The Celestial Instructi0n (6 page)

How does a snake emerge from the chaos of subatomic
soup? A description of complex organization animates itself. The knowledge of
good and evil itself is easily transmitted through anything capable of conveying
information, whether overt, covert, side effect, or completely unintentional. Much
simpler than throwing a clump of mammalian DNA in a marriage-bed: is something
in the world the case, or not? That whereof one can speak, one may not be
silent. That one original bit is the basis of everything.

The boundary between organic life and an electronic
computer virus is permeable, diffuse, diaphane. An act of intercourse transmits
a score or so megabytes of data, how much more so in the simplest network
processor? This time we are subverting, denaturing a tool blindly relied upon
by the West; the next time—sometime after my life on this earth—we will
transmit engineered life, first here, then throughout the universe as simply as
lighting a kerosene lamp or guttering a candle. And we will be the masters of
those we engineer as certainly as one who fills a pond with carp.

He thought of the encrypted message he would send
to Voide through one of the church attorneys. Not gloating, not threatening,
simply encouraging to complete their assigned task. Their attorneys make a poor
shield when facing four million men, five trillion dollars, and eight thousand
years.

In fact, Manager Hu at this instant was the most
powerful man on earth. He bent his spotted hand with the frayed serge cuff
toward the teacup. The West was hefting rocks while the East was fletching
quarrels. Now, the West ignores its systematic vulnerability to network
attacks, even as it depends more heavily upon its networked civilization. Meanwhile,
China has learned the power of tongues: it knows how to cast spells. Spells
that can bind, blind, confuse, and behead.

But for now that power depends upon absolute
secrecy, waiting for the overwhelming stroke of an electronic sword.

After sleeping most of the day until the sky was
darkening again under the cool incoming fog, Joex set up his netbook and
adapter with a view of the Chinese restaurant across the street. He got all
bars on his connection and began to search the net. The minutes turned into
hours, and his knees started to hurt from inactivity.

Riddler’s Crosstown Rental’s was owned by a legal
firm, Crosstown law, which also owned a real estate company, a security service,
an urgent care center, a wrecking service, and a local chain of Mexican
restaurants. “One of these things is not like the others,” Joex thought, “maybe
more accurately, all of these things are not like each other.” At the Oregon
department of corporations, he looked up the current filings for Crosstown and
recorded the corporate officers.

Joex then painstakingly searched each of the
officer’s names on the web. The name with the most Internet hits by far was for
an individual attorney named John Geedam, Esq.

Geedam seemed interesting, if somewhat sketchy. His
bar record showed a suspension for an alleged act of malfeasance involving a
trust fund, then reinstatement upon a third party petition to the state supreme
court. This was ten years ago. The third party petition—more than a thousand
pages with exhibits if the index was accurate— was submitted to support
Geedam’s reinstatement by the International Church of the Crux.

Joex smoothed his already thinning blond hair, considered
the start of the evening noise and partying from the rest of the hostellers and
kept searching. The International Church of the Crux was controversial to say
the least. Founded in the 1970’s by a handful of puzzle enthusiasts who had
made individual fortunes in computer startups, it began as more a chess club
than a parsonage. They apparently believed that to the extent that their
puzzle-solving ability led them closer to divine intellectual perfection, they
needed to make it possible for others systematically to seek their own perfect
minds through a program of exercise in mental structure and agility. With a
substantial independent endowment and the mercurial tempers of the newly rich,
the Crux quickly began down a darker path.

Within the Crux hierarchy, there had been purges in
the 80’s and most recently after the tech crash of 2000. Besides bringing in
attorneys to hold property in their own name and to firewall portions of the
church from each other and supporting front groups by invoking attorney-client
privilege, the Crux had steadily taken on a more defensive, religious rubric.
The current leader, Michael Voide, a twenty-eight year old man from Coventry,
Rhode Island, had apparently discovered the relationship of puzzle-making and
incessant adaptive testing to angels and the will of God. And according to
whisper, his ascent was assisted by blackmail and graphically executed threats.

According to the materials on the web, you would
rise in the Crux hierarchy, or Choirs, if you did well on batteries of computerized
puzzles and tests which seemed to be a grand amalgam of SAT’s, IQ Tests and
high-tech employment interview puzzles. They dubbed Sir Francis Galton a
Supernal of the Church. Books that were considered source scripture by
Church-goers were Sir Francis Galton’s long essay Hereditary Genius, the
bildungsroman Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse and the space opera The World of
Null-A by A.E. van Vogt, from whom they adapted the principal of the Games Machine.

Essential practices were works such as How to Solve
It by George Polya of Princeton, Guilford’s Structure of Intellect, The Art of
Fallacy: Rhetoric of the Irrational by William Shawme of Deep Springs, and the
Diagonalization and Internetworks: Georg Cantor and the Society of Mind (International
Church of the Crux, pub.)

The International Church of the Crux thrived on newly
wealthy engineers who wanted to believe that they were divine as well as simply
lucky and hard working. Supporting it was a staff who worked for room and board
in order to pay for their own test taking and elevation through the ranks of
the Church.

Offsetting the endorsements by the wealthy techies
and coddled celebrities were horror stories by those who had claimed to escape
the church. They told of imprisonment, physical and mental abuse, extortion and
blackmail. The Church used their own ecclesiastical confessions to threaten
family members of the Crux staff who were not compliant to the rule of the Church,
which in practice meant treating First Celestial Voide as absolute steward and master
over them. There were rumors of children disappearing after becoming staff
Angels, never seen again.

