by Sean Platt
The town of Bontauk had bloomed and died well before Leah had come into the world, but at the end of its life it had been home to a man named Vance Pilloud, who’d come into the mountains not because he was poor (as was the case in much of Appalachia), but because he was rich. He’d wanted to be left alone, and the mountains were one of the only places still available where “alone” was the rule. He’d built himself a small but very nice house on a large swatch of land and then, because he didn’t want to be totally cut off, paid for a Quark affiliate to lay a fiber line to his door.
Pilloud hadn’t lasted long in the mountains. He’d had a massive heart attack and died merely three years after completing his ranch, then had lain dead in the house for a week before anyone found him. His property went abandoned and was repeatedly raided. Now, twenty years later, the house was a decrepit and mostly burned shell on an overgrown patch of land. But the line was still there, and that was good enough for Organa’s best young mind.
Crumb said, “The munchkins, Leah!”
The day was beautiful. The air was clear and clean and unpolluted — something that Leah, who spent much of her time in District Zero, could appreciate more than most Organas. Breathing the clean mountain air, she found herself unperturbed by her companion’s rants. Crumb was a character, a part of their lives. In many ways, he was like an enthusiastic slow child. So she played along with him, smiling, her pink dreadlocks swinging with the horse’s slow rhythm.
“Oh yeah, Crumb? What about those munchkins?”
“They’re everywhere!”
“You mean now?” She looked around theatrically, as if afraid her horse might step on one of the munchkins…whatever they were. She assumed from the name that munchkins were small, but she supposed they could also just be hungry: eager for munching.
“No,” said Crumb, his eyes serious in their cradles of wrinkles. “Of course not! They’re with the Wizard!”
“Where’s the Wizard, Crumb?”
“We’re off to see the Wizard,” Crumb explained. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
Leah felt herself chuckle. “We’re going to hook you up to The Beam, you old nut.”
“We’re off to see the Wizard!”
Leah held both hands up, despite the fact that she knew better than to lay this particular horse’s reins across the saddle horn even for a moment. Given the vehemence in Crumb’s voice, the gesture of contrition seemed necessary.
“Where is the Wizard, Crumb?”
Crumb wasn’t listening. He was rummaging in his beard, which he seemed to use as a hairy backpack. He pulled some odd scrap of food from deep in its gray hairs and slipped it into his mouth.
They finally emerged from the forested part of the trail, which was good because overhead clearance had been getting worse and worse on the old path for the past few minutes. Leah reminded herself to check her head for ticks when she got back, and to ride out sometime soon with clippers to clear the path.
The path didn’t take them into what remained of Bontauk’s pathetic town center. It took them to the edge of Pilloud’s old property. So they crossed a large open field, past some fallen fencing and through a small sea of very tall grass, and walked up to the house. It looked like the house had been burned again since she’d last been here, and the place seemed to have fallen to another round of raids. There wasn’t anything left for raiders to steal, but the house’s shell looked big enough to be tempting, even as burned and decimated as it was. Eventually, she knew they’d burn it down entirely and people would lose any cause to raid it, but for now an entire wing was still standing. That was where they needed to go.
Leah tied both of their horses to a remaining fencepost. Crumb hopped down at her command and followed her inside the house. He pulled off bits of conventional, non-Beam plaster as they entered the old house and, Leah felt quite certain, began to eat it. She lost him for a while as he went into another room and pissed. When he found her again, kneeling over the FiGlass port with her toolkit, he held a small metal bowl covered with painted kittens that was rusted through and had a hole in its bottom. Crumb clutched it like a jewel.
She looked up at the gray-haired old man with an air of getting down to business.
“Crumb, do you know what we’re doing here?”
“We’re off to see the Wizard.”
