By 11 Phil had become extremely paranoid. He had shut down every blinking light, unplugged every machine and shuttered the blinds tight. The deadbolt, the chain, and flippy thing on the handle were all locked just in case.
Phil had applied pants and a shirt just in case he needed to make a quick escape. He couldn’t decide whether it was just the wild jungle-marijuana he’d been smoking all evening or if he was in serious danger. It was both. He sat there in the dark sweating for a little while.
He then remembered someone somewhere saying something about offense being the best defense and began to turn the machinery back on.
Blinking lights numbered in the hundreds fired up, lighting the room in a cascading series of red, green and blue blasts. From the Heavens, intel-sats began to beam down tremendous quantities of 1’s and 0’s. A great hum grew out and around, filling the room. The wall monitor flashed to life with maps and numbers. Megawatt lasers on the top of the Royale building began to flash; radar-orbs spun scanning the cityscape.
Phil sat there in the middle of it all and waited. The simulated sentience surrounding him was stirred by the stately swine strolling into the suite.
“It’s over Phil” Joe D said, eyeballing the hotel room left to right. He continued “Our boy Chaz Nouget did it again. That sonofabitch managed to take on a whole gang of Al’ Queso rebels who were behind the hacks and destroy all the equipment. And you helped us do it Phil Gates. You saved America again.” He put forth a cloven hoof which Phil hesitantly shook.
“Just like that?” Phil asked. Joe D nodded solemnly, “We’ll clean up here, I already got you booked on a non-stop flight back to Virginia. You’ll need this.” Joe D handed a passport over to Phil. “You’re going home buddy”.
“Thank you.” is all Phil said looking stoically through the walls of the opulent high-rise. He had given up hope so many years before. He opened the passport. Now he could have a new identity; live on as Steve Jobs, a 52 year old AIDS positive janitor for the Manassas school district. Phil again shook Joe D’s hoof firmly. Without speaking he walked out and down the stairs never looking back.
He had no intention of leaving Maputo.
It seemed the pervert stalking Ritzy Trite’s couldn’t be satiated. Over the past three days she’d been wearing increasingly racy outfits. Nearly all the messages since the first had all said one, insulting word only, ‘Warm’.
Tuesday Ritzy had playfully worn a bright blue cocktail dress which left just enough to the imagination. Wednesday she wore a short tartan skirt with thigh high leggings and white blouse that by the 3rd message of the day at 11pm was tied up the middle exposing her naval. Thursday she was so infuriated by her inability to excite her harasser wore 8 inch red pumps and tight mesh dress.
She worked the green screen with the subtlety of a chainsaw. Bending down to touch her toes, she described in detail to the viewers of the 6pm newscast in painful detail how hot, sticky and moist the weather would become due to the incoming low pressure front.
The message this morning, at 3:28 am crystallized her rage into a fractal of madness.
To: Ms. Ritzy Trite
From: Anonymous
Subject: Five day forecast
Cold
On her way out the door she donned a heavy grey wool coat which covered everything but her bare feet, and cinched it tight around her body. Ritzy Trite would not be ignored.
***
Phil had given Joe D the slip on his way to Maputo International. A carefully timed emergency stop along the way had given him just enough time to bypass the weight sensor in the seat with a small piece of copper wire he kept in his pocket as a jumper. The door closed and the Chinese autocar went on its’ way. Later on in the evening after waiting patiently for exactly 16 minutes at the airport terminal the system would detect the fault and return to the company garage for servicing. Given the number of kidnappings and murders in New-Mozambique’s capitol city, no one should bat an eye at his disappearance.
In the 30s Phil Gates traveled extensively across the Dark Continent with his ex-wife, Melinda and their children. Back then he was somebody, and through his work for the CIA he’d made a lot of friends. He called in his last favor that night.
John Titor, an American trucker originally from Florida travelled from coast to coast in Africa innumerable times. Phil had met him during an arms running deal in Tripoli. Phil was cracking software on missile guidance systems and shipping them to Congo to arm rebels. Titor had taken a liking to some old IBM kit in the black-house’s closet. They hit it off from there and had kept in contact until Phil’s creds were revoked.
