The Celestial Instructi0n

by Grady Ward

  After a little over an hour, he hit an unmarked one-lane graveled road that ran east west; he decided to walk toward the sun that was warming him. He realized that he had left the printout with his virtually aged photograph in the pocket of the overalls he had left in the dressing room. Besides the question of how he was tracked to Idaho so quickly, the larger question of the reason for his persecution remained. If a vehicle followed him from Portland, why had they not captured him along the way as he flagged down rides? If they had flown out agents, why had they not brought enough people so that he would not have escaped? Why were they dressed as Church rank-and-file rather than as cool Mr. Brillo? It seemed so long ago that his arc of personal dissolution was disrupted; the irony was that the path that he was on and the end sought by Mr. Brillo were the same except for speed. It began by him simply stopping going in to work years ago; to speed things up he could also simply check in to a local Church of the Crux, ask “why?” and see what happened. He kept walking along the road.

  By late morning, his legs were starting to hurt and his stomach had settled into a resentful knot. He saw a cluster of buildings ahead with a windsock flying over them. Joex squatted in the shade of a building as he watched the activity of a couple of people working on the field, which turned out to be a tiny agricultural airport. One fellow, dressed like a mechanic with a grimy scowl ignored him as he walked past into the office. A few minutes later, a young man of seventeen or eighteen with what looked like WWI-vintage flight goggles up over his forehead left the office walking toward the field.

  “Good morning,” the young man said, “Need a lift?” he joked.

  “Well, sure,” Joex replied.

  The young pilot stopped and twisted his face in a wry grin, “if you can hold your lunch, I’m going down to Mountain Home right now.”

  “Why not?” Joex shrugged and accompanied the pilot onto the field.

  He stopped before a beautiful vintage biplane outfitted with pipes and tanks underneath apparently used for crop dusting.

  “This is my Kaydet. Well not mine, actually. But I’ve flown her since I was fifteen,” he said proudly. “My name’s Bill.” Joex considered for a moment, “Joe X.” Nice to meet you. He held out his hand.

  “I’m going to pre-flight. There are some extra goggles somewhere in the second seat. The step ladder is around back.”

  They touched down an hour later. The biplane did not have headphones and so Joex was alone with his thoughts under the unique roar of the uncowled engine.

  It turned out that Mountain Home was near the Interstate that legged southeast from Boise. Joex walked across the small town to the entrance ramp, smiled, and stuck out his thumb. Bill had given him four extremely crumpled dollars. Joex was ashamed in accepting help from this kid, but he would have to figure out later how to make it right.

  Chapter 32

  The African sun eight-and-a-half degrees north of the equator is always cutting and glorious and there was nothing east past the old refinery that would block it from the Datatel Café. There was also nothing that stopped the flashes from the polished machetes that the go-boys swung toward each other in mock intricacy. Through the louvered vents that surrounded the ceiling of the ground floor, Sam saw and wondered what these flashes were. The click and ting and plangent clatter on the door instantly tied it together. Sam was up and away shedding his cardboard shell like a new moth, up the narrow broken mud-brick steps to the next floor he flew, unencumbered by anything except a modesty cloth he had sewn together with fine wire from tie-dyed rags.

  Sam hopped up on a table and looked down through the louver to the street. Seeing the boys, he hopped down and escaped over out to the terrace and over the side, using as a single step the principle internet junction box linking the café and the world at large. Sam and Ouest were one at this moment: a mercurial amalgam of silent, quick and brilliant in the fresh morning.

  Chapter 33

  Joex was dropped off near Salt Lake City late afternoon. His last ride had been a balding man in bib overalls with his two young sons riding in the cab of an elderly pickup truck. Joex had to squeeze in and kept his right arm out the window which didn’t roll up all the way anyway. He was offered a massive homemade sandwich from a plastic tub that was slipping around on the dash. “The love-of-my-life always makes one more. ‘Strapping boys,’ she says. Why waste it? Anyway, you’ve got a long walk if you want to get somewhere before dark.”

  Joex thanked him and bowed deeply to the delighted boys. He watched the truck drive off, raising a modest plume of dust as it re-entered the Interstate. It was hot for a spring day and looked around for shade. To the south there was a briny lake surrounded by a salt berm and a machine that looked like a narrow harvesting machine parked between him and the lake. Refreshed by the sandwich he thought it prudent to continue, to at least be somewhere peopled with the blended advantage of protective coloration from spying eyes. He spied a loose newspaper page caught on a tussock; he could fold it into a hat if he could remember how. Fold down the corners, but leave a thin bottom edge to fold up. Both sides. Pop it open, put on head. A shade!

  Joex could not get a ride. There was not a problem with the traffic, which was moderate. Nor anything wrong with his technique that he could think of. Rule one: make it clear you want a ride. A thumb out, stand by the road, stare at the drivers, all those were pretty clear. Rule two: make them happy. Usually a big smile—no matter how crappy or tired or hungry or sunburned you were—worked fine. Here, he melodramatically mimed and jumped and twisted and twitched to play the pratfall and the fool; anything to keep them from thinking “deviant murderer.” Nothing this afternoon worked. He even cocked his newspaper hat sideways and mimed a Napoleon with one hand stuck to his belly and the other hand stretched out, fluttering. Or he became a roadside Angel Moroni, summoning the traveler with an invisible horn. The drivers passed, eyes locked in front of them.

