by Grady Ward
Coupled with the events of this morning, being noticed made him want to retreat, get away, get on the road. Away from here.
“Don’t be getting paranoid, Joe baby; you’ll be seeing faces on Mars next.”
Beak, another patron of the Commissary, walked over to Joex’s table, put his thumbs in a vest he was wearing under a windbreaker and officiously said, “Have the police caught up with you yet, Big J?”
“What?”
That old detective Lacey was looking for you last night. Showed a picture of you. You looked like a kid.” Beak smiled. “I didn’t tell them anything,” Beak thought to add conspiratorially.
“Must have been mistaken. No one is looking for me. I am Joe X Bombadil, the master of leaf, litter, and lane.” But Joex stopped eating, unsettled, and pushed his considerable self away from the table. “Time for me to earn some money, Beak. So long.”
He needed a few dollars to buy his evening food and drink. Especially if traveling, since almost by definition the road was between places where he could get a meal, a place to sleep, or the best of all, a shower and a used-clothing give-away. Once outside he walked past the parking lot, beyond the underpass and over to the bus station’s outdoor benches that even at this early hour were filled with a number of street people—some sullen, some arguing with themselves, some rocking and twitching. He tipped some his remaining shag into a piece of newsprint, rolled a homemade, and bummed a light. He was disappointed that it was a butane lighter.
He was just beginning to relax after his meal as he finished his smoke when though the underpass he saw the hood profile a Silver Suburban pull up abruptly in front of the Commissary, the heavy vehicle rocking back on its springs. A tall, thin man who could have been Hispanic, or middle eastern or perhaps Indian, got out, casually looked around, looked at the front door, then went inside the mission. But before he went in, he adjusted his blazer and made an almost invisible brush of his left hip with the inside of his elbow. The motion was not lost on Joex.
“Shit. Joe X, Joe X, Joe X, more paranoia now? Maybe not. But I’d be crazy to think otherwise,” Joex thought. “Shit.” He got up and went inside the bus terminal the bus station to temporarily hide out in the toilet. He rapped at the door to get the attention of the ticket clerk who controlled the door lock. “Do you got a ticket?” the clerk shouted out rudely across his counter and across the room. “No, sir” Joex shouted back, but he rapped again on the toilet door. The clerk scowled and buzzed Joex in.
“This doesn’t look so good, Joe baby.” Joex sat on the toilet with his pants on, thinking about the implication of the Suburban. “Definitely not police. Nor FBI, nor Marshal's office, nor State Bureau of Investigation, nor anyone else I have ever heard of. Looks like a damn drug lord car.” Joex hadn’t been on the road so long that he thought everything happening was a pure accident or a delusional artifact of a misfiring mind.
As a traveler, Joex was getting used to following life as if it were a disconnected string of basic human needs for food and shelter and money and drink and smokes as scenes in the world pass by, unraveling. Planning ahead, as he remembered it, involved too many parts that could break or get lost. Homeless, it didn’t matter that the parts were unconnected and rattling. The map was fraying and splitting along its creases.
Now some ancient part of his mind told him that everything this morning was in fact related and had to do with him, and involved people executing deadly force. Intended for him. And there was absolutely nothing in his life that would explain why.
He could go to the police. The Mad Landing police. “Yeah, right, old buddy, that would be comic gold; might as well shoot myself in the head.” He, somehow, knew that the well-dressed stalker would take him from the police on some convincing pretext and Joex would disappear.
Chapter 5
Michael Voide, the first Celestial of the First Choir, impatiently messaged his assistant Angel, “Where the fuck are you and why hasn’t Geedam touched bases with me?” Michael, as chief material representative on Earth of the International Church of the Crux, expected to meet wealthy donors and celebrities who insisted on face time to go with their money and endorsements. Not to waste his time in his clerestory waiting for John Geedam, Esq., a Principality of the Fourth Choir, and goddamn not-yet-disbarred counselor to call with what had better be the expected news of the recent passing of Joex Baroco, quondam engineer and now hapless bum.
