble.