The Celestial Instructi0n (3 page)

Since 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.

Interesting 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.

Michael 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.

Thirty 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.

So, 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.

One 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.

When the sheriff came to evict him, he
merely left with the doors open and the key on the entryway side table.

It 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.

Sam 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.

But 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.

During 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.

Over 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.

But 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.

March 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.

The 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.

Sam 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.

After 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.

By 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.