“And when he calls, have Kingston conference us.” Kingston was his Security Throne and, right now, as the person who managed the reconnaissance and information security office of the Crux, a very powerful man in his own right.
Not short, nor tall—just about perfectly unremarkable—Michael leaned back and idly viewed one of the hundred-inch video screens that covered the walls of his immense twelve-sided office that effectively blocked view of Portland’s grey sky and the rest of the turrets, spires, cooling towers and monolithic cubes that made up the remainder of the Crux compound.
Since early morning the screen’s curtains had been drawn and were showing various live video feeds, real-time account balances, locator maps, scrolling news and reference data sets,. But the one he glanced at now showed a simple multiple-choice question: 0f4a. argent:cash::absinthe:[choose best answer] The answer choices were: young, sick, drunk, or gem. Michael instantly chose “young,” considering briefly “sick” as a second choice. If “gem” had been “money” or had been “emerald,” that would have been his first pick. Mediated through silver and green. Disappointingly uncircuitous.
Interesting how a choice becomes wrong in a differing context, even though its own character had not changed at all. Language problems especially, Voide thought. Only among their fellows were particles of language judged meaningful. In isolation, a word stripped off its vital germ, as rice polished white and sterile. The correct answer may well depend upon the precise era in which the question was first posed. But attending to the Crux was like a career investigating crime or baking bread. It was not as if at the end of your life you had eradicated criminals, or the hungry, or perfected human minds through life-long discruciation in the Parich. Perfection of the mind was an asymptote—just as a Celestial, he would never quite reach Supernal in this corporeal body. In any event, a simple daemon such as Baroco would not get in his way.
Michael made a note that some questions needed to be posed so that the parichoner must be specifically examined to see if they understood how the correct answer may change over different contexts, especially over that of time. That in turn reminded him to make sure the Perpetual International Copyright Treaty was proceeding through ratification. Celestial Voide inherently disliked spending as much money as he had to on the International Church of the Crux Meta-Pacs to ensure the critical Senators’ favor. But the lapsing of copyright was one of the few threats to the Church, not because of specific intellectual property itself, but because of the ontological, religious threat to the entire concept of a centralized Games Machine. Why think about becoming a parichoner of the Crux when one could entertain and educate oneself without a tithe? He was drawn back from this thought by his Angel returning his message in his fluttering and apologetic manner—a manner which Michael had an overwhelming urge to strike and hurt. No one would dare say a thing if he were to do so. He listened, staring at his assistant’s chin.
Chapter 6
Thirty years before, fully emancipated from his diminished family, Joex was taking a well-travelled path from school to career. He had studied and taught and wrote about computer science—real computer science, which was origination of the fresh ideas manipulating and mapping complexity groups into the human domain, not just applying the algorithms of those who actually understood the issues of space, time, and computability, and their application to real-world problems. But he had changed. The turning point for him from scientist to engineer was at an International Joint Conference in Boston in the 1980’s. He left utterly disillusioned after seeing the track audiences filled to overflowin
g with the presentations of charlatans touting the alleged machine modeling of cute babies with breast-feeding mothers, while the key tracks in which the fundamental work of systematic free intentional proofs were sparsely attended by spare men in functional clothing. Joex could not understand the inverse relationship between popularity and key importance in the field. Computer Science is not a sub-specialty in the field of grant whore, he decided. And it wasn’t just disillusionment, it was rage. Moreover, it was not just philosophical shading to Joex, it was a white-hot, seething rage in which Joex felt like hurting something, breaking something. The destroyer. His own anger frightened him.
So, he decided to make things. For years, he worked in Silicon Valley for Mooneye, Inc. writing embedded firmware network switches before there was an Internet outside of MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, and the Defense Advanced Research labs. Although over the years he rose in the technical hierarchy from member of the technical staff, to senior member, to principal member, earning a Master’s in engineering from Stanford University along the way, Joex did not know what happened next. He just got tired of increasing the version number of things: 1.01.001 alpha. BFD. Making suggestions that went unheeded and patent ideas that were unfunded, but eventually exploited by other drones with the resources to file.
