The Egg Code

by Mike Heppner

  “It does not mean that we are not coming. That’s what I said. What did you think I said?”

  “Just that . . . it doesn’t mean that . . . This is the police, right?”

  “This is the police. My name is Frieda Moore. I am a dispatch officer for the Township Consortium.”

  “Township Cons—”

  “Big Dipper Township, Big Lake Township, Clay Township, English Fire Township—”

  “Okay.”

  “Yellow Dog Township, Diamond Township, Steelcutter Township—”

  “Do you need me to stay on the line?”

  “Indian Township, Union Pride Township, The Sorrow of 1951 Township, and other . . . selected . . . townships.”

  “I’d like to go now.” He hung up the phone and walked outside. Something about the woman’s voice bothered him; she’d spoken as if his was the only call she’d received all day. Whatever agency she represented—and it wasn’t the police, he was fairly certain—wanted to bury Olden bad enough to keep a constant watch over his house. It made a guy feel kind of important.

  Gray smiled, thinking about his friend. Olden always was a bit of a crank. Did not get along with the rest of the art-school kids. Girlfriends were never a problem—there were always plenty of those. This was one of life’s great wonders, the attractive madman. Recent assassins, murderers, sex fiends—a good-looking bunch, if you take away the obvious rejects, the four-hundred-pound no-necks, the Jesus types. Given another brain, another political orientation, Olden Field would’ve made a nice PR man. And why not? The beautiful should not be made to suffer, this Gray felt very strongly. We subsidize intellectuals; why not pinup dolls? The extra cash might’ve kept Olden out of trouble. Buy the rebels’ loyalty. This network nonsense was not worth fighting for.

  Sirens came from all directions. A man’s voice made an announcement, but the sound was garbled, too far off. Looking away, Gray turned toward the lake, now alive with sunshine. The distant shore was black, hidden by the glare. Staring into the light, he could see a windsurfer gliding over the water. Powerboats circled on all sides, keeping at a cautious distance. Gray smiled without understanding, sensing only pure excitement, the thrill of seeing it happen. He cursed in admiration as his friend passed under the shadow of the tower.

  Am I Being Perfectly Clear?

  http://www.eggcode.com

  One of the most popular features of twentieth-century architecture is the glass brick. Glass bricks are dense hunks of glass, specially treated with chemicals to distort the passage of light. Often they’re used in tandem with cinder blocks to create a sturdy, bomb-shelter effect. We associate glass bricks with factories, office complexes and high school lavatories. In some cases, they’re used to spruce up an otherwise bland den or recreation room.

  Today, the glass brick owes its tarnished reputation to an early association with subsidized housing and left-wing politics. In this era of mass production, glass bricks have assumed the position once held by stained glass over eight hundred years ago. In medieval times, artisans used bright colors to conceal imperfections inherent in the glass-making process. The results were glorious. Stained glass panels depicted scenes from the Savior’s life, His rage in the marketplace, His courage in the desert. Even now, these windows form our impression of a time when only one church ruled the known earth, when no division existed between the religious and the secular, and when political leaders transmitted the words of Christ Himself.

  But whereas the stained glass panel was born out of spiritual devotion, the origin of the glass brick is more sinister. Seeking to make a religion out of the State, the early Socialists—who praised mechanization with the fervor of angry disciples—razed the Byzantine churches and replaced them with modular units, squat shoeboxes of concrete and glass bricks. In this way, Soviet leaders projected a humorless image of themselves, their people, and their grim, pre-fab culture.

  Americans seized upon this idea as well, hoping to transfer the same loyalty once given to religion onto the government. During the Eisenhower Adminstration, glass bricks began appearing all across the country—in post offices, induction centers, vaccination clinics, even modern churches. Great chapels, once bright with color, now emitted a pale gush of light. God’s love, so ran the thinking, can only be expressed through indirect means. Extending the metaphor, we must also consider the power of the Union in this same, half-seen way. The vague promise of the American Dream

  Transfer interrupted!!!

