But I am explaining myself badly. I am trying to describe how my passion is different from that of my lads; I think that really all I can do is assert it. I do not want you to think that I know less than they, rather that I know it for different reasons. Enmiring stuff, this. I was going to say, not something they’d understand, but of course that is exactly what they did do, or rather, they did not understand but they perceived it. They knew I saw things differently from them. Fuddy-duddy wasn’t a word they’d have used, I am the one put in my pigeonhole by that. Are there even pigeonholes any more? They conjure up clerks in offices, who in turn had quite likely forgotten that once the beehive interiors of pigeon houses, or if you will dovecotes, had small slotting spaces for the birds to rest in. A dome studded with birds, all cooing.
Could my lads see my pen sliding across the paper with its firm black script following they would regard me with the same interest they’d show in a movie based say on a Dickens novel, where men grown old in the work of record keeping stand at lecterns and transcribe bills and invoices and flowery letters in copperplate script, begging to remain, on behalf of their masters, their correspondents’ most humble and obedient servants; they’d see us all as antique local colour, too cute for words. Though not perhaps in those words.
Outside the cockatoos wheel across the sky in great raucous shrieking swirls. So ugly the sound. The cry of the crow, its dreadful keening caw, has a melancholy dignity, invoking solitary deaths in desolate landscapes, but cockatoos are simply noisy, stupid and full of malice. I saw about fifty once, terrorising a possum that was caught up a telegraph pole, dive-bombing it in massed formations, all the time shrieking at it loudly enough to deafen us all. They tear the trees apart, chunks fall to the ground, a ripped up browning litter. We cannot afford our few trees here to be so decimated. Sometimes there are odd sounds of sense in their screaming, because a tame cocky has escaped to the herd and taught them shreds of the human language that’s only a form of squawk to them. Pretty cocky, mutilated far beyond a Chinese whisper, come back, come back, a plaintive wraith of sound, cocky want a biscuit. Sometimes you see these cockatoos in old paintings, snowy-white, yellow-crested, fascinating exotic silent creatures, from a time before Australia was known to exist, they stare out at us with their sideways bright eyes, giving to believe they are wise and have seen much. But not honoured in their own country, where they bloom in dead trees like mutant magnolias. Or graze in the grass like hundreds of wisps of very clean washing, extra dazzle in their whiteness. Beautiful they are then, but their cries hurt your head.
I am writing about birds again. I think. I think I have already allowed myself one of these splendid set-pieces of the present. It’s a little self-indulgence, but also a kind of thinking space (I admire my self-knowledge) while my brain works out how to get on with the next bit.
Here it is, the next bit. I came into the study shortly before the lads and called up my emails. One of them had an attachment in the body of the email, not that I would have been wary of it in any form, so much of our business is done with attachments. But this one came up immediately I opened the message. I didn’t pay particular attention to the name of the sender, it didn’t mean anything to me and this was perfectly usual, our email address was in the public domain for anybody who wanted to get in touch. Clement had done us a quite spectacular website advertising our business, with all sorts of ingenious links embedded in it, so it got quite a lot of hits. Afterwards I thought the name might have been Kit something or other, but my memory is unreliable.
Anyway, there was the message, the words See see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament flashed up on the screen. They were in simulated neon, rather like those amazing advertising signs in Central Station when I was a boy, us hicks from the country used to get off our train and stare up at the Penfold’s grapes dropping their juice into a goblet until it was full of wine, when it drained and the drops filled it again. All the big city began in those red drops of wine. For me the email had some of the transporting recall of a Proustian madeleine; for a moment I was that youth again, and all life’s adventure awaited me.
This wasn’t wine; the letters dropped gouts of blood.
Novica had by this time come in and was busy at his box. I expect I exclaimed, because I was quite delighted by this effect, which I assumed had been sent to me by a friend who’d been at the play a couple of nights ago. Novica glanced across. That looks fun, he said. I was staring entranced at the red drops. Gradually they turned into a stream, no longer imitating a neon sign but becoming a wash of blood, and then quite quickly the whole screen was dissolved by this blood, there was no sign of the email program or its instruction box, the screen was simply a wash of blood that continued to flow down. Everything was obliterated, I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t exit, couldn’t go back, couldn’t call up anything else.
Then Novica exclaimed. Shit, he said, and looking across I saw that the same thing had happened to his screen.
Well, it was a virus, of course. A worm. After a while the blood coagulated and shrank into scabby patches, and then the screen went grey and that was it, nothing. The hard disk destroyed and everything along with it. The desktop gone. All the files, all the software. It was a particularly fiendish one. It shouldn’t have been able to get through our various viral screens, they were state of the art if anything was. Firewalls, you name it. But somehow we didn’t have a filter for this worm. I don’t need to say, I was very keen to find out how that had happened. It wasn’t an ordinary virus. A particularly clever piece of cracking had been involved. Some super blackhat at work.
