Estates

A dark brick and stone power station at dusk under a heavy ochre sky, its roofline a crowd of spires, turrets and conical caps more like a university than a works. Brass pipework and a smoking stack run up the left side, a few windows lit orange, one conduit glowing cold blue at the lower right. A large painted board is fixed across the frontage, its lettering weathered but legible: UNSEEN UNIVERSITY POWER & LIGHT Co., PROVIDERS OF ELECTRICITY, HOT WATER AND OTHER EFFECTS.

The university owns rather more of Ankh-Morpork’s infrastructure than the university generally mentions.

Power and Light

The Unseen University Power & Light Co. supplies the city with electricity, hot water, and the occasional mysterious glow. It began as an arrangement for lighting the Great Hall and expanded, in the way these things do, until the city was on the end of it. The company is wholly owned by the university and reports to the Bursar, who reports to the Archchancellor, who has never asked.

The estate runs in zones, in the manner the engineers insist upon: an enterprise side with the correspondence and the Bursar’s desk, an operational side with the site’s own systems, and a control layer with the plant itself. In front of all three sits the Guild Quarter, the boundary where the university meets Ankh-Morpork proper, where the institutional and commercial interfaces happen and nobody checks credentials too carefully. The contractors’ gate, the clacks relay and the exchange that speaks to the other guilds are all in there, and every one of them can be reached from the street.

Nobody currently employed can account for all of it. A workstation called HEX-LEGACY-1 has been running in the enterprise zone since the late 1990s. The hardware was replaced in 2003 and the software was carried across intact, because nothing was broken, and nothing has changed since because it still works. It survives because the rest of the network depends on files it holds.

The university’s position is that the arrangement works, which it does, and that it has always worked, which is a different claim.

The pentest

In due course the company was tested end to end, from the internet down to the control layer, by people engaged for the purpose and given a scope in writing. The account of that work, including the governance and legalities agreed beforehand, the zones as they were actually found, the exploitation paths that ran, and the remediation proposed afterwards, is held on red. It is not a flattering document and the university has not asked for it to be taken down.

The simulator built from it, so that the same estate can be entered again without inconveniencing the city, is the ICS Access and Persistence SimLab.

Other holdings

The buildings themselves, which contain more corridors and small rooms than the grounds should allow. The High Energy Magic building, which the faculty regard as a phase. The Library, which is dealt with separately because it cannot be surveyed.