Wouldn't it be great if computers really worked the way they show them on the movies? A few films that I've watched (or re-watched) recently - Hackers, Mission: Impossible and The Matrix to name three - indicate that film-makers either have no idea about how computers really operate, or they believe that the audience is absolutely clueless in that regard. The Matrix can be excused because it is set in the future, but as for the other films mentioned, Mission: Impossible takes the prize for "Stupidest Representation of the Internet" for its depiction of how email and newsgroups work. Hackers, apart from being an execrable film generally, is the hand-down winner for "Most Unbelievable Virus in a Supporting Role". Admittedly I'm no hacker, but when my desktop starts looking like a scene from Tron, or a computer virus talks to me like an extra from The Lawnmower Man, I know I've been at the keyboard too long.
The authors of this issue's contents will all be familiar to long-time readers of Ibn Qirtaiba. If you've never been aware of the relationship between mathematics and religion you'll enjoy A Y Tanaka's entertaining short-story, with which this issue begins. Fred Noweck's welcome return to IQ is with his review of a new e-novel, NightWind by Charlotte Boyett-Compo. Frederick Rustam's latest serial which commences this issue continues with the "datajacking" theme of his previous offering. Finally Keith Allen Daniels, whose recent collection of poetry was reviewed last issue, contributes another selection from that volume for your enjoyment.
Short story: Rhys by A Y Tanaka
On the excess weight of codes as opposed to ciphers, ponder Rhys' code, where God = M. It began lean, efficient and laden with symbolism, but once he expanded it for dispatches such as "God is immanent, transcendent, all-powerful and everlasting" (M=LTYJ) the pastor saw his striving for simplicity and elegance would turn back upon him. He'd need a unique codemark or cryptolex for every divine attribute transmitted (l,800 in Cardiff's Creed). He soon agreed the Aquinas cipher (G=D, O=E, D=O) or even the Russell cipher (G=[x], O=[y], D=[x]) would better suit his mission.
About that time his Board of Deacons, provoked by an errant scrutiny of key Gospel passages, voted to reduce the divine attributes by one. By lot, they picked All-merciful. Few had bothered to seriously weigh mercy's pros and cons; what really mattered was the Creed's attribute-total would no longer be a multiple of 18, the alpha-Judaic number par excellence.
Ancient desert folk used letters for numerals, and throughout the Old Testament 18 was written KhY (Kh=8, Y=10) which also spelled "life." Which explains the abiding significance of the number and its multiples:
"How much for the honey cake?"
- "One-eighty."
"How much for the woodcut, the old man with the book?"
- "Three-sixty; for you, half off."
"How much for the sabbath candlesticks?"
- "Eighteen-even."
"How much for the crucifix?"
- "Seventeen-fifty."
Rhys clarified those Gospel passages
for the Board, and tried to explain alpha-numerics were hardly religion-specific. Beyond
alpha-Judaic, 18 was a noveno-Christian number, a twofold nine, nine being a trinity of
trinities (3 x 3).
A deacon rose: "We ought then to revere our neglected 27, trinity cubed (3 x 3 x 3); or our long-shunned 81, trinity of trinities squared (9 x 9); or our cumbersome 729, trinity of trinities cubed (9 x 9 x 9)."
"But that would waste our spirit," answered Rhys. "For if the set of whole multiples of 3, as of 9, is infinite - if not, none but God knows the limits of the set - then naught but vanity would have us struggle to obtain a figure which God in His own good time will certainly reveal to us."
Another deacon rose: "Is it not still true, to use the layman's expression, God helps those who help themselves? Are we to sit on our hands, our primeval digits, and let our pencils, calculators, slide rules and computers go to waste, to use our dear reverend's word, while the Earth and all who dwell therein go to hell in a handbasket? Ever since we were cast out of Eden our task has been to Do, to remake the world in our image, as He made us in His. Our active hands and minds have devised the abacus, the nomograph, the steam-, gasoline- and battery-powered calculators, the fruits of our creative genius. God has obliged us to hack our own path through the universe of number, to Find Him."