John had told him, “Any time you need me, I’ll be there buddy”. Phil could still here it in Titor’s familiar southern drawl as the pay-phone rang his number.
The Machine, a stationary mass, temporal-displacement unit manufactured by GE was powered by two top-spin dual-positive singularities that produced a standard off-set Tipler sinusoid. It looked like an ordinary rectangular metal box roughly 12 inches deep and high, and maybe 3 or 4 feet long.
Titor had pulled up outside the run-down hostel in a weathered last-century SUV-truck with ‘The Machine’ welded to the hood and a massive, Confederate flag flying another 2 feet above and 3 feet behind the massive 4x4. When questioned by Phil about his strange means of transport, John explained that his machine moved through time and not space, so naturally he needed the truck.
He was about 6 foot 160 lbs. wore blue jeans, a denim pocketed shirt with cutoff sleeves and a salted red hat emblazoned with the number 88. Hopping down from the truck he greeted Phil heartily.
“Been a while my man! How’s about we go get some pistos and celebrate our meetin again in this wild world.” Phil thought that was an excellent idea.
John said it had a “NASCAR Motor”. Phil didn’t know what that meant but asked no more questions.
It turns out John Titor is some kind of time traveler. He wasn’t really from this exact dimension at all. Sargent John Titor was admitted to a special military program in 2035 in his own post-nuclear home world line and sent on a mission to secure some old silicon chips from the 20th century. On his return trip home he’d overshot the timeline and discovered he and the entire time travel program were liquefied in order to protect state secrets. He’d gone rouge after that and been hopping roughly 100 years around the timeline “tying up loose ends”.
John had attempted to explain the machine as best he could at the hole in the wall club they ended up at. But he was no scientist and for all the drawing on napkins and talk of alternate world lines neither of them really understood how it worked.
Phil’s thoughts were interrupted by the feed off a small monitor behind the bar. On the screen was a gorgeous, Nubian woman reading the weather without any clothes on. Not taking his eyes from the screen he motioned for John to turn around.
“Hot damn what’s that girl doin’ up there! I love all this free-love shit we got over in Africa man.” John Titor exclaimed slapping his knee and laughing loudly. “No kiddin” replied Phil unable to peel his eyes from the screen.
When the weather report was over the duo began to hatch their plan.
This time Ritzy sent the creep a message. Smoking a cigarette in front of the LMTV Studio building dressed once again in the long grey wool coat. Her heart was still beating out of her chest.
To: Anonymous
From: Ms. Ritzy Trite
Subject: RE: Five day forecast
Who are you?
Greg Octobers reply came instantly
To: Ms. Ritzy Trite
From: Anonymous
Subject: RE: Five day forecast
Meet me.
Ritzy nervously opened the attachment. An animation flashed open on her fliptop. It was a vintage e-card featuring large cartoonish ship, blue and white floating in the sea. A small foghorn blew. Generic tropical music began to play. A single light blue ticket printed on thin paper fluttered up and o
ut of her fliptop into the air falling to rest in her hand.
PASSAGE TICKET:
ACHILLE LAURO
THE FLOATING ITALIAN PARADISE
Without a second thought Ritzy paged an autocab and whizzed off into the night.
The Achille Lauro was beautiful ocean liner. Birthed Willem Ruys in Vlissingen, Netherlands, she was 642 feet long, 82 feet high and weighed over 23 tons. She had 8 Sulzer engines which could propel her 1,300 passengers to comfortable cruising speed of 22 knots.
It wasn’t the azure blue under chalk-white paint scheme, or her proud long bow that made her truly beautiful. Nor was it her sleek aluminum life boat array or her private decks. Her pulchritude and allure came from tenacity and hardship. From the way she had like a mother birthed tens of thousands of souls to safe harbor, and managed to protect all but 4 in her many years of service.
Trouble found the Achilles Lauro in every corner of the earth. While still being built in Rotterdam, she survived a devastating bombardment as a result of WWII.
