The War Room in Riyadh went right down the middle, leaking word of an Iraqi raid on the small Saudi port town of Ras al-Khafji on Day 14.
January 30th
The morning of January 30th saw a small, astonishingly bold unit of Iraqis thumb their noses at the Allies by invading Saudi Arabia and capturing Ras al-Khafji.
It wasn’t the first isolated Iraqi strike across the border, but it was the first strike carefully leaked through the lower Allied troop ranks. A pair of Euro war-journos were allowed to wander near al-Khafji, take corroborative footage. Soon after that the War Room appeared forced to admit an enemy success. News services worldwide leapt on it, touting al-Khafji as the opening blow in the ‘apocalyptic land-battle’ Iraq’s leader kept promising.
And the Islamic world went crazy.
ANTICIPATION = AL KHAFJI
So began the final vigil, the wait for what might be the peak-moment of Kevin Dunbar’s life: his fifteen minutes at the helm, steering history.
On the boardroom’s wall screen Underdog was now evident in twenty foreign telecasts. The tale of al-Khafji’s seizure was being told by three all-news Asian stations, by a French feed carrying a report on the ‘Arab street’, and by more than a dozen pro-Iraq channels showing live-via-satellite images from Iraq’s Islamic neighbour states. Crowds rejoiced at the boldness of Hussein’s army in Jordan; panic reigned in Israel; wildly ecstatic sign-wavers pressed around a CNN camera in Baghdad. The crawl translations talked on and on about Iraq’s ‘brilliantly defiant capture’ of al-Khafji, something Kevin had foreseen in an abstract way half a year ago.
But he was now a different man from the one who’d leapt through the doorway of opportunity back in August, propelled by a need to fulfill an imaginary destiny, to steer history. He’d been hardened by the weeks of aerial bombardment, hammered into someone new. And he’d broken through the mountain’s cloud layer, the summit-moment was in sight.
So now Kevin’s life lay on a knife edge. The remaining steps to the summit led up a precipice between terrors. On the one side lurked the terror that he was a concept-obsessed automaton, a man willing to betray his friends and destroy his marriage all to answer a simple question.
Was SOOPE theory correct?
Was it capable of pre-programming the forces and feedback mechanisms of the real world’s metasystems? If so, then Mennochio’s vastly more visionary SOOPE concepts may have merit. And if not…
Well, that was the terror lurking on the other side. The thought that he’d given up so much for a world view that was flawed in its fundamentals, mad in its mathematics. That would be more than Kevin could bear.
Underdog was about to answer the question, one way or the other, one side or the other.
Unfortunately, Kevin knew that the first person who might see Underdog run its course and reach its real target would be somebody on the far side of the world, somebody way down at the bottom of things.
That somebody turned out to be a young soldier named Ian Stote.
February 2nd, Saudi Border
Enigmedia tales show how the bottom of a system-of-systems connects to the top. So now it’s time to jump from the Delphic boardroom where Kevin Dunbar watched the war from on high down to the war itself, to see what Dunbar was watching for…
Just before dawn on February 2nd, a Boeing 707 packed with sensitive detection gear soared over the desert along the northern Saudi border, flying a safe distance from the entrenched Iraq positions, scanning the enemy across that distance. The aircraft was part of the Allies’ Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, and at 5:28 AM Gulf time its sensors picked up an encrypted Iraqi radio message in the 70-megahertz range. An officer aboard the JSTARS jet promptly transmitted a recording of the encrypted message down to an American reconn base on the desert floor to the south, where a yawning commander-of-the-watch, having been warned about keeping one eye open for any message-captures that morning, promptly ordered an electronic intelligence unit to the vicinity of the radio intercept.
And so four young American soldiers began a dangerous journey across the desert in an armoured vehicle covered with aerials, under a brightening sky that screamed at them relentlessly. One of the soldiers, an intelligence officer named Ian Stote, was aware of their true position in the world that morning. Stote knew he and his three companions were stuck way down at the bottom of it all, crawling along beneath a lethal technological storm, and hoping to God that their tiny vehicle would go unnoticed by it.
