by Grady Ward
On the center of each of the four walls were inset double-width wooden ladders. As Jack’s beanstalk into the clouds, the destination of the ladders was concealed by what looked like drooping pleated parachute material billowing down several feet over all ceiling space, except for the niches for the halide lamps. The center of the room which had a concrete pillar surround with a thick braid of blue wires was also surrounded by half-a-dozen long tables that were filled with laptops several ply deep and their accompanying milk crates, beanbag pillows and short stacks of mattresses in front of them.
The only thing more random in the room than the seating arrangements was the people that occupied them. They were talking animatedly to each other and referring to the screens with a gesture or a jaw-lifting laugh. Contrasting the austerity of the room the people were dress in a motley array of colors and styles: several were dress in striped bicycle jersey with form-fitting wool shorts. A group of men were dressed in what looked like pajamas, one woman was topless but wearing a high-top silk hat in a caricature of a nineteenth century political cartoon of a wealthy industrialist. One person who was the size of a child was enthroned on a tall wheelchair counterbalanced with what looked like immense battery packs topped with a battered bright orange traffic pylon.
A man who looked like a foppish graduate student dressed in a silk robe with one hand in a pocket and the other on an unlit pipe walked over to greet Slug and Margaret and the visitor to the shadow lab.
“Hello. He took his hand out of his pocket and offered it to Joex. Anything new?”
Margaret turned to Joex and said, “This is Gee; Gee, meet Joex.”
“Jokes?” said Gee with a dramatically upraised eyebrow.
“G?” replied Joex with a smile.
Margaret looked back at Joex. “He’s the joke explainer. Don’t worry about it, I’ll explain later. She winked. I need to run.” Margaret had spied her boyfriend who was juggling to the admiration of a small audience near the far corner of the room.
The volume and brightness of the room seemed to increase as Joex scanned it. Joex felt as if he were being engulfed in a tsunami flotsam of noise and color. He felt his cheeks flushing. The shaking in his hand hadn’t stopped, either. Gee touched Joex on the shoulder and directed his attention to what would have been the 3-4 point of a Go board the size of the warehouse. “Let’s get some food. You can use the bathroom if you wish. Let’s talk for a little while. Seriously, what’s new?”
Between the center ring of laptops and the circumferential ring to monitors there were dozens of what looked like self-contained living areas. There were bedrolls on the floor, little tables not much more than cardboard boxes holding a few pieces of personal property such as unidentified electronics, tiny lamps or books. A couple were showing off a spline glove, it made a purring sound as it reconfigured itself from a steel-hard surface to a velvety-soft one. There were people sitting on the bedrolls, some eating or talking or reading, or lying down on them with random lightshades made from strategic cardboard walls that blocked the bright ceiling lights. Yurts without the yurt. In a rough grid were more traffic pylons which suggested paths through the morass of bedding and property.
It was challenging to summarize Joex’s life in the last few weeks, and put it in the context of his greater life without sounding as if he were a completely paranoid lunatic. But it took a good ten minutes for Gee and he to make their way to the feeding station and obtained bowls of what looked like steamed Brussels sprouts seasoned with a tiny dollop of sesame oil. Part of the recipe was to thoroughly crush an English Ivy leaf between your fingers before taking a bowl; the bitter odor as your fingers dried flavored the dish in an exotic way. The food was perfect and unexpected.
Gee listened attentively and asked a few questions, not all of which he could discern their relevance. Gee did not react when Joex supplied his conclusion of how all the events were related and how the shadow lab could play a part in the analysis and possible counteraction. But it hardly mattered now whether Gee was bored or shocked or skeptical or supportive since Joex was at the complete mercy of the shadow lab people. He was going to collapse at any moment. If they were to turn him over the police or just dump him outside, there was nothing he could do about it. However, Gee merely suggested that Joex use the toilet while Gee sought out a prophet.
“A prophet?” Joex asked.
“Someone who can make things happen, as in acts of biblical prophecy. You’ll see.”
