Second, Peter described the cybersome as neuro-hierarchically organized over much of the globe. The most basic example of a neuro-hierarchy is consciousness itself. A select set of neural networks in the human brain operates to oversee other neural functionings of the brain, albeit an extremely narrow field of vision with not much control, yet one that can be extrapolated into higher, more comprehensive cyber-neural levels. And Peter’s third point was that the cybersome is not yet homogeneous even across the regions it currently holds sway. Viral agents abound. Potential mitochondrian bodies function side by side with retro-viruses injecting mutagenic information (the equivalent of deviant RNA and DNA strands) into the ‘some’s cyber-evolution.
It is often rumored, Peter admitted, that entire niches and regions around the globe can claim a different digital flesh not yet integrated into the dominant cybersome; separate species by no means widespread, yet still alive and surviving on the edges of the neuro-hierarchic information hegemony within which we all reside. If such completely independent digital forms are found to exist, side by side with our ‘some I pointed out, then it is possible to see our “body digital” from the outside. Colchis disagreed. He speculated that such “independent” organisms, if they existed at all, would be small, limited or isolated, and would exist at best as a mouse next to an elephant, with no whole vision of the larger creature beside it. The only truly independent digital flesh capable of seeing our ‘some in its entirety would be extraterrestrial, according to Peter.
As I jet-jumped to my yacht after my first meeting with Colchis, I imagined how a region like the San Francisco Bay Area could be described with such a model. Small neuro-information circles manage the social base of the Bay Area, and are managed by smaller neuro-information circles, and then by still smaller circles up a pyramid. Each level possesses an oversight and control far superior to human consciousness, with information generally flowing up and social control flowing down. Neuro-hierarchies flesh up into intertwined corporate and governmental pyramids. E-mail and compunet systems provide connective tissue. Telephone lines, cable television, fiber optic filaments, microwave and laser beams vein the general electromagnetic slurry. Vertical skeletal structures, more permanent information channels and hard data cores, reinforce the whole.
The information structures thus created are like coral in mass, though not in structure, given coral’s system of interdependent micro-ecologies. Insect hives more closely resemble its structure, but with the possible exception of the African termite colony they do not possess its bulk or complexity. Finally, certain systems and functions are virtually physiological in permeation and genetic in overall importance. The cyberorganic heights of the San Francisco peninsula and Silicon Valley, which peak with the Pleiades Platform, and the broad, high plateaus of Berkeley, Marin and San Jose, are counterpointed by the low plains across Oakland, Richmond, Hayward and Fremont. The Bay Area figures as part of the cyberorganic base of still larger neuro-hierarchies. Within the data coral/hive/biologics of the Bay Area’s ‘some, it is possible to detect various semi-autonomous to fully autonomous organisms. And, despite Peter’s well-reasoned opinions, I also imagined a truly independent digital realm as I saw the lights of my yacht on the ocean. A strange, perhaps Utopian digital territory outside of the cybersome’s hegemony, as wary of our ‘some as were our small mammalian ancestors of the giant dinosaurs that ruled the planet until 65 million years ago.
This cyberorganic model clearly has its limitations, one being tracking shifts of influence and power in such a structure. If a single cell or a group of cells mutate with consequences to affect the entire “body digital,” the potential of this change can not be detected immediately, even if the information describing the change is available to the entire system. Peter acknowledged this limitation when, the next day, he toured me through his current project underwritten by multi-billionaire Barry Parnell; perfecting the photo-electrical digital interface. The older, electro-silicon digital hardware is now being paralleled in its development by brand new photo-silicate digital technologies. And while electronic computers have been networked with optical ones, the true hybrid computer synergistically combining elements of both inexpensively does not yet exist outside of CyberSurveys’ laboratories.
“What we have is crude and bug-ridden, but give us six months and we’ll be fully marketable,” Colchis predicted. “I’m trying to work out a partnership with Harold Nishimura to develop a software package for the new hardware. I even have teams working on the next steps; biochips and the entire field of bio-digital technologies, as well as crystal quantum computers..”
