John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

And, Barrabas realized with a twinge, Jo Ann was listening to them. He wondered if she knew the lab she’d done brain work for was a branch of the SA. He wondered, too, if she was politically liberal. She was, after all, an artist. She answered his unasked questions, then, when she remarked, “The SA corporation really scares me, the way it’s growing. Racism amazes me. It’s like some old superstition, like believing the world is flat and the sun rotates around the Earth!”

“What, the sun doesn’t rotate around the Earth? Go on!” he joked, hoping to kid her away from the subject.

She smiled fleetingly and then put on an expression that said, But seriously… “I mean—what can anyone do about these racists? That dude was right. They’re a part of the system now…”

He was into the system. Jerome felt it before he saw it. He was in.

The computing work was done by the left brain—and the camouflage by the right brain. The right brain was singing. Singing the chorus to “Six Kinds of Darkness,” while the other part of his mind worked with the chip. The right lobe singing,

The left lobe hacking:

London UNET: ID#4547q339. Superuser: WATSON.

The music was camouflage, cover for the mole-signals, the piggyback signals that used updated palm-pilot tech to reach out, to access…

The left lobe of his brain working with the chip, which emitted a signal, interfaced with a powerful microcomputer hidden among the micalike layers of chips in the midi of Bones’s synthesizer; Jerome-X seeing the Herald on the hallucinatory LCD screen of his mind’s eye:

London UNET, ID #, date, assumed “superuser” name.

Then he ran an e-mail program that was his encryption worm, executing his diabolic algorithm, overflowing the input buffers receiving the data, the overflow carrying him into the target computer’s command center. Bypassing the passwords and security, now that he was in the computer’s brain, and then commanding:

CHANGE DIRECTORY TO ROOT.

ROOT: Superdirectory of the system. Scanning, at the root, for the branch of the system he needed.

Scanning for: Second Alliance International Security Corporation: Intelligence Security subdirectory…

Watching from the audience, Patrick Barrabas remarked (and was unheard in the blare) that Jerome-X had a funny, contortionistic way of dancing as he sang. His eyes squeezed shut, his hands moving as if over typewriter keyboards… Not playing the “air guitar,” but typing on the air keyboard…

Jerome was typing the commands out. Using a technique Bettina had taught him to implement more complex commands; sending through his aug chip by radio trans to a powerful mainframe; typing physically on a mental keyboard.

The chip fed him tactile illusions and read out his responses through its contact with the parietal lobe, reading the input from the proprioceptive sensors—sensory nerve terminals—in the muscles, and kinesthetic sensors , tactile nerves in the fingers: Jerome’s movements translated into cybernetic commands. His rapport with the aug chip essentially creating a mental data-glove, a data-glove that materialized only in the “virtual reality” holography of consciousness.

As Jerome sang,

Finding his way through the darkness in the forest of data. Taking cuttings. Taking information. Planting something of his own…

They were in Father Lespere’s flat behind the church. It was in one of the old-fashioned Parisian stone houses, with its high, narrow, rusting-iron front door; a door so tall and heavy it could almost have belonged to a cathedral. The cracked walls were brown with age and, in streaks, sepia with water stains. They’d come through the rear building, up the narrow, winding stairs. The light in the clammy, echoing stairwell, in the parsimonious French manner, turning itself off after they’d climbed a flight. The place smelled musty; its spaces were glum.

Father Lespere’s flat was a little more cheerful. It was cramped but high-ceilinged, done in off-white and pale yellow; there were some tasteful chandeliers, and an old rolltop desk, a few silk daffodils in antique Flemish vases. Lespere was one of the city’s elite, which meant he had a gas fire and electricity, a console playing music. Mozart. The furniture was simple to the point of spareness. There was a crucifix, of course, and a Mother Mary, and a wall filled with books on theology and architecture. Many books, but nothing that would make SA visitors suspicious. He had long since purged his bookshelves.

Briand looked at them with a gentle amazement as they came in. Smoking a cigarette, Old Briand sat in an old wooden kitchen chair; his face was gray with grief and age and flecked with salt-and-pepper stubble; he wore the uniform of a street cleaner, his crumpled hat in his hands, a china bowl of coffee and a bit of bread on a white wooden table beside him.

Bibisch and Torrence were dressed as construction workers themselves, as if they’d been laboring with rabble-reclamation teams all day. They’d put dust in their hair and grimed their hands. Their machine pistols were well hidden in their clothing.

Father Lespere wore a cassock, as if he were about to take confession, and in a way he was.

They shook hands and drank a little coffee and complained of the drizzle outside. Through the window, through the attenuated slant of rain, Torrence saw the strange landscape of Parisian rooftops, looking to him, in his present mood, like the monuments of a cemetery, the humped gray tile roofs and attic stories like barrows and mausoleums, the chimneys like an endless vista of abstracted gravestones. Here and there were the blasphemous intrusion of dormer windows. The surfaces slick with water; the sky murky with it.

“ Et bien, ” Lespere said, “if you are ready to hear the story, I will ask Briand to tell it.”

Torrence nodded mechanically.

Working hard to keep his expression neutral, Torrence listened as Bibisch translated the old Frenchman’s account. “They came in the morning, when everyone is a-sleeping. Not me, I work very early, I am alone awake in the building, happy that morning because I have some tea, difficile to get… Then there is a sound of a truck and a machine that smashes doors and the building shake, everything fall from the wall; and the men come into every apartment, take us out by the necks, we cannot see the faces because they have balls of glass on them. You know this kind of soldier… they take us to the street, everyone is looking from the other buildings. And they murder. That is all. They murder. They broke in—many times I have seen them break in and take people, and say that it is for France, it is for the Unity Party, it is for Security, and they had weapons so we will not argue—but this time they did not take someone to a prison, no. They kill them. They kill them there on the street. They say is reprisal. Is execution for…” She hesitated, then asked Briand to repeat the name. Briand did; said it quite clearly. Torrence felt a ghostly hand trying to choke off his breath.

Reprisal. For the one called Hard-Eyes. For the work of the terrorist Hard-Eyes.

Aka Daniel Torrence.

“How many are dead?” Torrence asked in a croak.

“ Quatre, ” the old man said. “ Une petite fille. ” One of them a little girl.

Torrence let out a long, slow, shuddery breath.