  This Is the Exciting Part

  The surfboard slowed as the skeg dragged in the sand. Olden jumped off, closing the rest of the way on foot. His skin felt hot under the shell of his wet suit. His long hair itched, plastered damp against his head; reaching up, he yanked off the hood and let it hang around his neck. The air was cold and the breeze was stiff—a nice day for surfing.

  Just ahead, the tower looked like a giant piece of coral, blanched by the sun. He hurried around to the front of the building. Once inside, he crept along a narrow corridor, stopping where a crack in the wall revealed a sliver of daylight. Peering out, he saw five agents circling in three bright red speedboats, their eyes blank behind opaque sunglasses. One of them cradled a rifle against his leg.

  Turning away, he continued down a dank and cavernous incline, the only light coming from a cast-iron grate overhead. A low rumble deep within the tower made the whole place seem alive. Squeaking in his wet suit, he leaned back and caught his breath. An absurd thought—to stay here forever, to starve himself inside the heart of the machine—made him smile for a moment; he pictured his skeleton chained to the doorway, heaped like bones inside a prison.

  Past the corridor, he entered a large antechamber—abandoned, by the looks of it. A shallow pool bled up from the sandy ground. He crouched and stirred the water with his hand. It felt thick and oily, like scum in a shaving basin. Footsteps crossed overhead, and he hurried into the next room.

  Up a short flight of steps, the hallway widened into an inner sanctum, poorly lit by three forty-watt bulbs. Moving carefully, he stepped over a pile of black wires to a large steel cabinet, key still in the lock. Curious, he turned the key and the door swung open, banging against the wall. Inside the cabinet, a Cisco 7500 hummed like a sump pump, the numbers on the digital display barely fluctuating as the signals hurtled in and out of the machine. Behind the console, a steel plate gave the manufacturer’s specifications in raised letters—ultra-fine stencil, stamped from behind. Reaching out, he traced the panel with his fingers: a capital G, one big curve and then a tail, straight across. He knew these letters without thinking; he knew them like a bad smell. G-L-O. And then three more. R-I-A. Stunned, he took his hand away from the cabinet. His face looked steely and certain. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said to himself.

  Busy now, he built a makeshift barricade, piling two tables in front of the entrance, a chair, a wastepaper basket, boxes of files, some books and steel binders. Footsteps echoed in the corridors, lost and apprehensive. Checking his watch, he planned out the next few minutes, wanting only enough time to do his job and then get out.

  Bent over the machine, he yanked the console away from the wall. Silver steel hoses stretched and went slack, still connected to the back of the box. The whole configuration reminded him of the cheap stereo equipment in his parents’ apartment, circa 1975. Resolved, he plunged both arms into the box, relying on feel and years of experience. Many of the screw heads were rusty, and they broke into a mica-brown powder that stuck to his fingers.

  Inside the router, the sound of a cooling fan slowed and then stopped as the network began to shut down. Given the Gloria machine’s tremendous capacity for sending information, several hours would likely pass before the system corrected itself. It hardly seemed worth the effort. The network was a fickle beast; after all, the Gloria router had held on to its lead by only the slimmest of margins. The drunks and deceased had come out to cast their votes, and this was who they’d picked: Random Router the First, a digitized freak fro
m the Midwest. Alive, the Gloria machine kept its grip on the Internet, maintaining the hierarchy, creating it by virtue of its lone, renegade force. Once unplugged, the system kicked in, searching for another leader. In the end, the identity of the router did not matter, for what defined the system was not the charisma of the individual, but rather the system’s own inherent need for a master. Even now, another rack-mounted machine in Ithaca, New York—or Houston, or San Francisco—was ready to be sworn in, his hand on the Bible, the bloodstained widow at his side. In the end, Olden wondered, who was being exploited? Maybe no one. Maybe his original premise— that people could do better, that they wanted more from life than mere gloss and convenience—was naive to begin with.

  Suddenly enraged, he walked up to the router and smashed it with his foot. Another kick, and a crack appeared. Attracted by the noise, a voice outside called for reinforcements. Not satisfied, Olden seized the machine and threw it against the wall, where it fell behind a stack of computer manuals. He could feel his anger drifting away, replaced by a sleepy euphoria.

