“Oh really.”
“I’m serious. Airborne.”
“I’ll be right back.” She had a way of closing up, of withdrawing, and then she seemed darker somehow, as if she had something on her mind. Was there a guy? She rose to open a window, long-limbed and graceful, then wandered toward the kitchen. He watched her as she nodded and smiled, first here, then there along the way. She moved with an unpretentious stride. She was indeed pretty, her white smile dazzling. Her head rode gracefully on a long neck. Her features were delicate and even, and her jaw had a brittle china-cup strength.
David and Tory sat talking all evening, most of it on a love seat where they sat close, face to face, gazing into each other’s eyes.
“What do you do?” Tory asked.
“I’m working for the I.G. detachment assigned to the Composite.” He was sure she’d find that boring, but she actually looked startled, and he wondered why. Some dark wink or thought or other moved in the liquid depth of that dark gaze: an involuntary blink tightening her pupils. The Inspector General’s office existed to inspect everything from blankets to burros, from tarps to tanks, from boots to bullets, and make sure it was according to regulations; the I.G. also listened to soldiers’ complaints and tried to make right where right was due. Did she have a complaint? The Composite was the 20,000 member military joint command assigned to guard CON2 in these violent times, with so many bomb threats and shootings related to nutty causes. “What about you?” he asked Tory. “What do you do?”
“I’m the Executive Officer of a data security unit. I’m afraid it’s kinda hush-hush.” She looked regretful, signaling she couldn’t say more about her job.
They turned from topic to topic. She was from Iowa. Her grandpa had been an Army officer killed in Vietnam. Her parents had a home in Davenport. Her dad was in real estate, her mom a housewife. She had an older brother and a younger sister.
David liked to read. He'd read some of the same books as Tory. He was sportsy--liked biking, hiking, martial arts, swimming, soccer. Funny, so did she. She laughed. “You’re making all this up, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I read minds, you see, and I just parrot whatever you’re about to say, so that you’ll be impressed.”
She threw her head back in a cascade of soft laughter. Light gleamed on her teeth, the pink of her palate. It took her a moment to regain control. “Maxie said you could be really funny.” She looked as if she were having fun.
People began leaving. Maxie opened some windows and a wonderful breeze came through.
The Air Force pilots left silently and slightly tipsy by the back garden gate, without passengers. Maxie brought two frosty rosé spritzers, and handed David and Tory each one. “Thanks,” David said, hardly noticing Maxie’s triumphant look.
A while later, Maxie signaled from the kitchen and Tory strode away. David sat with his eyes closed, enjoying the cool night air, and wondering how to make sure they saw more of each other. Maybe dinner? Or lunch?
More people left. Maxie was in a battle of goodbyes at the door, shaking hands right and left, smiling, hugging, encouraging. A man and a woman in white smocks appeared and began cleaning. David went out into the garden and inhaled a scent of trees. The city loomed darkly all around, sleeping, glowering.
Leaning on a wrought iron railing, he glimpsed the two women inside. Unseen, he watched Tory, trying to figure out how she had managed to tug that one note on his heart’s strings that no woman had in years. He was determined to see more of her. Under the thick hair with reddish highlights, she had a wide, dusky smile full of soft secrets. Her eyes seemed to throw off light when she smiled, but at moments she looked sullen and mysterious, almost hurt, and then her mouth took on a sultry pout, lower lip full. Was there a man in her life? This all seemed too easy. Maybe she was getting the proctology treatment from some other geek, and Maxie was trying to fix her up with David as a mercy thing. Everyone is getting the shaft from someone, David thought in a moment of alkaline despair. The world is full of proctologists. Actually, they are an alien race, invading the earth, and killing us off by ruining our love lives and frustrating us until we become extinct. We shall be as dinosaurs. Then the world will become one gigantic rectal exam populated by these people with huge gloves. But how long will they rule? How will they fare before other aliens--endodontists, perhaps--take over by a fiendish ploy? David set down his spritzer. Courage, he thought. He went back inside to mount his attack.
Already, the white-smocked man was vacuuming, and the woman cleaned plastic cups and plates from every surface. Maxie exhaled a puff of breath, and a few straight blonde wisps fluttered over her forehead. “David, I’ll invite you again. I’m having a cookout soon.”
