The Celestial Instructi0n (15 page)

Joex
had taken the large coffee from MacDonald’s, loaded it with creamer and sugar
so it was more a brown sludge than a drink, and sat outside on the curb to eat
it with the red plastic stirrer.

“Now
what?”

He
was tired, no—exhausted. And he was hungry. He thought his trousers already
felt looser on him. At least he had established a point of reference. A theory,
supported by the known facts. Waiting to be disproven. Now, how could he do
that? The only way he could think of was to look at the firmware himself. If he
could remember it so many years ago. Did source still exist? He hadn’t kept his
own. I don’t think that unit even exists anymore at Mooneye. Then the FBI. If
the Church of the Crux wants to kill me, if the Chinese are ultimately behind
it, and if the reason is to prevent knowledge of Rui Bao’s (how can I know?)
involvement in the switching project—at least in a timely manner—if the players
think it of some urgency, then can an imminent unspecified danger be thwarted
by the dogged perseverance—but glacially slow—investigation of the FBI? And the
saying on the net is: anything the government knows, the Church of the Crux
knows. What are my chances of leaving this all unscathed? Do I even want to?

Joex’s
descent into isolation over the last few years was a wild contrast to his recent
tumultuous ascent into imminent murder, spies, pathological cults, Chinese
agents, sluggish or corrupt attorneys, and wacked-out dominatrixes. And the Games
Machine. Fuck. How could such an organization as the Crux have such a wonderful
device? “What next, Joe X?” he spoke to his sludge. “I need some help.”

Sam Lion-McNamara was considering the value of knowledge. First,
what counted as knowledge rather than just a stream of bits, second, did it
have a value of its own, or was it only valuable to the extent it could affect
the material world? This was not just idle speculation. His life depended on
it. Once the go-boys had left, Sam had returned to the Café to the abuse of
Milton Kono who threatened to complain to the owner of his absence.

“Mr. Kono, I would not make waves. Are your accounts in order? I
can check in Excel, you know.” Actually, Sam had no idea whether the accounts
were in order or not, but he knew that the only thing which seemed to exceed
the ill-temper of Milton Kono was his ignorance of anything to do with
computers, hence the reason for Sam. And when you are ignorant of something,
you have no idea of the extent of its power. Whether he actually did have
something to hide, or whether the simple wall of his absolute ignorance
silenced him, Milton Kono, snorted and went back to his pencil-sucking.

First, knowledge can be miniscule bits: yes or no, on or off, do
we drop the bomb or not, is his life forfeit or not? The right single bit can
move the world. As can entire libraries of information. That too is knowledge,
how to farm, how to make a light bulb, how to burn a circuit board, how to
govern a nation, but, also, isn’t a mathematical theory or definition of a word
also knowledge, even if its material significance is nil? How about the
chirality of a unicorn horn? Right or left? Is it knowledge if it does not
exist? Certainly, the significance of a fragment of knowledge can change. One,
two, three, four is a simple sequence, but how does knowing that change if I am
told it is also the combination to your safe? How does linking knowledge and
weaving it together other parcels of knowledge change it?

Sam was inquiring into the nature of knowledge for the simple
reason that he needed to convert what he knew into the material means to get
away from this place and make a life elsewhere. He judged just leaving was
hopeless; what he knew with his hands and legs was pointlessly inadequate. And
what he knew with his head was only catalyzed by computers, specifically,
computers connected to the Internet. Cousin Siloi’s go-boys cared less what he
knew; if anything they would cut off his head to peer at his knowledge from the
inside.

Sam went to a terminal with the mouse that stuck the least and
logged on to Darknet with Tor. He picked up his mail as Ouest, went over to the
Hatz board to moderate and to see if he could generate some further ideas than
the cloud of hopelessness which was engulfing him. Here was something
interesting: the “Jim Rogers” that he had setup the Redbud account a few days
ago was willing to pay good money for some source code. Failing that, for a
binary image of the object code of some obscure switching firmware from the
1980’s. He was willing to pay hard money; I wish he could pay with a visa to
Britain or to the United States.

