Alt.History 102 (The Future Chronicles)

by Samuel Peralta

  I couldn’t shake the fear that this offer was a trap. Somehow, they would use my new location to narrow down where I had hidden the stolen merchandise. Still, it seemed he knew enough about what I had done that the danger of incriminating myself was moot.

  “What about Claire?” I said.

  The question caught him off guard, which is exactly how I intended it. After a long pause to try to figure out what I was getting at, he asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What is she going to be when she grows up?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. His voice was confrontational, which didn’t surprise me. “She’s five. I think maybe she wants to be a leprechaun.”

  “You’re saving up to send her to a Kendrell training program,” I said. “That would be my guess. Will she be a neurosurgeon, like her dad?”

  “I wouldn’t push her toward that,” he said. “She can pick whatever she likes.”

  “You mean - whatever she likes from the Kendrell Corporation’s offerings.”

  He didn’t say anything. The gears were turning, but he was clearly struggling to guess where I was going next.

  “They’ve made a slave of you,” I said. “You have this business, your house, your money. You have a career, and you’re so comfortable with it all that you don’t realize what they’ve taken.”

  He leaned over the table, right up in my face. “I like my life. My family is well taken care of. And I didn’t have to steal anything to get what I have.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But you can’t walk away from it. You have no choice but to stay here. You like your life, but what happens when you don’t?”

  “It’s a good life,” Bannister said. “It’s a full life. You make a commitment and you stick to it. Is that so hard to understand?”

  “Claire. They’ll make a slave of her, too. She’ll choose a career and sign a term of indenture. Is that right? Is that what you’ve got mapped out for her? They’ll give her four years of training and she’ll give them thirty years of her life back. It’s not hard to see who is getting the short end of that deal.”

  He didn’t have an answer.

  “Don’t you imagine your children - or their children - having a life better than yours? How does the path you’re on ever lead to that happening?”

  He thought hard about how to answer. At length, he turned away, and spoke with me behind him. “I suppose you see yourself as some kind of revolutionary. There are rich people in the world, and you’re not one of them, and you’ve got a chip on your shoulder about it. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it isn’t fair. But, do you honestly believe that gives you some right to take it?”

  “It’s no worse than what they have done,” I said.

  “Do you expect me to help you in some way?” he asked. “If you do, you might not be as smart as I thought you were. You should be able to see that I am in no position to do that, even if I did agree with you.”

  I started to speak, to try to explain myself further, but he cut me off.

  “Let me tell you what is going to happen,” he said. “I have to consider what is best for my business. I can’t turn you into the police without making this whole incident public. The shipping containers that disappeared from that boat are heavily insured. But if they’re found, they’ll find something in them that leads back to you. And that will lead them back here. I don’t want them back. See to it that I never hear about them again.”

  * * *

  I had already distributed my computer equipment to several abandoned buildings. I lined a few pockets to keep them from being discovered. But I still had one of the containers, and actually lived in it for about a week before I found another job and got a proper place.

  After the Yard, I moved from job to job every few months. I spent all of my spare time working on the computers - figuring out how the pieces fit together, experimenting, making very little progress. I worked out how to get every piece to power up, to build what I believed was a complete computer, but I couldn’t make it do anything.

  There was a black screen with white text and a blinking cursor. I could type on the screen, but everything I tried generated some error message I couldn’t understand. I spent days guessing with zero success. I thought I had hit a wall.

  My next job was at a steel mill, sweeping and mopping floors. They had a pair of computer operators, both of whom were kept busy and worked frequent overtime. One was an old man. He told great stories, but I rarely had a chance to speak to him. The other was his subordinate, a young woman named Nadia. She was quiet but friendly, curious about everyone.

  I have to admit, Spivey had ruined my impression of computer operators, but these two were stand up people. They may have changed my mind on the issue.

  Nadia was fascinated by my stories, even though I had to keep many of the details secret. We became fast friends, and spent many evenings together after work. I’d talk about my life, and she’d talk about the only thing she knew - her job.

  It was not my plan to trick her into teaching me. The fact that she was an operator was nothing more than a happy coincidence. Once the opportunity presented itself, I pressed her for as much information as I could get out of her, but by the time we started talking shop, she knew something of my plans. She knew as much as I could safely divulge. And, more to the point, she knew she was helping me, and did so willingly.

  She showed me enough to get started. With her help I was able to circumvent the safeties built into the hardware, create login information, and access Kendall’s own computer operator training program.

  From there, I was able to get back to work. I was still afraid to tap into Kendall’s network for fear of being discovered. Nadia assured me this wasn’t possible, but I wasn’t entirely convinced she would know if it was.

