The Spartacus File

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Oh, I see-and you've been able to recruit these loyal troops we need? Like Ed, the guy the rest of you watch nervously because he blew up that cop four years ago? Or wasn't I supposed to notice that?”

  Colby stared angrily at him.

  “Look,” Casper explained, “you're right that I'm not going to suddenly convert anyone; I'm mostly just planting seeds that may or may not yield something later. But I'm also providing encouragement for anyone who's already on our side to join us.”

  Colby considered that, then changed the subject.

  “And if you succeed,” he said, “you plan to replace the corrupt so-called Party with true representives of the people, and redistribute the stolen wealth of the capitalists to the workers?”

  Casper stared up at him.

  “Jesus,” he said, “what rock did you crawl out from under? No, I'm not going to do anything like that! I want a proper, democratically-elected government, and a free-market economy-I'm an American, for heaven's sake!”

  “Isn't that what we have now?” Colby asked sardonically.

  Casper blinked.

  Colby waited for a reply, but Casper could not come up with anything to say, and at last Colby snorted in disgust and turned away.

  Casper watched him go.

  And finally, the words came to him, too late to be spoken aloud.

  No, they didn't have a democratically-elected government, they had a one-party state. Even in the primaries, when there were primaries, the only choices the voters were offered had been selected for them from the class of professional politicians by other professional politicians. And they didn't have a free market economy because the Consortium and the other government-granted monopolies had, with the help of the Party politicians, taken over the marketplace and rearranged it to suit themselves.

  But was that enough to justify a revolution? The politicians had been elected; even if people weren't happy with them, they'd voted for them. The two old parties had been merged into the Party to deal with the Crisis, and the Party had done what it promised. The Crisis was over, but the people still voted for the Party; the Greens held a few West Coast seats in Congress, but not enough to matter, while the Libertarians and Socialist Workers and the rest couldn't get more than one or two percent of the vote.

  And that meant that those people were hardly likely to march in the streets in protest, let alone take up arms and assault the power stations and communications centers.

  Casper frowned.

  There was something wrong here. There was something in his thinking that didn't match the real world.

  If it was his thinking, at all.

  He'd never really hated the Party before; he'd considered it a sort of necessary, or at least inevitable, evil. A divided, two-party government had been inefficient and wasteful, unsuited to the complex modern world, and had brought on the Crisis, when the American economy virtually collapsed-that's what the propaganda always said, and most of the American people believed it. George Washington's warning against political parties was a favorite theme in Party literature, and the countries of eastern Europe, with their dozens of parties and unstable coalition governments, were held up as bad examples-better by far, the Party said, to have one organization providing the candidates. And everyone agreed that the little parties, with their extremist views, were all just eccentrics and crazies, relics of an earlier era. No one wanted them in power. The Greens were useful as a prod, but nobody wanted a Green government.

  Casper had always gone along without really thinking about it. He'd been too busy with his own problems to care about politics.

  But now he was thinking about it. He thought about it constantly. He was obsessed with politics, with strategies and tactics, with theories of government and constitutional rights, all of it stuff that had never concerned him before.

  This wasn't anything a spy would need, let alone an assassin-but it wasn't, Casper realized, his own thinking at all.

  Just what had NeuroTalents put in his head?

  Chapter Sixteen

  “If you look at history,” Casper said, “you'll see that a revolution can only succeed if the military either supports it or remains neutral. The final Soviet coup failed because the military came out for Yeltsin; Napoleon succeeded where Robespierre failed because he had the army behind him.”

  “You think you can subvert the military, then?” Colby asked. He, Casper, and Ed, the bearded member of PFC, were seated around the kitchen table, talking.

  Casper considered that question for a long moment, then admitted, “Probably not. Not as it's presently constituted.”

  “Then how can you expect to win?” Ed demanded. “Maybe now you're beginning to see why we've used terrorism-there isn't much hope in historical models, but we have to do something.”

  “But it won't work,” Casper insisted. “Terrorists can't overthrow a government. The only times terrorism has been at all successful have been in driving out an occupying army, by making it too expensive to stay; that's not the situation here. An occupying army has somewhere else to go home to; the Democratic-Republican Party doesn't.”

  “We know it doesn't work,” Colby said, glaring at Ed. “That's why we stopped. But what other choice do we have?”

  “You have to take the long view,” Casper replied. “Build up discontent, use non-violent civil disobedience, force the government to crack down-that makes the people in power appear as oppressors.”

  “They are oppressors.”

  “Of course, but you have to make them look the part.”

  “Which is what you're doing,” Ed said. “Well, I don't have your patience.” He stood up.

  Casper watched as Ed walked away, then turned to Colby, who shrugged and sat silently in his chair.

  Casper was thinking over what he had just said to Ed, and trying to match it against reality-the reality of the history of the United States.

  Since 1865, no revolutionary group in the U.S. had ever gotten very far. There had never been a serious coup attempt in all the hundred and fifty years since. Every assassination had resulted in a peaceful transfer of power to the designated successor. Even the most disputed elections hadn't led to violence.