Joex agreed.
When Joex returned from using the toilet and splashing water over his head to both rinse himself off and to keep himself awake for a few more moments, Gee was standing by a woman in her early 40’s, with pigtails, dressed in set of faux furs.
“Come this way.” She said to Joex, we can meld the corroboration with the problem itself, if it proves interesting.”
She made her way to a center laptop and motioned for Joex to sit in front of it.
“Please show me the code that you believe is relevant.”
Joex logged on to the Darknet using the obfuscated hex address that he had by this time memorized. He selected the thread of emails that he had exchanged with Sam “Ouest” and their attachments. He repeated to the prophet what the code represented and what he had hoped, or was afraid, to find. But it looked as if the prophet was ignoring him, she took over and was reading the email and scanning the attachments; but surely she couldn’t read code that fast?
Gee kept talking conversationally. “You know, Joex, that we have lost two members of the lab to the crux over the last few years. Suicides. We have been seriously diminished. It is difficult not to hate them. Not to mention their stand on fair use and their extreme use of Copyright legislation to protect themselves. The Perpetual International Copyright Treaty is their latest assault on freedom. Yes, it is very, very difficult not to hate them with a fucking incandescent fury.”
She lapsed into silence. The prophet continued to read and click, read and click, she told Gee to get another prophet. In contrast to the languor of his evening silks, Gee pressed the back of his wrist and murmured a few words into the air, then went back to Joex, “You know, we had a Games Machine adaptive learning project for a while. But some of us are afraid of Skynet,” he chuckled, referring to the cinematic self-aware malevolent computer. “But not quite like the movie. Our computers are not measurably anthropological yet; they have to rely upon human actors to supply them with whatever you could describe as their will. And it is not the concept of “evil,” which is a purely contingent idea as “time” or “souls,” which has any force, it is just that being an alien intelligence—by definition—means their concerns are disjoint from concerns possessed by us humans, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is everything we can do here—he motioned to the floor around him—to contain the emergent intelligence and restrict it to constructive ends.” Gee paused. “But in the end, we know in order to discover. And to know something new is an adventure whose consequences and ends cannot be anticipated.” “But I am so full of myself, sometimes. “Usually,” he corrected himself. I get tired of technology and want to give it up and become a priest. But then I consider how many Zen Masters were incinerated at Hiroshima.”
The prophet with the pig tails was joined by a middle-aged man with a bald head balanced by a full Van Dyke beard, which made him look as if his head were put on upside-down. A few minutes after he arrived, another email and attachment from Sam “Ouest” arrived at the mailbox the prophets were now poring over.
But Joex did not notice the arrivals since he had passed out—collapsed—into the surprised arms of Gee.
Chapter 43
Manager Hu sat on the edge of his cot and considered his utilitarian office. The kerosene had run out again in the night. The cold made his knees ache. He could feel some radiative warmth from the blinded window to the operations room and through it the gentle hum of hundreds of fans on dozens of servers and communications hardware.
The off switc
h to the world is not a unitary button, nor is it red. It consists of dozens of separate but interrelated computer commands, some contingent, some repetitive, some in discrete domains, some quantal, some continuous and nuanced. He had to meet with his workers—his children—to agree upon and finalize the interlocking sequences and to initiate the separate stacking of parallel operations. His role was more like a banquet chef that had to make some courses ready at the same time, but some at a later time, and others still later. Some had to be ready through all the other courses. The cooking domains varied from the delicacy of Oysters to the fine-grained cold of French vanilla ice cream. And of course the poison at the very end.
He might as well get to it. Though the directive was made and affirmed at all the highest, most secret and powerful levels of government, he knew his brother-in-law would sway in the political atmospherics of the State Council reacting to the imminent actual projection of power by the Central Military Commission.
