Repetition

by Alan Gallauresi

  Steganography was a bullshit job, all about noise.

  In 2001, media outlets went crazy over the notion that Osama Bin Laden was hiding terrorist plans inside seemingly innocuous images and messages on the web, a premise that was very hard to validate, amongst all the noise of conversation. That was real steganography: a low yield data mining operation that churned through trillions of bits in a search for gold. It was more likely to turn up lead.

  The truth is, almost the entirety of those of pornographic images with hidden maps encoded into them are chaff, misinformation campaigns designed to waste resources of the countries rich enough to blow money decoding them. Wald recalls several of their most promising investigations leading to the dullest of iniquities, like secret postings between adulterous lovers and drug-drop meetings. One algorithm Wald had been particularly proud of had correlated message board activity among stock brokers with sudden stock price dips; the major result was confirmation that several brokers were using the posts to inform friends and family when to buy and sell with insider information. It was petty crime -- the most mundane of secrets -- nothing at all like the massive government-spanning conspiracies predicted in lightly researched news reports.

  Vast conspiracy and criminal incompetence – those are the two things government is best known for. They don’t go hand in hand. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. Wald's mother had told that to him when he was young, and in his work he had substituted conspiracy for malice and found it equally compelling. Government is not the people – just people. Selfish people, lazy people; people who work until from 7 AM to 10 PM while their co-workers get on with their lives; people who tell high priced call girls secrets to feel powerful. Hard to keep a tight ship under those conditions.

  Wald had reviewed endless reams of data in his time. The paranoid part of him occasionally wondered. Had he discovered something dangerous, something he shouldn't have, without even realizing it? A flight is as good a place for morbid thoughts as any other and Stephen imagines a force powerful and far-reaching enough to take down a plane full of people to protect its secrets. Absolutely possible while extremely unlikely -- a motto that could be applied to just about any project the government undertook.

  That suspicion was necessary in Stephen's work, the work he hoped he had just given up. He desired mental quietude, to stop searching for structure in formless images and numbers, discovering meaning where none may be, deceit and artifice always, repetition in everything. He no longer wished to be a man looking for more than what is there.

  ###

  What gives you goosebumps? Not in the biological sense; that reaction is fairly well understood. An external stimulus – cold weather, nails on blackboards, etc – causes the skin to prickle, raising the hairs reflexively. It’s thought to be a defensive mechanism from the time when we had to worry about defending ourselves from something other than our own race.

  What gives you goosebumps? The question is meant to evoke specific images of fear: concrete monstrosities, not just our nebulous dread of the unknown in its common forms (e.g., the dark, job security, death, asking for a attractive person's phone number, etc). There’s a lot of overlap between what people are scared of, since their lists are mostly cribbed from horror films: serial killers; sexy vampires; relatively unsexy zombies; ghosts; little girls who turn out to be ghosts; mummies; dragons; animated dolls; reanimated dolls; dinosaurs; abductors from space; abductors from the highway; werewolves; communists; robots programmed to carry women in their arms. It’s not a coincidence that many of these fiends appear in monster movies, alien autopsies and CG nature shows, playing on late-night stations. Television serves as our new racial memory.

  How scary is a mummy these days? We’re frightened in cycles; we forget our fears and find them again elsewhere. Even the language changes as our initial visceral reactions fade and only the magnitude remains. The words used to describe our emotions have lost their connotation: fantastic; awesome; terrific. It’s only a matter of time before a flattering pair of pants is absolutely horrific.

  Farther removed from the present, our speech was even simpler – adjectives were unnecessary, as the threat was raw and compound: the man-lion manticore; the fish-woman siren; lion-eagle; fire-bird; devil-fish; sea-wyrm; goat-snake-lion. These were ancient evils. Beowulf wrestled them with his hand-grip; Pliny shielded himself from the eye-gaze of their dog-heads.

  Back further through prehistory lays the original racial memory of a million generations. Tremors of the terror of epochs ago are flowing through our arteries. They may take the form of Judeo-Christian goat-men with horns, forest beast-men, or unknowable old-gods from out of space. We feel them because somewhere down a long thread, at the waxing of a cycle, an ancestor feared something greatly. We feel shadows of obscene presences in the matter of our souls at the ebbing tide of history, waiting to return and claim us for their own.

  Amongst all these forces of revulsion, spiders are the worst.

  The anatomy of arachnids is unchanging, set in time. As eras drifted by the formidable predators, lifting them up to domination and back down to lowly bug, their bodies remained constant: chitinous carapaces over a wriggling body supported by crawling, segmented legs; pincer mouths bred to bite and suck the life out of their meals; leg-like pedipalps; adaptable booklungs. It’s this last feature that gave them such power over us.