Rhys: "Before He finds us. For He shall, and shall cherish us, He who loves the poor. And we'll indeed be poor. After we transfer into our Computer and Mathematics account every coin from our Missions account, our Food for the Homeless account, our Shelter for the Hungry account, our Emergency account, our Political Remonstrance account, our Staff and Officers' Salary, Expense and Retirement accounts - (my error; we can't touch those) - we'll indeed be well-shorn in His eyes, fulfilling neither His aims nor ours, His number still unknown."
Rhys sought to top off his theme (but ought to have left well enough alone) by demonstrating how 12345679 times 9 equals lll,lll,lll; how the same sequence times l8 comes to 222,222,222; how, times 27, it comes to 333,333,333; and so on, with like results each time the multiplier is built on 9.
"You left out 8," another deacon cut in. "Why not 1234567-eight-9?"
Suspicious eyes glared at Rhys. He'd not expected this.
"It won't work with 8," he mumbled. "Not always."
He sagged, for only a moment.
"Ah, but multiply the sequence by 72 (8 x 9, remember) and you get 888,888,888, more than enough to compensate. So you see, 8 walks among us, neither ostracized, anathematized nor excommunicated."
Meant as a joke, for neither anathema nor excommunication lingered as options in his church; ostracism sufficed.
But for Rhys it was the beginning of the end.
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Just one review this issue:
I don't usually review new books but I couldn't resist this one. NightWind is a dark fantasy set in modern day Milton, Florida. (I was surprised to find out that this town really exists.)
Lauren, a plain-Jane, 40ish, Milquetoast virgin (yes, I said virgin) has a life so abysmal, that her desires for something better are sent out into the universe, where something hears. And hearing, comes to Milton, Florida to answer her silent prayers.
Lauren, working as a stock clerk in a local book store, is subject to the vicious rumors and innuendo of the townfolk that she has to deal with. This woman is so disfunctional that she, when verbally attacked, can only hide her head and run away. I am familiar with this mind-set, having had something similar earlier in life myself.
Enter Syntian Cree, handsome, wealthy, charismatic... and who has an inexplicable attraction for Lauren. Suddenly everyone who has brutalized her is brutalized themselves. Attitudes of others are shifted to favor Lauren.
Who is this mystery man, Syntian Cree? You find out early in the story that he is a sucubbus, a male sex demon. And he has had a pact with the women in Lauren's blood-line for a long, long time. Answering their call. Dispensing justice and retribution for over a thousand years at their bidding.
Enter complications. (Wouldn't you just know it?) The boss of her employer is the head witch in town (yes, you heard right) and her mother was the witch's chief rival before mama was stripped of her power. This in only the first few chapters.
I won't tell you the ending. I don't want to spoil the ending for you. Suffice it to say that the ending was a trifle disappointing for me (I don't have the proper feminine mind-set and attitude to appreciate that kind of vengeance) but just remember a couple of old sayings:
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
and
Power corrupts; Absolute power..... but you know the rest.
I recommend this book highly, even though my religeous orientation doesn't agree with the premise. Enjoy!
Please send your feedback or requests to Freddy47@aol.com or Fred@sf.sig.au.mensa.org or by snail-mail to: The Sci-Fi Column, PO Box 30245, Savannah, Georgia, 31410.
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"This is gonna be sweet revenge, Babes. Old Seamus really has it coming. And after I've done him, every jack in the city'll cheer. But they won't know which one of us did it. There're too damn many rats in the ranks, these days. Too many duffers who got caught, and who'll snitch for CRAD to stay out of the Camps."
Melissa frowned. "I wish I could talk you out of this obsession, Mort. I get bad vibes about it. Playing games with someone like Big Mac is dangerous..." She paused. "There's somebody down here."
They listened.
THUMP!... The percussive sound from down the corridor was faint, but confirming. It was a warning for the two datajacks who were working in the sallow illumination of the old ceiling-striplite in the grimy basement cableroom.
"He's coming this way!" hissed Melissa. "Disconnect!"
"As you wish, my little honeybee," replied her consort, softly. He unplugged the tapcable which now ran from the small wiretap/diverter to his handheld computer on the table. He'd wanted to remove the diverter from the cable panel, but he didn't have time to splice the break he'd made for it in the fiber-optic telcom cable before the noisemaker from down the corridor arrived.
