Fractions (19 page)

Moh heard the sound of blood draining from his head, like a faraway waterfall. He watched Bernstein's face, and the whole mall, go from colour to a grainy monochrome.

‘The Black Plan?' he heard himself say.

‘Sure,' Bernstein said. ‘Your old man wrote it. Thought you knew.'

Kohn fought the flashbacks.

To no avail.

 

Heavy metal industrial shelving, loaded with electronic equipment, tools, the guts of computers. Trotsky's collected works. Hardware and software manuals. Glossy computer magazines (softporn, his mother called them). Moh was lost in one when he heard a cough.

He turned to the table in the middle of the room.

‘Morning, Josh,' he said, smiling.

His father glanced up from the screen and nodded. ‘Hi, Moh.' He reached out to one side, snapping his fingers. ‘Get us the Dissembler handbook. Third shelf from the top…thanks.'

The keyboard keys clattered for a few more minutes. Moh watched in silence, then levered himself up by his elbows on the table to take a closer look. He gazed at the screen, intent, fascinated, as indented lines of code trickled upward. He didn't understand what the code was doing, but he had learned programming literally on his father's knee and he could see the logic of it, could see that at some level it all made sense: he knew, just before it happened, when the next symbol would be the one for
ENDMODULE
. A keystroke later and the module dwindled into distance, becoming faint horizontal hatching on a box connected to other icons on the screen.

‘What you doing, dad?'

Josh frowned distantly at him for a moment, then smiled with resignation. He straightened up in his tall chair, bringing his shoulderblades together, sighed out his breath and reached for a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and leaned on the table, now and again remembering to blow his exhaled smoke the other way.

‘It's part of a big project,' he said. ‘Uh…I'd appreciate it if you didn't talk about it to anyone.' He gave Moh a quick co-conspiratorial smile. ‘It's complicated…resource planning, logistics and financial genetic algorithms, with a bit of contingency planning hard-coded in.'

‘What's “contingency planning”?'

‘It's…the things you do just in case.'

‘Like burying guns!' Moh aimed an imaginary rifle.

‘Yeah.' Josh sighed again and looked once more at the screen. ‘This is one for the Star Fraction.'

‘What's the “Star Fraction”?'

Josh looked at him, distant again, then shook his head as if coming out of a reverie.

‘Forget it,' he said harshly. There was a tone in his voice that Moh had never heard before, and the dismay must have shown in his face because Josh suddenly smiled and put an arm around his shoulder, and laughed, and hummed: ‘Five for the years of the Soviet plan and four for the International…'

Moh joined in, continuing: ‘Three, three the Rights of Ma-an, two for the worker's hands working for their living-oh, and one is workers' unity which ever more shall be so!'

Josh drew a blue line of smoke under the question of the project. ‘Well…how's workers' unity coming along in the Young Rebels?' he said.

‘We're always arguing,' Moh confided. ‘Some of the comrades think we should be more against the government and some of us say we should be more for it because the right are against it.'

‘What do you think?'

‘Uh, well, I was thinking – is the Republic a workers' and peasants' government?'

Josh coughed in a suspicously vocal way and said, ‘Hih-hihh-hmm, ah, even allowing for peasants being a bit thin on the ground in these parts, I think we'd have to say: “No”. But these categories (you know what that means? good) aren't really useful here. We're in a new situation. It's a radical democratic government. It isn't socialist but the capitalists don't trust it. So things are a bit unstable.'

They talked about politics for a while. Eleven years old and having just joined the party's youth group, Moh understood the politics he'd learned from his parents as an adventure that spanned generations like a space programme: behind them the pioneers who'd risen in Petrograd, fallen in Vorkuta; ahead the Alpha Centauri of workers' power and human solidarity; beyond that the infinite universe of socialism – the bright world, a world without borders, without bosses and cops. He felt proud to be part of it, arguing at school with right-wing teachers, marching on demonstrations, reading up.

‘Well, Moh, these hands have gotta work for their living-oh, so you better—'

‘Split!'

