The zenith angle by Bruce Sterling Page B

newspapers, magazines, and television, day after day.
    It was hard to believe—Van would never have imagined it—but Mondiale, the mighty Mondiale, was dot-bombing. Mondiale was coming apart at the seams. This brave, heroic, visionary, cutting-edge company—the bear market was beating it to death like a cheap piñata.
    This made no sense at all. Mondiale was not some flimsy e-commerce Web site with a make-believe business model. Mondiale was the necessary basis of modern civilization. Mondiale was a telecommunications giant that owned real property: cables, microwave relay towers, optical switching stations, long-distance voice franchises, big chunks of regional local loop, and even satellites. Mondiale was a highly profitable business that was laying fiber-optic pipe around the planet, uniting the world in efficient globalized prosperity. Mondiale was the future. It was insane to think that a society in an Information Age was not going to need Mondiale and its skills and capacities. But the world had stopped believing in that. The Bubble was the Terror, just like that. And the stock had cratered. Van’s own holdings, his fortune, his net worth, were nose-diving day by day, relentlessly. Van was helpless. There was nothing he could do to escape the collapse and save himself. As a federal employee, he had placed his holdings into a blind trust.
    Doing this had never bothered him. He had never been the kind of guy with any time to dabble and meddle in stocks. Of course he knew people who lived that life—one of them, Tony Carew, was his best friend. Knowing Tony well, Van had always known better than to try to outhustle the IPO hustlers on Wall Street. Van didn’t mind putting his Mondiale holdings into a locked federal box. Van had confidently figured he would just leave his stock there, as a classic, sensible, long-term investor, until the big emergency was over, and Mondiale took him back.
    But Mondiale was eaten by the Terror. Everything that the common wisdom had urged Mondiale to do had turned, overnight, into poison. Everything Van had discovered and assembled for them—golden vistas of research potential, a host of raw possibilities, shining ways forward . . . nothingness. Vaporware. The abyss.
    It felt very good to work inside solid bombproof concrete, then.
    Van was wiped out, but not quite totally. As the Deputy Director of Technical Services for an NSC
    board, Van had a federal salary, paid promptly every month. Van was paid about as much as a senior FBI agent, which was to say, he was paid peanuts. FBI agents never made a dime until they quit the FBI. Former FBI agents could do pretty well, when they went to work as well-paid private security people. Former FBI guys commonly went to work for big, serious-minded, major commercial outfits. Like Mondiale.
    Even Tony Carew, the proverbial dot-com rich kid, had hit hard times. Tony never said a word about red-hot market opportunities anymore. Tony was fiddling with science projects in Colorado, he was angling for high-tech defense work. Tony had lost more money than Van knew how to count. And he still had to live out there.
    Inside the Vault, though, a guy could get along on powdered eggs and grits. Creditors would never find you there. You didn’t have to watch financial news on TV or glimpse the stocks in a newspaper. The Vault had hot macaroni and cheese. The Vault had dry yellow cake. There was no beer or alcohol of any kind allowed. There was grape juice.
    That was what there was. That was all there was. That was the Policy, and it was the federal government. You didn’t have to think about it.
    It got worse. Federal procurement systems were notoriously sluggish. When he and Jeb had gone over the stats for the Grendel system, they had discovered that it would take eight times longer to pay for Grendel than it would to simply build it themselves. They could wait for a procurement check to be cut, but by that time, they would have lost the critical