by Grady Ward
There were two young women in the front office; from their demeanor and random outfits they looked as if they were putting in the work to pay for their own lodging.
The shorter of the two who was quite attractive under her rainbow-color streaked hair and extra weight was chattering gaily with her companion, saw Joex and reluctantly shifted into manager mode: “May I help you, sir?”
Evidently, she was not used to superannuated lodgers past the age of 30.
“Yes, please. I would like a bed for the week. I can pay in advance if you have a place.” Joex calculated what would be the correct length of stay, too long ahead would attract as much suspicion as too little. “Chi square,” he blurted out to himself as the woman helping him was consulting a crosshatched calendar that lay on the counter in front of her.
“What? Ki? You do chee?” Not looking up. Then after a moment, she said, “Yeah we have a four bed dormitory and a two bed room. But you’ll have to pay the full price for the room if you don’t have a roomie.”
“That’s ok. The room will be fine. How much?”
He paid the week in advance. He asked about the Wi-Fi.
“Cross the street.”
Joex looked through the windows almost opaque with road grime. “The Chinese restaurant?”
“Yep. That’s where everyone goes.”
Joex took the key and his bag and looked for the stairs. He heard the women cachinnate. He felt a pang of desire. But he had other work to do before he could resume his unremarkable life.
Chapter 14
Michael Voide silently pointed to the chairs that he directed his security Throne Kingston and Principality attorney Geedam. Despite the silence, the heavy curtains in Michael’s clerestory seem to muffle further all sounds the men made; Geedam sat down first and crossed his legs, Kingston sat moving his chair slightly to be able to see both the other men.
Voide steepled his hands and then extended all his fingers in fans and pointed them at the men. “Baroco is alive?”
“Yes, Celestial,” Kingston said.
“Where is he?”
Kingston and Geedam said nothing, frozen in their seats.
“Throne, how many Orders are there in the Church?” Voide asked.
“Twelve, Celestial,” Kingston answered.
“How many Orders are above you?”
“Five, Celestial.”
“Do you value your corporeal life, Kingston?” Voide looked obliquely at Geedam as he asked.
“Only as it may give service to the Church, Celestial.”
“Two billion dollars and all of Africa” Michael said, “Our first meager task to transmit a fallen to the end of his life. A homeless man. A man with no friends, no money, no possessions, no faith. A man that does not even know he is chosen. Or why. So simple.”
The First Celestial continued: “Out of the chaos there came order. God’s order. The order of his Supernals. Then the rest. We are the rest.”
Michael Voide turned his back to them and faced a thickly curtained wall. His full blond hair was a flowing nimbus over the navy blue bespoke suit. “To God, a million years, a billion, or the life of the universe is insignificant. Who knows how long it can take an Angel to elevate to a superior Choir? We are nothing to God.”
Both men looked at the back of Voides’s suit and thought of the elements of atonement, which might take years, if not decades, to fulfill in a remote penitential camp. Or forever, underneath the camp.
Michael Voide turned and now looked at Kingston as he spoke to Geedam. “We were premature Archangel, in selecting you as Principality. Can anything save your further fall?”
Chapter 15
Commander Ji Nitao, a man not quite old enough to say that a promotion was overdue, knocked gently at the nondescript room in a pink-prefabricated warehouse on Cixi road with his good left hand. He looked at the battered aluminum sill of the door. It had only taken ten hours for his driver to get to Hangzhou. The temperature was nearly freezing and the wind was gusting to twenty knots this close to the bay.
An older man in his late 60’s dressed in an ordinary worker’s overalls opened the door and warmly motioned for Commander Ji to enter, then to sit on a decrepit stool in the office. The cold mocked its feeble kerosene heater. Through a window inside the office, Ji could see a handful of young men and women inside the warehouse huddling in front of computer screens or leaning over each other. The screens were everywhere inside, on every surface, pointed in every direction.
“Your brother-in-law sends his greetings, Manager Hu.”
“Tell the Admiral that the wind is strong here today.”
“Yes, Manager Hu.”
“I have been told that Messenger Riu is to be detained,” Hu said, “the enemy knows nothing, but, yet, speed is always the essence of victory.” Manager Hu looked out over the warehouse floor. “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the pinnacle of skill,” Hu quoted. “We have half again as many soldiers as the United States of America, yet our entire army is here, in this building, now.”
“Yes, Manager Hu.”
“My brother-in-law must be ready, the treasury must be ready. The deluge must begin within the hour of the enemy’s darkness. They must surrender before he knows his own enemy has struck. Even better—for him to surrender and not know a war has been fought—and lost.”
“Yes, Manager Hu,” said Commander Ji.
“I will talk to you next when the second eight thousand years of history has begun, Commander. Perhaps eight weeks. Perhaps eight days.”
“Yes, Manager Hu.
“Please leave the encipherment and enjoy the day, Commander Ji. Kindly eat with us if you are hungry.”
Commander Ji considered the cold silk worms and deep-fried starfish that he had had last time he delivered a message from Beijing. “Thank you, Manager Hu, we must return before the roads freeze.”
