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said, wryly, “Same as you. She gets that from your side of the family, you know.”
     
    “I know. And I’m proud of it; same as you.”
     
    “Mark I have to say I was surprised to find you back in the field,” She said, “I thought for sure you’d given it up for the classroom.”
     
    “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, Meg,” Echohawk said, “Have you read up on the details of our request?”
     
    “Honestly, I hadn’t. Usually the station’s clerk reads through the bulk of it and summarizes the requests in three sentences including one for the applicant’s name.” Echohawk smiled.
     
    “Reread the application,” He said, “And you’ll understand why I’m out here. You’ll also see why we ordered the scan.”
     
    “Mark…do you have any idea how busy it is up here? There’s a hundred projects just like yours going on each day; those are just the civilian operations. Then there’s the Government stuff and then the military. There are projects ongoing I’m not even supposed to know about. Then, I have to oversee the day-to-day operations of running this station. I don’t get a lot of time to read requests and reports.”
     
    “I think you’ll want to read this one and not just for my sake.”
     
    “Is it that big?”
     
    “You just said a mouthful.”
    ♦♦♦
    History records that early in the twenty-first century international organizations decreed that Internet service was a public utility, much the same way that telephone or electrical services were. They renamed the Internet the World Grid and unknowingly ushered in a new technological era. Television, telecommunications and the services of the Internet were gradually combined into one vast, single medium. Extremely high bandwidth was required to transmit the Grid’s information to the world, so fibre optic trunk lines were established solely to provide Grid access. And the World Grid delivered everything: View-On-Demand television programming replaced broadcast TV’s schedules; people began to watch what they wanted, when they wanted; long-distance calling became a thing of the past because of real-time voice chat; telephones gave way to streaming video communication and the host of services once provided by the Internet were still all available on the new World Grid.
     
    The new media required new delivery systems and a small electronics firm working in Ottawa, Ontario provided the world with the next step in computer evolution: quantum optic computing, the computation of information using light instead of electricity and quantum processing. Previous computer systems relied on the electric processing of digital signals. Optic processing used light pulses instead of electrical impulses to transmit information. And where traditional computers transmitted bits of information as either ones or zeros to process information, quantum computation processed information by transmitting them as ones, zeros, or as virtually any probable combination of ones and zeros. Quantum-Optic computers, sometimes called Optical Probability Computers, worked so much faster, so much more efficiently that the amount of information that could be transmitted processed and stored was exponentially greater than any previous computer system designed.
     
    With the advent of quantum optic computing, Grid service providers replaced or absorbed cable companies, phone companies, Internet service providers and a host of other data-based industries. As currency was replaced by electronic credits to meet an international economy, even banks were absorbed into the new World Grid. The debit card became the new cash, with card-scanners built into most computer keyboards. Banks became largely virtual, with most people performing their financial transactions from their computer terminals. The World Grid was so all-pervasive that governments around the world formed supervisory committees to regulate as much of the technology as they could. And what couldn’t be