The telcom cable he'd tapped led upstairs to an apartment occupied by the object of his revenge - a man who was important enough to have AA-1 authorized access to every corner of the Web, but who preferred to live cheaply in this old apartment house in the Northeast Quadrant. With the tap, Mort could now intercept this tenant's coded outgoing ID-data, and program it into his illegal MiniCrackMaster software, Version 9.08, the latest for handhelds.
Properly programmed, he could then access the Web with the identity of the telcom cable's authorized user, even though he didn't have the guy's PermiPlug. Until he was detected and probed by security software, he could surf to his heart's content - and have his sweet revenge on Big Mac.
"Hurry! I feel him strongly, now!"
Melissa had a wild talent. She could detect the nearby presence of another human in total darkness, with her eyes shut and her ears and nose plugged. It was a talent she kept secret. The government claimed a proprietary interest in such persons, and "co-opted" them into involuntary servitude. Since the short nuclear war, such talents were appearing more frequently in the Terran population.
Mort and Melissa had swiped a couple of old chairs from the tenants's storeroom. They intended to relax in this small basement cableroom, and from here, during early morning when the residents were asleep, jack into the Web with Big Mac's big authorization.
Mort knew he wouldn't be able to tap this cable for very long - just long enough to use the cybercop's super-privileges against him. He and Melissa hadn't quite worked out how they'd do this; they needed a plan for quick and devastating action. For now, Mort needed to test his hookup and sample Big Mac's cyberenvironment. They'd return later for revenge.
"In here!" 
Melissa pulled open the door to a storage closet, an emergency hidey-hole she'd prepared before Mort began tapping into the telcom cable. She'd oiled the door hinges and latch to keep it quiet, in case they had to use it suddenly. Without Melissa's cool common sense - in addition to her wild talent - her boyfriend would have disappeared from the ranks of working datajacks long ago.
Mort carefully pushed the door-flaps of the big cable panel together, unlatched. He grabbed up his handheld, wrapping its tapcable around it as he retreated to the closet. He would have preferred to pull the latch ring and lock the door-flaps together so they wouldn't be seen as open, but he was afraid he'd make a too-loud metallic sound doing it.
He joined Melissa in the dark closet, and the two of them dropped to their hands and knees and peered through a vent grille at the bottom of the door.
"Oh heck. The chairs," bemoaned Mort, in a whisper.
"There's no place to put them," replied Melissa.
They detected the soft footfalls of an approaching intruder - a new intruder, that is. They heard him stop at the open doorway to the cableroom, then enter it. Through the grille, they saw a diminutive, young black boy. He was dressed street-wise in a dirty T-shirt, long shorts, and worn running shoes. On the T-shirt, was a representation of a Zulu warrior with an assegai and shield. On the guy's head and almost pulled over his eyes, was a brown watchcap.
("Thank God,") thought Mort. He was half-afraid the intruder would be Big Mac armed with a stunner.
The new intruder stood in the doorway staring at the chairs - then at the almost-closed cable panel. Noticing its unlocked door-flaps, he walked over and opened them to have a look inside.
Melissa glanced anxiously at Mort. Sensing her question, he shook his head to say: No - I didn't have time to undo the tap. He shrugged his shoulders in a fatalistic gesture.
Melissa stared at the intruder. ("He must be the janitor's son,") thought the femjack, hopefully. ("What's he doing up so late?") The janitor's apartment was on the ground floor. The basement was occupied only by utilities and stored goods.
The putative janitor's son began examining the wiretap/diverter.
("He's spotted the tap,") both datajacks thought, simultaneously.
Mort's work in the panel had been discovered for what it was - an illegal wiretap of a telcom line. Both she and Mort knew what that could mean for them if they were caught: a miserable year in a Re-ed Camp, or worse.
Mort was a young-man-of-action. He leaped up. From his pocket, he pulled his jackknife, the one he mostly used for wirestripping. He locked the blade and prepared himself for a fight.