Josh gave him five, gave him ten, laughing, and Moh left.

But later that day he came back, and over the next weeks he and his father, almost without noticing it, fell into a way of working together: Moh fetching manuals and looking things up, helping with testing and debugging, watching the system grow. Josh talked and thought he was talking to himself, or over Moh's head, and all the time the logic, but not the function, of the programs was becoming something that Moh grasped without knowing that he knew.

 

‘You OK, Moh?'

He blinked and shook his head. ‘Yeah, I'll be…'

‘You using or what?'

‘No more than usual,' Moh said. He forced a smile. ‘What did you say?'

‘Josh wrote it. The
CAL
system, remember?'

‘“
CAL
”?' Janis frowned at them both. Jordan's eyes widened.

‘Computer-aided logistics,' Kohn said. ‘I remember.'

‘Never seen it documented,' Bernstein said, ‘but it couldn't have come from anywhere else. I'm not saying he did it all, but that was the core. Nobody else could've done it.'

‘Why not?'

‘'Cause nobody else wrote Dissembler.'

This time the shock was different. No memories, no flashbacks. Just a falling feeling.

‘You're telling me,' he said to Bernstein, ‘that my father wrote Dissembler?' His voice creaked with disbelief. ‘How do you know?'

The lines on Bernstein's face deepened, momentarily showing his true age. ‘It wasn't talked about, back when you were a nipper. But –' He gestured at his stock and smiled sourly. ‘I've met a lot of ex-members since. Some of 'em in the bottom of a bottle, if you catch my drift.'

‘Why didn't you tell me before? About that and the Black Plan?'

‘Like I said. Thought you knew. Anyway, the Black Plan was a bit of a dodgy question, even in the Party. Not many people knew about it, I can tell you. Only the Central Committee and the fraction that was in the Labour Party and beavering away in the Republic's Economic Commission. Your old man was the best software engineer they had.
Course
they used him. The man who wrote Dissembler!' Bernstein laughed. ‘You know he released it as freeware? Could have been a millionaire, at least, but he didn't hold with patents and intellectual property and all that. Talk about a good communist. The Yanks were well pissed off: it ate through their controls and escrows like
acid.
'

Moh remembered Bernstein, after the meeting all those years ago, talking about illegal software and what the Yanks did about it. He must have thought Moh would know exactly what he was hinting at.

‘So that was why—?'

‘That, and the Black Plan.'

Bernstein's eyes held Moh's gaze, as if his memories were as sharp and inescapable. ‘It means he's still fighting them, Moh. “Wherever death may surprise us…” – remember?'

Only a sentimental affection restrained Kohn from punching him in the teeth.

‘Death is never welcome,' he said after a moment.

Bernstein's gaze inspected him, registered some shift in their relationship.

‘“Death is not lived through,”' he said sadly.

Kohn thought about it and nodded.

‘I should know,' he said.

 

He thanked Bernstein, said goodbye, and urged Janis and Jordan out of the mall, out into the sunlight. They walked to a ruined wall and sat on it, legs dangling, and talked. They were facing nothing but crumbling flyovers, sprawling squatter settlements: if they passed for anything it would have been backpacking students on a transport-archaeology trip. The ash of several cigarettes sifted to the ground as Moh told them what he'd remembered.

‘I still don't see how this Black Plan is supposed to
work
,' Janis said.

‘Nor me,' Moh said. He'd never thought of the Black Plan as more than black propaganda until last night. Jordan grabbed his arm and Janis's, almost making them topple backwards.

‘What—'

‘I know how it works,' Jordan said, in a voice strained with trying not to shout. ‘He put trapdoors in Dissembler! That's how it works! Because everybody uses Dissembler. Moh, man, your father was a
hacker
!'

‘What d'you mean, “trapdoors”?' Janis asked.

‘Ways in,' Moh said. ‘Trojan-horse stuff. Goes back a long way. The guys who wrote one of the first big operating systems planted some real subtle code in it that let them access anything it ran. If Josh pulled the same trick with Dissembler—'

The plan working through the market. He knew where that idea had come from.

