End Time

by G. A. Matiasz

  Harold returned the library log to its drawer and tidied up after the thief. As he arranged things back into place, he visualized how the Periodic Matrix had first unfolded on the multimedia mainframe server’s 40-inch HD CRT screen, when the periodic data hit his transpositions. It mapped out like a brightly colored, softly scintillating paper lantern chain. One that he might see at his uncle’s San Francisco restaurant after a few too many beers. Two shimmering globes, strung together vertically, with a much smaller, third globe threaded two-thirds of the way up between them; the computer simulation’s image of laced light turned, throwing off sparks. He picked up the diskettes from his briefcase once more.

  Where conventional Periodic Tables sketched the known territory of matter and hinted, by extrapolation, that superheavy matter might exist; the Hawking Periodic Matrix precisely mapped matter and superheavy matter, as well as the fantastic realm of ultraheavy matter. It had stimulated Lawrence-Berkeley to forge stable superheavy elements 110 through 124, what were now termed the Hawking Island, using the latest in particle beam and accelerator technologies. Elements 122 through 124—Hawkium, Lobachevium, and Riemanium—were the extremely promising beginnings of a super actinide element series analogous to the transuranium elements. They were collectively called the Hawking Nexus, the powerful elemental node to the Hawking Island. The Matrix continued to change the world, even as Harold mulled over the ironies to his young life. The 24-year-old graduate student contemplated his two sets of diskettes, one stolen and one in hand. He leaned back in his chair, the chair balanced on its two back legs and his feet propped up against his desk.

  Riemanium was now being hailed as a super plutonium. The Matrix complicated the debate over dark matter in astrophysics and super nucleons in subatomic physics; only two of its impacts in broader scientific circles. But matters were not so wonderful, closer to home.

  Stanford owned his work. His Hawking Transpositions. Arthur Linscott appeared as sole author of the paper announcing Nishimura’s transpositions to the scientific community, the same paper responsible for coining most of the Hawking nomenclature. Harold Nishimura’s credit consisted of being listed first as one of Linscott’s graduate assistants, and of a research footnote in Linscott’s paper. To be sure, Harold could not own the original equations authored by Hawking. And while his transpositions had been exceptionally clean, he had used standard methodologies and had chosen a standard computer simulation program. He could not honestly claim true ownership of the work.

  What his transpositions had done was to introduce a change in scientific notation. And changes in notation frequently ushered in revolutions. He considered all the world of change the zero had created. The changeover from hieroglyphics to an alphabet had liberated the writ-ten word, as that from Roman to Arabic numerals in Medieval Europe had unchained mathematics as a discipline. Similarly, the application of the eight tone musical scale to Medieval Europe’s church music had permitted Western Europe’s complex classical tradition to arise out of plainsong. Something as basic as an alphabet or a musical scale could not be copyrighted, patented or trademarked. The Matrix which emerged when Harold combined his Hawking Transpositions with the standard periodic data base had been an accident as well. But, it was Nishimura’s accident. All he wanted was proper credit for his work. Co-authorship of the paper would have been enough.

  “Be grateful for the credit I did give you,” Linscott had warned him. Lawrence-Berkeley worked to produce large quantities of the Hawking Nexus elements for government and corporate research. Teams of experimenters stood poised at Riemanium, itching to cross the broad 40-element gulf of instability known as the TransHawking elements, to explore ultraheavy matter’s bizarre realms. Harold was not at all grateful. He was angry instead, even as he could laugh at himself for expecting things to be any different. He had been incredibly naive in handing his work over to Linscott. So he had vowed to get even, in his own way. His computer metavirus, encoded on the three diskettes from his briefcase, was Nishimura’s backhanded revenge. He flipped his bundled creation in his hands with a rueful smile, turning the plastic diskettes slowly, over and over.

