The Celestial Instructi0n (18 page)

And the warm rain that was beginning to come down in heavy drops
suggested that free-climbing until he found a way in was unrealistic, even for
a slight boy of unlimited dreams. Maybe money from the post office get could be
across the border in Guinea. Maybe in Conakry I can get work on a container
ship and get to a northern place that has the possibility of life. But for now,
money. To get money, “Jim Rogers.” Jim Rogers. Maybe he will reward me with a
bonus. So, I need to send him the last code and a pointer to the bivalent
poison. So obvious, Sam thought. How could it not be seen before?

Then emerging from the bloom of his mind was a picture rather than
words that in the higher dimensional universe to not underestimate the value of
a simple pointer in the right direction, as virtually all of the search volume
lies just a skin’s-breadth from the surface. Then Sam started shaking with chills
despite the sultry warmth of the evening rain. His headache was getting worse.

Maybe five minutes with a live terminal. That is all, then the
guards could run after him and like a baboon, he could caper and climb, roll
and escape into the warm darkness of Freetown. How to get those five minutes?

Now it is a truth in both coding and real life that the more
complicated the situation, the more opportunity to find anomalies and
opportunities that can be exploited. So, Sam looked up the smooth sides of the
towers around him, pock marks from shell repaired with cement that was already
rotting out in the monsoon. To the intricate bristles of antennas at the tops.
The old communications building had the most by sheer volume of spikes and
dishes. And it is only twelve stories tall. That is my target then. Somewhere
in that complication, I may be able to get inside. Sam looked to a heap of
boxes and garbage at one of the building’s corners and saw the rat’s tail of
cables that was bundled to the oxidized aluminum façade of the building. Since
it had not yet been stolen, Sam inferred that a guard must patrol frequently.
He could not loll around.

One advantage of equatorial Freetown with its street lamps
stripped of metal—even if there were reliable public electricity to power them—was
that at night the only light came from the generators of the building itself,
contrasted to the pale yellow lines of flickering candles threading on the streets
outside. The building guards would not venture outside in the machete-glinting
darkness, nor would anyone outside bother to take their attention from their
loads of bright-eyed fish, or plantain, or plastic mops, or freshly baked bread
they were trucking to market. Sam started to climb.

Even with the headache and the slippery condensation of the
monsoon humidity, Sam climbed quickly. In much less than twenty minutes, he
reached the top and its jungles of antennas, buzzing shacks and black cables as
thick as his wrist. The rusted metal chair and the detritus scattered on the tar
paper roof covered it so thickly and in so many negligent layers that its skin
felt looked a mummified vomit. He noticed the main building generator under its
corrugated roof; from experience, he knew that periodically a boy had to fuel
it, unless they had rigged up some other way of supplying it. With carelessness
surrounding him in copious evidence, Sam had hope. He found the access door
beveled into an edge of the roof past the bulk of the clutter. With a few
rattles and shakes, it opened into a chimney of light and warmth and stale air.

He had entered some kind of darkened half-height storage area at
the top of the building. The flooring was unfinished and he suspected that just
a few inches under him was the ceilings of offices. There were catwalks laid
down, but there was no need to take them as Sam could see a spring-loaded
ladder next to the access door to the roof. Sam had never used steps that swung
down before, but realized that it only took the lightest weight to swing it down
so that its legs at its furthest end were flush with the floor. Sam let a wave
of chills go past. He felt hot and his need to move his bowels. First, the
message was cast into the ocean. Down the ladder, then back up. Sam stripped
off his shirt and stuffed it into the groin of the ladder’s fulcrum. Then back
down. When Sam took his weight off the ladder it only swung back a few inches
before stopped by the bundle. Mostly by feel, he descended the steps into a
much brighter area.