Melissa grabbed his pants-leg to stop him, but he pulled away from her. She arose but didn't follow him as he opened the closed door. He made no effort to be quiet; such an effort would be wasted in the tomblike silence of the basement.
Mort boldly stepped from the closet and faced the intruder's back. The boy seemed to be unaware of Mort's presence behind him, despite the sounds the datajack had made leaving the closet.
Mort stood still, his knife held conspicuously but unagressively in one hand, his handheld still grasped securely in the other. He cleared his throat loudly. Amazingly, the intruder continued to ignore him.
("What the hell?... What's wrong with him?")
Tension reigned at one end of this dual presence. Mort desperately hoped the intruder wasn't similarly-armed; Mort was no knife spiv. He passed his handheld back to Melissa in the closet. She took it from him. For once, she had no advice for her man. She considered the situation and tried to sort things out, logically. Something was wrong here. The guy at the panel was completely ignoring Mort.
The new intruder slammed the door-flaps of the cable panel with a CLANK!... which sounded loud in the quiet basement. He turned to resume his ramble up the corridor - and stopped. Seeing Mort and the knife, his dark face became a mask of alarm. He stood, awaiting a move from the stranger that would send him fleeing.
"Do you like my work?" inquired Mort, his lips curling in a sneer.
The boy wrinkled his brow at Mort's question. He made signs with his hands and pointed to his ears.
"He's deaf," concluded Melissa. She passed the handheld back to Mort and stepped from the closet, around him. With her freed hands, she made signs of reply. The boy responded with a flurry of hand and finger motions, writing his desperate speech in the warm, stale air. The two strangers thus communicated for what seemed to Mort like an eternity. He was unaware of his girlfriend's skill at hand-talk.
Then, they stopped. The boy continued to stare anxiously at the two newcomers. He took special notice of Mort's handheld - seemingly forgetting about his knife.
"Well...?" asked Mort.
"He's a Mem - a memory savant. He's on the run." Melissa's blue eyes danced between Mort and the deaf intruder.
"He told you that?" asked Mort, skeptically.
"He said he's homeless. He's been hiding here in this basement. I figured out the rest."
Mort had long-since learned to depend upon his girlfriend's mental abilities. Her perception of situational reality was very good, and her conclusions rarely wrong.
"I'll bet he can recall the color of every cable in that panel," she said. "He probably has a mental picture of the inside that's almost as good as if he were looking at it right now."
"Big deal," commented Mort. "Can he tap a telcom cable without getting caught, though?"
She signed some more. The boy replied and pointed to his T-shirt and to himself, and made five alphabetic finger-signs.
"His name is Chaka. He's named after an ancient Zulu warrior."
Mort thought little of this. He folded and stowed his jackknife to demonstrate his unconcern. "Well, tell Mr. Zulu to stand back from the cable panel and watch a datawarrior at work."
Melissa signed this as a request. She and Chaka sat on the chairs. Chaka smiled at Melissa and signed as Mort opened the door-flaps to continue his illegal work.
"He wants to watch you, Mort. He says he'd like to be a datajack. I think he could be helpful to us, you know - with his photographic memory. He could store data for us in a secret way."
"Sure," replied Mort, as he replugged the handheld's tapcable into the diverter, then opened the handheld and set it on the table.
"And he could get us arrested, too. You know how MemorAD controls its people. They're looking for this Mem, now, I'm certain. I don't want us to be anywhere near him when they find him."
"That's not very charitable of you, Morty. The guy sounds desperate. You know the kind of slavery service in MemorAD is like. I think we should help him escape that, if we can."
"Yeah, sure, Babes. We'll take a rogue Mem under our wings and turn him into a top jack... Get real, will you?"
Ignoring Chaka, he and Melissa argued for awhile about their new friend, the homeless Mem. Disputing Melissa's advice was not always a good idea, since she tended to withold her "services" when she became too annoyed at her talented, but insufficiently-disciplined boyfriend... During the short argument, Mort's trusty handheld remained off. He was battery-conscious, to a fault.
Seamus McLarge was having an attack of insomnia... He'd tossed and turned, and used his wakefulness to think about the problems of his office. But when he began fantasizing about strangling his snooty younger boss, he threw off the covers and went over to his desktop terminal.
