by Grady Ward
Chapter 36
Joex had taken the large coffee from MacDonald’s, loaded it with creamer and sugar so it was more a brown sludge than a drink, and sat outside on the curb to eat it with the red plastic stirrer.
“Now what?”
He was tired, no—exhausted. And he was hungry. He thought his trousers already felt looser on him. At least he had established a point of reference. A theory, supported by the known facts. Waiting to be disproven. Now, how could he do that? The only way he could think of was to look at the firmware himself. If he could remember it so many years ago. Did source still exist? He hadn’t kept his own. I don’t think that unit even exists anymore at Mooneye. Then the FBI. If the Church of the Crux wants to kill me, if the Chinese are ultimately behind it, and if the reason is to prevent knowledge of Rui Bao’s (how can I know?) involvement in the switching project—at least in a timely manner—if the players think it of some urgency, then can an imminent unspecified danger be thwarted by the dogged perseverance—but glacially slow—investigation of the FBI? And the saying on the net is: anything the government knows, the Church of the Crux knows. What are my chances of leaving this all unscathed? Do I even want to?
Joex’s descent into isolation over the last few years was a wild contrast to his recent tumultuous ascent into imminent murder, spies, pathological cults, Chinese agents, sluggish or corrupt attorneys, and wacked-out dominatrixes. And the Games Machine. Fuck. How could such an organization as the Crux have such a wonderful device? “What next, Joe X?” he spoke to his sludge. “I need some help.”
Chapter 37
Sam Lion-McNamara was considering the value of knowledge. First, what counted as knowledge rather than just a stream of bits, second, did it have a value of its own, or was it only valuable to the extent it could affect the material world? This was not just idle speculation. His life depended on it. Once the go-boys had left, Sam had returned to the Café to the abuse of Milton Kono who threatened to complain to the owner of his absence.
“Mr. Kono, I would not make waves. Are your accounts in order? I can check in Excel, you know.” Actually, Sam had no idea whether the accounts were in order or not, but he knew that the only thing which seemed to exceed the ill-temper of Milton Kono was his ignorance of anything to do with computers, hence the reason for Sam. And when you are ignorant of something, you have no idea of the extent of its power. Whether he actually did have something to hide, or whether the simple wall of his absolute ignorance silenced him, Milton Kono, snorted and went back to his pencil-sucking.
First, knowledge can be miniscule bits: yes or no, on or off, do we drop the bomb or not, is his life forfeit or not? The right single bit can move the world. As can entire libraries of information. That too is knowledge, how to farm, how to make a light bulb, how to burn a circuit board, how to govern a nation, but, also, isn’t a mathematical theory or definition of a word also knowledge, even if its material significance is nil? How about the chirality of a unicorn horn? Right or left? Is it knowledge if it does not exist? Certainly, the significance of a fragment of knowledge can change. One, two, three, four is a simple sequence, but how does knowing that change if I am told it is also the combination to your safe? How does linking knowledge and weaving it together other parcels of knowledge change it?
Sam was inquiring into the nature of knowledge for the simple reason that he needed to convert what he knew into the material means to get away from this place and make a life elsewhere. He judged just leaving was hopeless; what he knew with his hands and legs was pointlessly inadequate. And what he knew with his head was only catalyzed by computers, specifically, computers connected to the Internet. Cousin Siloi’s go-boys cared less what he knew; if anything they would cut off his head to peer at his knowledge from the inside.
Sam went to a terminal with the mouse that stuck the least and logged on to Darknet with Tor. He picked up his mail as Ouest, went over to the Hatz board to moderate and to see if he could generate some further ideas than the cloud of hopelessness which was engulfing him. Here was something interesting: the “Jim Rogers” that he had setup the Redbud account a few days ago was willing to pay good money for some source code. Failing that, for a binary image of the object code of some obscure switching firmware from the 1980’s. He was willing to pay hard money; I wish he could pay with a visa to Britain or to the United States.
