The Passage

by David Poyer

  So the petty officer had helped, but Shrobo had wished more than once for someone of his own caliber to bounce ideas off of. If they hadn’t been at sea, he’d have picked up a phone and called Fred Cohen at USC. But Mainhardt had warned him not to discuss Barrett’s decreased combat capability. Anyway, the more deeply he thought his way into the problem, the less he wanted anyone else in on it. It was taking on an epic quality in his mind—a chess match against some anonymous and evil Dr. Fu Manchu, both of them battling on the frontiers of information-processing theory. If he could crack it, defeat the virus, there was a paper in it: a classy, seminal publication that would be referred to again and again for decades to come.

  Now, still standing motionless under the shower, he suddenly realized he was thinking like an academic. Of course, he was an academic, but he was in business now, too. And there was more than a technical paper at stake.

  He leaned against tin, suddenly gripped by a lightninglike premonition of the future. No modern ship or plane could fight without computers. If viruses could infect and disable them, why then scan and detection programs would have to be written, updated, and serviced.

  Who better to win the contracts that were sure to be let than his own company, built on a solid theoretical foundation, combined with demonstrated Navy troubleshooting?

  And then beyond that golden mountain, taking his breath away, loomed up a whole Himalaya glittering with diamonds. Military computers were a small market. But a program written to search out viruses in an AN/UYK-7 or a USQ-20 could be quickly compiled to sanitize DECs or VACs or IBMs, and there were thousands of business mainframes. If viruses could infect military systems, they could infect business applications, too. Companies could create special strains and release them into their competitor’s systems, destroying customer databases and essential information. No one could afford to be without a safeguard.

  A face stuck itself through the plastic curtain, and he flinched and covered his privates. That was something he couldn’t get used to, the total disregard for privacy aboard ship, men dressing and going about with members and bellies dangling obscenely. He supposed there was a sort of nudist-colony naturalness about it, but

  … “Hey, you about ready? Thought you done gone down the drain. The guys all duded up—”

  “Oh, sorry. I was thinking. Guess I’m using too much water, too.”

  “Don’t sweat that; that’s Miami water. Have a pool party.” Williams disappeared and Shrobo rinsed down and went out into the compartment, holding his towel carefully lest it come undone, into fifty or sixty men dressing and boasting to one another what they were going to do in town. He found his bunk and got his suit on.

  “Oh man. Whatthefuck you wearin’?” said Hemmie, stopping.

  “My gray suit. It’s the only—”

  “You coming with us to the Zone, you ain’t wearing that. Come over here to our bay. Lightbulb, he’s tall as you. Maybe he got something to fit you there.”

  THEY didn’t get a taxi, as he thought they would, just stood on Biscayne Boulevard, keeping him back out of the light, till a white Impala with two girls in it stopped. It had no rear window, just transparent plastic sheet taped across the empty frame. Hemmie leaned in, talking to them for a long time, then stood up and waved the rest of them into the back. The women did a double take at him. “Who he? Who the skinny white guy?”

  “Friend of ours, from the ship. He’s cool, baby.”

  “Sure you wants him out with you? After what they done downtown today?”

  “Who done what downtown?”

  “Them fucking cops that killed that brother. He run a red light, they pulled him over, then beat him to death with they fucking flashlights. Now the jury just said, let them spic motherfuckers go.”

  “They treats us like dogs. Then some peoples come in from overseas, gets free food, treats them just like kings. People is talking crazy, ain’t gon’ take shit no more.”

  Shrobo muttered, “Say, where exactly are we going, Matt?” “Just up to a place Hemmie knows, have a few drinks. Be cool, my man. Ain’t gonna be any trouble.” And up front, the woman was saying indignantly to Hemmery, “Shit yeah, I know where Liberty City is. I live there.”

  HE gazed out, noticing that the streets looked empty; there weren’t even many cars out. But pretty soon, he started thinking again about the virus. He was staring blankly out the window when they pulled over. Baby J passed a couple of dollars to the women and the sailors all got out. Lightbulb stuck his head back in, sweettalking them, but finally let them go, shaking his head. “This it?” he said, looking around.

  Hank looked up and down the street, coming part of the way back from his abstraction. Spray-painted graffiti stroked steelcurtained store fronts. The streetlights seemed dim and far away. Several women were parading slowly back and forth under the closest one. A line of men sat on a wall in front of a detached house, looking their way. Hemmie said, “Yeah, this is it. This is a jumping place, man. The Zone. Don’t need to look far to find a good time here.”

  “Uh, is this safe?” Shrobo asked Williams.

  “Hemmie say so. He used to live here.”

  “How long ago?” said Shrobo, but they were walking toward the house, and he either had to follow or stay out in the street alone. As they neared it, Hemmie up front kicking empty cans out of his way, the men got down off the wall. Hemmie called out; they stopped. There was a short conversation. Then he turned and waved them on. “I tol’ you, this is cool. It’s a guest house, okay? I know the guy they work for.”

