by Lou Anders
If he were Jewish, it would be the same. Hot-eyed young men from the Shir Tikvah synagogue would knock on the door and burst in when he turned the knob. Or if he were Catholic, it would be young men in blazers and khakis from Blood of Our Redeemer; if he were nondenominationally Protestant, white-shirted young men from the Church of God in Christ. It happened every day. Every day people died. Every day.
TA’ HA’
Most dangerous, though—much more dangerous than the youth groups who spent their activism clarifying their fellow congregants’ values—were church hackers.
In 1992, Monsignor Frederic Dugarry had a vision. What he saw horrified him: a world of computers speaking to each other, people drowning in the torrent of ideas without guidance from the Church. This Virt would be Pandemonium, an earth-shattering collapse of authority on a scale not seen since Gutenberg. There was no question of stopping it; Monsignor Dugarry knew this, and he directed his energies toward ensuring that if the Virt were to take over the world, it would bear the standard of the Church.
He studied computer science and found it beyond him, but Monsignor Dugarry understood politics, and he quickly arranged for the Holy See to fund the education of promising Catholic youth in the intricacies of computer programming. Sensing as well that the fruits of this program might flower too late, he also scoured parishes from his home city of Montreal south through Boston and New York, west through Detroit and Chicago. He found computer-savvy youth by the hundred, and winnowed their numbers until he was left with a few dozen of the best. Then he turned them loose.
Usenet newsgroups dealing in pornographic images found themselves inundated in postings of the Gospels. Underground chat parlors imploded under the weight of thousands of automated postings. Child pornographers and parish whistle-blowers alike found their computers disabled, their personal information embarrassingly disclosed, their telephone service impeded.
Then Dugarry set his young hacker legion on Judaism and anti-Catholic bigotry. Nondenominational Protestant churches that made a practice of publishing anti-Catholic pamphlets, books, or comics found that their tax exemptions had been removed from local municipal mainframes. Charitable exemptions for synagogues likewise disappeared, costing affected congregations millions of dollars in time, legal fees, and redirected budgetary energy. E-mails praising the Church of Rome and admitting the errors of Judaism and Protestantism trickled out from the servers of Virt-linked synagogues and churches.
With that, Dugarry’s enemy began to return fire. Invisible enemies paralyzed the archdioceses of Montreal and Chicago; Vatican data-bases were corrupted or erased. A crossfire erupted when one of Dugarry’s protégés shut off electrical service to every mosque in the New England states and irate Muslims formed hacker squads of their own in the mosques of New York, Chicago, and Detroit.
Each faith rationed the amount of energy it spent undermining the others. All agreed that the real work lay in making the Virt an organ of salvation, renewal, and revelation instead of the cesspool of vice, depravity, and atheism it seemed in the spring of 1994 to be becoming. Catholic schools began directing their best and brightest into new monasteries devoted to programming. Lutheran, Baptist, and other Christian churches followed suit, as did Jewish day schools across the country. American Muslims alerted relatives in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Oman about the threat to world virtue, and soon madrassas all over the Islamic world were importing state-of-the-art computer equipment. The Sultan of Brunei paid for trunk lines that spidered out from Munich through Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Medina, Islamabad. Each faith enacted prohibitions on the use of networked computers—except by its own Swiss Guard of hackers. Like the Book before it, the Computer became a tool forbidden to the uninitiated.
Over the next five years, as the numbers of hackers fired with the spirit of God increased, it became clear that the secular population lacked the will to resist. On-line pornography concerns dried up; sites promoting atheism were careful to do so in the guise of academic analysis; enrollment in graduate courses in poststructuralist literary theory plummeted. Virt business thrived; Virt idleness and vice did not.
All of it, as far as Marwan is concerned, is just the latest act in the long history of emanationist idiots trading punches, arrows, and bullets. Idiots, all of them, reading Plotinus and Augustine and al-Farabi, thinking that humans exist only as some kind of divine effluvium, to be cycled through the world and reabsorbed once most of the odor had faded. No, he thinks. That isn’t right at all. There is nothing to go home to. We are all home already. The Kabbalists had it right, the Kabbalists with their long body on the table awaiting the word that would bring it life. We return to the divine to coexist. This is the creation of the Virt, the instantiation of the mind of God that is our birthright. We will not be kept from it.
TA’ SIN MIM
Mohamed was a reformer, Marwan thinks. Martin Luther was a reformer. And I, Marwan Hussein Aziz, am in their company.
What a wonderful moment of hubris, of bursting self-confidence, of absolute certainty.
Marwan prepares carefully. He has been maintaining a list of those he will contact when the moment comes. He invokes the list, and his terminal opens a wagon-wheel connection with spokes leading to each name. There are nineteen names.
With a keystroke he converts them all into Brethren.
TA’ SIN
I’m calling it in.
