Konsk: The Great Takover of the Place.

42. Reconnecting, again.

Trueman looked first baffled then dubious. He eyed the corpse again.

“Something serpently killed him,” he muttered, the tongue resisting his attempts at clarity of speech. “Look, we don’t know what happened, what’s to stop the same thing happening to me?”

“I don’t know,” Jodi shrugged. “You’re supposed to be the expert. Work through a buffer or something, with interrupts.”

Trueman harrumphed internally, supposed to be the expert, he repeated to himself. Yes but in the dark ages compared to the technology available in this time.

Then he thought more carefully; The sight of yet another dead body, particularly one that looked like him, or rather, like his new INCO body, was disturbing and required a further act of repression. Yet it could be that buried here were answers to the questions he was seeking, to his own personal situation and also to the wider events taking place in this baffling new world.

Maybe it was too late, he considered, the information lost or destroyed. No outside agencies had been able to access the data, not even the poor Vollies who seemed to have been designed for just such a task. Given the ongoing disaster in the whole area, wasn't it likely that the local system itself would be destroyed at some point?

OK, he thought, so it could be important, possibly very important, to peek and poke and given where I am and the body I occupy, I might be the only one who can do it. Next question, how to do so in such a way that doesn’t leave me looking like my erstwhile clone here.

He examined the equipment. There was no specific addition to this chair corresponding to the jaw implant, unlike the interface in the Alt-Tech Centre. He studied the fused hand and touch pad, gingerly pulling back the cuff of the overalls to reveal more of the wrist. Beneath the torn skin there appeared to be non organic components, melted and burnt, possibly insulation materials, plastics perhaps. Had this clone, if such it was, employed the nerves of the left hand as a primary input device? He dismissed the thought; interesting but not important. How was he going to get in, that was the question.

The screen continued to display a green wash with occasional blocks of colour. What would I have done back at the Farm, he asked himself, if the server had gone belly up? Probably just re-boot it. He found himself looking for a switch then stopped. He waved a hand at the screen. Nothing happened. He looked at the corpse, at the neck. Almost hidden by a fold of the overalls was a small, black object. He picked at it and it came away easily. The back was slightly tacky. He spoke into it.

“Information,” he tried, then, “Current status. Report.”

Maybe his voice was too garbled. He became more assertive.

“Command!” he barked. “Current system status. Report. Visual. On screen. Now!”

He added a “For fuck’s sake!” under his breath. Jodi raised an eyebrow. The screen went blue and letters appeared. Trueman jumped.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he muttered, leaning forward past the body to peer at the words that had formed.

“Peripheral failure,” he read and harrumphed. Thanks a lot, he thought, I'd worked that one out already. He checked the objects on the work surface more thoroughly. Jodi handed him a hat. Just before he laughed at the inanity, he realised it had a pull down visor. He thanked her somewhat sheepishly.

“I need somewhere to sit,” he said.

Jodi took the corpse by the shoulders and spilled it unceremoniously onto the floor where it sprawled stiffly amid the torn cigarette packets and stumps. The vacuum cleaner sidled up to it surreptitiously. Jodi dumped the touchpad, which had remained on the work top with some of the hand.

Trueman sat gingerly, attached the mini-mike to his collar, donned the hat and drew the visor down. It wrapped right around to his ears, curving below his chin. A soft voice, unidentifiable as either male or female, spoke into his right ear.

“ID positive. Would you like your regular ‘face, sir?”

Trueman, making himself more comfortable in the padded chair just muttered an affirmative then jumped as the opaque visor came to life. He was back in the virtual studio at the Alt-Tech Centre, or rather, he corrected himself, an instance of the virtual studio had been constructed in this local system.

The result was the same; turning his head he allowed himself to marvel once again at the graphical brilliance of the three dimensional illusion, the exquisite detail, the many framed pictures (his gaze skittered over the martyrdom of St. Eulalia) the shelves laden with their clutter of objects, the wood working tools and below, in the shadows beneath the bench, the representation of Learner’s book. He stared longingly at it, the temptation to access it, perhaps even to return home, his real home, the Little Big Farm, almost unbearable. Almost.

