The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

“‘Insufficient data’! No one could ever have accused Jaron of suffering from that. Research is one thing, but being an infojunkie is another.”

  “Infojunkie?”

  “Jaron got way too obsessed with what he called ‘The Documents,’” she said, shaking her head. “The thought of it still makes me cringe. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The Forrest documents?”

  “No, I haven’t. What are they?”

  “He showed them to me, though I suppose he probably shouldn’t have. A lot of strange stuff. From some CIA guy who died forty or fifty years ago. Forrest wrote spy novels and science-fiction stories, too, under pseudonyms, but Jaron said most of the stuff in the documents were codes. Four hundred-year-old ciphers. Art-of-memory stuff, with explanations in a bunch of different languages. Latin. Chinese. Hebrew. Jaron studied and translated a lot of them. He said something important had happened back then. Called it ‘the fork in the road to Thebes’—Oedipus again, you see?

  “Your bosses didn’t tell you anything about them, did they?”

  Ben, feeling obscurely embarrassed, stared down at the tips of his shoes.

  “Some of my briefing materials mentioned that Jaron was working on premodern and early modern ciphers, and possible links to mnemonic techniques. Not much else, though. I don’t know European history the way Jaron did, or have his knowledge of languages, like I said. I guess my ‘bosses’ don’t consider those documents a part of my ‘need-to-know.’”

  “I’ve always hated that phrase,” Cherise said, grimacing. “Spy talk. The language employed by the secret police of Vaterland Sicherheits—excuse me, Homeland Security.”

  They walked again, then paused outside the patio door, not yet entering the house.

  “Yesterday you said you’d seen the holo-cast,” Ben said. “Someone like you seems to appear in it. I was wondering if you might have been involved in its creation.”

  “No, that female character’s not me,” she said with an odd laugh. “God knows, there were times I was so frustrated with Jaron that I might well have pulled a gun on him, if I’d had one. But I never did. The woman in that thing is only based on me, and very loosely, at that.”

  “How so?”

  “She doesn’t talk or think the way I do. The way she goes on about Mind with a capital M—I’d be embarrassed if I thought she was supposed to be me.”

  “Any idea why she is that way—in the holo-cast, I mean?”

  “Wish fulfillment on Jaron’s part, maybe,” she said. Then she sighed. “As much as Jaron might have wanted me to, I don’t believe in Mind with a capital M, or Goddess with a capital G, or even gods with a small g. Jaron and his gods. ‘Our gods have become our machines, and our machines have become our gods.’ And, ‘Everything happens twice: Theology becomes technology. Then technology becomes theology. What we used to ask of gods we now ask of machines.’ It’s all there, in Jaron’s notes on the documents.”

  “Sounds fascinating,” Ben admitted, “and true, in its way.”

  “Jaron was always more than happy to share his piece of the truth,” Cherise said with a sad smile. Suddenly her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “When I think of how those documents obsessed Jaron, I almost hesitate to get you involved with them. He copied a bunch of what he considered the ‘most sensitive’ of them and gave them to me the last time we saw each other. For safekeeping. I didn’t want them then—I still don’t—but he insisted. Stick around after the memorial, and we’ll see what we can do about giving them to you.”

  “Okay,” Ben agreed, caught off guard by the offer. “And thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet—they may do you no good,” she said, eyeing him narrowly. “They might even do you harm. But there’s a chance they’ll give you some clues to what happened to Jaron, even if your bosses don’t think you need to know about them. Might even give you a chance to prove there really is a difference between a nationalist and a true patriot.”

  Finally they entered the house, and parted. More of the guests commiserated with Cherise. Left alone, Ben made his way to a table laid out with veggies and dips and finger foods. Instead of eating lunch, he grazed. After pouring himself a glass of wine, he found a chair in a quiet corner. For the most part he was left undisturbed. Those few guests who approached him seemed satisfied by his answer that he knew Jaron when they roomed together in college.