Sam responded in email: “Well, how about this? If you transfer the money to Sam Lion-MacNamara at Freetown, Sierra Leone, I will fetch your code for you.” Sam who had always been careful with his identities had used his real name. This was the first time he had used his born name on the Internet. It was exhilarating, powerful, and desperate, as if he had uttered an elemental incantation, which had heretofore been passed over only in fearful silence. But things were drawing to a close here in Freetown for him. To scurry from the go-boys until they got tired or hacked off important parts of him was not a life. Even the Pandemba road prison would be better. There at least I could bargain nightly for my life in exchange for my services.
In real-time his response was in turn responded to: “I will begin to transfer money when you transfer enough code to know that you have it. Then we will trade money for code, piece by piece. The more you send the greater my payment for each piece. But time is of the essence. – Jim R.”
Sam responded once again to “Jim Rogers”: “Sam here. No problem. Send email to Ouest giving me as much information as you have company, date, code size, module name if known, product name and model number, revision code, whatever information you have. If someone has put it on the Internet, or in a machine with a path to the Internet, I will find it for you.”
Two days later, Joex who had passed the night as a scarecrow in the dark next to the main library in Cheyenne, Wyoming. His paranoid tremors were acting up again. He wasn’t sure he could trust that his memory was accurate or that his reasoning was sound, but he believed that it was. The Games Machine had done something to him. The short time he had used it, it had done something to him. It clarified parts of his thinking and formed something like a community of scholars in his head, each outbidding the other with interesting ideas, images, and uncomfortable feelings. But he was exhausted. Instead of thinking, he felt as if he were moderating a discussion. A discussion of prize fighters at the tag-end of their strength He composed the message, sent then email, disconnected from Darknet and left the library. Next stop, Chicago. Then Boston.
Joex had decided to get help from probably the most concentrated pool of surpassingly brilliant computer engineers in the world. They had a crucial quality that he did not know existed anywhere else: they could be designing overwhelming electromagnetic weapons or could be elaborating an algorithm to generate entire endless worlds in a game: either task was met with playful competence and perseverance that rivaled Job. These were men and women who not only knew the secret of academic success was to give the study not only an epsilon more than asked for, but to give it two or three times as asked for, coupled with originality and grace. These were the kind of merry pranksters who for fun and diligence—and to thwart any claim of insufficiency or worse, plain error—would not only page through the entire set of Knuth’s Art of Programming 3rd edition, or Jewel’s Algorithm Discovery and Design, 4th edition to see if any of the more obscure algorithms could be applied to the problem at hand in a fresh way. They would then would transform the problem to another intellectual domain and similarly scan through the volumes of Apostol or Suh, then drop it off at a professor’s keep posed innocently as a naïve undergraduate question. They were incandescent and relentless. Where else was there hope that an imminent computer threat be isolated, if it existed, and if possible, countered? Today, please.
He knew exactly where he was going. The legendary shadow MIT computer science laboratory last domiciled in the Boston Combat Zone. By the time he got there, he hoped that he would have something to show them.
He was also going to connect with his sister. His aggressively Lud
dite sister, who brought up memories of his family and himself that he feared.
Chapter 38
First Celestial Michael Voide slapped himself once, then harder, again, and again and again. He rolled off his chair in front of a Games Machine. He had been there uncountable hours. He rocked his head into the carpet as if an infant, then started to weep and bent to the floor as if praying to the East. His mouth fell open and his tongue dug into the carpet fibers. His eyes had burning sand in them.
Although more than anyone in the Church the First Celestial understood the power that the Games Machine could both grant and extract, it was as a tearing away a suckling newborn at the crown of a full and fertile mother. His arms were trembling, he wanted to void himself on the floor, the background scintillation and tintinnabulation from the screens and speakers around the room were nauseating. A rage built up within him. He spit and babbled into the pile. He could feel his eyes roll up; his buttocks twitched with reptilian intensity. He ejaculated.
