The Digital Dream

by Mike Cartlidge

  Boson Books by Michael J. Cale

  The Digital Dream

  Waking Caliban

  __________________________________

  THE DIGITAL DREAM

  by

  Michael J. Cale

  __________________________________

  BOSON BOOKS

  Raleigh

  Published by Boson Books

  3905 Meadow Field Lane

  Raleigh, NC 27606

  ISBN 0-917990-21-8

  An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc.

  Copyright 2000 Michael J. Cale

  All rights reserved

  For information contact

  C&M Online Media Inc.

  3905 Meadow Field Lane

  Raleigh, NC 27606

  Tel: (919) 233-8164

  e-mail:boson@cmonline.com

  URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com

  Cover painting by Joel Barr

  The Time?

  The future. Hours, days, week, months. A couple of years, maybe.

  The place?

  Here, I guess. Wherever here is. Our computers and networks make the world a single place. It’s all becoming one. Isn’t it?

  PART ONE

  1

  I remember it clearly, that night, when everything started to come apart. In the case of the bird, I mean that literally. Of course. I was there in the control room when disaster came spiraling through the sky like a kamikaze moon.

  But that was also the night when Garner officially announced his candidature. I’d never met him and I never would. Of course. He changed my life, though.

  ***

  I can’t tell you what kind of night it is outside. My world is nothing but concrete walls in the bunker and ghostly illumination from the computer screens. I can smell the faint ozone smell from the machines mingled with the odor of stale sweat. I have the feeling that the only thing that would be stirring beyond the building would be a moonlight cat. Or a rat. Animal or human. Creeping through gutters and shadows. And I am here inside, locked in a capsule. If you’ve worked graveyard shifts, you’ll understand.

  (Don’t ask me where I am. Somewhere in Illinois but I can’t tell you more than that and it doesn’t matter, anyway. Geography is ceasing to have any meaning in the wired world. You could be working in Boston but your body could be in Buenos Aires. It doesn’t matter, anymore. As long as you’re connected, you’re where you ought to be.)

  But I am here. Worse luck. I’m not good at being a spectator. Like, if I can’t be playing sport, as I often was in slightly younger days, no way do I want to sit and watch it. Watching drives me crazy. And, here, for most of the time, there’s nothing for me to do but watch the others. That’s how I first came to see Garner. I’d wandered through into the off-line area with Lorca and was checking out the TV news. Our man got his regulation thirty-second sound bite. Down at the back end of the late-night bulletin. Meaning he was enough of a curiosity to attract some attention but that nobody at the network thought much of his chances. But, even then, something about him struck me, as I’m sure it did countless others. It wasn’t just that he was good-looking and photogenic. His delivery was perfect and, although I can’t remember exactly what he was saying, he said it really well…

  The news finishes and I stare out the plate glass window at the control room. Just a few operators on duty, hunched over their workstations. The system? The system works fine. Has done for weeks since user-testing sign-off and the final install. I can’t take credit, understand. This isn’t my project. My normal thing is computer and network security, running audits, recommending new ways to keep out the evildoers. I’m only here as a stand-in, since Jensen got appendicitis and the firm decided someone else at partner level needed to be seconded. This is a big client and a big client equals big billings.

  I sit at the back of the room and think those odd disconnected thoughts you get when you have to stay awake but the action list is void. Most of the workstation chairs are empty now. There’s just a couple of the agency workers. And the supervisor, Lorca, behind me in the off-line area. I stare at the man directly in front of me. His name is Bogdan Karshowki. He’s what my more politically-correct-cynical friends might call “body-weight challenged.” Layers of flesh overlap his collar. I stare at the greasy hair on the back of his neck. Try to analyze, to pass the time. Not unsympathetically. There’s a particular breed works in these places. My pick is, his best emotional connections are to the computers. Machines engage his intellect. They communicate with him without prejudice. They satisfy his needs. They alleviate his insecurities. They are remotely warm and comforting. He does not need to touch them. He imagines his thoughts reaching out like tendrils and embracing their electronic ganglions. Outside work, he probably hangs out in the chat rooms, where appearance and prejudice are separated and he can be as young and svelte as he can convince someone he is.

  Maybe we’re not so different, Bogdan and me. We’re here together in the virtual world. The network is the computer and the world’s the network. You only need access to a PC, nowadays, to be part of what’s going on anywhere in the world (and, occasionally, off it, as millions discover when they plug into web sites featuring those little roaming machines we send to disturb the dust on other planets).

  The room’s in an underground complex, miles from the nearest sealed road. Like I was saying, the climate is carefully controlled but my guess is that Bogdan Karshowki’s body is still uncomfortable. He doesn’t know that I’m looking, thinking about him. He remains hunched over the terminal. His mind remains free. His mental caress reaches across thirty thousand miles.