  * * *

  The operator’s curriculum describes a concept called abstraction. When writing a piece of software, abstraction means hiding the inner workings. The operator should know what the code does, what input it needs, and what output to expect. For his own protection, though, he shouldn’t know what process the machine goes through to generate that output.

  At the Yard, we would have laughed at such a concept. It was a daily practice to borrow parts from one machine for another, to take things apart and rig them up for some other purpose. So, I found the idea of abstraction foreign and not useful in any way.

  It is never explicitly stated, but they must have had abstraction in mind when computers themselves were invented. They seem designed to be impenetrable, even to their operators. For example, computers took input only in numbers, which means operators had to drill for months memorizing the conversion tables. The tables weren’t even in order. M was entered as 206. N was entered as 151.

  Learning to operate a computer was learning to read again. Memorizing the table made my eyes bleed, mostly because there was absolutely no need for it. It was maddening, until I understood that it was designed to be maddening.

  They didn’t want operators knowing too much. They didn’t want someone like me getting useful information out of someone like Spivey or Nadia. Once I had that epiphany, I was able to just shake my head and laugh every time I saw a page with nothing on it but a wall of numbers.

  * * *

  It was not long before I moved on from the steel mill. Every time I moved jobs, I made new contacts. I probed for like-minded people. I couldn’t afford completed computer parts, but I did find sources for materials and equipment to make my own hardware. More importantly, I met the people with the knowhow to do it.

  I recruited a mechanic from the steel mill to do some side work. Roderick put me into contact with a precision machinist, a man who dealt in medical supplies and did business with the Yard on occasion.

  Soon we were working with transistors made in a re-purposed warehouse. Some months later a chemist became aware of our work, and with his help we started working with silicon wafers. We moved from the warehouse to a clean room in a bunker. We built our fir
st integrated circuit a year later.

  The team I brought together to help me build computer components were the first to contribute their expertise to what would become our knowleWe decided creating our own network would be too risky. If it were discovered, it would be easy to shut our whole operation down. So, we compiled our first knowledge base on physical media. We offered it, along with the hardware to read it and the training to run the hardware, in trade to anyone who could contribute their own skills to the next version of the knowledge base.

  We organized the project organized into cells. Each cell - a group of people with a computer and some knowledge to supply - knew as little as possible about anyone else involved. We referred to each other under assumed names. The point was to protect the project. If any one cell was discovered and shut down, none of the others would be at risk.

  We had been working for months, and things seemed to be going well. And then I had my first real surprise on the project. A network appeared for us to tap into. No one took credit for it, and some cells (including mine) didn’t trust it at first. But some clever person figured out a way to distribute the network over many different computers, so that no single computer was critical to keep it running. They also devised a way for us to dump information into this network without being traced.

  I don’t know how it worked, but it stood up. Kendrell lobbied the US government to shut the network down, and the government agreed to do it. Cells were shut down daily, but new ones rose up even faster. The news began referring to it as The Black Network.

  As much as I love the name, I can’t claim that the Black Network is my creation. The science behind it is beyond what I know. It quickly grew to a point where I no longer felt I had anything to contribute to it.

  Roderick and I sat down one night to discuss the project. We talked about all the ways it could fail, and concluded that the Black Network’s weakest point was ourselves. We knew too much about the other cells - how they worked, how to find them, how they shared resources offline.

  We shut down our cell and walked away. I left whatever job I had at the time and moved to another city. The other cells most likely assumed I had been shut down by the Kendrell Corporation.

  Still, the Black Network went on without my support. It didn’t skip a beat. It didn’t feel my absence at all.

  * * *

  Where does the Black Network stand now? Will it continue to grow or will the Kendrell Corporation eventually snuff it out? For me, the issue was settled by a cell of the Black network, who began to ask, what good is it to have all the information we have if we can’t make use of it?

  They had accumulated a huge body of medical knowledge, but without official credentials, they couldn’t legally practice. Their solution was to ignore the law and practice anyway. Their clinic didn’t have a name, but the neighborhood quickly learned of it, and a week after opening, they were treating patients full time. Lines formed around the block.

  The Kendrell Corporation learned of it, of course, and tried to shut them down on the legal front, but the neighborhood - some would say the world - cried out in support of the clinic. Protestors took to the streets and picketed Kendrell Corporation locations all over the world.

  Two young, hotshot lawyers took up the case. They were educated by the Kendrell Corporation, serving terms of indenture. In spite of that fact, or perhaps because of it, they were sympathetic to our cause. They broke away from the Kendrell Corporation, who immediately seized all of their assets. The lawyers lived entirely on the generosity of anonymous contributors to the Black Network.

  These lawyers were smart - the kind of smart that can’t be taught in any program. They went head to head with the best Kendrell could muster, and eventually they won.

