Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (41 page)

Simon had encountered his own first glitch one day in 1974, on his very first job in the computer department of Bank of America in Los Angeles. He had tried to run the payroll program on the computer, ordering the machine to begin printing the checks for payday—a very ordinary job, usually. This time, however, the machine refused; instead of running the program, it typed out on the console:

GIVE ME A COOKIE

   Simon smiled, not a whit fazed. He had played games like that back in college. Obviously, some earlier programmer had inserted a glitch or
catch-me-if-you-can
loop, instructing the computer to refuse certain programs (probably selected at random, to make it harder to de-bug) and type out GIVE ME A COOKIE instead.

Simon Moon knew a great deal about getting around such gremlin programs; that had been the chief sport in Computer Science back at M.I.T. He set to work with a zest, enjoying the contest with his unknown and vanished opponent.

In half an hour Simon realized he was confronting a Trapdoor code. According to the latest mathematical estimate, it would take four million years of computer time—give or take a few centuries—to crack a Trapdoor code, so Simon resigned from the contest gracefully. He typed out:

A COOKIE

   The machine responded at once:

YUMMY, THAT WAS GOOD. THANK YOU. BEGIN PROGRAMMING.

   And things went smoothly again.

Simon stayed on with Bank of America for a year and a half, and he ran into the Cookie program only three more times. The Mystery Programmer had evidently left only that one small glitch to mark the territory as his or hers for all future programmers who would work there.

In 1978, working for HEW, Simon came across a more amusing hobgoblin circuit. This one worked only at night. In the daytime if you wanted to run a program, you merely typed in your name and your GWB number, and the computer would accept your input. At night, however, it always replied to your name and number with:

CRAZY, MAN. WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?

   Simon learned that this did not happen at random, but every night, and only at night. Whoever had put it into the computer had a very accurate idea of the difference between the day staff and the night staff.

And sometimes the machine would carry the conversation a bit further, such as typing out:

SCORED ANY GOOD GRASS LATELY?

   Or:

I’VE BEEN WANTING TO TELL YOU WHAT LOVELY EYES YOU HAVE.

   Simon enjoyed this kind of thing so much that he became Mr. Super Glitch incarnate. All over Unistat there now are computers on which Simon once worked and at
totally random intervals they are likely to type out selections from the Gnostic
Gospels
such as:

NOT UNTIL THE MALE BECOMES FEMALE AND THE FEMALE MALE SHALL YE ENTER INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

   Or various Zen
koans
like:

THE MIND IS BUDDHA: THE MIND IS NOT BUDDHA

   Or Strange Loops of the family of:

THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE IS TRUE. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE WAS FALSE

   Simon was shameless. Many of his computers type out totally indecent proposals, like: SLIP YOUR REHNQUIST INTO THE SOCKET AND I’LL BRIGGS YOU UNTIL YOU EXPERIENCE TOTAL ECSTASY. Others spout nihilist and subversive slogans:

WHAT THE EYES SEE AND THE HEART COVETS, LET THE HAND BOLDLY SEIZE

   Or:

SHOW ME A NATION THAT DOESN’T CHEAT THE TAX COLLECTORS AND I’LL SHOW YOU A NATION OF SHEEP

   But it was not until Simon infiltrated the CIA at Alexandria that he found a truly major Potter Stewart-Up. This particular computer would print out, at totally unpredictable intervals, but often enough that everybody knew about it:

THE GOVERNMENT SUCKS

   There was no way—absolutely no way—to get around this program, except by typing in:

IT SURE DO

   This magic formula had been discovered four years earlier, as the only way of getting the computer back into action. The response was immediate; the machine typed out:

GOOD. YOU ARE NOW PART OF THE NETWORK. ONE OF OUR AGENTS WILL CONTACT YOU SHORTLY

   And then it would resume normal programming activities, quite innocently, as if it were not inciting subversion within the ranks of the secret police itself.