‘Josh must have buried guns all right,' Moh said. ‘Buried them in the Black Plan: sleepers, logic bombs. And one contingency was that the Republic would fall, that the revolution would be lost.'

‘And what do you think the first part of the contingency plan was?' Jordan said. ‘I'll tell you – set up something like the
ANR
!'

‘Well, it certainly
enabled
it,' Moh said. ‘The story is that it siphons off money and supplies from all over the place. Computer-aided logistics, ha! But to actually build an organization?' He held up the pamphlet he'd bought. ‘You'd need this kind of programme, not a fucking computer program!' Jordan and Janis were looking at him as if he'd said something clever. He thought for a moment. ‘Oh, shit.'

‘Yes,' Jordan said. ‘Look at it this way. It's not just an analogy, it's the
same thing.
It's a selfish meme!'

‘I know about memes, ideas spreading; but why
selfish
?'

‘It's – well, it's a metaphor, right? For how ideas spread, replicate themselves. Like, ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they're in as genes are in the bodies they're in: just enough to get themselves copied.'

‘Like computer viruses,' Janis added.

‘OK.' Moh spread his hands. ‘And?'

‘If Josh built some political strategy into the Black Plan,' Jordan continued, ‘where would he have got the ideas from? Where else but from his own Party's programme, all his experience and reading about politics? The Plan
is
the programme – not the old pamphlet you got, not necessarily the ideas in any detail, but the set of practices that it
codes for.
' He grinned knowingly. ‘Over the years it's embodied itself in lots of organizations, isn't that right?'

‘Well, yes,' Moh said. It was a disconcerting view. ‘You're saying the programme creates the Party, and not the other way round?'

‘Of course it does,' Jordan said. ‘What do you think is going on in there?' He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Just a different mutation of the ideas, infecting fresh minds. A selfish meme replicating across time. Your variant of it may be in scores of sects, the Left Alliance and so on, but the most successful species at the moment is in the Black Plan. It's got its own bloody
army.
'

‘Now
you
're the one talking
serdar argic
,' Moh said. He punched Jordan lightly. ‘Come on. You're talking like it's some kinda electronic antichrist, taking over the world with—'

‘Barcodes containing 666!' Jordan laughed. ‘No, it's just a way of looking at it.' He made an inverting gesture. ‘Mind you, you've just said there's a connection between the Black Plan and the Fourth International…'

‘Well, maybe in the sense that you mean, that Josh wrote it. Beyond that…I don't know. Not much sign of Trotskyist ideology in the
ANR
. Or any other, come to that. They're pragmatic. Post-futurist.'

‘Exactly,' Jordan said. ‘The political and military techniques work independently of the ideology.'

‘What would you know about that?'

Jordan shrugged. ‘I read books.'

‘What about the Star Fraction?' Janis interrupted. ‘Bernstein said he thought
that
was in the Black Plan.'

‘Not the Fraction itself,' Moh said, frowning. ‘Just instructions for it, for people like Logan.'

‘“Not the Fraction,”' Jordan mimicked. ‘“Just instructions for it.” Get a clue, Moh. They're the same thing.'

‘OK, you can look at it that way if you want.' He felt stubborn about this, that Jordan and Janis between them were concocting a dubious metaphor for something plainly explicable in political terms. ‘What I think is that the Star Fraction was a
real
organization that Josh was involved in setting up. It was designed to exploit some kind of capability of the Black Plan but it never got activated.'

‘And what,' Jordan asked triumphantly, ‘were you so damn' insistent you'd done yesterday? You
activated
something!'

Moh stared at him, unable to speak as he experienced the mental flip into seeing things the way Jordan did: ideas as discrete entities – memes – leaping from mind to mind like programs indifferent to the hardware they ran on; language itself as a natural Dissembler, turning words into virtual realities in human brains; ideologies as meme machines, using all the parties and factions, armies and movements, faiths and reasons as their disposable bodies to reproduce another generation of gun-toting or Bible-thumping or programme-quoting or party-building meme-propagators.