“Oh, you’d like Austin, and you’d love San Antonio, and you’d probably be interested in Houston, but you’d hate Dallas. That is, what do you think of Calgary?”
I grimaced, and Ray laughed.
“You look just like an Austinite thinking about Dallas. I tell you, the Texas/Alberta parallels are there.”
“What about the computer scene in Texas? Is it as strong as here?”
Ray chewed on his cranberry and brie sandwich. “There is about the same usage coming out of Texas in the way of personal computers as Alberta, which is wildly skewed because of population density.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we have about five times your population and almost the same number of users logging in for personal use, gauging after-business-hours usage.”
“Wow. I knew that there was a lot of Internet usage up here, but that is amazing. Maybe it’s because of our relative isolation. I think Albertans have always had this need to connect to the rest of the world and keep abreast of things. There have been a symphony and an opera company and several theaters going for years, way more arts per capita in Edmonton alone than anywhere else in the country. Maybe that’s why the computer usage, too.”
“Maybe. I know a couple of old classmates who live near the mountains around here who telecommute for Motorola. They live to ski, so they work from home and ski as much as they can. You have to admit, the Internet does appeal to that hermit type.”
“Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, you know. Maybe the whole idea of the global village being accessible from way up here was what appealed to him in the first place.”
Ray laughed. “Maybe. This sandwich is great. So, I think we’d better get down to work, or my boss is going to wonder why I toured the university for two hours on the APD’s dime. Tell me about Babel, and more about this Tremor guy.”
I filled Ray in the best I could, giving him an idea of how Tremor seemed to be really intent on connecting with Milan. His discussion with me about Thea had given me the creeps, even if Alchemist had tried to blow it off as innocuous. Ray agreed with me. It sounded to him as if Tremor was the one we were after.
“You said there was someone else up here who logs into Babel as a regular. Who is it?”
“His handle is Sanders, which I think refers to Winnie the Pooh. He registered, as I mentioned yesterday, as a Thomas Chatterton, who, if you remember your literary history, was the poet who faked the ancient monk’s poetry on some old paper he found in the attic of a church. He committed suicide shortly after being found out.”
“What does that have to do with Winnie the Pooh?”
“Well, that doesn’t. You see, there was a writer-in-residence fundraiser last week.” I tried to explain the whole blue-suit business, the opera tickets, and the possibilities of who could be Sanders. “Denise says that Chick Anderson doesn’t seem to have the required skills on a computer, and I wouldn’t think Alex Danvers would be flirting on-line. Besides, I’m pretty sure Sanders was on-line talking at the same time as Alex and Valerie were at a movie they told me about. So, it has to be Winston Graham.”
“Who chats under the name of Sanders,” supplied Ray.
“Exactly.” I smiled. “It sounds a bit lame now that I try to explain it to someone else.”
“I don’t know. I’d say someone who would make a play on a plagiarizing poet for his registration, also making a reference to children’s literature, is more likely than to think that there’d be two people doing the same thing in the same chat room at the same time. I would put money on Winston Graham, given what you’ve explained. So where do we find him?”
“I’m not sure, although from the sounds of things he is doing an art history class and some comparative religion courses. Why do we need to find him, anyhow?” The weird conversation I’d seen about killing people echoed in my memory, but I felt odd about offering something so ambiguous to the police. There was likely a very plausible explanation for that entire discussion.
“Well, I will admit, we focused on Edmonton because there was so much activity coming out of here on Babel. Part of that, of course, we now know, comes from your monitoring work. It doesn’t explain all the activity, though. We’re getting log-ins from all over town. Now, either your Sanders logs in from libraries and computer labs and Internet cafés, picking a different place each day, or you have way more than just Sanders for neighbors.”
I stared at Ray. More people than Sanders on Babel? That was too weird to contemplate.
Ray insisted on picking up the lunch bill. I walked him back to the LRT entrance, promising to send him Chatgod’s e-mail address and a list of registrations for Babel. I told him I’d have to okay it with Chatgod, and he smiled and nodded. Since Chatgod had already pretty much agreed to my cooperating with the police, I didn’t think it would be problematic, either. He suggested that Steve and I have lunch with him the next day. I told him it would be our treat, and I’d have Steve call him at his hotel later if it was a go for him.
After he’d disappeared down the stairs to his train, I walked home, a lot slower than I’d power-walked earlier in the morning. I had a lot to think about. More than two Edmontonians in Babel? Who were they? And why weren’t they admitting it when Sanders talked about his hometown? Was it something about Sanders’s style? Maybe nobody wanted to meet up with him for coffee. Or maybe there was something a lot weirder than that going on.
35
The first thing I did after logging into Babel was call up the registration file and demand a print on the entire list. Since it listed people who were no longer current members, it took a while of churning out page after page, but that was okay by me. If there were more Edmontonians in Babel, I wanted to know who they were.