He was at the top of a concrete stairwell. Ignoring the passage
down, he tried the metal door inset to his right. It opened quietly onto a
vinyl tile-covered hallway. There were cubicles lit with a kind of gentle
night-light that spilled over their half walls. It was quiet, with only a
distant creaking or ticking of something unknown. The first cubicle he went
into had a computer, which Sam snapped on. The monitor was an older-fashioned
massive CRT that radiated an actinic glow as it warmed brightening Sam’s face.
The screen displayed a home page and Sam verified he was live on the Internet
by Googling Tor. It would be faster to download the Darknet client rather than
find a proxy.

But Sam was never to use the computer. As a torrential flash of
lightning, the entire floor’s lights switched on and thundered a shout “Who is
there? Give yourself up!” Sam started from the chair and squatted down under
the top level of the partitions. He involuntarily had diarrhea. Wet and
stinking, he scuttled back to the stairwell entrance and slammed the door
behind him. Just another two minutes he thought.

Up onto the ladder and into the roof storage area, then tearing
the rags of his shirt from the crux of the ladder and assisting the ladder’s
spring fixing back into place into a smooth and unbroken ceiling. He heard the
metal door open and a clatter of footsteps as they raced down to the floor
below. Then nothing. Sam waited. After a minute, Sam stood and turned to the
roof access door to retrace his steps in failure. But then, an exultation, a
shout and the ceiling ladder began swinging down again. Sam jumped through the
roof door, looked, failed to find anything to secure it, and crouched behind
one of the cluttered stacks of crates that obscured his silhouette in the
blackness. A lone guard came out, holding an ancient revolver on a string and a
flashlight that cast an uneven glare of concentric rings. He stopped and
listened, only hearing a battery of random plashes of fat drops hitting hollow
metal enclosures.

The guard though better of running further into the darkness; he
retreated into the beveled doorway, holstered his revolver and took out some
kind of electronic object with cast a faint blue glow on his own face. Sam
didn’t wait. He sprung from his crouch to the door and barreled into the guard
with as much velocity as he could manage and as low as he could. The guard
opened his arms and tried to step back, but Sam was hugging his legs and the
guard toppled backward. Lighter on his feet, Sam jumped up grabbed the mobile
phone the guard had dropped when trying to break his fall and climbed over the
guard using the top of the guards chest at a paving stone. Then jumping on the
swing ladder down and flying down the stairwell eight or ten steps at a time
using the inner handrail as a pivot on each turn. Sam was out the bottom and
out the fire door, partially blocked with trash before the guard was down the
first flight.

Sam had no idea to do with the mobile, but it was a totem of
linking with the larger world. Once outside, handful of meters away from the communications
building, into the humid night, he might as well have been magically cloaked.
Sam sat, now shirtless with his stolen mobile a football pitch away from the
Communications building, behind the Grand Plaza on a two-ply piece of
corrugated cardboard considering his loot. The guard had a smartphone that in theory
could browse the Internet!

Unfortunately, while a prize it itself, the mobile’s Internet
showed no bars whatsoever, which was probably good since the battery was also
exhausted as well, if the flashing empty outline of a battery on the display
was any measure. And Sam knew that that Datatel, and certainly no fixed line
operator, had setup a mobile Internet infrastructure in Sierra Leone. There
were fewer than a dozen mobile towers for the entire million people living in
town for even the older generation phones. But, Sam reasoned, why would a guard
have such a device if it was not uniquely useful? And he must have thought it
useful tonight, else why would be using it to apparently calling for assistance?
The guard must have well-used the phone because the charge was almost empty. If
the guard never used it, the phone would likely be completely dead or in a
charger somewhere, waiting for the random times of power supplied by the mains.
Conversely, if the guard used it lightly and with the Internet capability
turned off on the phone, Sam would expect the battery to be more fully charged.
But Internet use would drain it down must faster than voice only capability.