It was not by any means the end of everything; we did not go down that easily. That wasn’t what destroyed us. You don’t run a business like mine without constant and quite separate back-up. Except for some stuff Jake had been doing for the Treasury file the night before and saved only on his computer. He got shouted at well and truly for that, I made him grovel and get the data sent again, and shouted at them that it was all very easy to get the material re-sent but what such things lost was a business’s good name which was not so easily retrieved, and in the long run our only asset. Not that any process of retrieval was quick, either, it took some days to get things back to normal, reinstall the software, reload the files. And of course the checks we could have used to find it, the logs, the pathways, all that it had destroyed past recall. It was a very expensive piece of destruction, and even more nightmarish in its implication. Because if it had got through all our virus filters once, there was nothing to stop it doing so again; the hacker could keep wiping us out and such was the nature of our systems, all interconnected by a central hub, that it was difficult to isolate any one of us. I did call in a virus expert, and set up various checks and safeguards, which I can’t be bothered describing. That’s all behind me now. How wearisome it seems. What I write down here is different from that endless painstaking so clever computer activity which is in the end so utterly fragile. I suppose I should see a metaphor for the human condition in that, but actually I think we are tougher. But certainly I never thought I would learn to appreciate the simple safety of pen and paper. Even Leonie’s dribblings hardly obliterate anything. Now that it hardly matters.
In between getting the systems up and running again we had long colloquies about what to do. How to stop this happening again. We were agreed that it was the work of a hacker, targeting us specifically, not a generic attack, but how were we to find him, and stop him?
Of course you will call the police, said Flora, but I wasn’t keen to do that. Had we been a government department of course that would have been the first thing to do. But a business like mine, elegant, discreet, personal, you don’t want the police stamping through it if you can help it. Especially as I doubted they had a great record in catching computer criminals. I said I wanted to wait a while, see what we could come up with. In fact I was probably just hoping it wouldn’t happen again.
Oscar Luft is a hacker, said Clement.
Do
you know him, asked Jake.
Everybody does, said Clement, he’s hugely famous.
He used to be, I said. A hacker. He’s given it up.
Huh, said Clement, in a snort of derision. Who says? He says? Who’d believe a hacker?
People change, I said, wanting to look after Laurel, not wanting to discover that Oscar had betrayed her and himself.
Hackers don’t, said Jake. It’s in their blood. I reckon they’re born with it.
I forbore to ask how, if it was in the blood, it used to manifest itself, hacking being such a recent phenomenon. Instead I said: Okay, for the sake of argument, Oscar Luft’s the hacker. What’s his motive?
Clement cast his eyes about. Fun? He said. Because it’s there? Like Mount Everest?
I cannot believe he would be so wicked as that. I would need a motive, before I could finger a person as guilty.
Maybe somebody paid him a huge amount of money to do it, said Jake.
Still, I insisted, we need a motive.
You mean, somebody with a reason for hating you. Doing you harm. Novica spoke solemnly.
There’s a start.
You’ll have to work that out, said Clement. I thought people liked you.
Well, maybe people do. Maybe a person doesn’t.
In truth, I could not come up with anybody who would dislike me sufficiently to attempt to destroy my business. There are always people one has crossed, not taken to, fallen out with, but any of them I could bring to mind I did not see having the skills to take this revenge. A competitor? A chilling thought, if they’d stoop so low. And anyway the technology is an expanding business, there’s plenty of room in it. Maybe it was a warning. But of what? Against what? It was hard thinking this, first of all conceiving that anybody could wish me such harm, then trying to imagine who that person might be.
Oscar was at that play, said Clement.
Half Canberra was at that play, I said. So were you.
I suppose we have to assume it was somebody at the play, said Jake.
The virus is a specific reference to it, said Clement.
Might be coincidence, said Jake. After all, it’s a well-known play.
Is it? said Clement.
Seems a bit too much of a coincidence, said Novica. What else would make anybody think of the connection?
Might be copied from something overseas. There’s a lot of copycatting, said Clement.
I remembered the pelican, ripping open its breast and its blood flowing, filling the screen. Had that been a warning? And was the blood simply a conceit, a clever idea for a virus, or was it maybe …
You don’t think it’s some kind of death threat, I asked.
Wowee, said Clement.
What about the meaning of the words, asked Jake, running his fingers through the bleached points of his hair and quite destroying the sculptural effect. It showed how worried he was, he normally never touched those careful peaks.
Good point, said Novica. They aren’t about destruction, they are about the promise of safety. Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament is offering salvation. It’s Faustus’s problem that he can’t take it.
I was silent, remembering my walk along the lake, when the crimson sunset seemed to be enacting those words. I remembered the sentence that came suddenly to me, and the terror in it that I refused to think of at the time. What soul was it that I sold? All right, I did at times remark that the computer allows us to embark on the last great Faustian temptation, that of containing all knowledge in its small space. But I had not made any pacts with the devil, my soul was my own, intact, unsold. I needed no salvation. That was for certain.