I stood in the middle of my office-slash-dining room and stared at the general chat room moving along on my computer screen. Every night I was drawn into this world of language perpetrated by people I didn’t know, would never meet, and might not like at all if I were to meet them in different contexts. However, I had stopped watching television, I had taken on a job devoting myself to keeping this area relatively free from the creeping uglies, and I was connected by shared experience to many of these people. Even I, who had tried to maintain a carapace of anonymity, was part of the community. I had been there when Vicky had left her abusive husband, I had been there when Vixen’s son had been in the car accident and it was touch and go for thirty-six hours, I had been there when Andreas had finally asked Jennifer to come visit him in Holland for the summer holidays. The people of Babel were my community, and in among them were folks who were not who they seemed to be.
That, of course, was bad enough. But the real capper was that someone pretending to be someone else might actually turn out to be a hired killer.
Finally the list was finished. I read through Alchemist’s notes on the general activity of the previous eight hours and traded a few jokes before he signed off.
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: A. My neighbor’s guard dog turned on her. B. Doberman pinscher? A. No, Doberman bit her!
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: Ouch! That one is so bad it’s good.
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: That’s what I thought, too. Okay, sweetie, I’m outta here! Have a good, crime-free night. Hope nobody hires a hit on your shift.
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: Don’t be so dang flip about it, sonny. You’re not the one having to talk with the policemen.
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: Careful, chicky-wicky. Don’t forget the original agreement. You weren’t to discuss your job with anyone. If you hadn’t let your policeman boyfriend know about it, you wouldn’t be having these conversations with the law, now, would you?
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: Well, they were noticing a big spike of activity from Edmonton. They would likely have been knocking on my door once they’d gone through the service provider. I just wish I knew who else was pinging in from here. Besides, don’t get owly. I might need you to help out.
<
br /> PM from Alchemist to Chimera: Just yanking your chain, sweetums. You know I’m in your corner.
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: btw, any luck tracing Tremor-the-mild-mannered-hacker?
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: Well, I figured out how he could get in and out without being seen, but I haven’t heard anything about this guy from any of the general hacking circles.
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: You know hackers?
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: Most of them are pretty good people who test security of various programs to bring weaknesses to light, not to take advantage of those weaknesses.
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: I guess I can see that.
PM from Alchemist to Chimera: I really do have to boogie, kiddo. Have a good night. See y’all tomorrow, okay?
PM from Chimera to Alchemist: Sure thing, hon. Sleep well!
And I was on my own. I set the main chat room in a large window, and opened the three private rooms that had action in them in smaller screens, just enough to keep track of the names of the participants and whether they were passing URLs or photos. Meanwhile, I spread the typed lists of registration information in front of me, on the surface of my desk. I slid the keyboard tray under and leaned on the desk, pencil in hand.
What I was looking for were recognizable e-mail hosts or suffixes denoting countries. Anything that was international I could strike through, but the anonymous on-line hosts were the troublesome ones. Anyone could join Hotmail or Bigfoot or several other mail companies offering ease of delivery from any access computer, since they were Internet portal mail sites. Most professionals knew enough not to use Hotmail, since, when it began, it reeked of cheating spouses sneaking around on-line, and that was a hard reputation to expunge. However, there were enough other subscription e-mail services that didn’t bespeak a set location to make my expurgated list still at least half the size of the original.
I decided to work through on the basis of who I knew anything about. I was surprised at how much I did know about my fellow Babelites. I managed to remove another sixty-seven names based on information I possessed about their backgrounds from chatting with them that seemed to tally with their registration information. If it looked the least bit ambivalent I left the name on the list. If I had never seen the person in Babel, I circled the name and considered it removed from primary consideration. People tend to come and go in chat; sometimes they’ll hang around for several months, and sometimes they just flit in from day to day, trying out new people each time they went for the experience. I was looking for the regulars; people who were guaranteed to have been logging in and posting every day or every second day for the previous few weeks. Long enough to cause a spike in Edmonton usage.
In the end, I had twelve names that were possibilities. I had seen five or six of them, but I decided to run it past Alchemist, too, since the others might be daytime users. If they were, chances were they were from Europe and not my problem anyway.
I typed up the list of twelve for Alchemist, made a copy for Ray Lopez, and turned my full attention back to the room. Two of the private rooms had closed down, and the action wasn’t all that great in the main room, either. Even webbies occasionally managed to go out on a Friday night, it seemed. Actually, given the authority with which so many of them discussed newly released movies, I figured a lot of them went out a lot.
I made a pot of decaf and watched the action without interacting at all. Sometimes you feel like a chat. Sometimes you don’t. The only person I really felt like talking with was Steve, if talking had to be done. Of course, I was open to other forms of communication as well. He’d sounded distracted, though, when I had called about meeting Ray the next day for lunch, so I didn’t suggest he come over after his workday, which I had been half planning. We were still in that edgy period, not sure if we were totally back to where we’d been before or if we were creating a new sort of relationship. Neither of us seemed to want to stick out our neck because both of us had been hurt by the separation. Then, I had been positive I didn’t want a major commitment. Now, I wasn’t so sure. And I wasn’t so sure what the heck Steve wanted, anymore, either. Maybe he had decided that we would be better off just seeing each other casually ad infinitum. Relationships. If only there were an owner’s manual for them. With my luck, of course, if there was one, it would be badly translated from the original Korean.
