Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997 Pearl Publishing
Initiation
Jonathan was a wreck. A totally nervous wreck.
The bottle of bourbon was almost empty, but that was O.K., he had more-plenty more. He knew that the woman who came to 'initiate' him into the circle was right about Bubba Rom Dos. Just an old, drunken has-been who liked to shoot his mouth off and act important, rambling on about things he knew nothing about.
But Jonathan knew about these weird, evil things. He knew much more than he wanted to know about them. Things that he couldn't forget, no matter how hard he tried.
After he had been to see Bubba, receiving only a denial of the
Magic Circle's existence (from a young girl whose existence was
so real that he still thought about her), Jonathan had immersed
himself in scanning old CyberPosts…email, he corrected himself…that
dated from the early CypherPunks era.
It was a twisted, rambling trail that was woven around and through
the history of the CypherPunks. CryptoRebels, CyberHackers, Spooks,
Phreaks, and Phantoms…
Everybody had an angle, or a game, and even the players often
seemed unsure of who they were playing with, or against.
Was it Gilmore, or Hughes-Jonathan couldn't remember, it had been
so many years ago-who had stood on the desk in his grandfather's
study, and uttered the words which might well have been the official
battle-cry of the CypherPunks?
"Close ranks-every man for himself."
Jonathan had pored over the archive surrounding the date of the
legendary moderation experiment on the list. It was an archive
that Jonathan's grandfather, among others, had used for PseudoID
Traffic Analysis, along with UNIX route tracing records and information
secretly gleaned from the military's Onion Routers, in order to
attempt to "separate the double agents from the triple agents,"
as one of the Russian list members, Igor, used to say.
Jonathan still remembered the one time that he had received a
scathing rebuke from all present in his grandfather's study, as
a result of suggesting that they could learn much of what they
needed to know by studying the remailer records.
Big mistake.
Jonathan immediately found himself surrounded by a plethora of
enraged CypherPunks who obviously didn't give a fat rat's ass
whether he was a mere child, or not-nobody questioned their integrity
regarding their foremost contribution to anarchy…end of story.
One of the CypherPunks picked him up by his collar, lifting him
up to eye level, and said, in deadly serious, deep-throated tones,
"You don't tug on Superman's cape. You don't spit in the
wind. You don't peek in the files on your own remailer, and you
don't mess around with Jim."
To Jonathan's great relief, the whole ragged band broke out in laughter. Jonathan learned later that the gentleman who had 'corrected' him, Jim, was the author of an Assassination Bot-one which had begun as a theoretical exercise, and later became a major tool in the implementation of the CypherPunks launching of Channel War II.
Jonathan shook his head slowly, trying to convince himself that
this was all a dream, and that he wasn't really irrevocably connected
to this band of fringe-dwellers, rogues and eccentrics.
It didn't work.
He remembered the night that Priscilla had knocked on his door,
and in his rush to shut off his blue-light unit he answered the
door with his upper body uncovered. He was terrified when he realized
that this woman, whom he had never seen before, was standing there,
dumbfounded, staring at his tattoo.
Jonathan had almost fainted with relief when she stepped inside
the door, quickly shutting it, reached into her cloak, and pulled
out a bottle of Jack Daniel's, with a label he instantly recognized,
saying in a quiet, calm voice, "We need to talk."
Tuesday was the worst. That was what set off his three-day binge. He had been working on his skills, like the lady had told him to do. And he was keeping his eyes open, like she said. Somehow, seeking to observe the weird things, instead of dreading and trying to avoid them, had helped. Now, instead of trying to repress the memory of these events, he would analyze them, note them, try to arrange them in a logical fashion, so that if he ever had to deal with them, to work with or against them, he would be prepared.
"Be prepared.", that's what the woman had told him during his initiation.
"You will probably will not be contacted for quite some time-perhaps never.", the woman had said, but that was all right. Just knowing that there was a Magic Circle, that there were others out there, waiting, preparing, possibly already acting against the strange forces he had encountered-that was enough, just knowing that he wasn't alone.
And then Tuesday…
It had been a strange couple of weeks.
The weirdness going on in his system was just the 'usual' weirdness. Programs that he hadn't written cropping up and running themselves. They followed the normal pattern, in most cases-extracting newly input information from the databases he was working with, sorting and codifying it, uploading it to /dev/null. Theoretically, that meant it was being sent 'nowhere', but he had long since figured out that 'nowhere' was 'somewhere' that he was not supposed to discover.
So he left it alone…until Tuesday.
The Cowboy, one of the top computer honchos on the InterNet, probably the top honcho, according to many, had dropped out of sight, suddenly and unexpectedly, a couple of weeks before.
Strangely, he had been called into the Cowboy's 'domain'-"Cowboys don't have offices, they ride the range.", he had told Jonathan-the next working day after his initiation into the 'Circle'. He thought that this might be the 'contact' he was expecting, but it turned out to be a routine, minor matter.
There was a bizarre incident, however, which left Jonathan wondering if the Cowboy was really all that his reputation held him out to be.
