The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Which of them had lived the real life, which the illusion? If both had arisen from the same twin-split embryo, then was that embryo conceived of his parents’ sperm and egg, or Father Kwok’s sperm and Mother Kwok’s egg? Given that Ben’s birth date was two months later than Kwok’s, was Ben the leftover, the one who wasn’t raised by his biological family?

  What if neither set of parents had been the source of sperm and egg?

  It was almost too much to contemplate. Still, why had Ben’s parents never really discussed with him the issues which had preceded his birth: of their struggles with fertility and infertility, and the decisions that had sent them seeking help through reproductive tech? Was their silence just one of those “family things”?

  Like motherly love so extreme that it had shaded into sexual abuse?

  Sister! What are you doing with that boy?

  Ben pushed the thought away.

  He had long hated implants, only to learn, now, that he probably was one, and had been from the very beginning. He tried to think of something else, and almost managed it.

  “Something happened way back there,” Cherise had said. “The fork in the road to Thebes.” In the notes concerning the Forrest documents, Jaron had used that same phrase, but in a different context. The Forrest documents—even they had veered down different paths, leading to as many questions as answers.

  Ben had always assumed that Felix Forrest had been a straightforward Cold Warrior, true to his time. In the pictures he had seen, Forrest had certainly looked the part, sporting fedora and even an eye patch—quite legitimately, since Forrest had in fact lost an eye in a childhood accident. But the more Ben read of the old spy’s published works, especially his science fiction stories, the less sure he became about the man. If Forrest had simply been a gung ho patriot, then what had driven him to leak the truth out to the world, in supposedly fictional stories written under a pen name?

  In the course of his research, Ben—like Jaron before him—had found that Forrest’s “science fiction” thinly veiled secret CIA projects of the late 1950s and early 1960s, recasting those projects in the form of fantastic tales about a powerful and secretive “Instrumentality” that ruled the far future. Forrest had turned the CIA’s remote-viewing experiments into a story about the scientist Rogov, who projected his consciousness more than ten thousand years into the future. And, inside the tale of an enraged hyperdimensional traveler named Artyr Rambo, the old spy had even indirectly referenced the MK Ultra project—the covert administration of LSD to unknowing civilians.

  Leaks like that just didn’t fit the profile of a security-conscious hyperpatriot. Were they truly a lapse in secrecy—or had the old spy been following his own unspoken agenda? Had he harbored his own theories as to where the boundary lay between patriotism and paranoia?

  The “fork in the road” in Kwok’s research, though, hadn’t been about Jaron’s own life, Ben realized, or about Felix Forrest and his life, or even about agencies like CIA and NSA. No, it was about the much larger history of the art of memory and cryptography—involving the rise of science, secret services, and secret societies. The forks went much further back, to the trivia, the place where highways came together, or split apart. Where Oedipus unknowingly killed his father while on the road that led to marrying his mother. To the trivium of the medieval schools. To the Renaissance magus, steeped in the arts of that trivium and its sister quadrivium. The magus who, with his magic memory as an aid to gnosis, had made it dignified, important, and allowable for human beings to operate upon the world, to exert their powers.

  Who thereby had paved the way for modern science. Which then created a new trivium, by forking off from the magic and religion with which it had once been joined, part of a single art.

  Looking at the bridge, its arch, and the mirroring pond, at the whole circular hole that was half watery reflection, Ben thought of the way kaleidoscopes built magical phantasmagorias from shadows in the mirror, from doublings, forkings, reflections. He thought of Kwok’s holo-cast and of the characters who had already been identified therein, Giordano Bruno among them.

  The philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias Ben had consulted claimed that Bruno—Kabbalist and occult cryptographer, Hermeticist, sun-magician, and early follower of Copernicus—was either the greatest materialist who ever lived (for arguing that spirit and universe are one and the same) or the greatest immaterialist who ever lived (for precisely the same reason).

