Stormfuhrer (2 page)

It was one of his favorite aspects of this land—those thick trees that hid the dark brown cabin from any passerby who might happen to walk near the gate located some seventy yards away on the north side of the land.  His property was fenced with barbed wire and gated, surrounded also by the tall and the stubby trees of neighboring farms, the dark resaca, and the angular furrows of farmland rimming it, usually covered with dense sugar cane or low white cotton.  Little trace revealed the existence of his cabin, save the dirt road leading to it and his little green Subaru pickup that sat seemingly lodged into the pepper trees surrounding it.

He walked along the resaca that ran beside his cabin, noticing the thick meshes of water plants that dominated the dark water in its stagnant, undulating trail through the nearby farmland.   He often ate from the fresh produce of those fields, encouraged to do so by the several farmers whom he knew from the occasional visits that such land ownership required in this part of the world.  A six pack of Corona under one arm always helped to lubricate the long moments of these awkward occasions between the farmer host and this all but heterogeneous visitor.

His two-year-old, brown-eyed German shepherd awoke from her padded place beside the futon in the loft.  She heard the screen door slam and knew that her master was taking his morning walk.  She dashed blindly through the large door flap in the bottom half of the back door and out into the trail by the resaca.  She walked at his heels at first and then in front, sometimes stopping to sniff at a dead rodent or a piece of skin left by a molting rattler.

Continuing to smoke the last of his Cuban, Richard thought nothing of the web sites and the suffixes littering his three monitors at home.  Rather, he let his mind wander to other things—his grown up son, working construction somewhere in Montana, the woman who took the boy out of Texas, the thought that he, Richard Hayes, might someday remarry.  He  kicked a rock into the resaca as Fraulein stopped in front of him, gave him a tilted look of curiosity, then sniffed the air and continued to trot up the path.

The path stopped where the tree line ended at a barbed-wire fence.  There were no clouds beyond the trees, only the intensity of sun and heat.  On his return to the cabin, Hayes descended to a path next to the still water of the resaca, where Fraulein had already been, and halted, watching minnows swim near the hard, clay-dry edge of the water.  Several grackles squawked from the trees above the water, then louder as the German shepherd approached a black bird on the little trail.  It was beautiful in its bluish blackness, Hayes reflected.  The sad thing attempting to flap a wing that would never again touch sky or cloud.  It tried to walk but a leg had apparently been broken in its fall.  Fraulein sniffed at it and then backed away.   

He had not heard the grackles until he noticed Fraulein looking toward him and then up into the trees at five or six black shapes, squawking for their fallen comrade. Fraulein, receiving no sign from her companion whether or not to approach the broken bird, apparently decided that the easy kill wasn’t worth the noise and simply trotted on ahead past the bird.  Richard, knowing there was nothing he could do for it, also walked past it on the trail near the water.  The squawking continued behind them.

Near the cabin, Hayes stopped to grimace at some of the green hairs of algae that floated just beneath the surface of the wide resaca.  He wiped his bald forehead with the base of his t-shirt, revealing a thin patch of black stomach hair over a tiny gut.

As they neared the cabin, the German shepherd dashed through the door flap to lap up from a pail all the water that her companion wouldn’t let her drink from the dark green resaca.

Hayes glanced at the computer screens once again.  An hour had passed and browsers were still opening and closing everywhere on the three wide screens.  He washed his face in the sink of his little kitchen and looked out the screen door onto the deep, watery ravine amidst the trees. 

CHAPTER 2

Many hours later, the rolling of the thunderously silent browser screens finally ceased with the last remaining seven, one by one, blinking out until only the small program window was left in the center of the screen.  There were a few gray buttons on the screen's interface, with labels like “Resume,” “Cancel,” and “Main.”  Above these sat a scrolled list that refreshed every half-second and at the top of this list the name of the sole website found with the .allein suffix.  Three long beeps sounded when the last browser disappeared. 

Richard Hayes was oblivious to any of it at 3:47 PM.  He had napped hard on the couch during the late morning and into the early afternoon.  He had had guests over the previous night and hadn’t slept much.  Two local farmers had come over to watch the basketball playoff game on his giant flat-screen that, like a wall, divided his small computer nook from the “living room” portion of his cabin.   One of his guests, a farmer living nearby, was the father of a student who had graduated some ten years previously.  His name was Carlos.  The other was that man’s oldest son, Hector, who had graduated from another school. 

Hayes didn’t particularly like basketball, but this sort of company, the kind you can walk away from without excuse, the kind that doesn’t ask when you’ll be off your computer or why no one else seems to ever stop by, was always welcome.  It was a relationship implicitly based on trade, as Hayes felt all workable relationships were, at some level. 

