Lovelock (19 page)

Red walked to the door of the kitchen. “I can’t believe you created this scene in front of the children. Perhaps Mother is right, and you feel no decent concern for family. Or perhaps you are simply acting out the stress of your new assignment here at home, where you know that you are loved and will be forgiven.” He turned to the children. “Girls, Mommy is upset and she needs a hug. Give a hug to Mommy.”

It was the sickest thing I’d ever seen Red do. Of course Carol Jeanne could not refuse to hug Emmy and Lydia when they came to her with open arms. But it had to taste like poison in her mouth, to have her children’s embraces come at Red’s orders, acting out his condescending lie.

“I’m not upset at you, Lydia,” said Carol Jeanne quietly. “Adults just get angry at each other sometimes.”

“Don’t you dare to exploit the children by trying to get them onto your side,” said Red quietly.

Carol Jeanne was flabbergasted. “What do you
—I’m
not
—you’re
the one who—”

“Come along, girls, let’s let Mommy work out her feelings in privacy.”

And Carol Jeanne had to sit there and watch as Red took Lydia and Emmy by the hands and led them out of the room. What could she do? She loved them too much to exploit them; she loved them so much she couldn’t even stop Red from exploiting them.

I went to the kitchen computer, hit the escape key in order to clear away the drone message, and typed, “Like mother like son.”

“I can’t believe this happened,” she said.

I typed: “It’s been coming for years. Not your fault.”

“Poor Stef,” she said.

“Lucky Stef,” I typed. “Poor you.”

“Enough of that,” she answered, rejecting my take on things. “Use the office computer to find out who sent that vicious message.
That
, at least, I can do something about.”

It was easy enough to find out where the message came from. It came from “System.” Which meant that the little bee animation had been sent with the authority of one of the system operators—the managers of the computer network on the Ark. For a moment I thought this meant that the message had been official in origin, that the government of the Ark was exerting pressure in an amazingly heavy-handed way. But then I settled on the more plausible explanation. Someone had learned how to break into the network operating system and make it
look
as though private messages were coming from the sysops.

So now the immediate problem wasn’t tracing the message—that couldn’t be done at the moment. The problem was figuring out how the sender had broken into the network mail program. Whoever did it must be able to break in with impunity—no one else guessing that he was doing it, or the sysops would already have taken steps. So what I had to do was find the same invisible way to enter.

Naturally, I started out using my own entry code and password. It gave me most of Carol Jeanne’s authority to access information, which meant I could explore in areas that most citizens of the Ark could never reach. The problem was that by using my legal access, I was leaving trails all over the place. So I didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t want the sysops to know about.

Why did I feel that way? Why was I already worrying about being caught? If someone asked Carol Jeanne about it, she could simply say that someone had sent an anonymous message to her household computer and she asked her witness to search out who did it and how. Innocent enough, and perfectly within her rights.

Her witness. As I searched the network databases I remembered how she had stopped Red from seizing me or striking me or whatever it was he had in mind. Don’t you dare touch my witness. It bothered me now, that she had spoken of me as an object, a possession. Her witness. Why
couldn’t
she have said, Don’t you dare touch Lovelock? Why did she still feel that the only fair protection of my safety was my status as a valuable piece of property, instead of speaking as if I had a
right
to be left alone? It was just one more sign that my relationship with Carol Jeanne was not and never had been what I thought it was. In the days of slavery in the American South, as black household slaves plaited their mistresses’ hair there must have been conversation, perhaps even intimate confessions, the mistress playing out her thoughts in front of the listening maid. And perhaps the maids even fantasized that the mistress loved them, that they were friends. But then would come the awakening. The day when the family finances were in trouble, and money had to be raised, and they talked about selling this “friend.” Or the day the maid did something wrong, or was suspected of doing something wrong, and in that instant the friend would become an enemy, an untrustworthy captive. How many “intimate friends” found themselves stripped and flogged? How many lay there bleeding on a filthy mat, suffering less from the wounds of the lash than from the realization that they were not and never had been anything but property?

I’m lucky to have found out now, I thought.

Instead of searching any further on the system, where I could be traced, I accessed local memory where the code supporting the network mail system resided, and began to read it. Since it was local volatile memory, the sysops couldn’t know what I was looking at if they ever tried to trace me. And yet many secrets about how the mail system worked were there, for anyone who knew how to find them. Of course, in volatile memory it was the running program, not the source code, so it wasn’t marked up with comments that helped human programmers figure out what each section of code was doing. But that was no barrier to me. I was an
enhanced
capuchin, and so I was able to remember the meaning of every computer instruction and follow the logic in my head. It was almost a mechanical task to snake through the code, following it to find the place where access was given.

In my mind it felt as though I were exploring a cave, in a mountain riddled with tunnels like a cheese. I would follow one branch tunnel until it looped back into the main tunnel; then I would follow another one to see where it led. Finally I ended up with a map of the entire mountain, and then I could begin to search for the tiny jewel that someone had hidden there. Along the way, though, there were surprises.

The first surprise was the discovery that this was a very old program. It dated from the era when the Ark project had first been launched on Earth. Apparently the people working on the Ark had become locked into one computer network system and had never changed it or even significantly updated it. This meant that encryption and security were primitive and that whoever had hacked the mail system hadn’t had to be all that clever after all.

The second surprise wasn’t a surprise at all, having found the first. The sysops were aware that their software leaked like a colander, and there was a secret project to install a new, high-level system with layers of encryption and security. Whoever had sent the bee message to our house would find it a lot harder when the new software came online. No—would find it impossible.

So should I report this to Carol Jeanne? The message is anonymous because it was hacked into the system, but it won’t be a problem for long because within a week or so the new software will be up and running and the old hacks won’t work. Very well, Lovelock, she would say. Good work. And she’d give me a treat.