  Gradually, the guests filtered away. Eventually only a professor of classics named Bruce Danson remained, a gleefully self-described “archconservative purveyor of military-pastoral nostalgia to the postmodern world.” Danson argued good-naturedly that the current situation in the United States did not bear any real resemblance to that period in ancient history when Rome ceased being a democratic republic and became an empire. His banter was a different spin on what Cherise had already said to Ben, but not so very different. Before long, she rose to the bait.

  “When people in uniforms are presented as the ideal role models,” Cherise told the classics professor, “you know the ‘republic’ has long since been turned into an empire. And that’s not where I want to live.”

  “You sound like one of those secessionist Bear Flaggers,” Danson countered, his tone darkening. “Believe me, though, the secession of the Left Coast, or even just California—that’s political sausage you don’t want to see being made, Cherise. Clearly the American people are comfortable with letting our leaders protect us by any means necessary. If the will of the people is that the will of the people no longer need be consulted, then what leader is going to argue against that?”

  Their conversation made Ben think again of Marilyn Lu in Hong Kong, the other woman who had offered him forbidden information. Unless he assumed the existence of a vast conspiracy of subversive women, however, it could only be an interesting coincidence.

  As Cherise and the classics professor argued about media manipulation, Ben realized that, on the part of the classics professor at least, the argument was more a personal dance of flirtation and hoped-for romance than the hurly-burly of power and politics. Ben started to nod off. Next thing he knew, Cherise was shaking him awake, and none too gently.

  “You want the documents, don’t you? We’ve got to get going, then. It won’t look right if you leave too long after the rest of the guests.”

  Ben nodded, rising unsteadily to his feet. Groggy, he had a vague expectation that they would get in a car and drive to a safe-deposit box, or something of that sort. In his mind’s eye he could already see a bank vault and a teller waiting with a key—until he realized that Cherise was fiddling with something at the edge of the raised stone apron in front of the fireplace.

  She gripped a slab and lifted it smoothly. As he looked more closely, he realized that the stone slab, secured by a hidden latch, was hinged. In the space beneath, several smallish boxes and chests were visible.

  “The original owner didn’t believe in banks,” Cherise said, by way of explanation. “Jaron found this hidey-hole by accident, not long after we moved in together.”

  Cherise reached down and, after a moment or two of lifting chests and reading labels, handed a fireproof metal box to Ben.

  “Here, take it. You’re doing me a favor.”

  The box was about four inches thick by ten inches wide by twelve inches long. Unlatching and opening it, Ben saw that it contained not quite a telephone book’s worth of pages. With a nod, Cherise confirmed that the pages were copies of those documents with which Jaron became so obsessed, along with many of his notes.

  “Now,” she said, “what can you use to carry it out, so it won’t look too obvious?”

  Ben looked around, then spotted the case he’d used to carry the urn, and accidentally left behind amid yesterday’s furor.

  “How about that?” he said, pointing.

  “That should work. Let’s give it a try.”

  The size and shape of the metal box didn’t exactly match those of the urn, but the foam rubber lining of the travel case could be mashed down a little to accommodate
the documents. Staring at the case with Kwok’s papers inside, Ben thought how strange it was that things could have changed so much between himself and Cherise, all in a single day.

  Together they snapped the case shut and latched it, then straightened up. Walking with Cherise out of her house and toward his car, Ben’s left arm hung heavy with the dead weight.

  “Do you know we’ve met before?” Cherise said, as much as asked.

  “Really?”

  “Before I went back to school,” she said, nodding. “I was working as a dental hygienist at University Health Clinic. That was how I met Jaron. He was having his wisdom teeth removed.”

  “I had mine removed about the same time. Same place, too.”

  “I know. I remember you because you asked for the pain-deadening implants, just like Jaron. It was part of a pilot project in biodegradable bioelectronics.”

  “I remember,” he said, dropping the case onto the front passenger seat through the window. “Prototypes, but they worked perfectly well. I haven’t needed—or wanted—any other implants since. How’d you get that job?”

