The Celestial Instructi0n

by Grady Ward

  So, what is the analogy with code here? Assume someone had hidden a secret function or mate-in-seven with an innocuous-looking code segment or “position.” How could someone recognize it or even where to look for it among thousands of lines of code?

  Well, it stands to reason that anomalous code, while working as documented would not have been written in a standard manner. There would be something wrong about it, something that would stand out such as choosing to increment a negative number rather than decrement a positive one to reach zero. Equally efficient, equally correct, but conceptually in disarray. Sam reviewed the code again in his mind, scrolling backwards and forwards. This relatively simple code implemented a simple function. Two small pieces stood out. Both of them were in the core double-buffering area. Here the idea that despite external unexpected demands on the computer processor function (an “interrupt”) that none of the raw data stream that the processor was conveying from one external device to another would have any potential for corruption or loss. The buffer was a little reservoir of data that could be filled and emptied out smoothly as needed even if there was a period where it could not get more. The anomalies were a section shared by both double-buffering code that used two bytes, or sixteen bits, rather than the one byte that was needed to address a 256 byte buffer. Oddly enough, only a single byte was allocated for the sixteen-bit address. How could this have ever worked? But this would never break, right, since the upper byte was always masked off with an AND instruction.

  Sam played with the code in his mind.

  Then he got it. An error depended upon the coordinated fault of two separate pieces of code. Neither faulting given out-of-bounds inputs would fail; this had been verified and tested multiple times. But when this piece has this bad input followed by a separate bad input to the second piece of code within the time-frame of a few instructions, then the high byte of this instruction would be written over. Now this wouldn’t matter if the code were an embedded code kept in a read-only memory, instructions could not be overwritten even if attempted. But lately fully writeable memory had such low power requirements, low cost, reliability and of course flexibility to stay one step ahead of competitors by upgrading software on the fly, that read-only memories, even reprogrammable ones were virtually obsolete. So like an ancient Mastodon virus, the thawed bug could once again surface in the world, and could be exploited by those who might know of it.

  What Sam did not know it that this was a species of buffer-overrun error that would result in the data contents of the buffer being interpreted as instructions. Instructions that could do anything only constrained by the switching hardware itself, which was at the core of the Internet.

  Sam did realize that he needed to send “Jim Rogers” the last section of code and convey the anomaly he had noticed. Perhaps “Jim” would reward him with a larger money order? He could hope. What else could he do?

  The one thing Sam hadn’t mastered was reconciling the speed of thought with speed of ordinary events. He had to get to an Internet terminal. But he had nothing. But that was not unique in Freetown. One difference is that many others who had nothing still managed to hold some kind of job, such as the myriad guards on the twenty-story buildings around him. They certainly had Internet as their satellite dishes testified. But they were taught to hunt and to catch people exactly like him.

  And the warm rain that was beginning to come down in heavy drops suggested that free-climbing until he found a way in was unrealistic, even for a slight boy of unlimited dreams. Maybe money from the post office get could be across the border in Guinea. Maybe in Conakry I can get work on a container ship and get to a northern place that has the possibility of life. But for now, money. To get money, “Jim Rogers.” Jim Rogers. Maybe he will reward me with a bonus. So, I need to send him the last code and a pointer to the bivalent poison. So obvious, Sam thought. How could it not be seen before?

  Then emerging from the bloom of his mind was a picture rather than words that in the higher dimensional universe to not underestimate the value of a simple pointer in the right direction, as virtually all of the search volume lies just a skin’s-breadth from the surface. Then Sam started shaking with chills despite the sultry warmth of the evening rain. His headache was getting worse.

  Maybe five minutes with a live terminal. That is all, then the guards could run after him and like a baboon, he could caper and climb, roll and escape into the warm darkness of Freetown. How to get those five minutes?

