The Path Read online

  Click, click from my monitor sewn into the fabric of the pants I’m wearing. Enough exercise. Elevator time. I’ll avoid dessert at lunch to keep the darn thing from disapproving. The rice grain sized radio frequency identifier, RFID, in my palm opens the stairwell emergency door, a new model with a woman’s voice, quite sexy. Wonder who they modeled it after? The one to my office door I chose. I had always liked Meg Ryan as a kid, those nights under the covers. I miss that innocence, hers, and even miss my shame a bit, the fear of Mom or Dad walking in when I was nine. But now I could call up her Synth double for a night out and the wife wouldn’t think anything of it. It’s in my profile, the ones She agreed to before we were married. Nothing’s forbidden, but it’s hardly worth it. Ah Meg, never mind, some other time. Maybe one day I’ll take the chance and childishly liven up the libido again.

  Come to think of it, I heard Meg’s still with us, pretty ancient now, well over a hundred and fifty, looking good, and head of the American PTA. Or maybe it’s her kid who had her self modeled on Mom, changing identity. They do that, sometimes. Jolie is on her fourth go round. Same boobs, same see-through white dress at every party. Might check out news of Meg on the common room office screen during morning break, see if I can tell. There are usually signs, a DNA code clash or a mirrored twitch, right eye instead of left, that sort of thing. As a codifier, I have “awareness” or so they say.

  Through the stairwell door to the elevator. Taking the elevator up I smile, almost made it this morning, only 10 floors to go. Well, it was a restless night, always is when She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed is angry about something. It’s in her profile: anger, ranting, talk, talk, talk, always at me not with me, and then sex. The carrot in front of this donkey. She’s good at it. But like a Chinese meal, there’s always something missing, something insubstantial. Ever since my stint as a Spacefarer, and revelation on that asteroid (when it all went wrong—yeah, I know it was my fault), She’s been a little more controlling, a little less, well, mine. I wasn’t away long enough, heck, it wouldn’t matter if she had done it with somebody. It’s just that I did something out of character when I came back and it rattled her world. Not that her world is subject to mine really. It’s hers and she’s welcome to it, that’s the law.

  Some things they never change. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Marriage works, especially for her. “Ding” and the doors open. My floor.

  I decided to put a brave face on things. That WeatherGood One accident was troubling me but, really, it was hardly anything to do with me and, as we’re expected to think, life goes on. Or so I thought. “Hello Mary. How’s the System running this morning?”

  “Simon, there’s been a glitch in the food supply programming. I can’t track it down, but the FarmHands master control says they’ve got it and will pass the glitch to me for analysis. They say it will take me days to unravel it. I’m betting them I can do it in one.”

  “Well done Mary, always the office genius.” And she was, if a little weird. “What’s the bet this time?” Her reality was wrapped up in competing against herself with each new mental game, each anomaly to be unraveled. The folks at FarmHands knew that it made her happy, and presumably it made them happy to have her on the case. Everybody’s happy.

  “2 days, anywhere, with anybody I choose.”

  “Oh, shit. They’re really not going to like that result at Control. Last time you had a 1/2 day and three people were re-assigned because of failure to show up for a week, you got them so screwed up.” But Mary knew I was ribbing her, she never wasted anyone to that extent. It wasn’t her thing to take advantage, just to step outside of the system routine for a while and be radical; drink, booze it up, a few orgies, that sort of thing. It was allowed (if unusual, and in her profile is written the word “unusual type”).

  “John on the 40th thinks I should pick him if I win. ‘Dream on,’ I told him, I’m waiting for a crack at the master coder.” The master coder doesn’t exist, and Mary knows it. An urban myth, like those old middle-of-the-night childhood horror stories that scared the begeebus out of you. The master coder was like a Wizard of Oz, sounds good, pure bullshit.

  I had to ask, “Any news on WeatherGood One? There’s bound to be something there for you, unless it was something simple like equipment failure.”

