inherit the earth

by Hunter

  —X

  “Tell me, Witness, how many more people have to die — before you ‘inherit the earth’? “

  - Advocate2

  To: hunter. list@hunter-net. org

  From: Cabbie22

  Subject: Fool me once…

  Haha. Very funny. All right, you got me. Like an idiot I go to the search page and (surprise) Advocate2 turns up… nothing. Ditto for Advocate Debates. I even went through all 2415 matching results for “Inherit the Earth” because by this time, I was pissed. Nada.

  Now, you want to tell me what you’re playing at?

  Hell, I don’t even recall any mention of who got the #2 handle. I’ve been around here for about as long as anybody, but that was before even my time. Witness, any help here?

  To: hunter. list@hunter.net. org

  From: Witness1

  Subject: Advocate and Archives

  Sorry folks. I’ve been trying to stay out of this thread. My initial reaction was that this was just a troll trying to take a dig at me personally and get under my skin. I’m not sure of the motivation here. What I’ve seen here recently, however, is more disturbing.

  I will restrict myself to addressing certain factual points:

  1) There is no archive of messages stretching back to the early days of this site. Nor has there ever been. Hunter-net is not intended to be a permanent database, cataloging our collected knowledge of our foes. I am of the opinion that such a database would prove at least as revealing of its users as of its targets. It would, in short, be a potentially lethal liability.

  2) I have no knowledge of any debates centering around the premise of “Inherit the Earth. ” I certainly did not participate in any “Advocate Debates. ”

  3) Usernumber 2 is reserved under the hunter-net architecture. This is to allow me a backup signin with system admin clearance. This id has been activated only once, in an early attempt to restore the downed server during the catastrophic failure that brought down the original hunter-net. If any other user were online at the time (which was, for obvious reasons, not the case) the handle would have appeared as

  Sysadmin2. There was certainly never any userid of Advocate 2.

  Xterminator, I don’t know what your game is, but I don’t like it. I think your postings to this thread are in poor taste, but so far, you haven’t crossed the line. You do and I pull the plug.

  —Witness1

  Inherit the Earth

  • • • •

  Kim Sun pushed back from the computer, rubbing his eyes. The clock on the nightstand read 3: 42 AM in oversized luminous red digits. He had a hell of a lot of work to get done tomorrow and he really didn’t have the time or energy to waste on this Xterminator character tonight. This morning, he reminded himself ruefully.

  He shouldn’t let it get under his skin. This wasn’t the first time this had happened — some newbie signed onto the list and decided to try to make a name for himself by creating a little friction. So he’d taken a few potshots at some of the list regulars, so what? Kim had seen it all before -someone out to prove how clever he was or just trying to rattle folks, to get them to lose their cool.

  Kim knew he shouldn’t get so emotionally wrapped up in what was going on online, but he couldn’t help it. He hated confrontation - always had — even confrontation by electronic proxy. He knew that when he flipped on his computer tomorrow he would have a big knot in his stomach, the same big knot he had earlier today. It was stupid. He knew it was stupid.

  Compared to the all-too-tangible monsters he saw every day (or at least those days that he could work up the resolve to actually venture beyond the door of his apartment) the antagonists lurking online were pussycats. The real monsters still had all their claws.

  But he just couldn’t help it. Those folks on the list, they depended on him. They looked to him for answers — even to protect them. He provided a safe haven. A place where those like him, the Imbued, could meet, compare notes, swap war stories, share tactics - and most importantly, stay sane.

  They needed him. Hell, they even liked him.

  It was never like that anywhere else. Not at work (back when he could still hold down that network admin job — suits could smell a full-time employee who was only putting in a part-time effort). Not at school. Certainly not at home.

  He hated being made to look foolish in front of the folks on the list. They were the only people who mattered to him now. Maybe the only people that mattered, period. And among them, he was somebody. He mattered. He belonged.

  Yeah, I belong. I belong in a home for the clinically pathetic. Kim hit the key to pick up his email and pushed himself wearily to his feet. He headed towards the kitchen to grab a quick bite while the messages downloaded from a dozen or so different mailboxes. He picked his way over a tangle of cabling trailing from one of two floor-to-ceiling server racks that dominated the tiny apartment. Two server racks, computer desk, ergonomic chair, bed, nightstand, and trunk which doubled as both dresser and table. That was all for the furnishings. The kitchen and bathroom were little more than closets off the main room. The unflattering comparison was cleverly avoided by virtue of the fact that the apartment did not boast any closets of its own.

  Kim found a pizza box wedged diagonally into the dorm-sized refrigerator. Upon inspection, the box contained a single slice, stiff as a board. Kim stuffed the business end into his mouth and tossed the box into a mounting heap of trash that dominated the far end of the kitchen, blocking access to the stove. Need to take that out, he thought. Tomorrow.

