Robert Silverberg: The Pardoner's Tale

I couldn’t do a thing with him.

I was baffled. I was the Data King, I was the Megabyte Monster. All my life I had floated back and forth across a world in chains, picking every lock I came across. And now this nobody was tying me in knots. Whatever I gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. He was working with an algorithm I had never seen before and was having serious trouble solving. After a little while I couldn’t even figure out what he was doing to me, let alone what I was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so I could barely execute. He was forcing me inexorably toward a wetware crash.

“Who are you?” I yelled.

He laughed in my face.

And kept pouring it on. He was threatening the integrity of my implant, going at me down on the microcosmic level, attacking the molecules themselves. Fiddling around with electron shells, reversing charges and mucking up valences, clogging my gates, turning my circuits to soup. The computer that is implanted in my brain is nothing but a lot of organic chemistry, after all. So is my brain. If he kept this up the computer would go and the brain would follow, and I’d spend the rest of my life in the bibble-bibble academy.

This wasn’t a sporting contest. This was murder.

I reached for the reserves, throwing up all the defensive blockages I could invent. Things I had never had to use in my life, but they were there when I needed them, and they did slow him down. For a moment I was able to halt his ballbreaking onslaught and even push him back. And give myself the breathing space to set up a few offensive combinations of my own. But before I could get them running, he shut me down once more and started to drive me toward crashville all over again. He was unbelievable.

I blocked him. He came back again. I hit him hard and he threw the punch into some other neural channel altogether and it went fizzling away.

I hit him again. Again he blocked it.

Then he hit me and I went reeling and staggering, and managed to get myself together when I was about three nanoseconds from the edge of the abyss.

I began to set up a new combination. But even as I did it, I was reading the tone of his data, and what I was getting was absolute cool confidence. He was waiting for me. He was ready for anything I could throw. He was in that realm beyond mere self-confidence into utter certainty.

What it was coming down to was this. I was able to keep him from ruining me, but only just barely, and I wasn’t able to lay a glove on him at all. And he seemed to have infinite resources behind him. I didn’t worry him. He was tireless. He didn’t appear to degrade at all. He just took all I could give and kept throwing new stuff at me, coming at me from six sides at once.

Now I understood for the first time what it must have felt like for all the hackers I had beaten. Some of them must have felt pretty cocky, I suppose, until they ran into me. It costs more to lose when you think you’re good. When you know you’re good. People like that, when they lose, they have to reprogram their whole sense of their relation to the universe.

I had two choices. I could go on fighting until he wore me down and crashed me. Or I could give up right now. In the end everything comes down to yes or no, on or off, one or zero, doesn’t it?

I took a deep breath. I was staring straight into chaos.

“All right,” I said. “I’m beaten. I quit.”

I wrenched my wrist free of his, trembled, swayed, went toppling down on the ground.

A minute later five cops jumped me and trussed me up like a turkey and hauled me away, with my implant arm sticking out of the package and a security lock wrapped around my wrist, as if they were afraid I was going to start pulling data right out of the air.

Where they took me was Figueroa Street, the big black marble ninety-story job that is the home of the puppet city government. I didn’t give a damn. I was numb. They could have put me in the sewer and I wouldn’t have cared. I wasn’t damaged—the automatic circuit check was still running and it came up green—but the humiliation was so intense that I felt crashed. I felt destroyed. The only thing I wanted to know was the name of the hacker who had done it to me.

The Figueroa Street building has ceilings about twenty feet high everywhere, so that there’ll be room for Entities to move around. Voices reverberate in those vast open spaces like echoes in a cavern. The cops sat me down in a hallway, still all wrapped up, and kept me there for a long time. Blurred sounds went lalloping up and down the passage. I wanted to hide from them. My brain felt raw. I had taken one hell of a pounding.

Now and then a couple of towering Entities would come rumbling through the hall, tiptoeing on their tentacles in that weirdly dainty way of theirs. With them came a little entourage of humans whom they ignored entirely, as they always do. They know that we’re intelligent but they just don’t care to talk to us. They let their computers do that, via the Borgmann interface, and may his signal degrade forever for having sold us out. Not that they wouldn’t have conquered us anyway, but Borgmann made it ever so much easier for them to push us around by showing them how to connect our little biocomputers to their huge mainframes. I bet he was very proud of himself, too: just wanted to see if his gadget would work, and to hell with the fact that he was selling us into eternal bondage.

Nobody has ever figured out why the Entities are here or what they want from us. They simply came, that’s all. Saw. Conquered. Rearranged us. Put us to work doing godawful unfathomable tasks, Like a bad dream.

And there wasn’t any way we could defend ourselves against them. Didn’t seem that way to us at first—we were cocky, we were going to wage guerilla war and wipe them out—but we learned fast how wrong we were, and we are theirs for keeps. There’s nobody left with anything close to freedom except the handful of hackers like me; and, as I’ve explained, we’re not dopey enough to try any serious sort of counterattack. It’s a big enough triumph for us just to be able to dodge around from one city to another without having to get authorization.

Looked like all that was finished for me, now. Right then I didn’t give a damn. I was still trying to integrate the notion that I had been beaten; I didn’t have capacity left over to work on a program for the new life I would be leading now.

“Is this the pardoner, over here?” someone said.

“That one, yeah.”

“She wants to see him now.”

“You think we should fix him up a little first?”

“She said now.”

A hand at my shoulder, rocking me gently. “Up, fellow. It’s interview time. Don’t make a mess or you’ll get hurt.”

I let them shuffle me down the hall and through a gigantic doorway and into an immense office with a ceiling high enough to give an Entity all the room it would want. I didn’t say a word. There weren’t any Entities in the office, just a woman in a black robe, sitting behind a wide desk at the far end. It looked like a toy desk in that colossal room. She looked like a toy woman. The cops left me alone with her. Trussed up like that, I wasn’t any risk.

“Are you John Doe?” she asked.

I was halfway across the room, studying my shoes. “What do you think?” I said.

“That’s the name you gave upon entry to the city.”

“I give lots of names. John Smith, Richard Roe, Joe Blow. It doesn’t matter much to the gate software what name I give.”

“Because you’ve gimmicked the gate?” She paused. “I should tell you, this is a court of inquiry.”

“You already know everything I could tell you. Your borgmann hacker’s been swimming around in my brain.”