  “My father was a big name in microelectromechanical systems research at Sandia,” she said with a shrug. “MEMS, they called it. Nanotech grew out of it. Later I had versions of those implants put in my head, too, when I had my own wisdom teeth removed. Nowadays it’s standard tech. That’s why most people don’t have to lose a weekend drugged out against the pain anymore.”

  “Well, that explains it. Small world, Cherise.”

  “Smaller than any of us ever know, I’m sure,” she said, extending her hand for him to shake, which he did. “Good luck with your investigation, Mister Cho.” Then she lowered her voice. “Keep a good eye on what you’ve got in that case.”

  “You do the same with that urn. You might want to store it away, in place of what we just took out. Just to be safe. And keep an eye open for interested strangers.”

  Cherise gave him an odd look, but then waved and headed back toward her house. Getting into the car, Ben stared at the case for a moment as he started the car’s engine.

  At least he had tried to warn her, without mentioning Hui by name and breaking any more protocols than he’d already broken by talking about the ashes in the first place. He felt as if he and Cherise had engaged in some strange ritual, in which they’d exchanged one set of Jaron’s remains for another. He hoped that this set, at least, would prove more decipherable than the set he had left behind.

  FOUR

  GÖDELIAN LOVE KNOT

  CYBERNESIA

  Earthquakes shook and high winds whipped Easter Island, toppling the great-headed stone carvings. Don’s intelligent agentware, e-bodied as tattooed men and bark-bikinied women, screamed to the heavens and tore at their hair. Somewhere out at sea a tsunami was rolling toward Hanga Roa.

  Don quickly jaunted to Karuna’s virtual—Haiti in the time of Toussaint-Louverture—but a variant of the same catastrophe was happening there, too. Lightning streaked the sky and thunder rumbled. Winds and hail rattled the tree canopy. Dressed in voodoo priestess holy-rags and staring fixedly at images lurking behind a screen of waterfall, Karuna seemed almost too preoccupied to take note of the apocalypse. Out to sea, the horizon line was punctuated by smoke from volcanic eruptions to the east and south.

  “Good God! Where is that?” Don asked, pointing.

  “The closest one is Saba,” Karuna said. “In the Netherlands Antilles. At least four more are going off throughout the West Indies.”

  Don nodded. Karuna’s virtual space, like his own, was a deep imitation of a real place, even down to the geologic structure of the surrounding islands.

  “Is this happening all over Cybernesia?”

  “No,” Karuna said, examining system-readout images behind the waterfall screen. “Only about a quarter of the islands seem to be affected.”

  “Then why us?”

  “Hold on a minute,” she said, manipulating the images by casting cowrie shells upon a mat. “Let me check something here. Yes—I thought this catastrophe looked familiar! The sites involved match almost exactly the list of guests who attended the Cybernesia party. Everybody who attended, every DIVE we had grouped together when the Kwok material came through—that’s who’s being hit right now.”

  “Damn!” Don said, scowling. “I should have known! Medea-Indahar popped in yesterday, drama-queening about how sites with the Kwok stuff on them were being massively probed and pinged. That they were crashing. Or being crashed.”

  “How?”

  “Denial of service, mostly. Scorched earth. Way low on the value chain. ‘Inelegant.’ M-I thought it might be the military. No hint this was coming, though! I’ll jaunt to Crash Village, if I can. Medea’s DIVEs are more abstract simulations. She might be weathering this attack better.”

  When Don stepped through into Medealand, however, Crash Village was gone. Not a sign anywhere of the postapocalyptic poppets and downed jumbo jets. Instead Don found himself floundering in a lurid hellscape, aswim in the redblack heart of a space like one of the volcanoes erupting over the horizon in Karuna’s virtual. Only this hell was a cavernous underground space. Making his way with difficulty onto a fire-shored black island, Don managed to scan down closer to machine-language level.

  Every detail of the hellscape represented elaborate programs designed to extricate keys and passwords—ensembles of discrete-logarithm and Shor algorithms, along with modular arithmetics for factoring enormous primes and related asymmetric “one-way” functions.

  Don recognized other code and cipher-cracking programs, too, even if he could barely understand them: unusual quantum Fourier transforms, frequency analyses, higher algebras, statistics, combinatorics, number theory, set theory.