Sam responded in email: “Well, how about this? If you transfer the
money to Sam Lion-MacNamara at Freetown, Sierra Leone, I will fetch your code
for you.” Sam who had always been careful with his identities had used his real
name. This was the first time he had used his born name on the Internet. It was
exhilarating, powerful, and desperate, as if he had uttered an elemental incantation,
which had heretofore been passed over only in fearful silence. But things were
drawing to a close here in Freetown for him. To scurry from the go-boys until
they got tired or hacked off important parts of him was not a life. Even the
Pandemba road prison would be better. There at least I could bargain nightly
for my life in exchange for my services.

In real-time his response was in turn responded to: “I will begin
to transfer money when you transfer enough code to know that you have it. Then
we will trade money for code, piece by piece. The more you send the greater my
payment for each piece. But time is of the essence. – Jim R.”

Sam responded once again to “Jim Rogers”: “Sam here. No problem.
Send email to Ouest giving me as much information as you have company, date,
code size, module name if known, product name and model number, revision code,
whatever information you have. If someone has put it on the Internet, or in a
machine with a path to the Internet, I will find it for you.”

Two days later, Joex who had passed the night as a scarecrow in
the dark next to the main library in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  His paranoid tremors
were acting up again. He wasn’t sure he could trust that his memory was
accurate or that his reasoning was sound, but he believed that it was. The Games
Machine had done something to him. The short time he had used it, it had done
something to him. It clarified parts of his thinking and formed something like
a community of scholars in his head, each outbidding the other with interesting
ideas, images, and uncomfortable feelings. But he was exhausted. Instead of
thinking, he felt as if he were moderating a discussion. A discussion of prize
fighters at the tag-end of their strength He composed the message, sent then
email, disconnected from Darknet and left the library. Next stop, Chicago. Then
Boston.

Joex had decided to get help from probably the most concentrated
pool of surpassingly brilliant computer engineers in the world. They had a
crucial quality that he did not know existed anywhere else: they could be
designing overwhelming electromagnetic weapons or could be elaborating an
algorithm to generate entire endless worlds in a game: either task was met with
playful competence and perseverance that rivaled Job. These were men and women
who not only knew the secret of academic success was to give the study not only
an epsilon more than asked for, but to give it two or three times as asked for,
coupled with originality and grace. These were the kind of merry pranksters who
for fun and diligence—and to thwart any claim of insufficiency or worse, plain
error—would not only page through the entire set of Knuth’s Art of Programming
3rd edition, or Jewel’s Algorithm Discovery and Design, 4th edition to see if
any of the more obscure algorithms could be applied to the problem at hand in a
fresh way. They would then would transform the problem to another intellectual domain
and similarly scan through the volumes of Apostol or Suh, then drop it off at a
professor’s keep posed innocently as a naïve undergraduate question. They were incandescent
and relentless. Where else was there hope that an imminent computer threat be
isolated, if it existed, and if possible, countered? Today, please.

He knew exactly where he was going. The legendary shadow MIT
computer science laboratory last domiciled in the Boston Combat Zone. By the
time he got there, he hoped that he would have something to show them.

He was also going to connect with his sister. His aggressively
Luddite sister, who brought up memories of his family and himself that he
feared.

First Celestial Michael Voide slapped himself once, then harder,
again, and again and again. He rolled off his chair in front of a Games Machine.
He had been there uncountable hours. He rocked his head into the carpet as if
an infant, then started to weep and bent to the floor as if praying to the
East. His mouth fell open and his tongue dug into the carpet fibers. His eyes
had burning sand in them.