  Inside the “guest house,” stuffing leaked from brown sofas. Wires and pipes showed through holes in the walls. It smelled of vomit and something else nasty he couldn’t identify. But it felt safer, with iron grilles on the windows and the men sitting beside them looking out. A shotgun leaned in the corner. A black-and-white TV flickered on the floor. They went through a hallway into the back, past a room filled with large, dented blue plastic barrels, then down some steps into a basement.

  This felt more welcoming, cozy and dark and thick with the smells of beer and people. An air conditioner hummed cold into the smoky dark. Smoke gave him respiratory problems, but he decided not to object. A bar was the first thing you hit past the stairs, then things opened out. It was bigger than he expected. He got angry looks as they wedged themselves in, but then they’d look at his clothes, see Hemmie and Williams and Lightbulb and Baby J with him, and look away or back at their drinks.

  “Table here.”

  “Doc, what you want?”

  “I don’t know, maybe an orange juice.”

  “Johnnie Walker Red,” Hemmie said.

  “I don’t want an alcoholic drink.”

  “‘I don’t want an alcoholic drink.’ Well shit, you ain’t been asked what you wanted; you is being bought a drink.”

  “All right,” he said, unwilling to contradict them. Their voices were louder, more confident here than in the computer room.

  “That’s the stuff.”

  “We gonna make a man outta you yet. A sea-man.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Williams, catching something in his expression. “These guys is just unwinding. They don’t mean nothing.”

  “Thanks, Matt. I know that.”

  “You look stronger, though. That training is building you up real good.”

  When the whiskey came, he sipped it cautiously. “What’s the matter?” said Hemmery.

  “It’s too strong. I’m not drinking it.”

  “Hell you ain’t. I bought it, you gonna drink it.”

  “Hemmie,” said Matt.

  “I bought it, he—”

  “He ain’t gonna drink it, nigger, that’s all. Why don’t you drink it and I’ll get him a beer.”

  “I ain’t going to drink after him.”

  “Then just pour it in your glass. How about a beer, Doc?”

  “Do they have any?”

  They chuckled at that for some reason. “I imagine they do,” said Lightbulb. �
��I imagine they got any old thing you might care to want. Hey, look, pool table.”

  Baby J came back with three Colt .45 malt liquors in bottles. Lightbulb examined his. “Ain’t never had one of these. Seen they commercials on TV.”

  “It’s just beer. It’s all just fucking beer, is all.” Williams shoved one toward Hank. “There, drink that an’ shut up, okay?”

  They sat around talking for a while, the sailors mostly bitching about various personalities aboard the ship and he listening, once in a while nodding. Then he gathered his courage and got up. The bartender looked at him curiously but took his money. Other dark faces turned toward him, then away. He got three Colt .45s and two Johnnie Walker Reds and carried them carefully back to the table. Hemmie and Williams had found cues and were playing pool by the light of Bic lighters. He left their drinks with them and sat companionably with Lightbulb and Baby J, none of them talking, just watching the crowd and every once in a while lifting their arms and taking a drink.

  Gradually, he started feeling comfortable. He wondered if Williams was right, what he’d said in the weight room—what was it?—about feeling uncomfortable in his body.

  It was true. He’d denied it, but it was true.

  He’d always felt weak and too tall and awkward. When he decided he’d never be able to play basketball or even bowl without throwing gutter balls, he’d given up, not even sixteen then, and tried to compensate with his brain.

  But maybe it didn’t have to be that way. Alma would be surprised when he got back without the belly she’d remarked on sharply more than once. He felt his arm surreptitiously. Definitely harder. Maybe even Gwen would notice.

  He thought about that for a while, a pleasant little fantasy about his secretary. But gradually, staring into the shifting smoke, his mind drifted back to its preoccupation. He could dream all he wanted about fame and Navy contracts, but he still had to crack the Crud. And so far, it was smarter than he was.

  He finished the beer, but instead of putting the bottle down, he held it up, slowly rotating it as he looked through it toward the single light in the basement, a bulb on a cord above the bar. Then his eye refocused and he made out a series of letters and numbers molded into the bottom. He’d never noticed that bottles had data molded into them. Probably in case something was wrong with that batch of glass. He set it down carefully on the tabletop.

  The angled light from the single bulb shone through the glass and through the glass top of the table. Underneath it, on the grimy sealed-in tablecloth, he could make out the faint shadowy image of the letters and numbers, doubled by their passage through the two refracting and reflecting interfaces.

  I’m drunk, he thought. Why am I staring at this?

  He glanced to the left and saw that Williams had come back and taken Lightbulb’s place. Baby J was gone, too; just the two of them at the table now. Williams was looking at the bottle, too. For some reason he didn’t understand, Shrobo suddenly felt uneasy.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. What are you looking at?”

  “The table,” Williams said slowly. His eyes didn’t move. Unwillingly, Hank looked at it again, seeing only the faint doubled reflection. First, the reflection of the numbers on the glass, under the bottle; then, beneath them and fainter, the shadows of the same numbers, almost but not quite exactly beneath the first iteration. And around them was nothing but the crowded darkness, filled—he couldn’t say quite why—with steadily increasing tension.

  “That’s it,” Williams whispered.

