Apart from the banking issues, the housekeeper's two business proposals still faced all kinds of challenges if they were ever going to succeed.
Simon's attitude had not changed: ideas were cheap; what mattered was the execution that turned them into reality.
Still, after nearly a full day of meetings, the two proposals were quickly locked in.
Both plans would continue to ride on Ygritte, using the company's IE browser platform and email user base as the main channels for promotion.
The housekeeper would head the online software store team, temporarily holding the title of project manager at Ygritte while reporting directly to Simon. She would also keep managing his personal properties. Thanks to her Wall Street experience, Jeff Bezos would personally oversee development of the online payment system.
America Online and Bell Atlantic would give both proposals whatever support they needed.
If nothing else, once the online payment system went live and users switched to paying bills digitally, both AOL and Bell Atlantic would save a fortune in operating costs down the road.
By the time the meeting wrapped up, the names for the online payment tool and the online software store had also been settled.
No one overthought it. They simply went with Ypay and Ystore. The "Y," of course, stood for Ygritte.
They were staying in San Francisco tonight. After work, Simon sent the housekeeper ahead to the Woodside mountain villa to prepare dinner, then took his usual female assistant who had come to the city with him along with Jeff Bezos, Tim Berners-Lee, Carol Bartz, and the others to another office building near Ygritte headquarters.
Ygritte's headcount kept growing, but unless the company turned a profit or went public, Simon had no intention of building it a proper headquarters.
With no central office space, the company's teams were scattered all over Silicon Valley.
The cloud-computing development team, approved and launched the previous year, was housed in the plain white two-story building Simon and the group now entered.
The moment he stepped inside, Simon noticed the temperature was noticeably warmer than outside, as if the heat was on. He tilted his head and listened; the reason became obvious at once, dozens of computers of every size had been running nonstop.
He waved for the first-floor cubicle staff to keep working and led the others upstairs himself.
On the second floor the computer hum was louder. More plain cubicles lined the space, and at the far wall stood a rack of servers whose indicator lights flickered steadily.
Ralph Goodell, chief engineer of the cloud team, had his cubicle right beside that rack.
Ralph was a top-tier software engineer Jeff Bezos had lured away from IBM. An MIT graduate, he had reached vice president of research before leaving, mainly responsible for Unix server systems.
IBM might have had dozens of vice presidents, but prying Ralph loose had still cost Bezos real effortlegal paperwork to get IBM to release him, plus a $2.5 million annual salary.
That figure was several times higher than the base pay of Bezos, Carol Bartz, and Tim Berners-Lee combined.
Naturally, Ralph did not receive the rich equity packages the others enjoyed.
Once on board, he had thrown himself into the work.
In just two months he had written the core cloud-computing code himself while also hand-picking the team. The thirty-plus people now filling this two-story building had been interviewed and chosen one by one by Ralph and Bezos across the country.
At the moment the project carried a special codename: Housewife.
The name had come from a phone call Ralph made to Simon before officially accepting the job. He had asked what kind of "cloud computing" system Simon actually wanted, since the concept had never existed before.
Simon knew little about the deep technical details, so he had offered an analogy.
The way Ygritte's current data centers handled processing, he said, was like a clumsy newlywed wife who could only do one thing at a time: spend an hour washing clothes, an hour cooking, an hour cleaning, and so on.
All the waiting between loads of laundry, while an apple pie baked, while the floor dried after mopping was wasted time.
Existing data-center servers worked the same way: they processed tasks, user logins, data storage, word processing in rigid sequence. When no request came in, the capacity sat idle.
That created sharp imbalances: some servers idle while others were maxed out.
What Simon wanted was to train that clumsy young wife into a capable housewife who could handle laundry, cooking, and cleaning all at once, using every minute efficiently.
In concrete terms, link every server in Ygritte's data centers into one unified system and build an intelligent task-distribution engine so that every processor's power was fully used.
Because of that conversation, the project had been named Housewife.
Ralph, seeing the enormous potential, had quit IBM shortly afterward.
As the group approached, they saw a scruffy, thick-glassed middle-aged white man staring at his screen. The two engineers beside him spotted Simon and started to speak, but Simon raised a hand to stop them.
Everyone gathered around the scrolling data and waited five or six minutes in silence. Finally a number appeared: 73 percent.
"Fuck!"
Simon still had no idea what was happening, but Ralph, seated at the keyboard, muttered the curse under his breath.
Tim Berners-Lee caught Simon's puzzled look and whispered, "He's testing the fault-tolerance software."
Simon nodded, remembering bits of the progress reports he had read.
Once the cloud architecture was complete and every data center was linked, thousands of processors and countless components would fail somewhere at any moment. The fault-tolerance software the team was building would detect those failures and instantly reroute the tasks to healthy nodes.
Strong fault tolerance was one of cloud computing's biggest advantages.
In a traditional data center, a single server going down could cripple entire services. Even with good backups and quick engineers, there would still be downtime and that downtime could be disastrous.
Cloud computing solved the problem cleanly.
A handful of failed servers barely touched the overall system.
Inside the cubicle, Ralph's swear word snapped him out of his trance. He finally noticed the visitors, stood up quickly, and greeted them.
After a few minutes of small talk they moved to the conference room next door.
