The Celestial Instructi0n (25 page)

Sam heard shouting over from the Communications building. Two small
groups of ragged security officers were shouting and pointing in the direction
where Sam lay hidden among the war debris; Sam could see the silhouettes of at
least a half-dozen guards jogging in a determined manner in his direction. Sam
took a breath, popped up, and threw the smart phone as hard as he could toward
the group. He wheeled around pointing downtown, toward the harbor, and lit off
sprinting on his long legs and lean body that in the West would be called a
marathoner’s build, but in West Africa wasn’t called anything.

Once more into the sparkling twilight ocean dimming in the west,
he ran, seeking both escape and nourishment.

Epilogue

Two months later: Washington, Portland, Freetown, Cambridge

The President of the United States took the call in her office. It
was from the First Celestial of the Church of the Crux.

“Speaking,” she said, “how may I help you?”

First Celestial Cassandra Jones spoke to the President as if she
were an old friend who had gone differing ways, but perhaps shared the welcome memories
of schooling or a demanding sport. “Madame President. It is so nice to speak
with you. I trust that the Progression Toward Liberty Pac has received the
Church’s first contribution?” The First Celestial listened to the pleased
sounds and added, “We would like to put this matter entirely behind us,
considering the tragic suicide of Michael Voide after his treating the Church
as his own criminal enterprise. Be assured we are making sweeping changes so
that will never happen again.” The First Celestial looked up and with a flicker
of coded emotion on her face glanced at her Security Throne. “That’s right.
Everything. No more secret files. Transparency. That is the new prayer for us
at the Church. Transparency.” This time the First Celestial surveyed the
clerestory with its hot screens of data and broke into a broad grin. The tone
of her voiced was unchanged. “Thank you. I am very grateful for that. Let me
know if we can be of service to your administration and your re-election
committee in any way. Anything further we can due to facilitate the PIC treaty?
No? I trust the data from our Churches in Haifa and Moscow have been useful for
your people? Good. Thank you. Good-bye now. Good-bye”

As she powered down the mobile that she was given by her Security
Throne, she looked amused at his face, dark among the light-sapping folds of
velvet lining the room: the new Security Throne Special Agent Andrew Sahas. She
said to him “What a fool. The Games Machine will be in every home ten years
from now. Soon after that, the chimplants. Unlike people, you can’t betray an
idea, nor can an idea betray you. And that is why the Games Machine is going to
crush them.” The First Celestial stretched out her right hand, fingers splayed.

“Fuck me now, Andrew.”

In a hospital in Cambridge lay an old man with the usual noisy
clutter of machines and piped fluids around his bed. He was severely emaciated but
had already lived longer than his lung cancer predicted. His head was freshly
shaved like a new boot recruit. A raw recruit at the onco-academy.

Around his bed was Joex Baroco, dressed in new Carhartt work
clothes, Xtance, sitting stiffly, pigtails to the front, wincing occasionally
from pain that she steadfastly refused to medicate. It apparently issued from
elastic bandages covering her abdomen that were decorated with a variety of
insects and flower stickers that had been put on by Jimmy Hoffa over the weeks
that he shuttled between Xtance and Margaret, who recovered quickly from the
rough handling she received during the Omega.

Around them, the hospital had a chemical odor in its air as if an
additive to make its patients preserved, unspoiled, whole. It was not meant to
be frightening.

Finally, there was a teenage boy with them. He was dressed in a
t-shirt with some graphic of a person impaled on what looked like the golden
pins of a giant square central processing unit. He was quiet and polite, and
looked as if he were cold in the air-conditioned hospital air. His eyes darted
from bed to the cables to the clear piping and paused on the control faces of
the machines surrounding the bed. The morphine pump made a reciprocal wheeze
when it periodically administered another dose into the old man’s IV.

“Sam, this is my father, Ed.”

To Sam all of this was wonderful and new: within days of his final
escape at the Communications building, he was in fact tracked down again. But
this time it was the authorities from the US Embassy along with an official
from Sierra Leone Consular Affairs who knew his Cousin Siloi. The official spoke
to Sam in English. They didn’t come to arrest him, as it turned out, or to turn
him over to cousin. A school in the State of Massachusetts, the Computer
Laboratory it says, learned your age and position. It has given you a scholarship
for studying computers. They would like you to travel immediately so you can
begin the summer term in the town of Boston. Your Cousin has already been
compensated for losing your fine computer services,” the Consular official said
in the monotone cadence of a paid-for tool. He added at the end, in Mende, “You
are a God-damned lucky black bush bastard, McNamara.”