All four soldiers were aware that their greatest peril lay in ‘friendly fire’ from the storm-system of jets and missiles directly overhead. So they kept their heads down, and concentrated on ignoring the crowdedness of the vehicle’s interior as they proceeded in starts and stops, halting regularly to confirm their geoposition, plotting their course into a laptop computer containing a map — less than an hour old — of the latest enemy movements in their corner of the front.
All the while Lieutenant Stote watched his detectors.
At 6:07 AM, as the vehicle was gaining higher ground, Stote picked up a message-burst of the same signature as the fragment captured by the JSTARS. More Iraqi message-traffic! He recorded several bursts, then started pounding at his keyboard, preparing an email report about a leap in signal directed at a swath of Republican Guard bunkers miles to the north. When he’d finished, Stote tried to activate the satellite uplink, without success. The dish on the vehicle’s roof wasn’t rotating; another soldier reluctantly got out, and clambered up to clean any sand from the rotation-collar.
So Stote slipped his helmet on, peeked out of the armoured eavesdropping car and shaded his eyes, taking his chance to look up at a patch of sky, at a space criss-crossed like no other in all the preceding years of human aviation.
At that moment, the morning’s Allied sorties were being routed at high speeds through six hundred and sixty restricted operations zones, steered clear of three hundred missile engagement spaces, directed down seventy-eight strike corridors, dispatched to patrol ninety-two air combat sectors, or granted desert flight training in one of thirty-six practice areas. Scheduling and monitoring all the sorties was akin to managing an airport with approach-and-landing vectors spread over ninety thousand miles, a logician’s nightmare. Yet the plane traffic was nothing compared to the welter of electronic messages criss-crossing that same theatre of airspace…
Finally, the vehicle’s dish began to rotate freely. It locked onto the co-ordinates of a comsat. Then it sent Stote’s email. And in that moment, the global media-weapon built around al-Khafji began to go critical. Ian Stote had just triggered the weapon’s final chain reaction, which would run through its sequence incredibly quickly.
The vehicle’s transmission was picked up by an Intelsat, then bounced right back down to Riyadh, to the United States Central Command’s email clearinghouse. There, the report from the front was integrated into a dynamic map of the Gulf that served the War Room as a moment-by-moment snapshot of all known Iraqi and Allied activity. The morning’s overall snapshot was changing rapidly, telltale indicators were now blossoming on several fronts.
But the clearinghouse had been warned about just such a development; the War Room had its Oracle. And the information in Stote’s report served to confirm the Oracle’s prophesies for this particular morning.
Key-words within Stote’s message produced automatic routing to Dunbar & Caety, Boston. But an out-of-theatre civilian organization had to be cleared, so the routed report was held up for a few hours before being forwarded from the Riyadh building up to another comsat, then relayed on to the continental United States, then passed across the glass cables of the Defence Data Network and through a secure leased-line into the headquarters of Dunbar & Caety. At 10:33 PM on February 1st, Eastern Standard time, the message arrived on a lone laptop in the boardroom occupied by Kevin Dunbar himself.
Kevin had not
slept since the al-Khafji story broke and he was truly in the hollow of it now, in a void brought on by sleeplessness and superhuman effort. So when Stote’s email report arrived he was slumped forward in a chair at the granite table, one hand holding up his head as he tried to focus on the fat fifty-page spiral notepad he’d begun back at the beginning of August.
But Kevin wouldn’t have seen the new email even if he’d been looking at his laptop’s screen — because at that moment a shimmering pool of colours was swimming over the table’s polished surface, emanating from the boardroom’s reflective back wall and the projected display of the Oracle SOOPE. Dots of dazzling colour swarmed over the screen of the laptop and the cordless phone-and-intercom beyond it, over the old Roman shield, over the notepad Kevin was using to flush out his newest fear, his suspicion that he’d become so immersed in designing the Gulf War ‘Oracle’ that he’d missed something critical.
