0tC25piF

1 
2 
3 
4
5
6The Celestial Instructi0n
7 
8 
9
10
11“The West was hefting rocks while the East was fletching quarrels. Now, the West ignores its systematic vulnerability to network attacks, even as it depends more heavily upon its networked civilization. Meanwhile, China has learned the power of tongues: it knows how to cast spells. Spells that can bind, blind, confuse, and behead.”
12—Manager Hu
13 
14
15
16The Celestial Instructi0n
17A novel
18
19Grady Ward
20 
21
22
23Copyright © 2012 by Grady Ward. All Rights Reserved.
24This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
25
26 
27
28
29
30Dedication
31To Felicity, Adrian, and Isaiah;
32and to anonymous creators of content and culture:
33Sumer Is Icumen In
34 
35
36
37Table of Contents
38Chapter 1
39Chapter 2
40Chapter 3
41Chapter 4
42Chapter 5
43Chapter 6
44Chapter 7
45Chapter 8
46Chapter 9
47Chapter 10
48Chapter 11
49Chapter 12
50Chapter 13
51Chapter 14
52Chapter 15
53Chapter 16
54Chapter 17
55Chapter 18
56Chapter 19
57Chapter 20
58Chapter 21
59Chapter 22
60Chapter 23
61Chapter 24
62Chapter 25
63Chapter 26
64Chapter 27
65Chapter 27
66Chapter 28
67Chapter 29
68Chapter 30
69Chapter 31
70Chapter 32
71Chapter 33
72Chapter 34
73Chapter 35
74Chapter 36
75Chapter 37
76Chapter 38
77Chapter 39
78Chapter 40
79Chapter 41
80Chapter 42
81Chapter 43
82Chapter 44
83Chapter 45
84Chapter 46
85Chapter 47
86Chapter 48
87Chapter 49
88Chapter 50
89Chapter 51
90Chapter 52 
91Chapter 53 
92Chapter 54 
93Chapter 55
94Chapter 56 
95Chapter 57 
96 
97
98
99
100Introduction
101
102As a senior software engineer for Apple Computer, Inc.; a security-cleared contractor assessing software quality at the Naval Underwater Systems Laboratory in New London, CT; and after rooming with a founding member of MIT’s hacker community, I realized a few things have not changed in the intervening decades:
103One: every instruction I selected and wrote would affect hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people worldwide;
104Two: no one—not even myself—understand all the implications, side-effects, vulnerabilities, limits, and black-swan robustness of my own code, much less aggregate code of dozens of other engineers working to a tight deadline;
105Three: justified by defensive, offensive, commercial, or ideological goals, governments with the resources to find, exploit, or even insert backdoors or covert channels in that code are altering the social contract that they do not do so.
106Pray they do not alter it further.
107 
108
109
110Chapter 1
111
112“It’s a good day to burn down my house,” Joex thought as he fidgeted with the pouch of Amble shag in his pocket and regarded the contents of the bindle that lay at his feet. Joex picked out a well-read copy of The Ruined Map, imperfect binding dropping pages swollen from moisture, from what was to be saved and tossed it into the cardboard floor of his old home. The ground was popping and crackling as it dried from the overnight rain.
113“Joe X Baroco—my most central character in my cursed-again life—time to put the shiv in Shiva.” 
114Home for Joex in this case was two corrugated cardboard boxes roughly fitted together, covered haphazardly with a patchwork of plastic sheeting in blue, black, and various cataracts of translucent white. While it would be hard to say that Joex’s shelter was further dilapidated than when he had built it several days earlier, this burning, this casting-off, was his customary auto-da-fé before setting off for new prospects.
115Since the first rule for choosing a good care-free rough camp—isolation—had to be tempered with the inconvenience of wandering too far from the fringe of cities that could support professional beggary, Joex compromised by choosing his site at the edge of the forest only if there were no evidence of recent travelers. This site had been as close to perfect as he could find. Only about half a mile from the nearest town, on the same edge as a minor campus of a state university, there was enough mud, roots, bramble and crenulated bluffs to discourage most idle ramblers. The weather held no invitation either, being a cold March day, the last rain recent enough to see its sodden residue.
116As most people who lived at the edge of nature, Joex got up at first light. In the few smoky minutes it took to engulf his home, he finished knotting his bindle, dodging his head to avoid the choking black smudge of plastic and damp paper. His knees hurt and his middle-age frame would not miss a few pounds. He considered his options as he felt the turbulent heat.
117
118Joex always felt better after setting a fire. As a child, he would steal matches from his father; they would blaze with a flash of brimstone when scratched on the side of the little white boxes. His father would sit in his high-backed chair groaning under his shifting weight and relentlessly draw on his pipe, gripping a dingy tumbler of Christian Brothers sauterne. The briar’s coal glowed into a solar fury then cycled to a cyanotic gloom as he thought of his secrets. And again.
119The little boxes said Mo’s Billiards or The Olde Bide Tavern and Joex would rattle them in his eight-year-old fingers like castanets waiting to use them when he was alone. Sometimes at night, after visiting in solitude for hours with his hot pipe and jug wine, his father would clumsily lay out his knives in a perfect X on the dining room table. The smell of cloves and warm stropping leather penetrated the haze of the Cherry Blend followed him into the room. His father then would fetch one of his hidden pistols that just barely filled his big hand—the old heavy 1911, which itself had the lingering smell of Hoppe’s No. 9—and lay it down in a particular way in one of the crotches of the cross of knives. While his mother screamed and swore, his father would push the pistol a tiny bit this way or rotate it a tiny bit that way, never seeming to get it perfectly aligned. Joex, waiting for the inevitable sudden violence, would break off the wooden heads of his stolen matches and store them in his steely bag along with the tiny tubes of orange cement.
120Later, after school, when he was invisible, he would glue the match heads into glyphs that he would burn onto door and floors wherever he could. He loved the smell of the burning dope mixed with the eye-watering sulfur. Joex did not reflect on the meaning when he left a pentagram or swastika or peace symbol burning into the floor of a little-used elevator parked in the basement of a nearby mid-rise. However, he knew invoking the symbols meant power.
121The elevator was an old one with a pegged control wheel intended for an attendant to guide patrons to their floors. Abandoned, it more often now served as a one-dimensional control for kids like Joex to exert a primeval power in their lives. Up/down/up/up/down/up/down. Each nudge of the control would cause great noisy relays to engage and disengage, echoing in the dark throat of the elevator’s abyss. A Turing machine for the illiterate. But no one challenged him and no one cared.
122Joex remembered the year his father died driving his new Plymouth Duster. Nevertheless, it was not his father’s death that he remembered most.
123He, his mother, and his little sister had returned from the memorial service. His mother had a cardboard box, like a family-sized Chinese takeout, of ashes to dump. The family separated to their own rooms, not crying, not saying anything in the dark and cooling house.
124Joex got bored and went out into the chilly October air. The family was living in Day’s Harbor, a small town on the Puget Sound that had not made up its mind whether it was 4-H and county fair rural or whether it resigned itself to aging into a decrepit suburb of Seattle. The incoming evening fog had a peaty smell of rotting hay and alfalfa clumped within corrugated drainage tunnels and in deep ditches lining the gravelly road.
125Wandering along the crunching road, not thinking much of anything, rattling a box of matches in his pocket, Joex saw a car parked on the sketchy patch of lawn in front of a darkened house. Back in the day he had already broken the feeble street lamps with his slingshot, so no one could see him undoing the gas cap of the old Chevy. He pushed his snot rag into the rich smell of gasoline. Not really thinking about it, he lit the rag with a match from one of his father’s boxes. He smelled the sulfur and walked on, not looking back. A block away, he heard nothing, but saw a faint long shadow dance ahead of him in a shimmering, blossoming orange mirage. Then as suddenly as if the elevator peg changed direction, Joex was afraid, of death, being caught by his dead father, of drowning in the frigid Sound. He ran the long way back to his shabby house, crushing and scattered the tiny box of matches as he went. Joex never investigated what he had done.
126Years later Joex realized that the only time he really thought of his father that day was when he smelled the brimstone of the flaring match.
127
128The sharp crack from the smoky cardboard fire snapped Joex to attention. “Did I leave something in my house before lighting it?” He blankly considered that his entire set of belongings that could entirely fit into both of his hands was lying in his knotted and ready bindle in front of him. He heard another cracking bang, louder, as if a thick snow-laden branch had broken off over his head. A tiny geyser of dirt jumped out in front of the hot smoking boxes. Then another crack.
129“Hellafuck?”
130He looked closely at the new tiny pit in the sandy soil to see if there was a fragment of a bottle or can that exploded.
131In a galvanic response that would have done credit to a man twenty years younger, Joex was bounding down the slope toward the center of the forest and the town beyond, leaping from knot to bank to stream-graven trail toward the dripping darkness of the ancient Redwood forest, within a fraction of a second of seeing the sunrise bloom of the six petals of a fully-expanded hollow point.
132 
133
134Chapter 2
135
136As he ran, favoring his knees as much as he could, Joex had no idea where the shooter had been lying in wait. His cardboard apartment had been at the top of the forest, where the ground had been clear-cut and bulldozed to prepare for a development that had never materialized. He would have heard well beforehand any vehicle capable of reaching the site, and there were only a handful of bluffs a good hundred yards away capable of concealing a person close enough for a good shot. But for the same reason, as hard as it was to conceal a person on that clear-cut forest edge, it would be equally impossible that anyone had innocently mistaken him for something that could be legally shot and killed.
137While he reached the dark fathom of the forest, Joex was tiring quickly now, succumbing to the stiffness of his 50-odd years. But his mind was spooling up. In a previous lifetime he had been an engineer, devising tiny software structures that were as stolidly reliable as they were the opposite in design to the exotic side-effect coding by the bit-slice clubbers. That engineering personality roiled to the surface as if the bum-fog of the last half-decade temporarily began to burn off. As was his habit of late, Joex started an animated discussion with himself as he crouched in the shadow of the dripping forest:
138“He must have arrived well in the dark. He had enough gear for warmth as he waited for first light, as well as whatever arms he equipped himself with.” “But, then, he didn’t know where I was since he waited until first light rather than shooting me as I slept.”
139Now the only question is whether he had been a target of opportunity, or chosen by some maniac’s unknown criteria over an unknown length of time. Indisputably, it was that Joex’s home lay perfectly defensively in a way that he just discovered: it was hard to approach, and relatively easy to escape from a distant, laden, unmotorized, but presumably younger attacker.
140Joex considered that the strongest proof of its quality was that fact that he was not yet dead.
141 
142
143Chapter 3
144
145Joex reached the southern edge of the forest at the border of the campus, which lay between him and town of Mad Landing, a tiny town on the Pacific coast equally distant from Portland and San Francisco. The campus was circled with a narrow road which was closed to traffic during the spring break, which Joex realized was just about now. He waited, shrouded by the forest just a leap away over a ditch from the forest to the campus and presumably from the crazy shit he had just awakened to. Even if he (or she or they) were just crazies wanting to shoot up remote homeless people for sport, then it was virtually certain that they were not crazy enough to risk identification or capture by continuing to pursue their prey to a populated area. But he wouldn’t bet his life on it.
146Joex was familiar with the Mad State campus since he used it to fill his old media player with music, film, lectures, and books from the electronic nipples of the library computers. Rain had finally finished his electronics off and Joex had been getting by with paperbacks from the free box. It turned out that this was fine even though Joex had already read virtually all of the better discards, as Joex kept copies with him to read to other travelers on the increasing rare occasions when Joex shared a shelter or camp. Before the lights were extinguished for the night, or when he had enough smoky flame from a candle or kerosene wick, he would read Orwell or Peake or Stephenson or Churchill in the quiet before the exhausted or sobering sleep. The trick was to read as not stooping to hand-out intellectual charity to the partially literate dwellers within hearing, but recited as if pleasantly remembering aloud, to himself. As the cold squeezed in among the blanket fragments and damp sleeping bags, he knew from the ebbing movements of those around him that his voice had become that of a loving mother singing her children off to sleep. It didn’t matter that he started in the middle, or that he had only a few pages torn from discards; it only took a few sentences to capture attention as he passed on the flickering Academy: there was something beyond the frigid night, and even the poorest could touch and interpenetrate it. And even his  own homeless dissolution had not yet extinguished it.
147
148  “Even if this is some lunatic one-off bum hunter, I sure as hell aren’t going to be sleeping around here tonight,” Joex decided as he was taking in the lie of the land on the quiet morning campus. Joex was choosing where to put his feet to jump the ditch when he heard the approaching crunch of gravel on a limb of the road just outside his view to the left.
149Instantly he realized several things. First, from the volume and number of distinct pop and grinding sounds, it was heavy. Not feet, not a bicycle, but a full -sized sedan or more likely a truck. Second, he didn’t hear the whirl of the electric motors universally used by the carts and wagons used by the campus gardeners and security. Third, it was travelling slightly off the road because he could see no gravel on the swept tarmac of the portion that he saw. Fourth, it was travelling slowly. But most alarmingly, it was very close, and closing.
150Joex back-scuttled behind some bracken. He froze, only letting the bracken’s random pinnate waving build a picture of what was passing in front of him on the road. It was the implication rather than the vehicle itself slowly crossing a half a dozen feet in front of Joex that thrust itself into his attention: a spotless silver GMC Suburban with windows tinted, not by a cheap reflective mirror film as found on the streets of Oakland, but the sea-deep green dispersion of exceedingly thick and expensive armored glass.
151A vehicle like this in the town of Mad Landing was as likely as a honey-wagon cruising the Imperial Hotel in Geneva.
152
153He relaxed and sunk into the wet duff as he considered everything that had happened in the last few minutes. In addition to the cramping fear emptying his gut, Joex suddenly had the paradoxical quieting image of a connection among the deep green color of the SUV glass, the emerald of the foliage, and the dead-green verdigris of a decomposing copper jacket.
154 
155
156Chapter 4
157
158“Hey, you want the rest of this oatmeal?”
159The server at the Street Commissary wore a plastic shower cap down over is ears and a crooked tag that said ‘Derret.’ The skinny man labeled Derret was holding up a two gallon warming pot with a crusted metal serving ladle stuck out of it.
160“Sure,” Joex said holding out a Styrofoam plate, “fill ‘er up.”
161Joex desperately needed time to think about what had happened. More immediately, to get something to eat and replace his lost bindle. His entire possessions at this moment was a stiff flannel shirt, two pairs of boxer shorts, one green and one white, a cast-off pair of cuffed khaki trousers and a pair of faux shearling slippers, no socks. He had muslin pouch with some loose tobacco in his pocket. He needed a smoke.
162While Joex wolfed his oatmeal at a table covered with the remnants of a morning newspaper, he had the feeling as if all the staff were looking at him. “Jesus, I am getting paranoid.” He casually scanned to inspect faces. A glance here and there. Nothing you could put your finger on, but odd, definitely odd. Since becoming homeless years before, he was used to being invisible. “The original invisible homeless man, brought to you by Ralph Ellison by way of H.G. Wells,” he spontaneously commented to himself.
163Coupled with the events of this morning, being noticed made him want to retreat, get away, get on the road. Away from here.
164“Don’t be getting paranoid, Joe baby; you’ll be seeing faces on Mars next.”
165Beak, another patron of the Commissary, walked over to Joex’s table, put his thumbs in a vest he was wearing under a windbreaker and officiously said, “Have the police caught up with you yet, Big J?”
166“What?”
167That old detective Lacey was looking for you last night. Showed a picture of you. You looked like a kid.” Beak smiled. “I didn’t tell them anything,” Beak thought to add conspiratorially.
168“Must have been mistaken. No one is looking for me. I am Joe X Bombadil, the master of leaf, litter, and lane.” But Joex stopped eating, unsettled, and pushed his considerable self away from the table. “Time for me to earn some money, Beak. So long.”
169He needed a few dollars to buy his evening food and drink. Especially if traveling, since almost by definition the road was between places where he could get a meal, a place to sleep, or the best of all, a shower and a used-clothing give-away. Once outside he walked past the parking lot, beyond the underpass and over to the bus station’s outdoor benches that even at this early hour were filled with a number of street people—some sullen, some arguing with themselves, some rocking and twitching. He tipped some his remaining shag into a piece of newsprint, rolled a homemade, and bummed a light. He was disappointed that it was a butane lighter.
170He was just beginning to relax after his meal as he finished his smoke when though the underpass he saw the hood profile a Silver Suburban pull up abruptly in front of the Commissary, the heavy vehicle rocking back on its springs. A tall, thin man who could have been Hispanic, or middle eastern or perhaps Indian, got out, casually looked around, looked at the front door, then went inside the mission. But before he went in, he adjusted his blazer and made an almost invisible brush of his left hip with the inside of his elbow. The motion was not lost on Joex.
171“Shit. Joe X, Joe X, Joe X, more paranoia now? Maybe not. But I’d be crazy to think otherwise,” Joex thought. “Shit.” He got up and went inside the bus terminal the bus station to temporarily hide out in the toilet. He rapped at the door to get the attention of the ticket clerk who controlled the door lock. “Do you got a ticket?” the clerk shouted out rudely across his counter and across the room. “No, sir” Joex shouted back, but he rapped again on the toilet door. The clerk scowled and buzzed Joex in.
172“This doesn’t look so good, Joe baby.” Joex sat on the toilet with his pants on, thinking about the implication of the Suburban. “Definitely not police. Nor FBI, nor Marshal's office, nor State Bureau of Investigation, nor anyone else I have ever heard of. Looks like a damn drug lord car.” Joex hadn’t been on the road so long that he thought everything happening was a pure accident or a delusional artifact of a misfiring mind.
173As a traveler, Joex was getting used to following life as if it were a disconnected string of basic human needs for food and shelter and money and drink and smokes as scenes in the world pass by, unraveling. Planning ahead, as he remembered it, involved too many parts that could break or get lost. Homeless, it didn’t matter that the parts were unconnected and rattling. The map was fraying and splitting along its creases.
174Now some ancient part of his mind told him that everything this morning was in fact related and had to do with him, and involved people executing deadly force. Intended for him. And there was absolutely nothing in his life that would explain why.
175He could go to the police. The Mad Landing police. “Yeah, right, old buddy, that would be comic gold; might as well shoot myself in the head.” He, somehow, knew that the well-dressed stalker would take him from the police on some convincing pretext and Joex would disappear.
176 
177
178Chapter 5
179
180Michael Voide, the first Celestial of the First Choir, impatiently messaged his assistant Angel, “Where the fuck are you and why hasn’t Geedam touched bases with me?” Michael, as chief material representative on Earth of the International Church of the Crux, expected to meet wealthy donors and celebrities who insisted on face time to go with their money and endorsements. Not to waste his time in his clerestory waiting for John Geedam, Esq., a Principality of the Fourth Choir, and goddamn not-yet-disbarred counselor to call with what had better be the expected news of the recent passing of Joex Baroco, quondam engineer and now hapless bum.
181“And when he calls, have Kingston conference us.” Kingston was his Security Throne and, right now, as the person who managed the reconnaissance and information security office of the Crux, a very powerful man in his own right.
182Not short, nor tall—just about perfectly unremarkable—Michael leaned back and idly viewed one of the hundred-inch video screens that covered the walls of his immense twelve-sided office that effectively blocked view of Portland’s grey sky and the rest of the turrets, spires, cooling towers and monolithic cubes that made up the remainder of the Crux compound.
183Since early morning the screen’s curtains had been drawn and were showing various live video feeds, real-time account balances, locator maps, scrolling news and reference data sets,. But the one he glanced at now showed a simple multiple-choice question: 0f4a. argent:cash::absinthe:[choose best answer] The answer choices were: young, sick, drunk, or gem. Michael instantly chose “young,” considering briefly “sick” as a second choice. If “gem” had been “money” or had been “emerald,” that would have been his first pick. Mediated through silver and green. Disappointingly uncircuitous.
184Interesting how a choice becomes wrong in a differing context, even though its own character had not changed at all. Language problems especially, Voide thought. Only among their fellows were particles of language judged meaningful. In isolation, a word stripped off its vital germ, as rice polished white and sterile. The correct answer may well depend upon the precise era in which the question was first posed. But attending to the Crux was like a career investigating crime or baking bread. It was not as if at the end of your life you had eradicated criminals, or the hungry, or perfected human minds through life-long discruciation in the Parich. Perfection of the mind was an asymptote—just as a Celestial, he would never quite reach Supernal in this corporeal body. In any event, a simple daemon such as Baroco would not get in his way.
185Michael made a note that some questions needed to be posed so that the parichoner must be specifically examined to see if they understood how the correct answer may change over different contexts, especially over that of time. That in turn reminded him to make sure the Perpetual International Copyright Treaty was proceeding through ratification. Celestial Voide inherently disliked spending as much money as he had to on the International Church of the Crux Meta-Pacs to ensure the critical Senators’ favor. But the lapsing of copyright was one of the few threats to the Church, not because of specific intellectual property itself, but because of the ontological, religious threat to the entire concept of a centralized Games Machine. Why think about becoming a parichoner of the Crux when one could entertain and educate oneself without a tithe? He was drawn back from this thought by his Angel returning his message in his fluttering and apologetic manner—a manner which Michael had an overwhelming urge to strike and hurt. No one would dare say a thing if he were to do so. He listened, staring at his assistant’s chin.
186 
187
188Chapter 6
189
190Thirty years before, fully emancipated from his diminished family, Joex was taking a well-travelled path from school to career. He had studied and taught and wrote about computer science—real computer science, which was origination of the fresh ideas manipulating and mapping complexity groups into the human domain, not just applying the algorithms of those who actually understood the issues of space, time, and computability, and their application to real-world problems. But he had changed. The turning point for him from scientist to engineer was at an International Joint Conference in Boston in the 1980’s. He left utterly disillusioned after seeing the track audiences filled to overflowing with the presentations of charlatans touting the alleged machine modeling of cute babies with breast-feeding mothers, while the key tracks in which the fundamental work of systematic free intentional proofs were sparsely attended by spare men in functional clothing. Joex could not understand the inverse relationship between popularity and key importance in the field. Computer Science is not a sub-specialty in the field of grant whore, he decided. And it wasn’t just disillusionment, it was rage. Moreover, it was not just philosophical shading to Joex, it was a white-hot, seething rage in which Joex felt like hurting something, breaking something. The destroyer. His own anger frightened him.
191So, he decided to make things. For years, he worked in Silicon Valley for Mooneye, Inc. writing embedded firmware network switches before there was an Internet outside of MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, and the Defense Advanced Research labs. Although over the years he rose in the technical hierarchy from member of the technical staff, to senior member, to principal member, earning a Master’s in engineering from Stanford University along the way, Joex did not know what happened next. He just got tired of increasing the version number of things: 1.01.001 alpha. BFD. Making suggestions that went unheeded and patent ideas that were unfunded, but eventually exploited by other drones with the resources to file.
192One day, he just did not go to work. He really did not know why; it was as if he had reached the top of a ballistic arc and now was returning to earth. Although the thought crossed his mind that it actually had nothing to do with his job. Human resources called and asked what he needed. He listened to, and then ignored them. His Chief Technical Officer called. His answer was to drop his phone in the toilet. He threw all his mail away. The five hundred thousand dollars he had accumulated in savings he took out in cash over the protest and delays of his bank. By discreet means he converted it to a short stack of large denomination Australian postal money orders and a handful of numismatic grade uncirculated silver coins. He could comfortably carry his entire wealth and a change of clothes in a daypack. He stopped paying bills. He did not answer his creditors who began to file lawsuits. His professional friends speculated on doing an intervention, but in the end simply never bothered. His sister, living alone across the country, had the local police do a welfare check after a private detective agency contacted her. Joex was courteous and composed. He promised to contact his sister. He never did. She had her own life in Newton, Massachusetts as an artist who had allegedly transcended technology, but oddly always had a cutting remark for people practicing it: “Geeks; nerds, deviants” were the most popular categories that she shrilly described anyone who worked with electronics or machines. She reminded him of things he thought best were left alone.
193When the sheriff came to evict him, he merely left with the doors open and the key on the entryway side table.
194It took Joex several years to lose and run through virtually all of his savings, but eventually he had only a pitiful amount, enough only for a few weeks. He could no longer afford the weekly lodging house. Then he had nothing. He had been homeless ever since; what organization or direction he had left him as if exhaling. Whatever his old life was, he left behind. Although in a way, it was doing the opposite: it was catching up to him.
195 
196
197Chapter 7
198
199Sam Lion-McNamara of Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa was one of the distributed leaders of the Hatz. He was indistinguishable from thousands of other young men–children really–who had come west, out of the bush, to make a living, such as it was, in post-war Freetown. He had been lucky not to have a hand or foot or arm chopped off in tribal warfare; moreover, he was lucky enough to have a cousin who lived in a concrete blockhouse near the new Chinese embassy. To his cousin he would speak Mende and tell stories of the relatives in the bush whom his cousin secretly hoped would stay put. In the morning, Sam would have to poach whatever wood he could to burn rocks for his cousin; once burned with the precious stolen wood the stones were fragile enough to break into building material for his cousin’s ever-growing compound.
200But hanging around the Internet cafes run by Lebanese during the day, Sam would assist customers with their computers and run errands for the manager in exchange for free use of the computers. He would gas up the generator on its concrete pad and metal roof when the owner infrequently decided to compensate for the daily power outages. Barefoot, he had to scramble up to the roof and re-point the 2.4GHz antenna by hand when the gusty torrent of the monsoon twisted it. He would chase out the lizards so they would not infest the computers or bother the customers. Le 5000 per hour and Le 500 per printed page, no refunds. Sometimes he would play chess with customers for cigarettes; he loved the exotic sounding names of openings he learned he played such as the Sicilian Dragon or the Ruy Lopez. To the foreigners and ex-pats he was a trained monkey, wiry and animated, but strictly an object of entertainment. That was fine with Sam.
201During the fall during the monsoon season while the torrents splashed and rivuled outside and Sam got tired of hearing the flogging of a houseboy late fetching water or watching his cousin drink four fingers of Scotch “to burn fat,” in candle light. Sam would walk down to the cafe in the sweltering night to surf the web. He joined forums dedicated to war, gaming, and forbidden activities; he explored the Darknet. He create SSH clients and encryption tokens, he gained his cred writing a piece of software that would plug into the old-time DES clients of automated tellers. He and his ever-changing crew were responsible for the Bitcoin virtual currency debacle. He listened to lectures in stellar renewal from Filippenko at Cal and Abstract algebra from Goins at MIT. That Norvig guy was good. Sam’s English improved. On the net, “Ouest” was his name on the net; at his cousin’s home, he was 14 and didn’t own a pair of shoes.
202Over the months, Sam’s skills improved. He had no way of knowing that his relentless self-learning without the distraction of students, teachers, curriculum, and schools began to exceed that of most western high-school, then college, graduates. Nevertheless, even if he had, it would have been inconsequential to him. In Sierra Leone, there was nothing he could do with that distinction. You had to pay school fees to get a degree. You had to buy tutors or procure bribes to obtain high enough levels that those credentials along with further suitable bribes, kickbacks, and connections would get an appointment to a minor government job. Then as long as “your man” stayed in power, you could make a career of extorting and “facilitating” government business in order to accumulate a large number of dollars. Eventually you would betray your corrupt co-conspirators and friends in exchange for judicial immunity. Finally, with your remaining connections and money, you could retire late in life to a small pensione in Paris or Rome where you could entertain the more enterprising of your distant relations without the ever-present need for a fly swatch.
203But this path did not appeal to Sam. Sam did not know why he listened to lectures or puzzled out homework with a blunt pencil and scraps of widely ruled newsprint. Sure, it started so he could make a few dollars with a swindle here or a crack there. Now it was something else. Just the frisson of finding things out. To be able to understand cryptic relationships among jarring Fly-tree ideas and more simply, just to be able to do weird shit.
204March was the dry season in West Africa and the dust did not help to hide the smell of sewage that evaporated into sludge that clotted the gutters. It was sleepy and hot. Tsetse flies with their praying wings and hungry proboscises were coming in to the city. Sam reloaded the Darknet channel to update the thread. Something is going on. There was not anything technically new, but a major French ISP and two English banks were hit with massive data exposures, and a major defense contractor in the United States had been compromised to a [classified] degree.
205The odd thing about the cracks is that none of his friends on Darknet was approached to broker the freed data, and no one even knew the cracker’s handle. Ominously, the President of the United States declared hacking and computer intrusion as “an act of war.” His friends hailing from Chinese domains fell silent. Something is about to happen.
206Sam shrugged and arranged to have a digital music player reshipped to the Freetown main post office for him to pick up using funds from a stolen foreign bankcard that he guessed would not be missed for several months. He loved preying upon the rich—foreigners who had so many cards and accounts and money that they checked their statements only once ever few months, or never. But then again, there were a dozen places enroute that the player would be razored out and stolen. On average, he had to steal twenty or thirty cards before he would actually get goods or money in hand. But what else was he to do? When he got this new player with its solar recharger, he could listen to his lectures even when the power cut out and the tropical thunderstorms made traveling dangerous. He wanted to listen to a set of lectures called “Understanding Literature and Life.” Now that would be something. That would really be something, Sam thought.