  Their case was based on antitrust laws. The lawyers argued that the Kendrell Corporation represented a monopoly of electronic communications technology. It was far from the first time the company had faced antitrust charges, but until that time, heavy lobbying and a lack of public knowledge of the issue allowed them to win case after case.

  Still, the specifics of the case aren’t important. The important thing is Kendrell tried to shut down the clinic and, as I write this, it is still doing business. Their victory was the beginning of a movement. It seems fitting that it should begin in a free clinic. Their story began just as mine had - people helping people in need, for no reason but that they were in need.

  A Word from Adam Venezia

  So, what did you think?

  “The Black Network” is my first published work. I’ve been writing for about four years, but the early years of writing are much more about learning than producing. If not for The Future Chronicles, I’m sure I’d still be writing only for myself.

  Anyway, “The Black Network” might look like a story about net neutrality, but that wasn’t exactly my intention from the beginning. I started writing with the idea that information is a valuable resource. The internet—free access to information—is a crucial part of our modern existence.

  Computers began as a business tool. IBM, in case you don’t know, stands for International Business Machines. Everyone in the civilized world now has access to them, but it didn’t have to be that way. Money, oil, electricity, and land are all resources that have been hoarded, and made the hoarders wealthy and powerful. Even non-physical resources, such as the legal and medical practices, are tightly held and heavily leveraged by those who control them.

  Even now, countries like China have home computing, they have the internet, but it is heavily regulated and censored. Some would say this censorship is for the purpose of controlling the population, taking away their freedom.

  Prior to the internet, education was part of what separated the wealthy from the working class. Knowledge was for the rich. Even literature shows this trend.

  Last year I read James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, and as much as the book is praised, I couldn’t stand it. It is a difficult read. More to the point, it is intentionally designed to be a difficult read. The supplemental material within the book praise it for being a simple idea told in an elaborate way.

  From the first page, Ulysses makes it clear it is not for everyone. It is written for the highly educated, written at a time when only the wealthy were highly educated. And yet, the writing is good, highly skilled, so it is impossible for me to believe this choice was not deliberate. Joyce had to know what he was doing. It reeks of elitism. It is written purposefully to exclude lesser people—lesser in education and lesser in wealth.

  Fiction, by the way, is just as important as any facts. To read a story is to collaborate on creating a world. It exercises the muscles we use to simulate the world, to predict how people will act, to creatively solve problems.

  Fiction, and all other knowledge, is a valuable resource. We should be grateful to have access to it. That’s what “The Black Network” is about: demonstrating this value by showing what the world might be like without it.

  https://adamvenezia.wordpress.com/

  The Visitation

  by Hank Garner

  There have been theories that we on Earth have already been visited by inhabitants of other worlds. Part of the argument is that it is hard to imagine that, without outside intervention, the human race has advanced from simple cave dwellers to a species wielding the power to destroy ourselves. But do we really understand the degree to which these visitors may have shaped us?

  1

  “LET ME START BY SAYING THIS. It’s not easy to look back and trace the steps that brought you to where you are. Reaching your destination in life is the result of many tiny choices, each one resulting in moving you farther along, each decision culminating in a life that you never could have dreamed of. This is true for most people and most situations.

  “But this is not always the case. Sometimes you can look back and see an event so monumental that that one single thing can be seen as the thing that shaped everything, and has affected everybody. This was one of those events.

&
nbsp; “I know you’re young, and the world is not the same as it used to be. You probably can’t even imagine what life was like before they showed up. Before the visitation of 1985.”

  * * *

  “My father fought in the war. The big one. The war to end all wars. The war that nobody thought would ever end.

  “In the third decade of what had once been called World War II, my father received his mandatory service notification. He told me once that it started as something called a draft, but when they saw that there was no end in sight for the war, they shifted to a mandatory service system. Each male was forced to serve at least eight years in the armed services. If you were lucky to still be alive at the end of your eight year tour, you were free to return home. My father returned, twice as resilient as when he left, but with only one leg.”

  I pulled out a money clip from my front pocket, peeled off a bill, and slid it onto the bar. The barkeep nodded and walked toward me, holding the bottle. He looked at me over his spectacles, studying me for a moment. I nodded back, never breaking his gaze. I must have passed his test because he poured my glass full again. But he was watching me. Judging me with each pour, determining if I’d had enough yet.

  When the barkeep walked back to his station in front of the holo-vision at the end of the bar I continued.

  I gently swirled the glass, not looking at my companion. “You probably don’t believe me. Hell, I didn’t believe it at first myself. But when he showed up at our farm that day after the arrival, I knew that the world would never be the same. I felt it in my bones. I felt it in my gut. I saw the future, and I knew my life was about to change.”