One day, he just did not go to work. He really did not know why; it was as if he had reached the top of a ballistic arc and now was returning to earth. Although the thought crossed his mind that it actually had nothing to do with his job. Human resources called and asked what he needed. He listened to, and then ignored them. His Chief Technical Officer called. His answer was to drop his phone in the toilet. He threw all his mail away. The five hundred thousand dollars he had accumulated in savings he took out in cash over the protest and delays of his bank. By discreet means he converted it to a short stack of large denomination Australian postal money orders and a handful of numismatic grade uncirculated silver coins. He could comfortably carry his entire wealth and a change of clothes in a daypack. He stopped paying bills. He did not answer his creditors who began to file lawsuits. His professional friends speculated on doing an intervention, but in the end simply never bothered. His sister, living alone across the country, had the local police do a welfare check after a private detective agency contacted her. Joex was courteous and composed. He promised to contact his sister. He never did. She had her own life in Newton, Massachusetts as an artist who had allegedly transcended technology, but oddly always had a cutting remark for people practicing it: “Geeks; nerds, deviants” were the most popular categories that she shrilly described anyone who worked with electronics or machines. She reminded him of things he thought best were left alone.
When the sheriff came to evict him, he merely left with the doors open and the key on the entryway side table.
It took Joex several years to lose and run through virtually all of his savings, but eventually he had only a pitiful amount, enough only for a few weeks. He could no longer afford the weekly lodging house. Then he had nothing. He had been homeless ever since; what organization or direction he had left him as if exhaling. Whatever his old life was, he left behind. Although in a way, it was doing the opposite: it was catching up to him.
Chapter 7
Sam Lion-McNamara of Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa was one of the distributed leaders of the Hatz. He was indistinguishable from thousands of other young men–children really–who had come west, out of the bush, to make a living, such as it was, in post-war Freetown. He had been lucky not to have a hand or foot or arm chopped off in tribal warfare; moreover, he was lucky enough to have a cousin who lived in a concrete blockhouse near the new Chinese embassy. To his cousin he would speak Mende and tell stories of the relatives in the bush whom his cousin secretly hoped would stay put. In the morning, Sam would have to poach whatever wood he could to burn rocks for his cousin; once burned with the precious stolen wood the stones were fragile enough to break into building material for his cousin’s ever-growing compound.
But hanging around the Internet cafes run by Lebanese during the day, Sam would assist customers with their computers and run errands for the manager in exchange for free use of the computers. He would gas up the generator on its concrete pad and metal roof when the owner infrequently decided to compensate for the daily power outages. Barefoot, he had to scramble up to the roof and re-point the 2.4GHz antenna by hand when the gusty torrent of the monsoon twisted it. He would chase out the lizards so they would not infest the computers or bother the customers. Le 5000 per hour and Le 500 per printed page, no refunds. Sometimes he would play chess with customers for cigarettes; he loved the exotic sounding names of openings he learned he played such as the Sicilian Dragon or the Ruy Lopez. To the foreigners and ex-pats he was a trained monkey, wiry and animated, but strictly an object of entertainment. That was fine with Sam.
During the fall during the monsoon season while the torrents splashed and rivuled outside and Sam got tired of hearing the flogging of a houseboy late fetching water or watching his cousin drink four fingers of Scotch “to burn fat,” in candle light. Sam would walk down to the cafe in the sweltering night to surf the web. He joined forums dedicated to war, gaming, and forbidden activities; he explored the Darknet. He create SSH clients and encryption tokens, he gained his cred writing a piece of software that would plug into the old-time DES clients of automated tellers. He and his ever-changing crew were responsible for the Bitcoin virtual currency debacle. He listened to lectures in stellar renewal from Filippenko at Cal and Abstract algebra from Goins at MIT. That Norvig guy was good. Sam’s English improved. On the net, “Ouest” was his name on the net; at his cousin’s home, he was 14 and didn’t own a pair of shoes.