Quite often at work I thought of my namesake. Eusebius Hieronymus Sophonius. Geronimus in twelfth-century England. How he’d have loved using the computer. What a wonderful tool he’d have found it. But hearing Novica question the meaning of the virus it occurred to me that St Jerome would have had no doubt; he’d have seen it as a sure and certain sign from God. The offering of salvation in a context of destruction: it could only mean, desist. I have destroyed your handiwork; now, reach out and find your forgiveness in the blood of the lamb before it is too late and all is grey as ashes. You don’t query God’s signs, you simply take them to heart.
Except that I didn’t believe that God was some kind of heavenly hacker. I counted Him out. What worried me was the notion that somebody regarded me, or wanted me to suppose they did, as a latter-day Faust. I consoled myself that I knew the real thing when I saw it, I wasn’t to be fobbed off as he was with tomfoolery.
Despite my remonstrations Clement got hold of Oscar and questioned him. He pinched his little topiary beard – he was the image of the picture book Mephistophilis, I’d noticed that before but not seriously – and looked pained when I spoke to him about it. I had set him to find the culprit, hadn’t I? Tackling Oscar seemed a logical move. When I next saw Laurel at the restaurant she looked gaunt, her skin so pale it seemed her blood had stopped flowing. She looked at me reproachfully, and when I said that I did not believe it, that I knew Oscar was no hacker, I did not blame him in any way, her eyes went very large and her mouth twisted in a small smile. I’m afraid that it will ruin his exams, she said.
Clement acted without my permission, I insisted. Honestly, I told him I was quite certain Oscar was not involved. Please tell him I have no fears it was him, I said, hoping I sounded more sincere that I felt. Laurel’s face relaxed a little. Clement is a know–it-all, I said, if only he were half as clever as he thinks he is. Maybe I should sack him.
She laughed ruefully and gave me my coat, it was one of the small pleasures of the restaurant, being given your coat by Laurel, she held it while you put it on, and her elegant fingers almost without touching you seemed to settle it into place so it was immediately comfortable.
I kissed her on the cheek; I never had before. Tell Oscar I have faith in him, I said. And that I am giving Clement a piece of my mind.
When I heard, several days later, that Oscar had died of a heroin overdose, my first thought was, so he did do it after all, and committed suicide because he couldn’t live with himself so fallen from grace, again. You see, said Clement, it’s as I said. Hackers can’t stop. My heart was full of grief for the beautiful boy with the Daedalean smile, and I could not bear the thought of him betraying himself with his own foolishness as that golden lad had done. I thought of the old sculptor, old artificer, knowing what could happen, hoping that warning would be enough to prevent it. Do not fly too close to the sun or the wax holding your feathers to your wings will melt and you will plummet from the sky. The invention itself was successful – the father older and wiser flew to Crete and built the labyrinth for the minotaur – but his son lost. Pain doesn’t change, down the centuries. And neither do children, they still take no notice of their elders, and their elders are still left mourning. The young should not be cut off sooner than us old ones.
I have to confess, as well, to taking a certain comfort, ugly I know, and just for myself, that since Oscar was the hacker I had no more incursions to fear.
And then the notion of cutting off recalled to me the lines of the chorus at the end of Marlowe’s play. Well, partly recalled, I had to look them up.
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man.
I copied them out, they were so apt, so full of loss and sadness, and wept over them. For quite certainly, hacking is the work of the devil, and whatever it is that a soul is these days, Oscar’s had been required of him.
34
The day that Oscar died was his twenty-first birthday. He hadn’t wanted any presents, not objects, just money. His mother would have liked to give him something substantial or significant which would always exist as a mark of that time, a watch perhaps, some cufflinks, even a silver paperknife, a tangible valuable thing which he could treasure all his life as a twenty-first birthday present. But Oscar
said that was silly, just sentimental nonsense, he didn’t need any of those things. What he always needed was stuff for his pute, he was chronically short of money to keep that going as he liked. Laurel said what about him promising that when he got the CD burner he had everything he needed, but Oscar said that was then, things were always changing, he was falling way behind. Laurel thought, this is just what I don’t want, some transient soon obsolete thing. But gave him money. What about a party? Oscar didn’t want that either. Apparently it wasn’t cool to have a party. Twenty-one was no big deal. Eighteen was the thing, you got to vote. That was the one that mattered.
Oscar called in at the restaurant on the evening of his birthday. Laurel gave him some more money so he didn’t have to spend his gift money on entertainment. He leaned down and kissed her in that loving way he had, as though enclosing her for a moment in his radiance.
Jerome Glancy when he was leaving remarked on it. He gets more dazzling by the moment, that boy of yours, he said to Laurel.
Twenty-one today, said Laurel.
I bet he’s a real heartbreaker … Jerome interrupted himself. I mean the girls, of course.
Laurel smiled wryly. Well, I don’t know. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. There are girls, but it’s just a group, there isn’t any pairing.
Seems a waste, said Jerome. I wouldn’t mind being twenty-one again, with his looks and all these gorgeous girls around. Those lovely bare tummies they have.
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