So, once again leveraging his poverty with his arguments and
mental agility, Sam crept around the perimeter of the Plaza, pushing through
discarded trash like a longtail boat through a light White Man’s Bay chop until
he could see a corner of the Communications building through rusted rebar scrap
collaring a rocket hole in the once whitewashed concrete wall. Like digging
into a termite mound there were several people looking agitatedly around the
base of the building, looking this way and that, talking to one another with
waving arms and expansive gestures. Sam was no more than a single block from
the visible corner of the Communications building, but might as well be on the
moon judging by the wild rays of mis-focused flashlights flailing randomly and
attenuating uselessly into the scattering particles of the steamy night air.
Pointing the Smartphone at the communications building, he immediately saw the
faintest portion of a single bar flicking on and off. As fast as he could,
mindless now to the outside activity and his own headache, he launched the
built-in browser and typed in an Internet URL in the address bar. He wondered
if the signal had been dropped when the browser finally responded. He typed on
the tiny keyboard. He was at the free proxy to Darknet. He kept left arm
holding the phone as rigid as possible not to vary the antenna relative hot
spot he had found, as weak as it was. He hurried almost to the point of error
to log on to his encrypted and obfuscated account within Darknet. It seemed to
take hours as Sam worriedly noted the blinking empty battery outline. The
building itself had its own local cell tower connection for use by employees.

It was hellish to try to quickly type onto the virtual keyboard
while keeping the phone frozen. The screen starting flashing [LOW POWER]. Sam agonized
over each character to make sure it was correct and did not have to be re-done,
and wrote Jim Roger’s Darknet address, attached the last piece of code stored
with his account, and thumbed:

18244-400+18260-467 twin overwrite instruction [NO BATTERY] @ 466
bug bug I luv u

Sam had no idea why he wrote the closing, he hoped Jim would note
the sincerity and faithfulness of Sam in providing the code that Jim had asked
for. [PHONE OFF]

Sam mashed the SEND button. There was a pause before there was any
response: in either confirmation or rejection, the phone responded by indeed
turning itself abruptly off.

Joex had gotten a ride to the current location of the shadow lab
from a woman, Margaret Maloney he chatted up to at the library. The moment of
transformation from a stranger to a friend was the instant he suggested a
mapping among elements the Strugatsky brother’s work Roadside Picnic to their
elder brother-in-trade Lem’s Solaris. While Joex had never been good at reading
others’ faces, he knew that he should ask about the shadow lab the instant he
saw her interrupt the micro movements of her eyes and corner of her mouth with
a coordinated complicated and indescribable falter. The recognition of new
patterns was a gut joy to these people, an involuntary sexual act. Sure, she could
give him a lift. She was picking up her boyfriend and taking him for a slice
and a Sam Adams.

I could be anyone Joex thought—and she trusts me to head off alone
into the heart of Boston with her in a cool spring evening. In less than forty minutes,
Margaret had parked her 70’s vintage Fiat 500 in front of the dirty sign saying
“DO NOT BLOCK 765” that labeled a smudged brick building. The sign was bolted
on a rusting iron loading ramp pulled in a drawbridge as if magically separating
the people within the building from those in the remainder of the city. Margaret
sharply beat at the metal door to the left of the loading bay with her keys. She
had to repeat the knocking with a lengthier arpeggio of taps and scrapes before
the door swung open a few degrees of arc and a voice within said “What’s up?”

Margaret apparently spoke the correct magical incantation, for the
door then swung open all the way and she and Joex were admitted. The door
closed and pulled until a latch echoed in the dark concrete corridor. Margaret
and the doorkeeper—identified as “Slug” by Margaret—apparently knew each other
well since they chatted on without referring to Joex at all. Unfortunately,
this gave Joex a few minutes to reflect that physiological goad of the latest
murderous intrusion into his life was wearing off and he realized that he
couldn’t keep moving. His hand started shaking again.

But there was no place to sit or rest. The three of them were in
an unfinished concrete passageway; moreover, it was eclipsing darkness, although
as his eyes adjusted it looked more as if it were deep blue shading to violet
at the edges. It didn’t help that Slug was cultivating what Joex thought was
the Genghis Khan look of a short bowl cut, shaved eyebrows and bandy gait. Joex
smelled something that was like an old staticky tube radio set that his
grandfather had let him play with when he was a child alone in his room,
waiting for his father to come home. But Slug and Margaret moved confidently
forward and Joex moved with them trustingly.