  I look up at the ceiling as if I can see with X-ray eyes. See her up there. The machine is REGNAR 407. She’s a NASA bird, newly launched, handed over to INTERSPACE for positioning as part of a new comms hub. Commercial, owned by a consortium of corporations in the US and abroad. She’s humming through space, right now, somewhere above the North Pole. Heading our way. She’s the latest of her kind to snare Bogdan Karshowki’s affections, but I know he’s fickle. Not for him the long-term relationship. His machines: he helps them make their first moves, guiding them towards the role that will be their lives. When they settle down, he’s gone, like an eternal womanizer, always looking for the new conquest.

  Someone told me that REGNAR 407 is INTERSPACE’s twentieth bird this year. Only the third using our new system, though. The previous two worked fine. This will too. Our software engineers are the best and most expensive, working away in virtual labs all over the planet. You want to know about REGNAR? She’s special. A GEO. A geostationary. Most new satellites are LEO—Low-Earth-Orbit—devices only 400 or so miles above the planet’s surface. Millions of them circling. Cheap and nasty, is how I see them. Even more fickle than ol’ Bogdan there. GEOs like REGNAR are different. Rare and mega-costly. They hold still forever, once in position. They live their lives 23,000 miles up. Monarchs. REGNAR cost more than some countries’ annual budgets. She’s a queen, throning it, way above the everyday rabble. This isn’t my specialty, understand, but I’d have to be blind and deaf not to know that the launch of this bird carried with it some heavy publicity. NASA claims REGNAR is part of the most advanced telecoms system ever developed, capable of switching millions of voice or data circuits simultaneously. Even the President joined the act, one eye on the nearing elections, traveling to Canaveral to make his Kennedy look-alike speech, poetizing about the tin can as symbol of the superiority of America’s electronics industry, democracy and way of life.

  Everything should be cool but I have this feeling… Squint your eyes and the room seems shadowed and sinister. It’s ridiculous but I have a premonition of evil. Must be midnight nerves. I haven’t been sleeping well of late. I decide to stretch my legs
. In the control room, Bogdan Karshowki is whistling tunelessly to himself. Eleanor Rigby. Song reminds me of faraway once-home. English fields and lines of trees. Picking up rice where a wedding has been. The half-life tune is the only sign that he’s alive. I guess imagination must be kept well disguised in this place. Imaginative thought is viewed as one step away from instability. I picked that up on day one. Nonchalance is de rigueur. The operators are expected to be like their computers, calculating and emotionless. Still, I imagine that Bogdan’s thoughts travel with the signals from his terminal, a thousand miles along the earth’s surface to a control station deep inside the New Mexico desert and then across the vast stretch into space, whence the station in turn beams its signals to REGNAR. Yesterday’s virgin will soon be with others of her kind. Bogdan will use her, enjoying the exercise of feelings in her, sensations that have never before been roused and will soon be put aside, never to be employed again. Soon, he will introduce her to the company of others of her kind, to take her mind off the loss when he slips out the door.

  As I watch, he moves, leaning forward slightly to press buttons on the keyboard. I stand and step forward, figuring I ought to show some sign of interest. On the screen, I can see the status image change. All vital indicators green. Good. She is content and well, up there. I walk over to the coffee stand, pour myself a strong black, wish I could light a cigarette: but I’ve given up again and this time it’s held for three months. Longer than ever before. Benefit of untangling some of the knots in my personal life, I guess. Michelle long gone and I never think of her. Except just then, of course. I wonder if I like living alone. The freedom to drop socks and fart when I want. The loneliness of dark insomniac nights.

  ***

  So that’s how it was on the graveyard. Things were busier elsewhere. The techies pieced it together, later. Here’s some of what was happening.

  ***

  Inside a telecommunications center in the basement of a skyscraper in Singapore, a routing computer receives a message from a user in Hamburg, Germany. The center’s an unremarkable lights-out facility, a switchboard of sorts, allowing millions of computers in various parts of the world to communicate with each other, either on the Internet or through private networks. No human is there to see as the router checks the incoming instructions and finds them to its liking. The machine accesses a linked server computer and uses it to dial the number of a UNIX computer in Sydney, Australia, on a public telephone line.

  When the UNIX machine answers the call, the router sends a message requesting access.

  The UNIX machine is protected by inner and outer defenses. The latter are simple. It knows that dial-in calls can only come from seven authorized users, all with numbers in the Singapore area. When it receives a dial-in request, it is compelled to check that the message contains a four-digit code that will allow it to identify which of the users is calling. It will then break the connection and place its own call to the valid phone number to give the user access.

  So far, it has received four thousand, three hundred and twelve requests from the comms center in Singapore. Each message has contained a different code but none of them has been valid and, in each case, it has calmly broken the connection.

  This request is different. The code, at last, is a match to that in its internal password system. The system still clears the line but now it dials out, waiting for the local number (as it thinks it is) to respond. As it is dialing, the computer in Singapore also disengages and, within seconds, re-engages on a different phone line. The UNIX system is instantly confused by the new connection, thinking that its own dialed-out signal has been answered and that the user now on the line is valid and authorized. Its outer defenses are lowered.

  The machine is not yet violated. It still has its interior defenses. Other security systems stand guard of the inner walls. Only the entry of correct codes will give remote users access to the application programs that it runs.

  But its outer ring of software is now accessible.