  At the first reddening of sunset, Joex retreated from the road and sat down in the dappling shade of the harvester machine, looking out over the shimmering shallow lake—more a briny pond, he realized. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He unfolded the paper and began to read it before it got too dark. Nothing out of the usual; the world had no inkling of Joex’s hunt. A darter waiting for the hawk, or a blinded rat hearing the silky approach of the python. In the world of high-tech thievery, he saw the coarse wire photo of a an alleged Chinese spy caught delivering massive quantities of technical information to email addresses traced to servers in Beijing. The photo was hard to make out. It showed an Asian-looking man about as old as Joex in three-quarters pose with the hand of a bald Special Agent clamped on his shoulder. A Mr. Rui Bao. A citizen by birth, the article alleged that his mother a Chinese national (deported to China) had come to the United States specifically to give birth. The article was well-prepared, probably sourced from a FBI press release. Bao was accused of being a spy for decades. It listed the companies he had worked for along with denials of lax security by their spokespeople. One of the companies was Mooneye, Inc. That caught his eye. Interesting, I wonder if I knew him when I was there. Joex studied the photo in the waning light.

  He looked familiar, but it was hard to tell. What was that guy’s name? He had worked with one other person in the new lab Mooneye had created for its first Internetwork switch. But this more than twenty years ago. He and that other engineer wrote one of very first Internetwork operating system stacks for the switch, a box the size of a microwave with racks of cables going in and out. Its job was to keep track of all the Internet addresses it was connected to, to minimize the time taken to both switch from one to another as needed, and to minimize the overhead of transferring data from one cable to another. Joex had been assigned by (what was his name? It wasn’t “Riu Bao,” it was just a regular American name) to handle the address cache. He remembered he found a way of changing the quick hash association to an even faster radix one. One comparison most of the time rather than two
or more. Doesn’t sound like much except times ten million. I remembered what-was-his-name had bragged about using a system error trap rather than a comparison to an end-point to tell him when he finished traversing a link list. When the system interrupted him with an “executing in data area” error, he knew that the traversal was finished, popped the error off the stack and restarted the routine. It had seemed so anti-good programming, even though the firmware was intended to be burned once, frozen into read-only memory. Cast in ROM, there was no chance that this trick would come undone by another programmer. Compared to his memory of people, his technical memory was remarkable.

  What was his name? Robert-something? It was like two first names together. Like Robert Mark or Robert Mike.

  Then the article said it at its end: “Rui Bao, who had reverted his name to his Chinese family name, was listed on his birth certificate as ‘Robert Marks.’ In a press release from the Portland Bureau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Riu Bao is described a ‘citizen of the United States in name only: he had been groomed from birth with the specific task of stealing US technology for the fledgling Chinese telecommunications sector.’ Neither his mother could found nor was there any specific comment from Chinese officials, who asserted they had no need for American secrets, as their technology led the world.”

  “Wow. I worked with a Chinese spy,” Joex thought. But what secrets could he steal in our switch project? We had no idea of it eventual importance throughout the Internet. And we were the creators of the code. There weren’t anyone else’s secrets that could be pilfered, by Robert or myself. We went days in the lab without even seeing anyone else. The project itself was a modest success. The first Mooneye Internetwork switch was popular—if expensive—but soon had to deal with a flood of competitors. There were allegations of trade secret theft by others, but never an accusation that any of us were the thieves; we had invented the technology. Now that ancient technology had been swallowed up by switches that could handle names instead of numbers, arbitrary subnets, and could handle a thousand times greater Internet traffic at half the power outlay.

  Joex considered this, but wondered why a spy would be involved in a project that had no secrets to steal? Rather a waste of time if he had been a secret mole for the Chinese during this time. It would have been more of a benefit to have repatriated him and just have him lead up a design team in China. Of course, few predicted that the Internet and its electronic infrastructure would grow so explosively, or achieve such a pervasive, global reach. Other than the sheer bandwidth of fiber optic cable linking together Internet centers, the key hardware, which assured the Internet performance, was the Internetwork switch. Unlike a pure hardware device, the successor to Baroco’s and Marks’ simple device could handle switching, firewall and denial-of-service attacks, and shape traffic in one rackable box. Major Internet hubs had dozens of such switches, each costing upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, not including service contracts and interface racks. If the giant server farms of Google and other major Internet services, which required proximity to major sources of power and cooling such as hydroelectric dams just to keep working day to day, were the basic memory cells of the Internet, the medulla cortex of these cells were the switches; they mediated the transactions, routing the queries in and the results out, or bundled together the differing aspects of a complete financial transaction. Joex relived this technical history with a flush of pride that he had not felt for many years, certainly not since he had left Mooneye and had become homeless. But that was past. The flare and asphyxiation of a match.