“I’d love that.” He looked over her shoulder, and saw Tory in the kitchen with a broom and dust pan. Her hair looked frizzled from effort, her look pensive. How neatly drawn was the outline of her face, how warm her lightly-rouged lips, how neatly arranged her features seemed, crisp and just right.
“Tory,” Maxie said to her, seeing his look. She put her tools aside and walked toward them. Though she conveyed a sense of pleasure, she had something dark in her eyes; not cold at all, but warm and defensive, a beast that could be roused, a wall that might have to be climbed over.
The women walked him out to the street. They swatted mosquitoes and talked for a few moments under bug-chased lights. “Maybe my unit will fly around your building one of these days,” Maxie said.
David laughed, teasing: “Don’t tell me you wear a flight suit?”
“Bigger than Miami. Helmet, boots, this suit with all these pockets full of medicine packets. I also carry a great big gun on my belt. It’s just so cool. Beats doing blood draws and emptying bed pans. No offense--you were a fun patient.”
David told Tory: “I would really enjoy having lunch with you. Maybe a movie. We can talk some more about my mind reading and your interests?”
She thought darkly for a moment. Then, as if a sudden breeze had blown those thoughts away, her eyes sparkled and her red lips pleasured in a smile. “I’d like that.”
“You have our number,” Maxie told David with a conspiratorial dig in the ribs. The women waved and said goodnight as David drove away.
ALLISON: Washington in this pre-election year has a kind of nervous energy that borders on psychosis. Grinding poverty for half the population since the third collapse of the world economy in less than ten years; international humiliations of the U.S.; armies of homeless people on the streets; terrorism; scandals; rioting; the collapse of Social Security; the relentless bickering of hate radio; the endless partisan impeachment struggles between armies of lawyers; these are just some of the complex factors that have brought us to this Second Constitutional Convention. Here is our political reporter in the field, Peggy DeMetrio, for a convention center update. Peggy, can you give us a complete update and analysis of what’s at stake, and where the Second Cosntitutional Convention is right now?
PEGGY: Sure. I’m standing before the Atlantic Hotel and Convention Center, near the Islamic Mosque and Cultural Center along Embassy Row. It seems hard to believe that CON2 has been in session now for two weeks. Remember how, when the first bus loads of delegates rolled in, everyone was so upbeat and excited? To quote one delegate I spoke with, “We’re tired, we’re angry, and we’re going to do something about it. The Constitution is close to 250 years old and needs to be amended. We’re going to take our country back from the criminals, the foreigners, and the liberals. We’re going to stop the constant sniping, the impeachments, the censures, the stealing of our money.” That sentiment may still be there, but the exhilaration has faded in the midst of gridlock. The convention has been stalled for two weeks now on procedural issues. Radicals of the left and of the right, as predicted, are pushing the center to allow for more amendments. The limit of ten very carefully predetermined amendments so far still stands firm, but one has to ask for how long. People here are beginning to talk not about amending, but about rew
riting. People are saying that it was a long, arduous road to this point, and they want to make it count.
There are signs that the American people’s confidence in this convention is slipping. Polls show the support level is down to just under 50% today, down from 75% six months ago when this movement roared through the state legislatures like a brush fire. This convention was approved by the legislatures of 45 states as a handshake with the American people--a carefully crafted compromise of positions on abortion, creationism, gay rights, a balanced budget, and other positions--designed to resolve a number of long-standing conflicts without tipping the game to either extreme.
The majority agree on what are called the core amendments--balancing the budget, eliminating the Federal debt, creating a replacement for Social Security, joining every other civilized nation in guaranteeing full medical coverage to every citizen regardless of class differences. Then there are the so-called special interest amendments, designed to mandate positions on abortion, creationism, gay rights, furthering the separation of church and state by taking away the right of clergy to create marriage contracts, and so forth. This is only the first such national convention since 1787, and there are a lot of questions about what to do next at every step.
The most dire warnings were that this convention could not possibly be such a big tent and hold together so many opposing views; that the convention would fall apart, resulting in no new document. That would leave the United States without a new Constitution, but the old one, the 1787 Constitution, would be tarnished. It would be seen as just another piece of paper now that its glory had been poked through. Those warnings have not come true so far, Allison, but we are holding our breath.
