Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  “It’s bloody brilliant,” Tummy said. “You could make a fortune selling this technology to Apple or Google or something.”

  “Or I could spend the rest of life in jail if anyone ever found out that I developed this technology. Meanwhile the government, or terrorists, or whoever gets their hands on it could do some serious damage. So you guys better not tell anyone anything about this.”

  “Are you sure they can’t track you down?” Julian asked.

  “Pretty sure,” I said. “I took a lot of precautions. First of all, MINDY doesn’t run on any individual computer. A simple request like ‘Where is Tummy?’ takes MINDY several dozen individual operations to complete. At any given time there are millions of computers connected to the Internet that don’t have any firewalls or any other kind of proper protection. MINDY utilizes those computers by borrowing some of their memory and computing power. Only a tiny fragment of the whole task is completed by any one computer. The results are relayed back to MINDY who then uses other computers to put them all together, and other computers still to relay the results back to me. Nothing MINDY does ever utilizes any physical storage devices. It is completely memory resident and only uses processing power and RAM. You could say it operates in the subconscious of the Internet. Once it’s done using your computer, it will just disappear back into the cloud and leave no trace behind on your machine. None whatsoever. It’s probably as safe as it gets.”

  “Right,” Ginger said. “So what are you going to use it for?”

  I opened my mouth, ready to answer, closed it again, and after a few moments of thinking I heard myself say, “I don’t know.”

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 4

  Honestly, most of the time I didn’t have a clue what the others were on about. Sometimes they said something funny and I would laugh, and then they would look at me as if I was some crazy person, because apparently they hadn’t even said anything remotely funny and yet here I was laughing me arse off. But I didn’t care. I liked to laugh, and it didn’t really bother me if I was laughing at something that wasn’t meant to be funny. Laughing made me feel good, and it’s not like there were too many reasons for me to laugh in me daily life.

  Anyway, so I didn’t really get what Julian, Michael, and Ginger were talking about most of the time, but that was okay. It’s not like I had a choice to leave them and move on to a different set of friends. They were my friends. There were no others. They were the only people in me life who had always accepted me the way I was and who didn’t care that I was fat and stupid. They let me hang out with them, and they didn’t give me a hard time like everybody else did. Well, maybe Ginger did. Ginger pretended that she hated me because I kept staring at her tits. She said it was creepy. I don’t know, I was a teenager and I thought it was pretty normal that I liked staring at tits, especially big, well-shaped tits like Ginger’s. I wonder why Julian and Michael never stared at Ginger’s tits. I don’t know, maybe they just had other things on their minds.

  So yeah, I liked hanging out with the guys, even though most of the time I had no idea what was going on. But that’s okay. I didn’t need to know everything. Sometimes it’s better not to know anything. Most of the time actually. But you see, sometimes I was really smart. Sometimes I knew things that nobody else knew. I don’t know how or why, I just did. Like for example, I knew I was in for a whole lot of trouble when Michael asked me to plug that SD memory card into me dad’s laptop computer. I could have said no. I could have said that I tried it but it didn’t work. I probably should have done one of these things, because then none of all this ever would have happened. But to be honest, part of me wanted to see what was on me dad’s computer. Not any of his work stuff. No draft bills, no emails to the party headquarters. I wanted to see me dad’s porn, that’s all. And I thought that that was all that Michael was interested in as well. I had no idea that Michael was about to hijack the whole Internet and turn it into his own private doomsday device.

  What can I say, me dad was even more boring than I thought. We didn’t find any porn, which meant that he didn’t have any, because if Michael said he didn’t find any, it meant that it didn’t exist. All he found on me dad’s computer was boring politician’s documents. He showed me. The SD card had a virus or something on it that would allow Michael to access me dad’s computer from anywhere at any time.

  So we were sitting at Underground Zero, browsing through tons and tons of boring emails and documents. It was like breaking into a toy store, but instead of finding the latest and coolest toys, all there was were thousands and thousands of games of Scrabble and nothing else.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 5

  I am not a hacker. Some people call me a hacker, but they have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m a programmer. I write code. My programs are tools designed to make people’s lives easier. Like all tools, my software tools can be used to work both ways, good and evil. In the lower Palaeolithic, hand axes were the most common tool. You could use them to cut meat or to scrape animal skins. You could also use them to kill someone. But you wouldn’t accuse the Palaeolithic inventor of the hand axe of having invented a murder weapon. The computer tools that I devise are the hand axes of the twenty-first century. They are meant to do good things. Thousands of years from now, people will look at them and think of them as crude and primitive. But they will also recognize their inherent beauty, and how these tools set mankind on a new path towards a better future. I have no regrets. My tools are awesome, even if they are capable of collapsing the world as we know it. Not everything that can be done must be done or will eventually be done. People need to shut up and grow up and start acting responsibly. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So no, I don’t regret using MINDY to download top secret government files from Mr Lewis’s computer. The world needed to know these things. We had a right to know these things, too. At least that’s what Julian thought.

