by Exile
“No,” he cried. “I’m a god, Kess! I’m feted in every chess salon in the city.”
“You—”
“They hang ten to a bunch from their ceiling apparatus just to view my games from above.”
“—are—”
“I have a villa.”
“—a—”
“My own hovercraft.”
“— murderer! ”
“You can’t leave.”
But she was leaving, a staccato of stumbles down her rook’s staircase, a whirl of dark hair out through the hedge-gate. “You’ve won the game. You have to checkmate me.” The gate slammed behind her. The astonished cuckoo rose and vanished into the alders. “Come back and checkmate me.”
Beside him, J’taa’s thorax yawned, waiting for him, denticles masticating.
Do you remember what I asked you once? You must have been nine. That if you were given the choice between acquiescing to the small evils of a system that would let you live in comfort or taking to the wilds under horrible conditions to fight it in secret, what you would choose. You took no time in answering. You said acquiesce.
The university Charles Mestroe had attended at eighteen was a warren of corothai yeast-nest buildings in the heart of Loude, famous for its chess tournaments, the most prestigious in the land. He’d waited in the office that second morning until the corothul in charge of tournament registration had crawled from a tunnel in the upper left corner and taken a seat. Charles had presented his credentials – top-ranked in the countryside before he was seventeen, son of a lord – and then shrivelled, his heart drying to a tiny seed of rage as he was told in ungrammatical but certain terms that he was not to be admitted to the games. His mother was a known agitator, her writings incendiary. Revisionist sympathies in the family, no, they could not risk. He understand must.
Words like a fire in his brain, incendiary, burning everything.
Checkmate.
The corothul was an old one, with dark patches in his silver skin where parasites had begun to die. Charles had tried to breathe slowly, and found he couldn’t. There was no other reason to come to university; his studies bored him to tears. The game was everything. Charles Mestroe dreamed chess, drank it; his mind moved along its lines by squares, knight’s-move thinking. His very soul had long ago become checkered. He was the best and now he would never be able to prove it. Made that way by his mother and then denied it all. The mad queen of The Rook, brilliant and vociferous, who wrote her husband’s speeches for parliament denouncing corothai dominion, and published her own manifestos against them. And did more than just write. Ruined. Denied.
His hands clenched and unclenched and the corothul saw it. Some empathy for human emotion, gleaned, he supposed, through a long life among them, had made the alien’s skin light up, contacting others. When the flashing had ceased, the administrator leant forward over the yeast desk. There was – perhaps – a deal that made could be.
This is what you do too: you forgive your children for all their affronts, forgive them for not being like you, for the fact that neither of you will ever understand the other.
Charles left J’taa atop the rook and caught up with Kess inside the house.
She whirled on him. “Did you know what she was doing? Did you know how close she was?”
“They told me they were only going to take it away from her, that nothing would happen to her! God, please, Kess, I’ve fought to forgive myself for eight years—”
“She had discovered the secret of the parasitical circuitry.” The walls of the entrance hall seemed to draw closer. For a moment he felt dizzy. “Invisible waves in the air. She was on the brink of learning how to send out her own waves. She would have been able to jam their communications, send false messages, perhaps even take control of their bodies through their circuitry.” He saw red hair in a breeze, those forever wide-awake eyes gleaming at some new insight. “It would have been the end of corothai rule. They know very well why they censor our research, keep the truly useful technology from us and have done for hundreds of years. Who knows where we could be now if they didn’t? Their knowledge seems endlessly above ours, my god look at what they’ve done to the earth – two moons – and yet—” In Kess’s blue eyes the light shone. “We might have lifted from the surface by now, moved to other worlds as they do. Anything at all, if they had let us develop as we should have. Instead we are turned into apathetic apes.”