His welcome visitors usually brought him some of their produce or just a bit of conversation, some expert advice on growing vegetables, which Hayes dabbled in from time to time, or just some short piece of gossip about a local guy owning an adjacent piece of land who shot another farmer's dog.  Sometimes it was gossip about a school board member who was having an affair with a married coach, or one whose uncle got an unbid-for contract to plant shrubbery around the campuses.  It was pointless gossip, really.  These were merely the unpaid, elected, small-town officials that Hayes would see at senior graduations but rarely meet.  Most did it for the petty sense of empowerment their position gave them, in their minds, over others in the community with whom they held family grudges, though he knew of a few who actually wanted to see changes implemented that would improve student learning.  Still, the information gave Hayes some insight into why some decisions were made in his district that seemed on the surface to be completely irrational but that affected him as a teacher, in one way or another. 

Last night, Carlos had brought him a bag of large sweet onions,
cebollas dulces
, which he often made a meal of, sautéed in a skillet of garlic, salt, and butter.  There were also the remains of a six-pack of Corona Extra in the small refrigerator.  In return, there was his huge flat-screen television that was perfect for watching sporting events.  Carlos, the father, would sometimes stay all day, napping occasionally, in front of the thin, black monolith, the volume respectfully turned down low, while Hayes, at his computer and monitors, would often forget that the man was even there.  It was a perfect arrangement.

He was snoozing on his old couch when Fraulein, lying on the rug, barked a few times at the barely audible beeps coming from the computer on the other side of the television.  He awoke and patted her head, deciding to make some afternoon coffee before again checking the screens.  

In front of his long foldout table that served perfectly as makeshift computer desk, Hayes stood and waited for the coffee to brew.  He leaned onto the table to read the screen.  Centered in the scrolling area of the gray box was only one website that matched what he was looking for:

http://walküre.allein

Not very interesting.  Still, he often liked to visit strange, out of the way websites, despite the increased threat of inadvertently downloading some inventive new foreign virus, from which no computer could boast 100% immunity.

Hayes sat down at the computer table, grabbing a handful of almonds from a blue can, and munched through his sips of coffee.  He was wide awake now.  Here was a company that had already claimed its extension, so he couldn’t exactly buy it cheap and then sell it back to them.  But he had never heard of the company name tied in with this particular suffix.  It was clearly foreign, probably European.

He brought up an extensive Singapore-based search engine database, which he knew to be excellent in cataloging foreign sites, and did a search for “walküre allein.”  Nothing.  Then “allein walküre.”  Then each alone.  Nothing.  He tried various spellings, changing the “W” to a “V,” such as valkyrie, valkyre, vallkiere, valkyrja
,
etc.  No dice.

Hayes often wondered at how some companies had acquired their names.  No well-known classical or mythological reference was spared the inglorious honor of representing some flatulent corporation.  In fact several companies could be represented by one mythological reference but each with various spellings.  The name and icon always sported an accompanying logo, as if the said company bore the qualities of the deity it was named after, or the legendary hero, or its misspelled cousin.  Did any of the founders of these companies know anything about the history of their chosen mascot?  Hayes was doubtful that many did, with names like
Janus
--a company with two-faces, really? And
Pasiphae Labs
, a genetics research firm named after the wife of the legendary King Minos of Crete, a woman who copulated with an apparently very handsome bull and gave birth to the Minotaur.  What sad monsters they must be creating at Pasiphae Labs! 

Walküre,
Valkyrie in the English spelling, were the beautiful warlike daughters of Odin who retrieved the souls of the human battle-slain from the fields of slaughter and brought the heroes to Odin’s Hall where they would feast, drink, and fight until Ragnarok, the Viking’s version of the end of the world.  Well, Valkyrie would be a great name for a cryogenics company, Hayes thought, freezing your lifeless body in liquid nitrogen, only to unfreeze you and bring you back to life in the distant future when the cure for whatever particular disease you died from had been discovered.  He knew that whatever company this name represented, and whatever product it manufactured or service it provided, was not likely to be nearly that interesting.  It was probably a foreign bank or some insurance company.

Richard typed the web address into his browser and pressed Enter.  The screen went white and then froze.  He pressed a few keys.  Nothing.  He pressed a few more to pull up the Task Manager so as to override what was happening on the screen.  Still nothing happened.

He tapped spasmodically at the keys.  Nothing changed.  He was about to unplug his computer from the wall to initiate a hard reboot when he heard something deep within his speakers that he at first mistook for something occurring outside his cabin.

He put on a pair of headphones, thinking that it was probably some metallic noise caused by a short in the speaker wiring.  He turned up the volume of his computer speakers into which his headphones were planted.  He knew that the computer’s audio volume was on full since he left it that way to give him manual control at the speaker level.  Still, the sound was faint, if it was anything.  It could have been his imagination. 

He threw off the headphones and ran up the narrow stairs to click off the mammoth air conditioning unit.  Running back down, he thought for a moment and then unplugged his refrigerator as well, and his TV.  He returned to his chair.  Still a white screen shown on all three monitors.  Bright, almost pearlescent.  Putting the headphones back on, he listened again to the nearly silent pattern of sound.  From deep within the black headphones he thought he heard singing. 

