Metafire

But Ferguson had a different idea: "Jim, watch your opportunities. If we can listen to them inside their colony, then we should be able to see when they are not being alert. They hardly have any windows at all on that colony. It should be possible to pick an opportunity to inject sleeping gas and board them. But I think we can be patient. We should do this only if we are reasonably sure it will work." Ferguson knew this was brash, and possibly quite risky, but he had decided by now that he would start taking chances. He had the support of the top defense officials, and they knew his every word. Let them stop him, if they felt he was too brash.

Inside Metafire the various people had moved to their tasks. Enough people were talking that Bluebird would only occasionally pick up distinct conversations. One of the conversations was between Erisa and Jane Simplaceanu. Jane was continuing with her training of Erisa, "Now, let's take on another customer. This is a hard one. It's an EDS project for Upjohn. They are trying to use our product for what they call a "world wide backup." Basically, every Upjohn computer worldwide is being cloned on every day it can be cloned. The purpose is to create a "virtual Upjohn" in which statistics can be gathered on various failure modes within the system. For example, what would happen to Upjohn if central accounting went offline for a day. Actually, the questions get more subtle than that. When the blasts hit our major cities, many companies were severely damaged by the loss of subsystems. Upjohn has been one of the leaders in investigating system robustness."