That is why the rulers ought to be poets, warriors, philosophers, lovers; the current leadership is called “totalitarian” by the west, but the truth is that the monolith of the elite is veined with sand. Its ignorance creates fear and corruption and divisiveness: the manifold of lies and errors fragments the will. Only one who sees the aggregation of history in terms of a lover’s areolate suckling can assemble undivided power. Manager Hu sighed, scratched, farted, reached for his cane and got up to fetch water for tea. He had to initiate all the steps before a coward rose against him.
Chapter 44
As the chartered Citation taxied into the business hub at Logan International, Security Throne Cassandra Jones considered her position and next move. With an implicit presidential directive, she now had the power of the government, the Bureau, the Security Administration, the Congress, and, more significantly, the force of being somewhere beyond the edge of the law. Combined with the power of the Church, she felt invincible. In truth, the only limit on her power was Voide, the First Celestial. Where he stood in her Celestial sphere was not yet fixed. But first Baroco must be stopped, in case he stumbled on a way of thwarting the boxer boys, then she must deal with the Chinese, finally the post-apocalypse regularization of the Church hierarchy. The Games Machine may be transformational, but for now, its acolytes were fragile men.
The Chinese were counting on their ancient kingdom to impose inevitability upon the west after the event. But, again, the boxers believed in feng-shui and fortune cookies. Ten thousand years of civilization and the result is public school fees still out of the reach of rural Chinese?
Well, their joss-crackers can make the culture wobble, but the Church has the inner truth of the confessional, even upon several of the Chinese Central Committee and the American Senate. This will decide the future. And Cassandra, as her namesake, had a way of knowing the future, whether or not she was believed.
First, Vassar Street, as we see what progress on tracking and identifying the woman that was with Baroco. Then we come down with the force of the Church of the Crux upon them. Ganbei!
Jones adjusted the Glock 30 in the garter belt nestled in the foregate of her thigh. It was warm and she enjoyed its feeling. Solid. Unyielding. Visualizing the eleven HydraShock cartridges was like following a lover’s spine with a finger. She arched her back involuntarily to its thought, and then settled back into the seat as the jet was completing making the final circle to park. She flipped open her laptop and typed in the TrueCrypt passphrase. She had full access to Boston’s municipal security videos and to the Church’s recognition tools. Baroco didn’t have a chance.
Chapter 45
Joex awoke to someone fellating him. From above him billows of nylon cloth were attached in a tractrix grid of gathered lines as if parachutes deployed upside-down. He realized that he nested in a heap of random down jackets, sleeping bags and duvets on some sort of platform up in the ceiling space of the shadow lab. The heat collected as it rose. It was comfortable, cloudlike, almost ethereal. It was quiet but not lonely and could not quite make out the susurrus of the conversations below.
He was tired and aching, but didn’t move so as not to disturb the attention he was being given. He reached out his arm to guide the shoulder of whoever was his personal satyr. Looking down the length of his body, he saw that his warm nakedness was dappled with down garments. Margaret was articulating his debauch with gentleness and specificity. She was using a rectangular plastic bag in a frugal expression of prudence, and looked as if she were prepared to spend as much time as needed performing her art. When Joex touched her, Margaret glanced up, the corners of her eyes wrinkling into a smile and reapplied herself silently to her slow glissades.
Joex finished with a sigh, clasping Margaret’s shoulders with his hands. Margaret uttered a little laugh and asked, “Did you have a nice sleep?”
Joex gently craned his head down to the top of Margaret’s and kissed it.
Margaret drew back, sat up, criss-crossed her legs, and put her palms on the floor beside her shoulders. She launched into technical analysis as if she were an engineer returning from a lunch break.
“So, this is what is happening. While you slept, the prophets looked at your code. Your correspondent, Ouest, Sam, was right to point out the coactive buffer overrun. It is amazing that this was never found in all these years. But, then Sendmail was a bug breeder for the first twenty years of its deployment. Its original generality turned out to be a weakness when only required to do the narrow task that the Internet eventually required of it.