  Unconcerned, he watched as a pair of armed men struggled past the barricade. One of them aimed his gun, but Olden didn’t raise his hands, just walked toward them, grinning. “You need some help over there?” he asked.

  The barricade caved in and scattered across the floor. The men looked bumbling and pathetic, and they handled their guns like amateurs, unused to dealing with this sort of thing. Their pants were covered with splinters, as if they’d just come down from a giant tree.

  Bored, Olden listened to his rights, hearing the words for the first time, the whole speech—obscure clauses and sub-clauses, a full minute’s worth. He shrugged; none of this seemed to matter. “Sounds like I’ve got a lot of rights,” he said.

  “Rights my ass,” one of the agents said. It was a stupid thing to say— no one laughed, no one cared.

  XXIII

  A Brief History of the Internet

  The Third Death

  1968

  There were three important deaths in the year 1968. The first two, you already know about. The third man to die (strictly speaking, the second) was Macheath Tree, who passed away on May 5th—a date chosen, like the other two, for its well-balanced proportions. 4/4. 6/6. A tidy sequence of loss . . .

  In this season of academic rage, Harvard is a relatively calm place. The campus is littered with refuse—paper cups, cigarettes, pages from a botany textbook. Dr. Tree regards the ruined text and clucks his tongue. He gets through to some of them—the students, that is. Maybe one per semester. The others are merely bodies, blank faces. Their purpose is to provide context, nothing more. Distinguishing himself from the crowd, the brilliant young botanist quickly ascended to the rank of full professor. Macheath’s institution spends millions of dollars each year managing the crowd. The best students take care of themselves.

  Today’s drama has little to do with Dr. Tree. Macheath is a harmless man, with six daughters and a wife who teaches cryptology at MIT. For years, the Trees have kept to their jobs, despite many other offers, most from the federal government. Since the early sixties—even before that, some might say—the Department of Defense has been developing a transcontinental computer network, loosely based on the work of Paul Baran, a computer scientist from the RAND Corporation of Southern California. Baran’s model calls for a distributed system of interconnected nodes, fully redundant and able to withstand all but the most unlikely acts of domestic terrorism. It’s a novel concept, and the government has taken great pains to safeguard the project in the months and years before implementation. As an expert cryptologist, Macheath’s wife is one of the more essential consultants not yet on the DoD’s payroll. Watching her husband die, we must imagine Kay’s anguish, her widow-wild confusion, her need to flee Boston and start life over in a new town. These things are important. They were all taken into account when this murder was planned.

  The herbarium at Harvard is special to Macheath. Glass cabinets display dried poppies and centuries-old seedlings preserved in amber. He comes to the gallery, not to study, but to escape. His home life exhausts him with its constant routine of marriages and engagements, heart-breaks and adolescent fury. Stalling across campus, he spends hours talking to the curator—an old woman who, oddly enough, knows little about botany. He finds it rather unsettling, her lack of understanding, and he forces himself not to wonder about it, preferring to enjoy the simple pleasure of her company.

  “You should see our garden back home,” he says, closing the heavy museum door behind him. “My wife and I exchange flowers once a week. Nerves, I suppose. She worries she might not have me around much longer.” He runs out of words as they move into the corridor.

  The curator, laughs, embarrassed. “You dramatize, Dr. Tree.”

  “I know my wife,” he insists. “Kay is a smart woman. She’ll make an excellent widow someday.”

  “Dr. Tree,” the elderly woman protests. “Now you’re being silly.”

  They reach the gallery, where tall windows look out over a green part of campus. Long cabinets bank the walls; artificial roses lie under glass, resting on heaps of dark velvet. The curator moves behind the counter and slides a panel to one side.

  “I’m sure you’ll appreciate this.” Reaching into a display case, she removes a glass bud and places it on the counter. “Just came in, on loan from Oxford.” Her eyes flash ironically. “Look at the size of that stamen!”

