The Celestial Instructi0n (5 page)

When lunchtime came and he had a few Leones extra,
he would go down to the piers and eat with the men at their long tables, their
half-baguettes and bowls of hot sugar water to dip them in, flexing their explicit
tattoos and swearing in languages that were distant lullabies to Sam.

On the way back to work, he would see the Chinese
embassy employees walking en masse back to their fortress at the edge of town.
They always wore red and big smiles; Sam had heard that they and the Americans
coveted a new oil field in the waters off the coast and Sam had read that the
Chinese themselves imported goods of leather and woven cloth from Sierra Leone.
It had become too expensive for them to make in the even in the sweatshops of
Kashgar or Chengdu. The Sierra Leonean was the Chinese to the Chinese.

However, it was in the night that Sam was the
merchant and the master. He would spawn windows filling his ancient CRT with
chat channels here and Darknet websites there. He, as Ouest, always paid the
money and delivered the goods. He brokered deals for credit card details or
phony PayPal accounts. He collected and traded numbers in dollars that would
accumulate like a midnight thunderhead and then disappear into the glistening
screen when transferred, stolen, or frozen by the authorities, or more likely,
used to pay for more illicit transactions of data, goods, and street cred. This,
not the Kissy docks, is where Sam was the beggar-boss.

Joex’s first ride was all the way to Coos Bay, Oregon.
His ride was a small U-Haul van with a right rear wheel making a whining sound.
The driver was a man in his 20’s with dreadlocked hair and dirty bib overalls
with copper buttons for the straps. He called himself Bafomet. He smiled a lot
and his teeth were not too clean.

Joex ask to be dropped off at the bus station and,
in the dark, Bafomet let him out on Broadway, near a huge log yard with the agreeable
smell of wet cut fir. The Fireside & Woodshed lounge was closed, so Joex
parked himself on the sidewalk leaning against the bus stop and waited for the
9:20 to Portland. He figured with nothing but a stack of hundreds that it would
be better to travel in the least conspicuous way possible; a police stop at a
minimum would earn an instant confiscation, if not indeterminate detention
until those who sought him, found him. No. Until I can parameterize …
parameterize? Another blast from the forgettable past. Until I can see the
edges of what in the hell is going on, I am going to be Joe X Normal,
hard-working, God-fearing man seeking a job and middle-class enlightenment.
With that decision, he field stripped the double-fat blunt given to him as a
parting gift by Bafomet and tossed the contents into the street.

He will unwind Riddler’s Crosstown Rental’s and those
behind it until they too were field stripped and lay in the gutter to wash
away.

Joex arrived in Portland in the early afternoon.
His first priority was to look the opposite of what a person does who has
committed multiple counts of grand larceny who is running from his assassin.
First, he needed something to eat, luggage, then, a place to stay, then, some
budget clothing, toiletries, a way to get on the Internet and some time to do
his homework. The grading for this homework promised to be a bit severe.

During the ride up to Portland, he had separated
out a few of the hundreds from the different parts of the stack of bills and
separately crumpled and distressed them so that each when drawn out of a pocket
would looks if that were the last money he had in the world. It would not do to
pull out a stack of successive serially numbered crisp Franklins.

At the Target near highway 84 Joex purchased a
deep-blue gym bag, a toothbrush, comb, razor, shaving cream, and deodorant.
Then went in the bag with the underwear and socks, along with a couple of
button down shirts and khaki trousers with a woven belt. The cheapest leather
wallet. A store-branded windbreaker. His bag was getting full, but he needed
one more thing. He wandered over to the electronics section and purchased the
cheapest netbook he could. He added an external Wi-Fi adapter that would give
double the range of the built-in wireless antenna. He paid for his purchases
with several of his crumpled bills. This amount was pushing it, Joex thought. Most
people pay with cards now. However, that would pop me up on the radar.

