“How?” Dagmar asked.
He gave the question a moment’s thought. “Really old routers?” he offered. “From before they were all infected?”
“Right,” Richard said. “We could advertise for them on craigslist.”
Dagmar looked at him.
“No mockery, Richard,” she said. “All desperate ideas are being considered here.”
“Check,” said Richard. He gave his glittering Girard Perregaux chronograph a look. It was becoming a nervous tic, Dagmar thought—he didn’t have to take his eyes off his flatscreen to know what time it was—but it seemed as if he wanted to reassure himself the item was still on his wrist.
“You know,” he said. “Maybe I should call the computer centre and let them know what the problem is. They might be able to get some of their routers offline and restore at least some service.”
Dagmar waved a hand. “Carry on.”
Richard picked up the handset on his desk, listened for a moment, then returned it.
“No dial tone,” he said. He picked up the handset, then joggled the switch on the cradle several times. Eventually Dagmar could faintly hear the distant sound of a dial tone whining from the earpiece of Richard’s handset.
“Not all the switches are down,” he said, and punched numbers into the handset.
Ismet grasped both arms of his chair, then levered himself to his feet. Dagmar felt a mental shudder as she saw the look of pain on his face.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need to go lie down?”
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I can’t help you with your discussion, so I’m just going to go monitor my station.”
He walked toward his desk, then paused at the sound of Eurofighters overhead. He cocked his head and listened.
“I think that’s the same flight we’ve been hearing since the Zap hit,” he said. “I think they’re circling and waiting for air traffic control to come back online.”
“But the traffic control is radio,” Dagmar said. “The Zap wouldn’t take it out.”
“But the radars could be controlled through TCP/IP,” Richard said. “The controllers might not be able to read their screens right now.”
Dagmar paused for a moment of horror at the thought of aircraft wandering lost across the skies.
Ismet walked to his desk and sat. He connected his satellite phone to his computer and tilted the phone antenna toward the windows so that it got better reception. As the discussion developed, Dagmar saw him leaning toward the screen, heard him tapping away on his keyboard
“Look,” Helmuth said. “Either we go back to Stone Age fossilware or we try to out-evolve the Zap. I say we go forward—there’s got to be a way to put a quick and dirty IP together that will keep this thing out.”
They discussed this for the next quarter hour and eventually decided that this wasn’t their best allocation of resources.
“There must be thousands of people in the Greater D.C. area working on this problem right now,” Dagmar said. “They’ll do that job much better than we can. We can’t save the Internet, not from here. What we need to do is save the revolution.”
The faces that turned to her were bleak.
“Look,” she said. “If we find a solution, it doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to work reasonably well most of the time.”
Lola rose from her desk and walked to stand in the doorway.
“There was an ARPANET back before there was TCI/IP,” she said. “It must have used a packet switching system. What was it?”
Dagmar reached for her sat phone, called up its browser, and called up Wikipedia.
“Network Control Program,” she said. “NCP. Last used in 1983.”
“Over thirty years ago,” Helmuth said. “There’s no hardware for it now.”
Lincoln returned to the ops center at sunset. He walked with a kind of plodding deliberation, as if he were carefully choosing exactly where to place his feet. When he came into the room, he sat on a corner of Byron’s desk and looked at the others.
“Byron and Magnus,” he said, “have confessed to informing the Turkish government of our projects and our whereabouts. They were responsible for Judy’s death.”
Helmuth and Richard looked at him in shock. “Why?” Richard demanded.
“We’re in the process of finding that out. Interrogations are proceeding.” He looked down at Dagmar. “Any developments here?”
Dagmar offered him a summary of their discussion.
“Oh lord,” he said. “Next you’ll be wanting to go back to DOS.”
“DOS?” Dagmar asked. “Which DOS?”
“MS-DOS,” Lincoln said. “Pre-Windows Microsoft operating system. There’s no TCP/IP stack in there anywhere.”