  Now it is a truth in both coding and real life that the more complicated the situation, the more opportunity to find anomalies and opportunities that can be exploited. So, Sam looked up the smooth sides of the towers around him, pock marks from shell repaired with cement that was already rotting out in the monsoon. To the intricate bristles of antennas at the tops. The old communications building had the most by sheer volume of spikes and dishes. And it is only twelve stories tall. That is my target then. Somewhere in that complication, I may be able to get inside. Sam looked to a heap of boxes and garbage at one of the building’s corners and saw the rat’s tail of cables that was bundled to the oxidized aluminum façade of the building. Since it had not yet been stolen, Sam inferred that a guard must patrol frequently. He could not loll around.

  One advantage of equatorial Freetown with its street lamps stripped of metal—even if there were reliable public electricity to power them—was that at night the only light came from the generators of the building itself, contrasted to the pale yellow lines of flickering candles threading on the streets outside. The building guards would not venture outside in the machete-glinting darkness, nor would anyone outside bother to take their attention from their loads of bright-eyed fish, or plantain, or plastic mops, or freshly baked bread they were trucking to market. Sam started to climb.

  Even with the headache and the slippery condensation of the monsoon humidity, Sam climbed quickly. In much less than twenty minutes, he reached the top and its jungles of antennas, buzzing shacks and black cables as thick as his wrist. The rusted metal chair and the detritus scattered on the tar paper roof covered it so thickly and in so many negligent layers that its skin felt looked a mummified vomit. He noticed the main building generator under its corrugated roof; from experience, he knew that periodically a boy had to fuel it, unless they had rigged up some other way of supplying it. With carelessness surrounding him in copious evidence, Sam had hope. He found the access door beveled into an edge of the roof past the bulk of the clutter. With a few rattles and shakes, it opened into a chimney of light and warmth and stale air.

  He had entered some kind of darkened half-height storage area at the top of the building. The flooring was unfinished and he suspected that just a few inches under him was the ceilings of offices. There were catwalks laid down, but there was no need to take them as Sam could see a spring-loaded ladder next to the access door to the roof. Sam had never used steps that swung down before, but realized that it only took the lightest weight to swing it down so that its legs at its furthest end were flush with the floor. Sam let a wave of chills go past. He felt hot and his need to move his bowels. First, the message was cast into the ocean. Down the ladder, then back up. Sam stripped off his shirt and stuffed it into the groin of the ladder’s fulcrum. Then back down. When Sam took his weight off the ladder it only swung back a few inches before stopped by the bundle. Mostly by feel, he descended the steps into a much brighter area.

  He was at the top of a concrete stairwell. Ignoring the passage down, he tried the metal door inset to his right. It opened quietly onto a vinyl tile-covered hallway. There were cubicles lit with a kind of gentle night-light that spilled over their half walls. It was quiet, with only a distant creaking or ticking of something unknown. The first cubicle he went into had a computer, which Sam snapped on. The monitor was an older-fashioned massive CRT that radiated an actinic glow as it warmed brightening Sam’s face. The screen displayed a home page and Sam verified he was live on the Internet by Googling Tor. It would be faster
to download the Darknet client rather than find a proxy.

  But Sam was never to use the computer. As a torrential flash of lightning, the entire floor’s lights switched on and thundered a shout “Who is there? Give yourself up!” Sam started from the chair and squatted down under the top level of the partitions. He involuntarily had diarrhea. Wet and stinking, he scuttled back to the stairwell entrance and slammed the door behind him. Just another two minutes he thought.

  Up onto the ladder and into the roof storage area, then tearing the rags of his shirt from the crux of the ladder and assisting the ladder’s spring fixing back into place into a smooth and unbroken ceiling. He heard the metal door open and a clatter of footsteps as they raced down to the floor below. Then nothing. Sam waited. After a minute, Sam stood and turned to the roof access door to retrace his steps in failure. But then, an exultation, a shout and the ceiling ladder began swinging down again. Sam jumped through the roof door, looked, failed to find anything to secure it, and crouched behind one of the cluttered stacks of crates that obscured his silhouette in the blackness. A lone guard came out, holding an ancient revolver on a string and a flashlight that cast an uneven glare of concentric rings. He stopped and listened, only hearing a battery of random plashes of fat drops hitting hollow metal enclosures.

