Chapter 32 : Throttled

Chapter 32: Chapter 32 : Throttled

On the way back from Burbank, Ethan dropped Noah and a trunkful of tripods off in front of the dorms, then floored it the rest of the way to Hollis.

Only a desk lamp was on in B14. Maya sat at the computer with her back to the door, and beside her stood a man in his mid-twenties, a flannel shirt thrown over a T-shirt, a printed sheet of paper in his hand.

Ethan knew the face. He’d spent four years at this school in his other life, and whenever the dorm network went down or a lab crashed, this was the guy who showed up to clean up the mess. Dale, from Network Services.

"You’re Ethan Cole?" Dale handed over the sheet. "Since noon, this one machine of yours has been eating forty percent of the whole campus’s outbound bandwidth. The dorms have been lighting up our phones. People say they can’t even send email."

The paper was a notice signed by the director of Network Services. All public-facing services were to be off the campus network by midnight tonight.

"I’ve already throttled you. Otherwise the whole school would be cussing us out by morning." Dale glanced at Maya’s screen. "Gotta say, though, one box holding up this long under dozens of hours of video? That’s not bad code."

Maya didn’t turn around. "Thanks." There wasn’t a trace of thanks in it.

Ethan read the notice through and folded it in half, then in half again. "Your rules are right. A company’s website has no business running on the school’s network," he said. "We’ll be out before midnight."

Dale visibly stalled. He’d probably come braced for a fight.

"...Out to where?"

"Haven’t figured that out yet." Ethan grinned at him. "Give me ten minutes."

Dale got as far as the door, looked back at Maya’s screen one more time, and only then pulled the door shut behind him.

The second it closed, Maya swung her chair around. "Out to where? It’s nine at night. What data center in L.A. is going to open the door for you? And even if somebody does, dozens of hours of video, it doesn’t matter whose server you put it on. Get tens of thousands of people pulling at once, and it goes down all the same."

She turned the screen so he could see it. In another window sat an email from GoDaddy. The main site had blown past the resource limits on their shared hosting plan, and the account had been suspended.

"The new box with the raw footage is on the school’s network, and the main site’s still sitting on that seven-ninety-nine-a-month plan," she said. "Now both ends are dead."

"Which is why we split it in two." Ethan pulled over a chair and straddled it backward. "The website is one thing. The video’s another. The video doesn’t go on a server."

"Then where?"

"Amazon."

Maya thought she’d heard wrong. "The Amazon that sells books?"

"Back in March they put out something called S3. You throw your files up there, and they charge you for however much you store and however much gets downloaded. Ten thousand people watching or a million, it’s all the same to them."

Maya, unconvinced, pulled up a browser and searched. The page was pitifully bare. A few paragraphs of explanation, a document describing the API, and a box for a credit card number.

"This thing doesn’t even have an upload button."

"That’s why I need you."

Maya didn’t say anything. She opened the document and started scrolling. By the third page, she was muttering under her breath, request signing, buckets, and her hands had already found the keyboard.

"And the site?" she asked without looking up.

"It’s moving to One Wilshire."

One Wilshire sat downtown, at the corner of Wilshire and Grand. Thirty stories, and from the outside it looked no different from the office towers around it. But a huge share of the West Coast’s network lines came together inside that one building. Back in his old life, Ethan’s company had leased a whole row of cabinets there.

He dug up a number and called the 24-hour line for one of the colocation companies in the building. The guy on duty sounded half asleep and said sales would be in at nine tomorrow morning.

"I can’t wait until nine," Ethan said. "One cabinet, three months, paid in full tonight. You open the door for me now, and I’ll be there in an hour."

There was silence on the line for a few seconds. Then the sound of papers shuffling.

A little after ten, they wedged the server into the trunk. Maya climbed into the passenger seat with a carton of hard drives on her knees, both arms wrapped around it the whole time.

The car got onto the 110 heading north. There wasn’t much traffic at that hour, and downtown rose up ahead of them, one lit tower after another.

Neither of them spoke the whole way. Ever since the day the contest ended, when Maya had shut the editing room door on him, they hadn’t been alone together this long. Maya kept her face turned to the window. Ethan didn’t say anything either. He just drove in silence, turning something over in his head.

When they got there, the guy on duty was already waiting in the lobby, a young Latino guy in a hoodie with a badge clipped to his chest. He raised an eyebrow at two kids who looked like students wheeling in a server, but he didn’t ask a thing.

The freight elevator climbed. When the doors opened, the cold hit them.

The machine room had no windows. Rows of black cabinets ran on past where the eye could follow, indicator lights blinking green and amber. Overhead, yellow fiber crowded the cable trays. Thousands of fans were spinning at once, and you had to raise your voice to be heard.

