Wild Fyre by Ike Hamill Read Free Book Online

noticed them. It’s like if you detected that pi repeated itself, but only after a quadrillion digits. Whoever designed this thing came up with a chunk of data you install as part of the driver. It contains seeds that it grows into archetypes. Those archetypes are then multiplied to create whatever scene is needed. The solution was always there, but the only way to find it was to crunch data on an enormous scale. They must have processed all known video to figure this thing out.”
    “Tell me about the ramifications,” Ed said. He was already lost in the technical weeds, but he didn’t need to understand the “how” as much as the “why.”
    “They released it free—open license, no patents. Anyone can create a compressor or decompressor and use it in their product. So as soon as the first major player jumps, like Youtube or Netflix, then everyone will go. You know how many formats Netflix compresses to? In a couple of years, everything could be this one format. It’s that good. They’ll save an incredible amount on bandwidth, servers, drives, everything.”
    “What’s the downside?” Ed asked.
    “None, really. It will work best on connected devices so the data chunk can be updated. But I can’t think of a device that can’t be updated anyway. I mean, that happens with Blu-ray now, where the player has to be updated to play the latest movies.”
    “Put on your blackest hat,” Ed said. “What’s the conspiracy behind this?”
    Maco smiled and scratched the top of his head. “I can’t believe you. You’re always telling me to calm down and to stop looking for the second shooter. Let’s see… I guess I’d want to sandbox the code and really see what’s going on under the hood before I installed the driver. But codecs are completely isolated from the machine now anyway. Even if the thing were completely malicious, what’s it going to do, mess up the decoding of your cat video?”
    “So that’s the only risk?” Ed asked.
    “Yeah, aside from not encoding or decoding faithfully, I don’t see a risk. The upside of this thing is huge though.”
    “Because it will save bandwidth for Youtube and Netflix?”
    “Not only them, for everyone,” Maco said. “Do you know how many offices I’ve worked in where they had to upgrade their infrastructure because of video? Most of them. They bring me in because their network bogs down at 9:30 every morning and I find out it’s because the sales team is all watching viral videos. And you can’t stop them—there are too many legitimate videos they need to watch for their jobs. Hell, all the training is done by networked video. Every home and office would instantly become more productive when this codec goes into wide use. It’s revolutionary.”
    “Who made it?” Ed asked.
    “Some company that nobody has ever heard of.”
    “What’s their goal? Are they public?”
    “Nope—privately owned company, from Ohio or something. They had a lawyer read the press release. Video of it was posted in old formats and their new format. That was a nice touch. It looks really sharp and it’s so fast,” Maco said.
    “So they’re giving it away?”
    “You know me—I’m the most skeptical person in the world, but the licensing is solid and all the code is up there for everyone to see. Even if they’ve tried to hide something in there, it would only last two days before someone found it.”
    “So you—the king of conspiracy theories—thinks it’s safe.”
    “I didn’t say that. I said they couldn’t hide something in there. Give the world a chance to examine the code, and then I’ll say it’s safe. For now—safe or not—it’s amazing.”
    “What’s the name of the company?”
    “F-Code, LLC. That’s the letter F dash Code,” Maco said.
    Ed jotted down the name.  
    “Are you going to check out the source?” Ed asked.
    “I’ll glance at it, but I’m not expert on compression algorithms. That sounds like something Lister would do.”
    “Good