  In the time when we were fish-things, our scorpion-spider ancestors stalked us briny pools. When we planted our fins on land, they were already waiting for us, inexorable. Their remarkable booklungs – inanimate cellular layers folded up like the pages of a paperback – had made them equally suited to life on land as water, while we had to wait to evolve our own lungs from gills. In the startlingly high oxygen levels of the Carboniferous period, their race had grown to fantastic proportions. They hunted us mercilessly. Later, when the oxygen dissipated, their bodies shrunk again. They became tiny in comparison to us. We stopped fearing them in the same way, though we still feared them: arachnophobia is the most common phobia in the world. We stopped worrying about them eating us and started worrying about them crawling up our legs and laying eggs in our ear canals while we sleep.

  This is a scene from the waxing of their cycle, slightly altered from memory:

  Once, we skittered slowly through the undergrowth of fern choked hills blanketed in a green canopy, the sun unseen. In the fading ambient light, we alighted on flat outcrop of rock with a cavity channeling through it. The steamy jungle air was cooler in there, less laden with moisture. Inside we could breathe deeply -- really breathe -- through our tiny underdeveloped lungs. We grew cold; the light hardly shone in these depths and we had no way to heat ourselves. We moved sluggishly as our head emerged from the lip of the hole.

  Our ancient enemy waited above, delaying its attack until our body was fully visible. As our limp tail followed us out onto the rock, the hunter reared. The shadow of its form fell on us. Its pincers drooled; its limb span was awesome to behold. Air screeched through the shifting plates covering its thorax.

  The sight was terrific; the sound was fantastic.

  As the death-spider prepared to pounce on us, the autonomic muscles strung along the length of our body expanded, causing a dramatic intake of air. Our skin prickled, our body swelled. Small spines poked out, signaling danger. We were fearsome, or at least unpalatable, as we stood stock-still and pulled the covers over our head.

  The hell-beast never stopped moving as it plunged its pincers into our soft body with a hiss from its spiracles; a hiss that sounded exactly like finger nails dragging across a blackboard.

  ###

  The walking was easy here. .94 gravities, according to Chandrasekhar's gauntlet. Just enough to afford an extra spring in your step and allow your heart to average an extra year of life, as a bonus.

  The sun hid in the distance, peeking out through glass towers before disappearing again. The air temperature had remained constant as the sun ros
e and they grew nearer. An unusual sun to give light and no heat, he mentioned to Siri over the comm. He considered sending a pin drone farther ahead to investigate.

  Siri didn't answer. She was staring far off to her left, slowing her pace while edging her body around to face what she was looking at.

  What do you see? he asked. Something blocked the light for a moment, she said. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. Chandrasekhar checked his wrist computer. A person? The drones were not tracking any movement.

  No. Let's move on. She was already beyond him, and had quickened her step beyond their previous pace. He hustled to catch up. They were closing in on the wall of immense crystal buildings, interlaced and bound to each other by skyways, that thronged the edge of the Second Ring. Their great, half-hollow shadows kinked across the roofs of the low traditional homes and shops that Siri and Chandrasekhar had travelled past on their way to the spire.

  They had stopped in one home -- only one. They had passed through the doors without challenge. A quiet hum started up as they entered. It was clear the electronics were still performing well, although the terminals in the house were not networked to anything, controlling only the functions of the house. They had turned on lights; ran the shower at the previous owner's profile temperature of exactly 93 degrees. A thin layer of dust had turned the water momentarily gray before it dissolved down the efficient drain. After a few minutes, the humming stopped and Chandrasekhar had looked at his arm. The air-conditioning was still treating the air, registering a normal level of oxygen and air pressure for an Earth environment. Their entry must have triggered the change. There was no way of telling how long the owners might have been gone, if they had ever been there at all; Chandrasekhar had not been able to find any personal effects. The barren shelves behind the windows of shops had told the same story. This arc had never been colonized, or it had been stripped bare of anything that could fit into the materia recycling banks.

  There. He thought one of the pins had caught something on camera, at the edge of its range. It was already gone. He spent a moment queuing up the still frames. Whatever it was, it was a blur on camera.

  He saw Siri Anders working her jaw through the shield of her helmet. No sound came across the radio. Siri, can you hear me? He sped ahead of her and cut her off with a wave. Siri, can you hear me? he mouthed. She returned him a puzzled look and lurched to a halt. She cracked open her helmet and spoke faintly in the open air: My suit radio. Give me a second. She removed her helmet and ran her gloved fingers against its innards. Chandrasekhar heard two loud cracks, then the sound of her voice clearly and deeply across the comm radio as she lifted her helmet near to her head. The high oxygen content had invaded her lungs, lowering her pitch and making her feel light-headed. She replaced the helmet with alacrity. Think I got it. Ok? He nodded, ok - let's go. He thought that he had caught more movement on his wrist computer while they had been standing still.

  They were losing the sun in the gated heights of the towers ahead. Bullshit, he thought. He felt with certainty that there had been nothing wrong with Siri's comm; certainly nothing she could have fixed in handful of seconds, encumbered by suit gloves, her heart racing with pure oxygen.