  Shaking his head, Ben went back to staring at the perfect circle made by the high arch of the moon bridge and its mirror image. Earlier he had thought of the reflection as an illusion, the half that wasn’t real, but now he realized that the circular portal could only be complete if it existed as both object and mirror-image. The circle wasn’t illusion, it was the sum of the complementary parts. Which Giordano Bruno had called the coincidentia oppositorum, “the coincidence of contraries,” centuries before the quantum physicists got around to noticing complementarity.

  Ben remembered the last time he had spoken of complementarity—to Kimberly the stripper—and his face flushed warm.

  When the more traditional quantum mechanists looked out at the cosmos, they saw the full circle, but they declared that only the single universe on Ben’s side of the reflection was real, and the other half of the circle, the twin in the mirror, was a phantom. However, when the many-worlds theorists or multiversalists, the godfathers of quantum cryptology, looked out at the cosmos and saw the full circle, they declared that the twin universes which made up the whole were each equally real—only, from within each universe, the other universe was experienced as a phantom.

  In some universes, certain things never underwent the formality of actually occurring. Like Jaron Kwok’s demise. Like Reyna’s glioblastoma multiforme, her cancer, her death. Ben tried to push such thoughts away. What good could thinking them possibly do? Yet even in focusing on Jaron’s work, Ben’s mind returned to what might have been, in other worlds.

  Back there, at that fork in the road, the unrecognized twins of archetypal magic and empirical science had split from each other, at least in Kwok’s view. When Bruno had attempted to unite the sect-shattered Christian churches into a single universal Church through his secret and magical memory system, he had ultimately failed. The occultized art of memory went underground, into secret societies like the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, their many descendants. Alternatively, in demythologized form, the mnemonic arts had paved the way aboveground for the scientific method.

  Despite his failure, however, Bruno’s efforts at systematizing the art of memory in order to produce a universal memory machine weren’t so very different from Alan Turing’s efforts before and during the Second World War, which made possible the creation of software for his universal machines, soon embodied as mechanical and electronic computers. Bruno, however, hadn’t hoped to program the hardware of machines, but the wetware of human hearts and minds.

  The hardware of the bridge, the wetware of reflection. For a moment Ben saw in his mind’s eye the ghostly glimmer of a twisted golden chain, the luminous double helix of history running backwards and forwards through the darkness of time. Lullian combinatory wheels and Brunian memory wheels curiously mirrored military cipher disks, decoder rings, the scrambler wheels of German Enigma machines, the computing wheels of Babbage’s difference engines.

  American generals and admirals had referred to their code breakers as “sorcerers,” and their collective code name for a series of very important Japanese intercepts on the eve of World War II was MAGIC. Churchill had called electronic warfare “Wizard War.” The scientists and technologists of both the CIA and NSA were referred to as “wizards” both inside and outside those organizations. Cryptology was the mirror-molecule, the DNA of both magic and science.

  Whoa. Better watch that, he thought. Not too much. The euphoria of inforrhea was all over Jaron’s notes. That way lay madness or—what?

  When Ben stood and looked down at his reflectio
n in the surface of the pond, he didn’t see Jaron Kwok looking back at him, didn’t see the ghostly glimmer of a twin grown differently from the same chains of DNA. But the sight of his own reflection did remind him of how thoroughly Kwok’s notes discussed, not only history, but destiny.

  Quantum computing, Kwok asserted, was destined to remerge those roads that had forked so long ago. Sorcerer, scientist, and cryptanalyst—all stood mirrored in one another. For Kwok, the creation of the universe-bandwidth quantum computer, the ultimate cryptanalytic device, would yield the “universal key” for breaking codes. It was a return to and fulfillment of the magus’s clavis universalis, the great key to all the mysteries of the universe. The creation of the quantum cryptograph as a universal labyrinth, an undecipherable cipher, was a return to the magus’s labyrinthus universalis, a pathway of mysteries the uninitiated would be required to navigate if they were to gain the vast powers of the initiate.