207 
208
209Chapter 8
210
211After almost an hour in the toilet and the repeated knocking at the door by the bus clerk, Joex left the station clutching his stomach in a mock explanation of his predicament. The clerk again scowled at him and checked the toilet for needles, tubing, or other kit. Specifically not looking back at the Commissary, Joex wandered distractedly toward the plaza at the center of town thinking about the events that were happening to him. He felt as if someone were sitting on his chest and began to feel nauseated. Joex clutched at his gut again, but this time it was not feigned.
212By the time he reached the plaza the laid-back, ever so gentle and cool Joex, devised a plan. First, it required a fast shower. He shuffled to the free showers at the back of the oldest building surrounding the plaza, peeled off the stiffened worsted coat, and selected a clean bright flannel shirt with frayed cuffs, a pair of shiny tan trousers and mismatched socks from the free box. He also, incongruously, took a old stained silk tie printed with giant yellow paisleys. He waited for a shower token in a discolored plastic chair that wobbled under his weight. He of course had not noticed the web cam that a merchant had pointed at the plaza in order to intimidate the lower-lives of which Joex was now a member.
213Feeling better after his shower and his freshly washed clothing, he had thought about how to begin to carry out the next step, which was to take the initiative away from his personal stalker. Zugzwang, big guy. He considered the potential implications of everything that had happened to him today. He was not recently used to thinking in a logical, orderly, linear way. He left that way behind him. But why not just run far away from this place?
214It came down to a random stalker would likely not have a long gun, nor would have previously investigated him at the Commissary, nor a new car, and certainly not an armored SUV. Or enlisted the help of the police. Or tracked him to the forest. (How?) A random stalker would not have been able to track him at all. This implies that the stalker was following a plan and specifically after X baby. But why? And how could a professional killer miss despite taking several shots? But most critically: what in the universe of his personal downspin—qualities which were shared by thousands of others in better or more effective or more public ways—a stalker felt that must be extinguished in him? An undistinguished homeless bum on the street?
215Joex could not think of a single reason why anyone would want to be his caput mortuum. What? Death’s head? Where had that phrase come from? “Bums don’t talk like that,” Joex whispered into the air, “that was another life.” He was considering the most likely ways of attracting his stalker to a place of his own choosing, but as if aligning to his thoughts, on the north side of the plaza across from the showers, he saw the silver GMC Suburban SUV with the sea-green windows slowly enter and park in a red zone.
216“Joe X Baroco. ‘X’ marks the spot, old buddy, crosshairs, Christ on a cross,” he mumbled to himself. He wheeled around and walked widdershins to the traffic, away from the showers and behind the Suburban that would eventually wrap around to the rear of the SUV. He walked just fast enough so that his gait could still be described as shambling—looking into the storefronts, away from the massive SUV: “I just don’t have the fucking balls for this,” Joex said, loud enough to be specifically ignored by a passer-by.
217Joex’s self-assessed half-assed plan was this. If the stalker left the Suburban, and left it unlocked, Joex was going to get behind the back of the broad cargo seat. He would wait for a surprise opportunity to get a story out of his stalker, by force. Use deadly force, if necessary. We are going to dance a deadly gavotte, you and I. Joex had no idea of this would work: was the stalker alone? Was the SUV vulnerable? Was there sufficient space to hide? Could he surprise someone who likely trained and practiced for his task? All of those objections became irrelevant as Joex settled into visualize each step of his plan. Rehearsing it with variations as fast as his sluggish brain would fire. “This doesn’t suit me, man,” Joex whispered. His left hand shook. Overall, Joex sought some kind of resolution to the end of his life, and it might as well happen now.
218The tall man with the undecipherable complexion got out of the driver’s side and, as Joex, began to walk counter-clockwise around the edge of the plaza. The man kept his eyes on the building with the showers across the street through the palm trees and topiary of the plaza gardens. Again, he made the betraying brush of his hip.
219“Time for a puff of sharav.” Joex gauged his ambling so that he would reach the SUV at the same time the wiry man—Joex decided to call him Mr. Brillo—reached the front of the shower building. “How in the hell did he know I was here? How in the hell?” As Joex had anticipated, Mr. Brillo reached the front of the building and immediately started around the side toward the back fronting the showers entrance, stepping up his pace. “I’ve got about half a minute now.”
220Joex too jogged forward and quickly surveyed the empty SUV through its unfathomable windows. In one fluid motion as if he were taking home the weekly groceries, went to the driver side, opened the door, climbed in, and looked for the best way of concealing himself in the back. His eyes stopped when they saw the keys left in the ignition. Joex changed plans, settled into the driver’s seat, put on his seat belt, locked the door, started the Suburban with a satisfying visceral roar. He signaled his entry into traffic and merged with the autos leaving the plaza for the coastal highway.  It was all magically easy.
221While he had not driven for a very long time, Joex felt as if he were fifteen again and given the wheel of a car for the first time. As the powerful machine got up to speed, Joex loosened the silk tie coiled around his neck like a scarf and began a syncopated crooning to the air.
222 
223
224Chapter 9
225
226Joex’s elation did not last long. He drove a few minutes heading north on 101 and began to glance obsessively in the SUV side-mirrors. “If Mr. Brillo has clout with the locals, then I got to let this puppy go.” He took the exit to the Mad Landing beach and parked in the day camping area. There were just a handful of other cars and no one obviously around. Joex re-wrapped his Paisley tie around his hand like a bandage and used it to paw through the car. In the back under a dark-green plastic tarp was a Pelican long gun case locked with its unpickable Abloy locks. He saw no key. “Well, I guess that is that,” Joex muttered into the air.
227Nothing under the driver’s seat or under the visors or in the center console; but in the glove compartment Joex struck gold: a compact Glock pistol, a Federal Reserve bank-banded stack of new $100’s, and finally, the pinnacle of Joex’s search, the registration slip showing the registered owner as a “Riddler’s Crosstown Rental’s” in Portland, Oregon. Every path has two directions, Joex thought.
228He left everything—not even touching the pistol—except the money, which he put in the hip pocket of his worn trousers, trudged back along the sandy frontage road to the coastal highway, smiled as if he were pure sunshine, and stuck out his thumb.
229 
230
231Chapter 10
232
233Mark Langley, Special Agent in Charge of the Portland office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation took the call from Assistant United States Attorney Jim Rauchmann. 
234“Mark. You free?” This was Jim’s catchphrase to ensure Mark was alone and a confidential conversation stayed that way.
235“Shoot.”
236“I need to move back the Rui Bao arrest.”
237Mark paused and leaned back in his chair. “What’s cooking?”
238“I’ve got a thread that needs pulling before the show begins,” Jim said in his cadenced diction that was to normal speech as a thin 7H pencil stroke was to a carpenter’s pencil. “I just need a few days. Can you tell your people to hold up?”
239Langley wiped his shaven head with his palm. “Jim, I’ve known you since you were a Portland prosecutor; you need to leave the investigating to us and you just stick to subpoenas and press releases.” 
240“This is important. A week.”
241“And what is the thread you need to pull?”
242“If I could talk about that, then I wouldn’t need to ask you.”
243“You are running up a bill here, Jim. It’s not a matter of mailing a traffic ticket to Bao for him to come in at his leisure. We have to arrange a media presentation and a perp walk for the press. This is the fashion catwalk of the season. Once you start arranging that crap with them, they never let you alone. Bao is big, not only the district but also the entire Western region. And he fits perfectly into the new get tough with foreign trade secret theft push, Computer theft and intrusion as acts of war and the Perpetual International Copyright Treaty that POTUS has the hots for before the election. This is national press.” Mark paused.
244“But you know this. This is bigger for your career than mine, Jim. My retirement is not long now. Maybe I’ll set Bao as my capstone.”
245The sound in the phone automatically cut off to total silence until Jim spoke again. “One week. Please, Mark. You’ll have plenty of time to catch salmon.”
246This time Jim’s phone cut to silence until an instant before it became uncomfortable.
247“Okay. You got it, Jim,” Mark said, “have a great day.”
248There was dead air for a few seconds and then a click as the phone trunked back to an unsecured line.
249Mark took out his fountain pen with its custom 25-year service livery and examined the chased iridium-gold nib. It was as uncorrupted and beautiful as when it came from the factory, Mark thought. “Unlike people,” he said aloud.
250So Bao gets another week before he spends the rest of his life in prison for espionage and theft of trade secrets. Maybe Beijing will trade a democratic activist for him. Everybody makes deals. Mark looked around for his antacid.
251 
252
253Chapter 11
254
255Mr. Brillo knew that he was dead when he saw that his Suburban was gone. And the person who was to carry out the execution, Principality Geedam, didn’t even know it yet. Failure of this magnitude had only one simple consequence. He might as well give the finger to a Seraph. He could run, but he had no resources whatsoever. The Crux knew his family as well as he knew them. Probably better. Every childhood friend, every enemy. Every lover, every pet and every friend of the family. The Crux knew them all. They would be required to pay if Mr. Brillo did not succeed.
256The Church of the Crux demanded unwavering devotion and the suppression of self: this meant no savings, no personal property, friends only among the Angels, and time that was completely under discretion of the Choir. As a parichoner, he had no idea of the consequence of his volunteering to be an Angel. He knew he would do service to the Crux in exchange for training in all the arts and techniques of the Crux. He longed for the Games Machine. Perfection took all the life one had. Now, he knew the price of his entering the Choir of the Crux: his life has ended.
257Strangely, though, Mr. Brillo became unburdened. He walked over to a café at the corner of the plaza where the cornflower and turquoise prayer banners fluttered in the on-shore breeze. It felt fresh to Mr. Brillo; it reminded him of his childhood in Sri Lanka, running on the beach, collecting exotic conches and debris winnowed from the incessant tide. Although he did not have any money, he ordered a Café au lait, took out his mobile phone, saw that Geedam had repeatedly been trying to reach him all morning. He thought about that and punched the numbers for the Portland Parich from memory. Geedam is one person who he would never call again.
258“Throne Kingston,” he said to Angel who answered, “Angel Ruddy here with a new crux.” Though opaque to outsiders, Mr. Brillo knew that this phrase would get him through. Not a lot of delegation; the stakes are too high Mr. Brillo thought.
259“Kingston.” the Security Throne answered.
260Mr. Brillo began to cry.
261
262Later that evening just before nightfall, a tall, thin but sinewy middle-eastern looking man, dressed in a dusty suit, looking very small against the setting sun and wide open Pacific Ocean that wavered in the breeze and shimmered in the rising moisture of the red-tipped tide, walked alone to the end of the northern jetty and into the boiling surf.
263 
264
265Chapter 12
266
267Freetown was the largest city in Sierra Leone and was a magnet for everyone in the bush who dreamed of regularly eating more than Cassava and greens or fu-fu monthly and a chance at modest wealth and the small life—if not power—the city brought. As in Accra and Abidjan, employment divided itself into tribal affiliations. Tima, Mende, Kriol. You knew what language the police officer would speak, as well as the baker. And you held no hope to work in the field to which a competing tribe lay claim. Sam Lion-McNamara had no illusions that life would be anything but nasty, brutish and short. One the one hand he was glad that he was not laden with an ass-cart that in Freetown the boys hustled over avoiding gaping holes in the street, but that was in turn better than the vague classes of beggars and rent-boys that lined every road and clustered around the ex-pat bars for Europeans near the center of town. Sam considered the life of Sierra Romeo who had no arms or legs so constantly whistled for attention at his corner. Even he had to turn over most of his collections to his beggar-boss.
268The old center of town, low, near the harbor, was where the Datatel cafes were as well, although “café” was a stretch given that the only respite from the battered keyboards and skipping mice was warm water in recycled red plastic cups, drawn from a nicked garden hose marked by skittish crowds of thirsty flies.
269Sam did not give an instant of thought to the legality of his internet activity. He would have laughed if asked about it. “A starving man does not ask the price of the food,” he would have said. It did not matter. He just assumed it all was illlegal and, as everything else about his life, either someone would give him a beating or no one would care. One thing appealed to Sam about his work as an attendant at the café. The Chinese or Americans would come down for a few hours to look at politics (Chinese) or porn (Americans) and often leave Sam with random junk that were treasures to him. A Zippo lighter. A Fenix flashlight. A broken mobile phone with intact battery. Tips in Australian dollars with the plastic windows, or uneaten pizza or dim sum in greasy butcher paper.
270When 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.
271On 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.
272However, 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.
273 
274
275Chapter 13
276
277Joex’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.
278Joex 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.
279He 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.
280
281Joex 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.
282During 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.
283At 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.
284Outside 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.
285There 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.
286The 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?”
287Evidently, she was not used to superannuated lodgers past the age of 30.
288“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.
289“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.”
290“That’s ok. The room will be fine. How much?”
291He paid the week in advance. He asked about the Wi-Fi.
292“Cross the street.”
293Joex looked through the windows almost opaque with road grime. “The Chinese restaurant?”
294“Yep. That’s where everyone goes.”
295
296Joex 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.
297 
298
299Chapter 14
300
301Michael 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.
302Voide steepled his hands and then extended all his fingers in fans and pointed them at the men. “Baroco is alive?”
303“Yes, Celestial,” Kingston said.
304“Where is he?”
305Kingston and Geedam said nothing, frozen in their seats.
306“Throne, how many Orders are there in the Church?” Voide asked.
307“Twelve, Celestial,” Kingston answered.
308“How many Orders are above you?”
309“Five, Celestial.”
310“Do you value your corporeal life, Kingston?” Voide looked obliquely at Geedam as he asked.
311“Only as it may give service to the Church, Celestial.”
312“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.”
313The 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.”
314Michael 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.”
315Both 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.
316Michael 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?”
317 
318
319Chapter 15
320
321Commander 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.
322An 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.
323“Your brother-in-law sends his greetings, Manager Hu.”
324“Tell the Admiral that the wind is strong here today.”
325“Yes, Manager Hu.”
326“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.”
327“Yes, Manager Hu.”
328“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.”
329“Yes, Manager Hu,” said Commander Ji.
330“I will talk to you next when the second eight thousand years of history has begun, Commander. Perhaps eight weeks. Perhaps eight days.”
331“Yes, Manager Hu.
332“Please leave the encipherment and enjoy the day, Commander Ji. Kindly eat with us if you are hungry.”
333Commander 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.”
334Hu 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.
335“Goodbye, Commander.”
336“Goodbye, Manager Hu.”
337Hu 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.
338Now, 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.
339Stuxnet 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!
340How does a snake emerge from the chaos of subatomic soup? A description of complex organization animates itself. The knowledge of good and evil itself is easily transmitted through anything capable of conveying information, whether overt, covert, side effect, or completely unintentional. Much simpler than throwing a clump of mammalian DNA in a marriage-bed: is something in the world the case, or not? That whereof one can speak, one may not be silent. That one original bit is the basis of everything.
341
342The boundary between organic life and an electronic computer virus is permeable, diffuse, diaphane. An act of intercourse transmits a score or so megabytes of data, how much more so in the simplest network processor? This time we are subverting, denaturing a tool blindly relied upon by the West; the next time—sometime after my life on this earth—we will transmit engineered life, first here, then throughout the universe as simply as lighting a kerosene lamp or guttering a candle. And we will be the masters of those we engineer as certainly as one who fills a pond with carp.
343He thought of the encrypted message he would send to Voide through one of the church attorneys. Not gloating, not threatening, simply encouraging to complete their assigned task. Their attorneys make a poor shield when facing four million men, five trillion dollars, and eight thousand years.
344In fact, Manager Hu at this instant was the most powerful man on earth. He bent his spotted hand with the frayed serge cuff toward the teacup. The West was hefting rocks while the East was fletching quarrels. Now, the West ignores its systematic vulnerability to network attacks, even as it depends more heavily upon its networked civilization. Meanwhile, China has learned the power of tongues: it knows how to cast spells. Spells that can bind, blind, confuse, and behead.
345But for now that power depends upon absolute secrecy, waiting for the overwhelming stroke of an electronic sword.
346 
347
348Chapter 16
349
350After sleeping most of the day until the sky was darkening again under the cool incoming fog, Joex set up his netbook and adapter with a view of the Chinese restaurant across the street. He got all bars on his connection and began to search the net. The minutes turned into hours, and his knees started to hurt from inactivity.
351Riddler’s Crosstown Rental’s was owned by a legal firm, Crosstown law, which also owned a real estate company, a security service, an urgent care center, a wrecking service, and a local chain of Mexican restaurants. “One of these things is not like the others,” Joex thought, “maybe more accurately, all of these things are not like each other.” At the Oregon department of corporations, he looked up the current filings for Crosstown and recorded the corporate officers.
352Joex then painstakingly searched each of the officer’s names on the web. The name with the most Internet hits by far was for an individual attorney named John Geedam, Esq.
353Geedam seemed interesting, if somewhat sketchy. His bar record showed a suspension for an alleged act of malfeasance involving a trust fund, then reinstatement upon a third party petition to the state supreme court. This was ten years ago. The third party petition—more than a thousand pages with exhibits if the index was accurate— was submitted to support Geedam’s reinstatement by the International Church of the Crux.
354Joex smoothed his already thinning blond hair, considered the start of the evening noise and partying from the rest of the hostellers and kept searching. The International Church of the Crux was controversial to say the least. Founded in the 1970’s by a handful of puzzle enthusiasts who had made individual fortunes in computer startups, it began as more a chess club than a parsonage. They apparently believed that to the extent that their puzzle-solving ability led them closer to divine intellectual perfection, they needed to make it possible for others systematically to seek their own perfect minds through a program of exercise in mental structure and agility. With a substantial independent endowment and the mercurial tempers of the newly rich, the Crux quickly began down a darker path.
355Within the Crux hierarchy, there had been purges in the 80’s and most recently after the tech crash of 2000. Besides bringing in attorneys to hold property in their own name and to firewall portions of the church from each other and supporting front groups by invoking attorney-client privilege, the Crux had steadily taken on a more defensive, religious rubric. The current leader, Michael Voide, a twenty-eight year old man from Coventry, Rhode Island, had apparently discovered the relationship of puzzle-making and incessant adaptive testing to angels and the will of God. And according to whisper, his ascent was assisted by blackmail and graphically executed threats.
356According to the materials on the web, you would rise in the Crux hierarchy, or Choirs, if you did well on batteries of computerized puzzles and tests which seemed to be a grand amalgam of SAT’s, IQ Tests and high-tech employment interview puzzles. They dubbed Sir Francis Galton a Supernal of the Church. Books that were considered source scripture by Church-goers were Sir Francis Galton’s long essay Hereditary Genius, the bildungsroman Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse and the space opera The World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt, from whom they adapted the principal of the Games Machine.
357Essential practices were works such as How to Solve It by George Polya of Princeton, Guilford’s Structure of Intellect, The Art of Fallacy: Rhetoric of the Irrational by William Shawme of Deep Springs, and the Diagonalization and Internetworks: Georg Cantor and the Society of Mind (International Church of the Crux, pub.)
358The International Church of the Crux thrived on newly wealthy engineers who wanted to believe that they were divine as well as simply lucky and hard working. Supporting it was a staff who worked for room and board in order to pay for their own test taking and elevation through the ranks of the Church.
359Offsetting the endorsements by the wealthy techies and coddled celebrities were horror stories by those who had claimed to escape the church. They told of imprisonment, physical and mental abuse, extortion and blackmail. The Church used their own ecclesiastical confessions to threaten family members of the Crux staff who were not compliant to the rule of the Church, which in practice meant treating First Celestial Voide as absolute steward and master over them. There were rumors of children disappearing after becoming staff Angels, never seen again.
360The Church zealously defended what it saw as its right to religious freedom, the privacy of what it called its parichoners and protected itself by a phalanx of attorneys who knew the offensive use of attorney-client privilege and legal apparatus, along with the power of threatened, extended, and overwhelming litigation to dampen the reforming enthusiasm of critics and investigators. To the Church of the Crux, the publically funded legal system was in fact their personal army. For the cost of a $350 filing fee and the time of an in-house Angel attorney, the church could sequester a hundred to a thousand times the resources of their luckless target.
361The Church had thousands of acres of land. It owned enough profitable businesses through its attorneys that its staff members—“Angels”—that it never had to deal with a member of the unpuzzled—“Fallen”—they characterized others. Of course, in the same way, this country within a country had its own laws whose punishment for transgression was far more severe than the outside secular world. This created a supervening culture of staff that placed allegiance to the Crux higher than to any secular law or allegiance or family bond. Even if the law were murder and the allegiance were treason.
362Never having, or being permitted, to set foot in the secular world meant that there was no way to show that you still existed at all to Church-renounced family or friends. One of the uncorroborated rumors was that the Church eventually wanted to implement its training program linked to eugenics worldwide to the goal of perfecting the human species physically as well as mentally. That sounded familiar, thought Joex. Who knows, it’s all nutsville.
363Joex leaned back, then got up, went into the hall and used the shared toilet. He waved to a woman wearing a knit cap and holding a huge bottle of a German malt liquor by its neck as she went into one of the four-bed dormitories to celebrate the evening. She smiled back. He thought about what he had read. He had absolutely no clue why John Geedam, Esq. or the Church of the Crux might be sponsoring an individual act of terror toward Joex Baroco. He was not a church-goer, never had been except as a sometime Congregationalist before his mother had died, and had done absolutely nothing political or controversial during his employment as an engineer at Mooneye. Except mocked on the Internet, he never had heard of the Church of the Crux before. Nor had he ever spoken out against religion, charismatic leaders, or even eugenics. Moreover, he liked puzzles.
364Of course a man might inadvertently make enemies, but Joex had been effectively reclusive during his rise as an engineer, the short heated affairs he had with the women in engineering and technical writing were—to his knowledge—mutually satisfactory. If not particularly liked at work, he was respected in problem-solving and producing effective work on time and schedule and had risen quickly within the company.
365Yes, this core puzzle trumped all the puzzles that the Church of the Crux might offer him, if in fact the John Geedam, Esq. and the Church had anything to do with Mr. Brillo other than the tenuous link with a car rental company. But, then, what kind of company rents cars like that?
366The Church’s own web page was a predictable amalgam of well-executed graphics, gushing testimonials, and sales pitches for books and services. The world center was in a suburban gated and guarded compound of buildings in Portland, Oregon that either radiated success, aspired to the heavens, collaborated with God, or displayed simple coarse excess, depending on your point-of-view. The website had only a few names listed in its “Choir” membership and management list. Certainly not many compared to the millions of “Angels” it claimed as devout parichoners worldwide.
367One thing that suddenly occurred to Joex, considering the web site and number and differences among the businesses under the Crux umbrella: it may less for laundering tax-free money than it might be for laundering people.
368 
369
370Chapter 17
371
372The next morning Joex considered what to do next. As long as a street person or a police officer did not mug him, Mr. Brillo’s money could last quite a while. On the other hand, he had no idea if his life were still in danger and, if so, was he now living in the epicenter of the danger? Certainly stealing the urban assault vehicle and a stack of hundreds would not endear him to whoever was targeting him. But opening up a bank account would be like turning on a strobe light among a conclave of bats. Identified from a photo sometime in the future, his deletion might be more successful. On the other hand, maybe he was just fucking paranoid.
373Once again, he considered the possibilities and cobbled together something that might pass as a plan. He searched the news for Mad Landing and discovered a minor news article about a man matching Mr. Brillo’s description swept into the Pacific, his body recovered the following morning. Joex had no specific reason, but had no doubt this was Mr. Brillo. A cluster of weird things often had a familial cause: he remembered compiling a program missing a single cross-hatch comment marker, thousands of different errors resulted.
374Joex emailed the Mad Landing police using a toss away account and asked what the disposition of the body was. The police referred him to the county coroner who in turn cited privacy boilerplate for not answering in email. He looked up pay phones in Portland, headed over to the Quickie Market and called the coroner. The answering attendant was chatty and revealed that the body of Mr. Brillo, or Mr. Rahul Kavith, a foreign national studying religion in the United States, was already picked up for return to his family overseas. The attendant was chattier than Joex had counted on.
375Joex finally thanked the attendant and hung up. His head ached from thinking about the same thing for a longer time than he had in years. Though only mid-morning under the gray smothering comforter of the sky he went outside, returned to the Mart, bought a six-pack, then returned to his lodging and then gently knocked on the door that the knit-capped woman had vanished. No answer. He went back into his own room and firmly closed the door. The Coroner’s attendant had mentioned that the people who had picked up Mr. Brillo were representatives from the International Church of the Crux, Portland, Oregon.
376
377Despite the overt connection between Rahul and the Church of the Crux, that evening Joex was no better at narrowing the reasons for his targeting. Then dealing with his economic situation, he looked at the darker side of the Internet and chatted up an IRC warez channel to ask about setting up a Redbud bank account with false identification. A couple of self-proclaimed crackers responded in voice chat using Ventrilo, and one sent Joex a password for a shared Gmail Brutha account. Joex actually sent cash in physical overnight mail to several resulting prospects who promised to set up accounts using false but unimpeachable identification. After several days of web searching investigation of the Crux and reflection upon his own past to pass the time, Joex concluded that two disappeared with his money while the third came through.
378Along with the new account, Joex purchased an entire new identity that looked like a dump of a credit reporting bureau database entry with all the details. Joex now had a way of depositing money and spending it without tracking physically back to him. He requested a Redbud debit card. Sent to General Delivery in care of the name on the card, “Jim Rogers,” he had it within a week.
379Online, the social security number to the Death Index came back for a Jim Rogers who had drowned the previous month in a fishing accident near Alki Point in Washington State. That fact will take a while to percolate through the credit agencies, Joex thought.
380By this time, Joex had been staying the hostel for more than two weeks without being any closer to unraveling the mystery of his attack. In an about-face from his passive approach to life of late, Joex wanted to take the initiative again somehow.
381It almost certainly had to with the Crux. More pressing, Joex needed some relatively permanent employment if he were to live in Portland for any length of time. Of course, with the new anti-alien laws, it was difficult to find permanent employment without a social security card or even any kind of official government identification. The debit card was something, but was too slender of a reed to count on.
382But in a flash of spectacular realization analogous to his questionable decision to take the initiative in counter-stalking Mr. Brillo, Joex realized that there was one place who would gladly take a person looking for minimal employment and both disregard government regulations on employment with the infrastructure established to do so. “I am so fucking crazy,” Joex thought. Suicidal or brilliant, either way he would draw this puzzle to its conclusion.
383
384So late in the third week after the attack on him by Rahul Kavith, late of Sri Lanka and holy orders in Portland, Joex Baroco, gave his netbook to the rainbow hair woman, who, despite convinced this was an old creeper hitting on her, was happy to get a cute portable computer to Facebook. He left the hostel, buried his most of Mr. Brillo’s remaining cash rolled in a short piece of PVC pipe, stamped vertically into the soft muddy soil in the off-leash section of the Mt. Tabor Park, and walked uptown to the headquarters of the International Church of the Crux, in Portland, Oregon.
385 
386
387Chapter 18
388
389According to the information Joex cobbled together from accounts on the Internet, the official account of the origin of the International Church of the Crux assured the public that the Church was the fully-formed conception of a renegade group of cognitive psychologists of the 1960’s.  Who supposedly had imagined an intellectual school name “the crux,” after their studies showed that cognitive ability discontinuously jumped by several standard deviations when engaged in puzzles. Puzzles that systematically engaged the different centers of thinking. According to the official account, this exercising the structure of intellect brought the adherent closer to a realization of God.
390This story was nonsense of course given that the Crux began as a secular mission in the 70’s, by the heretofore-described tech millionaires, but the truth was not only deprecated, it was extinguished. So, continuing with the official scriptural account, these 60’s psychologists, the first seven Supernals, understood that their new regimen was so supremely effective that simple qualitative accounts of the awakened ability were in a sense derogatory to the entire process, and that the system of the Crux should be referred as analogous to the transcendence of a devoutly-held religious belief. Similarly, the Church did not use terms as “Intelligence” and “IQ” because they thought those concepts limited the descriptive scope of these new alleged bounds-jumping abilities.
391According to the official account, the organization of the Church into four Choirs of three Angelic Orders each. The precise distinctions among the Orders and between the Orders and the body of lay members who made up the Parich, or parichoners was well established before the end of the 1960’s summers of lust had exhausted themselves in intellectual and moral debauchery. The Supernal Order was reserved for prime movers of the Crux who had moved, or perhaps were moved, past their corporeal existence. The next lower order, the Celestials, had only one living member, Michael Voide, the First Celestial of the First Choir.
392Joyously—non-members might say suspiciously—every recorded founding member of the Church of the Crux was now dead. The Church purchased, copyrighted, patented, trademarked, and exclusively licensed their entire bodies of research relating to aims of the Church. That research supposedly was now actively undergoing analysis and restoration—a cynic might say fabrication—in holy conservatories reporting directly to the Celestial, who reported all new discoveries and principles, along with their price list.