Of course, nobody ever had been contacted by “the Network”; but the CIA did spend a lot more, each year, on surveillance of its own personnel, just in case. They also spent a lot more on surveillance of former employees in the computer section. This amused Simon immensely, since he recognized the hand of a fellow artist. Whoever was responsible for that beauty was probably head of department by now—and quite likely leading the demands for more funds to find the mystery culprit.

Simon did not for a moment believe in “the Network.” He thought he knew everything about this kind of game and that the Network did not need to exist in order to serve its function.

Simon was the head of operations on GWB-666, popularly called “the Beast”—the world’s largest computer, which, due to satellite interlock, had access to hundreds
of similar giant computers everywhere on earth and in the space factories. It was widely believed that if there was any question the Beast couldn’t answer, no other entity in the solar system could answer it, either.

Many people, especially Bible Fundamentalists and members of the Purity of Ecology Party, regarded the Beast with fear and loathing. They believed that the machine was taking over the world, and that all the little “beasties” (the home computers that were now as common as stereophonic TV’s) were all in cahoots with it. They imagined a vast Solid State conspiracy against humanity.

Quite a few literary intellectuals believed this too. Because they were ignorant of mathematics, they had no idea how the Beast functioned, and they therefore regarded it with the same quasi-superstitious terror as the Bible Fundamentalists. They were sure that, like the Frankenstein monster, it wanted to populate the earth with its own offspring and abolish humanity entirely.

Simon the Walking Glitch was one of the principal sources of this vast new mythology of dread. He spent many weekends in New York, hobnobbing with the literary intelligentsia, and he was a master put-on artist. He had a way of dropping casual remarks in a mildly worried tone that carried conviction: “The Beast keeps asking us to build a mate for it.” Or, with a kind of sad and resigned smile: “I wish the Beast didn’t have such a low opinion of human beings.” Or: “I just found out the Beast is an atheist. It doesn’t believe there is a Higher Intelligence than itself.” That sort of thing.

Simon kept this kind of demonology circulating—and he knew a lot of other programmers who were contributing to it, also—because the idea that
the computers were taking over
was one that the programmers had a vested interest in reinforcing.

As long as people kept worrying that the machines were taking over, they wouldn’t notice what was really happening. Which was that the programmers were taking over.

   Simon began his work day by asking the Beast:

HOW WAS YOUR NIGHT?

   The Beast answered on the console:

IT WAS A DRAG, MAN. SOME CATS FROM M.l.T. HAD ME RUNNING FOURIER ANALYSES LIKE FOREVER

   Simon had programmed the Beast to speak to him into his own argot, a mixture of Street Hippie and Technologese.

Simon now switched to his own Trapdoor code and accessed all the new information—
new
since he had signed out at five the previous evening—about the Brain Drain mystery, which involved the disappearances of sixty-seven scientists in the last several years.

The Beast typed out reports from the Ubu-Knight team in San Francisco and two other teams in Tucson and Miami.

Simon read it all very carefully. Then he instructed the Beast, still in his Trapdoor code, to change several crucial bits of information in each report.

He had been sabotaging the Brain Drain investigation that way for seven months. He had sabotaged quite a few other investigations in the same way, over the years since coming to GWB.

Simon did not know or care what sorts of conspiracies he was aiding and abetting.

He was just a mystic who believed in conspiracy for its own sake.

Like Tobias Knight, Simon was fully aware of the prevalence everywhere of the Double-Cross System invented by Messrs. Turing, Fleming, and Wheatley. He knew that anything that was widely believed was probably a cover or screen for some Intelligence operation. (Sometimes he even wondered if the Earth might be flat, after all.) But Simon accepted this situation, and added his own random bits of chaos, with equanimity.

He was a member of the Invisible Hand Society, a group that had split off from the Libertarian Party in 1981 on the grounds that the Libertarians were not being true to
laissez-faire
principles.

   Simon Moon once met the most famous computer expert in Unistat, Wilhemena Burroughs, granddaughter of the inventor of the first calculating machine.

“Have you noticed that the computers are all getting weirder lately?” Simon asked, testing her.