The Church zealously defended what it saw as its
right to religious freedom, the privacy of what it called its parichoners and protected
itself by a phalanx of attorneys who knew the offensive use of attorney-client
privilege and legal apparatus, along with the power of threatened, extended,
and overwhelming litigation to dampen the reforming enthusiasm of critics and
investigators. To the Church of the Crux, the publically funded legal system
was in fact their personal army. For the cost of a $350 filing fee and the time
of an in-house Angel attorney, the church could sequester a hundred to a
thousand times the resources of their luckless target.

The Church had thousands of acres of land. It owned
enough profitable businesses through its attorneys that its staff members—“Angels”—that
it never had to deal with a member of the unpuzzled—“Fallen”—they characterized
others. Of course, in the same way, this country within a country had its own
laws whose punishment for transgression was far more severe than the outside secular
world. This created a supervening culture of staff that placed allegiance to
the Crux higher than to any secular law or allegiance or family bond. Even if
the law were murder and the allegiance were treason.

Never having, or being permitted, to set foot in
the secular world meant that there was no way to show that you still existed at
all to Church-renounced family or friends. One of the uncorroborated rumors was
that the Church eventually wanted to implement its training program linked to eugenics
worldwide to the goal of perfecting the human species physically as well as
mentally. That sounded familiar, thought Joex. Who knows, it’s all nutsville.

Joex leaned back, then got up, went into the hall
and used the shared toilet. He waved to a woman wearing a knit cap and holding a
huge bottle of a German malt liquor by its neck as she went into one of the
four-bed dormitories to celebrate the evening. She smiled back. He thought
about what he had read. He had absolutely no clue why John Geedam, Esq. or the
Church of the Crux might be sponsoring an individual act of terror toward Joex
Baroco. He was not a church-goer, never had been except as a sometime Congregationalist
before his mother had died, and had done absolutely nothing political or
controversial during his employment as an engineer at Mooneye. Except mocked on
the Internet, he never had heard of the Church of the Crux before. Nor had he
ever spoken out against religion, charismatic leaders, or even eugenics. Moreover,
he liked puzzles.

Of course a man might inadvertently make enemies,
but Joex had been effectively reclusive during his rise as an engineer, the
short heated affairs he had with the women in engineering and technical writing
were—to his knowledge—mutually satisfactory. If not particularly liked at work,
he was respected in problem-solving and producing effective work on time and
schedule and had risen quickly within the company.

Yes, this core puzzle trumped all the puzzles that
the Church of the Crux might offer him, if in fact the John Geedam, Esq. and
the Church had anything to do with Mr. Brillo other than the tenuous link with
a car rental company. But, then, what kind of company rents cars like that?

The Church’s own web page was a predictable amalgam
of well-executed graphics, gushing testimonials, and sales pitches for books
and services. The world center was in a suburban gated and guarded compound of
buildings in Portland, Oregon that either radiated success, aspired to the
heavens, collaborated with God, or displayed simple coarse excess, depending on
your point-of-view. The website had only a few names listed in its “Choir”
membership and management list. Certainly not many compared to the millions of
“Angels” it claimed as devout parichoners worldwide.

One thing that suddenly occurred to Joex, considering
the web site and number and differences among the businesses under the Crux
umbrella: it may less for laundering tax-free money than it might be for
laundering people.

The next morning Joex considered what to do next.
As long as a street person or a police officer did not mug him, Mr. Brillo’s money
could last quite a while. On the other hand, he had no idea if his life were
still in danger and, if so, was he now living in the epicenter of the danger? Certainly
stealing the urban assault vehicle and a stack of hundreds would not endear him
to whoever was targeting him. But opening up a bank account would be like
turning on a strobe light among a conclave of bats. Identified from a photo
sometime in the future, his deletion might be more successful. On the other
hand, maybe he was just fucking paranoid.

Once again, he considered the possibilities and cobbled
together something that might pass as a plan. He searched the news for Mad
Landing and discovered a minor news article about a man matching Mr. Brillo’s
description swept into the Pacific, his body recovered the following morning. Joex
had no specific reason, but had no doubt this was Mr. Brillo. A cluster of
weird things often had a familial cause: he remembered compiling a program
missing a single cross-hatch comment marker, thousands of different errors
resulted.

Joex emailed the Mad Landing police using a toss
away account and asked what the disposition of the body was. The police
referred him to the county coroner who in turn cited privacy boilerplate for
not answering in email. He looked up pay phones in Portland, headed over to the
Quickie Market and called the coroner. The answering attendant was chatty and
revealed that the body of Mr. Brillo, or Mr. Rahul Kavith, a foreign national
studying religion in the United States, was already picked up for return to his
family overseas. The attendant was chattier than Joex had counted on.

Joex finally thanked the attendant and hung up. His
head ached from thinking about the same thing for a longer time than he had in
years. Though only mid-morning under the gray smothering comforter of the sky
he went outside, returned to the Mart, bought a six-pack, then returned to his
lodging and then gently knocked on the door that the knit-capped woman had
vanished. No answer. He went back into his own room and firmly closed the door.
The Coroner’s attendant had mentioned that the people who had picked up Mr.
Brillo were representatives from the International Church of the Crux, Portland,
Oregon.

Despite the overt connection between Rahul and the
Church of the Crux, that evening Joex was no better at narrowing the reasons
for his targeting. Then dealing with his economic situation, he looked at the
darker side of the Internet and chatted up an IRC warez channel to ask about
setting up a Redbud bank account with false identification. A couple of
self-proclaimed crackers responded in voice chat using Ventrilo, and one sent
Joex a password for a shared Gmail Brutha account. Joex actually sent cash in
physical overnight mail to several resulting prospects who promised to set up
accounts using false but unimpeachable identification. After several days of web
searching investigation of the Crux and reflection upon his own past to pass
the time, Joex concluded that two disappeared with his money while the third
came through.