  He had worked out the mathematics for a universal translation between Apple/IBM, Microsoft, EvoStep, Gleishaltuung and Tanaka computer operating systems the summer before as a hobby, entirely independent of his graduate work. And he had opted to develop the super virus from it before marketing his universal translation as copyrightable software. His metavirus would penetrate any of the five standard operating systems, reproduce a cluster of four interactive subprograms, and carve out a concealed, autonomous operating system utilizing a mere one percent of the memory in any infected network, server mainframe, or suitably large individual computer. When Harold finally perfected it, the super virus would steal information, transmit data, operate a CPU or modem, respond to a private password, obstruct host computer operations, and remain completely passive until he wanted to access it. Once Harold infected the Department’s compunet, and Linscott’s office and home PCs, Nishimura would be able to pirate Arthur Linscott’s research even as the professor conducted it.

  The Hawking Transpositions were history. The thief had wanted to steal his metavirus, without a doubt. Harold had told only two people about the metavirus, one of them Ralph, the cousin he had grown up with in LA who now resided in Seattle. The other one, Gene.

  Time to get the hell out of here,” he said, out loud. He was remarkably calm as he pulled out a copy of the morning paper, dated Sunday, March 13,2005, also from his briefcase. He opened it to the rental classifieds. The muffled sound of a distant explosion failed to distract him.

  ***

  Gene was disappointed to find out from his Sulawesi fence what was on the diskettes he’d lifted from Nishimura’s library. He hadn’t found his house mate’s log in the short time he’d been in Harold’s room on a mission to steal the metavirus, and he didn’t know how to operate the PC. Had he been computer literate, he would’ve confirmed the contents of the disks and made copies of the correct ones. But he disliked computers, so he’d grabbed at where he’d seen Harold stash the diskettes.

  “Hawking Transpositions. High school stuff. Ain’t worth a dime.” This from his fence.

  The Sulawesi middleman had copied the diskettes for Gene, who now carried the duplicates in an envelope as he strolled up the shady, tree lined walk to his current girlfriend’s Palo Alto house, the originals in his leather jacket’s inner pocket. With luck, he’d manage to sneak the originals back into his roommate’s library before Harold noticed that they were missing. Gene had thought about placing blank substitutes in his house mate’s computer disk library only after visiting his fence. Sun as thick as summer burned up the early spring day, the air smelling of heat and freshly mown lawns. A sprinkler stuttered rhythmically somewhere. In the distance to the east, a wing of B-52’s cruised the scathing blue sky. Probably a training flight out of Mather near Sacramento, prepping for the real thing over southern Mexico. The door was not locked, and he removed his sunglasses upon entering the hall’s gloom. Daylight sluiced in ahead.

  I’m working in the dining room,” a woman’s voice, Serena’s, yelled above a low polyrhythmic thunder.

  Serena’s stage name was Stiletto Blue, and she’d been instrumental in defining the Raspie sound at the turn of the century. But she’d shaved off all of her black Rasputanic tangles two months before, when she’d started on her “new direction,” generating Black Noise. Black Noise was a conscious response, her attempt to negate the musical travesty that Null had become. Serena also liked converting software programs into musical analogs as a hobby, for the sheer pleasure of listening to the results. She’d built her own equipment and developed her own software to that end. She sat on a high stool, bald and dressed in black, surrounded by an array of boards and consoles, all amidst a jumble of equipment, note pads, drums, guitars and fast food wrappers.

  “It’s a computer modeling program document, and a data base,” she said after slottin
g the three disks into her 24-drive work deck. “Stapledon 4.0. Ill have it translated to Musik Alkemy in a sec.”

  They’d been lovers for only the past three months, and always at his place. Every square inch of Serena’s house—floors, furniture, and fixtures—was covered with her music; heavily notated score sheets, cassette tapes and computer diskettes, hardware and software, and musical instruments. She’d even used the fast food wrappers to write down music and lyrics. Paths a shoe wide wandered around the junk piled everywhere. She offered him a joint of Kajan grass while the translation process blinked merrily. He lit it and coughed raucously with his first, good hit.

  “Now, I take the translation and pour it into the Astral Frame,” Serena commented, more to herself than to Gene.

