Mason, a technical program manager at Peer3, walked into the office of the chief network architect.
"Hey, Roman, got a minute?"
"Sure, Mason, what do you need?"
"Got a new customer that’s asking for hundred gigabit connections at fifteen different sites."
"A new customer?" asked Roman. "This isn’t BallSoft or Yoctoly adding new capacity?"
"Nope," replied Mason. "New customer called Radius 10K."
"That’s the new AI company that’s been making waves recently. They must be planning to go on-prem with their services if they’re asking for so much bandwidth."
"That was my first thought as well, but the locations they want us to light up are not where you’d expect to host a data center."
"What do you mean?" asked Roman.
"With the kind of bandwidth their asking for, you’d expect them to be provisioning a medium to large data center that would pull 20 to 50 megawatts, but each location is in an area that would not support that kind of power draw."
"Does their network architect just not know what they’re doing?"
"I thought that, but when I suggested a smaller connection, she was adamant. She made it clear they would need all one-hundred gigabits. Then she went on to tell me there were plenty of other providers in the area and she’d be happy to go somewhere else if we didn’t want their business."
"Well," said Roman, "if they’re willing to pre-pay for a year, we’ll be happy to provision those links for them."
Ron was keeping an eye on his workers as they operated their horizontal drilling machine. They were running fiber to a new customer, and they were one hop away from reaching the customer site.
He looked up and scanned across the cracked pavement of the abandoned lot next to where they were working and watched as a work truck from a competitor pulled up on the other side of the abandoned lot.
Then he saw another horizontal drilling machine slowly crawl its way into position.
He hopped out of his heated truck and walked across the abandoned lot. The last thing he wanted was for this new crew to interfere with his job. Colliding drill heads were a low but catastrophic possibility.
As he neared, a man hopped out of the crew truck with "Beam Tech" on the side, and waved at Ron.
"Let me guess, you’re also provisioning a line for Radius?" said the man as he stopped in front of Ron.
"Yep. And if you drive around their building, you’ll see a crew from Light Cloud as well."
"Damn, these Radius folks really don’t mess around," exclaimed Ron.
"No shit," said the man. "Most companies go with double redundant, assuming they can get their tightfisted corporate overlords to cough up enough dough, but not only are they going triple-redundant, they picked, quite possibly, the best three network providers."
"What do you mean?" asked Ron.
"We are the only three companies in the area with mostly independent infrastructure, minimum peering overlap, and our NOCs are in separate power substation zones."
"Well, good for them," said Ron. "So, how do you want to coordinate? We’re headed in to the same place, and I’d hate to have to explain to my boss how I trashed a driller."
"I hear ya’," said the man. "You lot got here first, so we’ll let you finish the last 100 feet first. We get paid for the time regardless, so me ’n my crew don’t mind get’n paid to watch you lot work."
Just then, a semi-truck pulling a flatbed trailer loaded with a horizontal drilling machine pulled into the abandoned lot, followed by a crew truck with the logo for Alpine Power Solutions on the door.
A man hopped out of the crew truck and walked towards Ron and the man from Beam Tech.
"Howdy," said the man. "Are you lot from the network companies?"
"Yep," said the man from Beam Tech as Ron nodded.
"Looks like you’re drilling towards the new Radius building. Are you headed for the northwest corner or the southwest corner?"
"Northwest corner," said Ron.
"Same," said the man from Beam Tech.
"Great!" said the man from Alpine Power Solutions. "We’ll be drilling toward the southwest corner, so we don’t need to worry about running into each other."
"I thought the building already had power," said the man from Beam Tech.
"They do, but the owners want solar, so they bought this here lot for panels, and we’ll run power from here to their building."
"How much power will they get from solar?" asked Ron, eyeing the size of the lot.
"It’ll vary with the weather, but the average will be a bit over 100 kilowatts per hour."
"Talk about paranoid," muttered Ron. "Triple-redundant network and solar power."
Jack was in his office, studying a cell he’d constructed in Rina’s molecular modeler when Nora knocked on his door.
"Hey Nora. What’s up?" he said as he got up and gave her a hug.
"I know we didn’t originally plan for it, but I think we should install one of Rina’s giga-cubes at our research institute. We’ll need it to power the molecular modeler and other simulation software."
"Damn, you’re right. I’ve been so used to having access to it here in my soul space that I forgot about the need for it in the physical world. Talk to Cindy and Rina. They can help you figure out what changes, if any, you need to make to the building to squeeze in a giga-cube." The source of this content ɪs N0veI.Fiɾe.net
"I thought you’d say that," said Nora. "I just wanted to make sure before I talked to them."
"By the way, how goes the effort to find people to work at the institute?"
"It’s going okay. Out of the hundreds of established senior researchers I’ve interviewed, only two met our criteria. The deciding factor in both cases was the fact that they could continue working even after they died, if they accepted a soul bond."
He and the girls had talked about how many of the people working at the institute he should soul bond, and they had all agreed that it would be safer if he just soul bonded all of them. That would eliminate any possibility of espionage or leaking of critical data.
"As for post-docs and younger researchers, I think I’m close to finding everyone well need. I’ve also been interviewing a few promising people who are still working on their PhD theses and found a few people I think we should hire."
"Great," said Jack. "If you have time, we can meet and try to soul bond the people you’ve selected. There’s no reason to wait until after the building is complete."