Although more than anyone in the Church the First Celestial
understood the power that the Games Machine could both grant and extract, it
was as a tearing away a suckling newborn at the crown of a full and fertile
mother. His arms were trembling, he wanted to void himself on the floor, the
background scintillation and tintinnabulation from the screens and speakers
around the room were nauseating. A rage built up within him. He spit and
babbled into the pile. He could feel his eyes roll up; his buttocks twitched
with reptilian intensity. He ejaculated.

He lay there. It passed. He rose and slouched at his command desk
and put the palm of his hand flat upon a small black gym bag with a small scarlet
Church cruciate embroidered upon it. With his other hand, he touched a screen
and said, “get me Dominion Cassandra Jones.” He waited for almost a minute,
frozen, staring at a midpoint on his desk, his right hand still on the gym bag,
his left, flat, motionless in front of the screen.

“Dominion Jones.”

“Good afternoon, Dominion. From this instant, you are my Security
Throne. This is your first direction; it will precede all other tasks that
don’t directly preserve your life.”

“Yes, Celestial.”

First Celestial Voide then spoke gently into the phone, as if she
had been his Throne for years, for life, since she was his mother, his
grandmother, his lover throughout time—the first parichoner he personally
executed at the age of twelve. Michael remembered he had kissed him—a far older
man—full on his slack lips, then more deeply, passionately, even as the daemon—now
dead and leaden—cooled and gassed.

As he spoke, he idly lifted the gym bag slightly off the desk;
something rolled within it to the near side of the bag. Something that was just
the size, shape, and weight of a human head.

Sam had skill with Google, which is to say that he was a wizard.
He had what seemed to be an intuitive grasp on selecting the skein of words
that would net him his target. It is said that, skillfully chosen, the query
game of “twenty questions” can winnow the entire universe down to a single
wildflower. Sam could likely winnow down the universe into the fleeting
constituents of a subatomic particle.

He went through the history of Mooneye on their web page, then
found the first family of switches they had innovated. Then he found an
unofficial support forum using several of the proprietary terms found on the
first pages. Then, then he sought each of the forum contributors by email and
nickname and company affiliation where there was one designated. Eventually, finally,
on a ancient FTP server he found a directory with a complete set of binary
images for each of the original models, with speculation on the differences.
Like a Rosetta stone, the author, now retired and who had probably forgotten
about this old trove, had decompiled the hex bits and bytes into pseudo-source
code that Sam could readily follow. Given a little practice with this dialect,
Sam could soon follow the binary without source cribs, but for now he needed to
know the traps and the hardware features of the switch originally linked to
specific machine addresses. A priori, there was no way of distinguishing an
operation code from an address code or from a datum code; was the hexadecimal
the label on the box, the contents of the box or an instruction on what to do
with the contents of the box? Then the same trilemma had to be unfolded once
again for the next group of bytes-the alphanumeric origami protein folding and
unfolding in a simulacrum of life—until the power extinguished from the
processor or the quest was abandoned. Sam dutifully fed the header block of
code into Darknet and waited for either a response from Jim Rogers or,
unluckily, in real life, the go-boys.

In Chicago, Joex collected the fragment with Sam’s tentative
pseudo-source comments. The past flooded back as he remembered the sequence of
hardware addresses to size the cache, flush, map input, and the other terms of
art for his project under Robert Marks, er Rui. He instructed Redbud to forward
to send money via Western Union to the agent on Proud Street in Freetown. He
then copied the acknowledgement and pasted into Darknet email and sent it off
to Ouest, or Sam Lion-McNamara, if that was a real name. “More,” he insisted,
closing the email.

And so, the trust was proven in increments and correspondingly
small money wires; for all he knew “Ouest” could be his supervisor at Mooneye,
an FBI agent, or an agent of the Church of the Crux. Now credentials didn’t
matter, the contents flowing from an old FTP pc in South Carolina to a battered
computer in Chicago mediated by a machine cobbled together from computer
electronic waste in West Africa was the ivory tangram which he had to piece together.