  The guard though better of running further into the darkness; he retreated into the beveled doorway, holstered his revolver and took out some kind of electronic object with cast a faint blue glow on his own face. Sam didn’t wait. He sprung from his crouch to the door and barreled into the guard with as much velocity as he could manage and as low as he could. The guard opened his arms and tried to step back, but Sam was hugging his legs and the guard toppled backward. Lighter on his feet, Sam jumped up grabbed the mobile phone the guard had dropped when trying to break his fall and climbed over the guard using the top of the guards chest at a paving stone. Then jumping on the swing ladder down and flying down the stairwell eight or ten steps at a time using the inner handrail as a pivot on each turn. Sam was out the bottom and out the fire door, partially blocked with trash before the guard was down the first flight.

  Sam had no idea to do with the mobile, but it was a totem of linking with the larger world. Once outside, handful of meters away from the communications building, into the humid night, he might as well have been magically cloaked. Sam sat, now shirtless with his stolen mobile a football pitch away from the Communications building, behind the Grand Plaza on a two-ply piece of corrugated cardboard considering his loot. The guard had a smartphone that in theory could browse the Internet!

  Unfortunately, while a prize it itself, the mobile’s Internet showed no bars whatsoever, which was probably good since the battery was also exhausted as well, if the flashing empty outline of a battery on the display was any measure. And Sam knew that that Datatel, and certainly no fixed line operator, had setup a mobile Internet infrastructure in Sierra Leone. There were fewer than a dozen mobile towers for the entire million people living in town for even the older generation phones. But, Sam reasoned, why would a guard have such a device if it was not uniquely useful? And he must have thought it useful tonight, else why would be using it to apparently calling for assistance? The guard must have well-used the phone because the charge was almost empty. If the guard never used it, the phone would likely be completely dead or in a charger somewhere, waiting for the random times of power supplied by the mains. Conversely, if the guard used it lightly and with the Internet capability turned off on the phone, Sam would expect the battery to be more fully charged. But Internet use would drain it down must faster than voice only capability.

  So, once again leveraging his poverty with his arguments and mental agility, Sam crept around the perimeter of the Plaza, pushing through discarded trash like a longtail boat through a light White Man’s Bay chop until he could see a corner of the Communications building through rusted rebar scrap collaring a rocket hole in the once whitewashed concrete wall. Like digging into a termite mound there were several people looking agitatedly around the base of the building, looking this way and that, talking to one another with waving arms and expansive gestures. Sam was no more than a single block from the visible corner of the Communications building, but might as well be on the moon judging by the wild rays of mis-focused flashlights flailing randomly and attenuating uselessly into the scattering particles of the steamy night air. Pointing the Smartphone at the communications building, he immediately saw the faintest portion of a single bar flicking on and off. As fast as he could, mindless now to the outside activity and his own headache, he launched the built-in browser and typed in an Internet URL in the address bar. He wondered if the signal had been dropped when the browser finally responded. He typed on the tiny keyboard. He was at the free proxy to Darknet. He kept left arm holding the phone as rigid as possible not to vary the antenna relative hot spot he had found, as weak as it was. He hurried almost to the point of error to log on to his encrypted and obfuscated account within Darknet. It seemed to take hours as Sam worriedly noted the blinking empty battery outline. The building itself had its own local cell tower connection for use by employees.

