By the time Cather Hargreaves got home for the evening, he was exhausted. Which was strange, since Grissom City was extraordinarily quiet right now, with all the tourists evacuated, and movement between sectors being kept at a minimum for safety reasons. He’d spent most of his workday sitting at his desk, going over reports or talking to security personnel elsewhere. Things had even been so boring for a while that he’d decided to get some extra exercise in and pulled out a set of resistance springs.
When he opened the door to their apartment, he found Toni hunched over her laptop, examining data. Best to tread lightly as he walked over to see what she was doing. At least the Moon’s lighter gravity helped with that.
What he saw was completely different that the sort of thing he was used to. Along the left side of the screen, one window had very dense data that had a lot of IP octets in it. The rest of the screen was occupied by some kind of visual presentation. Not exactly a map, but some kind of graphic.
Toni looked up from her work. “Steffi wanted me to take a look at Internet connectivity and how it correlated with other indicators of strain on the infrastructure as a result of the pandemic. I sent her some initial data, but what I’m finding interesting is how it changes over time. In particular, which nodes are staying down, and which are coming back up. And how long it takes before a given node is brought back up.”
Cather considered the possible implications. Not just the obvious security issues, but broader ones. “Which would give you at least some idea of whether a given area is losing a lot of their technical people to this pandemic.”
“And how comfortable people in any given area are about doing their own work on equipment. I mean, there are some places where a hotel desk clerk or an administrative assistant in an office isn’t even allowed to reboot a router or WiFi hotspot that’s gotten wedged. No, they have to get the official network technician to come up and flip the switch, and if that person can’t be found, the network remains unavailable.”
Cather recognized Toni’s tendency to be cavalier about formal rules. “And there may be good reasons for restrictions like that–“
“In a hospital or a secure military installation, sure. But I’m talking your typical business setup, where you’ve got a router perched on top of a file cabinet or behind a desk, wherever it’s closest to the cable or phone line. It says a lot about a culture, whether people who aren’t technical specialists feel comfortable about working on equipment.”
Cather recalled a story his ur-brother had told him when he was young. “Which was why American military units have been so flexible. Every soldier has enough experience as a shade-tree mechanic to do at least some basic repairs on a jeep or a truck.”
“Exactly. A lot of the nodes that are bouncing right back up are in the US. But what’s interesting is how it varies within the US. Some regions seem to have a lot more people who feel comfortable doing their own network maintenance. It may also indicate where there are more businesses that are heavily micromanaged, where ordinary workers are strongly discouraged from showing initiative. But I’m thinking that this data may be very predictive of how well different regions recover once this pandemic finally burns itself out.”