A phantom touched him and he looked about wildly before realising it had been Jodi. He flicked the visor up, momentarily confounded by the change in scene back to the media control room, the body tumbled on the floor, Jodi bending towards him, the pale scar drawing her lip upward as though amused at his surprise.

“We don’t have much time,” she said.

He nodded, assuming she had received more information from the others and nervously drew down the visor. The thought of someone being outside, really there, even someone he knew such as Jodi, while he was inside, absorbed in a task, worried him.

He thought for a moment then using his tongue to drive the jewelled cursor, selected an image of a camera hanging on the studio wall. An options menu appeared and he called up an external view. He smiled, pleased with himself as the image changed to one of Jodi, weapon half raised, looking through the equipment on the work surface. He widened the angle and dragged the viewpoint until he was looking from a corner up by the ceiling, able to see the whole room, including himself, his head concealed in the visored hat, and the open doorway. He felt a little happier. He made the image a bit larger, just in case.

Now, he thought, some protection. He looked for the maths crystal and pulled it forward. It hung before him, rotating slowly, its many facets flickering with icons and symbols. What on earth was he going to do? Jodi had suggested a buffer and an interrupt. OK, he could make sense of that. If he was going to examine the local system without getting fried like his clone, he could use a buffer to store the data and then peek at the buffer rather than the whole system.

He tried a virtual voice command, forming the word buffer with his tongue. An icon on the maths crystal illuminated, jumped out and enlarged. There were various input and output attributes to set. He selected the local system as the input and chose another picture for the output screen, enlarging it and giving it a bit of a curve. Hopefully he would be able to browse the local system through this.

And an interrupt? Again, an icon leaped out of the crystal. He placed one on the external view of the room, by the open doorway. There were a number of possible attributes to set here and he selected the heat source method and audio/visual alarm. Now, if another person entered the room, the interrupt would trigger the alarm. He had to set various attributes for the alarm, choosing the image and sound of a barking dog, a big black one, not unlike Learner’s shadow creature. This is almost fun, he thought, if a little worrying.

He called up another interrupt and after a few moments searching the virtual studio, applied it to a graph of his body functions which included temperature, pulse, blood pressure. He set it to shut down the buffer screen if his pulse rate rose above 180 or fell below 40. He thought for a moment then reset it for 200 and 30 on the grounds that things might get quite hectic. If his pulse fell below 30 it would mean he’d been thoroughly crashed and his heart was probably about to stop.

He arranged for another interrupt to shut the studio GUI down completely and retract the visor on the hat. With luck that warrior woman will know some basic resuscitation techniques, he thought. Don’t think about it!

Anything else, he considered? He didn’t know.

He dragged the buffer screen closer, enlarging it further and wrapping it around so it concealed the bulk of the virtual studio before him; a screen within a screen. He pulled the external view screen and the vital functions graphs over to one side, letting them just overlap the buffer; they all looked pretty normal with just the pulse up a little, which did not surprise him.

In the external view he could see that Jodi had adopted a meditative posture, standing with her knees slightly bent, back straight, arms lightly curved, able to observe both Trueman and the doorway.

He pulled up the visor. Yes, there she was, standing above him, facing the doorway.

“I’m going in,” he stated. She just blinked at him.

Trueman drew the visor back down, concealing the warrior and the media control room with the image of the virtual studio which was in turn overlaid by the buffer screen. OK, he thought, let’s do it. Open local system feed to buffer, he commanded silently.

The buffer screen came to life and filled with a variety of linked shapes. Trueman studied them. Like a flow diagram, he thought, a visual representation of a database; databases, he corrected and datasets. He began to follow routes through them, trying to trace the connections back to their sources but there were no details of where anything went. He felt stumped.

His programming self began to wonder how he could get underneath the bonnet, so to speak, to see how all this was done. He checked the maths crystal and found he could trigger a code view. Ha! Like old times, he thought, as the new page filled with letters and numbers.