“I need to hook you up to The Beam. Directly to The Beam. Leo thinks there’s something in that melon of yours that we need to know about, and it’ll be firewalled if it’s there. I can’t hack into a mind. I’m good, but not that good. We need The Beam as an intermediary. The Beam is able to talk to neurons, and I’m able to talk to The Beam with this.” She tapped the small rectangular port behind her ear. “So this is going to be me rooting around in your mind, through The Beam. We’re basically putting miles and miles of cable between us even as we sit here so that we’ll have the tools and the mutual language to communicate. Do you understand?”
Crumb seemed to concentrate very hard. Leah expected him to nod stupidly or to walk away, but he didn’t. The focus in his eyes — for Crumb — was intense. Finally, with both hands jittering, he said, “I want to see the Wizard.”
“Come over here.”
Crumb sat down and scooted closer to the wall, where Leah had uncoiled twenty feet of FiGlass line she’d ripped from the wall the last time she’d been here almost a full year before. Soon, the rest of the house would burn, and the FiGlass would melt and she’d need to dig it out of the dirt where it crossed the yard, but for now, the house offered shade and shelter.
As if he understood, Crumb turned so that the back of his filthy head was facing her. Leah fought nausea at his stink.
She tapped him on the shoulder so that he swiveled his head to look at her, then held up a Plasteel device that looked like a massive black spider.
“I call this ‘The Hat,’” she said. “It’s like one of those temperamental, sometimes-they-kinda-work experimental immersion rigs, except that there are no user outs. So you won’t see or hear the feed like you would with a rig. This is read-and-meta only. To whatever extent I can get in, it’ll allow me to download what’s in your head and let The Beam talk to the metadata underlying our handshake. But to you, it’ll just feel like sitting there with a tight hat on your head. Do you understand?”
Leah looked at Crumb, saw that there was zero chance he understood a word of what she was saying, and slid the device onto his head. There was a knob at the top of the Hat, and the fingers of the spiderlike contraption pointed down the back of his neck, beside his ears, and over his forehead. She picked up the end of the FiGlass line, checked the coupler, and found it intact. The male operator’s connection on the other branch of the line looked okay too. That was good. She’d brought what was needed to wire new connectors onto raw cable, but doing so took time. This made things much easier. She plugged one connector into Crumb’s Hat and stuck the smaller, rectangular connector into the concealed port behind her ear. With the connection made, she immediately saw the controls appear in her mind. She didn’t see the controls with her eyes, which still showed her Crumb and the room. The controls and the rest of what came next would happen deeper down and felt more like the “sight” that occurred within imagination. It had been disorienting at first, but by now, Leah was used to it.
In front of her, Crumb was playing with a bug, heedless of the contraption on his head. But at least he was sitting still. Leah had been afraid he would want to walk around. But Crumb was being compliant even if he didn’t understand — something that was almost shocking given his status as the town crazy.
“Crumb, I’m going to try to enter your head. Is that okay with you?”
Crumb said nothing.
“Crumb?”
He turned, meeting her eyes. It could be Leah’s imagination, but looking back into Crumb’s eyes, it was as if some of the crazy had left them.
“I’d like your permission,” she said. “What I’m about to do is kind of an invasion. So is it okay wi
th you if I access your mind?”
Crumb nodded vaguely. It would have to be enough. She doubted he understood, but she’d done her best. What Leah was about to do was a sort of mind rape, and she wanted the closest thing to consent she could possibly get.
“I won’t be able to get in at first,” she said. “It’ll take a while, for two reasons. One, minds have a natural firewall. We usually think of it as repression or mental defenses. Conscious, top-of-mind information is easiest to identify, but we know that whoever you are, that information isn’t top-of-mind. So this is going to be closer to an art than a science, and a lot relies on my intuitive abilities — of which I have many, fortunately.” She smiled, trying to affect good bedside manner.
Crumb was no longer listening. Still, Leah found herself wanting to speak. She was beyond uncomfortable, trespassing in someone else’s mind. She wasn’t exaggerating about it being an art. Hell, it was closer to trance than art, and what she didn’t want to tell Crumb was that before working on the connection, she’d sneaked away from him and done a rather large dose of moondust. Delving required a fugue. But who wanted a drug addict rummaging around in their brains?
