Scott

"Me? I'll have a Steakman Martini. Pretty dry. Up. With olives. I like olives dressed in martinis. Yeah, it has to be Steakman. Believe it or not, there's a difference in gin. My brother tried to educate my palate to Sharpbeam and Cathay Gin but my tongue refuses the education. The only martini that tastes right to me is a Steakman."

"You don't carry it? Then, I'll have a beer."

"The local's fine."

"Would you turn on the HV? Yeah, HNN. They'll be broadcasting from the White Dome today. Can't miss this one; it's a first in human history. They're going to excommunicate a guy from the human race."

"Thanks. Looks like we've got a few minutes till the big event."

" So, how do you like this place? Been working here long?"

"Yeah, I've been here a couple of times. Whenever I stay at the Hotel Perseus, I drop by. Has a special feeling for me, you know?"

"I was program manager for this place. We did this one and two other bars in the hotel. We did the VR. Actually, to say 'we' did them fixes too much credit on myself and most of the others. After all, we had the Boy Wonder on our team and he did the design. The rest of us just filled in on the stuff he didn't want to do."

"The Boy Wonder's a hell of an engineer. Came out of a tiny school over on Greenfields. It's an ag school, mostly, with an engineering college thrown in to earn accreditation. Burbank U. They're mostly known for their space hockey team. Won the GCAA a couple years in a row. The Boy Wonder played right wing. Too much energy to be a goalie; couldn't sit still for any length of time."

"Yeah, it's quite a game. Orbiting arenas and 3-D instead of two; jets on the players' hips instead of skates on their feet, inverted the goals in opposition, the team sport to top all team sports. Takes an extraordinary mind to keep people above and below you in mind.; You have to constantly re-orient yourself top to bottom from offense to defense. The Boy Wonder has that kind of mind; it's what makes him such a hotshot engineer."

"Why do I call him the Boy Wonder? It started on our first program together. We worked at Wellsper Satellite Systems, part of the Starbus Corporation. Wellsper's major line is stabilization systems for space stations and satellites but they have a minor in IT to help them make smart stabilizers. That's what we did, Scott and I and the rest; we built controllers."

"Our first job together was a rush-job controller for the USG's Crab Pulsar Orbiter. Had to design and produce that baby in less than a year. Getting a processor to work in that environment took state-of-the art engineering which is where the Boy Wonder fit in. Just out of school, he didn't know the combination of technology and schedule was impossible. He took the GAL-STD-1750N - it was just off the drawing boards in those days - and built a rad-hard nanoprocessor that's still ticking today.

Three-hundred-fifty-thousand lines of code playing on radiation-harderned electronics and we did it in ten months flat. Forty-three engineers, thirty-five of them software guys. Scott wasn't the technical director but the engineer who was knew enough to back off and let Scott have his way. As program manager, I just stayed the hell out of both their way.