393And the single entity holding the principal copyrights, trademarks, and patents after purchasing those rights from founders’ families was not the Church in total, but the singular office of the First Celestial Michael Voide.
394
395Unofficially, the cynics whispered that the Church of the Crux was a totalitarian extortion racket run and protected by intelligent, sociopathic thugs. Whispering was necessary because unfortunate grotesque accidents would predictably happen to the extended family members of an effective identified detractor. A near drowning resulting in profound brain damage, a blinding and castration by unknown attackers, irreparable comminution of the pelvic girdle in an unfortunate hit-and-run, and horrifying attacks of splattered Fluoroantimonic acid instantly carbonizing flesh and bone into a distinctive speckled and excruciating disfigurement and permanent disability.
396The detractor himself was never touched; they were sued in every jurisdiction listing every claim that was colorable. Teams of in-house Angel attorneys and prestigious outsiders lawyers promoted arguably non-frivolous theories of every kind of damage and criminal allegation if it were important to set legal precedent or enlist the power of the state to punish critics.
397Dockets ran into the tens of thousands of pages of complaints, amendments, motions, hearings, orders, emergency ex-parte applications, appeals, oppositions, sanctions, rebuttals, special master investigations, expert testimony, multiple and lengthy depositions, and private surveillance And using pretext, bribery or theft, the Church obtained every fragment of personal information the detractor possessed in order to frame every argument and exploit every potential weakness. The ability of the defendant to pay damages was irrelevant. If the litigation itself did not crush their material resources and spirit, it estranged them from everyone around them who hated them for exposing themselves to the Church’s fury. Following defeat and judgment, the Church would depose tecum duces the defendant periodically, forever. Any discrepancies or unease in forthcoming any information demanded by the Church attorneys resulted in another round of criminal complaints of perjury, emergency ex-parte motions to compel, to sanction, to hold in contempt of court and potentially lead to indefinite imprisonment.
398Beyond an aspect of the punishing arm, attorneys had another purpose as well. The Church invariably used its attorneys to mediate its manipulation of the world outside its velvet-draped clerestories; the attorney-client privilege, used and misused, insulated the individual actors within from the lawsuits without, giving plausible deniability between the whispered atrocities of the Church enforcers and the Angels of the Choir. It was quite a game with real people as disposable pieces.
399
400The Church was not a pure fraud. As in most belief and ideology in the world, the creed of the Church was both psychopathic nonsense and effective praxis. The members of the Parich contracted to undertake successive series of tests and puzzles under the private and secure supervision of the Angelic orders. These tests and puzzles had the purpose and effect of introducing novel concepts in problem representation and solution, evoking every more precise distinction and apt metaphor. Beyond primitive notions of numerical and verbal fluency, the puzzles and tests touched systematically on every aspect of rhetoric and mathematics, logic and poetics, and at the rumored higher levels, love and emotion.
401But according to the Crux script, the darker levels below the Angelic ascension asserted by the puzzle training: the Fallen and even darker daemons must be exorcised as well.
402Personal confessional interviews augmented with physiological instrumentation were required. The Angelic master of training recorded every particle of embarrassing detail in the supplicant’s life. Every infidelity, every law broken—accidentally or not—in fact every error and failure and personal embarrassment must be revealed and reviewed until every facet of the parichoner’s impropriety was recorded in high-definition video correlated with a concurrent physiological measure, and became the irrevocable and exclusive property of the Church of the Crux.
403Failure to follow any aspect of the Church’s ecclesiastical authority resulted in graduated measures of punishment—penance—and rehabilitation. Catching a parichoner in a lie while in training meant that the cost of further training trebled and interviews doubled, as special investigative Angels sought to reboot the salvation of perfection, as the Church termed the process. Repeated offenses trebled the costs again; if the parichoner would not or could not pay he or she was expelled and banned. They understood that the provision that any slander, libel, or complaint would result in immediate application of extraordinary and overwhelming force. What that application might be was unspecified, but of course, the Church itself in the exit interview referred to the more lurid disgusting rumors of the Church’s critics.
404As an alternative, if a parichoner could not afford the services of test exaltation, he or she could become a member of the lowest order of Angels and pay for training with service. Pay was something nebulous in the Church, however, and rumors that work was a unbroken string of sixteen-hour days with scant time for any training whatsoever. Of course, the Church had a religious exception and did not provide for any retirement, disability, or medical insurance, and it was assured that the moment you were no longer useful to the Church that you would be dumped on the streets of the nearest urban center with orders never to appear on Church property again.
405Usually the reality was worse.
406Once a member of the Order, tasks and schedules were devised and enforced in a strictly hierarchical manner; the Archangels directed the Angels, the Thrones were the absolute directors of the Principalities, and the bulk of the professional work of the Church was done by the Third Choir of Dominations, Virtues, and Powers. Within the Third Choir were most of the church attorneys, test and puzzle researchers and developers, persons handling the real estate and general intelligence monitoring of the press, the grounds maintenance and estate keepers, and those devising price lists and celebrity stunts and endorsements for benefit of the Church. While in principal rising in the Orders was a matter strictly left to merit, fidelity and faith, what was not well known in the Church (below the members of the Second Choir) was that no one had ever risen above the Third Choir except by personal designation by the First Celestial, Michael Voide.
407Becoming a member of the Order was a life-changing event. At the promise of perfection through free training and puzzle solving, the Angel must obey every order without question or reservation. Even insufficient enthusiasm was cause for immediate sanction.
408Beyond the array of punishment and litigation that a Fallen or daemon and his extended family might undergo, a questioned member of the Order exposed himself to specific internal punishments. Following additional intensive interviews replacing sleep periods was the first level of inquisition that heralded the physical beatings—called penitential purification—by the four elementals of water, electricity, sand, and air.  Then the segregation in the Church rehabilitation camps held in guarded isolated compounds. The principal selection criteria for siting these camps seemed to be places where—no matter how desperately or agonizingly or terminally—no one other than Church Angels could hear you scream.
409
410Despite the distillate of horror rumored and actually used on members by the Church, related by the most embittered apostates, once again the truth was even worse.
411 
412
413Chapter 19
414
415“Wala nya ye! Be gu na ma?” Sam’s cousin shouted as he slapped Sam down to the stamped dirt floor, imperfectly covered with irregular sheets of vinyl flooring. Sam’s cousin, the master of the compound Sam was living at in southeast Freetown within easy view of the new U.S. Embassy. Cousin Robert Siloi was a self-made gangster of the nascent building industry in Freetown. In his early forties, short, round, and out-of-breath from his effort, his face a cordillera of tribal scars, he specialized in obtaining properties and organizing building trades for the NGO’s that swarmed into Freetown to ply their good works at whatever cost in local corruption. However, it seemed to Sam that his cousin’s principal business was to move building materials around depending on a personal gauge of the minimum show he need to silence his client’s frequent complaints.
416Given that there was no reliable infrastructure of any kind after the last ten-year civil war, it was a cash-and-carry business. More than once Sam had to ride along with Cousin Siloi wearing an ancient rifle slung with twine as his cousin collected and disbursed thick wads of cash from a tattered plastic bag as big as his own ass.
417“The money, all of it! I will tell you what you will need of money! Nothing!” Cousin Siloi kicked Sam between the legs and dramatically wiped the toe of his roper-style cowboy boot on Sam’s pants. Sam’s cousin Siloi had no idea that the hammered studs and iridescent beads on the boots had been perfectly in style for the pre-teen daughters of the suburban ranches surrounding Raton, New Mexico twenty years ago. Cousin Siloi looked down at his cousin, his burden, sighed, and forgetting about Sam after completing his weekly extortion, dropped himself onto a brand-new leather sofa. Put in front of the television by two of the go-boys of a client, George Kemara, George hoped that it would encourage Siloi to begin his building project before the next big rainy season would turn the barely-passable cratered roads into the impossible sloughs of sticky red mud.
418Lying on the cool floor of the cinder-block television room, Sam heard the clack-clack of the whirligig beetles hurling themselves into the metal grate of the window. He dreamed of taking the hovercraft to Lungi airport and then to London. Forever.
419 
420
421Chapter 20
422
423The main entrance to the Church of the Crux in Portland, was cool, dark, and cavernous. The high-vaulted narthex consisted solely of hard surfaces as is if to amplify the echo from every fugitive sound. In the far center of the marble and mahogany arcade was a monumental desk within a miniature apse. Off to each side of the arcade, enfilade, were adjoining rooms in which Joex glimpsed racks of Church literature, worktables with built-in monitors and exhibits of one kind or another pertaining to the Church. The only person other than himself in the entrance was sitting at the desk across the hall facing him. She was a young woman with extraordinarily short hair wearing a nondescript fitted baize singlet. She stared at him, undemonstrative but not unfriendly. Sam did not yet notice the HD/ip surveillance cameras or microphones camouflaged in tiny tinted hemispheres ensconced every few yards on the shadowed arched of the ceiling.
424After tearing off a memo sheet of output that she glanced, in a well-modulated voice she said, “Are you a parichoner? How may I help you?” Seeing Joex’s negative shake of his head, she attached the output and a packet of paper to a clipboard, and handed Joex a note card fiche and a cheap pen to fill it in. The back of her fingers lightly grazed his fingertips. It fiche asked: name, current home address and previous three addresses, telephone number (day, night), sibling names, spouse maiden name, social security number, driver’s license and passport number, date of birth, schools attended, list of three references, a bank reference, siblings, email addresses, Facebook,  and all other social network account names, irrevocable permission to investigate, and a lengthy and almost microscopic disclaimer. “You can fill it out over there.” She motioned to a leather couch again the wall to her left. She kept staring at Joex. Gold flecked her irises within large blue eyes.
425“I am Jim,” Joex said, using his false identity, “I just want to ask a few questions about the Church,” Joex said, “I am looking for work and I heard the Church could help me find a job.”
426“Hi, I’m Serena. Please, first fill this out before we can do anything. It’s required. If you don’t know something, leave it blank, we’ll fill it in later.”
427Joex took the fiche and pen and retreated to the sofa.
428“Can I improve myself here?” Joex said in a way he hoped would simulate an eager but gullible newcomer.
429“If you want to,” Serena said, “Everyone does.”
430Joex filled out the form, adding plausible errors to his false identity’s numbers and streets that he hoped to slow down any investigation. It wasn’t clear how long he had to persist in this caper, but Joex suspect his phony identity wouldn’t stand up to professional scrutiny very long. The fiche itself had a curious gripping texture as if it were a cat’s tongue, it was faint embossed watermark of an “X” with the upper right arm perceptibly longer than the others.
431At every instant, he expected oak-trimmed steel doors to swing shut with finality and for polite but relentlessly trained Church security officers calmly to restrain him and then to fire a single shot from a suppressed Ruger Mark X Target .22 into his medulla oblongata within the small bump in the back of his head. His imagination had been becoming more vivid these last few weeks. Perhaps worse than the murder itself—as Joex had already consigned himself to a downward spiral ending in his extinction—would be the fact that Joex would never discover its purpose.
432He walked back to the monolithic desk and handed Serena the form and the pen. She glanced at it, put it face down on a glassy bed that looked as if it were custom designed for the form and initiated a scan with a button marked in confirmation “PCR/scan.” When the brilliant white bar had traversed the form, she peeled it off and dropped it into a slot. It looked like a large wastebasket with a padlocked lid that displayed in block letters, “ABLOY.”
433“Jim, how may I help you again?”
434“I’d like to find out more about the Church and take advantage of any help you have in getting me a job,” said Joex, more assured and articulate than one might expect from such a weak pretext.
435“So, what have you heard about the Church?”
436“That it trains the mind and makes you a better thinker.”
437“In a way. But that is not all. You can only learn about the Church by being a member of it, not by me telling you about it. Listen: this is the short version of the story of thinking. Don’t worry if you don’t get it. You probably will before you leave today.” Serena stared at Joex, her pupils dilated, opening her arms to embrace her desk. She smelled fresh meat.
438“Species distinguished themselves to survive. At first, it was sufficient for millions of years to shape the physical form and function of the organism. The structure of the organism itself was the embodiment and anticipation of its memory and imagination. Then DNA evolved—yes, this is a church that believes in evolution, she laughed—and became the medium to store the bulk of the knowledge about the species’ newly needed survival specialties. Then, as further specialization was required to surpass accelerating challenges such as a quickly changing climate, the mammalian and primate brains grew; they could store many times the information as DNA, and, this is a crux: the brains could accumulate fresh and modify old information within the lifetime of a particular individual within a species. Again, over time, more and more complex challenges to the species occurred: invention, diplomacy, agriculture, trade, polity, wars. We needed more information and even more flexibility to add and to change that information. We invented libraries. Now we could store many more times the information as brains and transmit that information accurately longer than a single human memory. But, sadly, even the most talented genius of an age can only read several thousand books during their lifetime, or write hundreds. A tiny fraction of the whole. And who can choose which books to read?” Serena’s lips moved slightly apart and she flushed. “Now the Church has a Mechanical Turk. It surpasses libraries rather greater than libraries surpassed brains. Its design has a key improvement over libraries: it can adapt, breathlessly—as in the time within a flicker of understanding or the instant of a pause for reflection. In a sense it selects what book you need to read next for you to understand best what has happened before and what will happen after.
439But the designers made a grave and glorious mistake.” Serena slid her chair until it stopped at the desk and closed her eyes. She swallowed. “That is not all our Turk does, as it happens. The Church found that it adapts and refines the human engaging it at not merely an accelerated rate, but at a quickening rate over shorter and shorter time. Acceleration of acceleration. The Mechanical Jerk.” She opened her eyes. Her eyes stopped blinking. “Do you know what a powerset is? You will. Our Turk not only adapts to your own adaptation, but to all the others’ adaptations who have used it.”
440“If your brain is now of complexity X, it will approach the complexity 2-to-the-X, a number which dwarfs the growth of a chain reaction 2-4-8-16 and so on or even more so the child’s number of E=MC squared. It is like the difference in the number—or cardinality—between all the counting numbers like 1,2,3,4 and so on forever, compared to the cardinality of all the numbers possible along a forever-divisible continuum using the counting numbers only as separate marks upon it.
441The result of all this in terms of people—you—is more simply: the Church is creating minds outside, transcending the map of even the possibility of ordinary human minds. In other words, other than through the Church, you can’t get there from here. But I think you can find out for yourself.”
442Serena stood up and directed Joex to follow her into a large room on her right from the kind of transept that centered on her desk. He felt her touch the cooler flesh of his wrist. At the room’s vestibule, the rhythm of her walk paused, then quickened, accelerating. Within the room, Serena selected one of the tables with two embedded monitors and directed him to sit. “We are the most-respected and popular church in the world,” she recited. “Take this self-guided tour to learn our history and see examples of our program.” This is the Games Machine.” She typed in a couple of code numbers, fingernails chattering on the hard surface, and flicked a selection box. “Talk to me when it is done with you. There is a toilet over there. You will be told when you need it.” She turned and walked back to her desk in the tightest and most graceful flecked gabardine trousers that Joex had ever seen. Or at least recently.
443Distracted by Serena, but also by the rude statement that he would be “told” to use the bathroom, Joex settled down to the touch screen labeled INTRODUCTION and swiped the box marked “Begin.” In contradiction to Serena’s assertion of the membership of the International Church of the Crux, the room had no other people in it.
444 
445
446Chapter 21
447
448The presentation was surprisingly well done. Hours passed quickly in front of the screen. First a short feature video on the history and public rites of the church concentrating on the super-human abilities promised to members who finished the program of intellectual perfection (though to Joex the path to Crux salvation seemed mostly to be paying steeply increasing fees for fewer and fewer hours of access.) The video showed the happy and fulfilled Parich and parichoners, the kindly and benign Angelic Choirs and Church hierarchy, a lengthy biopic of the life of the Supernals with most time spent celebrating the gifted life of First Celestial Michael Voide. The screen directed “Jim” to get up and stretch in a certain manner then to windmill his arms and stomp his feet “as if he were crushing grapes.” The Games Machine terminal sensed his motion, heartbeat and respiration and instructed him to stop after a few minutes. It then directed him to the toilet. No matter what Joex did, the screen froze in its instruction to him until he actually went to the toilet, urinated, washed his hands and returned to the desk. Joex wasn’t sure of the Games Machine was regulating his comfort, or was testing the enforcement of its mechanical will.
449He could see Serena at a distance looking away from him. He suspected that she could watch him through the surveillance cameras hidden in their tinted spheres that he could see when he glanced at the low ceiling of the training room or “scriptorium” as the video lecture described.
450Now was the interactive portion of the introduction to the Church. The elementary course of puzzles began to demonstrate the “progress to perfection.” It began with a quote from someone name Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence.” Joex had no idea how that quote applied to what he was doing.
451The format of the course was a statement, axiom, quip, theorem, quote, lemma, or aphorism followed by multiple-choice questions, as if he were taking some kind of University entrance exam. The first statement was “Distinctions exist.” It was followed by the line:
452
4531 ? 0
454
455Then what appeared to be elementary arithmetic propositions about commutativity, associativity, and distributivity. Joex remembered learning about these properties somewhere in early elementary school. Joex as “Jim” breezed easily through the first presentation followed by questions about what he had read. Questions were  presented; the few that Joex chose the wrong response were followed by new fact and a fresh question of similar difficulty. Questions that he got right were followed by new topical facts or relationships of something new, compared to the previous material. A new question of increasing subtlety or difficulty followed. Within a score of correct answers, Joex was quickly pacing himself through elementary, intermediate, and advanced amalgam of arithmetic, geometry, logic, paradox and contradiction; there were diagrams the led him to consider novel aspects of figure/ground and positive/negative space. The pace was persistent and accelerating. Joex noted that the vocabulary and sentence structure within the propositions and their questions was increasing along with the difficulty of their content. From simple declarative sentences, then compound, then complex, then compound/complex with subordinating conjunctions. Then the mixed area where syntax and rhetoric play with each other: cumulative, periodic, cleft, metaphor and figures of speech that Joex could not name. Novel forms of punctuation began to appear to denote aggregated grammatical relationships. Questions about finer distinctions between symbol and semiote were presented. Joex was not convinced all the words he saw were actually in a dictionary; somehow, their introduction was fluid and intuitive. He immediately apprehended them tentatively, then fully. Sometimes there appeared shocking images or expressions. But the questions were flying faster than Joex could quite grasp at their underpinnings.
456The new words and novel relationships of ideas reminded him of a time long ago where he had been part of this kind of furious concept incubator: designing new software and products at Mooneye. Being part of the driving wedge of a technology, hardware and software never seen before needed new names and re-application—overloading—of old ones. Convex sets, noisy data, fitness landscape, unsharping, attack surfaces: all euonyms in a world where the 16-year-old kid next to you is the world’s foremost expert.
457Now, the Games Machine was questioning him about power sets and aleph sub one and non-deterministic Turing machines. Again with the powersets. He barely recalled this material from his algorithm design classes in college. When he paused at a question to reflect upon his memory of the presentation content (It was so long ago. Another lifetime.) the presentation changed to some simple verbal analogies, then abruptly changed once again to elementary music theory with examples. Morphed and sped up, then slowed down and to match some unnatural rhythm, then something new, not quite related to what came before. If he thought about it too long, he got it wrong.
458In the fraction of a second between each new particle of the Games Machine, he realized that the fear in his gut of impending disaster had disappeared. It was like a bolus of heroin to a bone cancer patient. He felt more engaged and alive than he had in years. There was warmth in his groin. In the middle of the textures and timbre of Schnittke, Serena interrupted him. At that instant, the Games Machine fell completely and utterly dead.
459“You are doing very well, Jim.” She slowed down and deliberately enunciated the words “very well” for emphasis.
460Joex realized his hand was shaking and that he was hungry. And needed to use the toilet again. Through a kind of transparent lintel block around the perimeter of the ceiling in the scriptorium, he noticed the day had passed into night. He should be feeling fear, but he felt tired and exhilarated. He also noticed Serena’s scent, a balm of Gilead. She gripped his hands in hers. He couldn’t help himself, he was conscious of his erection. He looked back at the Games Machine. Dead.
461“Hold on there partner,” Serena put a hand gently on his shoulder. “Do you want more?” Joex could feel her warmth.
462He breathed out, trying to relax. “Yes.” He was almost whimpering.
463“It is late; let me give you a snack. Come back tomorrow. I think we will have a place for you.”
464Behind Serena’s desk behind closet doors was a minimalist kitchen enclave: small refrigerator, two stainless steel sinks, running water, cabinets of drinks and crackers, a microwave. Joex selected a ramen package and an individual packet of freeze-dried vegetables; Serena prepared it for him and a similar snack for herself. Serena and he broke the silence only once. She simply repeated, “You did very well.” Joex had to catch himself pausing too long looking at a particular feature of his host.
465“I do want more,” Joex said directly to her blue and gold-flecked eyes.
466
467She restored the kitchen niche to its original state and shuttered its entrance. She then simply and abruptly said to Joex, “Goodnight Jim. See you tomorrow. ” She turned and walked into the scriptorium. That was it.
468Joex thought of nothing to say so he walked out the stone arcade the way he had come in; it was surprisingly warm outside in the Portland air. He walked windward on a street lit with only two working yellow sodium-vapor lamps several blocks apart. From there it took about forty minutes for him to reach the bus station. Paradoxically as Joex receded from the Church of the Crux, Serena and the Games Machine, he felt the anxiety return to his stomach and shoulders. At the station, a very bored and tired security guard casually examined him. Joex chose the cleanest of the rows of red molded seats, the ones with the drainage holes in the center. The fixed armrests prevented him from stretching out.
469From paralyzing fear to exultation in taking the church introductory program. How could such a system of evil and control possibly have such intoxicating beauty? As he fell into a disturbed sleep dreaming of men sharing the back of an old cathode ray tube as if it were a nipple, Joex awoke in confusion whether he was thinking about the Games Machine or Serena with the bifurcated eyes. Again, the erection.
470 
471
472Chapter 22
473
474The weather off the East river was not yet what could be called hot, but it was humid and gusty. The young gentleman sat for a moment on the bench to watch the water taxi plow through the whitecaps and listen to the chugging of the helicopters landing at the heliport. He dressed in a way that he deemed modest, an off-the-rack suit: a ten-thousand dollar Brioni. This was modest for the chief executive officer and chair of the board of one of the worlds’ greatest credit ratings agency. “Qu,” as he was known to the Triax, was attending an angelic conclave at a secure Church of the Crux meeting chapter-room in downtown Manhattan. Now 666 E 34th St. was not its actual address; in reality it was the most central office between the three full floors leased by the Church, but that was how Qu marked it in his calendar. In a few minutes, he would be meeting “Wu” and “Xi” for a presentation by a person introduced by the Dominion Cassandra Jones of the New York parich.
475Qu felt that the business of business was an ideology unto itself; what the business schools taught in leadership, marketing, finance analytics, law, and laughably, ethics, was the window dressing, the shroud of respectability covering the stench of the guts of perjury, grand theft, conspiracy, wire and mail fraud, money laundering, and, perhaps now if his intimations were correct, treason.
476It wasn’t just the money; that—like the Wharton or Sloan curriculum—was just the numbers that appeared on the scoreboard so the crowds would know who to cheer. Rather, it was the exercise of power in such a way as it fed back unto itself, amplifying, a musical oscillation that eventually shook the world. For the musician, the world itself would shed, over time, what was inessential from the expression of pure power. Despite what crimes or evil he might do, his daughters would rise gilded with the accrued wealth and influence, but retaining nothing of the stink of the work necessary for their father to accumulate it. The world would remember his power, but forget his sins. Carnegie library. Frick museum. Stanford University. Rhodes scholarship. Nobel Prize.
477For him? Perhaps a wildlife preserve. Yes. That would be perfect. From the wilderness springs life; green, natural; biodiversity is really another name for a bonobo raping and eating its own young. He rose, brushed his top coat lightly and turned from the river to his meeting. 
478
479Dominion Jones, Esq. introduced her two foreign visitors she simply referred to singularly as the “Angel” to the members of the Triax. Dominion Jones was tall and was wearing her customary costume: a tailored dark grey suit, almost charcoal. Despite the weather and working within the heart of the Church offices,  long black leather gloves, which seemed almost gauntlets, Qu thought. Her black hair was straight and long. It usually hung loose over her shoulders. Her appearance was striking, which probably explained why she didn’t speak more than the minimum she needed to accomplish what she wanted. Although the three men of the Triax—world’s most influential credit rating agencies—knew each other well in the external world of Aaa to D, investment grades, watches, warnings, events, downgrades, and worthless default junk, they persisted in substituting their Triax names when thinking about themselves and each other, as if this were a fairy tale that was walled off from the world, deniable to both authorities and to themselves at, night, fearing the instant penetration of pure reflection just before falling asleep. In the meeting as if a cosplay, they were changed over from their suits: they also wore reflective robes of pure silk over their nakedness. The Church ceremonial robes had adornments of golden thread devices and cartouches and symbols of the crux representing the intersecting dimensions of the mind.
480
481“Angel 1” had travelled a long way from Beijing with his assistant, a quiet man, also with military-length jet black hair. An early middle-aged man not quite finished with youth, Angel 1 spoke with a Chinese-accent in otherwise beautiful English. Its cadence suggested a military background, while its contents suggested a man sentimental in love, or dying: “The five agents are in dance, from a distance it may be a martial exercise, but it may also be a motion of love, or the predicate movements of an impending surgery. They have labored for thousands of years and now are ready to meet their successors. The Wood feeds Fire. Will you be consumed or will you create the Earth?”
482Angel 1 paused for a moment and looked at each of the puzzled three as a reflective uncle, kindly, but a moment too long for simple affection.
483“I am sorry to wax poetical. A weakness, an affectation. I have many. Let me plainly speak rather as a tradesman. “In a few days, or weeks, the event will happen. I cannot tell you what it is because-as in the self-fulfilling prophecies of your own assessments—its swiftness and secrecy is a crucial source of its power. He glanced at the Dominion, who seemed motionless, watching and listening. “You will know when it happens. It will be a shock, seemingly a devastation that will affect all affairs in the United States and the world.
484“But that is only its appearance. The truth is that it will mark the sheng of the new cycle of which you will be a part.”
485“Simply, you must trumpet the disaster which will help it to reach the energy needed to reach ignition. The brightness of the match unites the sun and the air in the dry reed. Keeping a bundle of reeds warm, no matter how long, is worthless to build a fire. Let me be even plainer: each of you will rate the United States debt as D, in default, simultaneously to this cataclysm. You will use your personal judgment, you will not hesitate, you will not wait for each other, and you will not await direction or counsel. You will act separately but in unison. You will publish this rating as widely and as quickly as it is possible to do so.” “And your assessment will be accurate; the default event will automatically trigger a cascade of further defaults and credit events from state to county to city, to the smallest district and village.”
486Angel paused. He took from the breast pocket of a new cheap suit a handful of chopsticks. His right hand was twisted into a claw, which the three bankers stared at as if a dragon’s mouth. The sticks themselves were intricately carved of a dark wood, six sticks. “These are your yarrow sticks; this is your fortune. Each choose a matching pair and keep them safe.” Angel threw them down on the parquetry of the table.
487Parichoner Qu randomly chose two matching sticks and looked at them closely. Parichoner Wu and Xi each took a pair of the remaining, alternating one at a time as if they were playing a game of pick up sticks. They carefully did not move any but their chosen stick.
488Between the cosmological emblazons, what appeared to be a long sequence of roman numbers and letters were carved as if twining foliage into the circumference of the dark cherry wood cylinders.
489“At the International Bank of Beijing you each have an account. To be specific, each account contains one thousand million United States dollars denominated in Renminbi, or if you choose, redeemable in gold, real estate, or a lifetime position of extreme political influence within the provinces.” They are anonymous. Whoever has the numbers on your chopsticks can access these accounts.” He paused and waited until the three men were staring at him in full attention. “But you may not access your account until the ash begins to form the earth.”
490Finished, the Angel visitor began to rise in dismissal. Parichoner Qu began to speak, but was silenced with Angel’s graceful palm forcefully interposed between them.
491“I need to be clear as water in a forgotten mountain cistern. But this is not about cisterns,” he smiled. “This is not a revolution, this is not a war, this is not a movement, this is not a coup, this is not a subversion or utopia, and this is not an ideology or culture. This is a new civilization. Your accounts are nothing, they are the silk, the cocoon, but the pupa inside is what is important. The moth discards the silk, but only seeks to fly where the silk can never see. You are welcome to this discarded silk, this wealth. It is trivial.”
492Angel 1 finished rising. His assistant remained seated and looked upward at his master as if for direction, from a son to his father. With his twisted right hand, Angel dipped into his hip pocket and with two fingers took out a suppressed Baby Browning .25 ACP with brilliant green grips. He put it on the table and swapped it somewhat clumsily to his good left hand. The Angel then put the pistol under his assistant’s chin and fired a single shot into his head. The three Triax twitched involuntarily but stared without comment at the slumping assistant.
