The Celestial Instructi0n (12 page)

“Have you ever masturbated?” Archangel Jacks asked.

“Yes?” Joex answered unnerved.

“When was the last time?”

“When I was a kid, I think,” Joex said.

Archangel Jack slapped him hard. “When was the last
time?”

Shocked, Joex, felt his warming cheek sting. His
eye began watering from the corner of his eye on that side.

“A few weeks ago?” Joex said.

He flinched before the slap landed this time.

“When was the last time?”

“A few minutes ago, with Angel Millen, she rubbed
herself against me and I enjoyed it,” said Joex, desperately trying to avoid
further abuse. “Why are you hurting me?”

“Instant penance for your lies. This is by far the
kindest thing I can do for you if you want a life in the Church. Good. Good.”

“I don’t know if I can take the physical abuse,
Archangel,” Joex complained, “do we need it?”

In response, with her muscular right arm, Archangel
Jack pulled Joex toward herself until his scalp nestled in the hollow between
her chin and her collarbone. With her left hand, she deliberately inserted it
into the back of his trousers, bent over, stiffened her fingers, and pushed
them as far up his anus as she could. She paused for a moment then her voice unnaturally
dropped two registers and said, “I am your superior. This is not abuse and you
will take it no matter how hard it is. Do you understand?” The shock of rape
and the deep Satanic growl from Marla Jack made Joex instantly and clearly
understand the function of the thick door.

“Yes, Archangel. Yes, Archangel.”

She withdrew her fingers from him and, without
looking at them, wiped them on the top of his thigh.

“You have completed your first Games interview,”
said Marla Jack, “you are on your way to perfection.”

They both stood, he arranged his clothing. She
undogged the door and he blinked to scatter the tears that were catching in his
lashes. God, he was pathetic, Joex thought; ten year ago he could never have
taken that.

She led him back to the transept desk where Serena
was working, clipping forms and referring to a monitor on her desk.

Archangel Jack walked back to the assembly room.
Despite her thinness, which almost shaded into frailness, her stride was as long
and as deliberate as it was when she had arrived.

“Do you want me to make you something? A cup of
tea?” Serena asked, glancing back at the hidden kitchen.

“That would be nice.”

She prepared a cup of hot water and put in a tea
bag. He walked over to wait for the tea to steep. She regarded Joex with her
blue and gold eyes. She took his hand between hers and put it hard between her
legs, curling its fingers up into her. “Take it, Angel Rogers.”

At first Joex was again so shocked he didn’t know
what to do. His own rape was replaying itself in his mind. Then in proof that
he was a quick learner from his Games interview, his began to push down with
the heel of his hand cycling it into partially lifting her with his fingers. He
thought of nothing but the cycle of pressure and release, pressure and release.
He repeated the movement until he heard once again the hitch in her breathing
and her hand on his forearm as a motion to stop.

“Here is your tea, Angel Rogers. I will be back in
a moment.”

She turned to the Scriptorium and walked
purposefully toward it and its toilet. Joex lifted the tea to his lips, blew on
it to cool as if nothing had happened. He imagined that he should get used to it.

‘What kind of asylum is this place?” Joex thought,
his mind a squall of conflict.

Joex put the tea down and looked out over the
narthex desk and the empty chair. A printout was sliding out of a slot on the
desk, waiting to be clipped to a stack of similar printouts at the desk’s edge.
Neglected, The output tray was curling and twisting the printout over the
previous content. This printout drew Joex’s attention; there was a photograph
of a man on it. A man he knew. Joex looked at it with instant recognition. It
was not exactly Joex; it might have been his brother. It was a man Joex’s age,
not Joex exactly but cast in some way that Joex recognized.

He pulled the paper out from where it caught and
studied it. He realized it was his Mooneye employee photo taken years before,
but artificially aged somehow, less hair, more flesh around the cheeks, deeper
wrinkles at the edge of the eyes. Once again a quick learner, the next moment Joex
crumpled the printout into a pocket and jogged toward the narthex entrance and
away, away, away.

Manager Hu was familiar with being tired; if the
shape of the future world was a heavy responsibility, so too were the years
that lay heavy upon his heart and kidneys. For his blood pressure, he snacked
on a few peanuts still in their brown skin. He considered the coded message recorded
off the Internet by a junior wearing a t-shirt with two huge Japanese graphics
printed on it. It is time for the world to be renewed, Hu thought.

The prosecutor has news. Hu nimbly typed his own sequence
of words on his terminal, then the handful of letters that appeared on his
pocket authenticator. Ready to decode, he then typed the phrase that had been
brought to him. Hu read the message and put his palms together to warm them.
So, Messenger Riu is to be taken by the authorities. And I have no signal from
the Crux that the homeless worker, Baroco, is dead. These two facts made Hu’s
reasoning inevitable.

Next Wednesday is most auspicious. 1 AM Beijing is
12 noon in Washington, D.C. Event minus four minutes, the Celestial treasury
options for mere jiaos the purchase of real estate and the strategic resources
with our entire reserve of dollars, along with the dollars we control in Europe
and rest of the BRIC countries; minus three minutes Beijing broadcasts the
dumping at market of all US Treasuries, which Hu knew was well over two
trillion dollars including the amounts controlled by proxy in Japan, Britain,
and Brazil; plus two minutes the credit rating’s agencies universally degrade
the US into default; plus four minutes our options engage controlling over what
was eight trillion dollars in raw physical infrastructure; then at plus five
minutes our announcement that the Chinese people are happy to offer a Golden
Bridge to the foundering US economy by infusing it with dollars by purchasing
its depressed land and materials. And of course at the center, at zero minutes,
the event itself.

