by Jim Stark
As the van worked its way through the downtown traffic, Gil listened hard. Cities were full of strange noises, but he thought he could hear bells ... cowbells ... hundreds of them. They were stopped at a light, and as they began to move again the sound of bells seemed to become louder. The van slowed to a crawl, and stopped. It is cowbells, or old-fashioned school-bells, he said to himself, and they're all around us!
Diefenbunker ninety-one got to his knees and spoke aloud—whispering had no real chance of getting through the infernal clanging. “Keep your head down, hold on tight to the back of my cincture, and do not speak until I lift your hood—it's your game from that point on.” Gil grabbed the heavy rope belt of his monk-guide, lowered his head as far as he could, got onto his knees, and waited.
The back doors of the van opened, and Gil could feel people pouring in. By the brush of rough cloth on his free hand, he knew they were monks too—well, at least they were dressed as monks. They were praying in Latin, and ringing their confounded bells as loud as physics allowed. Then a bell-handle was shoved into his free hand and Diefenbunker ninety-one spoke directly into his right ear. “Ring this as loud as you can ... and mumble prayers if you know any ... and keep your hood right over your face."
The guide monk began to move forward on his knees, and Gil followed, keeping his head hung, holding the cincture like a lifeline ... which it is, he thought ... and clanging his bell like a town crier on amphetamines. Hands and arms helped him out of the back door of the van, and Gil realized that he should have been mumbling prayers. “Semper ubi sub ubi,” he started repeating over and over. It was a Latin phrase he had learned in school, back in the late 20th century ... “always where under where” ... college wit. A nearby monk must have been listening, and must have understood, because an elbow landed solidly against Gil's ribs. He kept baby-stepping through the madding crowd, and he kept on clanging his bell, but he switched to the Lord's Prayer, in English, which he remembered verbatim from his childhood.
He followed his guide up three stairs, through a door, and was grateful when the door closed and the clanging was muted by half ... except for his bell, which seemed to have developed a mind of its own. An anonymous hand stopped that, and took away his bell.
"And forgive us our sins as we forg—” he tried to carry on. Another elbow to the ribs straightened out his attitude on that score.
"We have an important message from the late Gil Henderson of the New York Times,” said Diefenbunker ninety-one ... to someone.
Gil could only see a small patch of marble floor, and it rankled him and amused him to be referred to as “the late Gil Henderson.” One thing about Henderson; left to his own devices, he was never late. Never.
"We have to deliver it personally to Mr. Yves Lacombe, president of the Canadian Press,” Diefenbunker ninety-one continued. “I trust he's in?” he added, even though Lilly had made sure of that ahead of time.
Gil knew Yves Lacombe pretty well—a cyberbuddy for many years—and he tried to imagine how the French Canadian news icon would react to seeing him alive.
A new voice started talking into a Sniffer. “Two of these—uh—monks came inside,” it said. “They say..."
The person on the other end of the Netlink listened to the explanation, and ordered that the two monks be brought up to the president's office. Gil kept his head down, and the oversized hood completely hid his face. He just followed the cincture. They shuffled into an elevator, rode up, and shuffled off, presumably into the president's office. And lead us not into temptation, he felt like saying, as a joke, but he had some bad memories of elbows to his ribs, and of boots scraping up his shin, so he remained silent.
"It's very private,” said the guide-monk as the door closed. “We have to be in a place where there's no MIU or Sniffer."
Gil wiggled forward when the belt he was holding moved. He assumed that Yves had been told by a hand signal not to speak. He stopped when the belt stopped, and another door closed. Then he heard a water tap get turned on, full force, and then ... a shower?!
"Do not say a word or make any sound whatsoever when you are given the message,” ordered Diefenbunker ninety-one.
"Okay,” said Yves. “I knew Gil Henderson well,” he added, “so I'll know if it's really from him."
"Just do not speak or make any sound whatsoever!” repeated the guide in a forceful whisper.
"Okay, okay,” said the president of Canadian Press defensively. “So ... let's have it."