  Gene liked over-the-edge, but she was a step or two too far over that fine for him. She’d developed her Frame as a “grand synthesis” of western, Chinese and Vedic, as well as ancient Egyptian and Mayan astrologies. Now she tried fitting everything, and most of all her music, into it. Their sex wasn’t good enough for him to put up for long with drug-hazed ramblings about her “phenomenal” Astral Frame. He took another pungent hit. Since Leslie left to make her own way in the world—dependable, stable, conventional Leslie—he’d shared his bed with the likes of Stiletto Blue.

  That’s weird,” she said, and so he glanced over her shoulder.

  Her main board’s LCD splayed out two large blocks of dazzling, chameleon color; a small, colorful island positioned between them a third of the distance from the large block on the left. That island’s colors melted, shifted, combined and split as he watched. A tiny, convoluted knot of shivering, iridescent hue extended out from the island toward the more distant color block. When he looked close enough, he discerned a hairline thread of shifting tint running from the large mass on the left through the island and its knot, to the big block far on the right.

  “That node,” she pointed to the eccentric knot, “That’s where your ‘center-of-being’ plots when I map out your horoscope, Gene.”

  “Coincidence,” Gene said, and handed her the joint, “Let’s hear how it plays.”

  She copied the conversion onto one disk, then popped the disk into her sound system. She adjusted the equalizer levels and turned up the volume. First was the sound of bells, phasing in and out in long sinuous waves. Fuller than any bells Gene had ever heard. Deeper and darker than cathedral bells. Then came the clawed, rended sound of apocalypse. Implosion. The chime of crystal fracturing, chipping and falling concluded. Gene took another, long hit.

  “Now, play it backwards, for the hidden messages.”

  PART ONE

  PRIMING THE APOCALYPSE

  ONE

  Eduardo Sanchez Hernandez walked a dirt road 25 miles southwest of Dzitbalchén in Campeche State with the family’s twelve goats and his dog, Guerre.

  En una jaula de oro, pendiente de un balcón,

  estaba una calandria llorando su prisión,

  y luego un gorrioncito a su jaula se arrimó:

  -Si tú te vas conmigo libre te sacoyo.-

  He sang to the dog who danced after the goats, nipping and barking those individualistic animals into a manageable herd.

  Y luego la calandria al momento contestó:

  -Si tú me sacas libre, contigo me voy yo.-

  Y luego el gorrioncito a lajuala se arrojó,

  con alas, pies y pico los alambres quebró.

  Y leugo la calandria al instante se fugó,

  tomó los cuatro vientos, voló, voló, voló.

  Eduardo was all of 12 years old in the predawn light. That light silhouetted the thick vined mass of an ancient Mayan step pyramid cut along the horizon, and smoked his footsteps as he took the goats out to graze. His family of three brothers, two sisters, father and mother, father’s uncle and mother’s mother, worked a small ejido and belonged to the Marti Cooperative. Folks considered his family well off in their village of Xlichécan, in that they had not starved or moved to the city before Liberation. The ejido provided them with subsistence corn and other vegetables as well as enough space to raise a few chickens. They owed their meager prosperity entirely to the goats. They owned eight of their goat herd outright, and the others they raised for the coop. They sold what they themselves did not use in the milk and cheese that their rebellious nanny goats produced. They took good care of their coop charges, and voluntarily tithed a percentage of their own goats’ productivity toward maintaining the Marti Cooperative’s rural lower-middle-class comforts. Whitewash on an ancient, decaying, low stone wall alongside the road bore the symbol:

  Eduardo felt the sound more than he heard it. A thrumming in the air, in the primordial dark of the forest around him, in the very light of that breaking day. He felt as might the child of a New Kingdom Egyptian peasant, innocent of all blame when some jealous, monodeistic god brought the plague of locusts upon a pharaoh whose heart that god first had hardened. The boy ran back to his village, the dog snapping the goats into a gallop behind him. The plague of metal locusts, a cloud of US assault helicopters, rose above the rain forest to glint metal light on the sunrise.