  Her head snapped up. “WeatherGood One failed? How long? People hurt?” Before I could answer, she quickly pulled up the news screen and began to probe through to the live feeds and re-play them at a different angle from what I saw. Oh, she was all aglow . . . quite cute really, in a frumpy sort of way. Mary, now older than I, doesn’t believe in alterations, she’s one of those, “I’ll live with what my genes have given me, thank you very much!” Reports were popping up on her wall screen now, with code streaming down the side and onto her tablet, a waterfall of digits and color, filling her whole desk screen. Mary stopped looking at me, so I avoided answering her questions.

  Instead, I couldn’t resist another joke, just to clear my thoughts, “Looks kind of like God was showing he’s still around and not to be fooled with.”

  Mary looked stern, “Simon, you can’t say that sort of thing and mean it, it’s silly. I’ll zip-mail all this to the brats in engineering, see if something failed, but with their redundant systems, I’ve never seen anything like this before, it’s not normal.”

  “Okay. Let me know, will ya? See you at break, save the window table for us.”

  “Nah, I’ll be winning my bet, have your meal with Tom and Suze without me . . . no time for round two of your theory of happiness on a Monday. What did you do, have another fight and then make up with her?”

  Mary knew me too well. I pulled a face, flipped her a very sexist bird, forbidden in the office place. Well, she deserved it. She laughed.

  I went into my office, commanding the door to open. No windows, no screens, green-grey walls, one chair, one head dome. The golden metal dome was molded for my head and hinged to snap securely into place as you pulled down the neck collar at the back. This completed the dome’s circuitry and activated the sensors arranged in geodesic patterns on the underside. Each sensor had a small blunt pin which made pinprick skin contact. It didn’t hurt, so long as you didn’t accidently tap the top or sides. “Back to work,” I said out loud, as my Dad always had each morning as he got up from breakfast. Funny day, this one, amidst all the trauma, Dad’s presence is almost palpable.

  I put it on. The dome activated and my “mind’s eye” vision popped into life. I could see hundreds of images of mock master System code on what appeared as walls, a myriad of pathways open and closed, everything a 3-dimensional visual construction. Everything looked clean, fresh and organized. My job was to move the mock System code around, to make chaos out of the normal, to re-structure reality, even pathways, directions, open and close new portals, so that what I did could be real, but not likely. Then people like the Marys across America, sitting in offices, or at the beach, or wherever their hearts were content, would spot the errors of my ways and re-arrange things. In the process, between my mix-up and their unraveling, the computing power of the human mind was encoded again, and fed to the real central computers, the System itself, to make all sorts of gizmos work “in a human way.” Sort of antichaos programming compared to the fuzzy logic and super-computers of a half hundred years ago.

  The System, looking after all of America, needed to be encoded, to understand and react in a human way, so I taught it, along with dozens of other programmers, on the backup, mock System computers. When our “mistakes” were corrected, the corrections became the human element—carefully encoded into the real System.

  Me? I like messing things up, seeing if they really do belong together. If they do, they shouldn’t fit anywhere else. I’m the human equivalent of a subprogram virus, trying to adapt, fit in and yet alter the reality around me. Funny how I can move so many things around and still have them fit. I’m getting better at it too. A little pat on the back here. Last week I made a re-arrangement fit so well, it
looked original. Caused a bit of a panic, I can tell you. Of course, realizing that it was a rearrangement, all they had to do was break it and all the disassembled pieces tumbled out of place and they fixed it. But for a while there, my imperfect perfection reigned supreme. Flawless but full of potential to become an anti-system.