Maya stopped in the doorway and didn’t move. She’d been writing code for years, and this was the first time she’d ever stood at the other end of the wire.

Racking the server, cabling it, and powering it up took under half an hour. The building’s pipe out was dozens of times fatter than the campus network’s, and once Maya’s upload script got going, the progress bar moved fast. But dozens of hours of footage was a lot of footage. She ran the numbers. Getting all of it onto S3 would take until dawn at the earliest.

All they could do now was wait.

The floor between the cabinets was raised, and cold air poured up through the perforated tiles. Maya found a corner, sat down with her back against a cabinet, and pulled her hands up into her sleeves.

Ethan came back from the vending machine at the end of the hall with two cups of hot chocolate and held one out to her.

Maya hesitated, then took it. "...Thanks."

This time, a little of the thanks came through.

He didn’t sit down next to her. He found a spot across the aisle and settled in with his back against the other row of cabinets, the two of them facing each other at an angle with the aisle in between.

Maya held the cup in both hands and waited for him to start talking. She figured he’d bring something up. That day, or Chloe, or he’d just use the mood to say something sweet. Guys always had something to say at a moment like this.

He did start talking.

"That upload script of yours. You write it in Perl?"

Maya glanced up at him. "Python."

"Ah." Ethan nodded slowly, giving the answer far more thought than it needed. "Python’s good."

Half a minute of quiet.

"That signature thing. You recalculate it on every request?"

"It’s cached."

"Caching’s good."

Maya’s fingers shifted on the cup.

Ethan found another opening. He asked which database she was running, then whether the Flash player would need changing too. Every question was on her turf, and every one of them was about as deep as a puddle. He could hear it himself. Not one of them was something he actually needed answered.

But he could see how she was sitting, wedged into that corner with her back ramrod straight and a death grip on the cup. There wasn’t a relaxed inch on her. Sitting like that until sunrise would be miserable. He had to say something.

"And your backups—"

"If you’re really that bored," Maya cut in, "you could go count how many cabinets are on this floor. Let me know when you’re done."

Ethan opened his mouth, then closed it again. He pressed his lips together, smiled a little helplessly, and leaned his head back against the cabinet. He watched the lights blinking overhead and said nothing more.

Suddenly the fans seemed a lot louder.

The words were barely out before Maya started to regret them. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t tell. All those random questions were just his way of making these hours a little easier to get through. She looked down and took a sip of hot chocolate. It had already gone half cold.

The progress bar had crawled past halfway when she finally broke the silence herself.

"...How did you even know about S3?"

Ethan didn’t answer right away. His eyes went to the cabinets across from him, somewhere else entirely, and then he said slowly, "Do you remember what I told you that night, on the library steps?"

Maya’s grip on the cup tightened.

Of course she remembered. That night he’d held out his hand, and when she’d taken it, she’d let go a second later than she meant to.

"You said that in a few years, everybody would have a screen in their pocket." Her voice was flat. "That something shot in a dorm room would pull more viewers than a network show. That the whole industry would move online."

Ethan shook his head. "It’s not just moving online."

He pointed up at the rows of glowing lights overhead. "That player of yours logs the second each person closes the video. That’s one person. But what happens when someday, everything everybody watches gets written down? Where they stopped, where they skipped ahead, what they clicked on next. Tens of millions of people. Billions of records a day."

"So it’s written down. So what?"

"Once there’s enough of it, you can start guessing," Ethan said. "Guessing what you like. Guessing what you’ll want next. Get enough of those guesses right, and it’ll know before you do.

"By then, you open up a screen, and you don’t have to look for anything. What you want is already sitting there.

"A TV network builds its lineup on a few editors’ gut feelings. This would run on votes cast by tens of millions of people’s fingertips."

Maya didn’t answer. She held the cup in both hands, her brow slowly knitting as she went over what he’d said, one piece at a time.

Ethan could tell what she was thinking, and he smiled. "Don’t buy it? This month, Netflix put up a million-dollar prize for anybody who can make their recommendations ten percent more accurate.

"A couple of years back, Google put out a paper on lashing thousands of cheap machines together to crunch more data than a supercomputer could handle.

"You buy a book on Amazon, and the bottom of the page tells you what else the people who bought it bought."

He turned his head and looked at her. "It’s not that I think the future’s going to look like that. It’s already sitting right in front of us. Most people just haven’t looked down yet."

Maya was quiet for a moment.

"So that’s why," she said slowly, "you’re always in such a hurry? Every single step? To catch up with it?"