She went on, knowing she was whistling in the dark.
“The second reason is due to The Beam itself. People hook up all the time, and nobody wants their brain hacked while they’re doing so. The encryption and firewalling around hookups like this are the toughest stuff a hacker can run into. It’s incredibly difficult to plow through.”
“I was once a mason,” Crumb said, flicking at a piece of stray plaster.
Leah sighed and went to work. She closed her eyes, stilling her mind. She operated the controls, mentally pushing the buttons that were available to anyone with a port like hers. She sniffed into The Beam, shook hands with Crumb’s feed, and began speaking to it. At first, she saw what anyone with access could see — no different than the most basic Beam page, readable like a billboard. She saw that all of his identity fields were blank, but that he’d self-identified as “Crumb,” which was almost touching. The other fields staying blank wasn’t suspicious in itself. People today were sometimes still born without Beam IDs as she herself had been. Identifiers also occasionally went missing or were deliberately obscured for privacy.
She let her mind slip, easing into the moondust trance. The sensation was like sinking below Crumb’s first layer as if it were the placid surface of a lake. Her thoughts grew darker. She could no longer feel her body. She let herself settle into Beamspace, her moondust-augmented mind spreading out and seeing the data as if it were bits of furniture in a room or fish in a sea. She could put any mask on the connection she wanted, but the one that seemed to work best for Leah was the visual metaphor of an immense rabbit warren filled with interconnected tunnels. She could “go down” any of the tunnels, parts of her mind touching Crumb’s, processed through the interpreters in an outlying, untrackable sector of The Beam. So she tried one of the tunnels and saw it branch into dozens of other tunnels. She tried another, finding even more options. In her mind, the metaphor shifted until instead of tunnels, she saw a huge bank of tubes lined up like a honeycomb — a warren for yellow-and-black striped flying rabbits with wings and stingers. Her mind flew to one of the cells, found it filled with metal. She went to another and found the same.
She pulled back, hovering. This was strange. The rabbit warren and hive constructs were usually adequate. Brains were complicated, but in the end they were just big computers. Yet Crumb’s mind was so much more complex and so much more secure than she was used to. She couldn’t burrow her way in, which was how hacking normally felt to her. It was shocking, really. Leah figured getting into Crumb would be like pushing through mud. Her concerns, now that she was in, revolved around a fear that the warren tunnels might collapse under pressure, not an inability to get in or to find the correct path among hundreds or thousands.
She told her mind to fly out, to tap at the metal filling one of the tunnels. The metal was impassible, the ground around it hard. So she saw herself scratching at it, forging a new path, trying to dig around the metal representing Crumb’s mind’s protections. The dry earth wouldn’t move. So she doubled her effort, mentally freeing her next-level hacker’s tools, and scratched at the dirt with a giant claw. But the earth still wouldn’t do more than sift away, so Leah switched to a kind of explosive ram and struck at the tunnels. Immediately, the metal started to twist inside the holes, bending the entire network. It was like she was trying to punch through an unbreakable metal can, but rather than puncturing through, her efforts were denting it instead. It was like trying to remove a screw and stripping its head — her own attempts to free the screw rendered removal impossible.
Alarmed, Leah pulled all the way back and opened her eyes. Crumb was still quiet in front of her, the plugged-in Hat on his head. She tapped him on the shoulder. He turned.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Crumb,” he answered.
“Who else? Who were you before you came to us?”
“Crumb.”