“Dickie—the prophet with the high albedo—wants to alert the community immediately, with a pithy email to select security mailing lists both in the industry and with some players he knows at Ft. George Meade. Of course the players insist they work for the Credit Union, and their encyclopedic knowledge of cryptography and covert channels is a happy accident. But.”
“But?” said Joex.
“But—assuming you are not a delusional schizophrenic—the context is that the Crux is really trying to take you out. The footage from last night was persuasive. I am so sorry about your sister! She paused. But even the Crux are reputed to act with efficiency and relentless, but deliberate, haste. Xtance, who you also met, and the third prophet, Lex, who you haven’t, think that their extreme measures mean that we are running out of time. And not coincidentally Lex thinks you may be a danger to us and would like to move you out of here to an even less public house.” She paused as if weighing the possible effect of her next sentence.
“And, yeah, the coactive is probably embedded in over ninety percent of commercial switches. And has been for the last twenty years. So whether you are delusional or not, there is a clear and present danger. I have no idea how much damage could be caused, especially to the United States, but I suspect a lot. In fact, a huge amount.”
Though confirming his suspicion, paradoxically Joex felt his chest flutter in relief as he felt as if his nightmare was finally shared and understood. He felt as if he were floating away. At least a few others now had his information and in fact had confirmed it was knowledge.
Margaret went on, “the simple act of communicating this externally may precipitate its exploit. The time to code, test, and issue a patch over so many platforms and corporate entities will be almost certainly too long given the time we likely have.”
“So, is there anything to do to reduce the threat? What are we going to do? What can I do?”
“We call it ‘denaturing’ the production code to keep its properties while lessening its appeal to vandals. Yes, this is the plan. We are writing our own exploit for the error, that is actually the easy part after someone has pointed out where to look in the first place. In fact, they may be testing it now in one of the sandboxen. Then we distribute it ourselves into the wild. What we want is to prevent others’ from exploiting this while we or others write definitive patches. Sterile fruit flies. We need time. Any mistake on our part might be as bad as the intent of the Adversary. The distribution is the key—universal and so
on. But first, this fix has to be as perfect as we can make it.”
“Do we bring in the government, say, the military or the TSA?” Joex asked.
Margaret brayed—how else could it be described?—“the government doesn’t work in the domain of time. The government has immense resources and some kind of organizational perseverance. But insight and tempo are qualities I would not associate with them. We must summon a monkey jump, a divine move. In hours or sooner if possible—not days or weeks.”
“And what you can do, beyond help to think about how to distribute this patch as quickly and universally as possible, just stay the fuck alive. Bringing us this information is sufficient for one heroic lifetime. Oh yes, it is sufficient. The virtual of the shadow lab is that is can find the people who can best use your knowledge as quickly as possible. In fact, that is the most important purpose of the entire Internet. And maybe the whole culture.”
Joex sat up and felt the weight of lack of sleep on his chest. “At least I can look over your shoulders and maybe help. And, Margaret,” he looked at her with a tentative expression, “don’t you have a boyfriend?”
“Sure do. Outside our virtual worlds, we have jugglers, jongleurs, and gamahuchers. I’m one of those.” “No hard feelings,” she smiled and playfully made to slap at Joex’s naked groin. She stood up and motioned with her head toward the wooden ladder on the wall. “If you can find your clothes, let’s go down together.”
Chapter 46
In a way, Sam had been lucky that the smart phone’s battery had failed. Along with the failure of the communication function, the phone’s GPS tracking which was logged and monitored whether the smart phone was switched on or off was also terminated. But Sam did not know this, nor did he know whether or not his last message had been successfully transmitted. His first priority now, after keeping out of the sight of security men—especially Cousin Robert’s go-boys—was to obtain Internet time. The smart phone might be parlayed into such time, or perhaps recharged and used again surreptitiously near the communications building. Spotlights had been turned on at the apex of the building and Sam could see the dishes aimed straight up as if prayerful hands toward a God that was both technologically sophisticated and unimaginably distant.