  Casper wanted to think that no revolutionary in all that time had had his own abilities, and that the government had never before been so corrupt and unpopular, but he had to admit to himself that he was probably being optimistic about that. Hell, before his imprinting he hadn't had any knowledge of subversion or rebellion, and the stuff in his head now couldn't be any better than the abilities of the people who wrote the file, none of whom had actually overthrown the U.S. government.

  And the government had been corrupt or unpopular during Reconstruction, under Hoover, in the Vietnam era-there had been revolutionary movements and mass demonstrations sometimes, but nothing had ever come close to actually overthrowing the system.

  Revolutions and counter-revolutions in the U.S. had come about at the ballot box or in the courts, not in the streets. Cecelia had been telling him that, telling him that the way to defy the power structure was to become part of it, but he had been resisting.

  He had wanted to find some way to bring the whole thing down from the outside, but looking at it, he didn't think it could be done. Seizing power stations wouldn't do anything but piss people off.

  The communications network couldn't be seized-there was far, far too much of it. Two thousand TV networks, transmitting by satellite; the internet supplying information through a system designed to withstand anything up to and including a nuclear war; the multiply-redundant cellular phone systems; thousands of radio stations

  …?

  And that wasn't even considering such alternative, semi-obsolete forms as faxes and newspapers.

  Taking over the military… well, first off, Casper doubted it could be done; the military was so thoroughly integrated with the civilian population and power structure that he couldn't see any way to detach it. But even if he did, he didn't think a military c
oup would work. There were three million people in the military-and three hundred million guns in civilian hands. The army would not necessarily bring the National Guard with it, and almost certainly wouldn't carry the police.

  And it wouldn't carry the media, or the people.

  Besides, the idea was to set up a better, more democratic government, a multi-party government, not a military dictatorship.

  A temporary military government might not be a disaster; it had certainly worked in other countries. Casper could use it to root out the most corrupt elements of the government, then stage new elections. But the military-backed candidates would lose in the elections, and the military might refuse to step aside.

  It might be worth a try if nothing else worked, but it didn't look like a very appealing course of action.

  And if you looked at history…?

  Maybe, Casper thought, leaning on the kitchen table, he was going about this wrong. He wanted to get the Party out of power, and replace it with people of his own choosing. He'd been looking at revolution as the way to do that-but maybe that wasn't the only way, or even the best way.

  He wanted to get his own people into power. The government said he was a terrorist. Well, where had one-time terrorists wound up in power?

  Soviet Russia. Nazi Germany. Israel. The Taliban's Afghanistan. Palestine.

  Those were not very cheering comparisons.

  But it was worth noting that only half of the examples that had sprung immediately to mind-and he knew there were others he hadn't thought about-involved terrorists successfully leading a violent revolution and seizing power by force. Hitler had maneuvered his way to power through the 1932 election, and the Israeli terrorists had been elected.

  Having been a terrorist apparently didn't make one unelectable.

  Of course, this might not apply in America-but elections were definitely the way to transfer power here. A political party had a much better shot at overthrowing the government than a revolutionary cell did.

  So where could he get a political party? He looked around at Colby, who was still silently watching him, and at the dingy little kitchen.

  People For Change consisted, so far as he could determine, of about twenty people, of whom half a dozen, not counting himself, Mirim, and Cecelia, lived right here. There were another hundred or so people who supported PFC at least to the point of knowing about it without turning anyone in for that last string of bombings in New York four years ago. Not even Ed, the unrepentant cop-killer who made everyone nervous, had been ratted out.

  That wasn't much to start with in founding a political movement, but it was better than nothing.

  He had an organization, at least a minimal one. He had a charismatic leader, in himself-for a moment he marveled at his own arrogance in describing himself that way, but he dismissed that; thanks to whatever the government had put in his head, he was a charismatic leader, or at least could become one. He knew it.

  What else did he need?

  Money. He needed money to buy access to the networks, more access than an ordinary citizen could get-nobody actually watched the public-access stuff where the loonies raved, and political discussions on the net just degenerated into endless arguments that sensible people filtered out. To attract mass attention, you needed to be in the mass media. That was how the whole system had gone bad in the first place-only millionaires could afford to run for office, and millionaires weren't going to screw around with the corporate structures that had made them rich, other than to make themselves even richer.

  If he could talk to people with money, he knew he could raise the funds he'd need-but how could he do that? Not through public-access channels or the public nets, that was certain. Maybe if he could get onto talk shows? But how could he do that while he was still a fugitive?

  And he would also need a front organization that people could donate to-it didn't have to be elaborate, a box number and a bank account should just about cover it. He'd need an employee, someone who wasn't wanted by the feds, to sign all the papers-but PFC ought to be able to provide that.

  He wondered how much of this he was figuring out on his own, and how much had been programmed into him. He had no way of telling.