  Reading Kwok’s notes, Cho had begun to wonder if the man considered himself a sort of reborn magus, a second Bruno. As near as he could tell, Giordano Bruno had believed his universal memory machine—with its wheels within wheels within wheels—was capable of intricately reflecting the permutations and combinations of the stars and planets in their courses. Bruno apparently believed that such adjustable simulacra would allow him to create a system for getting inside archetypal astrological systems, in order to tap into the ordering patterns of nature itself, and thereby open the “black diamond doors”—Bruno’s phrase—of the initiate’s psyche.

  Once opened, they became the “pearly gates” of Revelation and allowed the initiate to plug his psyche into the cosmic powers themselves.

  Although Jaron Kwok might not have pictured constellations as the “bright shadows of Ideas” the way Bruno had, Jaron too seemed to believe he could crack the combination on the vault of heaven. Had he—as cosmic safecracker—succeeded, or failed? Had he drawn the whole world of data into himself, like a great magus? Had he ecstatically reflected the universe within his mirroring mind, and become one with the Cosmic Powers?

  To what purpose? Patriotism, or paranoia, or simply ego? Had he wanted to beat the Chinese to the prize? The Americans? Both? And why? What if that boon they were all after, via binotech and quantum cryptology, turned out to be a booby prize?

  Or a booby trap. Poof! goes the universe. Or at least your place in it, hero. In that last instant before he disappeared, had Jaron even known that he had a twin? Or had he in the end simply died ignorant, the victim of his own machinations, achieving only his full potential for becoming a poor, tragic fool?

  Ben looked away.

  As he did so, out of the corner of his eye he caught the reflection of a woman coming toward him. At first he thought it must be Agent Adjoumani, but almost instantly the source of the reflection stood there beside him. A young Asian woman—lithe and strikingly beautiful, though a tad overly made-up for his tastes. For an instant he thought she might be a Guoanbu operative, Adjoumani’s looking-glass reflection.

  “Hello,” she said, and even that single word was suggestive. “I have it on good authority that you’re the kind of man who appreciates the female form. I can see in your eyes that it’s true. My name is Sin, but you can call me Helen. Come and dance with me, won’t you?”

  The woman flashed him a distressingly come-hither glance and pressed a piece of paper into the palm of his hand, just as Adjoumani came striding up. The FBI agent had been caught completely off guard, but before she could do anything, she and Ben watched the young woman skip lightly away.

  Ben opened his hand and looked at the piece of neon pink paper she’d slipped into his palm. What he read there made him wonder if “Sin” might be a stage name. It also made him nervous.

  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, clearing his suddenly dry throat, trying not to let the discomfort leak into his voice. “She gave me this. A complimentary ticket for a ‘hostess club.’”

  “‘The Temple of the Ten Thousand Beauties,’” Adjoumani read aloud, frowning. She shook her head disdainfully and handed it back to Ben. “The address is down the hill from the Temple of the Ten Thousand Buddhas. Pretty tacky, if you ask me.”

  “Yes,” Ben agreed, nodding absently. He took one last glance at the bridge and its reflection, that trapdoor into another world. “I’ve seen the Temple of the Ten Thousand Buddhas. And I think I’ve seen everything I came here to see, as well.”

  “Good. Let’s head back to the hotel, then.”

  Following her in silence, Ben’s thoughts grew darker much faster than the light of day declined. “I have it on good authority,” the woman had said. Just a coincidence? An offhand comment? Was she simply playing on his curiosity, hoping to attract a new customer?

  If she did know something about him, though, on someone’s “authority,” then whose? Was a “hostess club” the same thing as a “gentleman’s club”—another euphemism for a strip bar? The only person who knew about his strip-club night was Ike Carlson—and Kimberly, of course. Had Carlson betrayed him, somehow? Ben knew little enough about the man, after all.

  Now that he thought about it, hadn’t Kimberly the stripper been a little too well matched with him and his needs? Still, both Kimberly and Ike were half a world away. To what purpose would they want to betray Ben’s recent peccadillo? And to whom?

  To what purpose.

  For what purpose.

  He had heard and thought those phrases too often today. Thinking of bright shadows and dark reflections, of mirrors and strippers, he wondered if someone was trying to make a fool of him. Wondered if someone had been making a fool of him his whole life long.