Dagmar’s first computer had run Windows, and MS-DOS was as foreign to her as, say, Plankalkül.
“So,” she said. “Why can’t we use it?”
“Because—” A slow light seemed to kindle in Lincoln’s eyes. “Because it’s awkward and horrible and slow and primitive. Because you’ll have to type orders onto a command line instead of just clicking on something. It’s not flexible and will only perform limited tasks. And you might end up trying to communicate over a 300bps acoustic coupler, assuming you could steal one from a museum.”
“And it bypasses the Zap, right?”
“Yes,” Lincoln said. “When you’re running DOS, you don’t even have an IP address.”
“And will it run on our computers?”
“I…” He hesitated. “I don’t know why not. You might have to do some special formatting or boot from disks.”
“We can create a virtual machine that runs DOS,” Richard said. “DOS will see the processor as an—” He looked at Lincoln. “Intel 8086?” he asked. “Eight-oh-eight-eight? Whatever.”
Dagmar turned to Helmuth and Richard. “See if you can download a copy over a cell modem. Set it up on a computer and see what we can do.”
“Modems are going to be a problem,” Lincoln said. “Modem command strings have evolved in the last few decades. I doubt that any of our modems will be able to communicate using DOS.”
“We’ll find some,” Dagmar said. “And when we find them online, there is UPS. There is FedEx. We will prevail.”
Richard looked with some amusement at his display.
“Did you know,” he said, “that there’s a Usenet topic called alt.comp.DOSRULES?”
“There’s still Usenet?” Lola asked. Lincoln looked at her.
“Sometimes,” he said, “people actually go online to exchange information, instead of to look stuff up, play games, or to advertise themselves.”
Lola took a step back.
“Okay,” she said.
“And furthermore,” Lincoln insisted, “Usenet isn’t a damned dinosaur; it’s extremely robust. It’s not on a single computer somewhere; it’s on millions of computers throughout the world. Just try knocking that out.”
“Okay!” Lola said, more brightly, and made a patting gesture, as if she were calming an agitated but senile patient.
Dagmar smiled. “Will I find posts from Chatsworth on Usenet?” she asked.
“May not be the same Chatsworth,” Lincoln said.
“Do you know what I’m picturing?” Dagmar asked. “I’m picturing old alt-dot-DOS geezer-geeks rocking on their front porches and stamping their canes and talking about the days when bulletin board systems roamed the world.”
She heard the room’s printer start, and then Ismet rose slowly to his feet and walked to where the printer sat on its table.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Just taking care of business,” he said.
He took some papers out of the printer, then took scissors and carefully trimmed them. He limped to the wall beneath Atatürk’s portrait and picked up the hammer and tacks that waited there.
Below Atatürk’s blue-eyed glare, below the trophies from earlier demonstrations, Ismet nailed a pashmina scarf, a greetin
g card, and photographs of Judy and Tuna. Judy’s picture had been taken from her own Web site, and Tuna’s image had been pulled from one of the team’s unedited videos, and it showed him in Istanbul at the first demo, with a shopping bag and a bouquet of brilliant flowers.
Dagmar’s heart rose into her throat as she saw Ismet’s dogged act of devotion, as she saw the photos of the two lost members of the Lincoln Brigade. She remembered with a stab of guilt that she had planned a memorial for Judy and Tuna for that afternoon, but that the events of the day had been allowed to overtake it.
She rose from her chair.
“We’ll get on with our experiments in a minute,” she said. “But right now, I think we should take a few minutes to remember our lost friends.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dan the DOS Man says:
The best place to find a dos-compatible modem is in an antique store. Not necessarily a store that sells antiques, though you can find them there, but a genuinely old shop with a modem they’ve had no reason to change in years. Say the store sends a few credit card checks every day, you don’t need an up-to-date modem for that.
You can offer them a free new modem. They may be agreeable to the swap. Of course you can always give them money.
