“Not me,” I said.
“Frank is part of a secret organization called COFID,” she said. “Cops for Internet Decency. They pretty much agree with me on the difficulty of publicly regulating the net, so they’re trying to do it secretly, behind the scenes, beyond the law. Frank doesn’t know we’re on to him. He imagines that at some critical moment, he’ll reveal his secret identity as a COFID operative and bust us. He thinks that we think he’s just having some virtual fun with his pal Pablo.”
“Do you mean what I think you mean?”
“Yes,” she said, “if I’m right in thinking that you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
“Cops for Internet Decency,” I said, “sounds a little prudish to say the least.”
“The people Frank represents are frightened,” she said. “Information was hard enough for them but now they have to deal with sensation, too.”
“But isn’t sensation just a kind of information?”
“Not the way they see it,” she said.
“How did Frank hook up with you in the first place?”
“Everything is wheels within wheels,” she said. “Nothing is as it seems. Friends of friends of friends. His cover story goes several levels deep in several directions.”
“That’s the trouble with this whole case,” I said. “There are too many people pulling strings behind the scenes. You supposedly came clean with me once, but I guess that was mostly a story, too.”
“If an organization is really secret, no one will have heard about it, don’t you agree?”
“I suppose so,” I said, wondering if she’d changed the subject again.
“Okay, now I’m going to tell you what’s really going on.”
That of course would be another lie.
“I am a member of the top level of secret societies,” she said. “The most secret of the secret. I am what you call a SMOTI.”
“Is this like a riddle?”
“Actually it’s a lie,” she said. “I can’t just tell you about the most secret thing or it would no longer be secret. On the other hand, maybe you can learn what you need to know from my story.”
“Okay,” I said, “so what’s a SMOTI?”
Dark clouds gathered overhead. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. “A Secret Master of the Internet,” she said, and her god voice echoed from the sky and shook the landscape.
Then things got quiet except for her giggles.
“Hey, but hold on,” I said, ignoring the theatrics. “If this is the most secret of the secret, shouldn’t it be old? The Internet hasn’t been around that long.”
“We evolve,” she said. “Not so long ago I would have been a SMOPO.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“That’s right,” she said. “A Secret Master of the Post Office.”
“And before that you would have been a SMOM.”
“Well…”
“A Secret Master of Messengers?”
“Right,” she said. “Only I think carrier pigeons or ponies may have been between those two. Not to mention the telephone. You’ve got the main idea.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but I’ve noticed that you’re a lot more … well, I don’t know. Comprehensible? In here, I mean. Coherent?”
“I do better here,” she said. “In a way, I’m not really all there when you see me outside. I’m always groping for stuff that’s just out of reach. Things are hard and sharp, and everything wants desperately to get down on the ground.” She pulled an apple from the basket and released it in the air and it didn’t fall. “Here I have access to what I need exactly when I need it. The problem here is just knowing what to ask.”
“That story about you and Pablo coming from Russia as teenagers is also a lie.”
“Yes, a lie.”
“So, what are you up to?” I asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Well, to begin with, we are responsible for forming the anonymous remailer. EES was a struggling start-up company in the new Russia, and we gave it a shot in the arm. Once we whispered in Yuri’s ear, we just let him go. He poured the tremendous store of energy he’d bottled up by not dancing into the project, and it was a reality in a remarkably short time.”
“Does Yuri know there is another organization pulling the strings behind the Evil Empire?” I asked.
“People always know what they need to know.”
Which meant that I would probably never know the answer to that question.
“We expected certain sectors of business and government all over the world to be outraged,” she said. “We also expected that while they might be up in arms over the remailer, they would be at the same time using it. Yuri thinks EES will be the rerouter for the whole world forever. You heard him. We’ve always known that the Russian solution was temporary.”
“How temporary?”
“We’ve always expected a big showdown, but we thought we’d have a little time to get ready. Then we banged right into the problem of the killer hiding behind us. This is the wrong time for that.”
“Would there ever be a right time?”
“There’s a lot of pressure from the American Congress on the Russian government to stomp on four-e-four. They don’t seem to know about the Evil Empire connection.”
“Surely you expected that?”
“Yes, but not this soon,” she said. “Someday the net won’t need remailers. Anonymity will be automatic.”
“I can’t imagine how that could happen.”
“We’re happy to hear that you can’t imagine it,” she said. “But we do need the Russian government to hold out against the pressure a little longer. That would be a lot easier if it could be seen that an ordinary small town detective using tried-and-true methods could corner a killer even when the killer is hiding behind the anonymous remailer. Anonymity need not be sacrificed for safety.”
“So we’re back to that?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s not going to be as easy as we thought. We thought we could guide you to the killer. We thought we knew who he was. We were wrong. We really do need you to find and stop him. What’s your next move?”
I knew it would be foolish to imagine I now had all the facts. I probably did have all the facts I was going to get. I was pretty sure SOAPY/Dotes was a rogue element in all the scheming that was going on with the net and Evil Empire Software and Cops for Internet Decency and Secret Masters of the Internet.