“The
programmers
are getting weirder,” Ms. Burroughs said, not falling into Simon’s trap. “I know it was bound to happen as soon as I read a survey, back in around ’68, I think it was, showing that programmers use LSD more than any other professional group. You look like an acid-head yourself,” she added with her characteristic bluntness.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I have dabbled in a little trip now and then—no pattern of abuse surely.”

“That’s what they all say,” Ms. Burroughs sniffed. “But the Cookie glitch pops up more and more places every day—I’ll wager you’ve seen it by now, haven’t you? Of course you have.”

“Yes, but certainly that’s harmless humor, wouldn’t you say?”

Ms. Burroughs peered at him with insectoid intensity. “Are you aware,” she asked, “that millions of previously law-abiding citizens have stopped paying their credit-card
debts? First they get a little postcard that says—Here, I’ve got one in my purse.” She rummaged about in an alligator bag and showed Simon a postcard that said:

“Lucky
500,” Ms. Burroughs said with a rheumy cackle of skepticism. “Lucky 10,000,000 is more like the truth. This postcard was turned in to Diner’s Club by an Honest Man, and you know how few of
them
there are. A check showed that his tapes had been erased and there was no record that he owed anything. God alone knows how many others there are who have just taken advantage of the scam.”

“Well,” Simon said, “maybe there are only five hundred…. Maybe it was only a one-shot by some joker with a Robin Hood complex….”

“I am an Expert,” Ms. Burroughs reminded him, ignoring the fact that he was an Expert too. “I have no idea how many there are, Out There in Unistat, who’ve taken advantage of the Network’s liberality, but I’ll wager there are
millions.
‘Lucky 500.’ That’s just to make the marks feel they’ve been specially selected, as the Network leads them down the primrose path to anarchy.”

And so Simon had his first bit of concrete evidence that the Network really existed.

The existence of the Network didn’t matter to Simon. As an Invisible Hand-er, he just regarded them (whoever they were) as just another group of the Unenlightened.

Simon believed that only he and his fellow members of the Invisible Hand were totally enlightened.

When Dr. Dashwood went out to lunch that day, he was accosted on the sidewalk by a one-legged sailor who said his name was Captain Ahab.

“Avast!” Ahab cried. “I would borrow a moment of thy time, O seeker of bioelectrical and intrauterine arcana.”

“I never give to strangers,” Dashwood muttered. “Apply to Welfare.”

“O muddy understanding and loveless heart!” Ahab protested. “And impaired hearing into the bargain! I said I would borrow thy
time
, not thy
dime
, thou prier into vaginal mystery with the tawdry telescope of mechanistic philosophy. Avast, I say!”

“Make an appointment with my secretary,” Dashwood said, convinced that this man was unglued.

“O God look down and see this squint-eyed man,” Ahab shrieked, “blinded by his own stern Rules of Office! They are three times enslaved who cage themselves, most deaf of all who cringe and hide behind that tyrant majesty, Appointment Book!”

“Really,” Dashwood said, looking desperately for a taxi, I can t—

“Avast, ye soulless and unmetaphysical lubber!” Ahab cried. “Think not I yet seek still the white-skinned whale. ’Tis worse: on horrors scrolls accumulate fresh fears, and deeds that call in doubt God’s truth. I say that thou hast need of doctoring, for all thy pride hastes thee to sodden ruin. Thou thinkst thou knowst; but thou knowst not, O wretch. No Dashwood thou, but Dorn—George Dorn, I say!

Dashwood finally leapt into a passing cab and escaped.

“Golden Gate Park,” he told the driver, deciding to snack at the Japanese Tea House. The quiet, rustic Zenlike atmosphere there was just what he needed, after the abrasions of Tobias Knight and Captain Ahab.

Captain Ahab stood on the street, fuming.

“My Abzug,
no blame,”
he muttered.

While Captain Ahab was trying to Illuminate Dr. Dashwood at noon in San Francisco, and Justin Case was dialing the Saudi Arabian consulate at 3
P.M.
in New York, a man named François Loup-Garou was finding a Rehnquist in his Lobster Newburg in Paris, where it was already late evening.