Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  “You’re quite a philosopher.”

  He smiled broadly this time. “I’m an Arab,” he said.

  Ibrahim had graduated, with honors, he emphasized, from a small British-run academy in Istanbul, the closest technical institute he could afford. But his degree in telecommunications and economics was less than worthless in Nok Kuzlat; he worked at night in an industrial laundry, overseeing the antique robotic programs on the huge washers. Frustrated, but unwilling to abandon the country of his birth, he organized the Young Islamics for Contemporary Democratic Reform, a lengthy, high-sounding title for a fraternity consisting mostly of himself, a few of his brothers and cousins of varying degree, and a few nonrelated members like Ahmat and another friend who was apparently working at the moment in a garage.

  “We’re small, so what?” he said, unconcerned. “We work quietly and stay outside the notice of the government. The problem in Khuruchabja is the delusion that we are an island, isolated from the rest of the world by an ocean of sand. The government prefers to support that myth with the lie that they are keeping pollutants out, when in fact they are only keeping us prisoners within. But sooner or later we will have to admit the truth that we are part of the whole, accept the necessity of working with the rest of the world, not against it. And we must do so peacefully.”

  Ibrahim had a politician’s voice, but his eyes were a rarity, those of an honest evangelist’s. He believed in his arguments, and that kept me fascinated.

  “War is just another Western strategy to keep us subjugated and alienated. America is too strong militarily, Europe dominates us economically, our own rich Muslim neighbors won’t risk lifting a finger to help us. So what can we do?”

  I had a feeling he had the answer to that one, too. And it surprised even me.

  “We must give up our guns, if not our anger. We must learn to fight with modem weapons like diplomacy and the media and manipulating world opinion. But to do that, we must become part of the world.” He held up his hand, fingers down. “First the roots,” he said, and turned his hand palm up. “Then the flower.” Slowly he closed his fingers into a clenched fist. “Then we will triumph.”

  Beyond proselytism, Ibrahim’s other talent was hustling, a consummate PR man wheeling and dealing to beg, borrow and smuggle enough equipment into their secret hide-out to produce a surprisingly extensive underground electronic-bulletin network, while generating a steady flow of posters and leaflets. His cousin Abdullah had never stepped foot into a university but had taken to the computer equipment Ibrahim had acquired like a piranha to steak on the hoof.

  While Ibrahim’s interest was politics, the younger relatives under his patronage had their own specialties revolving around computers and communications. All of them had ambitions, a fire in their blood, dreams of changing the world. Two cousins had access to the government’s central computer library, where they worked evenings as low-level data entry clerks. Ahmat had spent his single academic year studying telecommunications and holoscience, longing to earn his degree in journalism at a good university, maybe in Kuwait City, where the Americans still taught, or even in the dark heart of the reviled, degenerate West itself.

  But Hamid didn’t make that kind of money, and it didn’t seem likely that Nok Kuzlat was going to be developing any cutting edge in the forefront of technological wonders any time soon. In the meantime, the Young Islamics churned out their leaflets, wrote coded E-dispatches to each other through their computer bulletin network, and sent their shaky, amateur holofootage surreptitiously to Amnesty International and the Worldwide Human Rights Association.

  “We’re through!” Abdullah said in delight. “We got through!” The “Confidential, Restricted Access, Authorized Personnel Only” had given way to a fast progression of diagrams, a split screen of specs beside it. Abdullah’s eyes widened even more behind his thick lenses, threatening to pop out of his head. “It’s a weapons system—” he said, awed, “diagrams AI’ed for modification… It’s a whole set of ways to make infrafusion bombs!”

  My legs suddenly twitched like they wanted to get up and run to the nearest border, all on their very own. My ears buzzed, nightmare images sniggering around the edges of my vision; I couldn’t hear the babble of excited voices in the room or see the excited faces clustered around the computer. Halton was silent, watching the screen in front of him, scrolling slowly through the diagrams pulsing evilly.

  “This is not correct,” he finally announced.

  “What?” Ibrahim said.