The Cowboy had been drinking quite liberally from a bottle of Jack Daniel's he had stashed behind the monitor, while Jonathan worked on some minor programs that the Cowboy had told him to troubleshoot for him. Once Jonathan had completed his tasks, the Cowboy came over to check his work, and proceeded to log onto the terminal that Jonathan had been working on.
The Cowboy, his coordination seemingly affected by his prolonged drinking, accidentally hit the return key at the 'login:' prompt, and then typed 'Cowboy' into the 'password:' prompt by mistake, which 'hid' what he had typed, as it is supposed to do, in order to keep others from discovering another user's password. The Cowboy now typed his password in at the subsequent 'login:' prompt, where it was plainly visible for Jonathan to see. The Cowboy, in his inebriated state, repeated this mistake several times, cursing the system for not allowing him to log on, before realizing what he had done.
The Cowboy, looking up sheepishly at Jonathan, corrected his error, logged onto the system, checked Jonathan's work, then dismissed him.
This type of thing happened every now and then, with one user
accidentally discovering another user's password, but Jonathan
had never heard of such a thing at the ultimate level of security
which the Cowboy was privileged to hold. And even a low-level
user, having made this mistake, would immediately 'change' his
or her password, in order to maintain the security of their user
identity and their work. The Cowboy had not done this, which bothered
Jonathan.
Then, when the Cowboy disappeared, Jonathan was called in to take over some of his duties, which were spread amongst a variety of individuals.
Jonathan was amazed at this, since the others sharing the Cowboys former duties were all top-notch, experienced 'Net'ers, which he was not, with high-level clearance in their regular posts. Jonathan then discovered, when changing his user attributes to match the Cowboy's, so that he could work with a variety of 'C-shell' programs, that his own security-level had been changed to match that of the Cowboy. What was unusual was that this had been done weeks ago-at the same time that Jonathan had been at home being initiated into the 'Circle of Eunuchs'.
Jonathan shivered as he thought about this, with a strange chill
running up and down his spine. The same strange chill had occurred
twice that day. The first time was when he realized that the strange
men surrounding him in the office he was temporarily working in-men
sent down directly from the Chief Director's Security Office-were
all working frantically to try to 'break into' the Cowboy's user
account-which Jonathan knew the password for. The second time
was shortly thereafter, when thinking about the 'password' incident,
and realizing that the Cowboy's password-gnimocsizemog-when spelled
backwards, read 'gomeziscoming'.
Then, Tuesday…
Jonathan was working at his home terminal, cleaning up a few leftovers from the day's office work, and he had noticed the intruding, unauthorized 'background' programs running, again.
When he checked into their activity, he noticed that they were doing searches on all of his databases, searching for the word 'Uncle'. Each time the word was found, the database record was uploaded to /dev/null, as usual. Jonathan decided it was time to find out just where the purloined information had been going, for all this time.
He pulled a sub-routine out of one of his programs, one designed to report back on 'path' errors when debugging programs. It was a sub-routine of his own design, and one that he was quite proud of. When one of his programs was sending its output files to some unknown place, with an unknown name, his sub-routine (which he called 'find_me.c'), would intervene to 'tag along' with the file, and, at its destination, change do a 'pwd' command (report the 'present working directory'), and use that and the name of the unknown file as arguments for the 'find_me.c' file, which would then report back to Jonathan's terminal with the path name and file name of the lost file.
When Jonathan 'piped' his sub-routine into the intruder program, however, he got some very unexpected results.
First, he was booted out of his login account, and his terminal
screen went blank. Secondly, the power to his system went off,
and he could not turn it back on. Thirdly…
Jonathan reached for another bottle of bourbon. This one was Wild Turkey. He poured himself a stiff shot, threw it back, and thought about the third effect of his program.
Thirdly, there was the sound of jack-boots on the stairs, several minutes later, then the sound of his next-door neighbor's door being kicked in, shots ringing out, and the sound of jack-boots leaving shortly thereafter. Jonathan had looked out the window to see dark figures loading his neighbor's lifeless body into a dark vehicle and then drive off into the night.
The following morning, Jonathan had seen the news of his own death come over the VirtualNews link, stating that a lone burglar, who escaped capture, was responsible.
Jonathan had switched apartments with his neighbor the day before,
switching their terminals inside the junction box himself, rather
than wait for the apartment manager's return from his vacation.
He had chastised himself for forgetting to change the names on
their mail slots, as he had promised the neighbor he would take
care of it, but that omission, apparently, had saved his life.
Jonathan reached for the bottle, once again, and thought about Bubba Rom Dos.
The broken-down old buzzard may be, as the woman had told him, a useless failure, having given up on life. But the geezer sure knew how to do it with style, and since it would undoubtedly be discovered, upon his landlord's return, that Jonathan was still alive, he could think of no one better to emulate, than Bubba Rom Dos, in his final days.
Jonathan raised his glass, in toast, to his new-found 'liquid guru', and he thought about the young girl he had encountered on his visit to see Bubba. What was her name? Alexis?
Yes, Alexis.
Chapter 15 - Initiation