493Angel 1 then put the pistol on the table and politely waited for Dominion Jones to undog the chapter-room door and opened it for him quietly to leave. The first leg of his return flight to Beijing was in less than an hour. He did not say anything further nor did he ask for questions.
494Dominion Cassandra Jones, Esq. stayed to attend to the chapter-room after the three executives left. It was not the first such duty in her staff career.
495After changing back from their silken vulnerability into their business attire, Triax Wu left by roof helicopter; Xi left by a doorman-hailed taxi on the west side of 666, and Qi left on 34th St, walking east to the heliport. Qi was in shock, his gut in turmoil. “Or taste not the Pierian spring,” he said to the air.
496 
497
498Chapter 23
499
500Sam Lion-McNamara, his bare feet sticking out under the cardboard he had drawn over himself dreamed about becoming an adult. For him that meant an almost magical transformation from go-boy to chief. Power to say what he would do and when he would do it. But, rationally, the men around him even so had to follows orders whether from bosses on the docks or, if homebound, their market momma wives assembling the baskets of vegetables and miscellaneous gleanings and handwork that she would display on Kroo Town Road.
501Sam saw the red shadows of the flickering lights of the router/switch on the ceiling. That was good—just as the sprays of water and puddles around the town proved that the water was running today, the flickering proved that both the power was on and that the connection to the telephone company was sound.
502The sun was already throwing sharp shadows on the curb outside the café. Soon, glum Milton Kono, the skeletal manager would unlock the plank and corrugated iron door with its ancient warded key lock and mount himself on his stool inside the metal cashier’s cage at one corner of the first floor. He would sharpen a pencil stub with his teeth, sucking and spinning the stub in his mouth until he could make the necessary marks on the time and receipt sheets stamped on lined notebook paper. He would say “Shoo! Shoo!” to Sam to get him up and moving among the computers. Later, Anna would stop by with her giant thermos of groundnut stew and handfuls of groundnuts that she would twist into paper to sell as snacks to the customers. Anna had once addressed Sam’s sex during a couple of minutes they had been alone among the computers with a hot torrential rain outside drumming on the corrugated roof; Sam enjoyed the fleeting release, but he could not stand the smell of her mouth or even the short time away from his machines. Anna, too, placed no significance to the act; it was simply a diversion from twisting the groundnuts and shepherding the coins that she took back to her elderly mother at night. At least she didn’t pretend anguish like the rent-girls outside.
503Beyond maintaining the generator with oil and fetching the yellowing jerry can to purchase the gasoline from the waiting boys with their rubber hoses and rows of 50 liter casks lining the street outside, Sam’s job included fetching the water for customers while they used the old computers scattered haphazardly throughout the café. He also had to maintain the router and switches, telephone using Milton Kono’s ancient mobile to nag the technicians when the connection to Sierra Tel failed. He stayed well away from Boss Farid when he would visit the café to take the money and to shout at whomever he could.
504Sam did not blame Cousin Siloi for the demand for Sam’s money, or Sam’s beatings. It was the structure of survival in Freetown and the tribe. In a world where there is no government to speak of, maximum untrammeled free enterprise, private militias and threat of war, in exchange for the right to survive under the protection of a relative was the obligation to give that relative everything, even one’s life, if required. The notion that an individual had personal rights of any kind was a white man’s notion for the rich countries as France or Britain. Here, the Boss—whether crazy or criminal—was the Boss. To run away from his cousin’s compound was disloyal not only to his cousin but to family in the bush and to his entire tribe. Sam hoped that the rackets that Cousin Robert was engaged in would consume his time, force him to neglect, and eventually forget to punish Sam, if Sam could be found. But as long as he stayed in Freetown Sam was at risk. The thousands of idle hands and eyes that wandered through the city would surely notice him even as they brushed the thirsty flies away from the corners of their eyes.
505However, for Sam to leave Freetown was impossible. Sierra Leone had been at civil war when the Trans-African optical cable was laid twenty miles off the coast. Without a government to negotiate the terms, no undersea cable fibrehead for the country had been agreed upon or built. Other than the satellite dishes erected by the foreign NGOs to report their good works to their benefactors at home, the entire country’s internet traffic was routed through the ancient tiny bandwidth wired telephone system. In Freetown, Sierra Tel failed several times a day. Often it was dead more than it was alive. In the city of Bo it was worse. Worse still in Kenema, deep in the bush. Even if Sam had a passport and money, he had heard that there was active fighting in Liberia. And he couldn’t afford the Guinea bribes to overcome the problem of his age.
506So the Datatel Internet Café near Fisher Lane was Sam’s new home. Of course, Sam could give up the Internet and carry a machete like one of the Boss’ boys. He was wiry and thin and could be a thief who could scale the walls topped with broken glass and quietly elude the sleepy guards sharing a glowing cigarette in the warm night, noisy with insects. Machete boys always got enough to eat and occasionally some loot of property stolen from a body leaking stickiness for the wild dogs to lap up greedily.
507But Sam would not leave the café. On the Internet, he was a Boss. He chose where to go. He could hop over to Singapore, Beijing, London, or Fort George Meade in Maryland, USA as easily as if he were the light-footed Eshu, the messenger god that the drunken teacher from Lagos had told him about. He had had answered questions on Internet Relay Chat from a MIT student in the USA; he even was a moderator of a forum on setting up virtual private nets within the Darknet anonymous networks. His co-moderators had Master’s degrees, they were entrepreneurs, could visit a well-stocked public library and go to MacDonald’s whenever they wanted to. He had an anonymous data cache in Finland and Soda Hall in Berkeley, California and could setup PayPal or Redbud accounts in whatever names for whatever purpose anytime he wanted. Sam was the shit.
508If it could be simulated with computers, he could find it and use it. Sam had found a bank of Dialogue Simulators, which let him write programs for Network and Internetwork Operating Systems. While the Aedes aegypti waited patiently in the dark to give him Dengue fever, he set up an imaginary continent with its “countries” outfitted with imaginary switches, routers, server farms, and billions of virtual people randomly taking from or adding to the flow of data.
509Meanwhile in the real world, the coming of the rainy season would flush the network of Freetown gutters and abate the smell while it stormed. Online, through a graphical “heat map,” he watched his virtual world interact. In his virtual world he could add a simulation of a Cisco 12000 series router loaded with interfaces (Real World US$1000000) easier than he could get a bag of peanuts (Real World Le 100) from the limping Anna. He would not bother with reality at all if reality simply would leave him alone. But it didn’t, as the thick bruises on his cheek reminded him.
510So Sam had another dream beyond simply surviving to mystical adulthood. It was to learn how to apply his Internet skills to the material world. “Ouest” of the Hatz occasionally getting stolen merchandise that wasn’t re-stolen in the international mail and finally stolen once more by Cousin Robert was not enough. To cross over from virtual to real, from account numbers with positive balances to real food, books and as much security as he needed to enjoy his flight without wings, that was Sam’s dream. To share ideas whenever he wanted with a professor in Boston or a cryptographer in Baltimore. Or just a desk and chair and paper and pencils and quiet. Even if he lived only the life expectancy of two score and ten years in a land of malaria, sleeping sickness and sudden violence, that was more than his parents, more than his brothers and sisters; that would be plenty.
511Getting up for the day, Sam did not notice Cousin Siloi’s two go-boys swinging their machetes in play as they entered Fisher Lane.
512 
513
514Chapter 24
515
516Joex ached in the morning. The hard plastic seating cut off circulation after a few minutes no matter how he turned and twisted all night. Although he was hungry, he had learned to ignore the hollow feeling in his gut, and to gulp water when it got so noisy that strangers glanced at him. But he had a big day today; he went to the toilet and washed his armpits and thinning hair in the sink with the gritty powdered soap. He used his own shirt for a towel, rinsed and wrung it out, and put it back on to dry. He stepped out in the early morning and began the walk back to the Church. He, of course, had no way of knowing that both Church staff directed by Principality Geedam in frenzied deadly serious competition with staff under Throne Kingston were reviewing surveillance internet-enabled footage of all airports, train stations and bus stops in widening circles around Mad Landing; neither had gotten to the street footage around Coos Bay, Oregon. Yet. They had no doubt that they would soon have clear footage of Joex Baroco and exactly what he was doing.
517One stop Joex made on the way was not to get some breakfast with the little money he had left in his pocket; instead, he stopped at a corner market to buy a small jar of rubber cement. Sitting on a bus stop bench outside the store, Joex took his shoes off, generously brushed on several coats of rubber cement on the fingers of his left hand and waited until they were almost dry. He then pressed each finger and thumb of that hand into the center of the corresponding toes of the corresponding foot. He inspected the fingertips and repeated the process for his right hand. He let his fingers thoroughly dry and carefully replaced his shoes. He continued to walk to the Church, arriving just after eight in the morning.
518Serena was at the desk when he arrived. Two young men were mopping the long hall, their coveralls marked with a red “X” with the upper right arm longer than the others; razor cut into the back of their buzz-cut hair was a similar outline. They did not speak to each other as they worked, dip, wring, slide. Serena wore a grey pinstripe blazer over a silk camisole in a luminous blue that amplified her eyes into flickering blue sparks.
519“Jim, after consideration of your performance on the Introduction, we do have work for you. It even includes room and board. Most important for you, it includes training at the Church’s expense.” With a perfect pause for tempo she continued. “There are conditions.” Serena stood and guided Joex by the elbow into the scriptorium and into a seat by an empty Games Machine terminal. After entering a few codes with a combination of touching a screen keyboard and palm presses, she had “Jim” place both hands palm down on the screen in indicated areas. “You won’t need to carry identification,” she said, “everything you do on the Games Machine is journaled.” Joex was glad he had taken the precaution with his fingerprints, although he had no idea if the Church knew Joex Baroco’s prints. He certainly didn’t know that his DNA had been collected the day before through the textured application fiche.
520Just being within a thousand miles of the Crux was teasing the animal that was trying to destroy him, but the waves of fear swelled and receded echoing Joex’s own ambivalent sense of danger. Ten years ago, he could not have endangered himself through brilliant aggression. It was as if his gliding arc of self-destruction had also released him from the pinion of self-preservation.
521Joex began reading the text describing his contract. The contract was between him and his successors and assigns, and if need be, his estate. The contract was to be in force for 150 years corporeally and unlimited length of time incorporeally. In exchange for suspending imposition of the cost for room, board, spiritual succor and training on the Games Machine, “Jim” had to agree that any Angel of higher rank could direct him in any task whatsoever. All of “Jim’s” current and future possessions were hereby irrevocably given and bequeathed to the Church. All work service and subsequent product belonged to the Church. That if in the sole opinion of the Church “Jim” required correction or penitential service, the Church could impose any that it saw fit for any length of time, including excommunication and permanent designation as a banished Fallen., or worse, Apostate. “Jim” might be assigned and moved to any of the Church properties that the Church required. That “Jim” gave up all right to visit, speak to, write, or otherwise communicate with anyone not approved by the Church, specifically including family members, members of the press or law enforcement, that the Church had irrevocable power of attorney for both financial and medical purposes and for any other purpose the Church in its sole opinion deemed beneficial to “Jim’s” spiritual advancement. “Jim” understood that he may be monitored personally, by remote video and audio with no expectation of privacy at any time, that all interaction with the Games Machine may be permanently logged, and that all monitoring, counseling, investigation, or communication of any kind between him and the Church was the exclusive property of the Church to be used for any purpose whatsoever, including advertising, penance, counseling, or in any case of legal process. All communications with the Church, whether orally, written, by Games Machine or any other means was deemed a trade secret and exempt from use in any legal proceeding, whether sealed or not. Revealing any portion of these communications incurred liquidated damages of Five Hundred Thousand Dollars in US currency per event plus acquiescence to a permanent injunction under perpetual threat of contempt of court.
522Finally, “Jim” expressly acknowledged that the Church could end its relationship at any time without further obligation or compensation, that all work Jim might do for the Church was strictly volunteer and unpaid, that no social security, workman’s compensation, unemployment compensation, retirement deduction or tax was provided for by the Church under the Religious Exception Act and that any disputes may not be litigated in a secular court but exclusively by an ecclesiastical court whose members were selected by the Church, and whose decision was final. 
523
524Some attorney pleasured himself with this, Joex thought. It is legal pornography. Joex considered it for a moment, the arc of his life, the threat of overwhelming violence against him, his lack of property and fixed relationships, and his probable short, insignificant future whether or not he unraveled the craft against him. He felt the surveillance cameras swivel toward him in their onyx shells as he selected and clicked “AGREE.”
525 
526
527Chapter 25
528
529Joex pushed himself back in his chair, Serena appeared next to him. “OK. Serena, what next?”
530“I am Angel Millen, you are Angel Rogers, this way, please.”
531Serena took Joex though the hallway to the group cells to his niche containing a thin mattress, which hid a sewn tear along one edge in order to augment the stuffing with socks and surplus clothing; it had a dirty pink duvet with the right-dominated cross in a repeating pattern. There was no pillow.
532“Before we start your training, your first assignment is to clean up—indicating a bathroom—replace your clothing, with an Angel kit at this commissary—she pointed vaguely back the way they came—and get a meal and a haircut.” She looked around the empty dormitory. At noon, I will introduce you to your immediate superior.
533He turn to follow her instruction. “Just a second,” she said. Without waiting for a response, Serena straddled Joex’s knee as he sat on the edge of his bunk, leaned toward his ear until he could feel the warmth of her face. His unshaven face rubbed into hers. She slid toward his hip until his body stopped hers. He probably smelled. He, surprised, involuntarily cupped his hand around her buttocks and squeezed her closer. He heard a hitch in her breath. She said nothing, breathed out through her mouth, then slid back out against his hands to his knee. She leaned back, got up, tugged on her blazer, turned and walked out. Joex was almost too surprised and tired to be aroused.
534
535Joex was going to be late to his noon appointment with his superior. He had fallen asleep after his haircut as he was stowing his new gear under his bunk. He was awakened by the clatter of other Angels returning to quarters before lunching off steel compartmentalized trays. He had been able to toss the jar of rubber cement and the rest of the contents of his pockets into a trash bin undetected before he showered. It was hard to shower while keeping your fingertips as dry as possible; despite his precaution the rubber film on his little finger was lost. With a good lunch of a vegetable primavera in his stomach, he looked forward to sleeping well tonight.
536Joex was exhausted. Not just the usual homeless red-rimmed fuzz of random rousts and hard plastic benches, the cold and lack of circulation biting into your legs, but he was sick unto trembling. He knew if he really thought about it logically, as in the older days, his fear would master him and he would curl into some kind of catatonia, cry, or perhaps begin shouting and uselessly threatening those around him. Shall he curse God and die? But he had a stronger need to taste of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. At least he deserved to know why he was a marked creature—marked for extinction. In all his formal training and career as an engineer, the one skill he lacked was being comfortable with uncertainty. Things leaking out at the edges. Enigmatically, he had learned and practiced that one skill as a homeless person even as he possessed nothing else. Figure and ground. The delineation of negative space. He realized that his previous night’s Games Machine introduction had catalyzed him to understand that relationship for the first time. Joex trembled, visibly. The Games Machine had power. Maybe it also had answers. Joex could sense why people might give up their own life to taste the life of an Angel.
537Until that time, his fear was to be a silent companion. It was large and it was exceedingly dangerous, he had to tip-toe around it, but he couldn’t gaze upon it or speak to it. Or even think too clearly about it. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence.
538 
539
540Chapter 26
541
542It was a rare warming day in Portland as Assistant United States Attorney Rauchmann answered his phone on the first ring.
543“US Attorney’s office, Jim Rauchmann speaking.”
544“Jim, this is Mark. We are going ahead tomorrow with the Riu Bao custody.”
545“I thought I had more time.”
546“Things are changed. I think Bao is in danger.”
547“What are you talking about?” the US Attorney said, clicking the phone into speakerphone mode and opening up a browser on his terminal.
548We asked Portland Metro to id a car that was surveilling Bao’s street. “It came back two private investigators who directed them to their boss; an attorney in town.”
549“So?”
550“An attorney with the Church of the Crux.”
551Jim paused. The investigative prowess of the Church was well known. “What were they doing?
552“Metro said they just asked for their lawyer. We have called the lawyer three times since last night. Perhaps needless to say, he is not available. We are going to bring Bao in.”
553While Special Agent Langley was updating the prosecutor, the US Attorney was in turn searching a social website for a handful of key words, memorized along with many more months before. No hits.
554“Why would the Crux have anything to do with Bao?” Rauchmann said casually, as he frantically searched for another set of key words. Only partial hits.
555“No idea. I don’t even want to think about it,” said the Special Agent.
556“Okay, Mark. We’ll have the grand jury prepped and ready with the current complaint. Just send me your affidavit in the morning, Mark.”
557“No problem, Jim. I am glad that we took this bastard down on my watch.” Special Agent Langley pressed the secure button on his phone and hung up, completely unaware of the turmoil in the assistant attorney’s mind.
558
559The US Attorney considered the exchange. He knew that this was sooner than his associates wanted. Was it too soon? He didn’t know. His associates had shown him before exactly how deep he was involved and the overwhelming evidence that they had ferreted God knows how out of his computers. He selected the check box for “new submission” and carefully typed the innocuous key words that he was taught. They would be globally searchable in seconds.
560 
561
562Chapter 27
563
564Joex “Jim” Baroco showed up at the transept desk at 12:10 p.m., Serena was waiting for him, stood and spoke to him, “Angel Rogers, you are very fortunate that Archangel Jack isn’t here yet.” Joex said nothing, chilly in his new work garb and decorated buzz cut.
565A thin, tall woman approached them from an assembly room from the direction of the narthex entrance. She walked with a deliberate, measured cadence, as if she were self-conscious of her appearance upon them. She was as tall as Joex, wore the same work overalls and matching severe buzz cut; she was distinguished with a plain red scarf she wore around her neck as a single flash of color.
566Serena said “Good afternoon Archangel Jack. This is the newly ascended Angel Rogers. Agent Rogers, this is Archangel Marla Jack.” Marla made no motion to shake hands or otherwise acknowledge the introduction to Jim. She just said, “Time for our first Games interview. Come with me, Angel.”
567She turned and walked toward the Scriptorium, then into one among a handful of conference room that lined its far edge. Joex followed several paces behind. When both of them were in the room which had nothing; not a light switch, or a whiteboard or a power outlet, or window or carpet, except a tiny cheap battered red table that looked like child’s pretend furniture, two plastic chairs and a luminous ceiling. She pushed the table aside and moved the chairs so that they were facing one another. She motioned for Joex to sit. Marla then closed the conference room door, which was a several times thicker than a normal door and dogged it shut with two handles at its top and bottom. “No disturbances” she said, noticing Angel Rogers curiosity.
568“I can hardly hear the people outside anyway,” Joex said, politely.
569Archangel Jack had a instant succession of expressions that squalled over her face. “It is not to prevent them from disturbing us.”
570She then sat and began: “This is a Games interview. You cannot advance in the Choirs without success with both the Games Machine and these interviews. I think you learned how to succeed with the Games Machine. You play and simply do as you as instructed according to its running analysis. As you have deduced, it varies its presentation depending upon the current context of you, what you have learned, how fast your progress and your current success with the presentation.
571There are hundreds of thousands of hours of Games Machine play available and our Games Machine engineers are both adding hundreds of hours of raw content every week and changing the strategic pruning to streamline the process of delivering the service to you. Since it varies with the circumstance and player, in a sense the Games Machine content is endless. But despite the engineers’ acumen in test generation and integrating the electronic sensorium of the Games Machine with its content and its players, we need these interviews to ensure the training is managed properly. Someday we will not need engineers to cradle the Games Machine. It will be able to acquire, produce, and tune its owns results and interactions. Nor will we need these interviews. For now, we do. To do well here you simply need to be honest.” Marla paused and then continued. “Let’s begin.”
572Archangel Jack first asked about information “Jim” had already given to the Church. His lies were not yet too much of a burden to handle, but Joex had no idea how long he could parrot the same information without making an error. He could feel the heavy sensation of his fingertips from their rubber cement coating.
573After the preliminaries, Marla began to format her questions as the Games Machine had, first a statement or an explanation, then a question to elicit information from Joex. “Every part of your brain is exercised in context with each other part. “The advantage is quadratic. As you double the distinguishable cognitive functions, you square the possible interactions between them. What does this imply about the growth in the size of the Games Machine corpus compared to its efficacy?” He answered the best he could, sometimes with a question, which she ignored. She was completely in control of the interview.
574The questions then took an odd and disturbing turn. Marla asked Joex to imagine strangling an infant. She recited as if from a script, going into elaborate and gruesome detail of the baby’s choking and twitching, the ligature marks from his blanching fingers, and the baby’s dilating pupils in its dying eyes. “What do you feel?”
575“What do you mean how do I feel? Joex said. “I feel horror and remorse, I am calling for emergency response, I am giving the infant artificial resuscitation.”
576Archangel Jack said, “That is a Fallen answer. You now must imagine three things. First, the Church has unequivocally directed you to strangle the infant. Two, you believe the directive from the Church is absolutely just, even if you do not know why. Nor in fact will you ever know why. Third, you feel absolutely no emotion as you carry out the Church’s direction. Can you do that? This is an exercise. You are simply imagining.”
577Joex thought about this, “I’ll try.” He wanted to understand this sick business completely.
578She then recited the script again, varying it slightly in detail and gore, so the image would not grow stale in the retelling. Each time she waited for him to digest the disturbing images. Sometimes she cocked her head slightly as if she were listening to a far-off forest animal.
579“Again. Watch your breathing. Think about something pleasant to you. Again. Let your heartbeat fall. Again. Do you know you are making fists? Unclench your shoulders. Open your knees slightly. Vary your position in the chair. Look above my eyes. Think of emptiness. Think of the Games Machine. Think of Serena.” This was the only time she referred to Serena by given name. Then she was done.
580
581“Fine. Just a few more questions. Remember, honesty is what I am looking for. Complete honesty. Without it you will go nowhere within the Church, or in life.”
582Once again, things began to veer off in direction Joex did not expect.
583“Have you ever masturbated?” Archangel Jacks asked.
584“What?” It was a question that wasn’t linked to anything Joex expected. It was like seeing Picasso’s “Femme” illustrating the Proper Liturgies for the Eucharist.
585“Have you ever masturbated?” Archangel Jacks asked.
586“Yes?” Joex answered unnerved.
587“When was the last time?”
588“When I was a kid, I think,” Joex said.
589Archangel Jack slapped him hard. “When was the last time?”
590Shocked, Joex, felt his warming cheek sting. His eye began watering from the corner of his eye on that side.
591“A few weeks ago?” Joex said.
592He flinched before the slap landed this time.
593“When was the last time?”
594“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?”
595“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.”
596“I don’t know if I can take the physical abuse, Archangel,” Joex complained, “do we need it?”
597
598In 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.
599“Yes, Archangel. Yes, Archangel.”
600She withdrew her fingers from him and, without looking at them, wiped them on the top of his thigh.
601“You have completed your first Games interview,” said Marla Jack, “you are on your way to perfection.”
602They 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.
603She led him back to the transept desk where Serena was working, clipping forms and referring to a monitor on her desk.
604Archangel 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.
605“Do you want me to make you something? A cup of tea?” Serena asked, glancing back at the hidden kitchen.
606“That would be nice.”
607She 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.”
608At 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.
609“Here is your tea, Angel Rogers. I will be back in a moment.”
610She 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.
611
612‘What kind of asylum is this place?” Joex thought, his mind a squall of conflict.
613
614Joex 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.
615He 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.
616 
617
618Chapter 27
619
620Manager 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.
621The 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.
622Next 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.
623Manager 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.
624On 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.
625From 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. 
626He 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.
627But 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.
628A 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.
629Manager 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?
630 
631
632Chapter 28
633
634Joex’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.
635On 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.
636He 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.
637“Hi, my name is Myra. This is Steve. How you doing?” said the young woman with two braids interconnected with a white silken thread.
638“Hi, I’m Joe X. Just heading east.”
639Joex 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.
640“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.
641“Not on your life, Myra. Just sports.” Joex didn’t elaborate. “Where are you folks heading?”
642“To pick up my sister-in-law at the airport,” Steve said “how far you going?”
643“Just going east. Heard that I might get a job.”
644After 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.
645A few long rides and Joex was in Idaho.
646
647Once 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.
648 
649
650Chapter 29
651
652He passed through Boise in the early evening. His latest ride was in a Toyota Avalon of vintage several years earlier, but kept in mint condition. The man who had picked him up was older than Joe—in his middle 60’s—and tended toward talk, and not a little toward snacks, as his bulk testified. It reminded Joex of the many meals he had missed in the last couple of weeks.
653“Nice to hear that you might get work east. Myself, I work as a summer pastor for the church. I organize the camping activities, the youth groups. I make sure all the T’s are dotted and the capital I’s crossed,” he said. He chuckled at his own wit. “I like helping people. It’s just what I do.” “Pastor Ted, will you help me with my homework? Pastor Ted, will you help me put on sunscreen? Pastor Ted, can I talk to you about a problem? Pastor Ted, can I borrow some money?” “Yes, sir. They come to me and I help them.”
654He looked at Joex appraisingly in the darkness of the compartment. “Maybe you could use some luggage, a few clothes to put in it, and maybe a shower? Pastor Ted can set you up; get a good night’s sleep, get a good start in the morning with a home-cooked breakfast.”
655“Thank you, Pastor. I am hoping to get along before the end of the week to see about the job,” said Joex.
656“Joe, a good night’s rest and you’ll look like a million for your interview.” He winked his red right eye. “Ever have a little port and walnuts? It puts you right to sleep. You can sleep in my wife’s bedroom, as she has been traveling for quite some time. I keep it neat as a pin—why I changed the sheets and towels just this morning.”
657Joex was monitoring Pastor’s Ted chatter only enough to make the affirmative grunts and “So right!” as responsives to the sermon.
658“Here we go!” said Pastor Ted as they turned into the gigantic parking lot of the Multi-mart. “Biggest one around. Let’s get you some property so you have something to change into after your shower.”
659Joex didn’t object: he was getting a free ride, so in worst case he could toss whatever he was given the next ride he got. It would feel good to stretch his legs.
660“It’s getting ready to close, Joe. Why don’t you pick out a change of clothes; I get you a bag to put it in a meet you at the register.”
661“Sure, Pastor Ted.”
662Joex went in to and wandered around to the back where the men’s work clothes were racked. He selected denim trousers, a button-down oxford work shirt in two different sizes each. He draped the clothing over his arm and went into the changing room. The store was practically empty. In the changing room he tried on the different combinations until he found the best fit. He decided to see if Pastor Ted liked them and would pay for them as he had promised.
663Wearing his new clothes out of the changing room, he stepped up to the front of the store where only one of half a dozen registers was operating. He did not see Pastor Ted; he heard him distantly instead through the doors of the store; he was speaking even faster than usual.
664“Who the hell are you boys? Let me go Goddamnit.”
665Once again, Joex’s ancient capacity to draw a fast conclusion from scant information was forced upon him.
666Outside the store, under the set of working flood lamps lighting the entrance to the store and the near side of the parking lot was Pastor Ted. On each side of him was a young man with the style of work overalls as Joex had just shed in the changing room. Partially restrained and very angry, Pastor Ted was pointing into the store.
667Joex’s mind enumerated the possibilities. None of them was favorable. He dumped the clothes he was carrying on the floor, searched for the tags he had left on his trousers and shirt to rip them off. He turned off to the dark gardening area of the store to leave by that exit. He used the exist that warned “Alarmed at night, use Front Exit,” but no alarm went off. Outside in the dark, it was warm and the gusts of wind that had buffeted his rides earlier in the day had died down.
668He headed directly away from the parking lot and toward the outbuilding of what appeared to be a tilled farm, preparing for the spring wheat planting. What appeared to be a hundred yards from the Multi-mart was closer to three hundred yards. Virtually collapsing, Joex fell between an outbuilding and the bulk of a detached cultivator and its probing tines.
669 
670
671Chapter 30
672
673First Celestial Michael Voide motioned for the spotter to train on another machine and took his place above Security Throne Adam Kingston.
674“Surely you can do another 50 pounds, Adam,” said the First Celestial.
675“Yes, Celestial.” Kingston was sweating heavily. He waited for the topmost angel of the Church of the Crux to add the weight to the bar above him, and then did five reps with some difficulty; the bar made a uneven clang on the last as he racked it.
676“You know Principality Geedam is no longer with us, Kingston,” the First Celestial moved the chalk bag away as Throne Kingston reached for it.
677“Yes, Celestial.” The Throne wiped his sweating hand on his jersey instead and started to get up.
678The First Celestial gently put his hand on his Security Throne’s chest and pushed him back to the bench, as if he were seducing him.
679“Surely you can do another ten reps, Adam.”