Over the months, Sam’s skills improved. He had no way of knowing that his relentless self-learning without the distraction of students, teachers, curriculum, and schools began to exceed that of most western high-school, then college, graduates. Nevertheless, even if he had, it would have been inconsequential to him. In Sierra Leone, there was nothing he could do with that distinction. You had to pay school fees to get a degree. You had to buy tutors or procure bribes to obtain high enough levels that those credentials along with further suitable bribes, kickbacks, and connections would get an appointment to a minor government job. Then as long as “your man” stayed in power, you could make a career of extorting and “facilitating” government business in order to accumulate a large number of dollars. Eventually you would betray your corrupt co-conspirators and friends in exchange for judicial immunity. Finally, with your remaining connections and money, you could retire late in life to a small pensione in Paris or Rome where you could entertain the more enterprising of your distant relations without the ever-present need for a fly swatch.
But this path did not appeal to Sam. Sam did not know why he listened to lectures or puzzled out homework with a blunt pencil and scraps of widely ruled newsprint. Sure, it started so he could make a few dollars with a swindle here or a crack there. Now it was something else. Just the frisson of finding things out. To be able to understand cryptic relationships among jarring Fly-tree ideas and more simply, just to be able to do weird shit.
March was the dry season in West Africa and the dust did not help to hide the smell of sewage that evaporated into sludge that clotted the gutters. It was sleepy and hot. Tsetse flies with their praying wings and hungry proboscises were coming in to the city. Sam reloaded the Darknet channel to update the thread. Something is going on. There was not anything technically new, but a major French ISP and two English banks were hit with massive data exposures, and a major defense contractor in the United States had been compromised to a [classified] degree.
The odd thing about the cracks is that none of his friends on Darknet was approached to broker the freed data, and no one even knew the cracker’s handle. Ominously, the President of the United States declared hacking and computer intrusion as “an act of war.” His friends hailing from Chinese domains fell silent. Something is a
bout to happen.
Sam shrugged and arranged to have a digital music player reshipped to the Freetown main post office for him to pick up using funds from a stolen foreign bankcard that he guessed would not be missed for several months. He loved preying upon the rich—foreigners who had so many cards and accounts and money that they checked their statements only once ever few months, or never. But then again, there were a dozen places enroute that the player would be razored out and stolen. On average, he had to steal twenty or thirty cards before he would actually get goods or money in hand. But what else was he to do? When he got this new player with its solar recharger, he could listen to his lectures even when the power cut out and the tropical thunderstorms made traveling dangerous. He wanted to listen to a set of lectures called “Understanding Literature and Life.” Now that would be something. That would really be something, Sam thought.
Chapter 8
After almost an hour in the toilet and the repeated knocking at the door by the bus clerk, Joex left the station clutching his stomach in a mock explanation of his predicament. The clerk again scowled at him and checked the toilet for needles, tubing, or other kit. Specifically not looking back at the Commissary, Joex wandered distractedly toward the plaza at the center of town thinking about the events that were happening to him. He felt as if someone were sitting on his chest and began to feel nauseated. Joex clutched at his gut again, but this time it was not feigned.
By the time he reached the plaza the laid-back, ever so gentle and cool Joex, devised a plan. First, it required a fast shower. He shuffled to the free showers at the back of the oldest building surrounding the plaza, peeled off the stiffened worsted coat, and selected a clean bright flannel shirt with frayed cuffs, a pair of shiny tan trousers and mismatched socks from the free box. He also, incongruously, took a old stained silk tie printed with giant yellow paisleys. He waited for a shower token in a discolored plastic chair that wobbled under his weight. He of course had not noticed the web cam that a merchant had pointed at the plaza in order to intimidate the lower-lives of which Joex was now a member.
