The Scarecrow

Chavez frowned for only a moment, then turned toward the door without responding. Rachel and I were left standing and waiting. Eventually through the glass I saw a man in a white lab coat walking down one of the aisles created by the rows of server towers. He was tall and thin and at least fifteen years older than Sideburns. I knew you could make yourself older with a disguise. But making yourself shorter was tough. Rachel turned and subtly gave me a questioning look anyway. I surreptitiously shook my head. Not him.

“Here comes our scarecrow,” Kurt said.

I looked at the kid.

“Why do you call him that? Because he’s skinny?”

“ ’Cause he’s in charge of keepin’ all the dirty, nasty birds off the crops.”

I was about to ask what he meant by that, when Rachel once again filled in the blanks.

“Hackers, trolls, virus carriers,” she said. “He’s in charge of security on the data farm.”

I nodded. The man in the lab coat made his way to the glass door and reached for an unseen locking mechanism to his right. I heard a metallic click and then he slid the door open. He entered and pulled the door closed behind him, testing to make sure it had properly locked. I felt cool air from the server room wash over me. I noticed that right next to the door was an electronic hand reader-it took more than a simple key card to access the actual farm. Mounted above the reader was a case with a glass door that contained what looked like a pair of gas masks.

“Hello, I’m Wesley Carver, chief technology officer here at Western Data. How do you do?”

He extended his hand first to Rachel, who shook it and told him her name. He then turned to me and I did the same.

“Yolanda left you with me, then?” he asked.

“She said she’d come back for us in twenty minutes,” I said.

“Well, I’ll do my best to keep you entertained. Have you met the crew? This is Kurt and Mizzou, our server support engineers on shift today. They keep things running while I get to putter around on the farm and chase down the people who think they can have a go at the palace walls.”

“The hackers?” Rachel asked.

“Yes, well, you see, places like this are a bit of a challenge to the people out there with nothing better to do. We have to constantly be aware and alert. So far, so good, you know? As long as we’re better than they are we’ll do fine.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said.

“But not really what you came to hear. Since Yolanda handed the baton to me, let me tell you a little bit about what we’ve got in here, yeah?”

Rachel nodded and signaled with her hand for him to proceed.

“Please.”

Carver turned so he was facing the windows and looking into the server room.

“Well, this is really the heart and brains of the beast down here,” he said. “As I’m sure Yolanda has told you, data storage, colocation, drydocking, whatever you want to call it, is the main service we provide here at Western Data. O’Connor and his boys up on the design and hosting floor might talk a good game, but this down here is what we have that nobody else has.”

I noticed Kurt and Mizzou nod to each other and give each other a fist bump.

“No other aspect of the digital business world has grown so exponentially fast as this segment,” Carver said. “Safe, clean storage and access to vital company records and archives. Advanced and dependable connectivity. This is what we offer. We eliminate the need to build this network infrastructure privately. We offer the advantage of our own direct, high-speed, redundant Internet backbone. Why build it in the back room of your law firm when you can have it here and have the same sort of access without the overhead costs or the stress of managing and maintaining it?”

“We’re already sold on that, Mr. Carver,” Rachel said. “That’s why we’re here and why we’ve been looking at other facilities as well. So can you tell us a little bit about your plant and your personnel? Because this is where we’ll make our choice. We don’t need to be convinced of the product. We need to be convinced of the people we are entrusting our data to.”

I liked how she was moving it away from technology and in the direction of people. Carver held up a finger as if to make a point.

“Exactly,” he said. “It always comes down to people, doesn’t it?”

“Usually,” Rachel said.

“Then let me give you a quick overview of what we have here and then perhaps we could retire to my office and discuss personnel issues.”

He walked around the line of workstations so that he was standing directly in front of the big windows that looked into the server room. We followed him around and he continued the tour.