  But did it really matter? However it got there, it was there, and he might was well get on with it. He needed to build up a political organization; that was more important than a military one in the U.S. There was something in him that was very, very unhappy with that idea, but that he was fairly sure was part of the programming he'd received.

  To build a political organization he needed access to people-but it didn't have to be live, did it?

  “So,” he asked Colby, “is there a vidcam around here?”

  “A vidcam? You mean a webcam?” Colby glanced over his shoulder.

  “I was hoping for something a little better, but a webcam would do.”

  “I don't know. Probably.”

  Annoyed, Casper got to his feet and marched into the next room; Colby watched him go without comment.

  The unattended computer in the next room had no webcam attached, so far as Casper could see, but as long as he was there he logged into the local network to see whether one might show up. None did, but as long as he was online he took a moment to check his e-mail log, the replies to the messages he'd posted on the nets under various pseudonyms.

  Most of it, judging by the subject lines, looked like the usual junk-people agreeing with him, people arguing with him, people trying to sell him things.

  One entry on the list caught his eye, though.

  “32: From: R.S. CHI Subject: C'PR BCH”

  Casper recognized his own name in the subject line immediately-but he also saw that the government watchdog programs wouldn't. A human being might, but the volume of e-mail traffic was far too great for the government to use human watchdogs.

  So unless it was some bizarre coincidence, not only was someone calling him by his real name, but whoever it was didn't want the FBI to know about it.

  Casper sat down and clicked on item #32.

  After the usual headers, he read, “Dear Mr. B.: If I'm mistaken about your identity, I apologize, but I assume it's you. If you really are who I think you are-friendly ghost tree-I think you'll be very interested in the attached file, SPXPTA. DOC-it provides the basic working specs for an optimization program that was accidentally run at NeuroTalents’ Philadelphia facility not too long ago, as well as some other relevant information.”

  Casper was very interested indeed. “Friendly ghost tree"-he'd heard of Casper the Friendly Ghost when he was a kid, though he'd never seen the movies or any of the old cartoons, and he certainly knew what a beech tree was. There couldn't be much doubt that this R.S. Chi had identified him correctly. He opened the file.

  It was gibberish. Casper stared at it for a moment, then realized that it was encrypted-and as was obvious at a glance, it wasn't the standard legal encryption.

  That was really interesting.

  It was also frustrating. How was he supposed to read it?

  He went back to the message to look for clues. The document name was the first thing that caught his eye-what the hell did SPXPTA mean?

  Well, he didn't know about all of it, but PXP was an illegal encryption program, Pretty eXtreme Privacy, that had been around for years. People For Change used it sometimes; so did about a million other people. The FBI would occasionally pick a user at random and come down on him, but the volume of traffic was too great for serious policing, especially since most of the messages they caught and decrypted were things like, “Bet we're ticking off the feds with this one!” FBI complaints against such users tended to get thrown out of court-the users were usually the kids of Party members or Consortium executives.

  The FBI could break PXP encryption if they had to, but there was too much of it on the nets for them to get all of it, and it would keep the automatic watchdogs from spotting key words and calling the file to a human being's attention.

  One of the key words t
hey watched for was PXP, of course-to slow its spread. Nesting it in the name of the file like that might keep it from being spotted.

  So the file was encrypted with PXP. Fine. Except now Casper needed the two keys, which would each be a long string of more or less random characters. What strings of characters?

  Well, there was the obvious one, the only other thing the mysterious R.S. Chi had sent him. Casper brought up PXP, and listed the first key as: “DearMr. B.: IfI'mmistakenaboutyouridentity, Iapologize, butIassumeit'syou. IfyoureallyarewhoIthinkyouare-friendlyg hosttree-Ithinkyou'llbeveryinterestedintheattachedfile, SPXPTA. DOC-it providesthebasicworkingspecsforanoptimizationprogramthatwasaccidentall yrunatNeuroTalents'Philadelphiafacilitynottoolongago, aswellassomeotherrelevantinformation.”

  That was presumably the private key; now he needed the public one. He had an idea how to find that; he googled on newsgroup posts by “R.S. Chi.”

  768 articles were listed; he picked one at random and opened it, and sure enough, the signature file at the bottom included a public PXP key. He plugged it in and clicked on “Display.”

  The decrypted file immediately began to scroll across the screen in plain English. Casper leaned forward and watched. When it was completed he read it through carefully, then read it again.

  When he had finished he sat back in his chair and stared at the screen.

  If Casper's guess was right, “R.S. Chi” was really someone named Robert J. Schiano, whose name turned up all through the notes in the file. And this Schiano was proud enough of his handiwork that he'd wanted Casper to see some of it clearly-because Casper Beech was intimately involved in it, whether he liked it or not.

  At least, Casper thought, he now had a name for the thing in his head, and a pretty good idea of what it was supposed to do.

  The thing in his head was the Spartacus File. And he, Casper Beech, was supposed to be the new Spartacus, the slave who would lead an army of slaves in a rebellion against the oppressive republic that had enslaved them.