Outside the store, Joex assembled his bag and
hoisted it over his shoulder. He walked down toward Mt. Tabor and stopped for a
coffee in a shop that had outside seating, despite the chilly overcast of the
afternoon. His new netbook was partially charged and Joex searched for hostels
in Portland. Most of them were not too scrupulous about requiring
identification, especially if he paid for a bunk in advance. He found a hostel
just a few blocks south of his café, put away his netbook, paid for his coffee
and walked down to it.

There were two young women in the front office;
from their demeanor and random outfits they looked as if they were putting in
the work to pay for their own lodging.

The shorter of the two who was quite attractive
under her rainbow-color streaked hair and extra weight was chattering gaily
with her companion, saw Joex and reluctantly shifted into manager mode: “May I
help you, sir?”

Evidently, she was not used to superannuated
lodgers past the age of 30.

“Yes, please. I would like a bed for the week. I
can pay in advance if you have a place.” Joex calculated what would be the
correct length of stay, too long ahead would attract as much suspicion as too
little. “Chi square,” he blurted out to himself as the woman helping him was
consulting a crosshatched calendar that lay on the counter in front of her.

“What? Ki? You do chee?” Not looking up. Then after
a moment, she said, “Yeah we have a four bed dormitory and a two bed room. But
you’ll have to pay the full price for the room if you don’t have a roomie.”

“That’s ok. The room will be fine. How much?”

He paid the week in advance. He asked about the Wi-Fi.

“Cross the street.”

Joex looked through the windows almost opaque with
road grime. “The Chinese restaurant?”

“Yep. That’s where everyone goes.”

Joex took the key and his bag and looked for the
stairs. He heard the women cachinnate. He felt a pang of desire. But he had
other work to do before he could resume his unremarkable life.

Michael Voide silently pointed to the chairs that
he directed his security Throne Kingston and Principality attorney Geedam.
Despite the silence, the heavy curtains in Michael’s clerestory seem to muffle further
all sounds the men made; Geedam sat down first and crossed his legs, Kingston
sat moving his chair slightly to be able to see both the other men.

Voide steepled his hands and then extended all his
fingers in fans and pointed them at the men. “Baroco is alive?”

“Yes, Celestial,” Kingston said.

“Where is he?”

Kingston and Geedam said nothing, frozen in their
seats.

“Throne, how many Orders are there in the Church?” Voide
asked.

“Twelve, Celestial,” Kingston answered.

“How many Orders are above you?”

“Five, Celestial.”

“Do you value your corporeal life, Kingston?” Voide
looked obliquely at Geedam as he asked.

“Only as it may give service to the Church,
Celestial.”

“Two billion dollars and all of Africa” Michael
said, “Our first meager task to transmit a fallen to the end of his life. A
homeless man. A man with no friends, no money, no possessions, no faith. A man
that does not even know he is chosen. Or why. So simple.”

The First Celestial continued: “Out of the chaos
there came order. God’s order. The order of his Supernals. Then the rest. We
are the rest.”

Michael Voide turned his back to them and faced a thickly
curtained wall. His full blond hair was a flowing nimbus over the navy blue
bespoke suit. “To God, a million years, a billion, or the life of the universe
is insignificant. Who knows how long it can take an Angel to elevate to a
superior Choir? We are nothing to God.”

Both men looked at the back of Voides’s suit and
thought of the elements of atonement, which might take years, if not decades,
to fulfill in a remote penitential camp. Or forever, underneath the camp.

Michael Voide turned and now looked at Kingston as
he spoke to Geedam. “We were premature Archangel, in selecting you as
Principality. Can anything save your further fall?”

Commander Ji Nitao, a man not quite old enough to
say that a promotion was overdue, knocked gently at the nondescript room in a
pink-prefabricated warehouse on Cixi road with his good left hand. He looked at
the battered aluminum sill of the door. It had only taken ten hours for his driver
to get to Hangzhou. The temperature was nearly freezing and the wind was
gusting to twenty knots this close to the bay.