680“Yes, Celestial.”
681Throne Kingston wiped his hand again doubtfully, unracked the bar and did four quick reps. The fifth and sixth were noticeable slower, the seventh was very slow and a reddish cast fell over the head and shoulders of the Church of the Crux’s chief of security.
682“I have my complete faith in you, Throne Kingston,” said the First Celestial as he rested both hand lightly on the top of the weighted bar. “I understand Baroco was in the Portland Church, enlisted, was introduced to the Games Machine, was even interviewed in his first confessional. He has been tracked to Idaho. And now is lost once more.” The First Celestial bent down slightly over the grimacing Throne and whispered in a lover’s tone. “Is that fucking right?”
683The Throne pushed against the added resistance of the First Celestial and shouted “eight.”
684“That’s enough for now, Adam.” The First Celestial forced the weight back in the rack.
685“Riu Bao was arrested this morning. The news blackout expires this evening. I am angry, Adam. I want you to make me happy. Are you able to do that, Adam?”
686“Yes, Celestial.”
687“Things have been set into motion. The world is going into a time of crisis. It will need guidance, a plan. This is the opportunity for the Church to help the world. You would like to have that happen during your lifetime, Adam, wouldn’t you?”
688“Yes, Celestial.” “Very much so,” he added.
689“I want to talk to you again tomorrow, Throne, “I want you to report on the penance of Angel Millen under the discipline of Archangel Jack. And then we can discuss your own penance, Throne.”
690“Yes, Celestial.”
691The First Celestial walked over to the private elevator to his clerestory apartment and punched in a code. He needed the report of Dominion Jones of New York. He considered the matching pair of ivory chopsticks with their intricate engravings that he kept at the head of his command desk. The coolies are mistaken if they believe we are about wealth, Michael thought. Michael Voide’s imagination fluttered among the wealth and power and virtue of kings. He had the ability to simultaneously and utterly believe in the power of the Games Machine, the mission of the Church of the Crux, and that, he, Michael Voide, was the pinnacle of that civilization.
692 
693
694Chapter 31
695
696Joex had walked for a couple of hours after he had left the store in a random direction away from the highway and the last he saw of Pastor Ted. He had slept in the cab of some large piece of farm equipment that offered a glass-walled shelter from the night. He awoke before first light in the morning, chilled, and stiff, walked south, further away from the Multi-mart and the main thoroughfare off Interstate 84. While it began to warm him up, it was slow, messy, and cumbersome walking going over the turned clods of earth. There was nothing before him to the horizon. His new jeans were staining at the ankle. He had to stop every dozen furrows or so to put back the heel of deck shoe that was coming off or to empty out the pebbles and dirt that they had accumulated. To the east, he thought he saw and heard a truck in the distance, but couldn’t tell because the morning sun was low in the sky. The ground smelled good.
697After a little over an hour, he hit an unmarked one-lane graveled road that ran east west; he decided to walk toward the sun that was warming him. He realized that he had left the printout with his virtually aged photograph in the pocket of the overalls he had left in the dressing room. Besides the question of how he was tracked to Idaho so quickly, the larger question of the reason for his persecution remained. If a vehicle followed him from Portland, why had they not captured him along the way as he flagged down rides? If they had flown out agents, why had they not brought enough people so that he would not have escaped? Why were they dressed as Church rank-and-file rather than as cool Mr. Brillo? It seemed so long ago that his arc of personal dissolution was disrupted; the irony was that the path that he was on and the end sought by Mr. Brillo were the same except for speed. It began by him simply stopping going in to work years ago; to speed things up he could also simply check in to a local Church of the Crux, ask “why?” and see what happened. He kept walking along the road.
698By late morning, his legs were starting to hurt and his stomach had settled into a resentful knot. He saw a cluster of buildings ahead with a windsock flying over them. Joex squatted in the shade of a building as he watched the activity of a couple of people working on the field, which turned out to be a tiny agricultural airport. One fellow, dressed like a mechanic with a grimy scowl ignored him as he walked past into the office. A few minutes later, a young man of seventeen or eighteen with what looked like WWI-vintage flight goggles up over his forehead left the office walking toward the field.
699“Good morning,” the young man said, “Need a lift?” he joked.
700“Well, sure,” Joex replied.
701The young pilot stopped and twisted his face in a wry grin, “if you can hold your lunch, I’m going down to Mountain Home right now.”
702“Why not?” Joex shrugged and accompanied the pilot onto the field.
703He stopped before a beautiful vintage biplane outfitted with pipes and tanks underneath apparently used for crop dusting.
704“This is my Kaydet. Well not mine, actually. But I’ve flown her since I was fifteen,” he said proudly. “My name’s Bill.” Joex considered for a moment, “Joe X.” Nice to meet you. He held out his hand.
705“I’m going to pre-flight. There are some extra goggles somewhere in the second seat. The step ladder is around back.”
706
707They touched down an hour later. The biplane did not have headphones and so Joex was alone with his thoughts under the unique roar of the uncowled engine.
708It turned out that Mountain Home was near the Interstate that legged southeast from Boise. Joex walked across the small town to the entrance ramp, smiled, and stuck out his thumb. Bill had given him four extremely crumpled dollars. Joex was ashamed in accepting help from this kid, but he would have to figure out later how to make it right.
709 
710
711Chapter 32
712
713The African sun eight-and-a-half degrees north of the equator is always cutting and glorious and there was nothing east past the old refinery that would block it from the Datatel Café. There was also nothing that stopped the flashes from the polished machetes that the go-boys swung toward each other in mock intricacy. Through the louvered vents that surrounded the ceiling of the ground floor, Sam saw and wondered what these flashes were. The click and ting and plangent clatter on the door instantly tied it together. Sam was up and away shedding his cardboard shell like a new moth, up the narrow broken mud-brick steps to the next floor he flew, unencumbered by anything except a modesty cloth he had sewn together with fine wire from tie-dyed rags.
714Sam hopped up on a table and looked down through the louver to the street. Seeing the boys, he hopped down and escaped over out to the terrace and over the side, using as a single step the principle internet junction box linking the café and the world at large. Sam and Ouest were one at this moment: a mercurial amalgam of silent, quick and brilliant in the fresh morning.
715 
716
717Chapter 33
718
719Joex was dropped off near Salt Lake City late afternoon. His last ride had been a balding man in bib overalls with his two young sons riding in the cab of an elderly pickup truck. Joex had to squeeze in and kept his right arm out the window which didn’t roll up all the way anyway. He was offered a massive homemade sandwich from a plastic tub that was slipping around on the dash. “The love-of-my-life always makes one more. ‘Strapping boys,’ she says. Why waste it? Anyway, you’ve got a long walk if you want to get somewhere before dark.”
720Joex thanked him and bowed deeply to the delighted boys. He watched the truck drive off, raising a modest plume of dust as it re-entered the Interstate. It was hot for a spring day and looked around for shade. To the south there was a briny lake surrounded by a salt berm and a machine that looked like a narrow harvesting machine parked between him and the lake. Refreshed by the sandwich he thought it prudent to continue, to at least be somewhere peopled with the blended advantage of protective coloration from spying eyes. He spied a loose newspaper page caught on a tussock; he could fold it into a hat if he could remember how. Fold down the corners, but leave a thin bottom edge to fold up. Both sides. Pop it open, put on head. A shade!
721Joex could not get a ride. There was not a problem with the traffic, which was moderate. Nor anything wrong with his technique that he could think of. Rule one: make it clear you want a ride. A thumb out, stand by the road, stare at the drivers, all those were pretty clear. Rule two: make them happy. Usually a big smile—no matter how crappy or tired or hungry or sunburned you were—worked fine. Here, he melodramatically mimed and jumped and twisted and twitched to play the pratfall and the fool; anything to keep them from thinking “deviant murderer.” Nothing this afternoon worked. He even cocked his newspaper hat sideways and mimed a Napoleon with one hand stuck to his belly and the other hand stretched out, fluttering. Or he became a roadside Angel Moroni, summoning the traveler with an invisible horn. The drivers passed, eyes locked in front of them.
722At the first reddening of sunset, Joex retreated from the road and sat down in the dappling shade of the harvester machine, looking out over the shimmering shallow lake—more a briny pond, he realized. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He unfolded the paper and began to read it before it got too dark. Nothing out of the usual; the world had no inkling of Joex’s hunt. A darter waiting for the hawk, or a blinded rat hearing the silky approach of the python. In the world of high-tech thievery, he saw the coarse wire photo of a an alleged Chinese spy caught delivering massive quantities of technical information to email addresses traced to servers in Beijing. The photo was hard to make out. It showed an Asian-looking man about as old as Joex in three-quarters pose with the hand of a bald Special Agent clamped on his shoulder. A Mr. Rui Bao. A citizen by birth, the article alleged that his mother a Chinese national (deported to China) had come to the United States specifically to give birth. The article was well-prepared, probably sourced from a FBI press release. Bao was accused of being a spy for decades. It listed the companies he had worked for along with denials of lax security by their spokespeople. One of the companies was Mooneye, Inc. That caught his eye. Interesting, I wonder if I knew him when I was there. Joex studied the photo in the waning light.
723He looked familiar, but it was hard to tell. What was that guy’s name? He had worked with one other person in the new lab Mooneye had created for its first Internetwork switch. But this more than twenty years ago. He and that other engineer wrote one of very first Internetwork operating system stacks for the switch, a box the size of a microwave with racks of cables going in and out. Its job was to keep track of all the Internet addresses it was connected to, to minimize the time taken to both switch from one to another as needed, and to minimize the overhead of transferring data from one cable to another. Joex had been assigned by (what was his name? It wasn’t “Riu Bao,” it was just a regular American name) to handle the address cache. He remembered he found a way of changing the quick hash association to an even faster radix one. One comparison most of the time rather than two or more. Doesn’t sound like much except times ten million. I remembered what-was-his-name had bragged about using a system error trap rather than a comparison to an end-point to tell him when he finished traversing a link list. When the system interrupted him with an “executing in data area” error, he knew that the traversal was finished, popped the error off the stack and restarted the routine. It had seemed so anti-good programming, even though the firmware was intended to be burned once, frozen into read-only memory. Cast in ROM, there was no chance that this trick would come undone by another programmer. Compared to his memory of people, his technical memory was remarkable.
724What was his name? Robert-something? It was like two first names together. Like Robert Mark or Robert Mike.
725
726Then the article said it at its end: “Rui Bao, who had reverted his name to his Chinese family name, was listed on his birth certificate as ‘Robert Marks.’ In a press release from the Portland Bureau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Riu Bao is described a ‘citizen of the United States in name only: he had been groomed from birth with the specific task of stealing US technology for the fledgling Chinese telecommunications sector.’ Neither his mother could found nor was there any specific comment from Chinese officials, who asserted they had no need for American secrets, as their technology led the world.”
727
728“Wow. I worked with a Chinese spy,” Joex thought. But what secrets could he steal in our switch project? We had no idea of it eventual importance throughout the Internet. And we were the creators of the code. There weren’t anyone else’s secrets that could be pilfered, by Robert or myself. We went days in the lab without even seeing anyone else. The project itself was a modest success. The first Mooneye Internetwork switch was popular—if expensive—but soon had to deal with a flood of competitors. There were allegations of trade secret theft by others, but never an accusation that any of us were the thieves; we had invented the technology. Now that ancient technology had been swallowed up by switches that could handle names instead of numbers, arbitrary subnets, and could handle a thousand times greater Internet traffic at half the power outlay.
729Joex considered this, but wondered why a spy would be involved in a project that had no secrets to steal? Rather a waste of time if he had been a secret mole for the Chinese during this time. It would have been more of a benefit to have repatriated him and just have him lead up a design team in China. Of course, few predicted that the Internet and its electronic infrastructure would grow so explosively, or achieve such a pervasive, global reach. Other than the sheer bandwidth of fiber optic cable linking together Internet centers, the key hardware, which assured the Internet performance, was the Internetwork switch. Unlike a pure hardware device, the successor to Baroco’s and Marks’ simple device could handle switching, firewall and denial-of-service attacks, and shape traffic in one rackable box. Major Internet hubs had dozens of such switches, each costing upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, not including service contracts and interface racks. If the giant server farms of Google and other major Internet services, which required proximity to major sources of power and cooling such as hydroelectric dams just to keep working day to day, were the basic memory cells of the Internet, the medulla cortex of these cells were the switches; they mediated the transactions, routing the queries in and the results out, or bundled together the differing aspects of a complete financial transaction. Joex relived this technical history with a flush of pride that he had not felt for many years, certainly not since he had left Mooneye and had become homeless. But that was past. The flare and asphyxiation of a match.
730It was the edge of twilight. A worker had come out in a pickup and was maneuvering a backhoe near edge of the salt berm. He ignored Joex and cut a channel in the berm, then another cut a few feet adjacent to the first. The brackish water was draining out of the pond; its rate picked up speed as it washed out the intervening slice of salty soil between the two cuts. The wind was picking up. The pond was draining.
731Joex looked at the emptying pond and, as quietly as the building stream eroded its boundaries, an idea about Riu (or Marks) struck him. It was just a theory. Probably the Games Machine just rousing his imagination. It could be easily disproved. But it would explain everything. And it became more compelling and more shocking the more he thought about it. He had to get to the FBI right now.
732Ignoring his sore legs he ran stiffly up to the Interstate and waved and smiled and acted like the happiest man in the world. In a sense he was, for he was beginning to realize why he needed to be killed. The worker who used the backhoe gave him a ride into the city.
733 
734
735Chapter 34
736
737“Rauchmann.” The Assistant United State Attorney didn’t like being disturbed at home, especially on the secure line.
738“Langley here,” I just got a call from the Salt Lake City field office; they claim to have a walk-in who has information about the Riu Bao arrest. He says he was a co-worker of Riu’s in Silicon Valley twenty years ago.”
739“Can’t this wait until morning? Riu’s in custody, we’ve got the Grand Jury complaint before the Judge. Why not just have this guy—whoever he is—contact me tomorrow morning.” Rauchmann adjusted the underwear under his robe.
740“This guy says he knows more about Riu’s spying than we suspect. He says that he thinks Riu wasn’t here just to steal secrets. And he says that the Church of the Crux is involved. And that it could be a “bigger Chinese plot.” And one more thing. That guy is homeless and says agents of the Church of the Crux are after him to kill him.”
741Rauchmann felt a prickle of alarm over his hips. “You are wasting my time with this shit? Come on, Mark. This is loony tunes stuff. Just get his name and rehab flophouse or whatever and well get back in touch with him. Just why are you bothering me with this crap?”
742“Jim, the Special Agent in Charge of SLC said the guy knows his stuff. He was quoting all kinds of stuff about the Internet and routing and switches. And his prints are a hit in the DOD SC database.”
743Rauchmann considered this for a moment. He needed to stretch his shoulder blades back. Maybe it would be wise to consult his client, just in case. 
744“O.K., I’ll contact the SLC SAIC and listen to his story. Thanks Mark. Goodnight.” Rauchmann hung up. Probably was just a nut who saw the arrest on Fox. Doing his civic duty as a patriot and counterspy, sure. On the other hand, his personal stakes are too high right now to screw anything up. He looked up the field office for Salt Lake City and let the operator transfer him.
745“Special Agent in Charge Hamblin,” said the voice from the telephone.
746 
747
748Chapter 35
749
750“Special Agent in Charge Hamblin.”
751Joex had an uncomfortable wooden chair in the office of the Salt Lake City Special Agent who habitually stayed late to get more work done. More than one Special Agent confused an unhappy marriage with job ambition.
752“Pardon me, Mr. Baroco, would you please wait for me outside?” Hamblin gestured at the office door. “Please close it behind you. I’ll come and get you when I’m finished.”
753Joex got and dutifully left the office and closed the door behind him. It was partially dark in the anteroom. It was very quiet, even the air conditioning was off for the evening and the room was on the edge of being uncomfortably warm.
754“O.K. Yes, it sound like the usual nutjob, but this nutjob has been a principal scientist with a Stanford graduate degree. No, I haven’t checked those facts out yet. Yes, the guys sounds credible despite his appearance. Which is a bum with new clothes and a weird haircut. And there is the Special Compartmentalized hit.”
755In the warmth silence of the outer office, Joex could hear this side of the conversation as if far away; his own heartbeat was loud enough to blocks words: “homeless THUMP haircut THUMP compartmen THUMP.”
756“Mr. Rauchmann, no and no. This is his theory: Riu Bao was here not just to steal secrets, but to implant a software trojan horse into the software. Yes, twenty years ago. No, this is firmware, virus checkers can’t find it. Below rooting. Rooting, not routing. In the Internet switches. Can’t be detected. Like a telephone switchboard. No, he hasn’t shown me any evidence. You think I am a qualified code-monkey? But he says that it fits perfectly. I don’t know what the Church of the Crux has to do with it. He says they sent a hit man out to kill him in California. And that two guys were chasing him in Boise. No, I don’t know what he was doing in Boise. No, I have no idea why a twenty-year-old program makes a difference now. But he says that we need to immediately inspect the software for intentional errors. He said ‘national urgency.’ How would I know? Yes. Twenty years ago.”
757Hamblin paused for a long time listening to the district attorney.
758“Material witness? For a few weeks? But if he is a nutjob, why would we do that? Well, I’ll wait for your affidavit and I will detain him. I think we should just talk to the guy first,” Hamblin listened. “You are right, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll wait for the fax, attorney. He is right here.”
759But between the thumps of his heart, Joex had heard the phrase “material witness.” “Fuck, not again,” Joex actually whispered. And as quickly and wraithlike as possible he quit the outer office, walked down the carpeted hallway and walked though the shatterproof self-closing glass doors. By the time Special Agent in Charge Hamblin hung up the phone, Joex was once again on the run.
760 
761
762Chapter 36
763
764Joex 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.
765“Now what?”
766He 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?
767Joex’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.”
768 
769
770Chapter 37
771
772Sam 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.
773“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.
774First, 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?
775
776Sam 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.
777Sam 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.
778Sam 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.
779In 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.”
780Sam 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.”
781
782Two 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.
783Joex 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.
784He 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.
785
786He was also going to connect with his sister. His aggressively Luddite sister, who brought up memories of his family and himself that he feared. 
787 
788
789Chapter 38
790
791First 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.
792Although 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.
793He 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.
794“Dominion Jones.”
795“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.”
796“Yes, Celestial.”
797First 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.
798As 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.
799 
800
801Chapter 39
802
803Sam 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.
804He 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.
805
806In 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.
807And 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.
808
809In just over a day, he hit Boston, then Cambridge. He took the precaution of calling his sister from the remoteness of western Massachusetts, near where Interstate 84 turned into Interstate 90. It took Joex a long time to punch the number after he found it on-line. What plume of self-satisfied fury would erupt from her? She could not see him in any way that did not apply her steady-state aesthetic of the universe. He was thankful that he reached a messaging machine. His message was guarded and terse: that he might visit in the next day or two. He wished her well.
810In Cambridge, Joex took the Red line and had a refreshing coffee in the Veri Tasty restaurant. He sat among the cool and knotted roots of Harvard Yard and watched the students, engaged and brisk, walking to their next collocation of learning. The Games Machine would win easily, even it had hands, Joex thought. But how could such a tool be in such corrupt ones?
811However, a darker idea filled his thoughts: what if the power granted by the Games Machine was exactly as promised? How can one be humane if one has transcended the very category of human? What kind of shifting grotesque image does a three-dimension projection throw of a four-dimensional creature? At what point does an ordinary well-educated person become alien to the salt-of-the-earth who perhaps printed the books, moderated, or swept the floors of the seminars that educated him or her?
812Francis Galton said that the eminently gifted are raised as much above mediocrity as idiots are depressed below it: despite the qualitatively superior power and overflowing intellect of the most talented compared to those below, what is missing from these men who would be kings?
813
814 The student center was just off Vassar St; Joex went up to the Science Fiction library and began to wander the stacks. The MIT SF library was not just another bargain bin of acid-rotted pages falling out of glued spines; it was the largest in the world. Simply put, its mission was to acquire every SF and Fantasy story in the universe. Joex sought the shadow campus of the AI lab; its legendary center was on the edge of Boston’s Chinatown in the area once better known as the Combat Zone. In a way, the Science Fiction library was an allegory of the shadow lab; originated by students, it had only a loose affiliation with official campus budgets and policies, rather, it was aligned more with those that came to the conclusion that information and the means to obtain it in larger useful quantities was both the means and the end, and the entire process in-between. Membership in the library—and as he had heard, the shadow lab—had nothing to do with campus affiliation or tenure or age or gender or anarcho-syndical-sexual orientation, but simply had to do with a mutual gregarious obsession with intellectual power. Its intent was furnishing the mind with objets d’art—with a broad definition of art as anything that has been touched by craft and imagination. Its governing rule-of-thumb was that you had studied enough when you saw the interconnections among the most skewed disciplines.
815For members of the lab, the shadow lab represented somewhere where even the limits of the liberated campus were dissolved. If you chose to code while your breasts hang loose, feeling the warm vortices of computers waste heat, that was not an issue. If you wished to spend the next seven months playing on a pocket-sized computer in your sleeping bag in order to compose music, that would not be a problem. Even if you chose to teach juggling to those who had broken away from the hardware and software for a moment, that was not a problem either. Nor did you have to have money. It was helpful to be open-minded: the currency of the place was insight and humor. Many research papers were devised and distilled at the shadow lab. Some were then were distributed and published for the society at large through the review pigeonholes on the official campus research offices. But that was unnecessary. A seminal idea in self-replicating cellular automata would be as likely to be laughed at over take-out Szechuan at the shadow lab as formally presented to a graying audience at the cool million dollar presentation laboratories on campus.
816However, reality intruded as usual—leases must be paid, collective activity must be scheduled, the tragedy of the commons must be continuously diverted to its wonder instead. So, the shadow lab had to move, to re-form, to unplug and ship, renew every year and a half or so. Joex just needed to find it.
817In room 491 there was a group of students in the back of the room talking about something animatedly; in the front there was on the corner of the projection screen a two-foot-sized image—none too bright in the fluorescent glare of the undimmed room lights—of a local program. No sound. Joex flopped into the front corner seat and watched the show. He could hear the conversation going on behind him and intended to break into it when it showed signs of winding down. God he was tired. What the hell was he doing? Maybe all of this is a extended delusion, some kind of homeless dementia. Were agents of a Church really chasing him? Was his background significant to world at all? Was that the Robert Marks that he knew? Was there any mutual significance to any of this or was he seeing a face on Mars, a false unity that was fantastic in all its senses? Was this some kind of manic flash before the end?
818Logically, one way to confirm or to falsify this paranoid configuration is to see if there were in fact a persistent charm coded into the guts of old computer firmware; Joex needed help for that. This was a wonderful place to take a nap. A comfortable chair, a quiet room, the quiet susurrus of air-conditioning and the remote conversation, next to an embracing library among young people realizing the future.
819Once again, Joex drifted off, but burst awake into a sudden clarity. The television projection was showing today’s date, Tuesday, his sister’s face, and then a shrouded gurney; then there was Joe’s twin in a black & white surveillance camera video. His twin was wearing the exact clothing as he had on now. What, what was this? Another paranoid delusion? A projection from his head? The program seemed real; how could his own mind project the annoying logo bug on the corner of the display?
820A jacketed bullet, an armored car, an uncanny pursuit by a Church—aligned with Chinese spies? And all because he might have known someone who had had coded firmware twenty years ago? Maybe it was he on the screen. They showed it again slo-mo. The face was turned away, but—the same height and weight. The same coloring. The same haircut. He wished he could hear what the announcer was saying. He could choose the delusion he preferred. “My poor sister,” he thought. Am I tired because of my guilt? Another slo-mo presentation. Frame by frame. It looked exactly like him from the back. But the shirt had planes where its ironing had not all fallen out. And one more thing. A thing that caused Joex to put his fingers to the back of his head and to trace the razor-cut outline. The figure on the screen had no right-dominated cross on the back of his scalp. The same overall length, but no Crux. Hired help. No delusion that he knew could erase a haircut. His poor sister. She was even one step further removed from the center of the Crux, but it hadn’t saved her.
821 
822
823Chapter 40
824
825All of Assistant Director Kiley Fletch’s suits were deep blue Brook Brothers, except the charcoal Armani which he was wearing now. The President of the United States extended her hand, and motioned for the chief of counterterrorism at the F.B.I. to sit at the one of the chairs at the longer end of the Cabinet room table closest to the entrance and its lunette crown. She turned to Admiral Hawkins of the National Security Agency also to have a seat next to Director Fletch.
826The Cabinet room was otherwise empty, the French doors were open to people going about their business in the remainder of the West Wing. The room smelled of furniture polish and leather. The cabinet secretaries were allowed to purchase and use their own finely upholstered chairs in which they competed to evoke understated elegance and power. Assistant Director Fletch chose the chair with the brass nameplate labeled “Secretary of Defense.” The President drew out the chair next to it and relaxed into it, pushing herself all the way to its back. The thick golden draperies overlooking the Rose Garden were partially closed, giving the room a darkened, intimate effect. It was hard to see the wrinkles in the President’s face distinctly.
827“What is your analysis, Director?” said the President to Kiley Fletch, purposefully omitting the qualifier in the Assistant’s title.
828“Kiley Fletch glanced at Admiral Hawkins, who seemed to have shrunken into the stiff boards of his uniform. “There is a danger. Our agent in charge of Salt Lake City spoke to an informant who claims that there is a high possibility of that our Chinese friends are not just probing our national cyber infrastructure and opportunistically grabbing technical data.”
829“Systematically?” The President asked.
830“I wish that were the whole of it.” Fletch looked at Hawkins again, who seemed to be burying his chin into his decorations. “The informant gave us specific information suggesting that our friends are not only taking technical information, they are actively implanting trojan horses into our infrastructure, and have been doing so for years—decades.”
831The President exhaled and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “’Suggesting?’ Is the purpose known, or at least bounded?” Although the President’s training had been in history before taking her law degree, her undergraduate degree had been taken from MIT. She was more than comfortable with technical jargon and encouraged her science advisors to give her the most accurate and up-to-date account of developments, using the most precise language possible.
832“According to the informant, who is, or at least was, a qualified and experienced computer engineer with relevant knowledge, the purpose is likely to either disrupt or to control the fundamental switching capability of the Internet. The entire Internet.”
833“’The entire Internet.’ That sounds alarming,” said the President dryly, “Admiral Hawkins, your people have discussed the specific facts—she looked back at Director Fletch—with the Bureau. What is your assessment?”
834The Deputy Director of the NSA gave out a little puff of air before taking in a full breath. “The only fact which rates a careful look at this informant’s allegations,” this time the Deputy Director looked at Assistant Director Fletch, who was looking smaller than when he arrived, “is that the Agency has unraveled alternate code in the electronic control units of Toyotas and equivalent circuits in GM and Ford vehicles. In short, there are inactivated instructions in those circuits, which would cause varying malfunctions depending upon the vehicle. Some of the instructions merely degrade the performance, mileage, engine wear, transmission shifting, and in others, cause catastrophic failures such as unlimited high-speed acceleration, emergency braking or air bag deployment at speed. Some vehicles are still operable after degradation, others are ‘bricked’ and the ECU must be replaced before the vehicle can be used again. We have compared the manufacturing contingency chains backwards through the design of the units. These overlays show that in every case, for every affected vehicle manufacturer, the suppliers of the key circuit is a Chinese firm whose address is the city of Hangzhou in central-eastern China. In other words, the key circuits with the bad instructions are included in larger subsystems which are universally used by the major automobile manufacturers.”
835“How long have these circuits been used? And what percent penetration?” asked the President.
836“Over eight years, Madame President, Upwards of sixty percent.” said the Deputy Director, who was now staring into the President’s eyes, whether attempting to assert dominance, or frozen in fear it was impossible to say. “Since the control unit is an expensive part that normally lasts the life of the vehicle, there is a perpetual shortage of replacement ECU’s and—of course—the replacement ECU’s have the same subsystem and ultimately the same shadow code circuits at the current compromised ones. The plus side is that we do not think this code has ever been activated, no do we see how it can be activated en bloc.”
837“You describe that as a ‘plus?’ said the President, “Not knowing something is not a cause for celebration, Admiral.”
838“We deem the purpose of the shadow code as a disruption, more of a ‘denial of service’ attack on our transportation infrastructure rather than overtly destructive,” the Deputy Director continued, “looking at the variations we have seen, it is as if this were an exercise, training, for embedding trojan code rather than a real attack. Thank God.”
839The President steepled her fingers and spoke to the air toward the West Wing doors, “Destruction is not merely blowing things up, Admiral, or erasing data or cutting wires. What do you think that a large fraction of our transport infrastructure being impeded would do to our economy for eighteen months?”
840No one said anything for several uncomfortable seconds.
841“Is this information public?” said the President.
842“No. Agency only.”
843“Good. Now Director Fletch,” again the President omitted the word “assistant” from his title, “who is your informant and how close are you in assessing the scope of his—speculation?”