  He returned to the computer and folded himself back into the chair. He cursed to find that the download had not run in its entirety. Instead, a dialog box queried, “User has requested confirmation of receipt of this message. Confirm? Yes. No. ”

  Kim squinted at the window nestled behind the dialog box, where he could see the heading of the email in question:

  To: KimSun@mindspring. com

  From: Xterminator@hotmail. com

  Subject: Prick

  Kim lunged across the desk for the mouse. “No, ” he said aloud, past a mouthful of pizza. He clicked the “No” button rapidly, several times for good measure. He didn’t know how Xterminator had gotten hold of his private email address - all messages to the list were anonymous, stripped of any revealing headers — but Kim was not about to confirm that address for him.

  The dialog box disappeared, only to be replaced by another which read “Sending Confirmation. Click to Cancel. ”

  Kim pounded the mouse button a half-dozen more times — to no avail. He slammed down the Ctrl-Alt-Del combo to abort the mail program and when that also proved ineffectual, he hit it again to reboot the system. Nothing.

  The red status bar showed that the mail confirmation was nearly complete. Knowing he would regret it, Kim snapped down the power switch to manually kill the computer.

  The image on the screen rapidly faded. Beginning at its outer edge, a bright white circle appeared and shrank inward, vanishing in a single point of light in the screen’s center. Now Kim was really alarmed. That was not the way a computer monitor powered down. It reminded him more of an old-fashioned television receiver.

  He counted to twenty slowly before thumbing the power switch back to life. For an instant, a message blinked in small white letters in the upper left comer of the screen. It flickered three times and then was gone, replaced by the scandisc program kicking in.

  The message read simply, “You left me to die, Witness. ”

  Kim sat bolt upright, as fully awake as if someone had just trickled ice water down his back. You left me to die? What the hell? Your computer didn’t just suddenly start giving you system messages saying, “You left me to die. ”

  That could only mean one thing, somebody had hacked into his system. But who? And more importantly, why? He needed to get in there and check the firewall. Under the guidance of the Messengers, he had done some extensive tweaking of this security program after a recent incident in which gatecrashers had barged in
on the hunter-net party uninvited. So far, the newly-christened Kerberos program had proved itself superior even to its namesake. It stemmed incursions from either side of the Black Gate between the worlds of the living and the dead.

  If someone had managed to win past the three-headed infernal watchdog program, Kim needed to know how and he needed to know fast.

  He hardly noticed as the scandisc program went through its paces. Even before it had surrendered control of the system, he had already positioned the pointer over the spot where the network security icon would appear.

  Kim was startled when the program terminated to find himself staring, not at the desktop, but at his email inbox. There, waiting for him, was the message from Xterminator.

  Feeling the knot in his stomach, Kim reached out slowly and double-clicked the message.

  To: kimsun@mindspring. com

  From: Xterminator@hotmail. com

  Subject: Prick

  You know what I said about it not being your fault that this place was such an asshole magnet? Well, I wrong. You’re a first-class prick, you know that?

  It’s one thing you jumping in and dissing me on the list when I wasn’t even talking to you. But I went back to the archives today, just to see what Cabbie and the others were bitching about, and (surprise) they’re just not there anymore. Nothing. You scrubbed the archives. And given the timing of this little disappearing act, I think it’s pretty clear that you did so just to try to make me look bad or to keep you from looking worse.

  Well you know what? You weren’t half clever enough or half fast enough. I’ve got hardcopies of the whole damned Advocate Debate thing. And just because you guys went so far out of your way to make me feel welcome, I’m going to return the favor. I’m going to repost them all for you — one by one — so everybody can see what a freaking crock you are.

  Oh yeah, and just so you don’t think I’m talking shit, I’ve attached the entire “transcript” to this message.

  Sweet Dreams, Asshole,

  —X

  Kim felt the knot in his stomach tightening. He keyed up his best home-brew virus-protection program and turned it loose on the attached file. The results were pretty much as expected. Once the bomb had been effectively defused, Kim opened the file.

  He scanned down the long list of email exchanges, his eyes skimming over the damning litany of subject headers:

  Inherit the Earth. The Ethics of Speeding Ones Own Inheritance. Murder for Personal Profit. Patricide for Fun and Profit. Who died and left you boss? A Question of Lineage (was: Who’s Bastard Are You Anyway? ). Who OWNS the Earth? My Father was a Human: the Propaganda of Eugenics. Imbued as the Master Race. Enough of this Master Race crap! Everybody knows the Rots Own Everything (was: My Father was a Rot). Not Funny (was: Your Father may very well BE a Rot). You have your Father’s Eyes. Consequences of being the Heir to Monsters. You only hurt the ones you love. SATAN IS THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD. Son of Satan? Return of Son of Satan? Revenge of the Return of Son of Satan Part 3…

  Kim snapped the file shut and closed down the email program. He knew those arguments, knew them well. He didn’t have to read through them in all their damning detail. He had gone over them time and time again in the sleepless hours before dawn. And he had spent countless evenings — like tonight — working straight through the night to avoid facing those same haunting questions again.

  And now all of his private doubts would be hung out, one by one, for everyone on the list to see. It was unbearable.

  His first instinct was to run. To just snap off the computer and retreat to bed. It was late; he was tired. He could deal with this tomorrow.