Hu rose, accepted the rigid case containing petabytes of cosmologically random bits generated by the National Academy observatory. One other case with identical contents was in Beijing.
“Goodbye, Commander.”
“Goodbye, Manager Hu.”
Hu watched the Commander get into the passenger’s side of the black BMW X6 and drive off slowly and respectfully. Sadly, he considered the display of transient wealth that the car betrayed. Hu went back inside his office, shut the door, and rubbed his hands before the elements of the heater. He knew that he was pressuring his brother-in-law, the Admiral, but Hu considered that working with the Crux might have been a mistake after all. It was not that he feared, as most did, the supranational extent and infiltration of the Crux into political and economic life or its hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth scattered from Luxembourg to the Isle of Wight; nor did Hu fear the Church’s mercenaries or assassins working as if by the fear of the word of a God, or something very far beyond God. He did fear their incompetence and meaningless viciousness. Casual, arbitrarily applied violence incurs many wasted motions, Hu thought. Apply material force only to achieve a specific end. You amplify that force only when it is coordinated within an overarching plan.
Now, Hu respected the Church of the Crux even less after his team had broken the Crux database of confessionals and operations. They had never suspected that the firmware in their laptop batteries could transmit a trojan behind their firewall. This was ironic, as the reason why we collaborated with the them in the first instance was because whatever the US Department of Commerce knew, therefore, the Crux knew and, in turn, we knew. They had no idea.
Stuxnet and Duqu were just toys compared to the seemingly mystical powers of his children to conceal and nuance covert channels from the ordinary noise of life. Hu looked at the dusty display of an electronic picture frame, now inactive; besides it, in a plastic bag, an ordinary battery-powered toothbrush, returned to China because it stopped working after a few months plugged into American’s houses and the de facto network of the power grid. Listening and recording. GPS, power fluctuations, the echo of
induced data flows from routers, laptops, access points and servers. Day in and day out. Returned for salvaging its toxic metals and its encrypted gold. What is it a toothbrush knows? As it turns out, passwords, statements and billets doux, commercial letters of intent and other intimate designs. A cordless toothbrush!
How does a snake emerge from the chaos of subatomic soup? A description of complex organization animates itself. The knowledge of good and evil itself is easily transmitted through anything capable of conveying information, whether overt, covert, side effect, or completely unintentional. Much simpler than throwing a clump of mammalian DNA in a marriage-bed: is something in the world the case, or not? That whereof one can speak, one may not be silent. That one original bit is the basis of everything.
The boundary between organic life and an electronic computer virus is permeable, diffuse, diaphane. An act of intercourse transmits a score or so megabytes of data, how much more so in the simplest network processor? This time we are subverting, denaturing a tool blindly relied upon by the West; the next time—sometime after my life on this earth—we will transmit engineered life, first here, then throughout the universe as simply as lighting a kerosene lamp or guttering a candle. And we will be the masters of those we engineer as certainly as one who fills a pond with carp.
He thought of the encrypted message he would send to Voide through one of the church attorneys. Not gloating, not threatening, simply encouraging to complete their assigned task. Their attorneys make a poor shield when facing four million men, five trillion dollars, and eight thousand years.
In fact, Manager Hu at this instant was the most powerful man on earth. He bent his spotted hand with the frayed serge cuff toward the teacup. 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.
But for now that power depends upon absolute secrecy, waiting for the overwhelming stroke of an electronic sword.
Chapter 16
After sleeping most of the day until the sky was darkening again under the cool incoming fog, Joex set up his netbook and adapter with a view of the Chinese restaurant across the street. He got all bars on his connection and began to search the net. The minutes turned into hours, and his knees started to hurt from inactivity.
Riddler’s Crosstown Rental’s was owned by a legal firm, Crosstown law, which also owned a real estate company, a security service, an urgent care center, a wrecking service, and a local chain of Mexican restaurants. “One of these things is not like the others,” Joex thought, “maybe more accurately, all of these things are not like each other.” At the Oregon department of corporations, he looked up the current filings for Crosstown and recorded the corporate officers.
Joex then painstakingly searched each of the officer’s names on the web. The name with the most Internet hits by far was for an individual attorney named John Geedam, Esq.
Geedam seemed interesting, if somewhat sketchy. His bar record showed a suspension for an alleged act of malfeasance involving a trust fund, then reinstatement upon a third party petition to the state supreme court. This was ten years ago. The third party petition—more than a thousand pages with exhibits if the index was accurate— was submitted to support Geedam’s reinstatement by the International Church of the Crux.
Joex smoothed his already thinning blond hair, considered the start of the evening noise and partying from the rest of the hostellers and kept searching. The International Church of the Crux was controversial to say the least. Founded in the 1970’s by a handful of puzzle enthusiasts who had made individual fortunes in computer startups, it began as more a chess club than a parsonage. They apparently believed that to the extent that their puzzle-solving ability led them closer to divine intellectual perfection, they needed to make it possible for others systematically to seek their own perfect minds through a program of exercise in mental structure and agility. With a substantial independent endowment and the mercurial tempers of the newly rich, the Crux quickly began down a darker path.