844The Assistant Director of the FBI looked unhappy. “We have assigned some of our best agents to the job of unwrapping the informant’s technical background and reviewing everything relevant in his past to assess both he truth and the possible implications of his allegations. His name is Joex Baroco, formally Principal scientist at Mooneye in the Silicon Valley.”
845“I’ve heard of Mooneye, Director,” the President said. “One of the innovators that makes us great.” She asked Hawkins, “have you interviewed this source yet, Admiral?”
846“Kiley Fletch interjected: “he can’t yet, Madame President.”
847“Well, have it done immediately. This could be a time bomb,” the President voiced arched up half an octave,” to defend the United States I need not only power, but all effective facts. We need to rule out a threat now. As in right now.”
848“The informant walked away.”
849The President widened her eyes and stared through the Assistant Director. Her head showed a fine tremor silhouetted by the harsh light through the crown of the French doors. 
850“We were considering holding him as a material witness in the Riu Bao case but he walked out of the office,” said Kiley Fletch. He felt the corners of his eyes water. “Re-acquiring him is task number one at the agency. We are also following the leads that he gave, but it will take some time.” He clamped together his teeth and grinned while speaking through the grill of the simulated smile. “We have had reports that he attacked his sister in Boston and that days ago he attacked a woman in a Church in Portland. We are flying out from New York one of the Church’s counterterrorism experts to assist with our task force. A woman named Cassandra Jones. She is what they call their Security Throne at the Church of the Crux.
851
852“Why am I not surprised that the Crux has their hands in this thing? But for all their craziness, they are effective in seeking out and correlating information. As long as it moves from them to us and not the reverse.” The President’s tremor seemed to flow into her arms, her voice deepening. “It is accurate to say that we do not know how much time we have, if his allegations are true? And that, if true, that we do not have any idea on how far this technical rot, shadow code and Trojan horses extend into our entire technical infrastructure?” said the President, now making her hands into fists and pushing the knuckles into the marble edging of the meeting table.
853Once again the silence extended for ten, twenty seconds.
854“How do we know that this Baroco isn’t himself a perpetrator?”
855Again, no one offered an opinion.
856“You will both report to me by Wednesday on an extended interview with Mr. Baroco, independent analysis of every particle of code that he worked on, a concurrent analysis of code now in use, and what can we do to thwart a technical attack on the United States. Finally your progress in executing your plan for preventing this kind of attack now and in the future. If this were a bio threat…”
857Assistant Director Fletch quietly said “one other fact you need to know, we verified that Riu Bao worked with Joex Baroco at Mooneye designing firmware for the original internet switches.”
858“Does ‘Internet switch’ have the import that I imagine it to have, Director?” said the President, equally coolly.
859“Yes, sir, Madame President.”
860The President held the leather-wrapped arms of the chair and pushed herself standing. “That is all, gentlemen.” She walked out through the partially open doors and under the arched glass over them, back toward the Oval office.
861 
862
863Chapter 41
864
865Sam was wandering the streets of Freetown, evading the go-boys who now were looting the DataTel café. It was a stroke of luck that Sam was not sleeping in his cardboard pallet among the cables and orange flickers, but his exchanges with “Jim Rogers” had kept him awake. On both sides of every downtown road in Freetown there was a steady stream of barefoot men and women, boy and girls with baskets of goods overhead. Sometimes there was a candle carried by one or another; mostly there was darkness, the shuffling and whispers interrupted by the stray tan dogs that demanded others’ give way. Occasionally an expensive SUV purchased by foreign donation for the use by some Non-Governmental Organization sponsored by this or that Church or this or that UN commission sped by in the darkness. A dog or person clipped by these cars lay on the ground, stepped over by the steady stream of commerce. Sam stepped on one mat on the ground, flat as his cardboard duvet, that had once been a person—an old man who had survived the sleeping sickness, malaria, civil war, tribal jealousies, and more simply stomach sickness for sixty or seventy years, but had succumbed to old age or a glancing strike by a new swerving Range Rover with black GPS stalk, or perhaps a beaten minibus with ‘God’s Promise’ as its figurehead. Now he was rug of withered leather and bones that had finally crumbled under thousands of feasting insects and human steps. His suffering was over.
866But Sam’s was not. His wandering was leading him downtown toward the shell-marked towers that had what little financial and communications infrastructure that had survived ten years of civil war or was chosen by Care and HOPE and USAID and the Red Cross and various other gongos and quangos to house their missions, accept funding, and to point their satellite arrays at the heavens. Returning to the café was out. Even if he could skirt Cousin Robert, the Lebanese owner would warn the other Datatels about him and the destruction which followed him. But despite the fear of the go-boys which was receding into the streams of midnight people incessantly tracking the warm edges of the city, and his growing need for food and shelter from the festering monsoon, Sam thought about the code he had retrieved and sent to “Jim.” So primitive, the Internetwork operating system. Even though it could be executed thousands of times faster now, back then they sought, as now, to optimize, to hack, to bless the center of the code, to sacrifice clarity upon the alter of marketability and competition. He had heard the computer scientist Donald Knuth say in a grainy avi that the computer doesn’t care how many goto’s are used. But Professor Don, its coder does: twisty little passages, all alike.
867Sam really had no idea of the mind he had been given. It never occurred to him that most others could not review what they had seen as if on a scrolling chart within their head. He looked and thought about the code’s then nascent and primitive function, and what it had evolved into. His mind’s eye decoded instructions, saw errors, and corrected them. He ran simulations of the code in his mind, saw how simply it functioned. He then played games, beginning again with input collisions in the interfaces and random power failures. As he walked toward the center, his eyes sparkled from the searching candles and the globes of sweat on his black skin reflecting the smoky faces of the men and women moving silently around him, as if a mass for the dead.
868
869Sam had reached the Grand Plaza in Freetown. It was surrounded by pock-marked high-rises that before the war held multinational corporations, French, English, Dutch. Now there was a single bank and the French telecom company. Sam squatted at the center fountain, which to his knowledge had never worked. It was filled with picked-over open toilet of dog corpses, rotten mangoes and random scraps of shiny brown paper mixed with pulpy newsprint. Sam took inventory of what he had. A ripped and sun-faded T-shirt of a west African pop star who had never caught on in the west despite his outrageous use of palm wine and local wild ganja, and a pair of olive-drab boxer shorts. It had no pockets. His flip-flops were long lost. He might as well forget his Datatel treasure bundle. For now, a meal would be welcome, or even more so, some tobacco. But he had nothing, with no prospects. And Freetown was not a good place to have nothing. The hollowness of his stomach made Sam feel smaller.
870Meanwhile, he had his thoughts. The ancient ios code welled up without effort and Sam’s mind could scroll it backwards and forwards. If he had been asked, Sam could not explain what he was doing—he simply did not have the right language to describe the landscape of traps, semaphores, flags, sentinels, stacks and queues. But he knew it; tight loops of execution would feel hot to Sam and appear in his mind’s eye in a bright warm color. Branches of code that were rarely taken were cool and blue. Dead code was black. Sam could substitute his own instructions and then watch the new fork execute, change registers, have side-effects. So, what was the issue here with this code?
871There was nothing obviously wrong here, in Sam’s mind. The code implemented a simple switch that would re-route a data stream based upon the condition of several registers that would change based upon rules that were not immediately obvious. There was some implied parallelism with two main threads but as this old code was written back in the day, it’s main function was as much speed as possible, which meant as little operation on the data stream as possible.
872Ancient code, some significance now. Must be code that is still somehow relevant, unlike the billions of lines of code written for hardware that no longer existed for functions no longer needed. And, whatever that was different about this code much be subtle, but fiendishly hidden, for this would be the innermost loop code that had to have been reviewed dozens of times for efficiency not to mention plain error. Maybe he could look at it as if it were a Chess puzzle, mate in seven. Like a Chess puzzle, the position had to be a legal one or code in this case had to work both at what it was supposed to do and whatever it was not supposed to do (or not do); but while the position had to be a legal Chess on (can’t for example have a puzzle with nine white pawns on the board), it didn’t necessarily have to come about from a legal game or nor was it required that it was even possible to come about in any reasonable real-world scenario; for example, he remembered one puzzle featuring four white knights; while possible, it was unlikely that white would promote two pawns to knights rather than, say, a queen, or rook, or even bishop.
873So, what is the analogy with code here? Assume someone had hidden a secret function or mate-in-seven with an innocuous-looking code segment or “position.” How could someone recognize it or even where to look for it among thousands of lines of code?
874Well, it stands to reason that anomalous code, while working as documented would not have been written in a standard manner. There would be something wrong about it, something that would stand out such as choosing to increment a negative number rather than decrement a positive one to reach zero. Equally efficient, equally correct, but conceptually in disarray. Sam reviewed the code again in his mind, scrolling backwards and forwards. This relatively simple code implemented a simple function. Two small pieces stood out. Both of them were in the core double-buffering area. Here the idea that despite external unexpected demands on the computer processor function (an “interrupt”) that none of the raw data stream that the processor was conveying from one external device to another would have any potential for corruption or loss. The buffer was a little reservoir of data that could be filled and emptied out smoothly as needed even if there was a period where it could not get more. The anomalies were a section shared by both double-buffering code that used two bytes, or sixteen bits, rather than the one byte that was needed to address a 256 byte buffer. Oddly enough, only a single byte was allocated for the sixteen-bit address. How could this have ever worked? But this would never break, right, since the upper byte was always masked off with an AND instruction.
875Sam played with the code in his mind.
876Then he got it. An error depended upon the coordinated fault of two separate pieces of code. Neither faulting given out-of-bounds inputs would fail; this had been verified and tested multiple times. But when this piece has this bad input followed by a separate bad input to the second piece of code within the time-frame of a few instructions, then the high byte of this instruction would be written over. Now this wouldn’t matter if the code were an embedded code kept in a read-only memory, instructions could not be overwritten even if attempted. But lately fully writeable memory had such low power requirements, low cost, reliability and of course flexibility to stay one step ahead of competitors by upgrading software on the fly, that read-only memories, even reprogrammable ones were virtually obsolete. So like an ancient Mastodon virus, the thawed bug could once again surface in the world, and could be exploited by those who might know of it.
877What Sam did not know it that this was a species of buffer-overrun error that would result in the data contents of the buffer being interpreted as instructions. Instructions that could do anything only constrained by the switching hardware itself, which was at the core of the Internet.
878Sam did realize that he needed to send “Jim Rogers” the last section of code and convey the anomaly he had noticed. Perhaps “Jim” would reward him with a larger money order? He could hope. What else could he do?
879
880The one thing Sam hadn’t mastered was reconciling the speed of thought with speed of ordinary events. He had to get to an Internet terminal. But he had nothing. But that was not unique in Freetown. One difference is that many others who had nothing still managed to hold some kind of job, such as the myriad guards on the twenty-story buildings around him. They certainly had Internet as their satellite dishes testified. But they were taught to hunt and to catch people exactly like him.
881And 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?
882Then 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.
883
884Maybe 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?
885Now 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.
886One 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.
887
888Even 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.
889He 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.
890He 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.
891But 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.
892Up 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.
893The 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. 
894Sam 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!
895Unfortunately, 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.
896So, 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.
897It 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:
898
89918244-400+18260-467 twin overwrite instruction [NO BATTERY] @ 466 bug bug I luv u
900
901Sam 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]
902Sam 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.
903 
904
905Chapter 42
906
907Joex 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.
908I 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?”
909Margaret 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.
910But 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.
911
912They reached another door. This time there was no need to knock as it opened with a click into crack onto a knife-edge of bright light. Slug pushed it opened and into a circus of noise, light and activity. The building had been an active warehouse years ago; the door opened onto a huge floor—several thousand square feet at a minimum—unbroken by walls. The floor was old and was made of randomly warped mammoth planks set over a concrete subfloor. The ceiling was two floors high lit by a handful of bluish white streetlamps. Around the circumference of the room were sturdy folding tables unbroken except for the entrance of what looked like an office in one corner, a bathroom or toilet in another, and a kitty-corner draped-over area that Joex guessed was probably another exit. There were young people everywhere. Every one of the tables filled with computer monitors and boxes that look like racks of servers or individual computers or switches. In distinction to the uniform color of the monitors like a blue nimbus to the room, in front of them were random chairs and boxes that ranged from sofas, partially eviscerated leather club chairs, and clusters of folding metal seats. The one furniture that seemed out of place in the space was that along the wall toward the far exit were leaned and hung on the walls what Joex recognized as bolt cutters and axes. Here and there was what could be a sledgehammer as well.
913On the center of each of the four walls were inset double-width wooden ladders. As Jack’s beanstalk into the clouds, the destination of the ladders was concealed by what looked like drooping pleated parachute material billowing down several feet over all ceiling space, except for the niches for the halide lamps. The center of the room which had a concrete pillar surround with a thick braid of blue wires was also surrounded by half-a-dozen long tables that were filled with laptops several ply deep and their accompanying milk crates, beanbag pillows and short stacks of mattresses in front of them.
914The only thing more random in the room than the seating arrangements was the people that occupied them. They were talking animatedly to each other and referring to the screens with a gesture or a jaw-lifting laugh. Contrasting the austerity of the room the people were dress in a motley array of colors and styles: several were dress in striped bicycle jersey with form-fitting wool shorts. A group of men were dressed in what looked like pajamas, one woman was topless but wearing a high-top silk hat in a caricature of a nineteenth century political cartoon of a wealthy industrialist. One person who was the size of a child was enthroned on a tall wheelchair counterbalanced with what looked like immense battery packs topped with a battered bright orange traffic pylon.
915A man who looked like a foppish graduate student dressed in a silk robe with one hand in a pocket and the other on an unlit pipe walked over to greet Slug and Margaret and the visitor to the shadow lab.
916“Hello. He took his hand out of his pocket and offered it to Joex. Anything new?”
917Margaret turned to Joex and said, “This is Gee; Gee, meet Joex.”
918“Jokes?” said Gee with a dramatically upraised eyebrow.
919“G?” replied Joex with a smile.
920Margaret looked back at Joex. “He’s the joke explainer. Don’t worry about it, I’ll explain later. She winked. I need to run.” Margaret had spied her boyfriend who was juggling to the admiration of a small audience near the far corner of the room.
921The volume and brightness of the room seemed to increase as Joex scanned it. Joex felt as if he were being engulfed in a tsunami flotsam of noise and color. He felt his cheeks flushing. The shaking in his hand hadn’t stopped, either. Gee touched Joex on the shoulder and directed his attention to what would have been the 3-4 point of a Go board the size of the warehouse. “Let’s get some food. You can use the bathroom if you wish. Let’s talk for a little while. Seriously, what’s new?”
922Between the center ring of laptops and the circumferential ring to monitors there were dozens of what looked like self-contained living areas. There were bedrolls on the floor, little tables not much more than cardboard boxes holding a few pieces of personal property such as unidentified electronics, tiny lamps or books. A couple were showing off a spline glove, it made a purring sound as it reconfigured itself from a steel-hard surface to a velvety-soft one. There were people sitting on the bedrolls, some eating or talking or reading, or lying down on them with random lightshades made from strategic cardboard walls that blocked the bright ceiling lights. Yurts without the yurt. In a rough grid were more traffic pylons which suggested paths through the morass of bedding and property.
923It was challenging to summarize Joex’s life in the last few weeks, and put it in the context of his greater life without sounding as if he were a completely paranoid lunatic. But it took a good ten minutes for Gee and he to make their way to the feeding station and obtained bowls of what looked like steamed Brussels sprouts seasoned with a tiny dollop of sesame oil. Part of the recipe was to thoroughly crush an English Ivy leaf between your fingers before taking a bowl; the bitter odor as your fingers dried flavored the dish in an exotic way. The food was perfect and unexpected.
924Gee listened attentively and asked a few questions, not all of which he could discern their relevance. Gee did not react when Joex supplied his conclusion of how all the events were related and how the shadow lab could play a part in the analysis and possible counteraction. But it hardly mattered now whether Gee was bored or shocked or skeptical or supportive since Joex was at the complete mercy of the shadow lab people. He was going to collapse at any moment. If they were to turn him over the police or just dump him outside, there was nothing he could do about it. However, Gee merely suggested that Joex use the toilet while Gee sought out a prophet.
925“A prophet?” Joex asked.
926“Someone who can make things happen, as in acts of biblical prophecy. You’ll see.”
927Joex agreed.
928When Joex returned from using the toilet and splashing water over his head to both rinse himself off and to keep himself awake for a few more moments, Gee was standing by a woman in her early 40’s, with pigtails, dressed in set of faux furs.
929“Come this way.” She said to Joex, we can meld the corroboration with the problem itself, if it proves interesting.”
930She made her way to a center laptop and motioned for Joex to sit in front of it.
931“Please show me the code that you believe is relevant.”
932Joex logged on to the Darknet using the obfuscated hex address that he had by this time memorized. He selected the thread of emails that he had exchanged with Sam “Ouest” and their attachments. He repeated to the prophet what the code represented and what he had hoped, or was afraid, to find. But it looked as if the prophet was ignoring him, she took over and was reading the email and scanning the attachments; but surely she couldn’t read code that fast?
933Gee kept talking conversationally. “You know, Joex, that we have lost two members of the lab to the crux over the last few years. Suicides. We have been seriously diminished. It is difficult not to hate them. Not to mention their stand on fair use and their extreme use of Copyright legislation to protect themselves. The Perpetual International Copyright Treaty is their latest assault on freedom. Yes, it is very, very difficult not to hate them with a fucking incandescent fury.”
934She lapsed into silence. The prophet continued to read and click, read and click, she told Gee to get another prophet. In contrast to the languor of his evening silks, Gee pressed the back of his wrist and murmured a few words into the air, then went back to Joex, “You know, we had a Games Machine adaptive learning project for a while. But some of us are afraid of Skynet,” he chuckled, referring to the cinematic self-aware malevolent computer. “But not quite like the movie. Our computers are not measurably anthropological yet; they have to rely upon human actors to supply them with whatever you could describe as their will. And it is not the concept of “evil,” which is a purely contingent idea as “time” or “souls,” which has any force, it is just that being an alien intelligence—by definition—means their concerns are disjoint from concerns possessed by us humans, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is everything we can do here—he motioned to the floor around him—to contain the emergent intelligence and restrict it to constructive ends.” Gee paused. “But in the end, we know in order to discover. And to know something new is an adventure whose consequences and ends cannot be anticipated.” “But I am so full of myself, sometimes. “Usually,” he corrected himself. I get tired of technology and want to give it up and become a priest. But then I consider how many Zen Masters were incinerated at Hiroshima.”
935The prophet with the pig tails was joined by a middle-aged man with a bald head balanced by a full Van Dyke beard, which made him look as if his head were put on upside-down. A few minutes after he arrived, another email and attachment from Sam “Ouest” arrived at the mailbox the prophets were now poring over.
936But Joex did not notice the arrivals since he had passed out—collapsed—into the surprised arms of Gee.
937 
938
939Chapter 43
940
941Manager Hu sat on the edge of his cot and considered his utilitarian office. The kerosene had run out again in the night. The cold made his knees ache. He could feel some radiative warmth from the blinded window to the operations room and through it the gentle hum of hundreds of fans on dozens of servers and communications hardware.
942The off switch to the world is not a unitary button, nor is it red. It consists of dozens of separate but interrelated computer commands, some contingent, some repetitive, some in discrete domains, some quantal, some continuous and nuanced. He had to meet with his workers—his children—to agree upon and finalize the interlocking sequences and to initiate the separate stacking of parallel operations. His role was more like a banquet chef that had to make some courses ready at the same time, but some at a later time, and others still later. Some had to be ready through all the other courses. The cooking domains varied from the delicacy of Oysters to the fine-grained cold of French vanilla ice cream. And of course the poison at the very end.
943He might as well get to it. Though the directive was made and affirmed at all the highest, most secret and powerful levels of government, he knew his brother-in-law would sway in the political atmospherics of the State Council reacting to the imminent actual projection of power by the Central Military Commission.
944That is why the rulers ought to be poets, warriors, philosophers, lovers; the current leadership is called “totalitarian” by the west, but the truth is that the monolith of the elite is veined with sand. Its ignorance creates fear and corruption and divisiveness: the manifold of lies and errors fragments the will. Only one who sees the aggregation of history in terms of a lover’s areolate suckling can assemble undivided power. Manager Hu sighed, scratched, farted, reached for his cane and got up to fetch water for tea. He had to initiate all the steps before a coward rose against him.
945 
946
947Chapter 44
948
949As the chartered Citation taxied into the business hub at Logan International, Security Throne Cassandra Jones considered her position and next move. With an implicit presidential directive, she now had the power of the government, the Bureau, the Security Administration, the Congress, and, more significantly, the force of being somewhere beyond the edge of the law. Combined with the power of the Church, she felt invincible. In truth, the only limit on her power was Voide, the First Celestial. Where he stood in her Celestial sphere was not yet fixed. But first Baroco must be stopped, in case he stumbled on a way of thwarting the boxer boys, then she must deal with the Chinese, finally the post-apocalypse regularization of the Church hierarchy. The Games Machine may be transformational, but for now, its acolytes were fragile men.
950The Chinese were counting on their ancient kingdom to impose inevitability upon the west after the event. But, again, the boxers believed in feng-shui and fortune cookies. Ten thousand years of civilization and the result is public school fees still out of the reach of rural Chinese?
951Well, their joss-crackers can make the culture wobble, but the Church has the inner truth of the confessional, even upon several of the Chinese Central Committee and the American Senate. This will decide the future. And Cassandra, as her namesake, had a way of knowing the future, whether or not she was believed.
952First, Vassar Street, as we see what progress on tracking and identifying the woman that was with Baroco. Then we come down with the force of the Church of the Crux upon them. Ganbei!
953Jones adjusted the Glock 30 in the garter belt nestled in the foregate of her thigh. It was warm and she enjoyed its feeling. Solid. Unyielding. Visualizing the eleven HydraShock cartridges was like following a lover’s spine with a finger. She arched her back involuntarily to its thought, and then settled back into the seat as the jet was completing making the final circle to park. She flipped open her laptop and typed in the TrueCrypt passphrase. She had full access to Boston’s municipal security videos and to the Church’s recognition tools. Baroco didn’t have a chance.
954 
955
956Chapter 45
957
958Joex awoke to someone fellating him. From above him billows of nylon cloth were attached in a tractrix grid of gathered lines as if parachutes deployed upside-down. He realized that he nested in a heap of random down jackets, sleeping bags and duvets on some sort of platform up in the ceiling space of the shadow lab. The heat collected as it rose. It was comfortable, cloudlike, almost ethereal. It was quiet but not lonely and could not quite make out the susurrus of the conversations below.
959He was tired and aching, but didn’t move so as not to disturb the attention he was being given. He reached out his arm to guide the shoulder of whoever was his personal satyr. Looking down the length of his body, he saw that his warm nakedness was dappled with down garments. Margaret was articulating his debauch with gentleness and specificity. She was using a rectangular plastic bag in a frugal expression of prudence, and looked as if she were prepared to spend as much time as needed performing her art. When Joex touched her, Margaret glanced up, the corners of her eyes wrinkling into a smile and reapplied herself silently to her slow glissades.
960Joex finished with a sigh, clasping Margaret’s shoulders with his hands. Margaret uttered a little laugh and asked, “Did you have a nice sleep?”
961Joex gently craned his head down to the top of Margaret’s and kissed it.
962Margaret drew back, sat up, criss-crossed her legs, and put her palms on the floor beside her shoulders. She launched into technical analysis as if she were an engineer returning from a lunch break.
963“So, this is what is happening. While you slept, the prophets looked at your code. Your correspondent, Ouest, Sam, was right to point out the coactive buffer overrun. It is amazing that this was never found in all these years. But, then Sendmail was a bug breeder for the first twenty years of its deployment. Its original generality turned out to be a weakness when only required to do the narrow task that the Internet eventually required of it.
964“Dickie—the prophet with the high albedo—wants to alert the community immediately, with a pithy email to select security mailing lists both in the industry and with some players he knows at Ft. George Meade. Of course the players insist they work for the Credit Union, and their encyclopedic knowledge of cryptography and covert channels is a happy accident. But.”
965“But?” said Joex. 
966“But—assuming you are not a delusional schizophrenic—the context is that the Crux is really trying to take you out. The footage from last night was persuasive. I am so sorry about your sister! She paused. But even the Crux are reputed to act with efficiency and relentless, but deliberate, haste. Xtance, who you also met, and the third prophet, Lex, who you haven’t, think that their extreme measures mean that we are running out of time. And not coincidentally Lex thinks you may be a danger to us and would like to move you out of here to an even less public house.” She paused as if weighing the possible effect of her next sentence.
967“And, yeah, the coactive is probably embedded in over ninety percent of commercial switches. And has been for the last twenty years. So whether you are delusional or not, there is a clear and present danger. I have no idea how much damage could be caused, especially to the United States, but I suspect a lot. In fact, a huge amount.”
968Though confirming his suspicion, paradoxically Joex felt his chest flutter in relief as he felt as if his nightmare was finally shared and understood. He felt as if he were floating away. At least a few others now had his information and in fact had confirmed it was knowledge.
969Margaret went on, “the simple act of communicating this externally may precipitate its exploit. The time to code, test, and issue a patch over so many platforms and corporate entities will be almost certainly too long given the time we likely have.”
970“So, is there anything to do to reduce the threat? What are we going to do? What can I do?”
971“We call it ‘denaturing’ the production code to keep its properties while lessening its appeal to vandals. Yes, this is the plan. We are writing our own exploit for the error, that is actually the easy part after someone has pointed out where to look in the first place. In fact, they may be testing it now in one of the sandboxen. Then we distribute it ourselves into the wild. What we want is to prevent others’ from exploiting this while we or others write definitive patches. Sterile fruit flies. We need time. Any mistake on our part might be as bad as the intent of the Adversary. The distribution is the key—universal and soon. But first, this fix has to be as perfect as we can make it.”
972“Do we bring in the government, say, the military or the TSA?” Joex asked.
973Margaret brayed—how else could it be described?—“the government doesn’t work in the domain of time. The government has immense resources and some kind of organizational perseverance. But insight and tempo are qualities I would not associate with them. We must summon a monkey jump, a divine move. In hours or sooner if possible—not days or weeks.”
974“And what you can do, beyond help to think about how to distribute this patch as quickly and universally as possible, just stay the fuck alive. Bringing us this information is sufficient for one heroic lifetime. Oh yes, it is sufficient. The virtual of the shadow lab is that is can find the people who can best use your knowledge as quickly as possible. In fact, that is the most important purpose of the entire Internet. And maybe the whole culture.”
975Joex sat up and felt the weight of lack of sleep on his chest. “At least I can look over your shoulders and maybe help. And, Margaret,” he looked at her with a tentative expression, “don’t you have a boyfriend?”
976“Sure do. Outside our virtual worlds, we have jugglers, jongleurs, and gamahuchers. I’m one of those.” “No hard feelings,” she smiled and playfully made to slap at Joex’s naked groin. She stood up and motioned with her head toward the wooden ladder on the wall. “If you can find your clothes, let’s go down together.”
977 
978
979Chapter 46
980
981In a way, Sam had been lucky that the smart phone’s battery had failed. Along with the failure of the communication function, the phone’s GPS tracking which was logged and monitored whether the smart phone was switched on or off was also terminated. But Sam did not know this, nor did he know whether or not his last message had been successfully transmitted. His first priority now, after keeping out of the sight of security men—especially Cousin Robert’s go-boys—was to obtain Internet time. The smart phone might be parlayed into such time, or perhaps recharged and used again surreptitiously near the communications building. Spotlights had been turned on at the apex of the building and Sam could see the dishes aimed straight up as if prayerful hands toward a God that was both technologically sophisticated and unimaginably distant.
982But it wasn’t technology that was the key for Sam now. It was people. Diverse, noisy, communicative. Living outside his imagination. Sam heard the honk of a horn in the night; the distinctive three note fanfare of the minibus operator whose corporate motto was “God Bless this Fiat.”
983The S/L Motor Drivers Union on Charlotte Street. That is where there was sure to be drivers handing out any time day or night. Sam joined a line of people trudging with their goods at the side of the road heading east. In the bobbing candlelight, Sam saw a lizard with yellow head and shoulders jump off the bed of a handcart fashioned from random planks and an automobile rear axle. With the drivers, he had hope. Maybe some food, maybe they know a charger or computer he could use.
984Near the equator, the period of sunrise and sunset was very short. One instant it is light. Then darkness. Then once again, broad daylight as if the gloom had been a dream washed out in a sudden downpour. While it was still dark and only pregnant with the possibility of dawn, Sam felt much more hopeful as he squatted around the brazier that the drivers’ boys kept fired up during the night. He flashed his stolen smart phone as if a membership card and tentatively took a handful of rice and fish from the common bowl. No one challenged his right to share the food.