Briana says:
How do I configure a modem for DOS?
Dan the DOS Man says:
What program are you using the modem for in dos? That program should have a setup program for the modem. If it is an internal modem, you may have to go into BIOS and disable the com port that you will be using for the modem.
Dos-capable modems DO NOT USE DRIVERS. If you have a Winmodem you’re out of luck. To test: if the modem is on com2, go to dos and type atdt5551212>com2. You might get lucky and hear the modem dial.
Use a hayes compatible modem if you can. Do not use a usb cable as dos doesn’t have that many drivers available. Like, none.
Its best to get an external modem. Most internal modems made now are software based and won’t work with dos. Many dos programs can’t detect com3 and com4.
By the way, be careful if you have a PS2 mouse. An internal hardware modem on com1 or 2 would sometimes conflict with a PS2 mouse. A PS2 mouse is on irq 12, which is okay, but it uses the same serial paths as com1 and com2 to connect to the pci buss. So be wary.
Briana says:
Thnx.
Dan the DOS Man says:
We prefer complete sentences on this bulletin board, Briana. And no slang derived from inferior and incomplete forms of communication such as text messaging.
Briana says:
I totally respect your old-school ethic, boss. Many thanks.
Dagmar contemplated the contents of the bulletin board on her handheld and saved them. She nodded to the RAF guard outside the building—her satellite phone had decided not to work under a roof—and then climbed the stair back to the ops room.
“You know,” she said, entering, “DOS is actually kind of cool.”
Helmuth glanced up briefly from his workstation.
“We’re going to make it cooler,” he said.
Helmuth and Richard had gotten their virtual MS-DOS machine working inside Richard’s computer the previous evening. But none of the modems in the room were compatible with DOS, so everyone had left the ops room except Lloyd, who was left behind to monitor any new uploads or other developments on the Brigade’s various Web pages. He would be relieved about midnight by Lola, who would in turn be relieved by Richard.
Dagmar and their RAF guards had helped Ismet up the stairs to his apartment. His bruises had widened and deepened since the morning, and he looked worse than ever, his face a Rorschach nightmare of purple and yellow and white.
She offered to help Ismet bathe, but he declined. Instead he lay on his sofa, propped up on pillows, while Dagmar sat crosslegged on the floor by his side.
“Can I get you something to eat?” she asked.
“Possibly soup,” he said. “I don’t have much of an appetite.”
“Would you like anything to drink?”
“Tea. Any kind.”
She found Turkish tea and a soup can labeled YOURT ÇORBASI in the cabinet. Apparently Ismet had brought food supplies across the island from the Turkish side. She poured the soup into a pot and examined it, finding only rice and yogurt and spices—nothing that would be hard for bruised lips and loose teeth to chew—and it smelled faintly appetizing, though with the peculiar heavy aroma common to canned soups.
Ismet came to the dining table to eat. He handled his spoon with care, trying not to splash liquid on the gauze bandages that wrapped two fingers of his right hand.
Watching him was painful. Dagmar wanted to take the spoon herself and feed him, except that she knew he was the kind of man who wouldn’t appreciate being spoon-fed. Instead she sat at the kitchen table as a host of anxieties warred in her nerves. She kept a towel in her lap in case he spilled something.
The previous evening she’d had the sense that he would fly today to his death. Instead he’d been saved from that fate by a savage beating, and she felt a strange gratitude to whatever brutal Cypriot cops had rescued Ismet from a deadlier peril. She would have him at least till the bruises faded—and she knew she needed him badly, needed some anchor in this mire of treachery and mendacity, the hopeful, hopeless revolution that had at its heart a misplaced piece of code.
After the meal Ismet took a pain pill with his last swallow of cooling tea. He looked at her.
“I think I will sleep alone tonight,” he said. He tried to smile with his cracked, bruised lips. “You might roll over in bed and land on me, and that would hurt.”