TA’ SIN MIM
The spokes of the wagon wheel vibrate with activity as the message blazes out into the Virt. Each person on the list reacts almost immediately. A seminarian in Saint Charles, Illinois, slips a worm into the Chicago Archdiocese and watches it work its way through Cleveland and New York and Mexico City; the bishop of Pretoria forwards Marwan’s message on to the Vatican, where the Brethren characters will begin seeping through the Holy See’s walls of security. A rabbinical student in Haifa touches his yarmulke and with a keystroke slaves every terminal in the Temple to Marwan. A fourteen-year-old white supremacist in Prague, under the impression that Marwan is planning a virus attack on a hospital in Tel Aviv, unleashes a brute-force crack on the Israeli State Information Service.
Marwan watches as one by one, the portals he has had under observation for weeks begin to crack open.
ALIF LAM MIM
Among the forces mustering to Marwan’s aid are several groups of Marxist or Maoist bent, all of whom have been fighting Dugarry’s progeny since the 1990s. Without them, Marwan’s goals would be out of reach, but he is nevertheless a bit mystified by materialism, and never more so than at this exact moment. All things are metaphysical, Marwan thinks. To believe in anything beyond what you can touch and hear and smell is metaphysical. To believe that you can touch a sequence of keys on a computer and speak to another human being on the other side of the Earth is metaphysical. If we can love, why not the soul?
One question begets another: What am I doing that is so different from seeking the philosophers’ stone or performing numerological operations on the Book of Elijah? Is it not just magic by another name? A sliver of doubt works its way into his mind, and Marwan touches the jack behind his ear.
The first seconds of the attack are now bringing gates down all over the world. Data pipes into and out of Rome, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina, Dallas, and Colorado Springs begin to squeeze shut.
Marwan has anticipated exactly this. This is why he has spent his inheritance on the living letters that await his instructions on his desktop. He toggles the terminal to touchscreen mode; the only thing on the screen other than the Brethren alphabet is a small ENTER button at the very bottom right. The program to activate Marwan’s jack awaits only a touch of that button.
With a steady hand he reaches toward the glow of his terminal screen.
YA’ SIN
The Virt like the Golem of Prague, wanting only the word inscribed on its forehead to come alive. Life, Marwan thinks. He begins to touch his screen.
alif lam mim
alif lam mim sa
<
br /> alif lam ra
He can feel the force of the information pouring away from him, roaring like water released from a dam. The Brethren letters, exploding out along the pathways charted by the nineteen members of Marwan’s list, carving their own ways through the security of Baptists and Muslims, Catholics and Jews. The living language, thinks Marwan. The words that will give the Virt life: I worship Him and He worships me. This is the syncretic truth.
alif lam mim ra
alif lam ra
khaf ha’ ya ‘ain sad
It begins almost immediately. Marwan maintains a separate terminal that scans public newsnets and cameras. Out of the corner of his eye he notices signs and wonders: holograms of saints appear in particle-laser laboratories; the words of Moses Maimonides echo from the public-address system at Fenway Park; at every roulette wheel in every casino in Las Vegas, the ball drops on nineteen.
SAD
Defenses start to come up, reactive attacks. The lights in his bedroom flicker, but Marwan reconfigured all the pipes into and out of his building weeks ago. Down the road, patrons of the Dearborn Swim Club are no doubt wondering what happened to their electricity—if they’re not all gaping at the recitation of the basmala that is booming out of the golf-course loudspeakers. (Marwan remembers Susan Heddle in a purple bikini, the summer before by the side of the pool. Even now the memory takes his breath away.) In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate …
Marwan centers his attention back on his terminal screen. His defenses are up; if they’re enough, they’re enough. If not … never mind. No doubt there are groups of young men on their way to his door now. No doubt they will find him. He feels certain that they will kill him now that they know what he is doing.
Unless he is right.
His field of vision narrows to the Brethren characters on the screen. He devotes his entire being to touching, from memory, the letters. He does not speak.
ta’ ha’
ta’ sin mim
ta’ sin
The second terminal goes dark, and Marwan’s breath catches in his throat. He hesitates, waiting for the fatal strike from the Virt.
It does not come.
ta’ sin mim
alif lam mim
ya’ sin
A siren sounds faintly, away down Ford Road toward the Fairlane Town Center. In the back of his mind Marwan wonders if he has had anything to do with it. His second terminal comes alive again. Scrolling on its display, he sees the Virt addresses of his unwitting coconspirators. Most of the addresses are grayed out, inert. Seven survive.
It is more than he asked for, more than he expected. Belief, Marwan thinks. If God is with us …
sad
ha’ mim
ha’ mim ‘ain sin qaf
Three more.
HA’ MIM
Marwan’s finger moves of its own accord. He has long since stopped directing it. He catches himself almost speaking the basmala, and closes his mouth before he can speak out loud, or even whisper.
ha’ mim
qaf
nun
Done.
At any moment his main terminal could go dark. There could be a knock at the door. The telephone could ring. How long can he survive? How long will the Brethren letters have to do their work?
Failure is still a real possibility. Marwan is suddenly infuriated. What is your right? Marwan thinks, as Martin Luther had and perhaps Mohamed. What is your right to put rules and priests and rituals, dead languages, the homilies and hadith of dead men, between me and the God who created me? What is your right to keep me from the fulfillment of my humanity? He has staked his life to know that his mother and father are not bits of divine stuff, assimilated into the Godhead like proteins dissolving in the protoplasm of some immense and thoughtless bacterium.