  It was the edge of twilight. A worker had come out in a pickup and was maneuvering a backhoe near edge of the salt berm. He ignored Joex and cut a channel in the berm, then another cut a few feet adjacent to the first. The brackish water was draining out of the pond; its rate picked up speed as it washed out the intervening slice of salty soil between the two cuts. The wind was picking up. The pond was draining.

  Joex looked at the emptying pond and, as quietly as the building stream eroded its boundaries, an idea about Riu (or Marks) struck him. It was just a theory. Probably the Games Machine just rousing his imagination. It could be easily disproved. But it would explain everything. And it became more compelling and more shocking the more he thought about it. He had to get to the FBI right now.

  Ignoring his sore legs he ran stiffly up to the Interstate and waved and smiled and acted like the happiest man in the world. In a sense he was, for he was beginning to realize why he needed to be killed. The worker who used the backhoe gave him a ride into the city.

  Chapter 34

  “Rauchmann.” The Assistant United State Attorney didn’t like being disturbed at home, especially on the secure line.

  “Langley here,” I just got a call from the Salt Lake City field office; they claim to have a walk-in who has information about the Riu Bao arrest. He says he was a co-worker of Riu’s in Silicon Valley twenty years ago.”

  “Can’t this wait until morning? Riu’s in custody, we’ve got the Grand Jury complaint before the Judge. Why not just have this guy—whoever he is—contact me tomorrow morning.” Rauchmann adjusted the underwear under his robe.

  “This guy says he knows more about Riu’s spying than we suspect. He says that he thinks Riu wasn’t here just to steal secrets. And he says that the Church of the Crux is involved. And that it could be a “bigger Chinese plot.” And one more thing. That guy is homeless and says agents of the Church of the Crux are after him to kill him.”

  Rauchmann felt a prickle of alarm over his hips. “You are wasting my time with this shit? Come on, Mark. This is loony tunes stuff. Just get his name and rehab flophouse or whatever and well get back in touch with him. Just why are you bothering me with this crap?”

  “Jim, the Special Agent in Charge of SLC said the guy knows his stuff. He was quoting all kinds of stuff about the Internet and routing and switches. And his prints are a hit in the DOD SC database.”

  Rauchmann considered this for a moment. He needed to stretch his shoulder blades back. Maybe it would be wise to consult his client, just in case.

  “O.K., I’ll contact the SLC SAIC and listen to his story. Thanks Mark. Goodnight.” Rauchmann hung up. Probably was just a nut who saw the arrest on Fox. Doing his civic duty as a patriot and counterspy, sure. On the other hand, his personal stakes are too high right now to screw anything up. He looked up the field office for Salt Lake City and let the operator transfer him.

  “Special Agent in Charge Hamblin,” said the voice from the telephone.

  Chapter 35

  “Special Agent in Charge Hamblin.”

  Joex had an uncomfortable wooden chair in the office of the Salt Lake City Special Agent who habitually stayed late to get more work done. More than one Special Agent confused an unhappy marriage with job ambition.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Baroco, would you please wait for me outside?” Hamblin gestured at the office door. “Please close it behind you. I’ll come and get you when I’m finished.”

  Joex got and dutifully left the office and closed the door behind him. It was partially dark in the anteroom. It was very quiet, even the air conditioning was off for the evening and the room was on the edge of being uncomfortably warm.

  “O.K. Yes, it sound like the usual nutjob, but this nutjob has been a principal scientist with a Stanford graduate degree. No, I haven’t checked those facts out yet. Yes, the guys sounds credible despite his appearance. Which is a bum with new clothes and a weird haircut. And there is the Special Compartmentalized hit.”

  In the warmth silence of the outer office, Joex could hear this side of the conversation as if far away; his own heartbeat was loud enough to blocks words: “homeless THUMP haircut THUMP compartmen THUMP.”

  “Mr. Rauchmann, no and no. This is his theory: Riu Bao was here not just to steal secrets, but to implant a software trojan horse into the software. Yes, twenty years ago. No, this is firmware, virus checkers can’t find it. Below rooting. Rooting, not routing. In t
he Internet switches. Can’t be detected. Like a telephone switchboard. No, he hasn’t shown me any evidence. You think I am a qualified code-monkey? But he says that it fits perfectly. I don’t know what the Church of the Crux has to do with it. He says they sent a hit man out to kill him in California. And that two guys were chasing him in Boise. No, I don’t know what he was doing in Boise. No, I have no idea why a twenty-year-old program makes a difference now. But he says that we need to immediately inspect the software for intentional errors. He said ‘national urgency.’ How would I know? Yes. Twenty years ago.”

  Hamblin paused for a long time listening to the district attorney.

  “Material witness? For a few weeks? But if he is a nutjob, why would we do that? Well, I’ll wait for your affidavit and I will detain him. I think we should just talk to the guy first,” Hamblin listened. “You are right, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll wait for the fax, attorney. He is right here.”

  But between the thumps of his heart, Joex had heard the phrase “material witness.” “Fuck, not again,” Joex actually whispered. And as quickly and wraithlike as possible he quit the outer office, walked down the carpeted hallway and walked though the shatterproof self-closing glass doors. By the time Special Agent in Charge Hamblin hung up the phone, Joex was once again on the run.