Gil looked up when he felt his hood get yanked up and off his head. For a reason he didn't understand himself, he winked at his old cyberbuddy.
Yves Lacombe let out an involuntary gasp ... then his face blanched. His eyes teared up instantly as he stepped forward to embrace the man who'd been declared vaporized ... last night ... and again this morning ... if the front page of the New York Times was to be believed ... or any other news report in the world. Yves started sobbing, and Gil fought against his own emotions.
The young monk put a hand into the vice and parted the two men. He was smiling at the impossible reunion, but he was anxious to get on with the plan. He pulled a piece of paper from under his cassock and gave it to Yves Lacombe. It read:
DO NOT SPEAK! CLEAR THE ENTIRE SECOND FLOOR OF THE BUILDING, AND GET US UNSEEN INTO THE TECHROOM NOW!
Yves did as ordered.
* * * *
The three of them—Yves Lacombe, Gil Henderson (again hidden under his hood), and Diefenbunker ninety-one—stood just outside the techroom on the second floor of the Canadian Press Building. The real monk gave a second note to Yves. The president of CP read it, raised his eyebrows, and again, he did as ordered.
He went in the room alone and began manually unplugging every single machine—even the coffeemaker. The room was crammed with the technology of 21st-century communications. In fact, this room and these devices were the hub of an international news network, the whole of which would now appear to have crashed. This action would undoubtedly cost CP millions in legal settlements when furious advertisers and customers found out that the cause of the disruption was sabotage—or at least deliberate. But the second note had also said that Michael Whiteside would personally accept all legal and financial consequences! Yves almost fainted again when he read that, because Michael Whiteside had also been listed on the Netnews as being among the atomized. He must have survived too!
Yves carried on around the room, yanking out plugs by the handful, assuming, or at least hoping, that whatever the not-so-late Gil Henderson had in mind would be worth all this electronic self-immolation. The part he knew about was astonishing enough—that Gil Henderson, known to have been at the Whitesides’ Wilson Lake lodge at the time of the nuclear “event,” was walking the face of the Earth, very much alive ... albeit dressed like a monk and unwilling to talk, thought Yves as he disconnected the last plug. And if he and Michael Whiteside survived, there may have been others!
As Yves reviewed his terrible handiwork, he found himself also assuming—not just hoping, but taking for granted—that all those other people at the lodge were similarly undead. He knew logically that there was no way that could be. The bunker at the lodge was a fallout shelter, not a bomb shelter, not intended or able to protect people from the blast effects of a direct hit by even the tiniest backpack nuclear weapon. The spot where the Whitesides’ lodge stood had been photographed from the air and shown repeatedly on the Netnews for the past three hours. It wasn't a crater as such, but appeared as a new, semi-circular bay on the eastern end of a now-poisoned Wilson Lake, with flattened trees emanating fan-like for almost half a mile—east, north and south.
That's what this is about! Yves realized as he double-checked all the sockets with a clockwise tour of the techroom. Not just how they escaped, but why they were targeted by the WDA in the first place. The commentary on the Net hadn't presented any rationale, but given the WDA's control since the Revolution, if it was a nuclear weapon, it had to have been done by the WDA ... or the nuke was stolen
from them, he considered.
Yves was done. The room was electrically inert ... for the first time since a decade before the Revolution, he calculated. “Okay, let's do it,” he said as he opened the door ... whatever “it” is, he thought.
Gil Henderson put a finger to his mouth as he stepped into the room and flipped the heavy hood off his head. He was annoyed that Yves would take any risk, even if there was no chance of being caught. He cupped his hands into a fleshy tunnel on Yves’ ear, and placed his mouth on the thumb end. “After I get my robe on top of the screen and lens of the editing suite, plug it in—only it,” he explained. “I have to flip some analog videotapes over to digital, then compress the data."