It was his tears making her gleam. “They said I had to give them something, just a little something about the woman who wrote the manifestos, and then they would let me register for the tournaments. That they only wanted to remove material, take anything censored away from her. I know now they must have had their suspicions, knew how to put pressure on me, but I didn’t recognize what was happening.” The moment, the second he would take back if he could, coalesced to acid on his tongue. “I told them about the lab in the woods.”
“Remove material.” Her shrug bore the weight of all sadness. “They came that day, no warning. Burned the lab, tore up the house searching. They removed her. Oh, but they brought her back, did you know that?” Put your hands over your ears. “She’d been tortured, horribly. They said they understood how humans always wished to have a body to inter. As if doing us a favour. Laid her out here on the hall floor, and your father, he…saw it.” The dust stirred by their movement choked him; it had to be the dust. “She loved you so. She recorded a message for you after you left for university and placed it in the golden queen. I think she understood how they might use you once you left here.” Her hand on his cheek was sudden and soft, a gift that would save him. “I loved you too, Charles.”
“Love me again, Kess.” Nothing else mattered all of a sudden; she was a real thing in his artificial life among the aliens, the human who could make him real again. Kess could bring him back to the worlds of human interaction – necessary and life-saving – going on below the corothai’s alien intellect, a truth beneath the game. Don’t leave me with them.
She was staring at him, shaking her head, but it was not refusal. “I was always stupid. You started winning at some point and I couldn’t keep up.” She drew near. “You won the love game. By going away, without even pretending it hurt you. I’m going to be stupid again.” They stood at the foot of the staircase, with a clear view of the empty entrance hall, and Kess peered over his shoulder at the front door to make sure J’taa hadn’t followed them.
She brought her lips to his ear. “It’s still going on, Charles. The research, the lab. It’s been moved deeper into the forest. It took years to rebuild, but there were others who could continue your mother’s work, while we help them hide and plan the overthrow. I’m the leader of the movement now.” Through the change of her breath at his ear he knew she was smiling. “The peon promoted to queen. Help us, Charles. I believe in you, even now.” Her face tilted up and he saw the old Kess, the worship, his redemption. “You’re close to them in Loude. You could spy for us. Say you will. For her. For us.”
Redemption. He took no time in answering. “Yes,” he replied.
From the top of the stairs came a voice. “Genius are you.” J’taa stood gazing down at them from the second-floor landing. Charles realized she must have skirted the house and climbed the outside wall to his open bedroom window, a locomotion that was simpler than walking for the corothai, and in the next instant he remembered the aliens’ hyper-acute hearing.
“No!” he cried. Kess had twisted from him, one hand to her mouth as though to recapture her words.
“This we have coming to discover. Having suspicion. I am thanking you.”
The red and blue lines beneath J’taa’s skin glowed brighter than he had ever seen. “Stop her!” Kess cried, but Charles knew it was too late, his heart withering. Waves, Kess had called it, sent invisibly. Others would already know. Probably waiting nearby.
“Here soon,” said J’taa, confirming the thought. She had ambled halfway down the stairs. He imagined leaping at her, closing
his hands on her throat, strangling his own stupidity. “Need only finding lab now.” Her gaze swept over Kess. “We will this game play you are torture calling.” For a second the faceted eyes seemed puzzled. “Game humans lose always.”
A shot rang out. J’taa’s head snapped back, blood and sparks flying. Another shot and she tumbled down the steps in a flurry of limbs to lie still at their feet.
Hedley the butler stepped from the kitchen doorway. In his wrinkled hands he held an ancient swivel-barrel pistol. He was shaking from head to foot.
Kess stepped to him and grasped his arm. “You did well.” They all stared down at the dead alien. Filigree lines of blue wriggled within the red blood, moving away from the body. Charles realized it was the circuit parasites deserting their host. In the distance the thrum of an approaching hovercraft lanced the air.
