by Greg Enslen
“Oh, I was wondering what that meant. Most of the other sections I understand, but how could you keep track of the travel of ‘dead’ people? It seems like a pretty simple job to me?” She grinned at her little joke.
“Oh well, that’s not exactly what we do.” He was pinching his lower lip between two fingers as he thought for a few moments, evidently making up his mind. “I guess if you are cleared to be on the Team, you’re probably cleared to know what we do over there.”
He turned spryly and led her over to the “Dead” section, weaving in and out of a maze of partitions with her in tow until he came to his own specific cubicle. She’d glanced back at the techies installing the Cray, but it didn’t look like they would miss her for a few minutes, so she’d followed. The cubicle was decorated with various bits of paperwork, signs, pictures cut from magazines, and photos of people who were evidently family members. He sat down at his terminal and offered her the only other chair in the cubicle.
“Back here, we track the locations and movements of people who are publicly, officially dead,” he began. “These people that we keep track of are actually alive and well and living in hiding, mostly under assumed names.” He turned and tapped a few commands into his terminal, bringing up a detailed map of the United States. The map was sprinkled with what appeared to be hundreds of little dots, most of them red, but others were different colors.
“Most of the people that we keep track of here are in the Bureau’s Witness Relocation Program. A lot of people have been ‘disappeared’ and gone on to lead productive and almost normal lives, thanks to that program. Those people and their families are indicated on the map in red.”
He pointed at the screen. “For example,” he said, typing on the computer until only two red lights were glowing in Sacramento, “that is a father and son who were placed into protective custody and moved to Sacramento by the FBI. They were witnesses in a mafia-related case, if I remember correctly.”
He tapped at the screen again and all the dots reappeared. “The others, the blue, green, and yellow dots, represent people that are in hiding. Most of them have faked their own deaths for one reason or another, but we can still keep track of them, here.”
Julie was fascinated, even if the idea of faking your own death was a little gruesome.
“Why would the Bureau care where these people are?”
“Well, a good percentage of those blue guys, the ones that faked their own deaths and set up camp somewhere else, those people are mostly involved in some type of criminal activity. We track them, wait for them to slip up, and then we swoop in and nab them. When people think that nobody knows they’re alive, they almost always get careless. They get a case of ‘the big head’, as my father used to be fond of saying, and they end up getting caught.”
Julie pondered this for a moment. “So why don’t you just swoop in and land on them with both feet when you find them?”
Shawn’s face broke out into a sly little grin. “Because then they would know that we know about them, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t feel free to begin a new life of crime.” He tapped again on the keyboard, making the map disappear, replaced by a blank screen. “And besides, where would be the fun in that, huh?”
From somewhere else in the large Computer Room, a voice was raised, calling out her name. She stood.
“Oh, that’s me. Thank you, Mr. McIvey for entertaining me. Hopefully, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the future.”
“Yes, yes, that would be nice.” He stood up and showed her out to the main area once again. “And the name is Shawn, Miss. Not ‘Mr. McIvey’. Nobody calls me that except the girls at the credit union upstairs.”
“O.K., Shawn. Call me Julie.”
She excused herself, and when she’d made it out of the jumble of cubicles, Julie saw one of the Cray Corporation techs motioning her over towards the Cray Rooms, nervously looking at his watch.
“Hi, Miss Nolan. I’m Chris Hanson, the liaison between the Cray Corporation and the Bureau. I was told that you would be representing your Team here, so I called for you.” She had not yet heard it referred to as ‘her’ team, but she liked the sound of it. “You should be here when they power it up, which could happen any minute now.”
“Thanks, Chris. Just call me Julie, okay? I’m not really sure what it is that I’m supposed to be doing here, except representing the Team. Other than that, I’m clueless.”
Chris smiled. “That’s okay. Besides those of us on the Cray staff, no one else is supposed to know anything about how the Cray works. At least, not yet.”
He motioned to the platform inside the Cray Room and explained its function. The Cray Platform was aluminum and plastic and designed to not allow any stray voltage or static charge to affect the Cray’s operation. Even the tiniest amount of stray electrical energy could destroy hours of processing time and seriously degrade the supercomputers performance.
Once the platform was assembled and placed into its final position by the Cray techs, it was hooked into a special, uninterruptible power source. A low-level magnetic field was generated in the base of the Cray Platform, far away from the actual working components of the Cray, and this low-level field attracted and dissipated any stray static charge that might be created by humidity or by any human movement through the Cray Room.
The techs unpacked the Cray and, using a specially built compact crane-winch, hoisted up the 1,500-pound supercomputer and carefully lowered into place on top of the Platform. A specific voltage was necessary to power the Cray, and three separate lines of that voltage were fed into the machine, buffered by a series of powerful surge suppressers and voltage regulators. These insured that the flow of power into the unit was uninterrupted and unwavering. The third power line was connected to a huge battery backup system that had been specially designed for use with the Cray, and would power the main unit and its input/output systems for up to 24 hours, in case the normal flow of power from the main and secondary power lines failed. A power failure could be caused by something as simple as an electrical storm or even by a terrorist incident, so the FBI techs had insisted that a battery backup system be included in the original request.