Gil “disrobed,” and draped the garment over the screen of the editing unit. He felt relieved to be rid of the coarse vestments that Jesus-Eers felt kept them humble. Jerks, he thought, forgetting momentarily that they had saved his life, along with many others, and that without them, the world would never know the staggering truths that were taped to his thigh. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, and quickly ripped off the medical tape that held the treasure in place. His leg hairs were pulled out by the hundreds, but the pain dissipated almost as fast as it arrived. After getting his pants back on, he separated the videocassettes from the medical tape, and nodded to Yves.
Yves booted up the editing suite, and Gil put the first tape into the slot and checked that a blank disk was in the digital copy-slot. Then, after a deep breath, he punched the “record” button on the right and “fast-play” on the left.
Michael had given him the approximate figures out at the Diefenbunker. The first cassette—the interview Gil had done himself with Lilly, Lars and Michael at the no-tech cabin and finished up at the lodge—was almost three hours long, and would take thirty minutes or so to fast-copy to digital. The second tape, Venice's interview with Victor Helliwell a few weeks ago, was twenty-eight minutes long, and would take five minutes to flip. The last tape—"of Michael Whiteside redefining the world,” Gil had been told earlier by Annette—was sixteen minutes long; three minutes to fast-copy to digital.
The next thirty-eight minutes would be critical, and Gil Henderson almost started praying again—that the WDA had no way to clue in to what was happening, and thus wouldn't be able to react in time. The three men had to remain silent until the next step, and while that was de rigueur for the smiling monk and easy for Gil, Yves Lacombe looked like he'd burst. He must be going crazy wanting to ask me questions, Gil thought as all the metallic squiggles of the analog tape turned into trillions of ones and zeros inside the console.
Hurry the fuck up, Yves thought, in spite of himself. He didn't say this out loud for a whole bunch of reasons, one of which was that he knew there were two things that never listened to the spoken word; high technology and golf balls.
Thirty-nine minutes later, Gil had the finished digital CD in his hand ... the future of a planet, he realized. He put the disk into another slot, and began waiting the one minute it would take to make a second copy-disk—this one in super-compressed-data form.
He was almost finished his assignment. If I can just get this done, I'm going to retire, Gil found himself thinking as the disks whirred. For one thing, the bottom will fall out of the market for investigative journalists, he re-realized, with a chuckle. But my life profile, culminating in this last superb caper, will be worth a fortune. I'm going to golf until I die.
He signaled to Yves to unplug the whole editing unit once both disks were out of the machine. With the editing unit again disabled, Gil pulled his robe off the top of the thing and went over to an ordinary MIU. He laid the robe over that screen, which is to say over its camera-eye—the point of the cover-up—and had Yves plug the MIU in. Gil was now ready for the final act. He inserted the super-compressed-data CD and checked his watch. According to the game plan agreed upon out at the Diefenbunker, he couldn't hit “send” for another two minutes, so he used the occasion to give Yves a gift—the source disk. “It's yours to keep when I'm done here,” he whispered into the ear of his old friend. “All I ask is that you send it to my boss at the Times first, okay?"
Yves nodded ... by which he meant “second” ... or “first if you don't count our own Canadian Press network."
* * * *
Michael Whiteside sat in the main techroom of the Whiteside Technologies complex. He was one of the “monks” who'd been dropped off from the back of the old delivery van as it made its way from Carp to the Canadian capital.
It had been arranged ahead of time that Michael's father's old colleague and friend, Laurent Gauthier, would come to the office for a “secret meeting.” Gauthier was given no explanation, but he'd been told that the late Randall Whiteside would want him to go. He had been met at his own front door an hour earlier by a silent monk with a hand-written letter from Becky Donovan-Whiteside, and that had done the trick. Laurent Gauthier had received a Christmas card from Becky every year since the Revolution, by snail mail, and he knew her cursive handwriting well because he admired it. Of course Becky had been listed among the dead at the Whitesides’ lodge, so Laurent had been shocked to hear from her. But that wasn't his greatest surprise of the day. He'd almost fainted when he was met by a different, taller monk at Whiteside Technologies. That monk had turned out to be a living, breathing Michael Whiteside!
