work harder than he already was, but there was no way in hell he was ever going to reveal it to Craig Middleton. Before he could summon a response, his boss had left the room.
CHAPTER 15
R eturning to his office, Craig Middleton closed his door and sat down at his desk. Waiting for him on his screen was the file with Harvath’s coordinates and a smattering of other pieces of peripheral information. Making sense of data, massaging it and making it speak to him, was Middleton’s gift. He wasn’t simply good at it, he was practically a savant. There were only a handful of people in the world who understood the capture, synthesis, and manipulation of data as well as he did. In the world of data and information, he was more than a king, he was something akin to a god.
Middleton had been with ATS for as long as anyone could remember. IBM had spotted his brilliance in high school and gave him a blank check for his college and postgraduate studies. When his schooling was complete, he went to work in IBM’s classified Fathom division, working on top-secret, cutting-edge projects for the United States government.
With Fathom, it was said that IBM had amassed the greatest assemblage of brainpower since the Manhattan Project. As might be expected with such an incredible collection of intellect, there were more than a few personality quirks within the division. Eccentricity and brilliance were often two sides of the same coin.
Craig Middleton though, possessed a genius that even his exceptional peers found unsettling. There wasn’t a single project any of them wereworking on that Middleton couldn’t immediately identify a way to improve. He wasn’t shy, either, about telling his colleagues what they had overlooked or how even the smallest details of what they were working on could be made better. While his suggestions were always correct, his delivery was arrogant, and he grated on everyone who worked with him, even his superiors.
While never missing a chance to defame him for his rude and boorish behavior, no one could deny his brilliance, which was off the charts, and even his most vehement detractors at Fathom used names like Einstein and da Vinci when describing him. They also used names like Hitler and Mao.
Middleton’s scorched-earth personality eventually succeeded in burning every bridge with his coworkers, and IBM was forced to seal him off from Fathom or, more accurately, seal Fathom off from him. Placed in an entirely new building on campus, Middleton was given an unlimited budget and his choice of what he wanted to work on, alone. His choice shook IBM to its core.
In the 1930s, International Business Machines began working with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to help organize and utilize population data on a scale never before seen. It was a taboo period in the company’s history, and one that IBM desperately wanted to forget. Middleton, though, was fascinated by it, in particular how the Nazis used data to surveil and control people.
Through a proprietary system of punch cards and punch card sorting machines, IBM assisted the Nazis in every stage of their persecution and eventual genocide of the Jewish people. It began with sorting census data to identify Jews in order to keep them out of particular fields of endeavor and eventually led to identifying where every Jew lived and how many family members they had so that they could be evicted from their homes and forced into the ghettos.
An American in Washington, D.C., named Herman Hollerith had developed the punch card system. At the height of the Third Reich, IBM was leasing, servicing, and upgrading two thousand sorting machines across Germany and thousands more across Nazi-occupied Europe, and manufacturing 1.5 billion custom punch cards each year in Germany alone.
There were “Hollerith Departments” at nearly every single concentration camp to compile and sort prisoner data, which ran the gamut from when a prisoner arrived to what slave labor he or she
CHAPTER 15
R eturning to his office, Craig Middleton closed his door and sat down at his desk. Waiting for him on his screen was the file with Harvath’s coordinates and a smattering of other pieces of peripheral information. Making sense of data, massaging it and making it speak to him, was Middleton’s gift. He wasn’t simply good at it, he was practically a savant. There were only a handful of people in the world who understood the capture, synthesis, and manipulation of data as well as he did. In the world of data and information, he was more than a king, he was something akin to a god.
Middleton had been with ATS for as long as anyone could remember. IBM had spotted his brilliance in high school and gave him a blank check for his college and postgraduate studies. When his schooling was complete, he went to work in IBM’s classified Fathom division, working on top-secret, cutting-edge projects for the United States government.
With Fathom, it was said that IBM had amassed the greatest assemblage of brainpower since the Manhattan Project. As might be expected with such an incredible collection of intellect, there were more than a few personality quirks within the division. Eccentricity and brilliance were often two sides of the same coin.
Craig Middleton though, possessed a genius that even his exceptional peers found unsettling. There wasn’t a single project any of them wereworking on that Middleton couldn’t immediately identify a way to improve. He wasn’t shy, either, about telling his colleagues what they had overlooked or how even the smallest details of what they were working on could be made better. While his suggestions were always correct, his delivery was arrogant, and he grated on everyone who worked with him, even his superiors.
While never missing a chance to defame him for his rude and boorish behavior, no one could deny his brilliance, which was off the charts, and even his most vehement detractors at Fathom used names like Einstein and da Vinci when describing him. They also used names like Hitler and Mao.
Middleton’s scorched-earth personality eventually succeeded in burning every bridge with his coworkers, and IBM was forced to seal him off from Fathom or, more accurately, seal Fathom off from him. Placed in an entirely new building on campus, Middleton was given an unlimited budget and his choice of what he wanted to work on, alone. His choice shook IBM to its core.
In the 1930s, International Business Machines began working with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to help organize and utilize population data on a scale never before seen. It was a taboo period in the company’s history, and one that IBM desperately wanted to forget. Middleton, though, was fascinated by it, in particular how the Nazis used data to surveil and control people.
Through a proprietary system of punch cards and punch card sorting machines, IBM assisted the Nazis in every stage of their persecution and eventual genocide of the Jewish people. It began with sorting census data to identify Jews in order to keep them out of particular fields of endeavor and eventually led to identifying where every Jew lived and how many family members they had so that they could be evicted from their homes and forced into the ghettos.
An American in Washington, D.C., named Herman Hollerith had developed the punch card system. At the height of the Third Reich, IBM was leasing, servicing, and upgrading two thousand sorting machines across Germany and thousands more across Nazi-occupied Europe, and manufacturing 1.5 billion custom punch cards each year in Germany alone.
There were “Hollerith Departments” at nearly every single concentration camp to compile and sort prisoner data, which ran the gamut from when a prisoner arrived to what slave labor he or she
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