  At the hub of the code-busting, Don saw, lay Medea-Indahar, a very masculine devil deeply body-tangled in a cyborgy, busy servicing and being serviced by techporn-endowed superpeople, sex demons, incubi and succubi exploring orifices, probing and prodding, licking and fondling and manipulating, erupting into and onto each other in molten orgasmic fluidity, again and again.

  Despite himself, Don stared. Were these debauchery partners merely sensorium constructs—hardbodied representations of software running on computers somewhere? Or were they actually puppets of distant human meat? Even if that were the case, they had to be coming together—so to speak—from haptically sexsuited participants hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

  “Jeezus!” he said. “You chose a great time to throw an orgy. All of Cybernesia is under attack!”

  “Donnie, the world has been going to hell since the day it all began, so why wait? Let’s just get there, already! But really, you’ve got it wrong. It’s not the whole world under attack—just everyone who attended your Cybernesia shindig. And this isn’t just safe sex, this is sex for safety!”

  “What?”

  “You work your way, I work mine,” Medea-Indahar said, without once breaking from the contrapuntal sex rhythm. “The thread that makes a love knot is the clue through the labyrinth. Clues are keys, and keys are clues. The system that’s ‘attacking’ us has already made a place for us. A bug, a glitch, a back door, inevitably inherent in the system itself. Gödelian incompleteness. Still, I could use your help.”

  “I don’t see what ‘service’ I can provide,” Don said, distaste dripping in his voice.

  “Must I spell it out, line-by-line, Donnie?” Medea-Indahar asked, pausing from time to time in his explanation to lick, suck, caress, or fondle. “Okay, then. The NSA’s bid to crash the Kwok postings has opened the agency itself up to a hack via its own international espionage web. The actions you’re viewing with such obvious revulsion are for moving through, penetrating, and enveloping—ooh, baby!—NSA’s own communication and database infostructure.”

  “So all this probing and manipulating—,” Don began.

  “—is about accessing communication links and exchanging information with databases. We’re a sexy switchboard, honey child. Coupling
and uncoupling through overseas hookups into NSA’s Intelink-U unclassified and open source databases. Foreplaying through that to its WebWorld and WebChat rooms. Caressing our way to Intelink Central, enveloping Intelink S, climaxing in Top Secret SCI, sensitive-compartmented information, ooh Daddy!

  “But we’re not through yet. Enciphering and deciphering are mirror processes, and we haven’t yet stepped through that mirror, Alice.”

  Don thought he could hear the strain mounting in M-I’s voice, despite all her attempts to sound unconcerned, even flippant.

  “At the moment I really don’t have time to explain to you how the essence of mathematics lies in its freedom,” M-I said. “What I need is the expansion you did on the Besterboxes, the one that allowed you to fly the islands of Cybernesia. And Karuna’s program that allowed them to join together. The route of the deep hack you and Karuna did for Kwok, too—the one that allowed him to take control of the worldwide computershare. Give me those, and right now, if you would be so kind.”

  Don stopped questioning and looked back inside his home virtuality. In the distance the tsunami was growing larger.

  In Karuna’s virtual, storm and eruption mingled and the sky rained mud and ashes.

  He pulled the Besterbox expansion and the computershare programs from his virtuality, and the island-joining protocols from Karuna’s—her work, but he still had access. Performing his own manipulations, he melded the programs into a single object, but left the computershare as a second object.

  Pulling them into Medea’s simulation, he manifested them as firebrands burning in different colors, one blue, one green, automatically embodying themselves in tune to the sim’s framing metaphors and algorithms. Don tossed the torches toward Medea amidst the lovepile.

  Even as the programming objects flew through the air, they morphed from burning brands into a blue incubus and a green succubus—with red-gold eyes, surgical chrome vampire fangs, dull steel devil horns, gunmetal finger- and toenails, just like the rest. On contact they were welcomed, the new demons instantly entwining themselves into the love knot which, through its writhing, was shifting connections, loading databases, altering programs throughout the world.