Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas (список книг .TXT) 📗
Maxine has a purseful of time-sensitive passwords from Vyrva, changed every fifteen minutes on average, for getting into DeepArcher. She can’t help noticing this time how different the place is. What was once a train depot is now a Jetsons-era spaceport with all wacky angles, jagged towers in the distance, lenticular enclosures up on stilts, saucer traffic coming and going up in the neon sky. Yuppified duty-free shops, some for offshore brands she doesn’t recognize even the font they’re written in. Advertising everywhere. On walls, on the clothing and skins of crowd extras, as pop-ups out of the Invisible and into your face. She wonders if— Sure enough, here they are, lurking around the entrance to a Starbucks, a pair of cyberflaneurs who turn out to be Eric’s ad-business acquaintances Promoman and Sandwichgrrl.
“Nice place to hang out,” sez Sandwichgrrl.
“Not to mention do business,” adds Promoman. “Joint’s jumpin. A lot of these folks who look like only virtual background? they are real users.”
“Really. There’s supposed to be all kinds of deep encryption.”
“There’s also the backdoor, you didn’t know about that?”
“Since when?”
“Weeks . . . months?”
So that 11 September window of vulnerability Lucas and Justin were so worried about, for good reason apparently, has allowed not only unwelcome guests to sneak in but somebody—Gabriel Ice, the feds, fed sympathizers, other forces unknown who’ve had their eye on the site—to install a backdoor also. And easy as that, there goes the neighborhood. She clicks away, reaching at length a strange creepy nimbus like a follow spot in a club where you know you’ll get sick before the evening ends, has a moment of doubt, ignores it, clicks on into the heart of the nauseous blear of light, and then everything for a while goes black, blacker than anything she’s seen on a screen before.
When the picture returns, she seems to be traveling in a deepspace vehicle . . . there’s a menu for choosing among views, and, switching briefly to an exterior shot, she discovers it’s not a single vehicle but more like a convoy, not quite simply-connected, spaceships of different ages and sizes moving along through an extended forever . . . Heidi, if asked, would say she detected some Battlestar Galactica influence.
Inside Maxine finds corridors of glimmering space-age composite, long as boulevards, soaring interior distances, sculptured shadows, traffic through upwardly thickening twilight, pedestrians crossing bridges, airborne vehicles for passengers and for cargo busily glittering . . . Only code, she reminds herself. But who of all these faceless and uncredited could have written it and why?
Popping up in midair, a paging window appears, requesting her presence on the bridge, with a set of directions. Somebody must have seen her log in.
On the bridge she finds empty liquor bottles and used syringes. The captain’s chair is a La-Z-Boy recliner of distant vintage, hideous beige and covered with cigarette burns. There are inexpensive posters of Denise Richards and Tia Carrere Scotch-taped to the bulkheads. Some sort of hip-hop mix is coming from hidden speakers, at the moment Nate Dogg and Warren G, doing the huge mid-nineties West Coast hit “Regulate.” Personnel come and go on various errands, but the pace is not what you’d call brisk.
“Welcome to the bridge, Ms. Loeffler.” A loutish youth, unshaven, in cargo shorts and a stained More Cowbell T-shirt. There is a shift in the ambience. The music segues to the theme from Deus Ex, the lights dim, the space is tidied by invisible cyberelves.
“So where’s everybody? the captain? the exec? The science officer?”
Raising one eyebrow and fingering the tops of his ears as if testing for pointiness, “Sorry, prime directive, No Fuckin Officers.” Gesturing her over to the forward observation windows. “The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”
“Awesome.”
“Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.”
An antenna swivels. “Lucas, is that you?”
“Bus-tiiid!” The screen filling for a moment with psychedelic iTunes Visualizer patterns.
“So you’re in here dealing with what, backdoor issues, I hear?”
“Um, not exactly.”
“They tell me it’s wide open these days.”
“Downside of being proprietary, always guarantees a backdoor sooner or later,”
“And you’re all right with this? How about Justin?”
“We’re good, fact we were never comfortable with that old model anyway.”
Old model. Which must mean . . . “Some big news, let me guess.”
“Yep. We finally decided to go open source. Just sent the tarball out.”
“Meaning . . . anybody . . . ?”
“Anybody with the patience to get through it, they want it, they got it. There’s already a Linux translation on the way, which should bring the amateurs in in droves.”
“So the big bucks . . .”
“No longer an option. Maybe never was. Justin and me’ll have to keep on being working stiffs for a while.”
She watches the unfolding flow of starscape, Kabbalistic vessels smashed at the Creation into all these bright drops of light, rushing out from the singular point that gave them birth, known elsewhere as the expanding universe . . . “What would happen if I started to click on some of these pixels here?”
“You could get lucky. It’s nothin we wrote. There could be links to somewhere else. You could also spend your life dowsing the Void and never getting much of anywhere.”
“And this ship—it isn’t on the way to DeepArcher, is it?”
“More like out on an expedition. Exploring. When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there’s one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that’d take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down here, sooner or later someplace deep, there has to be a horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss.”
“That’s what you’re looking for?”
“Some of us are.” Avatars do not do wistful, but Maxine catches something. “Others are trying to avoid it. Depends what you’re into.”
• • •
MAXINE CONTINUES TO WANDER corridors for a while, striking up conversations at random, whatever “random” means in here. She begins to pick up a chill sense that some of the newer passengers could be refugees from the event at the Trade Center. No direct evidence, maybe only because she has 11 September on her mind, but everywhere now she looks, she thinks she sees bereaved survivors, perps foreign and domestic, bagmen, middlemen, paramilitary, who may have participated in the day or are only claiming to’ve done so as part of some con game.
For those who may be genuine casualties, likenesses have been brought here by loved ones so they’ll have an afterlife, their faces scanned in from family photos, . . . some no more expressive than emoticons, others exhibiting an inventory of feeling ranging from party-euphoric through camera-shy to abjectly gloomy, some static, some animated in GIF loops, cyclical as karma, pirouetting, waving, eating or drinking whatever it was they were holding at the wedding or bar mitzvah or night out when the shutter blinked.
Yet it’s as if they want to engage—they get eye contact, smile, angle their heads inquisitively. “Yes, what was it?” or “Problem?” or “Not right now, OK?” If these are not the actual voices of the dead, if, as some believe, the dead can’t speak, then the words are being put there for them by whoever posted their avatars, and what they appear to say is what the living want them to say. Some have started Weblogs. Others are busy writing code and adding it to the program files.
She stops at a corner cafe and has soon fallen into conversation with a woman—maybe a woman—on a mission to the edge of the known universe. “All these know-nothings coming in, putting in, it’s as bad as the surface Web. They drive you deeper, into the deep unlighted. Beyond anyplace they’d be comfortable. And that’s where the origin is. The way a powerful telescope will bring you further out in physical space, closer to the moment of the big bang, so here, going deeper, you approach the border country, the edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information.”