I’d already been played for a sucker once. I could still just walk away from it.
But the truth was I wanted to nail the killer. It went beyond what Prudence wanted. I probably never would know what she was really up to. If I was going to do this, it would be, aside from the fact that she was still paying me, mostly for reasons of my own. Prudence was waiting to hear what I would do next.
“Can you bring up the BOD list from here?” I asked.
“Easy,” she said. She reached into the picnic basket and came out with a rolled-up paper like a small poster. She unrolled it and left it hanging open in the air in front of us. The BOD list, now pretty much complete. Oddly, of all the people hiding behind the Russian remailer, only Arthur Snow, CEO of SplashDown Software, and Nathan Ivanovich, dead, were local.
“How do I highlight things?”
“Touch them,” she said.
“Okay.” I scooted a little closer. “All of the locals.” I touched Gerald Moffitt’s name and it became bright yellow. I did the other locals.
GERALD MOFFITT
RANDY CASEY
PRUDENCE DEERFIELD
LEO UNGER
ARTHUR SNOW
NATHAN IVANOVICH
LUCAS BETTY
BERNIE WATKINS
RAMONA SIMMONS
SADIE CAMPBELL
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s look at a few facts. First, all the victims have been on this list.” I touched Gerald Moffitt’s name again and it darkened. I did the same for Randy Casey, Nathan Ivanovich, and Sadie Campbell. “
We also know that neither SOAPY nor J. Dotes is on the list using either of those names. Therefore we might conclude that the killer is not on the list, if it were not for one other thing.”
“Randy Casey,” she said.
“That’s right. Randy’s documentation was posted only to this mailing list. Either the killer is on the list or he has access to it.”
“What’s the plan?”
“He could strike anywhere next,” I said. “He could be anyone. Someone on the list. Someone else entirely. We need to make him come to us.”
“A trap,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We’ll need a place to set it up. We’ll need someone to be the potential victim. We’ll need something to set the killer off.”
“I can be the who,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“The who has to be on the BOD list,” she said. “Who else do you think we could get?”
She was right, but I didn’t like it. “There has to be another way,” I said. “For one thing, the killer probably wouldn’t believe it. He already killed one half of GP Ink.”
“Exactly,” she said. “He’ll just think he killed the wrong part and he’ll come back to finish the job.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “If we can set it up so you’re not in danger.”
“Me being the who, also solves the where,” she said. “We can just use the GP Ink offices.”
“I thought you were locked out of there.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “Gerald is old news to the police. That just leaves what we’re going to use to lure him in.”
“Bad documentation,” I said. “We’ll produce the world’s worse documentation. It’ll be so bad the killer simply won’t be able to resist trying to knock off the documentalist who committed it.”
“We could include all the things we already know he hates like really bad indexes,” she said.
“We can make it even worse,” I said. “We can index entries into the glossary! You know, when you want to know where something is discussed, the index leads you to a short useless definition of the item.”
“And no examples,” she said, “complicated prose and nothing to make things clear.”
“And we won’t tell them how to quit.”
“I know,” she said. “We can include a help system that when you choose it just tells you what the word ‘help’ means.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Are you sure you haven’t done this kind of thing before?”
She gave me a look of such simple innocence that I was amazed by her powers of deception. Then she smiled to let me know she knew what she was doing. “And context sensitive help. That is, the system watches you and makes sure there is no help available for whatever you’re doing.”
“Yes, wonderful,” I said. “And maybe we can redefine common terms and put things in unusual places in the name of originality.”
“Most of the stuff we’ve been talking about would have to be part of an on-line documentation system,” she said. “You just don’t have menus with help systems in printed documentation.”
“Hypertext,” I said. “What you said reminded me of Leo Unger and his rant about hypertext.” I was a little fuzzy on the concept so I called up Dennis who knew all about it.
“You again,” Prudence said.
“Actually,” Dennis said. “There’s not much left that is printed these days. The key word is ‘interactive.’ The idea is the user is supposed to be in control. Everyone gets what they need. There is no fixed path through the material. You click on a word and you go to a place with more information on that word. Maybe we should push it. Maybe we should create the ultimate hypertext document.”
“Which would be?”
“The dictionary,” Dennis said, “with every word linked to every other word. That way the user could make it say absolutely anything!”
Dennis was drifting away from the topic. Sky stepped in and said, “I don’t think so. What we need here are horrible instructions for a specific piece of software.”
“Okay then how about a tangled hypertext mess,” Dennis said. “Give me something to write on.”
“Use your finger and the air,” Prudence said.
Dennis wrote in the air, black letters each maybe a foot tall. “The GORKOIDS are necessary to PONK.”
“What does it mean?” Prudence asked.
“I’m making it up as I go along,” Dennis said, “but the user will ask that, too, and since this is hypertext the answer should be built in.”