  “Having checks and balances is very nice and all,” he said. “But people have a right to know when the cheques bounce and the balances are mostly debt.”

  Mr Lewis’s computer was a convoluted mess of junk, from useless programs that were once installed and have never been used to hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and Word documents containing half-baked draft bills and political strategies and, much to Tummy’s disappointment, not a single bit of porn. There was nothing that deserved the name file structure, no order, no proper system to anything. I was tempted to clean up Mr Lewis’s hard drive, do away with files and programs that hadn’t been accessed since the day he bought this computer, free gigabytes of disk space and establish a proper filing system that would make it possible to actually find something even if you didn’t immediately remember where you put it. It probably would have taken us months to find what we were looking for if we had gone through those thousands of files manually, but there was no time for that. Instead, I let the newly developed MINDY search module scan Mr Lewis’s hard drive. It found about a dozen files of interest, all in the same folder named ‘Education Reform’.

  The two main documents were titled Faith in Education and Academic Freedom – Strategies for teaching and learning in the new millennium – TOP SECRET and the School and Community Safety Act – TOP SECRET. The titles alone made me cringe, because the so-called new millennium was almost halfway through its second decade, yet computer illiterate dumbass politicians like Tummy’s dad still thought that in order to keep something secret all you had to do was to put a TOP SECRET stamp on it. Very inconspicuous. Apparently he had never heard of encryption, not to mention simple password protection. If that was our government’s idea of data protection, then we were all doomed. But it turned out we were doomed anyway.

  The government’s top secret Faith in Education and Academic Freedom reform plan was a bombshell. On 96 pages it listed in detail what they thought was wrong with the state of today’s schools, today’s youth, and, basically, today’s world, and how they were going to fix it.

  �
�Bloody hell,” Ginger said, shaking her head. “They actually mean Faith in Education and Academic Freedom literally.”

  I had printed copies of the Faith in Education and Academic Freedom plan for Julian and Ginger. Only Tummy didn’t want anything to do with it, and knowing his scattiness, I thought it was probably a good idea not to give him a copy that he could leave lying around on the dinner table at home.

  “Do you have any idea what will happen if me dad finds this in me room?” he said. “He’s going to chop me hands off, that’s what. I can’t have me hands chopped off, I still need’em for wanking.”

  Ginger scowled. “Now there’s an image that I can’t unsee. TMI, Tummy.”

  “You’re welcome.” Tummy grinned.

  “You’re welcome? What do you think TMI actually means?”

  “Thanks much indeed?”

  Ginger rolled her eyes. “It means too much information.”

  “Wha’ever.”

  “Listen to this,” Julian said. “’The disorientation and uprootedness of today’s youth can only be encountered by a return to utmost human qualities and virtues through stringent and intensive guidance along a well-defined path of righteousness and honesty, so that a child may find purpose and humanity in an increasingly inhumane world. Such guidance may only be derived from within the cornerstones of our civilization and from the time-tested rules and teachings set forth by the Almighty God of the three Abrahamic religions.’”

  “Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” Tummy said.

  Ginger nodded. “Good to see your job as an altar boy wasn’t a complete waste of time.”

  “It wasn’t a job, it was an honorary post. Otherwise I would have gotten paid.”

  “They’re making it compulsory,” Julian continued as he kept leafing through the document. “They’re making religious education classes compulsory for all pupils from nursery school through Year 12.”

  “Great,” Tummy said. “At least one subject where I stand a chance of becoming an A-student. I bet there’s nothing they can teach me about God that me mum hasn’t taught me already.”

  “Can they do that?” Ginger asked.

  Julian shrugged. “They’re the Department of Education. They set the guidelines for school curricula. It says here that religious education classes will be cross-denominational. All will be taught at the same time in the same classroom by the same teacher.”

  “A micro Middle East in every classroom, that’s going to be fun,” Ginger said. “But what about Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists? Are they to be guided along the cornerstones of the Abrahamic faiths as well?”

  “Apparently.”

  “What if I’m an atheist?” I asked. “Can I opt out?”

  Julian shook his head. “No, sorry, compulsory for all. They say religious education classes are not designed to missionize, but to educate you and enable you to make informed decisions on matters of spirituality.”

  “That sounds awfully like Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Ginger said. “They always say they just want to talk about Jesus, but in the end what they really want is for you to join their cult. Have you read the bit about evolution and creationism?”

  “No,” Julian said. “Where’s that?”

  “Page 44. It says evolution may be the truth, but it is not be the whole truth and not the only truth. Which is why they want creationism to be taught alongside evolution so that students may be enabled to make informed decisions, because there supposedly are so many questions that science alone cannot answer. That’s what they mean by academic freedom: the freedom to sell you myths as facts. If I didn’t know any better, I would be inclined to think that this whole thing is a satire.”

  Tummy snorted. “Not a chance. Me dad doesn’t have any sense of humour at all.”