At the top of the final notepad page, Kevin wrote
OMPHALOS
A Delphic altar used to mark the spot assumed to be the centre of the world. And a deceptively deadly metal jag on a warrior’s shield, representing the centre of the action. Kevin was afraid that the centre of the action in SOOPE design was already starting to shift out from under Dunbar & Caety.
MONSTER, he wrote.
Time for him to focus on Mennochio, that renegade Los Alamos researcher who was SOOPE-simulating new worlds and possibilities for humanity to aspire to, while Dunbar & Caety was still applying SOOPE theory to the oldest apps of the past, war and—
The intercom buzzed.
Kevin spun around, groping for the phone. “Who’ve you got?” he asked.
“Mister Dunbar, the AFPRO’s arrived.”
He blinked. Since their last illicit hotel rendezvous Olivia Jaegal had skipped three scheduled liaison sessions with Dunbar & Caety. Kevin had assumed she knew about his outing of their affair. So why was she showing up like this, unbidden—
He nudged the laptop linked into the DDN feed, re-angled the screen so that the back wall’s reflected colours weren’t masking what was on it.
Jesus, there it was!
A gold email icon, the highest clearance-level — the sender simply DESERT STORM — already a third of the way down the message queue. That made Kevin sit up. Must have been on-screen for a couple of minutes at least! Eyes so tired of watching for it he’d almost missed it… Fumbling with the trackball, he had to point and click three times before he nailed the right icon.
Kevin read what Ian Stote had typed during the desert’s dawn close to the Saudi border.
Then read it again.
By the time he closed the email two more gold-clearance icons had appeared at the top of the queue.
“Excuse me, sir?” The receptionist’s polite voice again. “Captain Jaegal’s insisting—”
Putting Reception on hold, then clicking the two new emails open: more radio intercepts, this time Iraqi transmissions to T-72 tank units, captured by a low orbiting satellite lofted just for the war; plus a report from a JSTARS aircraft describing evidence of enemy stirrings around other fortified bunkers. The Iraqis were revealing what infrastructure still existed, what portions of Hussein’s army his generals could still communicate with.
Suddenly dozens of gold-clearance icons dominated the email queue. After a couple of minutes Kevin stopped clicking them open, eased back in his chair. The widespread jump in radio traffic had happened! The bait had been taken!
The Republican Guard might finally be coming out of its bunkers.
A light on the intercom pulsing. Reception, still holding.
He stabbed at the SPEAK button. “Offer some refreshments, and my apologies — I’ll be a bit longer.” He hung up, unable to think what he’d say to Jaegal if he did invite her up.
But Olivia Jaegal was not to be stopped.
And so seconds later his summit-moment arrived, in the form of a photo-icon popping onto the laptop’s email queue, the sender AFPRO — from Jaegal! She must have convinced Reception to let her access their server.
Kevin clicked open her photo. An aerial shot filled the laptop, showing him a highway in the Kuwaiti desert, a line of tanks and trucks several miles long in the process of being bombarded.
Un-believe-able.
Hussein had actually done it, he’d actually ordered the units his generals could still contact to leave the safety of their fortifications, rush the Saudi border, running them straight into the targeting sights of the Allied air armada.
And all because the news was carrying footage of Muslims falling on their knees. All because the world was seeing images of a Middle East celebrating the ‘Victory at al-Khafji’, hearing reports of Hussein’s defiance and courage, as told by journalists and cameramen who were just doing their jobs, just trying to capture the drama of the ongoing Crisis in the Gulf.
All because deep inside Dunbar & Caety’s SOOPE an outrageous meme had done its job — a guesstimate-value representing Hussein’s ego had proven all too accurate.
Kevin shuddered, for an instant appalled by the power of his prophecy, the sheer overkill of this uber-moment. On his laptop screen, Jaegal’s photo showed hundreds of Iraqi trucks and tanks trapped on the highway, already on fire, their occupants already burning.
He looked away. Looked up toward the skylight in the boardroom ceiling, a patch of it free of ice and snow. A reflection prevented him from seeing any patch of sky above — the reflection of his war-Oracle swarming across the boardroom table. But he tried to imagine the sky above the factory roof anyway, the snow-laden clouds gathering on this dark winter’s night in America. He tried to imagine the mammoth machinery of war screaming beyond those clouds, then slamming down through the roof to obliterate him.