"Judas Priest," he grumbled. He knew he'd be sleepy, tomorrow.
McLarge was only five-feet-four, but because of this - and his ironic surname - he was known to his fellow cybercops as "Big Mac." Some who knew of his background also called him "Father McLarge," too.
Inspector McLarge's traditional-Catholic family had eased him into a Jesuit seminary after he'd graduated from St. Aquin's Academy with a self-indulgent major in computer science. Initially, he was enthusiastic about becoming a Jesuit priest, but when he found himself under a military-style regime worse than anything he'd suffered under the stern Christian Brothers at the Academy, his ardor had dimmed. Besides, in the seminary, he'd missed working with computers more than he'd missed his family.
When one of his teachers told him, "Those machines spoiled you, son," Seamus found himself in agreement. He left the seminary for a starting position with a Web-authoring outfit.
He turned on his terminal. "Now, where do I want to go, today?"
After the postnuclear Revolution, when the New Order closed the Web to all but a trusted, authorized elite, his employer went out of business. A friend of Seamus brought him into the Security Division of the new Cyberspace Regulation Administration. CRAD expanded as the Web contracted to fit the New Order's public-use specifications. Lots of cybercops were needed to deal with the angry groundswell of former-users who were now denied Web access by CRAD bureaucrats.
Since those early days, things at Security had settled down to hunts for occasional, daring datajacks - like Mort Drago and Melissa Mawn. CRAD Security had developed some nasty software tools for detecting and thwarting jacks like Mort and Melissa. Some of these were known to the datajack community, but CRAD saved the nastiest of them for "emergency use."
Inspector McLarge was about to have his own emergency.
"What the blue blazes is wrong with this box?" (Big Mac never cursed, except euphemistically. His mother had cured him of that tendency even before the Jesuit fathers had their shot at him.)
What was wrong was that Mort had diverted Big Mac's outgoing data stream to his handheld, but he hadn't turned the computer on, yet - creating a window of dead-service that was tragically short for Mort, but long enough for McLarge to check his cable and determine that it had been blocked, somewhere downline. This was sabotage!
"Bloody hell!" (He didn't consider a reference to the Underworld a real curse, and "bloody" had long-ceased to mean "By Our Lady.")
Ever suspicious, McLarge immediately suspected foul play... He had taken this down-at-the-heels apartment in the Northeast Quadrant of Terminal City so he could relax at home, knowing that his vengeful enemies in the datajack community would be unlikely to find him there. His official address was the CRAD Batchelor Officers Quarters, downtown. While commuting, he disguised himself to foil any trackers who might be put on his tail. His disguise was a running joke within the CRAD security bureaucracy.
Unfortunately for him, Mort Drago had discovered his hideaway from a source that would have infuriated Big Mac, had he know about her: a mole in CRAD. She was an old girlfriend of Mort's. She didn't work in the Inner Sanctum, but she did supply useful info.
McLarge donned his bathrobe, grabbed his cybercop ID and stunner, and headed for the basement.
Mort turned on his handheld. The CMOS processor leaped into RUN mode, without rebooting, and it immediately painted the flat-screen display with a notice: "PILOT SIGNAL DETECTED."
Big Mac had left his terminal on and probing
the line for its downtown host machine in CRAD. That machine, OmniMAX, was a big,
self-aware AI computer which was connected to the Web and just about every place else a
cybercop needed to be connected to. Only right now, it wasn't connected to Big Mac's
terminal. But the box had been persistently trying to make a connection with the AI.
Now, with Mort's handheld turned on, the pilot signal passed through it and reached OmniMAX. The return signal requested an authenticator from McLarge's PermiPlug, then a password from him.
But the Inspector was in the elevator headed for the ground floor, and was muttering to himself. His plan was to switch to the basement stairway on the ground floor, and quietly catch the telcom vandals in the act of sabotaging his cable. This ground-floor switcheroo would slow him down, but he feared the elevator door opening in the basement would be heard by the saboteurs.
"Seamus's terminal has been turned on!"
