Kurt waved his hand. “Whatever—sure. Geography. Topology. Distance. It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.”
“I’m not being pedantic,” the graybeard said.
“You’re not just being pedantic,” Lyman said gently, watching the screen on which four animated jaggy boxes were jumbling and dancing as they reported on the throughput between the routers and the laptop.
“Not just pedantic,” the graybeard said. “If you have a lot of these boxes in known locations with known nominal throughput, you can use them as a kind of sensor array. When throughput drops between point foo and point bar, it will tell you something about the physical world between foo and bar.”
Kurt looked up from his screen with a thoughtful look. “Huh?”
“Like, whether a tree had lost its leaves in the night. Or whether there were a lot of people standing around in a normally desolate area. Or whether there are lots of devices operating between foo and bar that are interfering with them.”
Kurt nodded slowly. “The packets we lose could be just as interesting as the packets we don’t lose,” he said.
A light went on in Alan’s head. “We could be like jazz critics, listening to the silences instead of the notes,” he said. They all looked at him.
“That’s very good,” Lyman said. “Like a jazz critic.” He smiled.
Alan smiled back.