She looked at him for a long moment, trying to understand what she’d seen. His mind was, without question, the most complex she’d ever run across. It seemed to be filled with bulletproof security, but the moondust fugue was as intuitive as it was analytical, and something inside Leah told her she wasn’t just experiencing security. It was as if Crumb’s brain itself was incredibly advanced. She might have understood if she were trying to hack the mind of a genius — Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, maybe Noah West — but this was Crumb. She’d known him all her life, and he was out of his fucking gourd. So it had to be just security, but even that seemed odd. Why would anyone go so far to protect such a simple mind?
“Crumb,” she said.
He continued to look at her, still surprisingly compliant.
“I can’t get in. I’d have to be more forceful to do so.”
“We can’t see the Wizard? The wonderful Wizard of The Beam?”
“What did you say?”
“Oz,” said Crumb.
“Your mind is locked down,” she said, blinking away the strangeness. “I can’t get into it without hurting you.”
Crumb looked earnestly back at her. “I want to see the Wizard.”
She reached for the connector on Crumb’s Hat, but his hand beat her to it. He put one hand over the port, then his second hand over Leah’s as her hand touched his.
“I want to see the Wizard,” he said, his voice soft, almost pleading.
“Do you understand what’s happening here?”
Crumb said nothing.
“I’m afraid I’ll kill you. I’ve never seen anything like it. Your mind seems to have a crumple zone — an intentional failure point. If I can’t unlock what’s in there, the system seems to have decided it would rather collapse than allow me in by force.”
“I want to see the Wizard,” Crumb whispered, now sounding desperate.
Leah pulled her hand away, leaving the connector in Crumb’s Hat. Then he looked forward again, waiting, as if they hadn’t just spoken, but Leah couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just had one of the most meaningful exchanges anyone had ever had with Crumb. Nobody ever knew what Crumb meant or wanted, but right now, Leah felt like she did.
“Okay,” she whispered.
Leah closed her eyes and allowed herself to settle back into the fugue. She found herself in front of the odd hybrid of rabbit warren and honeycomb, her mind struggling to assimilate the complexity of Crumb’s mind and security. She flew forward, found the earth as hard as before, and again struck at it. Everything again began to dent; she wasn’t going to get through without collapsing the whole works. It wasn’t a question of risk. The chances of failure, if Leah simply tried to bludgeon her way in, were absolute.
She looked at all of the metal-filled cells of the honeycomb, her conscious mind thinking of it as a puzzle. How could you solve a puzzle with no point of movement? A Rubik’s Cube had to turn. A lock’s tumblers h
ad to move. But what Leah was seeing was immobile. So where could she even try? Where was the point at which access could be attempted and failed?
She looked at the wall. This wasn’t all security. This mind had been complex before it was sealed. Why would a complex mind wall itself off and thereby cause its owner to become a Respero-fleeing vagrant? No, Leah intuited, this hadn’t been something Crumb had done himself. It had been done to him. But why?
But it was the wrong question. Instead, she asked herself: What would a complex mind do when it was faced with firewalling? What would it do to fight, even when there was no way to win?
Answer: it would create a back door.
Leah flew around the honeycomb, looking for access points. But there were none. She was circling surrender when she saw honey dripping from a cell near the bottom.
Honey.
Because the honeycomb was just her own mind’s interpretation of what she was facing, of course it wasn’t actually honey. It was simply something leaking — something that made sense within the larger mind (as honey made sense in a hive) and that anyone might overlook. It wouldn’t be anything particularly poignant, but it could be a key. Something that might lead from clue to clue, deeper and deeper.
Leah flew to the yellow honey and touched it. An image flitted in front of her mind’s eye
(a book)
visible for a thin sliver of seconds. Then the image was gone, along with the honey.
But it was enough. Leah had trained her mind to be sharp and observant, and she’d seen plenty. For that scantest of moments, she’d seen a leather volume, JOURNAL written on the cover. Inside, an ownership attribution: Stephen York.
Who was Stephen York?
She didn’t know the answer, but that fleeting vision had shown her the book inside of a larger context. It had been on a shelf with other books, in a building with a red roof, in District Zero. But that was it. That’s all she had.