The key to the whole thing is if the limit of ten amendments is breached. Right now, the Procedures Committee is deadlocked as extremists of the left and right want to remove the limit, and centrist moderates are fighting desperately to keep the limit, get the convention rolling, finish the business, and go home. The extremists don’t want it that way. They want a whole new piece of paper, and they’ve got to eliminate the center before they can go at each other’s throats.
ALLISON: Is there any progress in the committee at all?
PEGGY: The next vote in the committee should tell the tale. Right now, we have 50 committee member delegates wrangling in a room off the side, while the other 950 are engaged in arguments in the main hall. Those 50 are going to hold one final vote in the next few days. I cannot over-emphasize how critical this will be. If the center holds, the number of amendments will remain at ten; the convention will do its business and go home. If the committee again deadlocks, the extremists have promised to walk out and hold a floor fight. If they have the numbers, they can open it up, and then we could have a hundred amendments, a thousand. The entire Constitution might be thrown out. No telling where we'd go from there.
Chapter 6
During that fine half summer, half autumn weekend in September, a graying Coast Guard specialist sat in a restricted, gloomy basement at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., working with the world’s most powerful computer. His name was Ibrahim “Ib” Shoob, and he was a head walker. He caught hackers who broke into secure data bases, civilian or military, and got their hands on sensitive information. It was all in a day’s work, as Ib smoked cigarette after cigarette in the Secure Room of the National Systems Security Office (NSSO).
Ib was away from his family for long stretches. By day when the observatory’s silvery domes made flashbulb shots of the noon sun, or by night when the domes glimmered in moonlight, Ib was usually at work stalking his targets. Ib lived for his wife and children, computing, and the Coast Guard, not necessarily in that order. He was grateful to the nation that had sheltered his immigrant parents from the ravages of Lebanon during Israel-Hezbollah campaigns. They were an industrious family of merchants and bankers, but proud of their middle son who’d chosen military service instead. Now Ib was on the verge of retirement. His three children were well on their way, two of them in college. He’d earned his degree while in the Coast Guard, and the service had helped him discover his genius for computing. He had just been admitted to the doctoral program in computer science at Boston University, and was to matriculate after his retirement next year. He looked forward to relocating with his wife Hala to some picturesque New England town with brick buildings and winding little streets. Meanwhile, he used his technical finesse and moral zeal to chase electronic wrongdoers. He felt privileged to be working on the CloudMaster computer system, of which only four machines existed.
CloudMaster had originally been developed for the Navy as a weather modeling system. It was so powerful that it could reliably micro-read the weather over a huge footprint of land and sea. It could predict the number and force of raindrops or balls of hail that would hit a square yard of aircraft carrier flight deck during a given segment of minutes or hours, adjusting constantly as realtime information in the system drifted through changes. In its guts, each CloudMaster created a tiny universe complete with pulsing stars, whizzing comets, and rotating planets--cyber fantasies. On the rotating planets were seasons, latitudes, weather pinwheels, storm systems, high and low pressure areas, rain fronts, snow levels, tornadoes, nights and days. CloudMaster worked on the principle of a fuzzy network--over a million virtual pico-processors shuffling information at near light speed, sharing registers, floating data streams. To prevent the machine from burning up, its insides were, like outer space, chilled to near absolute zero and reduced to near-vacuum pressure. Photon bit streams streaked across each other’s luminous vapor trails, racing between golden logic gates. To keep the machine from collapsing under earth’s tremendous atmospheric pressure, CloudMaster resembled a deep-ocean bathyscaph with an egg-shaped, massive steel hull. The machine had been developed as a weather modeling system for the U.S. Navy, but it could also model a nation’s economy in a thousand dimensions, or predict the fate of a nation. Just before CON2, all four CloudMaster machines in Washington were yanked from most of their work streams and linked together in a secret net. This puzzled Ib. And he was not one to let go of a puzzle.
At the moment, Ib was tracking an intruder. The hacker was somewhere in Holland and went by the handle Flying Dutchman, though head walkers at NSSO quickly dubbed him Salty. He’d pop up in a Navy parts list or an Air Force flight schedule, and flaunt his icon: a wooden warship under full sail, with a cannon blowing smoke. Gotcha, a sign in the sail read, and he’d be gone.