Manager Hu had met with his team of programmers
yesterday and they had assured him that they were ready. They updated auxiliary
sites with tuned and re-tuned internetwork packets. Covertly extracted encryption
keys from field programmable gate arrays and the shadow configuration bit
stream was ready to go live. Programmable logic controllers will signal reverse
current throughout every major distribution grid. Fifteen root servers, at
thirty-seven physical locations will be silently updated with the desired substitute
table entries hidden within their system kernels. Dark silicon will go light. Two
hundred data centers in the United States, One hundred fifty in Europe, twenty
in Japan, ten in South America, and five in Beijing. These sites will be armed
and ready to broadcast without further instruction.

On the other hand, although they had already been
hired and payment tendered, the botnets have to be engaged in real-time, which
means several seconds of latency at a minimum. Minus 15 seconds should Hu
guessed. Not significant. Hu picked up a fly whisk that he kept on his table.
His fingers probed the tips of the finger-length whiskers that had been
individually sharpened and annealed in a solar furnace over the course of several
days. The whisk’s handle was a common turned rosewood handle stained even
darker from his hands over the years. The attached brush was not horsehair but was
a gathering of sapphire whiskers which made a musical silence when gestured
sinuously in the air. The fibers were stiff but delicate and could easily be
broken, except if stabbed directly, straight, and without hesitation into the
face of the enemy. On the parallel moment, they were stronger than the hardest tool
steel forged. Manager Hu delicately fanned himself with it. Along with his cane—a
simple titanium tube with a rosewood ball handle, decorated with an inlaid
ceramic elliptical conic section—the whisk was a matched gift from his
brother-in-law, the Admiral.

From a decrepit building near the harbor of
Hangzhou, Manager Hu selected the sequence one-time symbols to reduce the
concise message to his brother-in-law into meaninglessness. Then in a final,
decisive, irrevocable act of his life, he then injected the encrypted output
disguised as words into a friendly public message on the Renren social
networking site.

He summoned his junior and directed her to run
through the serial pings of the botnets to make sure they were responsive,
functional and ready for their new set of instructions. He directed her to set
up another simulation for him to test personally. Many calculations must be
made in the temple before the war is fought. The root server subversion would
be damaging, the botnet attack disabling, but the taking of hardware of the routing
switches was the killing stroke. The Internet in the United States as well as
much of the world would be dead. Today that meant every aspect of human life
that involved the transmission of information, whether telephoned instructions
to civil defense or launch codes via satellite link.

But that was just the drawback phase of the
gathering tsunami. The subsequent crest and bore of our generous Celestial
assistance to maintain the means of production and the failed western
democratic institutions will be welcomed with a fatal embrace. The West will be
damaged, discredited, and bankrupt.

A few minutes after next Wednesday at 12 p.m. in
Washington, D.C., China would become the new owner of the world. The United
States might flail randomly as a child in an armory, but it would never
recover.

Manager Hu once again reviewed the sequence of
initiators and consequences, the synapses and axons of his control. Was it irony
that because a homeless man exists thousands of miles away, who has not a
particle of knowledge of any of these events, the collapse and rebirth of the
world is initiated?

Joex’s sole goal was to get to an entrance ramp of
Interstate 84 east. He could switch to Interstate 80 around Salt Lake City, but
he must get out of Portland before the Crux was thoroughly awake. Distance was
the key now. Along the coast, his dress and haircut would be eventually
recognized, noted, passed along. Within the heartland of the country, not so
much. He had never been to Tulsa before.

On the one hand, the wonderful and intoxicating Games
Machine and the promise of God-like transcendental intellect; on the other hand
the twisted, brutal emotional and physical abuse that was its hand-in-glove. It
was like the free inventiveness of a Silicon Valley start-up run by a
coprophagic Balkan general. But, then, other than technical start-ups accidentally
associated with young liberal independent and benignly progressive sorts, the
Crux seemed to be directed by a paranoid and violent—if conceptually alert—sociopath.
Then, what really was the difference between the organizational models? Joex
reflexively realized that it had been years since he had such a texture of
ideas. He deliberately exhaled. He hated that the Games Machine had accelerated
his thinking, jolted him out of a torpid consideration of things—if it meant
that it supported degrading violence both personal and…what? But along with
this hate Joex felt the deep stirrings of an aroused intellect. He pushed it
down, away. He could not permit himself to think there was any good in this
psychotic Church.

He caught a ride with a young couple in a ancient Scion
wagon whose engine had to scream to merge at highway speed. They shared snacks
with Joex out of a grocery bag they kept on the floor.

“Hi, my name is Myra. This is Steve. How you
doing?” said the young woman with two braids interconnected with a white silken
thread.

“Hi, I’m Joe X. Just heading east.”

Joex was unafraid of uttering his real name. Saying
it rather than twisting in a personal labyrinth of deception was refreshing.
Joex resolved not to disguise his identity again.

“Joe X? Are you in the military? That’s some sweet
swag.” said the woman looking curiously at Joex’s buzz cut with its intaglio X.
She likely related the X in his name and the X in his hair.

“Not on your life, Myra. Just sports.” Joex didn’t
elaborate. “Where are you folks heading?”

“To pick up my sister-in-law at the airport,” Steve
said “how far you going?”

“Just going east. Heard that I might get a job.”

After a few more banalities, the group fell into
silence under the roar of the engine. The couple let him off half an hour later
and wished him good luck. “Thanks, I need it,” Joex replied.

A few long rides and Joex was in Idaho.

Once he was past the border Joex fell into a
jostled sleep, his right hand holding his only possession—the crumpled printout
in his pocket. He kept it crushed in his palm.