“I could put a pillow between us.”
His look turned somber.
“If you attacked me again,” he said, “I could not defend myself.”
Shock made her sway in her seat. Tears stung her eyes.
He couldn’t trust her not to go mad on him. That was what he was saying.
“You should stay with someone else tonight,” Ismet said. “Lola, perhaps.”
“I barely know Lola,” she said. Her voice broke on the last word.
“Richard and Helmuth, then. Someone you trust.”
“I trust you.” She heard the wail in her voice and told herself to stop, that her emotional need and his physical pain were incompatible right now. The pain could not be suppressed: therefore her need had to be quashed. She would have to take her own solitude upon herself and live in it at least for a while.
Ismet couldn’t rescue her every single time. He couldn’t save her from the enemies that swam in her own psyche. Those were hers to fight.
“Yes, okay,” she said. “I’ll crash on Richard’s couch.”
She washed Ismet’s bowl and spoon and saw that he was already half-asleep. She helped him back to the couch, then kissed his cheek, felt the bristles sting her lips. She left his apartment and walked to her own—the promise to stay with Richard and Helmuth was already forgotten—and in the borrowed place, surrounded by others’ possessions, she felt the aloneness embrace her.
Without conscious thought Dagmar made tea for herself and put a frozen stuffed pepper in the microwave. She stood for a moment in the kitchen, looking at the furniture and belongings that had been requisitioned for her from another family, and considered the number of betrayals that had brought her to this moment.
Byron and Magnus were vile, but they were at least explicable: whatever reason they had for selling her to Bozbeyli, fear or avarice or opportunism, it was at least an understandable human motivation. They were too transparent to be evil masterminds—they were just very screwed-up human beings, confused, probably deep in denial.
But Lincoln, she thought, was not in denial. He knew what he’d been doing all along. It was Lincoln’s lie that had brought her here, selling her the notion that the U.S. government was so devoted to the notion of democracy in Turkey that it would give her the tools to bring it about.
She should, she considered, just pick up he
r phone and buy a one-way ticket back to Los Angeles. If the government tried to invoke a penalty clause and evade payment, all she had to do was threaten to talk to the press.
It wasn’t as if she wasn’t an expert at telling convincing stories to strangers. It was only a bonus when the story was true.
Except now, she thought, there were actual revolutionaries in Turkey, whether she had created them or not. And they were fighting the police and the military, staging strikes and demonstrations, occupying a ministry building in Ankara. Living in cages in jails and military bases, screaming under torture, dying, rotting under the ground.
She couldn’t fly to her life in California and leave them behind. Not when there was a hope that she could help them succeed.
And besides, she thought, work was the classic cure for depression. Dagmar hooked her laptop to her satellite phone, downloaded a copy of MS-DOS along with a user’s manual, and ate her stuffed pepper as she began to acquaint herself with the ancient history of personal computing. She visited the alt.comp.DOSRULES forum on Usenet and from this learned of the existence of Dan the DOS Man, along with a number of his colleagues.
Her brain was so charged with her new knowledge and so filled with plans for implementing her ideas that after she fell asleep the nightmares failed to possess her.
In the morning she checked on Ismet and found him in greater pain than he had been the night before. She made him tea, made sure he was comfortable, and then went to the ops center while she conducted her long-distance conversation with Dan.
Soft morning light warmed the ops room, glowed off the ochre yellow walls. The air bore the scent of freshly brewed coffee. The absence of aircraft noise was startling: the planes had all landed, either here or somewhere else, and then not gone up again. The situation was otherwise unchanged: the Zap still possessed Ankara and the southwest corner of Cyprus, including Akrotiri and at least a part of Limassol. Cell phone service and VoIP at Akrotiri were still down, and ground lines were erratic.
Lincoln’s door was closed. Dagmar tried to decide what she felt about Lincoln, what she had decided about him. He was either a complete manipulative bastard or as much a fool as she.
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