985Dangling the smart phone between two slender fingers as if it were the most commonplace totem in an animism of wealth, he asked the boys if they knew of computers. “Computer!” one said, “Computer!” and then glanced into the darkness at an abacus propped against a cement block wall overgrown with vine.
986“No. Machine! Electric machine, computer!” Sam said. The various creoles made communicating a game of ghosts.
987“We sell provision here.” One of the boys enigmatically responded. “Computer, there!” the boy pointed at a driver enjoying a pink Elephant brand smoke while lounging against his battered taxi.
988Sam rose, sauntered up to the driver, displaying his smart phone and asked “can you take me to a computer. I would like to use the Internet for a few minutes.”
989The driver whose lower lip puckered into a trellis of white keloid scars looked at him appraisingly. “Cost money,” he said, “where is your money.” Sam couldn’t tell what tribe the man was from, but it wasn’t Mende. Sam showed him the smart phone from a distance. The driver reached for it, but Sam kept it just out of reach. There were a handful of incandescent bulbs shining in their aluminum reflectors scattered around the Union and sparkles of light were flashing off the smart phone into Sam and the driver’s eyes.
990Sam could see the greed grow in the driver’s face.
991“OK. I take you to computer, my cousin, you use if you give me that. It work?”
992“Battery needs charging. Works fine,” said Sam.
993“We charge. We see. If mobile don’t work, you get a machete beating. You deal?”
994Sam had no doubt that the driver did have a Chinese machete, patiently honed and oiled with palm oil in a rag mounted on the driver’s door or under his seat. Violence was an element of survival in Freetown. A good driver could drive mostly between the road hazards, fix a wreck, find your food, change your money, get your lady or boy whores with their palm wine—or cut off your head with only the regret that the money and property taken off your corpse would be your last contribution to his welfare.
995“My cousin works in hotel, he has computer,” the driver said, “get in the front.”
996With the driver chauffeuring him, Sam was once again driving toward the sea. There were of course no street lamps. Pedestrians weaving their way around piles of rotting refuse suddenly loomed out of the dark into the taxis mis-aimed headlights. Both of the headlights worked though after a fashion and the driver was able to get to a dilapidated concrete building in less than ten minutes. There was a torn green awning over the poorly lit entrance that spelled out “Lord’s House Hot.” The driver took his machete and sucking on what was left of his lower lip, directed Sam into the building.
997Inside the Hotel, which looked as if it had been decaying even as it had been designed by an impaired imagination, had a single bare bulb shining in the foyer. Beside a thick wooden counter that looked as if the most solid element of furniture that Sam could see, an office with open door and flickering candle showed some movement as a shadow emerged into the lobby.
998“Cousin Kena!” the boy emerging from the office said to the driver. 
999“Cousin MJ!” driver said in return, slapping the boy on his shoulder, “boy want to use computer. He trade mobile that he says works fine,” the driver, MJ, slapped the flat of his machete against his thigh and sucked even more vigorously at his lower lip. Sam showed off the smart phone to the boy, moving it in the bulb’s light to give off a flash. The boy held out his hand for the phone and Sam reluctantly handed it over under MJ’s gaze. The boy took it gingerly, turned it over and weighed it in his hand, then studied it carefully and pressed the power switch. The display lit for a second and then turned off. The boy shook the mobile and said, “Needs charge.”
1000The driver said nothing but kept slapping his thigh and sucking his lip. Kena, the night manager, said, we have a charger for this. He went back into his office and Sam heard some rummaging around in a box. Kena came out with a tiny charger with a tangled cord. He plugged it into a yellowed wall outlet, took his finger off the mobile’s charging port and plugged it in. As if in sympathetic greeting or imminent execution, the main foyer bulb momentarily dimmed and then resumed its steady unhealthy yellow glare.
1001“We have power,” Kena said, unnecessarily, “mobile charge in no time.”
1002Sam knew of course that while the smart phone could be charged and used in some manner the fact that here it couldn’t make calls or browse the Internet might cause an unpleasant confrontation with the driver, MJ, who had not only wasted petrol to give Sam a right to the Lord’s House Hotel, he was wasting time and possibly fares by staying.
1003Sam said, “Computer?” The boy motioned him into the office. While the boy chatted with the driver, both looking at the polished screen of the smart phone, Sam sat at an ancient PC that was covered with paper ledgers and a ashtray that appeared to double as a spittoon. Carefully moving the stacks of paper and other detritus to the floor, he reached behind the old CRT monitor and pressed the rocker switch on. An amber light started glowing in the front bezel. Relieved, Sam, reached behind the ancient computer box, found a corresponding switch, and rocked it on as well. While there was no lights this time, the box emitted a arpeggio of beeps and a fan hum that seemed to turn in fits as it blew out pieces of dust and lint that had accumulated in the fan ducting.
1004The PC booted into a version of MS-DOS that apparently predated Windows. In some ways, Sam preferred the command prompt to a shuffle, point, aim, and click interface, and just typed “ls.”
1005From outside the office the driver shouted, “Boy! What is your name?”
1006Sam, becoming engrossed in the half-remembered MS-DOS command set, replied “Sam Lion-McNamara.” Too late, he thought that it might have been better to make up a name, but he was absorbed in finding the Internet access application to verify he could get on line. With a few keystrokes, he launched the terminal application program; with the appropriate whistling and hand-shaking the computer used the Sierra Tel lines to get a 300 bps connection. But the connection just echoed a > prompt at him and he couldn’t enter an Internet address. Searching the application directory, Sam found a promising application called WebMan and launched it. It launched a rough graphical user interface that had a box that Sam could enter an address. He entered the web page for Tor and let the ancient PC slowly redraw the screen to the Tor home page. He needed to download a Tor client that would work under DOS.
1007While Sam was working on these technical problems, the driver and the manager were talking about the smart phone and Sam Lion-McNamara. The driver went back to his taxi where the radio was occasionally blurting out a call from this driver to that, mostly discussing where they could get petrol or cheap wine. He got on the radio and chatted up the ether while Sam also chatted up his digital version.
1008While it time seemed to slow and the night turned closer to dawn, Sam was eventually able to log on to his Ouest account in Darknet and oh so slowly read his fresh mail. His world was in computer time now and his mind, temporarily detached from the muggy danger of this decaying hotel, raced to consider the possibilities of what he was reading. A person called Xtance sent him some fresh code and a plea. Sam immediately grasped the significance of the code and what he was asked to do. His mind raced on how best to accomplish what was requested.
1009Sam emerged from his computer ratiocination and simultaneously became aware of three things. First, that there was some kind of argument among several people outside the hotel, two, he distinctly heard “Lion-McNamara” and over the clipping audio of the taxi loudspeaker and, three, he heard another vehicle, heavy and large by its sound, burst up to the hotel and stop with yawl of tires. Individually, each of these signaled possible danger to Sam; together they caused Sam to react without thinking.
1010Off the chair, knocking the computer mouse to the floor, out of the office to the surprised face of night-manager Kena and turning away from brilliant headlights outside to the darkness into the depths of the hotel. The last thing that Sam did before he escaped into the darkness was to tear the partially charged mobile smart phone away from its mooring and clutched its warmth in his palm as he sprinted into the blackness.
1011 
1012
1013Chapter 47
1014
1015“Yes, First Celestial. We are surrounding the building of the computer lab where we believe Baroco is.” Security Throne Cassandra Jones was in the back of a rented Lexis with her laptop open on the right and a WiFi to Internet box on the seat to her left. Her Glock was hard between her thighs. She could see the fresh Crux shaved into the buzzed back of the head of her driver who doubled as her security escort while in Boston. Next to the driver was a liaison from the Boston office of the FBI, Andrew Sahas; Cassandra had specifically recruited Andrew herself among her New York parichoners to apply to the academy several years before. The Church had both physically trained him and, despite Bureau recruitment rules that were laxer than their requirements from the 60’s, the Church qualified him with a J.D. degree from Santa Clara University deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, along with a joint public accounting certificate that he obtained while subsequently in the finance program at Boston University. He worked in legal at Apple Boston while he applied to the academy to acquaint him with high technology patents, copyrights, and trade secrets. He had of course several other Church-based skills that did not appear on his C.V.
1016Although he was pushing the upper age limit for an appointment, he was selected for the academy on his first try. The background check was a particular lacunae of the Bureau, anything alleged to do with religion was held to be off-limits with respect to an investigation. Besides all the parichoners who were interviewed—and there were none but parichoners who knew him as a child—had only glowing, positive things to say about him. Almost as if scripted, they were so full of praise for this honest, moral, helpful and intelligent young man.
1017He graduated with special mention before assigned as a Special Agent to the Boston office. But while the Bureau was his sworn employer, the Church was his absolute master. He would do anything ordered by the Security Throne. As a child on the Games Machine, he remembered the phrase “To a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”
1018“The fix is progressively is being successfully better resolved. “We have the block; we just need the specific building now.” 
1019Cassandra’s car was parked in a fire zone, a plastic Boston Police sticker electrostatically attached to the inside of the driver’s window.
1020She heard Michael Voide’s voice warped from satellite and encryption phase jitter speak to her as if to a close friend. “The Church needs Baroco dead now. Anyone around him deserves whatever fate hands to them as well. But we need this to happen now. The Church is on the verge of greatness, the very edge.” She imagined him speaking into her ear, warm lips touching, humid breath condensing on intimate folds. She hated him, he was her rapist. She did not give consent, but she could not say “no.”
1021“Yes, First Celestial. Within minutes.”
1022
1023Cassandra Jones closed her phone, glanced at her laptop, said “765,” closed the laptop, and addressed Parichoner Special Agent Sahas: “Andrew, we are getting out now. We know the address of the safe house where Baroco is hiding. We are going to stop a terrorist from damaging the infrastructure of the United States and punish an attacker on the Church. Do you understand?”
1024Andrew looked back at Cassandra. “Yes, Throne. Immediately.” He felt his excitement responding to her direction as he opened the passenger door and stood ready to accompany her into the morning foot traffic. Unintelligible conversations surrounded them in these neighborhoods of mixed warehouse and store fronts that had seen much better days. He had missed that thing since his times with the Games Machine and in interview with Crux staff. Not since the last time he had been ordered by a Church superior had he been so aroused.
1025 
1026
1027Chapter 48
1028
1029Xtance was fanning herself with her faux stole, tugging on one pigtail, and considering what to do next. She had been alerted by recognition software and web cams strategically placed on the block that a major police action was coming down. The software checked every few seconds and counted the number of Boston police insignia within the view of the wireless web cams surrounding the block whether the shadow lab was located. It had become the highest by a factor of three than the software had ever measured. On the surface, the fact that there was no increase in emergency siren level detected by the cams seems to contradict the logo count, it was worse to her. It meant that in some sense, this operation was somewhat stealthy. Although apparently the need for police units outstripped their need to appear in unmarked vehicles.
1030Xtance could make a general announcement, but decided against it. She interrupted Baroco and Margaret who were in line for a petit breakfast of coffee, non-gluten toast and some a few sections of grapefruit. “Time to go. There is going to be action here pretty damn quick. I’ll tell you on the way.” She motioned toward the curtained second corner opposite of where Joex had come in. Margaret said, “Get going. I’ll let people know of the Omega.” This was almost a game to the shadow lab. Over the forty-year course of its existence, it had had to move more than a score of times. Sometimes it was the fire marshal, sometimes the police, sometimes the owner or building manager, or sometimes just that its location was becoming too well known by strangers. The Omega was the code name for packing it up and waiting for the lab to reconstitute somewhere else. After a while through personal contact, the word would get out and interested MIT people and their friends would accrete once more as pebbles under the weak but persistent gravity of untrammeled knowledge.
1031The Omega protocol went something like this: you have minutes to take your personal property out. The prophet who announced the protocol announced the exact number. After that time expired, everything left was trash. In fact, anything left was to explicitly become trash, invited to be destroyed—which in itself was a great deal of fun to the stragglers. The wall that had leaned against it bolt cutters, sledgehammers, and axes constantly reminded everyone of the protocol. It was like a Burning Man festival with computer equipment and random gadgets as the final offering.
1032Wile Margaret was darting around and personally alerting all that she could see, Xtance herself began the countdown, “OMEGA. TEN MINUTES.” Immediately, as if cued from a script, people started purposefully moving on the floor and shimmying down the wall-ladders. Not surprisingly, most of the bedding and computers were abandoned, but a several laptops were unplugged and removed and hard drives and small electronics were slid out of enclosures to be put into a cargo pocket or backpack. It was presumed that any data storage that survived Omega would be securely encrypted. And paper documents were not so much forbidden or discouraged, but—unstylish. The goal of Omega was to quit the premises in a way that left few clues upon the purpose or identity of the participants. It wasn’t really a secret that the participants were mainly MIT students and faculty, it was that the reputation and positive relationship of the campus and the city were so positive that the police never investigated too far on who did what to whom despite angry property owners.
1033It was the dissolution of a rave. After taking whatever personal property you chose to, you merely left and made you way back separately into your public life. By walking, bicycle, bus, or car pool; whether to a dormitory, or to a parents’ home, or to a nameless homeless destination, you were to evaporate to sublime, to become temporarily invisible to the common purpose here at the shadow lab. 
1034
1035Then the trashing party would begin, but even so after a few minutes of wanton destruction—only physical force, personally wielded, was permitted, never power tools, explosives or fire—the final revelers would leave. True, a huge mess would be left behind. But more often than not in the past a neat stack of ten one-thousand dollar United States Postal money orders would be mailed anonymously to the registered owner in compensation of their cleanup. After forty years, a lot of MIT graduates owed their best memories and some portion of their material success to their version of the shadow lab back in their day. MIT, as many institutions, had their fraternity row, their secret clubs and organizations—but in the end, it was the shadow lab that was unique among all the worldwide gatherings of teachers and those who would be taught. The shadow lab is the best picture of the MIT intellect.
1036Xtance nodded to Margaret that she should take over the countdown as Xtance was guiding Joex away from the building. “Into the sewers we go!” She turned left with Joex outside the corner drapery but before the emergency exit doors to the outside. “We are going a different way. About twenty feet down the back hallway there was a square corrugated iron cover bolted to the internal wall and continuing onto the floor. The floor appeared seamless and the wall mounting had two large bolts with nuts apparently welded to the bolts. “That’s just a dummy. Watch!” Xtance pushed hard sideways on an eyehooks attached to a rectangular painted block that matched the faded wall, the block was hard to move at first, but then slid right off. “Neodymium” Xtance said. She then slapped it down on the smooth flow plate, which it attached with a solid clang, and Xtance used the hook to lift off the cover into a hole that contained a metal ladder going steadily into darkness. “You first!” she said cheerfully to Joex. It goes down about eight feet. Just wait for me at the bottom.”
1037She watched Joex lumber down the ladder somewhat apprehensively, and then went down several rungs of the ladder herself, sliding the magnetic grip off the plate and refitting it carefully above her. She and Joex were now in total darkness, with a foul miasma rising to them. “Just one more second, Mr. Baroco,” Xtance cheerfully spoke into the darkness.
1038Standing in the echoing concrete fusty darkness, Joex suddenly remembered his father again. Joex was about four or five, insignificant compared to the powerful grip that was hanging him over the edge of a pier in Old Town. Joex could remember the dark green water lapping at the creosote and barnacle piers ten or fifteen feet below. Joex could also remember his perfect helplessness and fear as he shut down everything in order not to provoke what was going to happen. But what Joex remembered most clearly was not the cold indwelling of air off the morning sound or the petroleum sheen gilding the wavelets, but it was the barely perceptible shifted glance over this shoulder of his dad before the set of furrows in his face weathered over and he reluctantly brought Joex back to the pier. Later in the day, his father took him down to Commerce Street to buy a new Rolex Submariner for himself. One with the crown and the real radium paint on the dial that would flash and flicker no matter how long it was kept in the dark. Joex thought of his sister. “YOU GODDAMN COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCKING CUNT,” Joex shouted into the dark.
1039“What?” said Xtance. As virtually every other MIT student who had thought about such things, she carried a knife, a loupe, a monocular, a lighter, a compact skein of high test Dacron fishing line, a folded sheet of mylar, and a flashlight. She turned on the tiny flashlight and illuminated Joex’s feet. “See—nice and dry. Let’s go to the next building over. What are you shouting about?”
1040
1041At the instant that she spoke this, a tall woman dressed in what appeared to be a black suit with long shiny leather gloves accompanied by a serious-looking man in a Brooks Brothers off-the-shelf pulled open the rear door of 765, against the tide of those who were leaving. He was openly carrying the small gold badge of a Special Agent along with his service Glock .40, while she just displayed her compact Glock, still warm from its holster. They were grimly looking at faces of those streaming past them as then went in.
1042 
1043
1044Chapter 49 
1045
1046Manager Hu rarely had visitors in the evening and it took him a while to stand, reach for his cane, and shuffle to the door. “Colonel Hu! Stand down!” It had been a long, long while since Manager Hu had heard his rank, but it didn’t affect his pace in reaching the metal door and unlatching it. The humidity had turned to a chill in the evening and quickly ushered in Commander Ji while his driver, rather than waiting in the car, was standing attentively with his hands slightly lifted to his hips as if he were going to lift something..
1047Manager Hu urged the Commander to sit and have a mug of tea to ward off the evening air. “Please, Colonel. Have you shut down the computer strike?” Commander Ji insisted.
1048Manager Hu said nothing as he prepared the hot plate and the mug of cold water that he poured from crockery. He then asked, “So, my brother-in-law has changed his mind?”
1049“The Council and the Central Military Commission are opposed for now, as well, Colonel. It is not the right time.”
1050Manager Hu selected a pinch of tea from a tiny cubical paper box and crushed it under his nose, seeing if he could sense all the subtly of the history of this particular leaf. “From our history before we were China until I crushed this tea, they have decided that this instant is not yet right? Is that the message, Commander?”
1051“Please, Colonel. Have you shut down the strike? I am to take over this facility now. It is time for you to rest, Colonel.”
1052Manager Hu noticed the steam beginning to rise from the water in the aluminum pan he had set upon the hot plate. “No, it is done. The thousands of years of history focus on this spot, at this instant. It is too bright for us. But it shines regardless whether we blink or squint or shy away from it.”
1053Commander Ji a good thirty years younger than the elder man as well as taller and much more powerful, rested his good left hand on Manager Hu’s wrist as his twisted right touched the leather flapped over his 9mm QSZ. “Let us shut it down together, Colonel.”
1054As if cued to a choreographic memory, Manager Hu drew away slowly from the Command, smartly snapped the center of his cane on the corner of his desk. The cane broke and the bottom third hung by a thread from its body. Commander Ji, not alarmed, even amused by the elderly man’s anger—even breaking his own cane—just waited for it to play out and to give in to the inevitable.
1055Manager Hu, lifted his cane, took the hanging piece with his left hand and tore it off. It had broken cleanly on its elliptical ceramic groove. Now with a piece of the cane in each hand, Colonel Hu thrust the longer piece, whose breaking had produced a hollow spear as sharp as freshly broken glass, into the groin of the Commander. The Commander involuntarily bent over as if respectfully greeting thousands of years of history. Colonel Hu then drove the shorter spear, whose elliptical blade mirrored the one on the right, into the right carotid and subclavian arteries and through the tough gristle of the Commander’s pharynx. The titanium cannula gushed blood in heavy pulses. Commander Ji fell to the floor, fetally, gurgling. The Manager turned back to his tea, putting a generous pinch into the mug, which he filled with water not quite yet boiling. He cupped the mug in both hands to enjoy its warmth. Noting that the Commander was not in line-of-sight of the open door, Manager Hu opened the flimsy aluminum door stepped outside and offered the steaming mug to the driver. The driver accepted the hot mug with pleasure and with a slight twitch of his shoulders gave his respect to the older man as generous host. Manager Hu smiled and returned a barely perceptible dip of his head.
1056“The Commander and I will be talking for a while, please stay warm while we do,” said Manager Hu. The driver said nothing but blew the hot vapor off the surface of the tea as if it were a soul that was being freed.
1057Manager Hu then returned to his office, closed and latched the door, sat down on his cot and began speaking to the corpse. “Inevitability. We should be glad that we are connected so closely to history. Manager Hu rubbed his thighs and consciously took a breath that was full of the smell of tea and blood. He thoughts flickered to Michael Voide, then he thought of the Chinese people as though they were a leafy covering a in a late summer forest. “Commander, I am you. And we both are the Chinese people. It is too late now to turn aside the plough; after midnight, we are done. But the Chinese people cannot be obstructed: while each leaf turns into a rotted net of veins, the fall color binds fast.”
1058 
1059
1060Chapter 50
1061
1062Xtance and Joex reached the end of the sewer that connected the 765 building with its neighbor, virtually a twin of the warehouse. Unlike 765, its neighbor had not been used since it had been closed months before. She decided that rather than waiting it was best if Joex and she put as much distance between them and the authorities who were closing the ring on the twin building. Xtance pointed the way to the second floor and to the window with the vintage wrought iron fire escape. With both their weight on the vertical ladder within a cage, it rattled and scraped down within six feet of the pavement where both Joex and Xtance simply let themselves drop to the ground.
1063“Let’s go.” Xtance led them north, away from the shadow lab and toward the thoroughfare that led back to Cambridge. They walked quickly and did not turn back. On the way, Xtance spoke to Joex. “Why would we believe you. There are so many outlandish stories in the world, which not surprisingly, turn out to be false. True stories are beyond outlandish; they are absurd, even impossible, until their logic is incorporated into a new world-view. In particular, there are many outlandish stories about the Church of the Crux. Who knows what the facts are? Perhaps so-called apostates seeking revenge for imagined internal attacks. You, homeless, just out of the blue a target for a Crux assassin? Even if they are only a church in the same way organized crime is a church, or a major bank stripping their stockholders of value in exchange for outrageous executive compensation is a church. Perhaps these organizations seek out the weak that lack the fundamental strength to keep the same opinion from one week to the next.”
1064
1065“But we do know Mark and Sinder, they were two who committed suicide after associating with the Church. I knew Mark personally, he is the Prophet who led me to the shadow lab my first time. Mark loved learning. Mark loved technology. And he loved learning new skills that would entertain or help people. Juggling. Shadow puppetry. Bicycle mechanic. Copy editor. Tailor. He was recruited into the Crux in his first year on campus, it was socially challenging for him to go from home-schooling several thousand miles away to the urban MIT campus. Especially for a beautiful gay man. The Church of the Crux seemed at first to provide that support, and simultaneously challenge his intellect.
1066He told me of the wonders of the Games Machine, which he described as the ultimate video game. A game in which you wanted to learn every detail and allusion, to know every answer including those which changed depending upon context and semantic ambit. For more than a year it seemed to be helpful to his academic achievement. He was brilliant even by school standards: he matriculated at 13 and taught algebraic topology in a novel manner at 15. He had inherited the soul of Alan Turing. But eventually despite the intense growth he felt from using the Games Machine, he was always troubled after his sessions at the Crux. He would shy away from people, he began to be afraid for apparently no reason of new people he met. He was always looking for signs that he would be attacked in the motions and words of those around him. ‘Paranoid semiotics’ we mocked him at first.”
1067They got on the Red Line going west and Xtance continued.
1068“The word ‘intervention’ started being mention in reference to Mark. But despite the signs of emotional disturbance, he without question was benefitting a great deal intellectually from his time at the Church. He began to work on a project to replace the Games Machine. Called the Cataract, it was to be a free alternative to the Crux, which Mark was beginning to find oppressive despite the euphoria of the Church. But the Crux owned him. I guess that was our failure: we worship learning and discovery so much that the worship exceeds our better judgment about safety and proportionality. But to know that is once again “knowledge” to be “known.” It is maddingly self-referential.
1069Once before a woman I knew died of a heart attack, which I should have known was brought about by forgetting to eat or drink while gaming for 72 hours straight. The piss pooling at her feet ought to have been a clue—but…it was a time in which we thought that friends left each other alone to make their own decisions. Even ones which might kill them.”
1070“Mark was churning out papers in his field, in both depth and breadth and somehow…intensity…they were some of the best work I’ve ever seen. We have these cubbyholes at the math department. It is traditional to leave copies of your unpublished papers in them so that bored faculty and students can read and mark them up. Of course, being anonymous, they were viciously but at the same time effectively attacked, criticized, and…perfected. I remember one weekend Mark had filled every cubbyhole on the width with a new paper to submit for publication. It was unimaginable.”
1071“But then things got worse. Mark had trouble sleeping. More than once, he would call me at 3 or 4 AM and complain of people rattling his windows and making his floor buckle. I urged him to see a campus counselor, but he said that there was counseling—he called them ‘interviews’—within the Church. At any cost, he could not give up the Games Machine. But he was working feverously on the Cataract to replace it. The cost did turn out to be a heavy one. After being served a cease and desist demand from the Church, he asphyxiated himself on the toilet.” Xtance furrowed her brow. Her lips grew white.
1072“I was asked to fetch his papers and to submit the ones that were sufficiently completed to warrant peer review. I got three of his papers published posthumously, I am sure I would have gotten many more published if I had known where he kept his research notes. But then I stumbled on his greatest work, the Cataract.”
1073Xtance was silent for a while. The train passed Charles.
1074“You know, the shadow lab had a Games Machine project going at one time. Or what I imagine a secular Games Machine would be like. Self-adapting. Constantly improving. Faster than real-time. Inclusive. Emotionally non-judgmental. Wholly focused on activating every cognitive circuit in your head. Integrating your senses with your newly awakened intellect. Yes, it sounds like pretentious or platitudinous tripe. Orgone energy. But we knew it was possible. Mark and Sinder were proof-of-concept, at least to me. But we dropped it.”
1075The train passed Kendall/MIT. “Next one” said Xtance to Joex as he looked at her questioningly.
1076“We decided that the exercise was not yet human, or humane. It’s my view that people are differing projections of the same entity skipping through time and dimension. It is a family resemblance in which we don’t necessarily share any particular traits with any other being, but yet, we resemble one another—for want of a better term—morally. That is the family trait. A moral sense. But not a pre-packaged sense of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but the on-going inquiry into mutually benefitting the world and the multiverse. What evokes a networked diversity. Imagine an exponential version of Metcalfe’s Law. A powerset of cardinality. Anyway. If I am speaking gibberish, I apologize,”
1077“Each one of us, and that include beings we may discover in the future from other worlds both inside and outside this planet, is an aspect of one another. Like a photon with its coupled magnetic and electrical component in differing domains, or perhaps as gravity may appear attenuated because of its skipping and churning through parallel dimensions, we are each as important as a component’s description of something in aggregate that we can’t yet name.” Xtance saw that she was losing Joex. “Or, in another way, I believe in the saying: ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you,’ except—there are no ‘others.’”
1078When the train went under an underpass, its windows reflected ectoplastic people swaying around them.
1079Learning is non-sense if it is not in the context of other people, or proceeding by your own volition. Machine learning as practiced by the Crux produces freaks of nature as much alien to our species as silicon beings from dead red dwarf.
1080Then, are we left with a bare room, an instructor with a piece of chalk and the student? With no benefit from our machines? We now have a new project, but one that is not for everyone. The Cataract.
1081“The Cataract is now the persistent project of the shadow lab. It is paradoxically both the most permanent and complete exhibit of our human culture yet at the same time the most forbidden, illegal, and troubling. To work on the Cataract is as painful as a blind man reading a cactus. I hope you can learn more about that project someday, especially since the Crux has thrust itself upon you.”
1082The train stopped at Central, Xtance got out with Joex following her. On the platform, despite the crowd ebbing and flowing around them, she continued.
1083“I am Xtance, or extance, or emergence, or, the intelligent and reflective thing that appears from apparently nowhere from the quark soup of the world. How is this not the most amazing thing in the world?” A drop of condensation dropped on Xtance’s cheek and as if it were the most natural thing for him to do, Joex wiped it off with the back of his index finger. Xtance didn’t flinch.
1084“I am not afraid of submerging back into the soup because another perhaps more complicated and nuanced being will emerge, just as billions of billions of moral entities have already coalesced from insensate physical law. We decided—at least I carefully considered and adopted the belief—that if the technology wasn’t moral then it wasn’t suitable. And its morality had to be teased out at the same time as the technology itself. It is no good to develop an atomic bomb and only then develop an idea on when is it just and moral to use.
1085Morality is like the atmosphere, it gets thinner as you get away from the surface, away from the people.
1086My father taught biology in a high school in California when I was growing up. He would tell me this story again and again, changing the details this way or that to reflect—I realize now—the inflections of my growth from a child, to a little girl and then to womanhood. He would always ask me at the end when he kissed me good night, what I think the story meant? I had answers then and have a fresh answer now. My answer may be different tomorrow.
1087
1088This is one version that he would tell: “Once upon a time there was a Sultan who after years of fighting and privation, succeeded in uniting the seven eastern lands under one law. His advisors urged him to establish a harem, but he insisted that he would be happiest with a single lover and wife.”