PART THREE
ARMAGEDDON, CA 94666
TWENTY-FOUR
The ASU campus police made their move as Greg and four others from the Recycling Coop made their rounds. Satiated by Margaret’s attentions at the Stack the night before as well as early that morning at her apartment, Greg bundled newspapers and loaded barrels of glass, aluminum and computer paper with the other recyclers while the police conducted a sneak attack on the P&M Building. They hit the back exists to all the halls radiating from the lobby and found most of them unoccupied. The recycling crew learned about the successful police foray when they pulled into the Zapata Cafe’s parking lot, their last stop before the drive down to the yard in San Rafael.
The cops have taken over part of the P&M,” Joseph shouted, running from the kitchen, “ASPs asking everyone to go to Remley Plaza for an emergency demonstration. We’re gonna try and retake the building.”
“What about the truck and the recycling?” Greg asked, “We still have to get the truck back to the school yard by tomorrow morning, or we pay for an extra day.”
“Can you go this afternoon?” Joseph asked. The other recyclers glanced from Greg to Joseph and back again.
“No, the yard closes at noon today,” Greg said, thinking also of his afternoon commitment with Andre.
“Can you handle it alone?”
“I guess so,” Greg said, used to at least one other person driving down with him, mostly for the company. The yard workers can help me unload.”
So, it was settled. Greg made sure the netting was secured over the truck, then jumped back into the cab and geared things into motion. He saw a familiar face and a friendly wave on the road out of the campus.
“Need a ride Smoke?” Greg asked.
“Going down 101 to 580?” Smoke asked in return.
“Going as far as San Rafael.”
“Good enough,” Smoke jumped in, his black leather jacket wrinkling sound as he settled into the passenger side. “Thanks.”
“You’re not staying for the P&M demo?” Greg asked, turning onto Main.
“Naw, got business in Berkeley.” Smoke’s mirrored shades revealed nothing. “Besides, the occupation’s outlived its usefulness.”
“Thought you and the MDRG were into liberated zones,” Greg commented.
“We are,” Smoke smiled, “But a liberated zone means doing something radically different with the space you’ve liberated. Turning the P&M occupation into a giant slumber party ain’t exactly what I call radical.”
“As I recall, you were the one who ‘inspired’ the takeover.”
“Yep. And as your run-of-the-mill building occupation, it was fair. It went a tiny way toward shutting down the war machine. But it didn’t go any distance toward defining liberated territory.”
“And your liberated zones on campus do?” Greg asked, a touch sarcastic.
“Those are just theater, pure and simple,” Smoke noted the other’s tone of voice. “They’re like sign posts, pointing the way to how liberated territory might be created. They’re metaphors, and not the real thing.”
“What would you consider a real liberated zone? The guerrilla held territories in the Yucatan?”
“Might be, but I never been there,” Smoke gazed out the window as the truck approached the 101 on ramp, then turned back to Greg with a wink. “Might be a few a little closer to home.”
/> “How’s that?” Greg was curious, “If ‘the-powers-that-be’ won’t let a building occupation stand, how does a liberated zone stay around?”
“With great difficulty, and some folks'll argue that a more productive strategy would be to perfect temporary, highly mobile autonomous space,” Smoke returned his gaze down the highway. “I still think there are opportunities to creatively carve out more permanent liberated territory. My bro, he’s...well, he’s out of circulation at the moment. He knows a couple of genuine liberated zones. Ever hear the name Chumley?”
“As in the Chumley Foundation?” Greg took a stab.
“Yeh, the family set that up. Andrew Chumley was born a YIP diaper baby in 1965. Mom and Pop had married, but were integrating the cultural radicalism they called ‘the counterculture’ with the political radicalism they called ‘the New Left.’ 60’s stuff, you know. Lotsa drugs, free love, ‘turning on, tuning in, dropping out.’ What folks called The Movement back then. Mom and Pop Chumley dosed poor Andrew at least three times with LSD-25 before the kid was 5. Probably shellacked some neural synapses in the process. They were Berkeley rads, University dropouts, outside agitator types, members of SDS.
