The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test (continued)

With Carey's help, Stewart introduced the technology to half a dozen members of Congress - as well as high-level officials at the State Department and the FCC - and presented his ideas about why it should be funded (but not regulated) by the government. The result: a $10 million Department of Defense expenditure for Media Fusion in the 2000 federal budget, for "undersea warfare applications" using ASCM. The provision was eventually dropped, but it served notice of the nascent company's unusual influence in Washington.

When Media Fusion moved into its Dallas offices, US Representative Dick Armey (R-Texas) showed up for a ribbon-cutting photo-op. In March 2000, Stewart was invited to the St. Patrick's Day party at the White House. At one point in the evening, he ended up with five minutes of chat time with President Clinton. The company then set up a political action committee, giving thousands to various political campaigns, including Senator Hillary Clinton's.

Representative Billy Tauzin (R-Louisiana) was particularly enthralled with Media Fusion's prospects. After a briefing by Stewart, Tauzin, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, lauded the technology in a speech to telecom and Internet executives, trumpeting its "huge implications" for the cable and fiber-optic telecommunications industries.

As Media Fusion's reputation grew, avenues once closed to Stewart began to open. Over a period of eight months, beginning in fall 1999, he pitched the Media Fusion future to executives at Sun Microsystems, Enron, SGI, Computer Associates International, AT&T, the FBI, the CIA, the Coast Guard, and dozens of other organizations. According to former Media Fusion employees, Stewart and CEO Edwin Blair, a former oil and gas exec, were offered investments of $20 million or more on at least three occasions. But Stewart and Blair, who together owned more than 80 percent of Media Fusion's stock, refused to cede control, and so passed on deal after deal.

After a briefing by Stewart, the chair of the House Energy Committee trumpeted the tech's "huge implications" for cable and fiber industries.

Blair told me that the company had nonetheless raised between $8 million and $10 million, largely from individual investors. The company also professed to have secured $5 billion from mostly unspecified "licensees," including a $1 billion agreement from a group of US rural electric cooperatives known collectively as Integrated Opportunities.

Stewart "has an uncanny, intuitive ability to use technology," said Garen Ewbank, Integrated Opportunities' founder and the architect for the licensing deal. "I put him in the category with the Gutenbergs, and the Edisons, and the Bells, and the Einsteins."

Experts in the power line communications industry, though, were quietly doubtful. "Their approach is that you're too stupid to understand our technology," said Bill Moroney, president of the United Telecom Council, an information technology consortium of electric utilities. "I'm not going to say it doesn't work," he said, but his encounters with the company had left him with an "odd taste." Fearing legal action, UTC members were reluctant to speak out about Media Fusion. And who could say that ASCM was impossible? "You never know," he said. "They thought the Wright brothers were nuts."

I called Robert Kent, deputy director of Carnegie Mellon's Information Technology Development Center, hoping for a more definitive take. Stewart had told me Kent was leading Media Fusion's research and testing efforts at the university. "He's apparently a really brilliant guy," Kent said of Stewart. "There is a certain lack of formality in this work, which he admits to." But after Carnegie Mellon physicists had met with Stewart, and heard that he had conducted several successful experiments, "the consensus was that maybe there was something there."

Most of the money raised, according to CEO Blair, was being poured back into equipment, patents, and research. He didn't know how many engineers or scientists the company had hired already, but referred vaguely to "software gurus" working in the office. I asked him what kind of technical work these gurus were undertaking.

"Gosh, I don't really know," he said. "I know they were working on one deal for Luke on the big bang theory as it relates to the electric grid."

The big bang? This company did everything big. It was all part of Luke Stewart's master plan, and Blair hit on the fundamental premise underlying it all: "The way we've looked at it from the beginning is that God has given Luke a gift," he said. "And we want to give it to the world."

The Lord works in mysterious ways, they say, and if he's working through Luke Stewart, his methods are peculiar indeed. While the 47-year-old Stewart's corporate bio catalogs a lifetime of technological accomplishments and highly sensitive government work, a thorough dig into his background turns up a raft of pissed-off investors and disillusioned business partners. Media Fusion, it seems, wasn't Stewart's first attempt at saving the world through technology.

An early technical proficiency, he said, led him not to college but to the Navy, where he served three years and was trained in nuclear propulsion and special operations. (Stewart's available military records show only that he was trained as a machinist's mate.) Stewart's post-Navy achievements were nothing short of remarkable. He worked variously as an independent software developer for Microsoft in the 1980s; a leader of a team at Salomon Brothers that designed a secure financial transaction system for Alan Greenspan; a consultant on "advanced physical and technical security measures and countermeasures programs" for a company called Best Systems; and "director of defense imaging and information systems autonetics" for Orincon, a defense think tank.

By its nature, this kind of sensitive work and independent contracting is difficult to verify. A Microsoft spokesperson would confirm only that Stewart is a "former employee," although at Media Fusion's offices I saw a small Microsoft plaque commemorating his Excel macro-writing. Salomon Brothers, merged twice over the past half-decade, could find no trace of his employment. Orincon confirmed that Stewart consulted for the company but said he never held any title. I couldn't find any trace of San Diego-based Best Systems, but on his old résumé the company was listed at the same address as "Stewart Consulting." All in all, there was little to prove or disprove his remarkable claims.

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