After the Cray was completely installed and powered up, Hanson and Julie spent about an hour discussing it, and he took her through the basic power up and logon functions on one of the terminals in the I.O. Room. She chose a password and logged on, setting up a personal account and setting aside some of the unit’s 800 gigabyte hard drive space for herself.
Hanson, after looking at his watch at least fifty more times, finally excused himself and left her alone to play on the system. And she found it fascinating. The machine was so fast, so much faster than anything else she had ever seen. The Cray Operating System had been written to take advantage of the incredible speed, and some of the same programs that came with the initial operating system showed off the computer’s speed and flexibility. And after a couple hours playing in the I.O. Room, Julie started to wonder if this machine had any limits at all.
She had come up with a few ideas on how to best test this machine, and now she was sure it was up to the tasks she had envisioned for it.
She walked and climbed and hiked, and the birds circled above and screeched once in a while, dipping down to investigate her. Still she climbed. The mountain towered over her, massive and angry, and she could not go on another step. The boots slipped on the dusty rocks. The next time she slipped and fell, she didn’t bother to get up.
It was too much. She couldn’t go any further - maybe if she rested here tonight, or at least for a few hours, she would get some of her energy back. Her shoulder screamed in pain - she had used her arms and shoulders to pull herself up a thousand rocks and slippery slopes, and her arm hung lifeless, weary and throbbing.
But why climb? It didn’t seem that she was getting any closer to the top, and she was so tired, and the accepting fog was coming to rescue her.
She had first seen it again during one of her frequent
rests, pouring out of the tiny black spot so far away, coming out of the forest. Coming for her, she was sure. When she had looked back a few minutes later she had been amazed to see that the fog had spread out and covered more than half of the plain between the forest and the mountain, covering in a few short minutes what had taken her hours to trudge across.
The fog was coming, and this time, she welcomed it. She was just too tired to fight it anymore.
That was when she heard the man yelling.
She sat up. It HAD been a man, yelling something up above her on the mountain. His voice had been huge and deep and powerful, and she was instantly very, very happy. Someone else was here! There was someone to talk to, to ask questions of!
Her exhaustion faded in her excitement, and she stood, wavering only a little, and began making her way up the mountain again, moving towards the voice.
She rounded a rocky outcropping and was afforded a sweeping view of the opposite side of the mountain. A flattened notch had been taken out of this side of the mountain, and here the ground was flat for five hundred yards or so before it sloped upwards again, violently.
In the middle of this flat area was another small hill, one about a hundred feet high. It was a gentle slope that became very steep as it approached the flat summit.
And there was a man here, pushing a huge rock up the slope of that smaller hill.
He was a huge man, wearing an odd-looking toga thing, something that she had only seen in the movies. The outfit looked like it belonged in a bad Hercules movie, but he looked natural in it.
As she walked closer, she saw that he was trying to push a huge boulder up the sloping side of the little hill. He pushed, his muscles straining, and the rock rolled slowly, grudging, up the side.
He was a huge man, easily twice as tall as Sally. His hair was dark and bushy, and a large brown beard curled up around his pursed mouth. He was very tanned and muscular, and the sweat glistened on his body.
The rock was also huge - it looked bigger than her car. It looked at least 9 or 10 feet around, and it must’ve weighed at least a ton. How could one person, no matter how big they were, ever succeed in rolling that rock anywhere?
The man pushed it about half way up the slope before he noticeably slowed down, turning to put his back against the rock and push upwards with his legs. He spread out his arms and held the rock to keep it from rolling off his back, and he began pushing off with his legs, backing up the hill. The slope became very steep, and as Sally watched, he finally came to a point where he could no longer get enough leverage to roll the rock any more. The muscles on his neck stood out like thick brown ropes below his tortured face.
Sally saw that he could never get the rock up there – now he was pushing it straight up. She didn’t think he could do it, but incredibly, he was trying to maneuver the rock upwards, anyway, literally trying to carry the rock on his back up the last five or six feet of the slope. How he was even keeping his footing was a mystery to her.
And then he howled.
It was the scream that she had heard before, but now she was much closer and the ground around her feet rumbled as he yelled in rage and frustration. The howl was like that of a huge, trapped animal. It sent shivers up and down Sally’s spine. No matter what the guy looked like, nothing human could make that type of noise.
He howled and the ground moved around her and he pushed with everything inside himself, and still the rock would move no further.
Suddenly, the man stepped aside and deftly allowed the rock to roll off of his back. The boulder dropped away and rolled smoothly down a well-worn path, bouncing once or twice and coming to rest at the base of the slope, shaking and vibrating the ground with its passage.
The man just stood there for a few minutes. He held his head in his hands, and then he looked up and began examining the very top of the slope. There was an area around the top of the hill where he would simply have to carry the rock. He kicked at the rim of dirt and rock around the lip of the small hill, trying to carve out a rut or something to help him carry the rock up and over, but the rock and dirt would not move for him. He could carry a thousand-pound rock on his wide back, but he could not dig in the dirt. Sally did not understand this.