Within the Crux hierarchy, there had been purges in the 80’s and most recently after the tech crash of 2000. Besides bringing in attorneys to hold property in their own name and to firewall portions of the church from each other and supporting front groups by invoking attorney-client privilege, the Crux had steadily taken on a more defensive, religious rubric. The current leader, Michael Voide, a twenty-eight year old man from Coventry, Rhode Island, had apparently discovered the relationship of puzzle-making and incessant adaptive testing to angels and the will of God. And according to whisper, his ascent was assisted by blackmail and graphically executed threats.
According to the materials on the web, you would rise in the Crux hierarchy, or Choirs, if you did well on batteries of computerized puzzles and tests which seemed to be a grand amalgam of SAT’s, IQ Tests and high-tech employment interview puzzles. They dubbed Sir Francis Galton a Supernal of the Church. Books that were considered source scripture by Church-goers were Sir Francis Galton’s long essay Hereditary Genius, the bildungsroman Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse and the space opera The World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt, from whom they adapted the principal of the Games Machine.
Essential practices were works such as How to Solve It by George Polya of Princeton, Guilford’s Structure of Intellect, The Art of Fallacy: Rhetoric of the Irrational by William Shawme of Deep Springs, and the Diagonalization and Internetworks: Georg Cantor and the Society of Mind (International Church of the Crux, pub.)
The International Church of the Crux thrived on newly wealthy engineers who wanted to believe that they were divine as well as simply lucky and hard working. Supporting it was a staff who worked for room and board in order to pay for their own test taking and elevation through the ranks of the Church.
Offsetting the endorsements by the wealthy techies and coddled celebrities were horror stories by those who had claimed to escape the church. They told of imprisonment, physical and mental abuse, extortion and blackmail. The Church used their own ecclesiastical confessions to threaten family members of the Crux staff who were not compliant to the rule of the Church, which in practice meant treating First Celestial Voide as absolute steward and master over them. There were rumors of children disappearing after becoming staff Angels, never seen again.
The Church zealously defended what it saw as its right to religious freedom, the privacy of what it called its parichoners and protected itself by a phalanx of attorneys who knew the offensive use of attorney-client privilege and legal apparatus, along with the power of threatened, extended, and overwhelming litigation to dampen the reforming enthusiasm of critics and investigators. To the Church of the Crux, the publically funded legal system was in fact their personal army. For the cost of a $350 filing fee and the time of an in-house Angel attorney, the church could sequester a hundred to a thousand times the resources of their luckless target.
The Church had thousands of acres of land. It owned enough profitable businesses through its attorneys that its staff members—“Angels”—that it never had to deal with a member of the unpuzzled—“Fallen”—they characterized others. Of course, in the same way, this country within a country had its own laws whose punishment for transgression was far more severe than the outside secular world. This created a supervening culture of staff that placed allegiance to the Crux higher than to any secular law or allegiance or family bond. Even if the law were murder and the allegiance were treason.
Never having, or being permitted, to set foot in the secular world meant that there was no way to show that you still existed at all to Church-renounced family or friends. One of the uncorroborated rumors was that the Church eventually wanted to implement its training program linked to eugenics worldwide to the goal of perfecting the human species physically as well as mentally. That sounded familiar, t
hought Joex. Who knows, it’s all nutsville.
Joex leaned back, then got up, went into the hall and used the shared toilet. He waved to a woman wearing a knit cap and holding a huge bottle of a German malt liquor by its neck as she went into one of the four-bed dormitories to celebrate the evening. She smiled back. He thought about what he had read. He had absolutely no clue why John Geedam, Esq. or the Church of the Crux might be sponsoring an individual act of terror toward Joex Baroco. He was not a church-goer, never had been except as a sometime Congregationalist before his mother had died, and had done absolutely nothing political or controversial during his employment as an engineer at Mooneye. Except mocked on the Internet, he never had heard of the Church of the Crux before. Nor had he ever spoken out against religion, charismatic leaders, or even eugenics. Moreover, he liked puzzles.
Of course a man might inadvertently make enemies, but Joex had been effectively reclusive during his rise as an engineer, the short heated affairs he had with the women in engineering and technical writing were—to his knowledge—mutually satisfactory. If not particularly liked at work, he was respected in problem-solving and producing effective work on time and schedule and had risen quickly within the company.
Yes, this core puzzle trumped all the puzzles that the Church of the Crux might offer him, if in fact the John Geedam, Esq. and the Church had anything to do with Mr. Brillo other than the tenuous link with a car rental company. But, then, what kind of company rents cars like that?
The Church’s own web page was a predictable amalgam of well-executed graphics, gushing testimonials, and sales pitches for books and services. The world center was in a suburban gated and guarded compound of buildings in Portland, Oregon that either radiated success, aspired to the heavens, collaborated with God, or displayed simple coarse excess, depending on your point-of-view. The website had only a few names listed in its “Choir” membership and management list. Certainly not many compared to the millions of “Angels” it claimed as devout parichoners worldwide.