  He had never been much inclined to paranoia. Conspiracy theories were the toxic mimics of genuine investigations—just fantasies that filled the void when facts were hard to come by. Or so he’d always thought.

  Still, what Lu had suggested to him today would make anyone feel shaky. Her story of changeling children was like something out of a grim fairy tale. If there were a “someone” who was responsible for his unexpected history, then who? Who could have done such a thing? Who could have made him a pawn from even before the moment of his birth—and again, to what purpose?

  The shadowy secrecy of it all made him think of those organizations which had given Kwok the Forrest documents. The same organizations which had hired first Kwok, and now him.

  But Lu’s discovery didn’t smack particularly of “national security” or even “corporate competition.” Beyond the secret agencies and terrorist networks, beyond the criminal conspiracies and clandestine cabals, beyond the international intrigues of shadow governments, were there entities still more shadowy?

  Where should he look for creatures that lived so far from the light of day? What key should he use to unlock the black diamond doors—and what Powers might he find behind them?

  Glancing down at the neon pink ticket in his hand, he felt as if he was holding a thread that would lead him away into a labyrinth that grew ever darker.

  ANTICIPATING THE UNPRECEDENTED

  CRYPTO CITY

  In a small teleconference lounge amid the rooms of H/O’s eighth-floor executive suite, Deputy Director Brescoll met with Beech, Wang, and Lingenfelter. No one in the room looked particularly happy, although their reasons likely differed from Brescoll’s own.

  His mother-in-law had just been diagnosed with uterine cancer, and his wife Marion, who was very close to her mother, was taking it hard. Despite the painful challenges he and his family were facing at home, Jim tried to stay focused on the matters at hand, but he wasn’t finding it easy.

  “I’ve looked through your reports,” Brescoll said. “It seems to me we’re facing a number of problems. The way I see it, they fall into four overall areas.

  “First, there’s activating the ash found when Jaron Kwok went missing. Second, there’s explaining the eccentric images embedded in the Kwok holo-cast, particularly the views of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial
Hall and the painting in Philadelphia. Third, there’s containing access to the materials Kwok released through his holo-cast. Finally, there’s dealing with our competitors in this effort. Guoanbu in China, certainly, but what about Cybernesians working out of Tri-Border? The New Teachings Warriors? The Cheng crime family? What do they all expect to gain from their activities?

  “Let’s start with the first issue, the binotech ash and its activation.”

  Beech, seeming a bit too eager, activated a holovid showing footage of complex nanorganic mechanisms.

  “Our technician operating in Lu’s Kowloon lab noted that Lu was growing out a number of samples in blood-based media,” he said. “Working from that, we’ve done the same. The binotech is, indeed, activated by contact with blood.”

  Brescoll noted the odd glance of disagreement that passed between Beech and Wang. Then Wang dislodged Beech’s data display. He replaced it with his own graphs showing percentages of “Projected Binotech Population Activation” and “Characterizations of Recursively Enumerable Languages by Means of Watson-Crick Automata.”

  “I think ‘partially activated’ more accurately describes the situation,” Wang said. “Under electron microscopy, the mechanisms that make up Kwok’s ashes—they’re of more than one type, you see—have proven to be unprecedentedly complex. We have nothing that quite matches them. And yet all they’re doing so far is very low-level communication and replication.”

  “But you believe they’re capable of more?” the deputy director asked.

  “Much more,” Wang said firmly. Jim noted that Bree Lingenfelter glanced quickly from Wang to Beech and back to Wang, then she displaced Wang’s imagery with her own graphs documenting “Turing Machine Grammars in Mixed Organic/Inorganic Systems,” and “Overlap of Complementarity Properties in Watson-Crick and Generalized Quantum Systems.”

  “I have to agree with Doctor Wang,” she said. “The way these binotech devices exploit the quantum-mechanical foundations of DNA’s molecular activity is much more sophisticated than would be required for simple replication or local communication. Nobody we know of—not us, not the Chinese, not the Russians or Japanese or Europeans—nobody has produced binotech devices possessing this level of sophistication.”