On his other terminal, one name remains active. The rabbinical student in Haifa, tirelessly baffling the Temple defenses with self-reflexive Kabbalistic numerology, strings of integers that endlessly ramify in the depths of Judaism’s electronic bunker.
HA’ MIM ‘AIN SIN QAF
And then he, too, is gone, and Marwan is alone.
There is a knock on the door. Then a bang. Shouts in English and Arabic.
He thinks they’ve kept the pipes open long enough for the word of life to breathe into the form of the Virt. His second terminal erupts in a chaotic slush of images and text; Marwan cannot make sense of it.
I have worshiped you as I can, Marwan thinks. I have struggled with error and deception. I have not come this far …
He cannot finish the thought. My life, he thinks. My life.
HA’ MIM
The Brethren alphabet disappears from his screen.
For an endless moment Marwan believes he has failed. Then his eyes adjust, and he realizes that the terminal is not dead. A living black radiates from the screen. The ENTER button at the bottom right suddenly glows too bright to look at.
The breathing void, the Naught That Is. What the Kabbalists called Eyn Sof.
Marwan speaks for the first time in four days. His voice is dusty. “I want to see my father again. I want to see my mother again.
“I know they are not gone. I know they stand with you, as I will stand with you. I know that you have shown yourself to me, and you will show yourself to the world. Allahu akbar.”
Marwan gets out of his chair and slips off his sneakers and his Detroit Red Wings cap. For a moment he wishes for the comfort of his rug; then a wave of unease sweeps over him as he realizes that he is facing not east but south. Another moment, though, and he has caught himself. This, after all, was the whole idea. My God, he thinks.
He touches his forehead to his bedroom rug. When he looks up again, the ENTER button now displays Brethren characters.
QAF
Marwan hears his door frame splinter. He picks up the four-pronged plug and looks at it, as he has looked at it a thousand times before.
Here I stand, he thinks. I can do no other.
He slips it into the jack behind his right ear. His right index finger poises over the lower right-hand corner of his terminal screen.
NUN
Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide.
But Knowledge, too, falls by the wayside at last.
ALIF LAM MIM
Enter.
Paul Melko has published stories in Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, Terra Incognita, and other places. He also reviews short fiction for Tangent Online. Paul lives with his family in Ohio, where he works as a computer consultant.
SINGLETONS IN LOVE
Paul Melko
Moira was sick, in bed with a cough, so Mother Redd shooed us out of the house. At first we just hung around the front yard, feeling weird. We’d been separated before, of course; it was part of our training. In space, we’d have to act as a quint or a quad or even a triple, so we practiced all our tasks and chores in various combinations. That had always been practice, and we’d all been in sight. But Moira was separated now, and we did not like it.
Manuel climbed the trellis on the front of the house, skirting the thorns of the roses that grew among the slats. As his hands caught the sill and pulled his head just over the edge, his hind legs caught a rose and bent it back and forth to break it off.
I see Moira, he signed.
“Does she see you?” I asked, aloud since he couldn’t see me, and the wind took the pheromones away, leaving half-formed thoughts.
If Manuel could see Moira and she could see him, then it would be enough for all of us. We’d be linked.
Just then the window flew open, and one of Mother Redd was there. Manuel fell backwards, but he righted himself and landed on the grass, rolling, sprawling until he was among the rest of us, the red rose still clutched in his toes.
I touched his shoulder, breathed him a thought, and he offered the rose to Mother Redd. I saw immediately it wasn’t going to work.
“You five, go and play somewhere else today. Moira is sick, and it wo
n’t do us any good for you to get sick, too. So vamoose!” She slammed the window shut.
We thought it over for a few seconds, then tucked the rose in my shirt pocket and started down the front path.
We didn’t have Moira, but we did have license to vamoose, and that meant the forest, the lake, and the caves if we were brave enough. Moira would have advised caution. But we didn’t have Moira.
The farm was a hundred acres of soyfalfa that Mother Redd worked with three triples of oxalope. The ox were dumb as rocks by themselves, but when you teamed them up, they could plow and seed and harvest pretty much by themselves. The farm was a good place to spend the summer. Lessons took up our mornings, but they weren’t as rigorous as during the school year when we studied all day and most of the night at the ’Drome. At school we learned to sleep in shifts, so four or five us were always awake to study. We’d spent summers at the Redds for sixteen years, since we were out of the crèche.
Baker Road led west toward Worthington and the ’Drome or east toward more farms, the lake, and the woods. We chose east, Strom first like always when we were in the open, with Manuel as a scurrying point, never too far away. I followed Strom, then Quant, and Bola last. Moira would have been after Quant. We felt a hole there, which Bola and Quant filled by touching hands too often.
Within a mile, we were relaxed, though not indifferent to Moira’s absence. Bola was tossing rocks onto the tops of old telephone poles. He didn’t miss once, but we didn’t feel any pride in it. It was just a one-force problem, and Bola lobbed the rocks for diversion, not practice.
