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.LP .ce .ps 18 .B CU/FARLEY .R .ps 10 .B tags: 1960, margaret, tab1, tab2, the_chief .R .PP .ps 12 1 October 1960 I loaded Tommy into the truck and took him to work with me. .PP .ps 12 The boy perked up at the sight of the two-story displays. A damn sight better than the consumer grade equipment his mother used to review her nude home shows. We had a spare terminal so I logged him in with basic access and let him handle analysis on some of the non-essential traffic. No one would mind. With his orange cap he almost fit in. .PP .ps 12 Perturbations in the mesh. We were bringing a new series of embassy clouds online and things were not going smoothly. I was asked to supervise a side-switch. .PP .ps 12 At 07:30 Tommy spoke up, something about overlap. .PP .ps 12 "Pop, we've got incoming." .PP .ps 12 Three embassies were competing for the same channel. Ping errors were filling up the logs. I asked Tommy if he had a solution. .PP .ps 12 "Subnet them." .PP .ps 12 My men went into action and the crisis was averted. .PP .ps 12 Chief gave Tommy a lollipop. .PP .ps 12 Tommy liked the snow but touching his hand to it produced tears. I growled at him a bit. .PP .ps 12 I gassed up the truck and we cut across town back to the hovel. We had opened a new file on Tommy. CU/FARLEY would follow him for the rest of his life. He'd shown aptitude. All of that testing wasn't a waste after all. His mother would grumble but his interest was clear, honest. We assigned him TAB2 and that was that. .PP .ps 12 Inside the house I prepared a plate of sandwiches and pickles and we settled in to monitor the logs. Again Tommy showed initiative and reorganized his own desktop for efficiency. I dozed off for a while and when I came to he'd routed the embassy logs through his login. He picked out some trouble spots and saved the boys back at HQ a few hours of grief. I considered pulling him out of school for a few months until the embassies were all up and running. Heh, not likely, not with .I his .R mother. .PP .ps 12 Flipped on the telescreen. Presidential election. Iran. .PP .ps 12 Can't escape it. Switched off the telescreen and back to Tommy's progress, trawling the logs. I showed him how to clean up a few streams and within a few minutes he was giving me advice on my own data structures. I wondered how long this could hold his attention. .PP .ps 12 At 10:25 a page came over the wire, calling me back to HQ. I strapped Tommy into his seat and we were on our way. .PP .ps 12 The truck spun through the slush and we got hung up in the parking lot. I left the vehicle and trudged towards the building with Tommy in tow; housekeeping would dig out the truck as time permitted. .PP .ps 12 We made it up the stairs and Chief stopped us before we got to our terminals. CU/FARLEY was already twenty pages thick. They had decided to call in their investment early. I slicked down Tommy's eyebrows with my thumb and handed him over. .PP .ps 12 My son and I locked eyes. Tommy full of comprehension. .PP .ps 12 He reached up to his head and removed his orange toboggan. He glanced at the name I'd scrawled inside it, .I TAB2, .R and then passed it over to me, his three-year-old arms not quite bridging the gap between us. .PP .ps 12 I nodded. I understood.