The Celestial Instructi0n

by Grady Ward

  The Celestial Instructi0n

  “The West was hefting rocks while the East was fletching quarrels. Now, the West ignores its systematic vulnerability to network attacks, even as it depends more heavily upon its networked civilization. Meanwhile, China has learned the power of tongues: it knows how to cast spells. Spells that can bind, blind, confuse, and behead.”

  —Manager Hu

  The Celestial Instructi0n

  A novel

  Grady Ward

  Copyright © 2012 by Grady Ward. All Rights Reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To the shadows on the Internet: may they be only allegorical.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Introduction

  As a senior software engineer for Apple Computer, Inc.; a security-cleared contractor assessing software quality at the Naval Underwater Systems Laboratory in New London, CT; and after rooming with a founding member of MIT’s hacker community, I realized a few things have not changed in the intervening decades:

  One: every instruction I selected and wrote would affect hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people worldwide;

  Two: no one—not even myself—understand all the implications, side-effects, vulnerabilities, limits, and black-swan robustness of my own code, much less aggregate code of dozens of other engineers working to a tight deadline;

  Three: justified by defensive, offensive, commercial, or ideological goals, governments with the resources to find, exploit, or even insert backdoors or covert channels in that code are altering the social contract that they do not do so.

  Pray they do not alter it further.

  Chapter 1

  “It’s a good day to burn down my house,” Joex thought as he fidgeted with the pouch of Amble shag in his pocket and regarded the contents of the bindle that lay at his feet. Joex picked out a well-read copy of The Ruined Map, imperfect binding dropping pages swollen from moisture, from what was to be saved and tossed it into the cardboard floor of his old home. The ground was popping and crackling as it dried from the overnight rain.

  “Joe X Baroco—my most central character in my cursed-again life—time to put the shiv in Shiva.”

  Home for Joex in this case was two corrugated cardboard boxes roughly fitted together, covered haphazardly with a patchwork of plastic sheeting in blue, black, and various cataracts of translucent white. While it would be hard to say that Joex’s shelter was further dilapidated than when he had built it several days earlier, this burning, this casting-off, was his customary auto-da-fé before setting off for new prospects.

  Since the first rule for choosing a good care-free rough camp—isolation—had to be tempered with the inconvenience of wandering too far from the fringe of cities that could support professional beggary, Joex compromised by choosing his site at the edge of the forest only if there were no evidence of recent travelers. This site had been as close to perfect as he could find. Only about half a mile from the nearest town, on the same edge as a minor campus of a state university, there was enough mud, roots, bramble and crenulated bluffs to discourage most idle ramblers. The weather held no invitation either, being a cold March day, the last rain recent enough to see its sodden residue.

  As most people who lived at the edge of nature, Joex got up at first light. In the few smoky minutes it took to engulf his home, he finished knotting his bindle, dodging his head to avoid the choking black smudge of plastic and damp paper. His knees hurt and his middle-age frame would not miss a few pounds. He considered his options as he felt the turbulent heat.

  Joex always felt better after setting a fire. As a child, he would steal matches from his father; they would blaze with a flash of brimstone when scratched on the side of the little white boxes. His father would sit in his high-backed chair groaning under his shifting weight and relentlessly draw on his pipe, gripping a dingy tumbler of Christian Brothers sauterne. The briar’s coal glowed into a solar fury then cycled to a cyanotic gloom as he thought of his secrets. And again.

  The little boxes said Mo’s Billiards or The Olde Bide Tavern and Joex would rattle them in his eight-year-old fingers like castanets waiting to use them when he was alone. Sometimes at night, after visiting in solitude for hours with his hot pipe and jug wine, his father would clumsily lay out his knives in a perfect X on the dining room table. The smell of cloves and warm stropping leather penetrated the haze of the Cherry Blend followed him into the room. His father then would fetch one of his hidden pistols that just barely filled his big hand—the old heavy 1911, which itself had the lingering smell of Hoppe’s No. 9—and lay it down in a particular way in one of the crotches of the cross of knives. While his mother screamed and swore, his father would push the pistol a tiny bit this way or rotate it a tiny bit that way, never seeming to get it perfectly aligned. Joex, waiting for the inevitable sudden violence, would break off the wooden heads of his stolen matches and store them in his steely bag along with the tiny tubes of orange cement.

  Later, after school, when he was invisible, he would glue the match heads into glyphs that he would burn onto door and floors wherever he could. He loved the smell of the burning dope mixed with the eye-watering sulfur. Joex did not reflect on the meaning when he left a pentagram or swastika or peace symbol burning into the floor of a little-used elevator parked in the basement of a nearby mid-rise. However, he knew invoking the symbols meant power.