  The swarm swiftly passed Eduardo on waves of thunder, so that when he crested the final hill, hell erupted through the wooden and tin roofed huts of his village. His home. Lateral fireballs shredded trees, houses, animals and people indiscriminately in loud, long thumps that obscured any screams. Eduardo continued his mad dash toward his family’s house. Surprisingly, so did the dog and goats. A helicopter wheeled and fired a short battery of sheriken missiles. They whisked in diamond formation to imbed into earth, trees, and flesh and bone before detonating.

  Eduardo, Guerre and the goats all died relatively instantly.

  TWO

  The young man seated meditatively on the downtown Oakland warehouse rooftop had many names. Short dark hair, average in height, thin and wiry, with sharp tanned features; he looked ten years younger than his age. His eyes, closed now, were a chameleon hazel. He had an almost imperceptible cleft in his chin, and his smile, when he did, was broad. Black t-shirt, tightly pegged black jeans, and red high tops; he’d already stashed his tote bag earlier, locking it in a luggage locker in the downtown Oakland Greyhound station. He’d used two nom de guerre by 9 that morning.

  He was Michael Baumann, Mike to his new lover Rosanne Casey, the weekend scheduling clerk for Security Pacific Services, whose fragrant bed he had left three hours before. During a long afterglow from lovemaking in her apartment over a month ago, Mike charmed Rosanne with feigned, friendly interest into talking about her work.

  “Security Pacific handles some pretty big accounts,” she snuggled into his warm embrace, “We’re shipping the Piccoli gem collection for a museum show in San Francisco at the end of the month.”

  A quick eye and hand provided Mike with the Piccoli’s exact schedule and route while picking up Rosanne often after work. He failed to note that Security Pacific management frequently coordinated several “high security” shipments into a single run, as a recent economy measure. A more in-depth probing of his lover might have revealed it. The Piccoli was to be just such a piggy-back run, the other client being UC Berkeley looking to “privatize” some of its operations. He regretted this hole in his knowledge all too soon.

  He was also Peregrine, infamous second-story man, on the CB to his current employer after arriving at the warehouse that morning. Rossi Diamotti ran the operation. He’d started planning the theft two years before, bringing in Peregrine as a freelancer a year and a half ago to help track the gems. Now, Diamotti wanted a slam performance. Rossi had introduced Peregrine to the rest of his team six months before. The bearded Somali Vet weapons specialist Sidney. Austin Dread, the Afro-manic adrenaline freak/auto racer/pilot/computer wizard. And Peregrine’s own personal nightmare Mako, a toothy six-foot-tall-five-foot-wide Hawaiian Samoan, profession assumed.

  “I want the Piccoli, “Rossi said, eyes narrow and hard, “Whatever the cost.”

  Diamotti had ea
rned his impressive fortune by questionable means; smuggling, protection, blackmail, scams of every sort. The stumpy bald-headed man was ugly in person and in business.

  “No killing,” Peregrine spoke up. Mako smirked, and his scarred, brown face was unpleasantly accented by white-white teeth. “I can plan things so that no one has to get killed. It won’t come cheap.”

  “I said, whatever the cost,” Rossi agreed, and so he had planned the operation.

  Fifteenth century Borgia acquisitiveness represented the Piccoli’s core collection, supplemented by Ghibelline, Medici and Sforza contributions. In all, it comprised forty-seven precious gems and over 300 semi-precious stones in expertly crafted silver and gold inlays. Antonio Benavito Piccoli managed to assemble it all into a private collection in 1930, under the auspices of Mussolini’s fascist regime and personal friendship. Piccoli’s death in 1956 in turn placed his gem collection under Italian government control. Rossi wanted this Italian national treasure for his own. What’s more, he was willing to pay Peregrine’s asking price, a solid million, for the job.

  Peregrine opened bis eyes and absorbed the random spread of clouds in rich blue sky before him. Absently, he toyed with a silver ring on his right hand, out of habit. The air smelled of heated asphalt and impending rain. The city spread dingy buildings and garish billboards all about him. Sounds of traffic drifted up to him. He unlimbered calmly, methodically, though not ritualistically. Then, he glanced at his watch. 9:18 a.m.