  It was hellish to try to quickly type onto the virtual keyboard while keeping the phone frozen. The screen starting flashing [LOW POWER]. Sam agonized over each character to make sure it was correct and did not have to be re-done, and wrote Jim Roger’s Darknet address, attached the last piece of code stored with his account, and thumbed:

  18244-400+18260-467 twin overwrite instruction [NO BATTERY] @ 466 bug bug I luv u

  Sam had no idea why he wrote the closing, he hoped Jim would note the sincerity and faithfulness of Sam in providing the code that Jim had asked for. [PHONE OFF]

  Sam mashed the SEND button. There was a pause before there was any response: in either confirmation or rejection, the phone responded by indeed turning itself abruptly off.

  Chapter 42

  Joex had gotten a ride to the current location of the shadow lab from a woman, Margaret Maloney he chatted up to at the library. The moment of transformation from a stranger to a friend was the instant he suggested a mapping among elements the Strugatsky brother’s work Roadside Picnic to their elder brother-in-trade Lem’s Solaris. While Joex had never been good at reading others’ faces, he knew that he should ask about the shadow lab the instant he saw her interrupt the micro movements of her eyes and corner of her mouth with a coordinated complicated and indescribable falter. The recognition of new patterns was a gut joy to these people, an involuntary sexual act. Sure, she could give him a lift. She was picking up her boyfriend and taking him for a slice and a Sam Adams.

  I could be anyone Joex thought—and she trusts me to head off alone into the heart of Boston with her in a cool spring evening. In less than forty minutes, Margaret had parked her 70’s vintage Fiat 500 in front of the dirty sign saying “DO NOT BLOCK 765” that labeled a smudged brick building. The sign was bolted on a rusting iron loading ramp pulled in a drawbridge as if magically separating the people within the building from those in the remainder of the city. Margaret sharply beat at the metal door to the left of the loading bay with her keys. She had to repeat the knocking with a lengthier arpeggio of taps and scrapes before the door swung open a few degrees of arc and a voice within said “What’s up?”

  Margaret apparently spoke the correct magical incantation, for the door then swung open all the way and she and Joex were admitted. The door closed and pulled until a latch echoed in the dark concrete corridor. Margaret and the doorkeeper—identified as “Slug” by Margaret—apparently knew each other well since they chatted on without referring to Joex at all. Unfortunately, this gave Joex a few minutes to reflect that physiological goad of the latest murderous intrusion into his life was wearing off and he realized that he couldn’t keep moving. His hand started shaking again.

  But there was no place to sit or rest. The three of them were in an unfinished concrete passageway; moreover, it was eclipsing darkness, although as his eyes adjus
ted it looked more as if it were deep blue shading to violet at the edges. It didn’t help that Slug was cultivating what Joex thought was the Genghis Khan look of a short bowl cut, shaved eyebrows and bandy gait. Joex smelled something that was like an old staticky tube radio set that his grandfather had let him play with when he was a child alone in his room, waiting for his father to come home. But Slug and Margaret moved confidently forward and Joex moved with them trustingly.

  They reached another door. This time there was no need to knock as it opened with a click into crack onto a knife-edge of bright light. Slug pushed it opened and into a circus of noise, light and activity. The building had been an active warehouse years ago; the door opened onto a huge floor—several thousand square feet at a minimum—unbroken by walls. The floor was old and was made of randomly warped mammoth planks set over a concrete subfloor. The ceiling was two floors high lit by a handful of bluish white streetlamps. Around the circumference of the room were sturdy folding tables unbroken except for the entrance of what looked like an office in one corner, a bathroom or toilet in another, and a kitty-corner draped-over area that Joex guessed was probably another exit. There were young people everywhere. Every one of the tables filled with computer monitors and boxes that look like racks of servers or individual computers or switches. In distinction to the uniform color of the monitors like a blue nimbus to the room, in front of them were random chairs and boxes that ranged from sofas, partially eviscerated leather club chairs, and clusters of folding metal seats. The one furniture that seemed out of place in the space was that along the wall toward the far exit were leaned and hung on the walls what Joex recognized as bolt cutters and axes. Here and there was what could be a sledgehammer as well.