“Anyway, Mom went off to Chicago in 1969 for the ‘Days of Rage’ and wound up joining the Weather Underground. Got herself killed in 1971 in a shoot-out with the cops during an armored car robbery with the Black Liberation Army. Pop went off to an Oregon Commune with the kid, where he OD’d on heroin in 1972. The grandparents adopted Andrew, and when they died, he inherited all the goodies. Andy boy liquidated every family asset that he could, amassed some three billion bucks, and then he disappeared.
“What he did was to buy up a hundred old oil tankers. He rebuilt them, redesigned them, linked them into a large floating platform somewhere in the Pacific west of Hawaii with supplemental flotation systems and storm stress nodes. What he did was to rip the decks off the tankers, fill them with enriched soils and start growing all sorts of stuff. 1997 Andrew started secretly taking orphans off the streets of the world’s metropolitan sprawls, the younger the better. He’s raising the first generation of completely free human beings outside of any nation state or national power, or so he claims.”
“And that’s real?” Greg cocked a quizzical eye at his passenger.
“As real as the P&M occupation,” Smoke chuckled, “And its not unique. In 1975 a group of five black Vietnam vets, Army Corps of Engineer types, got together to build an Invisible City. Ever read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man?”
“No,” Greg frowned, “My ex-girlfriend, she read it though. In English.”
“Book begins with the unnamed first-person narrator in a room. Clandestine, underground, and walled with lights powered by stolen electricity,” Smoke recalled, tapping a forefinger on his chin. “The vets started building their own Invisible City. Today, one major metropolitan area has its own very literal underground. Structures built under city streets, stealing electricity, gas, water and sewage in such sophisticated ways that they’ve yet to be detected. This independent underground city is populated by young African Americans, taken off the streets real young. No drugs, a completely autarchic economy other than what they expropriate. They’re just beginning to tap into computers ‘cause the phone lines are so easily traced. Politics, allegiances, goals largely unknown.”
Greg chewed his lower Up, visions of Smoke’s words before his eyes. Traffic was minimal. He unconsciously switched lanes to pass. Two large ravens winged across the highway.
“Under Oakland?” Greg asked.
“Nope,” Smoke smiled a fisherman’s grin, “In fact, not in California because we’re so tectonically stressed.”
Clouds, a dark line of them, were gathering on the west. Rain, to seal his buried treasure. Greg watched a column of seagulls over some hidden interest. Who the hell was Smoke?
“Got one more story,” Smoke glanced at the truck’s driver, somewhat askance as if judging whether to reveal any more. “Knew someone, a friend at Stanford. He devised a computer virus. Actually, its a highly compressed program, a cluster virus that unpacks itself into six interactive subprograms when it enters a computer. It’s designed to penetrate the five standard operating systems now on the market, and one of its subprograms can mutate the whole thing when the cluster virus hits an unfamiliar operating system to hack it. Once it gets into a large computer or compunet, it steals and conceals just one percent of the entire memory to efficiently create its own, autonomous operating system which piggy-backs its operations on the host’s. Another subprogram drives each individual autonomous operating system, wherever possible, to electronically or optically link up with others like itself, in theory to carve out an independent digital realm in the world ‘some.”
“That’s operating, now?”
“Not exactly operating yet,” Smoke seemed bemused, “It’s spreading though. He released it two years ago, but hasn’t accessed it yet. Too early to tell how far its penetrated.”
Millions of megabytes of linked autonomous operating system. Out there.
The recycling yard was on the southern outskirts of San Rafael, near the highway. As Greg sighted the turnoff and prepared to exit, Smoke said:
“You can let me off here.”
Greg stopped the truck at the top of the off ramp. Urbanization spread in all directions. Smoke left with a thanks. Who is that mutherfucker? Greg asked himself as he started down the off ramp.
