Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Spartacus File

It might be worth a try if nothing else worked, but it didn't look like a very appealing course of action.

And if you looked at history…?

Maybe, Casper thought, leaning on the kitchen table, he was going about this wrong. He wanted to get the Party out of power, and replace it with people of his own choosing. He'd been looking at revolution as the way to do that-but maybe that wasn't the only way, or even the best way.

He wanted to get his own people into power. The government said he was a terrorist. Well, where had one-time terrorists wound up in power?

Soviet Russia. Nazi Germany. Israel. The Taliban's Afghanistan. Palestine.

Those were not very cheering comparisons.

But it was worth noting that only half of the examples that had sprung immediately to mind-and he knew there were others he hadn't thought about-involved terrorists successfully leading a violent revolution and seizing power by force. Hitler had maneuvered his way to power through the 1932 election, and the Israeli terrorists had been elected.

Having been a terrorist apparently didn't make one unelectable.

Of course, this might not apply in America-but elections were definitely the way to transfer power here. A political party had a much better shot at overthrowing the government than a revolutionary cell did.

So where could he get a political party? He looked around at Colby, who was still silently watching him, and at the dingy little kitchen.

People For Change consisted, so far as he could determine, of about twenty people, of whom half a dozen, not counting himself, Mirim, and Cecelia, lived right here. There were another hundred or so people who supported PFC at least to the point of knowing about it without turning anyone in for that last string of bombings in New York four years ago. Not even Ed, the unrepentant cop-killer who made everyone nervous, had been ratted out.

That wasn't much to start with in founding a political movement, but it was better than nothing.

He had an organization, at least a minimal one. He had a charismatic leader, in himself-for a moment he marveled at his own arrogance in describing himself that way, but he dismissed that; thanks to whatever the government had put in his head, he was a charismatic leader, or at least could become one. He knew it.

What else did he need?

Money. He needed money to buy access to the networks, more access than an ordinary citizen could get-nobody actually watched the public-access stuff where the loonies raved, and political discussions on the net just degenerated into endless arguments that sensible people filtered out. To attract mass attention, you needed to be in the mass media. That was how the whole system had gone bad in the first place-only millionaires could afford to run for office, and millionaires weren't going to screw around with the corporate structures that had made them rich, other than to make themselves even richer.

If he could talk to people with money, he knew he could raise the funds he'd need-but how could he do that? Not through public-access channels or the public nets, that was certain. Maybe if he could get onto talk shows? But how could he do that while he was still a fugitive?

And he would also need a front organization that people could donate to-it didn't have to be elaborate, a box number and a bank account should just about cover it. He'd need an employee, someone who wasn't wanted by the feds, to sign all the papers-but PFC ought to be able to provide that.

He wondered how much of this he was figuring out on his own, and how much had been programmed into him. He had no way of telling.

But did it really matter? However it got there, it was there, and he might was well get on with it. He needed to build up a political organization; that was more important than a military one in the U.S. There was something in him that was very, very unhappy with that idea, but that he was fairly sure was part of the programming he'd received.

To build a political organization he needed access to people-but it didn't have to be live, did it?

“So,” he asked Colby, “is there a vidcam around here?”

“A vidcam? You mean a webcam?” Colby glanced over his shoulder.

“I was hoping for something a little better, but a webcam would do.”

“I don't know. Probably.”

Annoyed, Casper got to his feet and marched into the next room; Colby watched him go without comment.

The unattended computer in the next room had no webcam attached, so far as Casper could see, but as long as he was there he logged into the local network to see whether one might show up. None did, but as long as he was online he took a moment to check his e-mail log, the replies to the messages he'd posted on the nets under various pseudonyms.

Most of it, judging by the subject lines, looked like the usual junk-people agreeing with him, people arguing with him, people trying to sell him things.

One entry on the list caught his eye, though.

“32: From: R.S. CHI Subject: C'PR BCH”

Casper recognized his own name in the subject line immediately-but he also saw that the government watchdog programs wouldn't. A human being might, but the volume of e-mail traffic was far too great for the government to use human watchdogs.

So unless it was some bizarre coincidence, not only was someone calling him by his real name, but whoever it was didn't want the FBI to know about it.

Casper sat down and clicked on item #32.

After the usual headers, he read, “Dear Mr. B.: If I'm mistaken about your identity, I apologize, but I assume it's you. If you really are who I think you are-friendly ghost tree-I think you'll be very interested in the attached file, SPXPTA. DOC-it provides the basic working specs for an optimization program that was accidentally run at NeuroTalents’ Philadelphia facility not too long ago, as well as some other relevant information.”

Casper was very interested indeed. “Friendly ghost tree"-he'd heard of Casper the Friendly Ghost when he was a kid, though he'd never seen the movies or any of the old cartoons, and he certainly knew what a beech tree was. There couldn't be much doubt that this R.S. Chi had identified him correctly. He opened the file.

It was gibberish. Casper stared at it for a moment, then realized that it was encrypted-and as was obvious at a glance, it wasn't the standard legal encryption.

That was really interesting.

It was also frustrating. How was he supposed to read it?

He went back to the message to look for clues. The document name was the first thing that caught his eye-what the hell did SPXPTA mean?

Well, he didn't know about all of it, but PXP was an illegal encryption program, Pretty eXtreme Privacy, that had been around for years. People For Change used it sometimes; so did about a million other people. The FBI would occasionally pick a user at random and come down on him, but the volume of traffic was too great for serious policing, especially since most of the messages they caught and decrypted were things like, “Bet we're ticking off the feds with this one!” FBI complaints against such users tended to get thrown out of court-the users were usually the kids of Party members or Consortium executives.

The FBI could break PXP encryption if they had to, but there was too much of it on the nets for them to get all of it, and it would keep the automatic watchdogs from spotting key words and calling the file to a human being's attention.

One of the key words they watched for was PXP, of course-to slow its spread. Nesting it in the name of the file like that might keep it from being spotted.

So the file was encrypted with PXP. Fine. Except now Casper needed the two keys, which would each be a long string of more or less random characters. What strings of characters?