  The stepped into the cloaking shadow of a half-mile high building. A sudden flurry of movement distorted the video sent by the drones. He let the urgency in his voice come through to Siri. Something's coming for us, converging on us... He sent the drones in pursuit with a flick of his fingers in the air above his forearm.

  Then let's get the hell out of here, she said, sprinting forward. They were dancing between the small footprints of the enormous towers: towers built without the overriding restrictions of weight distribution and elevator economics. The pins were tracking a dozen of the things, all headed towards them. Whatever they were, despite their pace starting and stopping, they were definitely gaining ground. They seemed to slow down when the pair stayed in the glare of the spire star. Chandrasekhar alerted Siri. Without pausing to acknowledge his communiqué, she adjusted her heading, routing them toward the largest patches of sunlight in the maze of buildings.

  He flicked his cheek and the gauntlet spilled out a nauseatingly steady image projected 10 meters ahead of his swinging arms. The thing was fuzzy, disturbingly under-formed -- like an electron microscope image a molecular scale organism. Chandrasekhar struggled to identify the fibrous hairs and overlapping plates as body parts; the thing looked as though it was squeezing itself into its stubby spider limbs as it moved, like a giant dust mite made of rubber hose and steel wire.

  These things must have flown here on that ship we saw, he huffed. Siri shook her head. Or come here on it. His mind failed to appreciate the difference at that moment. His chest was pounding, and Siri was beginning to flag. We have to stop for a moment.. make a plan. She slowed and slipped to a single knee, breathing in a few breaths of the high oxygen air though an open port in her helmet. He followed suit, his lungs tightening from the rush.

  Weapons? she inquired. Chandrasekhar replied negatively; he hadn't had time to grab any supplies when the Boots of Steel had deconstructed before their eyes. She offered: Our helmet lights can be tightened to a point -- are they high powered enough to work as lasers?

  So she had already worked that out. Yes. But this atmosphere is flooded with pure O2. It could only take a single spark to burn it up, and burn it down. A world fire, burning in empty space.

  So, we're completely defenseless, then? He thought for a moment, and shook his head. Not completely, but we don't have time a lot of time to improvise. It would help to know what we are fighting against, since they may have killed off the entire population of this place. They were beginning to close, and Siri and Chandrasekhar had to move. He lifted himself from a slump and pointed out their path. I can manage something. He looked steadily at the place where her eyes would be, the helmet's face shield returning the star's glare. What about you? Siri rose to her feet, and started off.

  Cockroaches, she said. She trotted ahead of him. What you said before, about the oxygen; it only takes insects a few generations to adapt to those conditions, to grow huge. I don't think these things killed the people here. They're just cockroaches escaped from the remains of a dead ship.

  Chandrasekhar waved at his gauntlet as they passed under a lattice of skywalks. He wondered about Siri's guesses, and how much she knew without needing to guess.

  Chapter 14

  Sphere of Influence | A Managed Attack | The Coming of the Beast-Things

  The young Malaysian man in 17-A is getting on Stephen's last nerve. His right thigh is now straight-up laying against Wald's left. The question is: does he know and doesn't think there's anything wrong with it, or does he know and is bullying his way to more leg room at my expense, or is he just completely oblivious?

  Wald takes the possibilities one by one. He considers whether the man comes originally from a country where human contact is more generally accepted among strangers, pausing for a moment to reflect on whether it is racist to wonder about the possibility in the first place. He deems it ignorant instead; when he recollects all he knows about Malaysia, he envisions islands; the name Kuala Lumpur; and twin Petronas towers, joined together at the hip. You build that high out of national pride, perhaps, but also due to population density. That said, a high population density doesn't necessarily mean personal space is out the window; New York City may not compete with Mumbai in density, but it was still a pretty populous place, and he thought there were plenty of New Yorkers who would tell you to get your fucking leg off of theirs in this situation. Just about any situation, really, except maybe on a rush hour subway ride.

  God, is that what this is now? Airplane flights have become seven hour subway trips? And 17-A is just ready to acknowledge it, free to be uncomfortably pressed up against another man because it's inevitable anyway. Just fuck it.

  17-A's head is still down, absorbed in his book. There is something European about the surprisingly light shade of his hair color, as if he is pa
rt Scandinavian. He leans his weight without seeming regard of what he is doing, and his akimbo right elbow still absorbs both sides of the armrest. Now, his knee taps against Wald's. This has got to be deliberate, thinks Wald. Premeditated even. Tactical. Stephen contemplates giving ground -- just enough to get his leg clear. He doesn't care to be touched; he does his best to avoid hugs when possible. He would to prefer to give ground and suffer from compounded cramping than prolong the contact, but he worries it will do no good. No dice, Leg Hitler! Don't look for appeasement here! He dares to push back, ever-so-slightly. No reaction, and now his leg is pressing even more firmly against his neighbor.