Gauthier was in his late seventies, and in excellent health. The last time he'd been in this building was in mid-2014, the very day Randall Whiteside was assassinated. That was the day Gauthier quit, vowing never to return. He had been one of the first people, aside from Randall Whiteside and a few others out at the lodge, to see the black prototype LieDeck that Victor had created in the basement of his farmhouse. That was back in April of 2014, two weeks or so before the incineration of Bucharest and Leningrad—"the last holocaust,” as it had been known ... at least until yesterday. He had been the one to test the prototype LieDeck, to convert it into a marketable product, and to oversee the sales blitz that had literally transformed the world. Now ... here he was, nineteen years later, looking at the same black prototype instrument in the hands of the son of his former boss and mentor.
There wasn't much Gauthier didn't know about high technology back in his glory days, and he had kept current for the sheer love of it, even in his retirement. His loyalty to the Whiteside family was undiminished by the years, so when Michael asked him to do something illegal, and told him it was the only way to achieve freedom and justice, he had agreed—without even asking for the application of that ancient LieDeck to Michael's words. Breaking the law was utterly against Laurent Gauthier's nature, but he knew the ring of truth as well as any electronic device. If Michael said this was for freedom and justice, then that was the reality.
Now, he had spent the past hour writing a computer program which, if it were used and traced back to him, could destroy his good reputation and land him in jail for the rest of his life. Gauthier wasn't told the reason behind the risky assignment, partly because passing notes was a terribly inefficient means of communication, and partly to protect him in the event that they were caught and prosecuted. “Speed,” one of Michael's notes had specified, “is of the essence."
"Done!” he mouthed silently at exactly 12:52 p.m. He was referring to the program he'd been writing—and he was eight minutes ahead of deadline!
Only one MIU had been left plugged in at the Whiteside Technologies nerve center, and just as it was over at the Canadian Press building, this MIU had a monk's cassock draped over the screen—over the lens that was used to capture the image of the user. At precisely 1:00 p.m., the call came through, the one they were waiting for.
"We got a squashy here,” came the voice of Yves Lacombe, president of Canadian Press. “Squashy” was the colloquial term for a super-compressed-data transmission. At the max, digitized data could be reduced to less than one two-hundredth of its real-time length. This squashy, representing the digitized sound and images from the two hundred and twenty-four minutes of
analog videotapes, would be downloaded accurately in just over a minute.
"Send,” said Gauthier aloud, as pre-arranged by a note from Michael.
Sixty-three seconds later, the squashy was on board an MIU at the headquarters of Whiteside Technologies. With a well-practiced hand, Gauthier embraced the squashy in the new—and totally illegal—program that he had created. A few seconds after that, he nodded to Michael, who personally pushed the “send” button. Every new MIU that now received the squashy—and this was the illegal part—was tricked by Gauthier's program into relaying the message on to five more MIUs automatically, the previous five MIUs which the receiving unit had been in contact with.
The first squashy Michael sent was transmitted simultaneously to one thousand MIUs in the first minute or so, and relayed to 5,000 more in the next minute, and these 5,000 sent it on to 25,000 more in the third minute. There would be 125,000 receptions in the fourth minute, more than half a million in the fifth minute, several million in the sixth minute, and so on. And during that second minute, after the first missive had been fully launched, Michael sent the first-generation squashy to yet another thousand MIUs at random, which started another hypermodern speed-of-light electronic chain letter going. By their estimation, by 1:19 p.m., the bombshell squashy would have been archived by virtually every MIU in the world!
However, since the distribution was quite random, the squashy would end up on the WDA's MIUs too! Success depended on how long it took for the WDA to get a grip on what was happening.
At 1:12 p.m., the SuperNet crashed internationally, globally. There wasn't much in the way of communications technology that couldn't be found at Whiteside Tech, so Laurent Gauthier had an old-fashioned ham radio ready for exactly this eventuality. He plugged it in and listened to words being spoken all over Upper America and the world. This type of calamity had never happened before, ever, and as far as he knew, it couldn't happen at all unless the WDA purposely pulled the plug.
"How'd we do?” asked Michael.