And then he saw her.
Sally had gotten up her courage and had moved to inspect the huge rock he had been trying to roll up the slope. She ran her hands over it and found it to be impossibly smooth, as if this huge boulder had lain on the bottom of a rushing river for eons, the water wearing and smoothing away the sides until the rock was perfectly smooth, perfectly round. It looked more like a huge marble than a heavy boulder.
From here, she could also see up the slope towards the top, and she saw plainly the deep, smooth groove that ran all of the way up to the top. The groove was as smooth and rounded as the boulder. The rock was the same width as the groove. It was obvious that the man had been rolling the rock up this slope in the same groove for a long time.
Something else clicked in the back of her mind, a name or a face or something from her past.
“Who are you?” a gruff, powerful voice boomed from behind her, and she whirled around to face it.
He was huge, HUGE, much bigger than he had seemed. Maybe it was just because he was a lot closer to her now. Too close. He stood in front of her and towered over her at the same time like a statue in a museum, except this statue was sweaty and panting and clenching its fists.
“My name is Sally, and I’m…not really sure what I’m doing here. I woke up in the forest, and I crossed the plain, and now I’m trying to climb this mountain. I haven’t seen anyone…” She tried to remember the last person she saw, but all she could picture was the silhouette of someone standing over her, pointing something shiny at her. The memory was gone as quickly as it came. “Well, not in a while.”
The man listened to her intently while she spoke, and then he nodded and sat down heavily, the ground bouncing and almost knocking her to her feet.
“Where did you come from?”
She sat down on the rocky ground. It felt good to sit down. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, and the searing pain in her shoulder made her cringe.
“I woke up in a clearing in the forest on the other side of this mountain. I came out of the forest and saw this mountain, and somehow I knew that I was supposed to climb it. There is a building on top, and I think that’s where I’m supposed to go, but I don’t think I can make it. I’m just too tired.”
She shook her head and the utter exhaustion that she had felt just before hearing his pained, tortured screams came back to her, full force. She would be lucky to ever get up from this sitting position again.
The man nodded his head knowingly. “Yes, I too have seen the Temple on high. It stands strong and proud as a testimony to the gods. I have spent many a long hour looking upon its beauty.” He grew quiet for a moment, thinking, his eye glazing over with inner searching. “As soon as I complete my task, I too will complete the journey to the summit and enter Zeus’s Temple.”
She guessed it looked a lot like a temple, but she would never have thought to call it that. “Why do you call it ‘Zeus’s Temple’?” He looked at her as if she had just asked him to pull off his own head. “Why, because Zeus built it, of course. The gods were most kind in choosing this place for a temple - it gives me hope, seeing the temple sitting up there, waiting.”
“But, what task must you complete?”
He looked up at her and smiled, one arm sweeping towards the mute round boulder sitting a few yards away. “As soon as I am strong enough to push that rock up and upon the top of that hill. Only after I have proven my strength will I be worthy of entering the Temple.”
She almost laughed aloud, but the huge man had delivered his answer in the quiet, breathless tones of a priest giving up a centuries-old secret. Sally could see absolute truth in his eyes, so pure and simple that she glanced back up the rut that ran all of the way up to the top of the little hill to avoid his pensive eyes.
>
“Why? Why must you push the rock over the hill?”
The man seemed confused by her simple question, a question that she had assumed he must have asked himself a million times. He sat back and thought about this for a long time, his eyes slowly closing in thought, and Sally was beginning to think that the huge man had fallen asleep when he finally sat back up and answered.
“Because I must. When I am strong enough to finish my task, then Zeus will know that I am worthy. He charged me with this task long ago, so that I may prove my worth to him, and for that honor, I feel most privileged.”
She saw the way he looked at the rock and the hill, and suddenly she understood. She leapt to her feet, pointing her finger at the man and his rolling rock.
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute, I know this story! Dr. Macintyre taught us this story in Greek Mythology - you’re that guy that rolls the rock up the hill for all eternity. Oh, what was the name?”
She grabbed her forehead with one hand, trying to remember. It was in there, it had to be. Her face worked as her mind struggled to recall where she had heard all of this before, and for once, her mind did not rebel against her. “Sisyphus! That’s your name. And Zeus charged you with an impossible task.”
The man lumbered to his feet and grabbed her arm with one of his huge, beefy hands, staring into her eyes.
“How do you know of me? I have not met you before, have I?”
In that moment she knew that the man, the mountain, everything she had seen since awakening in her wedding dress – it was all a dream.
But why?
Why had her mind constructed this particular scene? His task was hopeless, but Dr. Macintyre had said that the legend was a parable, a representation of the ancient Greek methodology that once a task is begun, it should be completed, whatever the cost. Sisyphus had never given up.
And suddenly it dawned on her what her mind was trying to tell her. It evidently couldn’t tell her, so now it was showing her what she needed to do. Sisyphus had never given up, and neither could she.
