The Celestial Instructi0n (19 page)

They 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.

On 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.

The 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.

A 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.

“Hello. He took his hand out of his pocket and offered it to Joex.
Anything new?”

Margaret turned to Joex and said, “This is Gee; Gee, meet Joex.”

“Jokes?” said Gee with a dramatically upraised eyebrow.

“G?” replied Joex with a smile.

Margaret 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.

The 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?”

Between 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.

It 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.

Gee 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.

“A prophet?” Joex asked.

“Someone who can make things happen, as in acts of biblical
prophecy. You’ll see.”

Joex agreed.

When 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.

“Come this way.” She said to Joex, we can meld the corroboration
with the problem itself, if it proves interesting.”

She made her way to a center laptop and motioned for Joex to sit
in front of it.

“Please show me the code that you believe is relevant.”

Joex 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?

Gee 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.”

She 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.”

The 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.

But Joex did not notice the arrivals since he had passed
out—collapsed—into the surprised arms of Gee.

Manager 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.

The 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.

He 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.

That 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.

As 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.

The 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?

Well, 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.

First, 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!

Jones 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.