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Note: The way the Dealer finds the "Everest job" was considered, by one preview reader, to be "hokey". Yet there is good reason to believe that eCommerce will lead to job matching that is in every detail just like this, as discussed on the FAQs page.


Having turned off the cooling in his apartment, the stifling air had now grown too warm. Chan Kam Yin wiped his forehead, where a thin bead of perspiration had taken shape. He hardly noticed the heat, or the sweat, or his own action to brush it away. He had entered mental overdrive. The whole world narrowed down to a few lines on his screen.

It had taken him countless hours to find the pattern. But he had it now. Anonymous identities danced the markets, making purchases in a certain size range, clustered over an extended but nonetheless well-defined time interval. The anonymous clusters tended to buy positions where the odds were against them. Even more interesting, they tended to win. If they weren’t controlled by the Predictor, they were controlled by someone just as good for the Dealer’s purposes. He knocked out a simulation of what would have happened in the past couple of weeks if he’d ridden the predictions of these anonymous clusters. The ride generated pure wealth. Pushing himself for one last effort, he found an open ‘cast with the same pattern in place. He moved into play. Success. He had just locked his own fate to that of the Predictor.

The Dealer sat back, relaxing in perfect satisfaction. He rubbed the crick in his neck; someday, he promised himself, he’d get ergonomic furniture, to go with the wallscreen of which he dreamed. The days of comfort, he promised himself, drew closer.

He felt tired but not sleepy. With his eyes glazed open he scanned the Web markets, just surfing the goods for sale, the prizes for winning, the jobs available. It seemed a good moment to look for additional opportunities. In due course, an intriguing Request For Proposals drew his eye.

He’d found the RFP posted in the Anguilla Seaside Web Market. The solicitor, Supercon Intercepts, had requested a custom-designed skytruck to cart a large, awkward device to the top of Mount Everest. Doing a global search on the Supercon Intercepts brand, the Dealer could see that they did a lot of contracting for Earth Defense. That made sense: who but Earth Defense would want to drag something that unwieldy to the remotest pinnacle of the planet? Particularly during the Month of Shiva, when just about everybody else on the planet put aside their on long-term projects and concentrated on the next couple of weeks.

The Dealer spent but a moment puzzling over the purpose of the ungainly payload: the description of the object only gave aerodynamic information, and its purpose didn’t really interest him that much. What fascinated him was the set of constraints on the skytruck. The requirements were fierce.

The truck would have to be a brute. A big brute, with huge lungs—the truck would gasp for breath, hovering in the thin air above Everest.

For a moment he thought about just shipping the thing with a roton . . . but the ungainly shape really ruled a roton out. No, the RFP writer had been correct specifying a skytruck.

The engines would constitute the biggest problem. Conventional skytrucks used electrically-powered turbofans, fuel-efficient but not as powerful as you’d like for this application. Worse, you’d need a custom-designed supercharger to supply oxygen to the fuel cells, adding yet more weight and considerably cutting down on the efficiency of the full engine assembly. You might be able to lift the cargo that way, but the Dealer sure wouldn’t take a ‘cast on it. At best it would cost a fortune.

Most people would have had to give up trying to solve the problem at that point. But the Dealer knew something most people didn’t know: Saab had built a next-generation combustion engine, using the same principles as the original Moller engines that powered the first skycars, but updated to use ceramic materials and burn pure hydrogen. He’d run into the Saab spec sheets while perusing the websites for antique car buffs, antiques being about the only things around these days that still used combustion. Saab had been trying to build a business in engine retrofits.

Anyway, the Saab engines were just the monsters for this job.

The Dealer suddenly realized that his expertise on combustion engines gave him the inside track on this deal—could he really win the contract? Why not? He could surely undercut anyone foolish enough to bid using conventional technology!

He searched the Web for a suitable airframe; he needed something sturdy but open-framed, so the odd corners of the package could stick out. The frame was pretty easy to find, though it took a bit more surfing to find the bottom-end price he wanted. He needed to buy the frame cheap, because he couldn’t go cheap on the flight control system: Because of the complicated effects of the payload’s center of gravity, with all the appendages exposed to the fierce turbulence at twenty-nine thousand feet, he’d need top-of-the-line flight control. Only the shortest response times, the most precise corrections, would satisfy the demand. He hated going with expensive parts. It hurt deep inside. But it was necessary.

He wasn’t sure how to carry the hydrogen for the engines, whether to use an adsorptive powder, a simple pressure cylinder, or whether to liquefy it; he didn’t trust the pressure cylinders, but the adsorptive power was heavy, and refrigeration would surely be both heavy and technically tricky. After staring at the alternatives for a while, he realized that he wasn’t the right guy to make this call. He posted a request for consulting services on the Web, to see if he could get a real expert to give him a quick answer.

Meanwhile, he turned on his CAD package and started integrating the pieces he’d already identified. His CAD system wasn’t really up to this, it was almost a toy—you don’t need fancy stuff for working on Mustangs—but despite its flaws it could still give him some sense of whether the pieces of his plan could sing in harmony.

Four in the morning came and went. He knew he ought to hit the sack, but his mind was flowing with the elements of the operation. He fiddled with the design till it looked as good as he could get it in his CAD system. Satisfied with that phase of the analysis, he rented a little time on a high-end system from the server complex in Novosibirsk. With that he could run a professional simulation of his new invention.

Meanwhile, a hydrogen power specialist in Germany answered his consulting request. The pressure cylinder was the way to go, though the German gave him a pointer to a particular Australian manufacturer who had a million-dollar bond backing the reliability of his products. If the cylinder failed, the Dealer could make a bigger profit than if it worked.

He still had twenty-four hours before he had to submit the proposal to Silicon Intercepts, and the CAD servers still needed a couple of hours before reporting on their simulations. It was time to get some sleep.


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