Sam didn’t correct him on any point. Nor did he believe him until
he personally held a new passport, with a United States “F” visa, on board the
Air France jet to New York City. Some members of the shadow lab were eminently
well-connected, it seemed.

The attenuating of the Event— the Celestial Instruction, as it
came to be called privately within the government—was materially aided by Sam’s
botnet re-distribution, if not by his trickster codicil. The codicil caused any
server with pattern residue of the stack trojan itself to do a complete hard
drive dump to the Internet using old Usenet protocols. Not all Chinese servers
had avoided this and, in particular, not every one linking a nondescript pink
building in Hangzhou with Beijing and the rest of the pacific rim. Among the
copious data dumped to the Internet was huge quantity of purported
confessionals and ops alleged to originate in turn with the International Church
of the Crux, Portland.

Over the days that followed, the administration played the Event down
even as its computer security researchers frantically analyzed and made
recommendations. The Church publically denied authenticity of any documents
concerning its Ecclesiastical acts: it was just a tragic coincidence that First
Celestial Michael Voide took his own life with a Church registered Glock 30 on
the evening of the Event, witnessed by his own Security Throne Cassandra Jones
and her associate, Angel Special Agent Sahas.

That had nothing to do with the true culprits, a Chinese spy ring,
the Church said. The Chinese government in turn denied any knowledge of such a
ring and declared that information security mattered as much to them as to the
United States; moreover they had traced the attack as originating from eastern
Europe. A deranged over-the-hill hacker named Hu with no connection to the
government of any kind was solely responsible for any re-broadcast attacks from
China, they said, somewhat contradicting their previous categorical denial.
After a swift fair military trial Hu was executed for crimes against the state,
they added.

As for Joex Baroco, he was dumped at the airport strip in
Portland, Jones having been briefed on the failure of the Chinese coup during
the flight. Whatever information he had or who he might tell was instantly
extinguished into irrelevance.

“Back to obscurity with you. You are a daemon, banished from all
Church properties. You are hereby released from your vows,” somewhat
prematurely arrogating the power that belonged to the First Celestial alone. “Be
glad I do not rule you an apostate.”

Joex had no problem with that. It would have been trivial to drift
back into a lazy decline. Once again, he made the trip back to Cambridge after
fetching the remainder of his money buried in a dirty PVC tube. Something was
awake in him: not just the threat being a target, not just Xtance nor her Jimmy,
or even Margaret’s craft. Ashamed, he barely could admit it was his session
with the Games Machine as well. He needed it or something like it. Maybe at the
Shadow Lab or maybe the Cataract project, which no one seems to know much about,
except that it somehow countered both the Games Machine and the Perpetual
International Copyright Treaty? But it was something he had to do. Besides he
had to earn money to help buy a biplane for a young man in Idaho named Bill. A
promise that he was reminded of when he read the news of the accident of the
small plane carrying the heads of the major three financial ratings agencies
that happened just days following the Event. Joex did not see the back-page
notice of the accidental death the same day of assistant US Attorney Jim
Rauchmann on a misty Portland street. The car responsible later found that
night with the driver, a ringer for Joex, dead from alcohol poisoning—a man
whose DNA matched that found at his poor sister’s home.

 Despite the upheaval in Joex’s life and his sister’s death, the
manhunt and the threat to his own life for something he did not even know that
he knew, his cross-country excursion and international convulsion of conflicting
titanic forces, Joex paradoxically emerged rested, assured, positive and eager
to meet the world again. It was as if a switch was thrown; a control wheel
nudged forward.

Joex, surrounded by Xtance and Sam and Ed, no longer had a need to
play with matches.

“Dad, I came by to say ‘hello’ with my new friends,” said Xtance
to the dying man.

“You mean to say good-bye,” Ed tried to smirk, which turned into a
soft bubbling cough, which he had to turn on the pillow so the drool would not
run down his chin.

“Dad, you are a biologist so I am not going there. The only thing
you need to know is that I love you and I have loved you my entire life. And I
will love you for the rest of my life and the lives of everyone around me.”

“You know I believe I have loved you your entire life as well and
that we are the shadows in the cave, merging and playing together, as long as
there is light.”

Ed was quiet now. His eyes focused on his daughter.

“But now, Dad, close your eyes; I have a story for you. It is
about a Sultan who united the seven eastern lands and found true love forever.”

Afterword

This was a
work of fiction. Reality may be uncomfortably coincident.

Two headlines
on February 14, 2012, just as this book was completed:

We are getting used to
seeing these kinds of headlines. It is what we do not see that frightens me.

The United States is vulnerable to a fateful attack and will
remain so for the calculable future.