You just wait, Ib thought. This afternoon, Salty had shown up in a top secret personnel data base of Metro Power & Light, groping into sensitive information about people’s salaries, ages, that sort of thing. The phones to NSSO flooded with frantic calls from system administration at MP&L. Like a Texas Ranger, Ib hopped into the saddle--or rather, his office chair while wearing V-goggles--and entered a parallel reality. Ib was the ultimate pro. He had no working icon, just a symbol he displayed at the moment when he had his man and the police were breaking doors down in Tokyo, Rio, London, or Mombasa: a cross with R.I.P. above, and Thank You underneath. Most head walkers liked to use the effects provided by manufacturers and software enhancers--a walking or running man complete with clicking footsteps, or a race car with roaring engine, a thundering rocket, a clanking knight--but Ib preferred to be a silently floating, invisible eye. He left almost no signature. He glided in and out of forbidden places like the truncus of a flashlight beam moving flat along a wall. He was a ghostly manta ray in the cyber ocean, barely flicking a wingtip. With CloudMaster running in background, dissecting thousand digit numbers to find their two unique prime factors that were 500-digit entry codes, Ib could break any lock on cyber-earth in seconds.
Head walkers traversed a pseudo-reality of highways, roads, bridges, skyscrapers, underground metropolises, long halls--a virtual city peopled with the icons of its population, millions of workers and players around the world like Ib. When the call from MP&L came, Ib put on his goggles. The presentation of V-world sites varie
d. Some places were monochrome black on gray. Many were cartoon-like. Some achieved oil-painting artistry. Most were interesting. But Ib never dallied among other people’s silly games. Blending into the raging river of raw photons that was the net, he sidestepped knights or cowboys challenging him to fight. He avoided beautiful females luring him, with winks and waggling fingers, to flash credit cards and step into shady side-rooms with a promise of more to be seen. These were often just roll-joints; your session was relayed to some casino town in Africa or Asia, maybe to a ship in international waters, where such billing was legal, and presto--you’d be billed 100 bucks a minute on the plastic you flashed to get in.
Ib entered MP&L’s General Area Network. It was a simple, elegant environment, a monochrome reminding Ib of an architect’s rendering of a future airport: spacious, floors dotted with meandering stick figures, its walls numbered with access ports to data bases. In the middle of this imaginary lobby floated a 1500’s Dutch warship with cannon blazing. Of course it was too late to catch Salty entering. Ib could only hope to follow him, link him to the trail he’d left, have him arrested based on that evidence.
“Alert, Ib. Subject on site,” CloudMaster’s unisex voice whispered.
Ib’s heart leapt. Somewhere nearby Salty still lingered, perhaps greedy to look into women’s files, unaware of the head walker stalking him. “Triangulate.”
“Searching.”
“Echo,” Ib said. CloudMaster, linked to the scenario in Ib’s goggles, churned through Metro’s history buffers, looking for the moment when Salty had showed himself just long enough to instruct Metro’s system to display the warship. “Echo successful.”
“Trace,” Ib said.
“Please wait,” CloudMaster said. “Trace successful.”
There Salty was, the trace a tiny moving dot like a pinprick. “Follow,” Ib said. As long as Ib followed his prey unnoticed, CloudMaster could slam data files back and forth from anywhere in the world to find, and deliver Salty’s name, address, phone number, gender, birth weight, and so on to Amsterdam’s computer crime detectives. As he pursued Salty, Ib found himself traveling along a kind of highway tunnel. Where was this bird headed? They entered a cartoon landscape owned by Columbia Net, the Washington network authority. Here, cutesy animal figures chased each other under pastel skies, with old-style cartoon music. Ib streaked on behind his nearly invisible quarry. Beneath them raged the data stream, giving an illusion of danger, for the icon people were evanescent, like ghosts. One could pass through the stream and, at worst, have to do a reconnect. Cartoon cop cars drove by with pigs shooting rubbery guns. Ib entered a very utilitarian, cold environment. CloudMaster announced: “Metro Emergency Archive.”
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