Mort often referred to Big Mac, derisively, by his forename. He felt he almost knew the cybercop, personally. He did know something about the Inspector, though. A few of his datajack friends had learned something of McLarge's modus operandi before he arrested them. And some of them had had the sense to log their pre-arrest experiences for the benefit of the cracker community.
Melissa turned her attention to her wild talent. She could detect the descending, fuming Inspector. Everyone else upstairs was asleep.
"He's coming down in the elevator!" Melissa's personal "radar" was better than the ultrasonar of a Class-1 guardbot.
Chaka was good at lip-reading, but he couldn't figure out why his new friends were becoming so agitated. Even before Melissa signed "Follow me!" to him, he stood and prepared for flight. When she ran for the basement corridor, he followed.
Mort jumped to the cable panel. He unplugged the handheld's tapcable from the diverter - leaving it in place - and followed Melissa and Chaka out of the cableroom.
"Damn! It'll take me a month to find another diverter!" But he found it satisfying to know that its presence in the cabling would annoy the hell out of Seamus McLarge.
"Shhhh! He got off the elevator on the ground floor. He's coming down the center stairway." warned Melissa, as she and Chaka ran for an alarmed exit at the end of the corridor.
Mort followed, cursing under his breath at the sudden turn of events.
They turned a corner. Ahead was the exit door. Alarmed or not, it was their only hope. The goods-entrance they'd unlocked and slipped through was at the wrong end of the basement for them, now.
They reached the exit door's panic-bar just as a determined Inspector McLarge crept quietly from the stairway into the basement.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP... The exit alarm sounded in the quiet of the dingy basement, a quiet otherwise broken only by the labored breathing of the cybercop.
"Bloody hell!" he repeated. "He's getting away!" McLarge had it fixed in his mind that his saboteur was a single daring datajack.
For a moment he stood rooted, frantically figuring what he should do. Of course, in his haste, he'd forgotten his cellphone. He couldn't call CRAD for outside backup. He scanned the corridor for a wallphone. There was none. He ran, puffing, in the direction of the beeping.
"You're out of shape, Seamus me boyo," he admitted to himself. As a long-time Inspector, he'd grown accustomed to relying on younger cybercops to chase any datajack who ran when discovered.
He passed the doorway to the cableroom, stopped, and gaped at the open cable panel. He could clearly see the diverter. He knew this was more than simple sabotage. He forgot about chasing the perp. He was wearing a bathrobe, and little else. He'd been so annoyed at the discovery of his hideaway apartment by a datajack, he hadn't even bothered to put on his slippers.
He entered the cableroom and inspected the wiretap. "Nice work."
The tap bore the signature of an experienced datajack. His wirework was first-class. The guy had set up a table and chairs - two chairs. ("Two datajacks, then.") McLarge rubbed his chin stubble.
"They'll be back," he said, confidently. "They haven't finished with me, yet... And when they return, I'll be waiting for 'em."
He made a mental note to get a tech down here, tomorrow. The two guys who'd tried to tap him had surely left fingerprints or other traces of their DNA somewhere in the cableroom, or elsewhere in the basement.
Searching about, he discovered the previously-secret dwelling place of the unknown Chaka. Believing that a datajack was living in the basement of his building was profoundly disturbing to Big Mac.
"I'll get 'em. If it takes me a lifetime, I'll get the both of 'em." He wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and made a mental note to keep a cellphone in his bathrobe pocket.
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When it came to him suddenly
that he was the largest prison
in the universe, with tiny convicts
incarcerated in the cytoplasm
of his myriad cells like eggs in aspic,
his thoughts became suicidal -
for how could he justify
paying room and board for all
the galaxy's miscreants? A staunch
proponent of capital punishment,
he quietly arranged their execution
by committing suicide.
But he had to be careful, lest
the little buggers escape
in a bowel movement, or spring
themselves from his rotting remnants
to infiltrate the water table
and savage the ecosystem.
So he flung himself into a vat
of fuming nitric and hydrofluoric acid,
where everything - flesh, hair,
bones and implants - was dissolved
without a trace. Even the tiny license
plates that spelled out God's intentions.