Ralph walked Simon through every aspect of the project's progress. He added that a truly perfect system might have to wait until next year; he had come up with several promising new ideas that needed more development time.
Simon neither agreed nor pushed him. He simply told Ralph to do the best he could.
Cloud computing only delivered its full advantage at scale. With Ygritte still sitting at just a few million users, the need was not urgent. The real payoff would come when the portal's businesses had matured and total U.S. web users reached the tens of millions.
That moment was probably one or two years away.
So Simon was in no hurry.
Over the next two years Ygritte would keep expanding its data centers anyway; the extra capacity would not be wasted. And once the cloud system was finished, any surplus computing power could fuel even more new projects.
The conversation grew so lively that by the time they left the building the sky was completely dark.
Since it was already dinner hour, Simon invited everyone to a nearby restaurant.
It was after nine when he finally returned to the Woodside villa with his assistant.
Inside the living room, the housekeeper sat on the sofa reading a document. When she saw them she stood.
"Boss, shall I make dinner again?"
Only then did Simon remember he had sent her ahead to prepare a meal.
"No need. Have you eaten?"
She nodded, face calm.
Simon felt no embarrassment. He shrugged off his trench coat; both women stepped forward at the same time. Smiling, he handed it to the housekeeper and asked Jennifer, "Want a shower?"
"Sure."
The assistant nodded and headed upstairs.
Simon dropped onto the sofa, picked up the paper the housekeeper had been reading an article on data encryption.
Alice Ferguson hung his coat and returned to the single armchair nearby.
Simon skimmed the paper; he understood maybe half of it and had no desire to study it harder. He asked casually, "Where are Zoe and the others?"
"They've gone to bed," the housekeeper replied. She glanced at the document in his hands. "I think user-account security is going to be a huge challenge for us going forward."
Simon smiled. "How do you plan to fix it?"
"I believe Ygritte should set up a dedicated network-security team right away."
"We already have a department."
"Eleven people. I checked their files. They're all average no real experts in computer security. That's nowhere near enough."
"Talk to Jeff when you get a chance. You know how it is right no. Ygritte has too many priorities, so some things slip through the cracks." Simon paused, then added, "Besides, network security is one of those areas where doing our best is enough. No system is unbreakable; the facts prove that every time. The real key isn't technology."
The housekeeper looked curious. "Then what is it?"
Simon lifted his eyes from the paper, studied her for a moment, and patted the cushion beside him with a smile. "Come here. Sit next to me."
She hesitated, then stood and sat close.
Her back stayed perfectly straight, body stiff.
Simon breathed in the pleasant scent of her perfume and felt quietly satisfied. He made no further move, simply leaned back on the sofa and answered, "The key is still people."
The housekeeper had grown used to her boss's occasional teasing. Seeing he clearly had nothing more in mind, she relaxed and asked, "What do you mean?"
"Like I said, any system can be broken. What matters is how we respond. Say a hacker steals a hundred dollars from a user account. What do we do?"
"Call the police."
"Of course we call the police," Simon said, grinning. "But do you honestly think they'll move heaven and earth over a hundred bucks?"
The housekeeper stayed quiet, simply watching him and waiting.
"Even if they wanted to, they couldn't. Stuff like this is inevitable, so we handle it ourselves." Simon's eyes narrowed slightly. "Forget a hundred dollars, even if someone dares to steal just one dollar from a Ygritte account, as long as we spare no expense to catch them and put them in prison, word will spread. After that, hackers will think twice. They'll know that even a single dollar will get them caught."
The housekeeper could imagine how a one-dollar thief would end up behind bars. The charge would never be "one dollar." There were plenty of other crimes they could pin on him.
But how would they even find the person?
Simon noticed the confusion on Alice's face. He reached out, gently lifted her delicate chin with one finger, and smiled. "Looks like you're still a very proper good girl. In that case, forget about it. Just focus on doing your own job well."
For ordinary people, if the police wouldn't act it was hopeless.
For Simon it was simple.
This world still had a profession called private detective. Bounty hunters existed too. In real life there were bounty hunters; online there would be "bounty hunters" willing to do certain jobs for money.
In fact, the thought suddenly struck him: he could use this very issue as the perfect excuse and opportunity to build an intelligence network that belonged only to the Westeros system both real-world and digital.
The idea took root instantly, and Simon's mind began laying out the plan.
Poach a batch of people from the FBI, CIA, or even overseas agencies like MI6 and set up a detective agency. Or better many small, scattered mini-agencies so no one noticed the pattern. Controlled properly, they could form a complete intelligence web.
He could also recruit a few top hackers on the side.
Some hackers chased pure technology and freedom, but plenty chased cold hard cash and cash was exactly what Simon could supply.
As the Westeros system kept expanding, a private intelligence network like that would solve more problems than he could count.
Why had the first FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, held such terrifying power? Because he had created and controlled the FBI's intelligence network for decades.
Hoover served under eight presidents, and not one of them dared suggest removing him until he died and an era finally ended.
Afterward the government rushed to impose restrictions on intelligence chiefs, yet every powerful figure who glimpsed the network's potential still tried every trick to sink their own hands into it, hoping to wield the same kind of authority Hoover once had.