  You see, I wanted to try an experiment. Instead of moving the blocks of the system around, say taking the power supply profile and supplanting the water feed program (which caused the modeling to have water at constant pressure out of every tap—water like a laser cutting through cups and yet oozing out of industrial pipes, a woman on a bidet would get the thrill of her life, well, not really) . . . where was I? Oh yes, anyway this is what I do. I can make the systems look like they could fit in each other’s coding, but in reality it causes simulated chaos. Of course, the closer the systems’ coding are to each other, the harder it is to spot. The big stuff, like the power supply is an easy one to spot and fix for them. My talent lies in making them think they are looking at one problem and when they change it back they take a small part of the program back with it that I didn’t change, thereby changing the original program, never knowing it was them that caused the error. Like swapping the power system and the water feed program the second time I did it. They weren’t looking very well that day!

  In the water feed programming was a small, seemingly insignificant, sub-program which regulated the monitoring of pressure at old fire hydrants (no longer used, of course). I put that sub-program in the power system program that I put into the water supply. It fit because, well, it was meant to be where it was. When they spotted that the big programs had been switched, they swapped them back, verified all the primary systems but never checked the redundant sub-systems. Presto, they had installed the hydrant pressure sub-program in the power system programming.

  When they ran the backup System proof test (so that the “human quotient” could be measured for the master programming), my little subprogram mistook a normal drop in amperage in the shadow mock NuEl on Third as a panic call to increase fire hydrant pressure for a five alarm fire, drawing massive amounts of water (yes, they used to have those fire-fights, engines strewn across avenues, sirens wailing, water everywhere—as a kid I loved those). As the sub-program increased amperage (thinking it was water flow), the mock NuEl went, well, just sub-sonic. Bodies everywhere in the simulation. Chalk one up to me. Mary, when she reviewed what I had done, as the central office called to congratulate me, well Mary simply stared at the code and told me I was a really, really, sick bastard. Highest form of compliment. Of course, all this was caught in test using the mock backup System, in a test only, fixed and put back to normal. But the human element programming was useful, if only for codifiers at Control Central to incorporate at some stage into the real System.

  This morning all I could see to play with was the mock WeatherGood system. That’s all Control seemed to want me to look at. What fun was there in that? WeatherGood was a faultless and vital system. Okay, this morning the real System has a glitch. But in here, with the fake System, everything should be faultless, as normal, and it looked that way. Anyway, anything that I could touch in there was not a complex algorithm; it had to be simple, unchanging, stable. There was nothing I could insert or mess around that they couldn’t spot in one second. Or less. Damn, give me something else . . . I requested other programs’ access. Again and again it was the WeatherGood system program I was shown.

  I gave the mental command to exit, took off the dome, came out of what I felt was a mental pit. I looked around the blank walls. The void, the plain color, in here was useful. Was I getting pushed towards WeatherGood because there was a fault there and they wanted to compare my handiwork on the mock System programming? An alarming thought occurred: Was there something in there that maybe I had done to some other part of the mock System, something that had migrated there to the real program files, which had caused the death-by-wind event on 3rd Avenue? Impossible. Really impossible. Anyway, if I had wanted to cause an occluded front to roll on its side over 3rd I would have simply changed . . . what, what would I have changed? That program has no swappable elements that could not be spotted instantly. Somehow, the whole map would have had to be different, same coordinates, same time/space criteria, same program . . . wait, that’s it, just change the reality, the Earth, not the overlay.

  Dome snapped back on.

  I went through the usual checks and alterations, making seemingly clever (but stupid really) changes to code here and there. Something to make the system think I was doing something, keep giving me access. Changing bits (oh, ain’t that clever?), code lines swapped here and there, seemingly in a pattern, but mindless really. I have access in here to all the code ever written for the WeatherGood program and I was looking for the key to the primary reference source. What was all this programming supposed to act upon, over what area, what map?

  There it was, in a code so old I could hardly recognize it. You have to be old, like me, born late last century after WWII. The code in here is basic. Simple, binary basic, labeled “USGS, IGY, 1959, section 62, ref. 412, grid 1 - 1200.” WeatherGood was using the old binary encoded maps of the Americas, reloaded as they were in 1959 after the International Geophysical Year. That shouldn’t be, though. Parts of the American continent were now underwater after the Big Orange Quake forty years ago and, anyway, there had been three volcanoes that I knew of since then, each had changed the landscape for 100s of kilometers in and around Los Angeles, obliterating the city and all its people. All that was left there now was water, nothingness. How could WeatherGood be using a land map from 1959?