  As the others kept quoting their favourite bits of the soon-to-be-introduced new school curriculum to each other, I took a closer look at the more technical aspects of this so-called education reform. It was based on a concept that MMC had already successfully tried in several third world countries. The plan was to turn every single classroom in the country into a 21st century state of the art multimedia experience, the most modern and advanced classrooms in the world. No more chalk and blackboards. In fact, no more paper either. The blackboards were going to be replaced by 92-inch touch screen monitors that the teacher could fill with multimedia content from the computer on his desk, or he could simply write on it with his finger. Students would no longer have to write down stuff in their notebooks. They could simply copy everything onto their own brand new tablet computers that were paid for by the taxpayer and provided by MMC Media Supplies. Students would also be able to do all of their homework on their tablets, and as soon as they were done, the teacher would be able to access it and grade it from his teacher tablet while sitting comfortably on his sofa in the living room. Students’ tablets were also equipped with a whole bunch of useful apps like a timetable app that would tell you exactly when and where your next class would take place, or a Wikipedia app, or an online dictionary app. There was a chemistry app, a physics app, a history app, a geography app. There were apps for everything and anything that would put the entire knowledge of the world at your fingertips. It almost sounded too good to be true.

  And it was, because your teacher also had the ability to remotely activate or deactivate any of your apps or your Internet access, so that if you were sitting in a written exam they could make you sure you didn’t simply google your answers. There also was an app that let you call in sick, but if you did that, it would automatically send a text message to your parents’ mobile phones. The students’ tablets also had a built in RFID chip and a GPS tracker. The RFID chips were going to be used to check you in and out of school and, in fact, in and out of every single classroom every single day, and the GPS tracker let your teacher and your parents check your whereabouts, not only during school hours but 24 hours a day, even if your tablet was switched off. In the government’s revolutionary plans for a brave new world, every school kid in the country would be under around-the-clock surveillance, or as the School and Community Safety Act paper put it: under control. It was an Orwellian nightmare come to life.

  “This is not a bombshell,” Julian said. “It’s a nuke.”

  The way he said it had something alarming. Where there should have been unease in his voice, there seemed to be undue excitement. Even Tummy noticed it.

  “I don’t like your tone, Jules,” he said.

  Julian just smiled. He knew that we knew that he wouldn’t simply shrug this off, that there was no way he would wait for somebody else to light the fuse of that bomb. So I finally asked the question that Tummy and Ganger were too afraid to ask because deep down inside they already knew the answer, and they didn’t like it.

  “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “Oi!” Tummy protested. “Who’s we? I’m not going to do anything about it. And neither are you. This is at least two or three sizes too big for us. If anybody finds out that we hacked into me dad’s computer we’re all going to prison. Well, you guys will be going to prison and I’ll be dead because me mum and me dad will both kill me, one after the other. No one must ever know about this, you understand? Because if we...”

  “Tummy?” Ginger interrupted him.

  “What?”

  “Shut up! We get your point.” She looked at Julian and me. “I hate to admit it, but Tummy does have a point. This could be very dangerous.”

  “Well, thank you very much,” Tummy said triumphantly. “Listen to her, guys. Her dad is a lawyer. I rest me case.”

  “However,” Ginger continued, “if the government is really going to go through with this plan, it will be the biggest social upheaval since the industrial revolution. Make no mistake, this is huge, and I’m not sure if knowing about this in advance and not trying to do anything about it is the right thing to do. We should at least discuss our options here.”

  “What options?” Tummy asked visibly upset. His head was glowi
ng bright red. “We can either shut the hell up about it, or we can get ourselves in shitloads of trouble. These are our options. What is there to discuss?”

  “Tummy,” I said, “nobody is planning to go to the police and say, ‘Hey, we hacked into a government computer and we stole these top secret documents, please arrest us.’ There are a lot of ways we can handle this. I don’t know, maybe we can just leak these files to the press? Anonymously, I mean.”

  Ginger shook her head. “They’d find it rather intriguing, no doubt, and maybe they’d even start their own investigation, but as long as they don’t have a verifiable source that they can quote, they’re not going to print anything. For purely legal reasons. I mean, anyone could type up a fake document and say they found it on a politician’s computer. Without hard evidence no editor is ever going to run this story.”

  “See?” Tummy said. “This is pointless. Nobody is going to believe us that these reform plans are real unless we incrini... incremi...”

  “Incriminate,” Julian assisted him.

  “Yeah, that. Incriminate ourselves.”

  I nodded. “Tummy has a point. We could get ourselves into shitloads of trouble.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Tummy said. “Besides, if they really go through with it, they will have to make their plans public sooner or later anyway. Let public outcry take care of it then. No need for us to get right in the middle of it.”

  “It might be too late by then,” Julian said. “Sneaky lawmakers are sneaky. A little bill here, a small amendment there, and before you even know it, this thing is the law of the land. And then what?”

  Tummy grunted. “Great. So what do you want to do about it?”