Ethan laughed out loud. "Not really. The hurry’s about something else." He didn’t explain, just paused for a beat. "Besides, I never planned on chasing it."

He tipped his head back. Overhead, thousands upon thousands of indicator lights blinked on and off, from this row all the way down to where the eye gave out. They landed in his eyes, one small point after another.

"Whoever’s chasing it is stuck behind it," he said. His voice wasn’t loud, and the fans swallowed half of it. "What I want is to be it."

Maya looked at him. The cup in her hand hung in midair, halfway to her mouth and forgotten.

It was the same feeling she’d had that night on the library steps. Heavier, even. The guy across from her was her age, in a rumpled hoodie, his hair a mess, and when he talked about tens of millions of people and billions of records, his voice was too steady to sound anything like a daydream.

She snapped out of it, and her face went hot, and right on the heels of that came irritation. Why did he always do this? Every time she’d just settled on how to dislike him, he’d pull something like this.

Before she knew what she was doing, her foot was already out, across the aisle, connecting with the toe of his shoe.

Ethan was still lost in his grand ambitions when the kick landed out of nowhere. He looked down at his shoe, bewildered, then up at her. "...What was that for?"

Maya froze too. What was she doing?

She pulled her knees up and buried her face in them. Her voice came out muffled. "Nothing. I’m tired."

Ethan rubbed the back of his head. Strange. In the life he’d already lived once, he’d run that same speech across more negotiating tables than he could count, and investors would practically reach for a pen before he’d finished. It had worked fine on the library steps, too. So why did it keep going sideways with her?

He couldn’t figure it out, so he gave up trying.

Maya kept her face buried in her knees until the worst of the embarrassment wore off. She lifted her head just enough for her eyes to clear her knees and looked across the aisle.

Ethan was asleep. He was slumped against the cabinet, his head tipped to one side and his mouth hanging slightly open, one leg stretched out into the aisle and the other drawn up, the hot chocolate still pinched at a precarious angle in his hand. Not a flattering way to sleep, by any stretch.

Looking at him, Maya felt a small, wicked idea creep into her head.

She dug a blank label out of her bag, the kind she’d been sticking on the hard drives, uncapped a pen, and printed a few capital letters on it, one careful stroke at a time. Then she got up, crept over on quiet feet, crouched in front of him, and brought the label toward his forehead.

Almost there.

Ethan sniffed, and his head tipped up.

Her fingertip landed right on his lips.

Maya went rigid from head to toe. The next second, she sprang up and fled back to her corner in about three strides, her back pressed to the cabinet, her heart pounding.

Across the aisle, he smacked his lips, let his head loll back to one side, and slept on, perfectly undisturbed.

The label was still stuck to her finger. Seven crooked capital letters. SCUMBAG.

She balled the label up and squeezed it in her fist. Then she looked down at that one finger of hers, and sleep was suddenly out of the question.

It occurred to her, out of nowhere, that from the moment they’d gotten in the car until now, he hadn’t said one word about Chloe.

When Ethan woke up, his neck was too stiff to turn. Across the aisle, Maya was already sitting in front of the cabinet with her laptop, typing fast.

"Upload’s done." She didn’t turn around. "I’m switching the DNS over. Ten minutes."

On her screen, the site came up, the hour-long segments lined up neatly in order. On the back end, the count of people online crept back up, ten thousand, twenty thousand, and the server’s load bar held steady in the green.

Ethan rubbed his neck and leaned over for a look. "You didn’t sleep at all?"

"Somebody had to do the work."

He could hear that there was still a barb in it, just not as sharp as last night’s. He didn’t mind. The site, the back end, the servers, she’d been carrying every bit of it alone from day one. Anybody would be a little short-tempered.

"Thanks for this," Ethan said. "Once things calm down, I’ll find you some help."

Maya’s hands paused on the keys. "Who? Got your eye on somebody new?"

Ethan thought about it and answered in all seriousness. "Dale?"

Maya didn’t answer. Two seconds later, she ducked her head and her shoulders shook once. Whether she was holding in a laugh or cursing him under her breath, there was no telling.

When they came out of the building, the sky was just turning gray. Grand Avenue was nearly empty. A homeless man pushed a shopping cart slowly across the intersection, and somewhere off in the distance came the hiss of the first bus braking.

Ethan stretched and let out an enormous yawn. His hair was flattened on one side and sticking up on the other, and he looked no different from any college kid who’d pulled an all-nighter.

"What you said back there," Maya said suddenly. "Dale."

"Hm?"

Maya hugged the carton a little closer.

"...Fine. He can read my code."

Ethan glanced over at her and smiled.