  Halton had turned to address me. “These diagrams are erroneous. It would be impossible to build a working device from any of these plans. The AI programming is too rudimentary; the entire system is using less than a tenth of the storage capacity of the microflake.”

  “So what are you saying, Halton?”

  He gestured at the screen. “This is a cloaking program. It’s hiding something at a deeper level.”

  Abdullah stared at Halton with astonishment and a growing expression of worship. A true hacker’s hero. I must have looked a little astonished myself.

  “Can you get into it?” I asked.

  Halton glanced at the boy seated beside him. “I think we can,” he said. Abdullah beamed.

  Ibrahim didn’t look pleased; Abdullah was his cousin, and Halton had just cut into his jurisdiction. I stayed quiet, hoping the tension would stay controlled as Abdullah and Halton hunched over the screen, pecking away at the ancient keyboard and conversing in an incomprehensible language, half Markundi, half computer babble. The “weapons system” froze, then vanished, replaced by scrolling lines of algorithmic code, silent black letters marching up the pale screen. I took one look at the stuff crystallizing on the 2-D display and knew I was way far out of my league.

  Halton straightened, and turned to look at me with that imperturbable expression. “It knows we’re here,” he said quietly.

  Brrr. Cooties crawled up my spine. I suddenly had some sympathy with the muftis who hated AI’s.

  Abdullah was following the screen with absolute concentration. “Look at this stuff,” he said, his younger cohorts crowded around him. “I’ve never seen any programming paradigms like this. Look!” His finger jabbed at the screen. “And that—incredible, fantastic, it’s poetry…”

  Then it balked. Frozen script pulsed on the screen while Abdullah cursed softly, keys clicking frantically under his sprinting fingers.

  “We can’t do it,” he said finally, and leaned back away from the screen.

  “Why not?” Frustration at getting so close jittered my teeth.

  “We don’t have the equipment.” He looked utterly disappointed, not for having failed, but for being denied access to the precious programming.

  “It’s a holoed AI, like you thought, Kay Bee,” Halton said. “But it’s asked for specifications not available here.”

  “Like what?” Ibrahim cut in sharply.

  “It’s a three hundred sixty-degree hologram,” Halton told him. “We’d need four synchroed full-sized holosets for projection, and it refuses to communicate without simultaneous display.” He pointed to the two standard holosets in the corner. “They’re no good—too old, can’t be synched.”

  Ahmat smirked dourly, Told you so.

  Jesus H. Christ. A full dimensional AI’ed hologram at that level of self-governing would have been monstrously expensive to produce. The damned flake must have cost more to make than Halton. That thought made me uneasy.

  But Ibrahim was not a man who liked to be thwarted. He turned to me. “How much money have you got?” he demanded brusquely.

  “Not enough to run out and buy four new holosets, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  He held his hand out imperatively. I handed over the contents of my wallet, which amounted to a hundred and eighty-seven Khuru rials and change, or about sixty bucks. He smiled tightly. He was back in charge now, and he wanted us to know it. “In my hands, it’ll be enough,” he boasted and left.

  Half an hour later, h
e drove up in the most battered threewheeled delivery car I’d ever seen, oily black smoke from the two-stroke Albanian-cloned Trabant engine belching out the exhaust pipe. The boys scurried out to unstrap the two huge woven baskets tied to the flatbed and hustle them into the dark interior, away from any curious eyes. Inside were four top-of-the-line 90-degree holosets in mint condition, sales specs still pasted on the sides, along with the umbilicus attachments to synch them. I knew they must have cost close to three thousand dollars apiece. They were gorgeous.

  I didn’t get back any change, either.

  “We have three hours, then we have to return them,” Ibrahim said, triumphant, enjoying the surprise on my face. “They’re being destroyed tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “The mutawin confiscated these from people showing illegal holotapes. They plan a public demonstration in the square tomorrow. They’re going to burn all the illegal tapes and holosets, whiskey, AI cassettes, music chips, pornographic magazines, books, all the things they’ve taken.”