“The all caps are hot words, your links?”
“Right,” Dennis said. “You click on any of those words and you go via a link to other information. Here you see the sentence is absolutely meaningless unless you know what Gorkoids and Ponk are. Look what happens when you click on GORKOIDS.”
An arrow appeared and Dennis manipulated it over the word “GORKOIDS.” The word blinked, and the entire sentence disappeared.
“In SQUEALEMIA the merry MOSTOMORPHS do FLOMP,” he wrote. “Next you’d need to go to Squealemia to see what that means and that would take you on to another link and so on. By the time you got back to Gorkoids you’d be totally befuddled and then you have to do the same with Ponk. And that’s only the first sentence of the documentation.”
“It drives me crazy already,” Prudence said.
Sky took over again. “We do have a couple of other problems besides just finishing this,” he said. “We need some software to document and we need a way to get what we do out to where the killer can see it.”
“The second part is easy,” Prudence said. “I release it under my name to the BOD list. It could be in the killer’s hands almost as soon as we finish it.”
“I know how it should go!” Dennis said.
“Would you wait a moment,” Sky said. “We need to figure out what software we should document.”
“Maybe Yuri could help us,” Prudence said.
“Forget the Gorkoids,” Dennis said. “Forget the Squealemia!”
“You mean we document something for Evil Empire Software?” Sky asked.
“It’s an idea,” Prudence said.
“Would you listen to me?” Dennis said. “It doesn’t matter what software we go with. This will fit anything!”
“What will?” Prudence asked.
“A parable!” Dennis said. “We do a parable. The idea is that the user is supposed to ‘just sort of know how to use the program’ after reading the parable! Boy, that should really make the killer’s head explode!”
“He’s right,” I said. I got up off the quilt. I put out my hand to help her up. “Let’s go for a walk in the woods and write a parable.”
eighteen
Alice and Umberto by Prudence Deerfield
First things first.
Imagine that all your keys are little guys and all the little guys have little names. Like maybe you’ll call the one under your little finger “Alice.” When Alice is stroked in the company of the Control Key, hereafter known as “Big Daddy,” you’ll call her “RoboAlice,” but when she’s pushed along with the Alt guy, you’ll refer to her as “Alice’s Evil Twin.”
Henceforth the pointing-and-clicking device is your “capybara.” The flying arrow in your “Magic Mirror” is “Time.”
Now one day Alice (not to be confused with little “Alice”) says she’s got something to tell Umberto (likewise not “Umberto”) and they sit down together under an apple tree.
Here goes, says Alice, scratching the capybara behind the ears until Time flits around the Magic Mirror like a butterfly. When the butterfly finds a Flower, Alice speaks again.
You’re a chicken in the Middle Ages, she says. You’re insufferable and cocksure. At the same time you’re a red fox with a black tip to your tail. One day you break into the chicken coop and eat yourself.
So you see the chicken is like a man who mistakes his lover for a baloney sandwich. The fox is like the dogged determination necessary in
a quest for truth. The coop represents your physical limitations, and the eating episode finally resolves the ambiguities in our relationship, Umberto.
Umberto calls upon his evil twin to undo all of Alice’s fine work. He flicks the butterfly from the nose of the capybara and takes the time to call up six friends: Moe, Bob, Ely, Ruby, Tom, and Odo.
Umberto and his friends lounge around the barnyard drinking beer and playing cards. Somehow they also find time to polka.
Meanwhile, Alice has been co-opted by a parental presence. Umberto doesn’t realize she’s been replaced. He gets a blackjack. His heart leaps up, and he does a couple of complicated polka steps.
What is that noise? he wonders. Is that you, Alice? Do a few steps. Do you rattle when you walk?
Says Alice, I do not rattle when I walk, I do not rattle when I talk. It is out of the song comes forth completeness.
Thus do we see with an inward eye that Alice and Umberto are the stuff of computation and the resolution of their difficulties comes with the execution of the algorithm of life.
Not to mention the capybara.
THE END
nineteen
“You and Dennis should get some of the credit, too,” Prudence said.
“I don’t think credit is the right word,” I said. We were still in the woods. Our parable to catch a killer floated above us in the sky.
“You don’t think it’s too short?”
“Not with all the hypertext links,” I said. “We can link up just about every word to a maze of unrelated information.”
“Just random information?”
“Sure,” I said. “Cookbooks, encyclopedias, the yellow pages. But I think we should check with Yuri next about the software.”
A cell phone appeared in Prudence’s hand. She dialed and put the phone to her ear. A moment later she said, “Yuri? Meet me at the Wallace port. Sky’s here. What? Never mind. I’ll tell you later. When can you get here? Okay.” She jammed the antenna down and tossed the phone over her shoulder. “He’s on his way.”
We broke out of the forest overlooking the meadow where we had sat on the quilt and sipped juice. Before we’d gotten down the hill, Yuri appeared out of thin air.
The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Page 19