So now you’re off to university! A life of your own! I’m left with seemingly nothing, but I know that’s not true, that you’ll be here, an overarching presence, a game behind the game. From now on you’ll make your own moves and I would have it no other way. But be wary – life is chess – the blunders are all there on the board waiting to be made. Fate will slide from the corner when you’re not looking. I watch you pack and I believe in you, but I want to hold you too. I want to keep this moment forever, because I know you will be a different person when you return.
“Escape plan!” Kess shouted. The house exploded into action. Footsteps sounded above. A man and woman Charles had never seen stopped at the top of the stairs to peer down at J’taa’s body and hurried on. Two children ran from the kitchen carrying bags of provisions. He realized the house was full of partisans, hiding from their alien visitor. Kess had drawn a vial from her pocket and bent to scoop one of the wriggling blue parasites into it. “Just what we need,” she said. The man and woman reappeared, moving Charles’s father down the stairs on a hover stretcher they couldn’t possibly have, and vanished out the back door.
Windows burst as the first troop hovers landed on the front lawn.
“Now!” Kess screamed. “Go, go!” She urged the last stragglers toward the back door and followed them.
“I’m sorry,” Charles whispered to no one.
As though she heard him, Kess turned for a second, still moving, intent on saving her own. “Come or stay.” Then she was gone.
Through the windows he saw corothai troops loping toward the front door, the larger type with more limbs, their silver green-tinged. They wouldn’t ask who he was.
He ran into the back, saw the last of the partisans dodging to the right, using the hedged gardens as a maze to throw the aliens off. Corothai barrelled out the back door, caught sight of him and screeched an order for him to stop. He was the only one visible to them. “Redemption,” he whispered. He ran left.
In the chess garden the golden queen turned her head to look at him. Not a fault in the circuitry. Somewhere a house was burning. “They wanted to watch me play,” he told her. “So I’m sacrificing a peon. Lose a piece, win the game.” Shots rang out behind him, the dreaded corothai lightning guns. He felt a numbness in his back. He was on his knees. The queen began to speak to him.
HACKER CHESS
Robert Runté
It started with his fridge turning itself off.
Jerry hadn’t been particularly aware of the fridge being on, but the sudden cessation of its low humming was sufficient to draw his attention.
“The fridge?” Jerry put down his coffee, incredulous. That was low.
He got up from the kitchen table, crossed over to the kitchen counter, and flipped open his laptop. Once past his lock screen, he dutifully set his sit/stand timer for the requisite sixty minutes, hit the ‘’Yo” button on his Remember Romance screen, and plowed through several innocuous menus to get to
the good stuff. A simple cntr-shift-666, and he was in.
Hmmm. His detection software had noted an intrusion via his remote desktop connection app a little over an hour ago. It looked like a simple man-in-the-middle thing, which had yielded the intruder a password to the entrapment software. An obvious amateur (or a bot, maybe), the intruder had poked around for a while, found the “top secret” files, and obligingly downloaded Jerry’s takedown software to the intruder’s own system. And that should have been that.
Probably not related to the fridge, then.
He logged into the HouseSmart system. No trace of an intrusion there. At least, nothing obvious.
It occurred to Jerry that it was always possible his fridge had just malfunctioned. Fridges did fail, from time to time. It wasn’t like it was a new fridge.
But, when you worked for a computer security firm as a white hat hacker, a little paranoia was always justified. Lot of idiots out there trying to take you down, mess with you.
One way to be sure.
Jerry went over to the fridge, opened the door, noted that the light came on – which meant it hadn’t been powered down – and glanced at the control panel. It said “ON.” Jerry reached out to the touch screen to switch the fridge to manual, and got a nasty little jolt instead.
“Gotcha!” scrolled across the readout.
Hilarious, Jerry thought darkly. He closed the fridge door, and sat down at the kitchen table. There was no point checking the HouseSmart software again; there was nothing to see there. Whoever had hacked his fridge had obviously bypassed the native software to install his own. Jerry could pull the plug easily enough by simply disconnecting the fridge, but he would only have a window of a few hours before his food started to spoil. Presumably, the intruder’s software would let whoever was on the other end know when Jerry plugged back in, and any attempt to reboot or switch to manual would just lead to another shock.