  Along with some of the hapless targets of Nok Kuzlat’s self-appointed Muslim Morality Police, I wouldn’t be surprised. These mutawin roamed the streets preying on citizens who didn’t come up to their notion of Islamic standards, lecturing suspected miscreants, seizing possessions with impunity, slapping women around whose excuse for being on the street was not adequate. They were allowed to burst into private homes without warning or warrants, looting whatever they chose, beating the inhabitants or hauling them off to certain mosques as prisoners. They were tolerated, even encouraged by the government, since their brutality kept the population properly subdued while making the mutawin a target of hatred rather than the regular police.

  Westerners living in private compounds set aside for them weren’t exempt from these Gestapo tactics either; the previous year, three Dutch nurses working in a Nok Kuzlat maternity hospital had been abducted, held hostage for more than five months while the EC and Dutch consulate filed a barrage of complaints. After being publicly flogged by the mutawin, the nurses were turned over to the government, who promptly threw them out of the country as lawbreakers and agitators. Their crime? They’d been caught drinking champagne during a birthday party when the mutawin broke down the door of their shared apartment. When in Rome, best not to fuck around with Caesar and his lions.

  “You stole these?” I asked Ibrahim incredulously.

  “Of course not,” he scoffed. “I rented them. I’ve got a friend in the mutawin.” Apparently, even the Muslim League of Decency still believes in the good old-fashioned values. What’s a little traditional baksheesh between close friends?

  Ibrahim and Ahmat set the holosets up, cables running in a circle from set to set like an electronic witch’s pentacle, I thought.

  Abdullah hunched over the computer screen, his bottom lip pushed out as he scowled, his total attention on the world inside the electronics. He conversed with Halton in low tones about the sheer finesse of the tight virtual code, the elegance of the parallax fractal subfoci. They discussed the fine points of concept AI vocabulary and Mitre’s tertiary directrix symbolism. Things entirely outside my planet, monkey boy.

  A shimmer of hazy gold light coalesced into effervescent bubbles of electronic fire, bouncing off the self-generated holoscreen spun by the four synched holosets. It filled out into a solid tube two meters wide, extending to the ceiling. Spikes of gleaming light shot to either end of the holosets’ projection radius. I shook off the uneasy impression of an electronic genie, smoky fingers lazily exploring the insides of the bottle.

  “It says it’s not happy with the accommodations,” Halton said.

  Then Abdullah whistled, eyes wide. “Merciful Allah, I don’t think I believe what I’m seeing!”

  The AI was rewriting its own programming. All by itself.

  “Now it’s happy,” Halton said tersely.

  The room exploded with brilliant white light. I squeezed my eyes shut, retinas smarting from the abrupt flash, then cracked them open to squint cautiously into the radiance. The light was so intense, the room looked flattened, annihilating any hint of shadows.

  All of us had our hands up shielding our eyes, staring at the figure taking shape in the midst of the column of light. The holosets hummed, forced to the limits of their capacity. The light pulsated, contracting into an oscillating human form suspended in the air, unearthly glorious. Pure white robes like fine silk blew around its body without revealing the indistinct shape beneath it. White fire spun through its hair, illuminating the most terrifyingly beautiful face I’ve ever seen.

  We stood immobilized, staring open-mouthed as it shimmered silently. I was thinking, Jeez, the boys in CDI’s Research and Development labs sure get to smoke some wild ganja to dream up something like this baby, when it opened wings, slowly unfolding from around its form. Stretching open. Out. Up. The effect was overwhelming. One of the cousins moaned and fell on his knees. The rest of them didn’t look too far behind him.

  “I am the Archangel Gabriel,” the thing said. Its voice reverberated through the room like thunder, genderless, musical, hard as granite.

  Another cousin sagged to the floor, murmuring strangled prayers to himself in a choked whisper. I frowned. “No, you’re not,” I said with as much scorn and authority as I could whip up. “You’re just a programmed AI microflake being fed into a holoprojection.” It was for the benefit of the boys, but the hair on the back of my neck stood up when the hologram inclined its head, its white eyes as blank as a marble statue’s boring straight into me.