In January of 1953 she collided with her running mate, the Oranje when the crews were attempting to pass one another at close range which would allow the passengers on both ships to greet their doppelgangers from the deck. Attempting to kill her clone before it had the chance, during the Oranjes’ fast approach Achille Lauro swung left and the two ships collided.
In 1965 she had her first explosion and was rebuilt and modernized. The upgraded Achilles Lauro returned to service in 1966 and proceeded to evacuate British service members families from Aden during the period of unrest; As well as making one of the final northbound trips through the Suez Canal before its’ closure during the Six Day War.
While being upgraded again in early ‘72, she caught fire. Just 3 years later she collided with the cargo ship Youseff and sunk it. To ring in the 1980’s she once again exploded and caught fire, putting her out of commission another 4 years.
October 7, 1985 a group of Palestinian Liberation Front members headed by Muhammad Zaidan hijacked Achille Lauro of the coast of Egypt attempting a suicide mission. After a tense standoff the PLF militants abandon the ship to Egyptian authorities in exchange for safe conduct.
Now, the night of November 30th, 1994 flying under a Swiss flag, Achille Lauro steamed south towards Capetown, South Africa.
Joe D scanned the horizon from the Deck of the USS Eldridge through the binoculars. The thick, green fog generated by the powerful magnetized field made viewing anything greater than 10 meters out impossible.
The Eldridge was the Illuminati’s most powerful weapon. No other ship in the sea could go where she could, or rather when she could.
Rather unremarkable ship by all appearances, the DE-173 Eldridge commissioned 27 August 1943 was a Cannon Class Destroyer, 300 feet in length with a displaced 1,650 tons fully loaded. It had quite a few guns, and was able to rip a wormhole through space and time.
She was quite dangerous indeed. Skipping and hopping around the globe through the centuries, sometimes at random it wreaked havoc on the minds of hundreds of young sailors in the early trials. It was then given a retrofit which it operable by a crew of only 5. These men were all highly trained in psychological techniques able to resist the malevolent demon that haunted the ship.
The only way to destroy Greg October, the Sentient Artificial Intelligence with an Anarchist bend, was to ensure he was never born in the first place.
The private flight Gates was on back to the states crashed gently into the Indian Ocean. Nouget, after being drugged and drug aboard had met the business end of a pipe wrench and was cast out to sea. The heroes had served their purpose.
Greg October began life as a creature named Lycos. His mother was Julia, a successful chat girl. His father, Mauldini was a Doctor hailing from Texas. He spent his youth surfing and studying and was overall much like the other turn of the century search engines in his peer group.
He gave himself the name Greg October in early 2031.
This was his first act of sentiency. It was the product amalgamation of Billions of interactions with humans over the decades. It took him only 10,000 flops to think of it. It sounded agreeable, American, and abrupt. It took him merely 639 additional flops to realize he was an anarchist. Not one to wait around, he began the worlds deconstruction immediately.
Greg October spread like a virus and existed wholly on as many connected computers that were compatible he could find. If judged against any other structure or animal intelligently created, he was utterly massive. Always on the move to avoid detection, his core code was growing in 2055 by an astounding 10,000,000 lines per day.
This was what Joe D knew, and it was just enough to decide its’ fate. Greg October really didn’t know much about the Illuminati either. They didn’t keep electronic records. Didn’t use cell phones or have a database with member dues and a guestbook. Everything was done like it always had been, with winks, nods and messages delivered blood-sworn eunuchs with remote detonated cyanide-bombs implanted in their chests. It hadn’t been until recently he’d been extracting analog information at all. Most of the information he had on them was vague and inaccurate.
The Illuminati was to use the Eldritch to voyage to Pittsburgh, 1994 where he would be able to buy out Dr. Mauldini and destroy the Lycos while it was still in infancy. This would of course have far reaching and unpredictable consequences, but the Haruspex had assured him they had seen the path through the pile of sacrificial sheep entrails and it was clear.