The screens of all three of his wide monitors were still white and frozen.  Even the surrounding browser frame was gone.  Frustrated, Hayes ripped off the cushions of the headphones, exposing the bare metal and magnets to the skin surrounding his ear canals when he returned it to his head.  Now, though it was still extremely faint, he heard a voice.  It  was clearly singing, operatic and female, and very beautiful.

Gradually, the screens began to glow with an even brighter white, almost blinding in the dark corner of the cabin where Richard sat.  The music faded into the low roar of a crowd of people speaking what sounded like an indistinct gibberish. Through the mist of gradually darkening pixels, Hayes became surrounded on all three screens by a crowd in what looked to be an old street market.  He brought the three screens closer together and decreased the angle of the outer two until they nearly surrounded him on three sides.  As the sound increased, he brought himself and his chair closer to the screens.

The realism was astonishing.  It was panoramic.  It was as if he were looking at real events through a helmet with three wide openings.  Even the spaces between the screens, each a half-inch wide, went unnoticed.   There was a bit of a glare coming from the window beside his couch that hadn’t been completely covered, like the others, so Hayes reached for a black felt blanket that sat folded under the long table and threw it over his head, encompassing also the three flat screens.  He reached for the cushions he had removed from his headphones and deftly slipped them back into their plastic cups.  The cushions of the headphones surrounding his ears completed the almost total envelopment of his senses.  He just sat there for a moment, enthralled by what he was seeing and hearing--the people, the old fashioned cars, the sounds of a big city.

Hayes was looking through the eyes of a man apparently trying to tie the laces of his own boots.  This movement, however, had halted suddenly.  The man now fixedly held the black, oily-looking shoestrings with both thumbs and index fingers.  He had froze.

Richard moved a balled device with his gloved right hand.  The black glove was a standard 3D mouse glove that, among other things, moved multiple black cursors associated with the fingertips and palm of his hand.  Its surface was studded with tiny metallic studs covering both the front and back of its leathery skin.  In the gloved hand, Richard held a standard mouse shaped into a sphere, designated for less complicated interactions. 

Watching the man’s hands at the bottom of the forward screen, he positioned his gloved mouse ball with his right pinky and clicked.  Nothing.  Again he clicked the finger, this time with an upward drag.  The man’s finger moved slightly as the cursor drifted off the finger, leaving it in the same position.  That was all he could do for the moment.  The view of the man’s polished black boots shook at times as pedestrians jostled by on the crowded sidewalk, apparently brushing against him with a faint
“enschuldigen sie bitte”
followed immediately by a louder
“
excuse
me please.” Richard recognized the faintly audible words as German while the louder translations of the words were pronounced in English less than a half-second later.

It was a game of some kind, one that would clearly involve complicated movements, so he reached for the studded left-handed glove that matched the one already on his right and slipped it on.  Now both hands might control the booted figure through whose eyes he could view the crowded street.

He turned his left wrist and the world went sideways, and in the right-hand screen his shoulder was soon rubbing against a sidewalk curb.  The shoestrings were still in his hands, but with some clicking and dragging of his gloved hands, he was able to free the man’s virtual hands from the strings and somewhat right himself again.   

Hayes dragged the ball held in his right hand forward while spinning it up slightly.  This moved his view upward to the people walking nearby--fathers, mothers, children, some glancing at him, nearly all wearing hats.  An elderly woman stopped in front of him and shook her head with a look of sad disgust, glared at him momentarily and then went shuffling along into the crowd, using a closed black umbrella as a cane.

With some further difficulty, Richard stood the man upright.  It required the lowering of the gloves, flattening them like feet against the desk and raising up the palms while leaving the fingertips upon its surface.  A few clicks of the mouse with his right hand and he was stumbling along the sidewalk.  From behind, he heard boots crunching the pavement towards him.  He spun the mouse-ball to the right and his character’s virtual head began to turn, finding it somewhat difficult to look very quickly in either direction.  He pushed the mouse-ball away from him, and as he did, he looked down at his black clothes.  A dark cap fell forward over his face, blocking most of his view.

With a jerk, the hat fell to the ground and a gloved hand was around his left arm.  Faintly:
“Laufen kann schwierig sein, ja Komerad?”
  Then louder: “Walking can be difficult, eh comrade?”  He spun the mouse-ball left and saw the young face of a soldier in uniform. 

The images were crisp and the edges smooth.  There was no hint of manufactured polygons though the interface.  This program was cutting edge though it had no directions or help screens, nothing in text.

After fooling around with the keys, the mouse, and the gloves, Richard found the right combinations for the movement of his legs, his head, his arms.  It was complicated, but he managed to step slowly into the back of a military vehicle, a truck, still guided by the soldier’s hand wrapped around his left arm.  He managed to make his avatar duck into the truck opposite the man, who let go of his arm, causing the body to tip into a seated position.  It was dark in the back of the green tarp-covered truck.  The sky was overcast.