The yard was several acres, fenced, with row upon row of mega-dumpsters. Most were filled to the brim with waste materials—aluminum cans, scrap metal and wire, fiberglass, glass, plastic, newspapers, computer cards and sheet paper, cardboard, particle board, styrofoam and the like. Greg pulled into the yard and onto the weigh plat-form.
“What’s it today?” a grizzled old man named Benchley craned his head out the window of the rickety shack next to the scales that served as his office.
“Mostly papers, computer paper,” Greg said, “Got a couple barrels of cans and glass also.”
“Where’s the rest of your crew?” Benchley asked.
Tm a little short handed today,” Greg said, without going into detail, “Your help available?”
“Yep,” the old man gestured back into the shack, and noted the truck’s weight on a form.
Two hulking men, with Greg, unloaded the truck’s contents onto a second platform scale. That weight was noted, along with the truck’s new weight. Then, it was a matter of separation and subtraction. As each recyclable quantity was removed, weights were recorded, until everything was accounted for. Greg sat in the cramped shack as Benchley ran through his calculations. A newspaper front page had been hung with pushpins on the wall next to the cluttered wooden counter, a yellowing paper with screaming headline: “Riemanium Not Found” under the kicker: “Bomb-Grade Theft Baffles Police.”
“It’s only $259 this time.” the old man started on a check in his book, “Taiwan and Korea’s stockpiled lots of computer paper, and the price is down.”
Thanks,” Greg accepted the check. Then he pointed to the posted newspaper. “By the way, what’s this about?”
“You been living in a cave or something?” Benchley was incredulous, “An atom bomb’s worth of riemanium’s been stolen and nobody’s recovered it yet. It’s the crime of the century!”
“Century’s only begun,” Greg folded the check and put it into his pocket, “Some political group’s got it, don’t they?”
“Yeh,” Benchley spat, “Bunch’a’communists. Want to stop the war or something. Christ, if I had that riemanium...”
“Lot’s of folks would like to get their hands on it. It could further anybody’s political agenda. What’s yours?”
“Ever hear of Aaron Burr?” Benchley asked, filing the paperwork on Greg’s cargo.
“Vice president of the US,” Greg remembered, “Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, I believe.”
“More than VP,” the old man grunted, “Burr was a revolutionary war hero and a statesma
n. He killed Alexander Hamilton in a dual. Too bad he couldn’t kill the Federal system and the Federal bank Hamilton created.”
“I’m not too keen on the system we have these days either,” Greg said, “But what does that have to do with the riemanium?”
“Burr wanted to establish an Empire of freedom in the west after he was VP,” the old man said, “They said he conspired with the British. They put him on trial for treason. But they couldn’t convict him. What he wanted was an empire of free men unbeholding to the financial interests represented by Hamilton and his cabal. He wanted a land where true individualism could flower not stunted by either capitalism or socialism, the twin horrors of the modern age. You know, Burr could have been president. In those days, two people ran against each other on a single ticket for the presidency and the VP. The person with less electoral votes became vice president. So it was that Jefferson and Burr got equal votes for both positions. Congress decided for Jefferson, with Hamilton blocking Burr. If Aaron Burr had been president in 1800, things would have been real different.”
“And that’s what you support?” Greg was ready to leave.
“Burr’s dream of a western Empire, you bet,” Benchley smiled, “And if I had that riemanium, that’s what I’d be dealing for.”
Greg stopped at a San Rafael metal yard to purchase supplies for his lathe work, then found the freeway once again. It must have been his day for hitch hikers. He was positioned before the on ramp to 101 north, and he was a stereotype, if not an archetype. He wore a khaki safari outfit with boots and pith helmet. He was skinny, bow legged, and buck toothed, with coke lensed, horn rimmed glasses. Jerry Lewis, the nutty professor, on expedition. He’d piled three duffel bags around him, and the man had his thumb out.
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