Tried to imagine it. Couldn’t.
Imagination failed him, even as something slammed into him.
Kevin would remember that look-up as the clearest moment of revelation in his life. The moment he saw the metasystem steering him, saw the truth.
The door inside him shouldn’t have opened — not because it led to a place impossible to reach, but to a place possible to reach.
NEW ORDER, he wrote.
America, all powerful now, its systems so advanced that a man like Kevin could tip them over into titanic overkill. Who could possibly stand against that, he thought, staring at the photo of the bombarded highway.
A demo of the new order so successful that no conventional force would pit itself against the America, not in the coming decade, at least. So military apps were not the market to be in, no. The centre of action was shifting elsewhere.
Staring at Jaegal’s photo. Then picking up the remote for the multi-channel screen, calling up Reception’s security camera-view — and there was Olivia Jaegal facing the security lens, holding up a printout of the same aerial-photo she’d just mailed him. Taped to the bottom of the photo was a big note declaring:
YOU DID IT
The juxtaposition of this image — Jaegal holding up her photo-and-declaration in the wall screen’s centre square, surrounded by nineteen newscasts showing Hussein’s supporters rejoicing, even as the army they were cheering on was annihilated from the air. Annihilated because of those telecasts of cheering crowds.
Annihilated because of Kevin Dunbar.
MONSTER
Circling that word on his list, circling it again before he remembered it meant someone else, that genius theorist at Los Alamos. Then pressing the intercom. “Send Captain Jaegal up,” he gasped.
Seconds later Jaegal took a long-legged stride out of Reception’s camera-view. Heading on up to make her play. And Kevin realized he was prepared to play the fool for her again, if it meant one last opportunity to fool the ADSM… Turning toward the boardroom’s back wall, where the Oracle SOOPE’s dateflag had reached FEB-02-91 — the Persia
n Gulf present.
All the intricate shapes on-screen were frozen, the nightly download had begun. All Dunbar & Caety’s hard-won techniques embodied in the simulation were winging off to Riyadh, to other places too.
But ADSM could go ahead and run with military SOOPE-apps. Kevin was going to run elsewhere. Stroking a line through the phrase NEW ORDER, he wrote
NEW WORLD
Then he closed the notepad, and slipped it into a pocket just as the boardroom door swung open.
“Kev, I’ve brought champagne!” Olivia called out, closing the door and then reaching behind her neck, loosening long dark hair around her shoulders. Oh, the ADSM knew Kevin well enough, intended to know him better still.
But tonight Kevin Dunbar had misled a worldwide audience, the mass media, and the leader of Iraq. It should be a mere exercise to mislead this AFPRO, ply her with pillow-talk about non-existent project goals. Then in the morning he’d book a flight to New Mexico. Go see this Mennochio, hear out his vision.
And hope it wasn’t too late to sign up for a new kind of world.
ARCHIVE APPEND:
DUTT Hearing on the al-Khafji SOOPE simulation
Convened at the Hague, January 2019
For thirteen days, the international prosecutors carved into Kevin Dunbar on a live World Court telecast. Never a day passed without archival footage of the highway from Basra to Mutlaa in Kuwait — the so-called Highway of Death — backdropping Dunbar on the courtroom’s digital walls for the press gallery cameras.
And never a day passed, during the hearing’s first week, without another former Allied pilot who’d flown a Highway of Death bombing mission taking to the witness podium. The pilots all told similar stories, testifying that they’d never seen a more pathetic sitting-duck situation in combat, and tossing out such choice quotes for the online news services as ‘a turkey shoot’ and ‘bombing fish in a barrel’.
The aim of the archival footage and pilots’ statements was to support a prosecution bid to have Weapon of Mass Destruction status slapped onto Dunbar & Caety’s original al-Khafji simulation, a.k.a. the Oracle SOOPE. But the footage and pilots also served another prosecution aim: assisting in the gradual grinding down of the hearing’s central witness, Kevin Dunbar.
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 37