He lay there. It passed. He rose and slouched at his command desk and put the palm of his hand flat upon a small black gym bag with a small scarlet Church cruciate embroidered upon it. With his other hand, he touched a screen and said, “get me Dominion Cassandra Jones.” He waited for almost a minute, frozen, staring at a midpoint on his desk, his right hand still on the gym bag, his left, flat, motionless in front of the screen.
“Dominion Jones.”
“Good afternoon, Dominion. From this instant, you are my Security Throne. This is your first direction; it will precede all other tasks that don’t directly preserve your life.”
“Yes, Celestial.”
First Celestial Voide then spoke gently into the phone, as if she had been his Throne for years, for life, since she was his mother, his grandmother, his lover throughout time—the first parichoner he personally executed at the age of twelve. Michael remembered he had kissed him—a far older man—full on his slack lips, then more deeply, passionately, even as the daemon—now dead and leaden—cooled and gassed.
As he spoke, he idly lifted the gym bag slightly off the desk; something rolled within it to the near side of the bag. Something that was just the size, shape, and weight of a human head.
Chapter 39
Sam had skill with Google, which is to say that he was a wizard. He had what seemed to be an intuitive grasp on selecting the skein of words that would net him his target. It is said that, skillfully chosen, the query game of “twenty questions” can winnow the entire universe down to a single wildflower. Sam could likely winnow down the universe into the fleeting constituents of a subatomic particle.
He went through the history of Mooneye on their web page, then found the first family of switches they had innovated. Then he found an unofficial support forum using several of the proprietary terms found on the first pages. Then, then he sought each of the forum contributors by email and nickname and company affiliation where there was one designated. Eventually, finally, on a ancient FTP server he found a directory with a complete set of binary images for each of the original models, with speculation on the differences. Like a Rosetta stone, the author, now retired and who had probably forgotten about this old trove, had decompiled the hex bits and bytes into pseudo-source code that Sam could readily follow. Given a little practice with this dialect, Sam could soon follow the binary without source cribs, but for now he needed to know the traps and the hardware features of the switch originally linked to specific machine addresses. A priori, there was no way of distinguishing an operation code from an address code or from a datum code; was the hexadecimal the label on the box, the contents of the box or an instruction on what to do with the contents of the box? Then the same trilemma had to be unfolded once again for the next group of bytes-the alphanumeric origami protein folding and unfolding in a simulacrum of life—until the power extinguished from the processor or the quest was abandoned. Sam dutifully fed the header block of code into Darknet and waited for either a response from Jim Rogers or, unluckily, in real life, the go-boys.
In Chicago, Joex collected the fragment with Sam’s tentative pseudo-source comments. The past flooded back as he remembered the sequence of hardware addresses to size the cache, flush, map input, and the other terms of art for his project under Robert Marks, er Rui. He instructed Redbud to forward to send money via Western Union to the agent on Proud Street in Freetown. He then copied the acknowledgement and pasted into Darknet email and sent it off to Ouest, or Sam Lion-McNamara, if that was a real name. “More,” he insisted, closing the email.
And so, the trust was proven in increments and correspondingly small money wires; for all he knew “Ouest” could be his supervisor at Mooneye, an FBI agent, or an agent of the Church of the Crux. Now credentials didn’t matter, the contents flowing from an old FTP pc in South Carolina to a battered computer in Chicago mediated by a machine cobbled together from computer electronic waste in West Africa was the ivory tangram which he had to piece together.
In just over a day, he hit Boston, then Cambridge. He took the precaution of calling his sister from the remoteness of western Massachusetts, near where Interstate 84 turned into Interstate 90. It took Joex a long time to punch the number after he found it on-line. What plume of self-satisfied fury would erupt from her? She could not see him in any way that did not apply her steady-state aesthetic of the universe. He was thankful that he reached a messaging machine. His message was guarded and terse: that he might visit in the next day or two. He wished her well.