  In response to a further incoming command, the UNIX system transmits part of its own memory bank, a messaging block, to its far-off counterpart. The block includes a store of passwords that other, valid, users have recently fed into the system. The modem pool re-routes the message back to Germany. Thirty seconds later another message, accompanied by a valid password, transits through the route on its way to Sydney.

  ***

  High above the earth’s surface, REGNAR 407’s on-board computer detects a minor fluctuation and pulse-fires a retro-rocket. The cylindrical space vehicle experiences a slight adjustment to the 100-RPM rotation that keeps it positioned on its axis. Its antenna shifts marginally on its platform, its position driven by a small electric motor, to allow it to continue pointing towards its controlling antenna in New Mexico. The sun gleams off the satellite’s solar panels, the machine shining like a metallic angel in the cold wastes, spinning, lancing through the dark, skating ever closer to where the great satellites hang in space in their never-changing orbits.

  2

  AMALGAMATED METALWORKERS INC

  MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

  CONFIDENTIAL. AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY

  ENTER USER ID...

  PASSWORD...

  Sikpuppi leans back in his chair and grins. The plastic Godzilla stares on impassively from the top of the computer terminal. Sikpuppi winks at it and his hands return to the keyboard.

  RUN KEYBREAK

  “Run it, sucker, see what transpires.” He whispers, like he’s scared that someone other than Godzilla will overhear. Godzilla moves not a muscle.

  The computer program goes through its repetitive routine, flashing sequences of numbers and letters onto the screen next to the message ENTER USER ID. The blur of characters goes by too quickly for Sikpuppi to keep pace.

  “Amateurs.” Sikpuppi lives to crack systems. Has contempt for his victims.

  There is a break in the flash of numbers. In the middle of the screen, the message has changed:

  ENTER USER ID ALAN

  Beneath the message, next to the line that reads PASSWORD, the stream of characters continues.

  “Take it easy, sucker. Any time in the next five seconds’ll do.”

  Sikpuppi stands and stretches his legs. Takes paces round his cramped bedroom. Mucho exercise, this, by his standards. He looks in the mirror and grimaces. He is large and blotched. Snub nose, shock of carroty hair. He remembers his old man once compared his shape to a beanbag, whatever the fuck a beanbag is.

  He stoops and pulls up the covers of the unmade bed, the bedclothes making a hump under the quilt. The room smells of stale sweat and hot plastic. Around him on the bedroom furniture are more models, Dracula, in a long black cape, out of place against more modern monsters, Darth Vader and the Alien Queen. Models of the original Starship Enterprise. And Discovery. X-Files posters on the wall jumble against others from science fiction art, matching the covers of the paperback books that line the sagging shelves. In the way they’re positioned, it’s like they all radiate from the system, a Pentium 6 with more power and disk space than even Sikpuppi will ever need. It huddles like a metal rat on the old school desk, the eye-screen on top of the processor, the tail-cable at the back, the vein-wires to one side connecting through the in-board modem to the phone jack. It’s what gives Sikpuppi his social life, his freedom to rap, surfing the Net, talking to cyberfriends, checkin’ out the message boards. Chatrooming the girls. Online, he’s six-two, really, lean, twenty-three, quarterback king. Cool dude.

  And, away from the relative order of the Web and the chatrooms and the message boards, it takes him to places that aren’t meant to be so welcoming.

  Strings of characters continue to flash across the screen.

  He peers out the window. On the sidewalk outside, Mrs Smolenski from next door is taking her corgi for a walk. The woman is massive, fatter than Sikpuppi, who has no fellow-sufferer’s sympathy. The dog, disproving ancient axioms, is thin and weedy. Little rodent must dine off
the scraps from the old girl’s table, thinks Sikpuppi. Laffs. As he watches, the mutt stops and crouches by a lamp post. Mrs Smolenski looks at some distant spot way off down the street as if unaware that the dog is even with her, letting alone crapping all over the sidewalk. Sikpuppi, who hates dogs and all other animals, looks idly up the street in the vain hope that a policeman will appear. His juvenile mind plays a fantasy about la Smolenski being cited for street pollution, arrested by a night squad, beaten up and held in the cells by a pair of fat dike policewomen to be raped by a police dog...

  The computer beeps. “What kept ya?” Sikpuppi sits, rubbing his hands unconsciously over his stomach. The message in the center of the screen now reads:

  PASSWORD **** ROBOT ****

  ENTER ANY KEY TO CONTINUE

  Sikpuppi picks up a giant-size chocolate bar from beside the keyboard. “Soul food, man.” His mom would have a fit if she saw it. She’s always yappin’ on about his fuckin’ weight problem. Yackity yak. It makes him sick. That’s what she doesn’t realize, with all her nagging. It makes him so uptight, he has to eat to relieve the tension. Ha ha. Laffs.

  He leans forward and presses the ENTER key and the screen blanks for a moment before filling with new messages.

  AMALGAMATED METALWORKERS INC

  MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

  MAIN MENU

  1. Current clients register

  2. Information access system

  3. Accounting and billing systems

  4. Housekeeping routines

  ENTER CHOICE TO CONTINUE...