  A shiver ran up his spine. Why is my mouth suddenly dry? he asked himself. Why is my heart pounding? He coughed nervously, wishing the men at the bar would stop smoking. “That’s what?” he said.

  “That’s how we going to read it,” Williams said. He pointed to the bottle.

  Shrobo leaned to peer, but there was nothing else there. “Oh,” he said. “You don’t ever stop, do you?”

  “You’re the same way.”

  He said unwillingly, “What have you got? You think of something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What?”

  “See, we can … read the initiating sequence. But we can’t read the zipped portion because if you try to unzip it, it erases.”

  Shrobo felt as if it was he being left behind now, stopped at an invisible line he could not cross. It was an unfamiliar feeling and he didn’t like it. He said, a little sharply, “Right. So what?”

  “So instead of trying to read it, we write to it.”

  “We write to it?” Shrobo blinked at the tabletop. His throat itched. His eyes burned. But he was still staring at the two lines of letters and numbers … of alphanumeric data … shining faintly, the letters traced of light superimposed on those traced in shadow … .

  Then he saw it, too—all at once, stunning in its beauty. He said slowly, “We write over it. We write the same code over it.”

  “That’s right.”

  Williams smiled, eyes still on Shrobo as he went on with growing excitement. “Yeah! If we write over the entire virus perfectly, it won’t erase. There’s no reason to; it’s simply a substitution of a zero for a zero or a one for a one throughout. We’re simply writing over it, with the same programming.”

  Standing above them chalking his cue, Hemmie said, “But ain’t that the point? That you don’t know the program? So how you gonna write it over itself if you don’t know it to start with?”

  “What the Doc means, I think,” said Williams, “is that we start with the section that we know and … iterate random numbers after that. Try a one, then a two, then a three, and so forth. There are only ten choices for the next number. We run through all ten till we find the one that doesn’t make the virus erase itself. Then we know that’s the next sequence. Do that with the next number, and the next, and the next … till we get to the end, and that’s the virus.”

  “Exactly,” said Shrobo. “It isn’t intellectually rigorous or elegant, but it should work, given time.”

  “A long time. That’s a lot of substitutions. And every time, got to set the whole problem up again when it erases.”

  “Only an average of five times, till we get the next number,” said Shrobo. “An AN/UYK-seven processes—what, ten-to-the-fifth operations a second? Say a complete iteration of the whole substitution /replacement process takes a minute—”

  “More than a minute. If a permutation—”

  “Don’t look at it as a permutation, Matt. It’s a series. And it’s not that complicated; we’re not inverting any twentieth-order matrices here.”

  “No, but figure—you got to print out every bit as you crack it. That will slow you down to the pace of the Teletype.”

  “Why? You just save it to a separate register—oh, I see what you mean. Any decode becomes live virus. You’re right, we’ve got to print to hard copy.” He pulled out his calculator and punched it. “Okay, even including all that, I figure we could have it cracked in less than a day, if we ran full-time.”

  “Which you can’t, and besides, you got to write the program first.”

  “We’ll start as soon as we get back.” He sat back, feeling a queer mix of triumph and resentment. Williams had seen it first. But he’d known his unconscious was trying to tell him something. He’d have had it himself in just a second or two longer.

  He was on his fourth beer when a noiseless murmuring wave eddied through the underground room. Heads turned toward the door. He noticed it but didn’t really think about it till Lightbulb said, chalking his cue casually, “Hey, where’s everybody going?”

  “I don’t know.” Hemmie got up. “Lemme see.”

  When he came back, he was looking around. “We better see if there’s another way out of here.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Some trouble out on the street.”

  “Kind of trouble?” The others got up and so did Shrobo. “Kind of trouble?” Williams asked again.

  “I don’t know, just trouble. Guy at the
bar says we better get Doc out of here.”

  “This way,” called Hemmie, and they moved after him. They fumbled through a door, an unlighted corridor that smelled of piss and mice, then up a set of steps. The door resisted briefly. Then wood cracked and it flew up and they were out in the warm air in an alley, the sky blocked off to either side except for a narrow ribbon of stars glimmering directly above. They ran, Hank panting along last, just after Lightbulb. Then the street opened out ahead, like a horrible carnival of noise and light and motion.

  Glass sparkled over the pavement. There was a choking smell of gasoline and smoke. An eerie flickering lighted the street. Directly in front of them, a car with windows smashed into heaps of jewels was tilted up on its side. Two bodies lay where they’d been dragged out. Around them a crowd yelled and danced, chanting something he couldn’t make out. They waved bottles and bricks and pieces of pipe, and now and then one of them would dash in to beat the motionless bodies, then dance back.

  As they stared, a white Impala without a back window came down the street. It crept slowly around the turned-over car, nosed the crowd apart, then rolled on, bumping over one of the bodies. It stopped, backed up, drove over it three times. The wheels crushed the head.

  “Shit, shit, shit, what is going on,” muttered Baby J.

  “Cover Doc’s face, man. Quick. Them is white boys, there on the ground.”

  Shrobo felt them pushing him down. Then a hand covered his mouth. He choked and coughed, started to wipe it off, then understood what they were doing. He helped rub the ash in over his cheeks, his forehead.