  You’re supposed to look at holograms. They’re not supposed to look at you.

  “Who,” the thing demanded imperiously, “are you?” The voice was like fingernails down a velvet blackboard.

  Stunned, I stared at it without speaking for a moment; then my brain kicked back into gear. Reaching out, I passed my hand through the field, distorting the projection. It didn’t seem to notice. I took three noiseless steps to the right, and grinned in satisfaction as its blind eyes remained glaring at where I had been.

  It was sophisticated, I had to give it that. But the illusion was still an illusion. The AI could adjust the projection’s attitude by triangulating on the direction of my voice, all remote-controlled from the flake.

  I thought about my answer. The AI would remember this conversation, recording it in the flake’s memory tracts down to my voiceprints. Anyone who opened this microflake again was going to know someone had popped its cherry. Since CDI had sent it down with me, I didn’t figure it would take them all that long to guess who. So what the hell.

  “Kay Bee Sulaiman, GBN Network News,” I said in my best news correspondent’s voice. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind…”

  “You are not the Chosen One” it interrupted, its eerie voice angry, harsh cracklings ripping through the intonation. It scowled, refocusing on my voice. Its eyes blazed white heat as it turned its head to sightlessly glower at me. I think it was royally pissed off that its ruse had been discovered. “You are not the Chosen One,” it repeated.

  And shattered into splinters of erupting light.

  In the sudden darkness, I heard muttering, hands groping. The lights hadn’t gone out, it was just that the hologram had been so bright, the room only seemed dark until my eyes had adjusted. Halton was already at the monitor, tapping into the board as Abdullah stumbled to pull himself up beside him, staring at the screen with dazed awe.

  Ibrahim was incensed. He stalked to glare down at the AI reader. “Blasphemy,” he said angrily, his voice strained. He was shaking; sweat beaded the hair of his mustache. “Of the worst kind.” His eyes rolled toward me, bloodshot. “What kind of insulting bullshit is this, Sulaiman?”

  Halton turned from where he sat in front of the screen. “It’s refusing to come out again,” he said.

  “I wish you’d stop talking about it like it’s alive!” I shouted at him. “It’s only a goddamned computer flake! Not a human being!”

&
nbsp; Ibrahim darted to pop the flake from the reader, and gasped in surprise as Halton blurred, one moment seated in front of the monitor, the next standing by the reader with his hand firmly fastened around the man’s wrist. Their eyes locked as he gently took the flake out of Ibrahim’s hand.

  “That microflake’s got to be destroyed,” Ibrahim insisted. “It’s an affront to Islam and Muslims everywhere.”

  Abdullah looked appalled at the idea.

  “More than that,” Ibrahim continued, “someone is making fools of us. This shit is obviously intended to be used in some kind of manipulation, another hoax by the West designed to exploit and cheat us. You can’t let this… thing… get out. There would be chaos!”

  That probably was closer to the pragmatic truth. Ibrahim didn’t quite seem the devout type.

  “You’re probably right, Ibrahim. Some people are playing a rather nasty game,” I said quietly. Halton released his wrist, and Ibrahim rubbed it while watching us both balefully. “But if you destroy it, you gain nothing. Whoever made it can make more. I want to find out who wants this thing and why… Don’t you?”

  Halton and I had some heavy-duty scheming ahead of us tonight.

  Ibrahim massaged his wrist, the muscle in his jaw working. “ ‘Woe unto those who write the Scripture with their hands and then say, This is from Allah,’ ” he said quietly. “ ‘Who is an enemy to Allah and to Gabriel.’ ”

  I nodded grimly. “You got that right, kid.”

  THIRTEEN

  * * *

  This time I was getting reproachful looks from the waiter as I sat way out on the rooftop, away from the canopied veranda adjoining the interior. I didn’t have my PortaNet, and I had the umbrella up to block the worst of the sun’s direct rays, so I had no excuse for still forcing him to walk out over white-hot cement in his thin-soled pointy shoes to take our breakfast order, other than I wanted privacy.