An older man in his late 60’s dressed in an
ordinary worker’s overalls opened the door and warmly motioned for Commander Ji
to enter, then to sit on a decrepit stool in the office. The cold mocked its
feeble kerosene heater. Through a window inside the office, Ji could see a
handful of young men and women inside the warehouse huddling in front of computer
screens or leaning over each other. The screens were everywhere inside, on
every surface, pointed in every direction.

“Your brother-in-law sends his greetings, Manager
Hu.”

“Tell the Admiral that the wind is strong here
today.”

“Yes, Manager Hu.”

“I have been told that Messenger Riu is to be
detained,” Hu said, “the enemy knows nothing, but, yet, speed is always the essence
of victory.” Manager Hu looked out over the warehouse floor. “To subdue the enemy
without fighting is the pinnacle of skill,” Hu quoted. “We have half again as
many soldiers as the United States of America, yet our entire army is here, in
this building, now.”

“Yes, Manager Hu.”

“My brother-in-law must be ready, the treasury must
be ready. The deluge must begin within the hour of the enemy’s darkness. They
must surrender before he knows his own enemy has struck. Even better—for him to
surrender and not know a war has been fought—and lost.”

“Yes, Manager Hu,” said Commander Ji.

“I will talk to you next when the second eight
thousand years of history has begun, Commander. Perhaps eight weeks. Perhaps
eight days.”

“Yes, Manager Hu.

“Please leave the encipherment and enjoy the day,
Commander Ji. Kindly eat with us if you are hungry.”

Commander Ji considered the cold silk worms and
deep-fried starfish that he had had last time he delivered a message from Beijing.
“Thank you, Manager Hu, we must return before the roads freeze.”

Hu rose, accepted the rigid case containing petabytes
of cosmologically random bits generated by the National Academy observatory. One
other case with identical contents was in Beijing.

“Goodbye, Commander.”

“Goodbye, Manager Hu.”

Hu watched the Commander get into the passenger’s side
of the black BMW X6 and drive off slowly and respectfully. Sadly, he considered
the display of transient wealth that the car betrayed. Hu went back inside his
office, shut the door, and rubbed his hands before the elements of the heater.
He knew that he was pressuring his brother-in-law, the Admiral, but Hu
considered that working with the Crux might have been a mistake after all. It
was not that he feared, as most did, the supranational extent and infiltration
of the Crux into political and economic life or its hundreds of billions of
dollars in wealth scattered from Luxembourg to the Isle of Wight; nor did Hu
fear the Church’s mercenaries or assassins working as if by the fear of the
word of a God, or something very far beyond God. He did fear their incompetence
and meaningless viciousness. Casual, arbitrarily applied violence incurs many
wasted motions, Hu thought. Apply material force only to achieve a specific
end. You amplify that force only when it is coordinated within an overarching
plan.

Now, Hu respected the Church of the Crux even less
after his team had broken the Crux database of confessionals and operations. They
had never suspected that the firmware in their laptop batteries could transmit
a trojan behind their firewall. This was ironic, as the reason why we
collaborated with the them in the first instance was because whatever the US
Department of Commerce knew, therefore, the Crux knew and, in turn, we knew.
They had no idea.

Stuxnet and Duqu were just toys compared to the
seemingly mystical powers of his children to conceal and nuance covert channels
from the ordinary noise of life. Hu looked at the dusty display of an
electronic picture frame, now inactive; besides it, in a plastic bag, an ordinary
battery-powered toothbrush, returned to China because it stopped working after
a few months plugged into American’s houses and the de facto network of the
power grid. Listening and recording. GPS, power fluctuations, the echo of
induced data flows from routers, laptops, access points and servers. Day in and
day out. Returned for salvaging its toxic metals and its encrypted gold. What
is it a toothbrush knows? As it turns out, passwords, statements and billets
doux, commercial letters of intent and other intimate designs. A cordless
toothbrush!