  But could he deal with the sleepless uncertainties that awaited him in the world outside the box? Could he deal with the fact that he was out of work, short on cash and looking at the rent coming due next week? Could he deal with the fact that his “hobby” had taken over his life? Could he deal with the fact that he was, by anybody’s definition, some kind of freak? That he heard voices — voices that told him some pretty disturbing things about himself. Voices that told him to Inherit the Earth.

  He wasn’t sure he could cope with all that right now, on top of… everything else. Better to stay right here, on familiar ground. He had to go inside. He had to check up on the firewall program to see who or what had been in and messing with his system. If the hacker could get inside his computer, he could get inside hunter-net. And there were people there who depended on him, needed him. To keep them safe.

  His cursor hovered over the network security icon. Resolutely, he double clicked and felt the opening movement of the familiar ritual unfolding around him.

  Deep cleansing breathe in. Hold it. Calm. Breathe out. Out. There. Emptiness.

  His fingers struck a jarring contrast to his measured breathing. They were a blur on the keyboard. The userid and password were designed, less to form coherent English words and phrases than to set up a certain rhythm of keystrokes. They were the opening notes of the fugue that would bring him into a trance-like communion with the Messengers.

  The firewall program blossomed to life before him on the screen, but he hardly spared a glance for its splashy graphic intro. He could no longer see the pictures, but only the individual points of light and color. They struck responsive sparks within his consciousness. The streaming neon logodata sizzled along his optic nerve as if it were merely an extension of the computer’s own circuitry. His eye was merely an i/o port in that interface — an organic i/o port, but nothing more.

  Kim was already deep within the bowels of the program’s datastrucure, racing along the conduits of silicon synapses. Any moment now, he should feel the presence of the Others. They did not come to him in a blaze of glory, amidst trumpet blasts and the trembling of mountains. Rather, he always sensed the Messengers as silent and invisible brooding presences — more like firm nudgings this way or that, guiding his instinctual efforts to mold the network configuration.

  After a time, he began to worry. He did not feel that comforting presence. Had something gone wrong? For Kim, communing with the messengers was always accompanied by a sense of security; of everything being right in the world. It was perhaps ironic that their presence also triggered his Sight and the awareness of the monstrous all around him -an unambiguous indication that all was certainly NOT right with the world.

  He rounded a comer in the circuitry diagram only to be confronted by the self-representation of the firewall. It rose before him, a daunting barrier of weathered masonry. The wall rose fifty feet into the air. From its battlements, roaring watchfires illuminated the night sky, snapping defensively at the low-hanging moon and stars.

  Kim surveyed the scene before him, his every instinct screaming danger. He had expected to see only carefully marshaled columns of binary data. This was the heart of the firewall. The abrupt change from the abstract to the representational confused him.

  The firewall was self-referencing. It had to be. It needed to be able to conceive of its own place within the network security system since the wall itself was most often the first target of any attack. But the program should conceive of itself as a program, as a series of sequential commands and conditional responses. The firewall should not be able to conceive of itself metaphorically— as a fire-crowned wall. Such a self-image required something more than the merely mechanical, it required imagination. A human imagination.

  Could the program be taking its cues from me, from my presence here? Kim wondered. That would seem to be the only explanation for the scene before him — that he was somehow seeing the picture of the firewall painted in his own imaginings. But why, then, was its presence here so startling to him? Why wasn’t it closer to the image his mind’s-eye conjured up when he heard the word “firewall”? A solid wall of crackling flames?

  Then, perhaps, the firewall was drawing on someone else’s imaginings. Could someone else be here within the machine as he was? The thought did nothing to reassure him.

  Even as this idea formed in hi
s mind, Kim became aware of a stirring, a movement, at the base of the wall. There was the figure there, a crouched human figure in the shadows, curled in upon itself.

  Against his better judgement, Kim crept closer.

  As he drew near, he became aware of a sound above the roaring of the flames. It was a frail human sound, the sound of crying.

  It was not the hushed sobbing of an adult, but the unselfconscious wail of an infant. Kim had trouble picturing that sound coming out of the full-grown figure hunched double beneath the wall.

  At the sound of Kim’s approach, the figure turned sharply. Kim found himself staring into a face that must have once been breathtakingly radiant. The skin had the luster of fine marble, but the face was smudged with ash and soot. The features looked more like something that had been liberated by a sculptor’s chisel than the contours of mere flesh and bone.

  Kim stopped dead in his tracks. From the shoulders of the bedraggled figure, a pair of blazing white wings unfolded. For a moment, their light eclipsed that of the watchfires above. Kim had to shield his eyes against it.

  As his eyes adjusted, however, he could clearly see that the wings were tattered about the edges and singed as if, like those of Icarus, they had ventured too near the sun. Further, they were befouled with mud and muck. Kim wondered at the presence of this downtrodden angel. He pressed forward cautiously, more than half afraid that his footsteps crunching through the rubble here might be enough to set the battered figure to flight.

  But already it had turned away. Not only was the angel not afraid of him, it acted as if he were of no account whatsoever. Just another small frightened thing scuttling among the detritus of the old wall.