In Cambridge, Joex took the Red line and had a refreshing coffee in the Veri Tasty restaurant. He sat among the cool and knotted roots of Harvard Yard and watched the students, engaged and brisk, walking to their next collocation of learning. The Games Machine would win easily, even it had hands, Joex thought. But how could such a tool be in such corrupt ones?
However, a darker idea filled his thoughts: what if the power granted by the Games Machine was exactly as promised? How can one be humane if one has transcended the very category of human? What kind of shifting grotesque image does a three-dimension projection throw of a four-dimensional creature? At what point does an ordinary well-educated person become alien to the salt-of-the-earth who perhaps printed the books, moderated, or swept the floors of the seminars that educated him or her?
Francis Galton said that the eminently gifted are raised as much above mediocrity as idiots are depressed below it: despite the qualitatively superior power and overflowing intellect of the most talented compared to those below, what is missing from these men who would be kings?
The student center was just off Vassar St; Joex went up to the Science Fiction library and began to wander the stacks. The MIT SF library was not just another bargain bin of acid-rotted pages falling out of glued spines; it was the largest in the world. Simply put, its mission was to acquire every SF and Fantasy story in the universe. Joex sought the shadow campus of the AI lab; its legendary center was on the edge of Boston’s Chinatown in the area once better known as the Combat Zone. In a way, the Science Fiction library was an allegory of the shadow lab; originated by students, it had only a loose affiliation with official campus budgets and policies, rather, it was aligned more with those that came to the conclusion that information and the means to obtain it in larger useful quantities was both the means and the end, and the entire process in-between. Membership in the library—and as he had heard, the shadow lab—had nothing to do with campus affiliation or tenure or age or gender or anarcho-syndical-sexual orientation, but simply had to do with a mutual gregarious obsession with intellectual power. Its intent was furnishing the mind with objets d’art—with a broad definition of art as anything that has been touched by craft and imagination. Its governing rule-of-thumb was that you had studied enough when you saw the interconnections among the most skewed disciplines.
For members of the lab, the shadow lab represented somewhere where even the limits of the liberated campus were dissolved. If you chose to code while your breasts hang loose, feeling th
e warm vortices of computers waste heat, that was not an issue. If you wished to spend the next seven months playing on a pocket-sized computer in your sleeping bag in order to compose music, that would not be a problem. Even if you chose to teach juggling to those who had broken away from the hardware and software for a moment, that was not a problem either. Nor did you have to have money. It was helpful to be open-minded: the currency of the place was insight and humor. Many research papers were devised and distilled at the shadow lab. Some were then were distributed and published for the society at large through the review pigeonholes on the official campus research offices. But that was unnecessary. A seminal idea in self-replicating cellular automata would be as likely to be laughed at over take-out Szechuan at the shadow lab as formally presented to a graying audience at the cool million dollar presentation laboratories on campus.
However, reality intruded as usual—leases must be paid, collective activity must be scheduled, the tragedy of the commons must be continuously diverted to its wonder instead. So, the shadow lab had to move, to re-form, to unplug and ship, renew every year and a half or so. Joex just needed to find it.
In room 491 there was a group of students in the back of the room talking about something animatedly; in the front there was on the corner of the projection screen a two-foot-sized image—none too bright in the fluorescent glare of the undimmed room lights—of a local program. No sound. Joex flopped into the front corner seat and watched the show. He could hear the conversation going on behind him and intended to break into it when it showed signs of winding down. God he was tired. What the hell was he doing? Maybe all of this is a extended delusion, some kind of homeless dementia. Were agents of a Church really chasing him? Was his background significant to world at all? Was that the Robert Marks that he knew? Was there any mutual significance to any of this or was he seeing a face on Mars, a false unity that was fantastic in all its senses? Was this some kind of manic flash before the end?