A beginner could read up on fridge hacks: they were common enough, and a newbie would still think it funny, might not know the etiquette that forbade it. The shock from the touch screen, however, had been new to Jerry. That shouldn’t be possible; though now Jerry knew that it was, it was only a matter of time before he would replicate it. Still, it gave one pause.
His phone beeped.
He extracted it from his pant pocket, swiped to unlock; was relieved to see it was just Catherine’s return “Yo.”
As long as he had his phone out anyway, he tapped his way down to his malware tracer, and followed up on that last intruder. Probably not the guy messing with his fridge, but you never knew. Certainly, whoever had stumbled into the entrapment software would be pissed and out for revenge, had they the know-how to finger Jerry. Which Jerry seriously doubted; but he occasionally netted bigger fish, genuine hackers who’d become over-confident, careless.
He was in the other system and having a look round almost as fast as he could swipe. It was a sophisticated hardware setup: expensive, all the bells and whistles and then some, so probably not a professional hacker’s. The defences were decent enough, but off the shelf stuff, so no match for Jerry’s takedown ware. His program owned that system now. The question was, was this guy a big enough idiot to have left himself vulnerable to… Ah, yes. Idiot.
There was the villain’s smartphone data, backed up in the specific corner of his desktop computer set aside for it. And as one might expect from a technophile with all the latest add-ons, he used his smart phone as his universal channel changer and garage opener.
Jerry opened his garage door.
And closed it again.
Then set it to repeat for a thousand cycles.
It was a low level prank, to be sure; but if the system belonged to some rich, spoilt teen, then the mystery of the garage door would perhaps awaken the parents to greater vigilance. If, on the other hand, it did turn out to be the guy hacking into his fridge, then it would send a simple, “two can play at that” message to back off.
The toaster started to clatter.
Jerry turned with a slow deliberateness to see the toaster’s carriage control lever bouncing up and down.
So. Wanted to play, then, did he?
&nb
sp; Jerry returned his attention to the intruder’s system. The villain’s keychain was there for the taking, so either this guy knew Jerry was a white hat, or it was entrapment software. Jerry moved on without pausing. He passed some expensive software suites he could have erased, but that would only be a minor nuisance to anyone with the deep pockets it had taken for this set up. And since he hadn’t caught the guy using that specific software to nefarious ends, it would be unethical for Jerry to delete it. So, what to do?
He returned to the smartphone data, found the thermostat controls, and turned up the heat on the guy, literally and metaphorically.
A moment later, Jerry’s stove turned itself on. All five burners.
“I see your stove,” Jerry said aloud, “and raise you the security alarm.” He changed fridge-guy’s disarm code, as he triggered the burglar alarm. He dropped in a little subroutine to generate a new random number password every fifteen seconds, in case the security company tried to reset the password remotely. Then, for good measure, he disabled the disarm button.
It was a high-end alarm system, impossible to disconnect or power down without the code. After all, if one could simply turn it off or unplug it, so could any hypothetical burglar.
“Check,” Jerry said.
After a moment, the toaster stopped bouncing. Then the burners went out on the stove.
Jerry allowed himself the beginnings of a smile. He turned to look at the fridge. Once it came back on, he would silence the alarms, having made his point.
The fridge remained stubbornly off.
Jerry could wait. He took a moment to navigate to the Remember Romance app, and hit the Wassup button. Catherine might find the retelling of this little duel amusing, though he should probably wait for pizza tonight rather than texting.
Still nothing from the fridge.
Instead, there was a faint hissing sound Jerry couldn’t quite place. He stood up and walked over to the fridge, placed his ear against it. Nothing. He opened the fridge door, and scrolling across the smart panel were the words, “Check the stove, moron.”