My shift was done for another evening. Things had slowed down to nearly nothing, anyhow. Either Far Eastern folks didn’t on the whole care for chatting, or, more likely, they had found sites that were configured with greater ease to their own languages. At any rate, Chatgod’s continuous demographic chartings showed that Babel stayed dormant from 3:00 a.m. till close on 10:00 a.m. I certainly wasn’t about to argue. I shut down Babel and then my computer and went to bed.
36
Another day of being woken by the alarm was not what I had signed up for. I grumbled my way into the shower, but, after several minutes under the pounding water, I was feeling a little more human. By the time I was dried off and clothed, I was feeling myself again. A grumpy self, mind you, but recognizable.
Steve was going to pick up Ray downtown and bring him over to the High Level Diner for lunch. I would walk over to meet them there about 11:30, before the big lunch crush. This gave me time to log in to the Grant MacEwan site to record the marks of the two students in my distance course who had barrelhoused through and finished the entire course in four weeks instead of the four months allotted.
That was one of the real pluses of distance teaching. The students who tended to get into it were often strong and highly motivated. I occasionally dreamed of having an entire classroom filled with students all equally motivated. Unfortunately, a good class was usually filled with eight motivated learners, ten time-markers, and twelve or more people with chips on their shoulders who were annoyed they had to pay money to take this particular class. You thanked the stars for those eight and suffered the rest.
I filed the marks, sent a heads-up e-mail to both the students, and sent copies to the distance classes coordinator, who liked to have a running tally of who had completed the courses. By 10:30 I had finished my Grant MacEwan duties for the day. I read my on-line horoscope, swept the kitchen and office area, dusted the bookcases and the venetian blinds, and washed up the few dishes that were sitting in the dishpan. I rubbed some hand cream into my knuckles, pulled on my leather jacket, and grabbed the list for Ray on my way out.
My luncheon companions were already at a table by the window, and they waved as I crossed the street toward the restaurant. I managed to wiggle past the lineup of six or seven people at the doorway and headed straight for them, nodding to the waiter watching the door. Ray was poring over the menu, while Steve was describing various dishes. The High Level Diner was one of our favorite restaurants, and Steve could probably explain exactly how each dish on the menu was made and served. Even so, they changed their menus with annoying regularity and had recently removed one of my favorite dishes, their curried chicken. I made do with their chicken enchiladas but reminisced about the curry every time I went there.
Both the men looked expectantly at me, as if I was bringing the Price Waterhouse Academy Award results with me instead of a list of possible Edmonton chatters. I handed over the list, explaining how I had come to winnow it down to these ones. Ray nodded approvingly as I listed my parameters, and I felt as if I’d accomplished something rather special. To celebrate, I ordered the bowl of café latte instead of just a cup of regular coffee.
“It should be easy enough to get addresses on these people if they’re here in town,” said Steve.
“I can get you a copy after lunch, if you’d like one,” I offered.
“The trouble is, figuring out who is from Edmonton and who isn’t won’t be easy. We’ll have to track down some of the service providers and lean on them for disclosure. My colleague Kate is good at that,” added Ray. “I can tell you right away, though, that four of these chatters a
re from Silicon Valley. That e-mail program is a Stanford think-tank exclusive.”
“Well, that is what I call winnowing down. Already we have fewer people to deal with.” I pointed out Sanders’s registration information. “This is the fellow I was talking about before. I think his real name is Winston Graham, and I jotted down the phone book information for all the W. Grahams listed. Of course, that doesn’t really mean much, does it? I have a friend who lists himself in phone books as Earl Grey. Winston Graham might be Chatterton or Winnie the Pooh in the phone book for all I know.”
“We’ll find him, even if we have to check all the Orange Pekoes in the book, too,” Steve assured us. He looked a little more determined than usual.
“I am certainly not saying that I think there’s anything particularly fishy about him, except for the fact that I came across one fairly ambiguous discussion about assassinations. By the way, there is no registration for Tremor, which I can’t really understand. To enter Babel, he would have had to register at one time. I’ll ask Alchemist about it tonight, but I’m pretty sure of that, at least.”
“Is there any way of changing your handle once you’re registered in the system?” asked Ray, making notes in his Palm Pilot.
“No, I don’t think so. I think you’d have to let your registration expire and then reregister with another nickname.” I promised I would ask Alchemist about that, too.
“Have you thought about logging in to Babel yourself?” I asked Ray. “Maybe you might see some of the possibilities for hacking better if you looked around yourself.”
He smiled at me. “Oh, don’t worry, we’re all over that. On the whole, it’s not a bad little joint. It’s a lot more hospitable than a lot of chat sites I’ve been to. I think you and your co-worker do a very good job of being unnoticeable, too. There is a seamlessness to it that works.”
I smiled, a bit nervously. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of Ray and his peers having already been through Babel. I felt a bit violated, to be honest, even if they were the good guys.
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