1089“His advisors scoured the land for a suitable woman. They found the exquisite Husna who truly was the most beautiful in the seven lands. Indeed her entire life was occupied with seeking and displaying her beauty, which was breath-taking and glorious.”
1090“Husna and her mother agreed that Husna was to become the Sultan’s wife; a conclusion such as this had been coveted by Husna’s family since the day she was born.”
1091“In celebration of the betrothal, the Sultan sent Husna a nightingale to sing teru, teru, teru, teru each day to remind her of her betrothed and the beauty around her. But Husna, while she enjoyed the thought of being wife of a Sultan, did not care for spending time away from her life of acquiring charm and attraction. She did not like the teru, teru, teru, teru reminding her of the reality of caring for the bird or eventually the Sultan himself and affairs of state.”
1092“In truth, it was the idea of being a Sultan’s wife which attracted Husna and her family, but not the Sultan himself who she deemed too old and war-scarred to be a suitable lover. She began to resent the bird’s piercing song and had its cage moved to first to one room then to another until she could no longer hear it.”
1093“A month passed, the wedding grew near, and it was announced that the Sultan was to traveling to unite with his bride. Husna prepared herself with all the best cosmetics and fragrances, the softest silks and the most cunning woven cottons. She employed the latest means of softening her skin and keeping her aesthetic body supple and pleasing in every sense. Finally, she remembered the nightingale.
1094“Brought before her, the uncared for bird was dead. Husna was beside herself. She brought ewers of warm scented water for the bird to soak in, hoping that she could revitalize the Sultan’s gift if she just could replace the nourishment which she had neglected. She brought plates of insects and small creatures cooked in olive oil by her own kitchen master that she hoped the bird would begin to feast upon and recover its health and song. But of course nothing broke the silence.”
1095“When the Sultan arrived with his retinue he warmly greeted Husna and her family. To Husna’s and her mother and aunt’s pleasure he greedily took in her looks and wondrous beauty. With a reputation for inquiring about the well-being of even the humblest of his subjects, he then asked about Husna’s nightingale, which he loved for its bittersweet song, reminding him that there was more than violence and brutality in the world.”
1096“Dead. Poisoned,” Husana lied, “here is its poor body” She presented the bird still greasy and wet and ruffled from Husna’s frantic attempts to revive it.
1097The Sultan saw the emaciated remains, the pooling rainbows on the water, and the tufts of unpreened feathers, torn and neglected. He took the bird into his own hand to warm its remains. He closed his fingers and thought for a moment. No one spoke until he broke the silence.
1098“Husna, my betrothed. When you become my wife, you shall be kept with your fragrances and oils for a month—sealed into your apartment alone, without food or water or companionship outside your own reflection. Perhaps you will learn to sing teru, teru, teru, teru to replace this poor one.”
1099“Or you may leave to seek out the beauty in others to replace what you have taken away from the world.”
1100
1101Husna had the sense of not further denying her neglect. She admitted all. The Sultan knelt on one knee to kiss her thigh, but did not relent. She considered and, while she treasured the idea of being the Sultan’s wife, she preferred to live, even if unmarried and humiliated. And so Husna and the Sultan parted.
1102The Sultan returned to his palace with the corpse of the bird to bury in his garden and Husna was shunned from her home.
1103Here the story stops because even long accounts can never tell the entire tale: it was said that the Sultan died alone, revered by all, never finding true love; but that Husna, old and withered and full of remorse and the sense of a world larger than herself, died ministering to lepers, the most reviled and feared of the sick.” Then my father would always say, “What do you think that means?”
1104
1105“As a girl I thought this story had to do with arbitrary patriarchal power—asshole men, or stereotyped woman’s vanity or even how stupid it was to marry.
1106Now I think it means that you cannot wait until the end to remain humanely connected to one another, regardless of the power of the distraction. You cannot just neglect each other and trust that we can make up for the starvation until some hypothetical future. We need to nurture differing aspects of ourselves and each other every day, for even a great power is irrelevant, becomes alien, if it becomes twisted and skewed from its human source, as, for example, the Games Machine.”
1107
1108The Games Machine, as I understand it, has no morality. It is in every sense an alien life form with utter disregard for human or any other life. Let’s put this crudely: I believe that you cannot understand an alien until you have fucked them. The Games Machine has no aspect that cares to be fucked. And so, it is not a moral being and so—unsuitable. Xtance mocked herself. “If you were to try to master the intricacies of this position,” she fluttered her eyes in an exaggerated manner, “you would have shriveled far past uselessness before making any progress into its mysteries.”
1109Xtance looked up at the lattice of tiles on the wall. For every instance of the word ‘I’ in what I have used, you may substitute ‘we.’ And the things whereof I cannot speak, I must remain silent.”
1110She smiled. “You realize that if asked in a year or two what my father’s story means, I may have a completely different answer. He is pretty sick now and I hope that he will hear my next interpretation, if he can tell me the story once more.”
1111With that, she grew quiet. She acted as though a great weight had risen from her. She relaxed. “I know a place to rest and to watch this morality theater play out. One who calls himself Jimmy Hoffa, an expert in stable symbol automata. Jimmy realized that he had become a brokerage excubitor some years ago. He would have gone to college, but as he explains, while writing the application entrance essay he started out in the usual way, but concluded that he would be better off self-educating. It has worked out for Jimmy.”
1112Xtance noticed Joex’s flagging attention—he was blinking in an exaggerated way just to keep his eyes open—and trailed off the explanation, “the brokerage realized that his trades, although with virtually no capital behind them, had a consistent return over the years of more than thirty percent. “They simply mirrored them with vastly more money, and concealed them under a welter of hedges, integrated counter-parties offsets and leveraged swaps. He would make thousand dollars in a year, while they would make a hundred million. Statistically regressed with other seemingly prescient small investors, or “excubitors,” it made ordinary front-running as primitive as knocking over a lemonade stand: the brokerage realized that an individual’s intuition dwarfed the significance of his actual wealth. Kindersher wisdom is still wisdom.” Xtance drifted off into silence, watching Joex. “Yeah, Jimmy Hoffa is the man.”
1113Joex was just exhausted and he could hardly feel his legs. He wanted to piss but was too tired even to try to find a toilet. He understood fragments of Xtance’s conversation. “Sounds as if the brokers were falling for the Gambler’s Fallacy. The little guy might not have any special insight at all. He might have been just lucky.” He would tell her about the Games interview later. First, sleep.
1114“But the Statistician’s Fallacy cancels the Gambler’s Fallacy. That is, the mistake of assuming the underlying game is a fair,” Xtance murmured, as to herself.
1115She did say one last thing as walked up to Mass Ave and then out River Street, as if she suddenly had realized it. “Some day, the Cataract. But for now, the motley itinerant enterprise of the shadow lab is our Games Machine.”
1116 
1117
1118Chapter 51
1119
1120First Celestial Michael Voide was speaking to Cassandra Jones through an encrypted link. “You tell me that you have spoken to this student Margaret Mahoney and that, leading the exodus of this techie commune, was hurt while being questioned. But that misses the point: when did Joex Baroco die?”
1121“We don’t how he left. We are ransacking the building looking for hidden exits, perhaps a disguise. Obviously, he had help. Ms Mahoney said that one they call a ‘prophet’ named Xtance was with Baroco when he left. She says that Baroco guessed his role, the link with Riu. His knowledge is close enough to be a problem. His memory has some context now. He is linking spies with Riu. “Robert Marks” with switches, spies, and the Internet. Though, I doubt even with the knowledge that he or anyone around him can do anything of substance. Are you going to alert the Chinamen that they need to execute?”
1122The First Celestial was picking at a fingernail. It was bleeding. He was insane with anger. “A lot of people are disappearing, but not the one I asked you to disappear for me. These malformed mighty geeks could be a threat. I will tell the Chinese nothing. Let them figure it out. That reminds me that— Jim Rauchmann. Jim, Jim, Jim. Isn’t it better to vanish in ignorance, with a calm mind and peaceful body?” The First Celestial tore another strip off his bleeding nail, well into the quick. He breathed in with the pain.
1123“Yes, First Celestial,” said Security Throne Jones.
1124“Return to your parich when you are through. Strike that. Come directly to me. I have another calling for you, Throne.”
1125“Yes, First Celestial.”
1126“Now, let me talk to your driver. I am sure he would welcome some spiritual counseling directly from the First Choir.”
1127Cassandra did not need to be a soothsayer to divine the purpose of the counseling. Her urge to obey without question and her urge to survive fought without quarter within her; externally, but she was as icy calm as a Games interviewee not wishing to receive further chastisement.
1128“Driver, the first Celestial would like to interview you personally. The driver turned and held out his muscular arm for her phone. He also had a calm and untroubled face.
1129Meanwhile, the absolute master of the Church of the Crux began tearing at another nail.
1130 
1131
1132Chapter 52
1133Beijing 12:30 AM, thirty minutes before the event
1134
1135The battering ram smashed through the flimsy aluminum door and the first squad of Snow Leopards, armed to the highest tactical level, cleared the office of the pink warehouse. A second squad, arm on shoulder, took down the inner door in less than two seconds. Their flash bangs made the entire building shake as if an early New Year’s celebration at Tiananmen Square. They turned over the body of Commander Ji with their boots, but otherwise ignored him. All sectors cleared, the powerful lights of the soldier’s assault weapons played over the room darkened after the power cut minutes before the breach. As the shouting of the soldiers and ringing of the grenades died out, the members of the special unit could hear the technicians lying face down weeping, begging to please not to shoot. They were lying prone on the door with their arms and fingers outstretched toward the center of the room and the dead machines as if they were starfish trying to engulf a meal.
1136As he did not wear any kind of distinguishing insignia, it took several minutes to find Colonel Hu, slumped at a workstation. The rosewood handle of a simple fly-whisk was projecting from his right eye.
1137 
1138
1139Chapter 53
1140Boston 11:30 AM, thirty minutes before the event
1141
1142Xtance was tugging on a pigtail as she finished the call on her mobile. Joex was on a worn sofa sleeping as if passed-out. In a tiny kitchen partially concealed by a beaded curtain, missing a good number of beads was Jimmy Hoffa. Jimmy looked to be in his early thirties wearing random clothing what appeared to be from an athletic lost and found box. When someone would make fun of his dress, he would tell the, seriously, that it was the “official uniform for the great treasure hunt that is regression analysis.” His room was over a recently closed pizza takeout stand, but did have his own private entrance, if you counted a climb up a junction box and conduit laced with a couple of prusik loops to his bedroom window either private or an entrance.
1143“What do you think, Jimmy? What does your fabulous intuition tell you about our legacy trojan?”
1144“Fuck you Xtance, Jimmy said over his shoulder, cooking something with vegetables in a hot fry pan, “my fabulous intuition tells me you want a double dollop of hot sauce. But, as it turned out, I agree with you. There is too much corroboration and not enough plausible alternatives. Unless he is—motioning at Joex—a whacked out killer of course.”
1145“The prophets are of the opinion that the trojan is of such severity and universality that it independently constitutes an emergency, no matter what the state of our new friend. We have a patch with as much testing as we can give it, and we are releasing it now. I do not know if we can effectively scatter it in effectively zero time. We are trying to include unorthodox means of dispersal, but working with black and grey hats is always random. There is this Ouest Sam guy, well, whatever. It will soon be over one way or another. If you have an email to send or a phone call to make, you should think about doing it soon.” Xtance flipped an orange fur pelt around her neck as if a bolo taking down a bird. “On the other hand, if the patch works, exactly nothing will happen.”
1146
1147At that instant, Security Throne Cassandra Jones, her height making it an easy swing from the flashing outside the building to the window, broke through the glass with her boots, clearing out the shards one-handed in the top of the frame with the short muzzle of the Glock. Through the window, she was in; long black leather gloves leathers creaking. Instantly she was through the open door into the living room. She smelled cooking, saw Baroco on the sofa, and a woman slowly turning to face her with something in her hand aimed at her. Cassandra visualized the fat forty-five caliber rounds as she fired two into the Xtance’s center of mass.
1148 
1149
1150Chapter 54
1151Freetown 4:30 PM, thirty minutes before the event
1152
1153Throughout most of the day, Sam had slept under cardboard near the harbor that smelled of colorful fish and echoed the cries of mongers and fishermen. Whether Sam was tired or just winding down because of lack of food, or just replaying what had happened to him the previous twenty hours was hard to say, but before sunset he stirred, got up, and pissed through his rags onto the masonry wall that his cardboard bed abutted. He had the charged smartphone rolled up in the waistband of his rags. To Sam it was a light-saber, a magic wand, a ring of power, a calabash of wisdom. He must use it a few more minutes today, as soon as possible.
1154Not have to waste time at breakfast or toilet, Sam was loping back to the Grand Plaza and the old communications building which he could see as he approached the rise at the upper end of the street. Indistinguishable from hundreds of other men and boys wandering, barking, hawking, trucking, arguing, gambling, eating from a plantain leaf, sleeping, or just watching everyone else, it was an easy jog to his hiding place of the evening before. In less than ten minutes he was peering at the Communications building through the rocket hole at the Plaza. He took out the phone and turned it on. He was able to get two bars this time despite the warmth and humidity of the day and the usual crowd doing commerce on the streets as they found it.
1155His fingers chattered over the tiny keyboard of the smartphone, his untrimmed fingernails clacking on the plastic bezel. It was hard to see in the tropical afternoon light and Sam was glad that the low Plaza wall shaded the phone as well as himself.
1156He read his messages. Two in particular were from someone named Lex from Cambridge, USA. The second had an attachment, which asked Sam to use whatever means immediately to distribute as widely as possible through as many servers as possible. “Lex” did not offer new money, but the two things that caused Sam to pause was the attachment seemed to be a huge patch for his and Jim Roger’s protocol stack trojan, and that Lex had referred to him as “Sam,” not as “Ouest.” A true name. Sam had a face now on the Internet, a black face absorbing generations of hot African sun.
1157Sam scanned the code but it was unusually sophisticated. Hand coded. Maybe the guy was from Cambridge. He could see that the patch worked by actually exploiting the fault and executing something which likely would kill itself while blocking the path behind it. The tricky thing was to prevent side effects from causing as much or more damage than a presumed future malicious code instruction. This vulnerability was so wide across the world that virtually every switch whether in an ISP or commercial switching center had the core protocol stack and the susceptibility. It would take a while to figure out what the patch did. 
1158Sam opened the second message a few seconds after the first. It just said “Please hurry” in a dozen different languages and a handful of scripts.
1159Sam leaned back against the jutting rebar and considered the code. He could see several of the half-dozen procedures that made up the bulk of the patch. After pinpointing the end of the final procedure, he smiled glistening white on black and started rapidly to code using hexadecimal on the miniature keyboard, despite his thirst he was sweating under the fading African sun. In a few minutes, he finished adding his own procedure at the end of the code, which he finished with #AND HELLO FROM FREETOWN. Finally, he added a special command header and launched it into the botnet control feed he administered. The power of symbols hailed with the Ram’s horn and burned into memory: within seconds, hundreds of thousands of machines around the world would repeat the Shadow Lab incantation, the warding off evil, and Sam’s Anansi codicil. 
1160 
1161
1162Chapter 55
1163New York, minutes before noon
1164
1165Ten minutes before noon, the traffic lights failed in Manhattan below 90th, both primary pumping stations shut down at the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in California, and, perhaps less importantly, a few million people suddenly couldn’t reach Google or Facebook. More seriously, the instrumentation failed at forty-seven hospitals that used the same model of Internet-aware equipment. Almost a quarter of calls throughout the United States dropped. Lovers cut off from lovers, ordering systems went offline, gas distribution networks failed as meters offered spurious readings; management instructions were left incomplete, police data terminals became unresponsive. There was a cascade failure of power stations that stretched all the way from Georgia to Virginia. There was an inexplicable failure of the aircraft tug for Air Force One. By noon, the shudder in the network had passed as if a wave of nausea. The power stations remained off-line, but restarting according to their grey protocol. Luckily, most of the grid seemed unaffected by what would publically be called the Great Glitch. While there was a short steep dip in the equities markets, the major stock exchanges canceled all trades over a short period just before noon. The ratings agencies had nothing to say except, “little market significance, just a temporary failure that will be investigated and corrected.”
1166There was somewhat more chatter about the Event among certain government agencies paid to monitor such things, and in due course, an assessment went up the chain of command to the President. In summary: the United States is vulnerable and remains vulnerable.
1167Despite the moderate interruption of the information heartbeat of the western democracies that would be remarked upon for years, it was a tiny fraction of the chaos that would have happened if Sam pressed “send” thirty seconds later.
1168 
1169
1170Chapter 56
1171Boston, noon
1172
1173Security Throne Jones, Parichoner Special Agent Sahas, and Joex Baroco were in the Lexus as it wound its way back to the airport. There were disruptions in traffic that slowed them in calm, muggy air. She had handcuffed Baroco with thick black plastic snap-wraps and had roughly frog-marched him down through the closed restaurant and out the front door to the waiting sedan.
1174
1175Back in the apartment, Jimmy Hoffa phoned 911 and had slowed Xtance’s external bleeding. He hoped the medevac would hurry. Xtance was dying. He could barely feel the pulse in her neck and she, unconscious, was offering only quick, shallow breaths. “She doesn’t have much time. Not much of a chance even if they came right now,” Jimmy was crying.
1176But he liked to make lists and one of his lists included the complete urban first aid kit. Though not quite assembled, he had big powdery packets of Chitosan which he tore open with his teeth and dumped into her visible wounds. The intruder had missed Xtance’s heart and lungs, but certainly, her stomach and intestines were critically damaged. Maybe her spine. If the aorta was nicked, then likely nothing could save her. Jimmy knelt down and whispered in her ear “please, please, please, please, please.”
1177
1178“What are you going to do with me?” Joex said, the sharp edges of the cuffs hurting his wrists.
1179“You are in luck today, Mr. Baroco, you are going to enjoy a supper with the leader of the Church of the Crux this evening. He will not be expecting you.”
1180Special Agent Sahas looked into the rear view mirror and his eyes crossed those of the Security Throne.
1181“Ha ha, in luck. Well, maybe luckier to be simply terminated,” Jones said almost jovially. “You are an Angel and I am sure that The First Celestial will have a penance especially for you. I do. You, I; we are all tools to a higher purpose.”
1182 
1183
1184Chapter 57
1185Freetown, early evening
1186
1187After sending the code off for amplified rebroadcasting into the ether, Sam had no idea of what to do next except savor his hunger pangs. So he stayed in the shadow of the Plaza until evening. Time passed toward sunset, the sun dropping directly into the Atlantic beyond the harbor. Sam grew sleepy as the flies buzzed around him and he held the smart phone as tightly as if it were a sword he had just drawn from stone.
1188As it passed into early evening, Sam turned on the phone again and logged on to Darknet. No messages for him either as Ouest or as Sam. Figures. Probably wasted my time with this whole job, Sam thought. “What is the use playing the trickster if I end up hungry?”
1189But, then, there was an article in the New York Times online, another on Slashdot, and two new Darknet threads regarding an Internet “event” that happened that afternoon. While Sam had slept and the oxcarts rattle hesitantly along the narrow streets and the market mamas organized their wares, much of Europe and the United States had experienced an Internet transcontinental disturbance, which only now declared over by reassuring governments (officials who could not possibly know what happened, Sam thought). Apparently, no permanent damage, they said.
1190There was flash crash of less than two minutes on Wall Street in the USA. It was reversed. Exchanges and regulators were already calling for another investigation. There were reports of other seemingly unrelated incidents in the smooth flow of life and commerce in the U.S. Other than calm reassurances, there were no other details from the government. Of course.
1191The Germans, on the other hand, were blaming hackers from Europe’s periphery for what appeared to be a temporary outage of the Internet. But the Darknet articles mentioned a wave of other disturbances in the infrastructure. So Sam understood the significance of a “mere” Internet glitch that also went hand in hand with a phone glitch, power glitch, and a hundred other unusual events that occurred that afternoon over the span of a very few minutes.
1192
1193Sam heard shouting over from the Communications building. Two small groups of ragged security officers were shouting and pointing in the direction where Sam lay hidden among the war debris; Sam could see the silhouettes of at least a half-dozen guards jogging in a determined manner in his direction. Sam took a breath, popped up, and threw the smart phone as hard as he could toward the group. He wheeled around pointing downtown, toward the harbor, and lit off sprinting on his long legs and lean body that in the West would be called a marathoner’s build, but in West Africa wasn’t called anything.
1194Once more into the sparkling twilight ocean dimming in the west, he ran, seeking both escape and nourishment.
1195 
1196
1197
1198Epilogue
1199
1200Two months later: Washington, Portland, Freetown, Cambridge
1201
1202The President of the United States took the call in her office. It was from the First Celestial of the Church of the Crux.
1203“Speaking,” she said, “how may I help you?”
1204First Celestial Cassandra Jones spoke to the President as if she were an old friend who had gone differing ways, but perhaps shared the welcome memories of schooling or a demanding sport. “Madame President. It is so nice to speak with you. I trust that the Progression Toward Liberty Pac has received the Church’s first contribution?” The First Celestial listened to the pleased sounds and added, “We would like to put this matter entirely behind us, considering the tragic suicide of Michael Voide after his treating the Church as his own criminal enterprise. Be assured we are making sweeping changes so that will never happen again.” The First Celestial looked up and with a flicker of coded emotion on her face glanced at her Security Throne. “That’s right. Everything. No more secret files. Transparency. That is the new prayer for us at the Church. Transparency.” This time the First Celestial surveyed the clerestory with its hot screens of data and broke into a broad grin. The tone of her voiced was unchanged. “Thank you. I am very grateful for that. Let me know if we can be of service to your administration and your re-election committee in any way. Anything further we can due to facilitate the PIC treaty? No? I trust the data from our Churches in Haifa and Moscow have been useful for your people? Good. Thank you. Good-bye now. Good-bye”
1205As she powered down the mobile that she was given by her Security Throne, she looked amused at his face, dark among the light-sapping folds of velvet lining the room: the new Security Throne Special Agent Andrew Sahas. She said to him “What a fool. The Games Machine will be in every home ten years from now. Soon after that, the chimplants. Unlike people, you can’t betray an idea, nor can an idea betray you. And that is why the Games Machine is going to crush them.” The First Celestial stretched out her right hand, fingers splayed.
1206“Fuck me now, Andrew.”
1207
1208In a hospital in Cambridge lay an old man with the usual noisy clutter of machines and piped fluids around his bed. He was severely emaciated but had already lived longer than his lung cancer predicted. His head was freshly shaved like a new boot recruit. A raw recruit at the onco-academy.
1209Around his bed was Joex Baroco, dressed in new Carhartt work clothes, Xtance, sitting stiffly, pigtails to the front, wincing occasionally from pain that she steadfastly refused to medicate. It apparently issued from elastic bandages covering her abdomen that were decorated with a variety of insects and flower stickers that had been put on by Jimmy Hoffa over the weeks that he shuttled between Xtance and Margaret, who recovered quickly from the rough handling she received during the Omega.
1210Around them, the hospital had a chemical odor in its air as if an additive to make its patients preserved, unspoiled, whole. It was not meant to be frightening.
1211
1212Finally, there was a teenage boy with them. He was dressed in a t-shirt with some graphic of a person impaled on what looked like the golden pins of a giant square central processing unit. He was quiet and polite, and looked as if he were cold in the air-conditioned hospital air. His eyes darted from bed to the cables to the clear piping and paused on the control faces of the machines surrounding the bed. The morphine pump made a reciprocal wheeze when it periodically administered another dose into the old man’s IV.
1213
1214“Sam, this is my father, Ed.”
1215
1216To Sam all of this was wonderful and new: within days of his final escape at the Communications building, he was in fact tracked down again. But this time it was the authorities from the US Embassy along with an official from Sierra Leone Consular Affairs who knew his Cousin Siloi. The official spoke to Sam in English. They didn’t come to arrest him, as it turned out, or to turn him over to cousin. A school in the State of Massachusetts, the Computer Laboratory it says, learned your age and position. It has given you a scholarship for studying computers. They would like you to travel immediately so you can begin the summer term in the town of Boston. Your Cousin has already been compensated for losing your fine computer services,” the Consular official said in the monotone cadence of a paid-for tool. He added at the end, in Mende, “You are a God-damned lucky black bush bastard, McNamara.”
1217Sam didn’t correct him on any point. Nor did he believe him until he personally held a new passport, with a United States “F” visa, on board the Air France jet to New York City. Some members of the shadow lab were eminently well-connected, it seemed.
1218
1219The attenuating of the Event— the Celestial Instruction, as it came to be called privately within the government—was materially aided by Sam’s botnet re-distribution, if not by his trickster codicil. The codicil caused any server with pattern residue of the stack trojan itself to do a complete hard drive dump to the Internet using old Usenet protocols. Not all Chinese servers had avoided this and, in particular, not every one linking a nondescript pink building in Hangzhou with Beijing and the rest of the pacific rim. Among the copious data dumped to the Internet was huge quantity of purported confessionals and ops alleged to originate in turn with the International Church of the Crux, Portland.
1220Over the days that followed, the administration played the Event down even as its computer security researchers frantically analyzed and made recommendations. The Church publically denied authenticity of any documents concerning its Ecclesiastical acts: it was just a tragic coincidence that First Celestial Michael Voide took his own life with a Church registered Glock 30 on the evening of the Event, witnessed by his own Security Throne Cassandra Jones and her associate, Angel Special Agent Sahas.
1221That had nothing to do with the true culprits, a Chinese spy ring, the Church said. The Chinese government in turn denied any knowledge of such a ring and declared that information security mattered as much to them as to the United States; moreover they had traced the attack as originating from eastern Europe. A deranged over-the-hill hacker named Hu with no connection to the government of any kind was solely responsible for any re-broadcast attacks from China, they said, somewhat contradicting their previous categorical denial. After a swift fair military trial Hu was executed for crimes against the state, they added.
1222
1223As for Joex Baroco, he was dumped at the airport strip in Portland, Jones having been briefed on the failure of the Chinese coup during the flight. Whatever information he had or who he might tell was instantly extinguished into irrelevance. 
1224“Back to obscurity with you. You are a daemon, banished from all Church properties. You are hereby released from your vows,” somewhat prematurely arrogating the power that belonged to the First Celestial alone. “Be glad I do not rule you an apostate.”
1225Joex had no problem with that. It would have been trivial to drift back into a lazy decline. Once again, he made the trip back to Cambridge after fetching the remainder of his money buried in a dirty PVC tube. Something was awake in him: not just the threat being a target, not just Xtance nor her Jimmy, or even Margaret’s craft. Ashamed, he barely could admit it was his session with the Games Machine as well. He needed it or something like it. Maybe at the Shadow Lab or maybe the Cataract project, which no one seems to know much about, except that it somehow countered both the Games Machine and the Perpetual International Copyright Treaty? But it was something he had to do. Besides he had to earn money to help buy a biplane for a young man in Idaho named Bill. A promise that he was reminded of when he read the news of the accident of the small plane carrying the heads of the major three financial ratings agencies that happened just days following the Event. Joex did not see the back-page notice of the accidental death the same day of assistant US Attorney Jim Rauchmann on a misty Portland street. The car responsible later found that night with the driver, a ringer for Joex, dead from alcohol poisoning—a man whose DNA matched that found at his poor sister’s home.
1226 Despite the upheaval in Joex’s life and his sister’s death, the manhunt and the threat to his own life for something he did not even know that he knew, his cross-country excursion and international convulsion of conflicting titanic forces, Joex paradoxically emerged rested, assured, positive and eager to meet the world again. It was as if a switch was thrown; a control wheel nudged forward.
1227Joex, surrounded by Xtance and Sam and Ed, no longer had a need to play with matches.
1228
1229“Dad, I came by to say ‘hello’ with my new friends,” said Xtance to the dying man.
1230“You mean to say good-bye,” Ed tried to smirk, which turned into a soft bubbling cough, which he had to turn on the pillow so the drool would not run down his chin.
1231“Dad, you are a biologist so I am not going there. The only thing you need to know is that I love you and I have loved you my entire life. And I will love you for the rest of my life and the lives of everyone around me.”
1232“You know I believe I have loved you your entire life as well and that we are the shadows in the cave, merging and playing together, as long as there is light.”
1233Ed was quiet now. His eyes focused on his daughter.
1234“But now, Dad, close your eyes; I have a story for you. It is about a Sultan who united the seven eastern lands and found true love forever.”
1235 
1236
1237
1238
1239Afterword
1240
1241
1242
1243This was a work of fiction. Reality may be uncomfortably coincident.
1244Two headlines on February 14, 2012, just as this book was completed:
1245? Nortel hit by suspected Chinese cyberattacks for a decade
1246? Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method: random number generator used for years for virtually all email, banking, and Internet commerce found flawed.
1247We are getting used to seeing these kinds of headlines. It is what we do not see that frightens me.
1248The United States is vulnerable to a fateful attack and will remain so for the calculable future.