lilfluff

Title: Best Laid Plans
Fandom/'verse: Our world, or one quite like it.
Summary: With similar interests and some enjoyable dates, Blaine takes Kristine out to the country to pop The Question... (and not actually where I originally expected to go with this prompt)
Word Count: 662
Prompter:

aldersprig: Planning and when it goes awry

Blaine grinned as he pulled his car off the barely paved country road onto the gravel side road. "And welcome to my home away from home. Or simply home after graduation."

Waiting until they drove past the trees that hid his plot of land from the road, Kristine took a good look at the house before answering. Thick walls, backing into a low hillside, "It almost looks like an Earthship, but without the huge greenhouse wall."

The sun facing wall did have quite a few windows, but all made from rather average sized panes rather than a wall of glass.

"I did borrow some ideas, but even if I wasn't considering potential vandalism I wasn't sure I wanted to try mounting any of those large sheets of glass on my own."

"You build all this on your own? That's a little hard to believe, how long has it taken?"

He parked and showed her to the entrance. "Not the whole thing, I had Dad and Eddie's help at first. Started during my Junior year of high school. Dad paid for the land and we started working on weekends and over breaks. Got most everything but finishing off the front wall done before I was on my own."

The sun facing wall might not have been all glass, but with eight window strips that arcs up to become skylights the large room was well lit. A few scattered light strips banished the shadows when Blaine flipped a few switches near the door.

"The part you'll love is back here." Heading off to the right they took a short hallway that lead into the mountainside. Approaching a cluster of doors the soft hum of fans could be heard.

"On the left is the larder. Over six hundred cubic feet of freezer space and plenty of shelf space for everything else. But the real gem is to the right." Opening the door Blaine motioned Kristine in and grinned again at her reaction.

"Are you honestly showing me a supercomputing cluster?"

"Well, it won't make it on the Top 100 list, but yeah. Two clusters and some independent servers. And two buried lines to connect the place to the net."

"You're right, I might be falling in love. The things I could make this room do," Blaine could almost swear he heard a purr coming from her. The, this is mine you just don't know it yet, look she gave him was certainly feline enough. Perhaps it was time to ask the question.

"So... We've been dating long enough to come out for a weekend in the woods. Perhaps you'd like to bump it up a level. I could set up a guest account on the network... Or if you'd prefer, would you like this place to be yours as well?"

She gave him a most beautiful smile he could remember seeing, "Blaine, are you..." The smile faltered as she looked closer at the monitor beside him. "Red Hat? Really? These boxes are running Red Hat?"

"What, you'd prefer Windows?"

"Please, no need to curse. I just prefer a truly open operating system."

"Oh, so Ubuntu? Debian Linux?"

"No, not Linux, I said a truly open OS. FreeBSD for my computers."

"Come on, that's nearly as bad as Redmond's FUD, the only restriction the GPL license puts on you is that you share the same rights to everyone else for any changes you release."

"You said it yourself, it's got restrictions. The BSD licenses give you the freedom to do anything you want with them, anything."

"Including removing those rights from others!" Blaine paused and shrugged, "You can at least agree they're both far better than anything coming out of Redmond, right?"

"Of course they are! You even have to ask?" Kristine leaned in grinning that feline grin again, "Go ahead, set up that guest account. I'll have root and set up one of those clusters my way before the weekend is out."

"Ha! You're on."