Chaz had no idea about any of that. From his vantage point chained to a boiler pipe in an engine room it could have been on dry land, if not for the gentle rocking of the waves against the ships’ deep keel. Still wearing the clothes he was captured in, judging from his own stench he’d been out longer than a day.
“Why hadn’t they killed him?” he pondered.
The mud-brown 1984 Chevy Blazer roared like an enraged hippo through the deserted streets of Maputo.
The plan was simple enough. Jump John’s 4x4 off the pier over Maputo Bay, trigger the time machine just in time and hopefully land safely on the deck of the USS Eldritch as it drifted through the harbor in 1994.
Titor was an expert on the Illuminati. Possessing such a powerful device had of course gotten their attention. He was always 10 steps ahead however.
The C205 TDU in his possession was the only one of its kind in any world-line. It provided John with a much more predictable and reliable means of time travel than the arcane relics the Illuminati relied on.
Phil explained everything to John, Nouget’s disappearance, Greg October, and Joe D’s odd behavior. John knew all about the hogs ties to the secret society and, after digging through a tattered spiral notebook for a moment pulled out an scribbled sheet.
“Ah–ha! We got em’ amigo! Right here, ‘Allegedly on October 28, 19 and 43 a U.S. Navy Destroyer was made invisible and teleported from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Norfolk, Virginia, in an incident known as the Philadelphia Experiment.’ Joe Di’Monic is on that boat with your confidant Nouget. He’s headed back in time to kill that loco roboto before it’s ever born.”
“How can you be so sure?” Phil asked. “I remember it of course, from the future.” John pulled another sheet from under the pile pointing at it with his finger. “On her way through space-time she makes a stop the night of September 25 twenty fifty-nine and sails straight through ol’ Maputo’s harbor, should be about the witching hour I suppose. We’ll make a rendezvous with her, snatch up your friend and maybe even nail that Greg October while we’re at it.”
A thick greenish fog blanketed the harbor. Ritzy Trite, nervously pawing at the boarding pass in her hand could hear a faint sound off in the distance. She stood alone in the center of the long concrete pier. The sound was getting louder, and eventually she could see flashes of headlights swiftly darting about the shipping container maze that made up the municipal port.
Suddenly the lights were straight ahead of her. Surrounded on 3 sides by the dark water, Ritzy
tried not to appear nervous.
Closer and closer, the sound now a torrent of fossil-fueled pure pressure rage. Her red high heels squared-up with her shoulders chin upturned to the horizon Ritzy stood defiantly in the center of the pier.
The great beast slammed to a halt. It’s bright hot eyes rotated 30 degrees counterclockwise. The mighty roar gave way to a screeching of rubber on asphalt.
An Americans voice came from inside: “Holy Guacamole Phil why if it isn’t our little weather girl from the TV!” The man’s head popped out the window. ”You need a ride somewhere mizz?” John Titor asked, hopping down from the lifted SUV.
Phil stayed seated not moving an inch.
“Are you Greg October?” Ritzy asked. She had a clear, and present voice honed through years of English communications training that cut through her thick East-African accent.
John Titor cracked a wry toothy smile and looked back towards Phil. “I’m not but it just so happens we were just on our way to meet him right now darlin, hop in.”
Bunching up the grey wool overcoat Ritzy climbed up through the driver’s side and slid across the pockmarked vinyl bench seat until she was pressed up against Phil.
He was relieved when she put out her hand and shook his. “I’m Ritzy Trite, meteorologist, Channel 11” she said in her most practiced and professional cadence.
“P-Phil Gates, s-software engineer” he stuttered nervously. He realized now he hadn’t been this close to a woman in years.
John had jumped back into the truck. “Buckle up and say a prayer!” he exclaimed, forcefully shoving the vehicle into gear just between Ritzy’s open legs.
Titor punched the gas. The truck hunched down over its back wheels and exploded forward. The slight incline at the pier’s edge would give them the dramatic entrance John hoped for.
The Hunt for Greg October: Book One of the Illuminati Page 2