  Tracing my way back up the code, kind of like swimming up a stream of zeros and ones, I looked for branch to the flow, an amendment, a qualifier. I’m good at this, this editing, this flowing through all the code, this deconstruction technique. I couldn’t have missed it. It’s not there, it’s not here. WeatherGood works on a flawed, outdated, map. Now, what WeatherGood does exactly to work the way it does, I have no idea, but what the program instructs are, what the instructions are in code, any code from the most moderns all the way back to binary code, that is right here in front of me. I can touch it, figuratively, right in front of my eyes in here. Screems of it, pages and pages of code running seemingly endlessly across my vision. Not one line of code I can’t read and understand. And not one byte that told WeatherGood that the maps were out of date.

  Unless . . . was the USGS IGY map of 1959 re-edited at source? Named the same, was the file updated but never re-named? Okay, that’s poor record keeping, but it might explain this. It may have been too hard to catch all the references to the USGS IGY 1959 in every program and subset, so they simply kept the file name the same. Heck, in old Basic that would be a large task, mundane, repetitive to change every program calling on the newer version. But they could have written a worm even back then, a virus as they were once feared, to find and destroy and supplant, so why didn’t they? Okay, viruses were outlawed made seriously criminal after the Purge, but the Nation could surely get around their own laws for this good reason, couldn’t they? I stopped probing, the dome went silent, waiting. I retraced my pathways, made sure I made a few changes along the way, and got the hell out of there. Leave it virgin. If I was right, this could be a real discovery and I wanted to keep it virgin. I knew other codifiers were always digging around my trail. I’d seen their clumsy attempts to follow me, real time, before. Not this time buckos. This little discovery is mine.

  Ego is a dangerous thing.

  I took off the dome, and the system announced “345 changes made, 320 remedied in 1.2 seconds, 22 remedied in a further 3.1 seconds, 3 remedied in a further 2 seconds. Performance nominal, rating 4.” Like an old game of computer solitaire you play at the museum, it keeps score for me. 4 out of 10 is not my usual standard, which is 9.275, but enough to keep my average from slipping too much as it’s only one probe amongst thousands.

  I went to provoke Mary into thought and, if she were a
round, Suze also. Suze was cuter and, if I was lucky, not heads down with a desk full of code to unravel. She’d maybe flash her smile and perk up her boobs. Suze wasn’t the workaholic self-evaluator Mary was. Provoking fellow humans had the curious effect of making me a better codifier. Often, Mary or Tom or Suze would say something that would give me a damn good idea. Once I left a small electronic tag where I had been meddling (a particularly good little executable subset of code which could, ideally if not spotted and not run on the dummy system, make all tomatoes blue for a day).

  When you worked inside the System programming, you could attach little electronic flags, like the old Post-it notes or a bookmark, only they were only little glowing colored ribbons of nothing that could be easily removed when found or no longer needed. Without the tags, remembering where you spotted something, or some code you wanted to amend could take hours to discover. With tags in place, you could zip around, checking the screens of code quickly.

  The thing was, I had left that really visible tag with Tom’s name on it, to give him credit for an off-hand remark over lunch. He had said, as he was slicing a tomato, “I feel so blue today.” So I made the blue tomatoes snafu all his—if it got into the System, all tomatoes grown for weeks would be genetically altered to become blue, sort of rotten blue colored. Some codifier in New California spotted the alteration, but it was six hours before anyone did and that caused a lot of discussion as to why Tom had access at all and what if it has made it into the System. . . Tom was pissed at me as they called him names but the System gave me the credit in the end, doing my job, as it was recorded that I was the only one in there. But I knew Tom would watch whatever he said in my presence for a while.