  Macheath hesitates, suddenly uncertain of the woman’s name. “Why, thank you . . .”

  She takes off her glasses and folds one stem, then the other. “Gloria,” she says, smiling at him.

  “Gloria. Yes, of course.” His fingers curl around the bud. “Yes, I’d agree—this is . . . quite . . . a . . .” His body tenses as a bright stream of blood spreads across his hand. The broken stamen, filling its host with poison, drops and shatters against the floor. He stoops, gesturing at the mess. “Oh, my carelessness . . . I’m . . . sor—” He falls in stages, grabbing the counter, the woman’s dress. Dark blood spills over his chin, staining the collar of his nice striped shirt. One last sound eases from the back of his throat as his hand clutches at nothing, then turns up, palm open. A bit revolted, the curator steps around the body, finds a note inside her pocket and dials the number. The words she says into the phone are measured and precise; she whispers in fragments, as if speaking to a computer.

  Dateline: Washington, D.C.— July 27, 1974

  As the network expanded, liasons from the Defense Department began to worry about their commander in chief. Every strategy, every means of delay, had failed entirely. If 1973 was a year of manic, near-constant activity, 1974 was the Year of the Vultures—slow, ominous, and inevitable. Some insiders had even begun to mention the dreaded R-word in their conversations with the President. The only way Nixon could salvage his reputation, they advised, was by burning the tapes and resigning, sacrificing himself in the name of presidential confidentiality. But he had to move quickly. With each passing day, the certainty of his impeachment loomed closer and closer. It was either leave now or wait until morning for the bandits to arrive. For these reasons, Richard Nixon’s behavior on the twenty-seventh of July was something less than coherent, and those on hand to witness the presentation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to famed cryptographer Kay Tree were treated to a classic demonstration of Nixonian mania and despair.

  Kay and her youngest daughter, Lydia, were greeted in the White House briefing room by Nixon and two of his top aides, Stephen Bull and the omnipresent press secretary, Ron Ziegler. Unlike many medal recipients, Dr. Tree was certainly no stranger to the president. They had first met in the mid-sixties—an odd period for Nixon, sandwiched in between his humiliating defeat by Governor Brown in ’62 and his narrow victory over Humphrey in ’68. Reduced to private service, Nixon had spent this time building the contacts he would later tap for favors, both personal and political, as president. Much as he detested the academic world, he appreciated Dr. Tree’s usefulnes
s to the administration. Still in development, the ARPANET project required special precautions to ensure the president’s beloved “national security.” As far back as 1968, Nixon was urging Dr. Tree to move to Washington, bribing her with the promise of a job at the Pentagon. Kay resisted these advances until May of that year, when her husband died under questionable circumstances. Distraught, she accepted Nixon’s offer and soon was working in conjunction with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Over the past six years, the original charter had broadened to include a variety of different networks, most incompatible with one another. The new challenge was getting these networks to speak the same language. In accomplishing this, the project attained its ultimate goal: an invincible web of technology, encompassing all sectors of corporate and commercial life. This award, then, represented more than just one woman’s extraordinary achievements. Big money was involved—big money, and the potential to make a lot more of it.

  The White House briefing room was a barren, cavernous place. Nylon curtains sectioned off a tiny area from which the president liked to spy on the press. Dismissing Bull and Ziegler, he smiled at his guests and invited them to sit.

  “Excuse me, Mr. President,” Lydia asked with a proper curtsy. “May I play with King Timahoe?” King Timahoe was a flop-eared Irish setter, the White House’s copper-colored mascot. Even at fifteen, Lydia still loved to play with dogs.

  “Lydia wants to teach King Timahoe a trick,” Kay explained, then reached over and covered her daughter’s mouth. Lydia twisted away.

  “Oh?” Nixon’s face went slack. The curtains, still settling, clacked on a metal track. Making an effort, he smiled up at his guards, his teeth weathered and brown with age. “Oh, ha! Wants to teach the dog a trick. By all means.” He snapped his fingers at a young officer dressed in full ceremonial garb. “You, uhh . . . I forgot your name.”