Give me a treat. Give me a soul-destroying animal-tricking treat. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs I was already salivating at the thought.

But I am not a dog. I don’t have to do what I have been conditioned to do.

If Stef can wake up and find a man inside the shell that he had become, why couldn’t I also find the man inside me? Not the
human
man, because I was better than human. But a man all the same, a male person, a citizen of the universe with natural rights and privileges like any other. If Stef could tell Mamie exactly what he thought of her and walk away, why couldn’t I?

Because Stef could go live in bachelor quarters and still function on the Ark. Whereas I would be a runaway witness, an unheard-of anomaly, a failure of conditioning, and I would be hunted down and destroyed.

So I could not come out in the open as Stef had. I would have to live as Stef had lived for so long, hiding my real feelings as he had hidden his, so that up until the moment of his actual rebellion no one had guessed that he would ever find inside himself the power to act. When he did rebel everyone was astonished; but they were astonished only because they had never known him. No one had known him.

No one knows me.

No one knows who I am or what I can do. I’m like the hacker who sent that message. Anonymous. My disguise is perfect. I look like an animal. I can’t talk with my voice. I’m small and weak-looking. They think I’m cute. And my conditioned devotion to Carol Jeanne is considered unassailable.

The terrible thing was that it
was
unassailable. Even as I thought these rebellious thoughts, I still felt that deep abiding love for Carol Jeanne, that hunger to please her, that aching need to rush to her and tell her all that I had discovered in my searches through the system, so that she would know that I loved her and served her and she would give me a…

Give me a treat.

I found how the hacker had sent us the anonymous message. Sysops routinely sent system circulars, polling all the computers linked to the network and checking them for outgoing mail. It was possible to attach riders to the mail polls—the Ark government used this method to send news and notices. The system riders could also be addressed, not to any individual, but rather to groups or classes of individuals, so that notices could be sent to all the people working in the bakery, for instance, or to all the people living in Mayflower village. The hacker had simply attached a rider to the poll and had set it to be distributed to all households with members belonging to the gaiology division and counseling services who were also in Mayflower village and who had arrived within the last ten weeks. Thus the message, though technically still sent to a group, would show up only on our house computer.

But how had he attached his little animated message to the system circular? That, too, was easy enough. The ancient software had a back door. The sysops themselves signed on using their names and activating all the normal traces and record-keeping procedures. But the original programmers had built in a way to enter the system with even more authority than the sysop. It wasn’t an intuitive entry—even in the old days, they were more sophisticated than to simply allow someone to type a generic name like “program” or “entry” and get in. What I found was that the network software installed in every linked computer scanned keystrokes when it was active, and while most of the branches from the keystroke scans led to obvious places in the program, one of them did not. It checked for an awkward combination of keystrokes that no one would accidentally enter:
CONTROL
-A {[<^
SHIFT-BACKSPACE
. If someone pressed
CONTROL
-A and then followed it with the rest of those keypresses, he would find himself facing the same menu choices that the sysops saw, with all the powers that the sysops had—but without the software being “aware” that he was there at all, so no tracks would be left.

He? Who was this hypothetical he?
I
had this power now, no matter who else had it. I signed off as Carol Jeanne, then pressed
CONTROL
-A {[<^
SHIFT-BACKSPACE
, and as far as the network was concerned, I was God, omnipresent, omnipotent, and invisible.

Now I could go look directly at the source code without arousing suspicion. As I suspected, the little routine that allowed the back door was completely undocumented. It didn’t show up anywhere. The sysops probably didn’t even know it was there, and the programmers who had created it for their own use while working on the program were no doubt all dead or at least retired. They probably didn’t remember the back door themselves.

So how did the hacker who sent the bee message find it? Surely there was no one else on the Ark who could plunge into raw code and trace it in his own mind the way I had done. Surely no one had such mindless tenacity as to spend weeks of his life pressing random sequences of keys until he happened on this unlikely one.

There was a part of me that already wanted to stop searching. I had already found the jewel beyond price: I could go anywhere and do anything, I could read any message, I could examine any data, I could alter any part of the code, and no one would even know I had been there. And yet this powerful jewel would be snatched out of my hands in a matter of days or weeks, when the new software went online. Whatever I would do with this power I had to do immediately, and yet I had no idea what to do with it. When it eventually slipped out of my hands,
then
I would see its uses with all the clarity of regret and frustration and despair. I had to think, I had to concentrate on what my temporary omnipotence was good for.

Yet my assignment from Carol Jeanne was to find out who had sent the message. I now knew how the message had been sent, but not who had sent it. I had to bring her a report. I had to, I had to, it was a hunger gnawing in me, a hunger that only intensified as I contemplated telling her nothing, saying that it was a hack that I couldn’t trace. Lying to Carol Jeanne? Unthinkable. I would have to tell her everything, especially the thing I wanted to conceal from her, this new power of mine. I
had
to tell her, I could hardly stand not to tell her, and the more firmly I decided that I would never tell, the more terrible the urgency to confess became.

It was like the proscription of sex. It was like my panic in freefall. I was out of control. They had stolen me from myself. I did not belong to me.

I leapt from the desk. I scampered to the door. Animal me, I thought, monkey me, scamper, leap, cavort while the hurdy-gurdy man turns the crank. Hold the cup as they toss in the money, and then give it to the human, give it all to the human.

I did not leave the room. I lay there trembling, going over the network code in my mind, mentally rewriting it to improve it here and there, coming up with encryption schemes with incredibly complex algorithms, doing anything I could to take my mind off the lie that I intended to tell Carol Jeanne.