  The elevator was an old one with a pegged control wheel intended for an attendant to guide patrons to their floors. Abandoned, it more often now served as a one-dimensional control for kids like Joex to exert a primeval power in their lives. Up/down/up/up/down/up/down. Each nudge of the control would cause great noisy relays to engage and disengage, echoing in the dark throat of the elevator’s abyss. A Turing machine for the illiterate. But no one challenged him and no one cared.

  Joex remembered the year his father died driving his new Plymouth Duster. Nevertheless, it was not his father
’s death that he remembered most.

  He, his mother, and his little sister had returned from the memorial service. His mother had a cardboard box, like a family-sized Chinese takeout, of ashes to dump. The family separated to their own rooms, not crying, not saying anything in the dark and cooling house.

  Joex got bored and went out into the chilly October air. The family was living in Day’s Harbor, a small town on the Puget Sound that had not made up its mind whether it was 4-H and county fair rural or whether it resigned itself to aging into a decrepit suburb of Seattle. The incoming evening fog had a peaty smell of rotting hay and alfalfa clumped within corrugated drainage tunnels and in deep ditches lining the gravelly road.

  Wandering along the crunching road, not thinking much of anything, rattling a box of matches in his pocket, Joex saw a car parked on the sketchy patch of lawn in front of a darkened house. Back in the day he had already broken the feeble street lamps with his slingshot, so no one could see him undoing the gas cap of the old Chevy. He pushed his snot rag into the rich smell of gasoline. Not really thinking about it, he lit the rag with a match from one of his father’s boxes. He smelled the sulfur and walked on, not looking back. A block away, he heard nothing, but saw a faint long shadow dance ahead of him in a shimmering, blossoming orange mirage. Then as suddenly as if the elevator peg changed direction, Joex was afraid, of death, being caught by his dead father, of drowning in the frigid Sound. He ran the long way back to his shabby house, crushing and scattered the tiny box of matches as he went. Joex never investigated what he had done.

  Years later Joex realized that the only time he really thought of his father that day was when he smelled the brimstone of the flaring match.

  The sharp crack from the smoky cardboard fire snapped Joex to attention. “Did I leave something in my house before lighting it?” He blankly considered that his entire set of belongings that could entirely fit into both of his hands was lying in his knotted and ready bindle in front of him. He heard another cracking bang, louder, as if a thick snow-laden branch had broken off over his head. A tiny geyser of dirt jumped out in front of the hot smoking boxes. Then another crack.

  “Hellafuck?”

  He looked closely at the new tiny pit in the sandy soil to see if there was a fragment of a bottle or can that exploded.

  In a galvanic response that would have done credit to a man twenty years younger, Joex was bounding down the slope toward the center of the forest and the town beyond, leaping from knot to bank to stream-graven trail toward the dripping darkness of the ancient Redwood forest, within a fraction of a second of seeing the sunrise bloom of the six petals of a fully-expanded hollow point.

  Chapter 2

  As he ran, favoring his knees as much as he could, Joex had no idea where the shooter had been lying in wait. His cardboard apartment had been at the top of the forest, where the ground had been clear-cut and bulldozed to prepare for a development that had never materialized. He would have heard well beforehand any vehicle capable of reaching the site, and there were only a handful of bluffs a good hundred yards away capable of concealing a person close enough for a good shot. But for the same reason, as hard as it was to conceal a person on that clear-cut forest edge, it would be equally impossible that anyone had innocently mistaken him for something that could be legally shot and killed.

  While he reached the dark fathom of the forest, Joex was tiring quickly now, succumbing to the stiffness of his 50-odd years. But his mind was spooling up. In a previous lifetime he had been an engineer, devising tiny software structures that were as stolidly reliable as they were the opposite in design to the exotic side-effect coding by the bit-slice clubbers. That engineering personality roiled to the surface as if the bum-fog of the last half-decade temporarily began to burn off. As was his habit of late, Joex started an animated discussion with himself as he crouched in the shadow of the dripping forest:

  “He must have arrived well in the dark. He had enough gear for warmth as he waited for first light, as well as whatever arms he equipped himself with.” “But, then, he didn’t know where I was since he waited until first light rather than shooting me as I slept.”

  Now the only question is whether he had been a target of opportunity, or chosen by some maniac’s unknown criteria over an unknown length of time. Indisputably, it was that Joex’s home lay perfectly defensively in a way that he just discovered: it was hard to approach, and relatively easy to escape from a distant, laden, unmotorized, but presumably younger attacker.

  Joex considered that the strongest proof of its quality was that fact that he was not yet dead.