Looks familiar, too. Then he was truly surprised, even shocked. The backbone to all the sophisticated foam on top, it had barely changed since ARPANET! In fact, the very foundation of the network was the same, and there was Zoob, his Zoob, his contribution to the growing network! Why, he'd coded that back in 1982!

It was like finding a sleek car had a little horse in the engine, for pity's sake. Admittedly, as a packet driver it had been a fine piece of code for its day, elegant and simple compared to what it replaced and it had earned him some decent money, becoming ubiquitous. But seriously?

Then he stopped and examined the Zoob code section more carefully. Something didn't look quite right. Its been changed, he realised, someone had made a very subtle alteration.

“Oh for fuck's sake!” He blurted, out loud.

Quickly he checked the camera. That expletive had roused even Jodi. He waved a hand reassuringly.

Now he was chuckling. The additional bit of code was a virus and he knew who had written it. It was his! He also knew that he hadn't released the virus, yet. Oh my, Trueman thought, oh my oh my!

He sat back in the chair, propped his chin on his right thumb and laid his forefinger along the side of his nose. This nudged the visor and the display tilted then realigned itself. He checked the external view and was reassured that Jodi hadn't noticed that. Back to it then.

The virus provided a back door. It popped open to a password, the same password as that to his workstation back at the Little Big Farm (the square root of PI to nine decimal places, each alternate digit translated to the letters of the alphabet, according to their ASCII number).

The page of letters and numbers began to change, beginning top left and flowing down, line by line as the hard encryption was undone. Now he could read it, could follow where all the connections led.

It started to make sense; all the feeds led here and then a fat pipe connected back to the Alt-Tech Centre. So it was all being driven from there, he realised, all of it, including the fake feeds, the whole scam! It became blinding clear who was responsible.

Trueman found the function he needed on the maths crystal, copied the critical information and placed it all on a virtual shelf in the virtual studio.

Now those poor people, he thought, the Vollies.

He traced a link to another connector, this one locked. Momentarily stoppered, he noticed the tongue flickering and then the lock sprung open. He sighed. So it was me who locked it, or rather, the original occupant of this body. Now he knew who was responsible for that outrage. Gritting his teeth, he copied what he needed and added that to the stack on the shelf.

This will probably see me in jail, he thought, with an edge of bitterness, or worse. But he was determined, the whole appalling mess of abuse and murder had to be revealed.

He needed a last piece to this particular jigsaw- the INCO and clones were themselves tools; they were designed and used for a purpose. He already knew who had controlled them and that the INCO embedded interfaces gave them unparalleled access to the system but there was something else. The neural net. Checking his own file, he could see it had been implanted in the back of his neck. But what was it specifically for? What on earth would you do with an implanted neural network that resembled the way a human brain worked?

“Of course,” he said, out loud. You might want to upload your conscious mind to it, into a new body, he thought. The thought went on, or another mind might take up residence in it, somehow, by accident, or mistake.

He sat back, shaking a little and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Hello me.” He muttered, a little bitterly.

Trueman pulled the information from the shelf, (virtual info from the virtual shelf, he reminded himself). Now, there has to be some sort of international enforcement agency still in operation. He snooped the system and found a survival of an International Security Force with teeth and offices in several countries, including that of the Alt-Tech Centre.

There you go, he thought with satisfaction, and sent the info down the pipe. As an afterthought, he sent further copies to several connections in the old country, including Last Resort cantref.

Done, I think. He checked on Jodi. As far as he could tell she hadn't moved a muscle and seemed to be asleep with her eyes open, or meditating? What else then?

The virus, he thought. I need to sort that.

With a growing sense of longing, realising that he had wanted to do this ever since he first plugged in, back at the Alt-Tech Centre, Trueman picked it off the shelf with an eye blink. It floated towards him, releasing a little shower of sparkling dust. He studied the beautifully complex fractal on the cover. Very attractive, he thought.

Then, at last, he opened Learner's book.

Thanks for reading. Pics are from the Public Domain except for the dog, who is my familiar. Comments always welcome. Hwyl! Chris.