  Chapter 3

  Joex reached the southern edge of the forest at the border of the campus, which lay between him and town of Mad Landing, a tiny town on the Pacific coast equally distant from Portland and San Francisco. The campus was circled with a narrow road which was closed to traffic during the spring break, which Joex realized was just about now. He waited, shrouded by the forest just a leap away over a ditch from the forest to the campus and presumably from the crazy shit he had just awakened to. Even if he (or she or they) were just crazies wanting to shoot up remote homeless people for sport, then it was virtually certain that they were not crazy enough to risk identification or capture by continuing to pursue their prey to a populated area. But he wouldn’t bet his life on it.

  Joex was familiar with the Mad State campus since he used it to fill his old media player with music, film, lectures, and books from the electronic nipples of the library computers. Rain had finally finished his electronics off and Joex had been getting by with paperbacks from the free box. It turned out that this was fine even though Joex had already read virtually all of the better discards, as Joex kept copies with him to read to other travelers on the increasing rare occasions when Joex shared a shelter or camp. Before the lights were extinguished for the night, or when he had enough smoky flame from a candle or kerosene wick, he would read Orwell or Peake or Stephenson or Churchill in the quiet before the exhausted or sobering sleep. The trick was to read as not stooping to hand-out intellectual charity to the partially literate dwellers within hearing, but recited as if pleasantly remembering aloud, to himself. As the cold squeezed in among the blanket fragments and damp sleeping bags, he knew from the ebbing movements of those around him that his voice had become that of a loving mother singing her children off to sleep. It didn’t matter that he started in the middle, or that he had only a few pages torn from discards; it only took a few sentences to capture attention as he passed on the flickering Academy: there was something beyond the frigid night, and even the poorest could touch and interpenetrate it. And even his own homeless dissolution had not yet extinguished it.

  “Even if this is some lunatic one-off bum hunter, I sure as hell aren’t going to be sleeping around here tonight,” Joex decided as he was taking in the lie of the land on the quiet morning campus. Joex was choosing where to put his feet to jump the ditch when he heard the approaching crunch of gravel on a limb of the road just outside his view to the left.

  Instantly he realized several things. First, from the volume and number of distinct pop and grinding sounds, it was heavy. Not feet, not a bicycle, but a full -sized sedan or more likely a truck. Second, he didn’t hear the whirl of the electric motors universally used by the carts and wagons used by the campus gardeners and security. Third, it was travelling slightly off the road because he could see no gravel on the swept tarmac of the portion that he saw. Fourth, it was travelling slowly. But most alarmingly, it was very close, and closing.

  Joex back-scuttled behind some bracken. He froze, only letting the bracken’s random pinnate waving build a picture of what was passing in front of him on the road. It was the implication rather than the vehicle itself slowly crossing a half a dozen feet in front of Joex that thrust itself into his attention: a spotless silver GMC Suburban with windows tinted, not by a cheap reflective mirror film as found on the streets of Oakland, but the sea-deep green dispersion of exceedingly thic
k and expensive armored glass.

  A vehicle like this in the town of Mad Landing was as likely as a honey-wagon cruising the Imperial Hotel in Geneva.

  He relaxed and sunk into the wet duff as he considered everything that had happened in the last few minutes. In addition to the cramping fear emptying his gut, Joex suddenly had the paradoxical quieting image of a connection among the deep green color of the SUV glass, the emerald of the foliage, and the dead-green verdigris of a decomposing copper jacket.

  Chapter 4

  “Hey, you want the rest of this oatmeal?”

  The server at the Street Commissary wore a plastic shower cap down over is ears and a crooked tag that said ‘Derret.’ The skinny man labeled Derret was holding up a two gallon warming pot with a crusted metal serving ladle stuck out of it.

  “Sure,” Joex said holding out a Styrofoam plate, “fill ‘er up.”

  Joex desperately needed time to think about what had happened. More immediately, to get something to eat and replace his lost bindle. His entire possessions at this moment was a stiff flannel shirt, two pairs of boxer shorts, one green and one white, a cast-off pair of cuffed khaki trousers and a pair of faux shearling slippers, no socks. He had muslin pouch with some loose tobacco in his pocket. He needed a smoke.

  While Joex wolfed his oatmeal at a table covered with the remnants of a morning newspaper, he had the feeling as if all the staff were looking at him. “Jesus, I am getting paranoid.” He casually scanned to inspect faces. A glance here and there. Nothing you could put your finger on, but odd, definitely odd. Since becoming homeless years before, he was used to being invisible. “The original invisible homeless man, brought to you by Ralph Ellison by way of H.G. Wells,” he spontaneously commented to himself.