Something Far Larger
by J. J. Carswell
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
The most prominent theories involved the CIA; the subtler versions mentioned the NSA as well. And that was the hole that she dug the deepest. But there was never any evidence that the CIA or any part of the American government could carry out an electronic attack like the one she had witnessed.
Setting aside the intelligence community’s motive in nuking a teenage Space Camp alumnus, the core problem, the Gordian knot that no explanation could cut, was technological. Even if some sort of lethal data could be encoded in the colors and sounds that had brought on Andrew’s spasm of violence, the computer was incapable of producing those outputs, and the code on the floppy disk didn’t allow for it. Were there fundamental truths of electronics, or even physics, that the U.S. government knew and no one else? The thirty-seven other incidents she had identified served no more of a national security purpose than the one she had attended.
If the CIA didn’t check out, the KGB made even less sense. The Soviet Union, and subsequently the young Russian Federation, had a considerably less sophisticated cyber operation than the United States and, presumably, more urgent targets around the world than thirty-eight amateur computing enthusiasts. In the fire-hazard clutter of her living room — the demented and to anyone else unintelligible repository of her investigations — the plastic tub of accordion files and external hard drives labeled “Russia” sat largely untouched in the corner, between “Neurological Disorders” and “Linguistic Relativity.”
And it likely would have stayed that way if, in her ever-wider and ever-deeper canvassing of the Internet, she had not posted to a strange and anachronistically simple message board called X2856. This board had no statement of mission, topic, or purpose, and it was left to any aspiring participant to break the low-end encryption used on its messages; plain-text posts were deleted promptly by an unknown moderator. Once one could read X2856, however, two words appeared in nearly every thread and formed a mission statement of their own: X2856 was a message board of technology and theosophy
Olivia encrypted and posted the same plea as always. For weeks, no one responded: no skepticism, no mockery, but also no aliens, no Luddism, none of the conspiracy theories currently in vogue. It was possible that the denizens of X2856 had no interest in interlopers, however handy these interlopers might be at cryptography. But nothing if not disciplined, she continued to check X2856, kept it in her regular rotation, as a hunter might check her traps.
Her discipline was rewarded: she loaded X2856 one time like all the other times, except this time she had a reply. It came from a user whose handle was the ASCII symbol ¶. The others on the board referred to this user as Pilcrow, and Pilcrow’s post consisted of a long quote. At least, it seemed to be a quote, since it was in quotation marks.
This quote described or, better, struggled to describe, a set of colors, a strange spectrum, visible yet almost never seen. Reading this description, of an unearthly rainbow far from our familiar ROYGBIV, Olivia began to shake. She was back, nearly twenty-five years later: to the blood, to the smashed monitor, to the needle-nosed pliers, to the 911 call.
She controlled herself and managed to reply with two questions: What is this? And where is it from? For a week Pilcrow made her wait. She lived those days and nights on the brink of desperation. No longer was she disciplined about broadcasting her SETI-like communication into the digital galaxy. There was nothing for her but X2856.
And at the end of that week which seemed never to end, at the end of that agglomeration of ten thousand minutes, a wait all the more painful because she didn’t know if there was an end — what torture, having caught a whiff of the forbidden fruit — her prophet returned.
Dividing a single block of text into 5,000-character posts, such that most posts ended in the middle of a word, Pilcrow told her a very long story.
The quote, which Pilcrow claimed to have translated from the original Russian, came from the writings of a Soviet political prisoner named Yuri Smyrnoi, who — in Pilcrow’s estimation — was the great unheralded theosophist of the twentieth century. The great unheralded martyr of twentieth-century theosophy!
Smyrnoi was the only child of a party apparatchik in a sparse but resource-rich region of the eastern USSR, which was as good as being born to minor royalty. His father won him a sinecure as the director of research and development for a state mining operation where research and development were neither necessary nor encouraged. This left Yuri with empty time and excess brain power, and he directed an ever-increasing portion of both toward the occult.
Theosophy never had the following in the Soviet Union that it had in America and Europe, meaning that Yuri had to import many of the books and objects that lined his walls. Getting them into the country was a delicate proposition, but owning them was even more so.
He spent his days laboriously translating text after text. Requiring no translation, however, was Yuri’s most dangerous possession: the work of the “White Abbot,” three thick leather-bound journals filled with small, crabbed Russian script.
The journals were primarily ledgers, page after page of notations about food, water, wine, charitable donations, and, most interesting to Yuri, the names of patients treated at the abbey. These “patients” hadn’t come to the abbey for medical care. According to the Abbot, they suffered from what he called Bies, which neither Pilcrow nor seemingly Yuri nor seemingly the Abbot himself could manage to describe. “It’s not possession.” That was Pilcrow’s translation of Yuri’s clearest statement on the question. “Though at first it resembles the demoniac, the force in question is not contained within the patient.” So Yuri quoted the Abbot.
The ledgers covered decades. Patients continued to arrive, even though none ever seemed to improve. The Abbot noted the frequent suicides without comment. Yuri understood — Pilcrow explained — that the abbey had no treatment plan but was simply a receptacle, an asylum, for those refused by their families.
The Abbot’s purpose was not curative; it was scholarly. The fragments of prose in his journals read like scientific papers. He had taken on the impossible task of defining Bies, delimiting it, cataloguing its signs and symptoms. And he claimed to see these symptoms in other species as well; his ledgers included his non-human “patients” and documented their suicides every bit as clinically.
Around the time Yuri was elevated to direct the entire mine, his mania for theosophy and the work of the White Abbot moved beyond books. The mine, where work was dark and dangerous and careers were short, had always found a ready workforce on the trains of prisoners that pulled through en route to Kolyma.
Now Yuri began to pad these requests, requisitioning an extra man here, an extra man there, accumulating a small corps to work not in the mine but in the director’s personal warehouse. The promise of work above ground, and a relative freedom unheard of in the gulag, were plenty to ensure their loyalty.
How could they know that the mine’s fatality rate had nothing on the warehouse’s? “To us,” wrote Pilcrow, the model for Yuri’s warehouse is obvious. He filled it with animals, human and others, who exhibited certain symptoms, having tracked them down over extraordinary distances. (Though some of the human variety were on the trains already.) But Yuri’s goals went beyond the study of Bies in those who already suffered from it. He wanted to expose others.
His warehouse operated at an efficiency unimaginable to the Abbot. This was due partly to the raw exercise of power, but it was due also to an unexpected technological advance. In 1951, explained Pilcrow, the Soviet Literary Gazette printed an ideological takedown of computation, accusing engineers of creating bourgeois thinking machines.
As fate would have it, a computing device had recently arrived for use in the administration of the mine. Yuri publicly denounced the counterrevolutionary machine, and disappeared it into his warehouse, where he programmed it with old ledgers and discovered new patterns. It was an evolutionary leap from those leather-bound volumes he worshipped, more of a leap, perhaps, than he had bargained for.
After a few months of life in the warehouse, this primitive computer began to glow. It glowed with indescribable color, the same colors that Yuri tried and failed to describe in his journals.
The chaos that engulfed the warehouse in those final weeks quickly brought Yuri’s excesses to light; in other words, they could no longer be overlooked. Just as the White Abbot had been burned at the stake, so now did Yuri undergo his own heresy trial, in which he openly defended his occult practices to the high priests of dialectical materialism.
Pilcrow claimed to have a transcript of this strangest of secret tribunals. “The force in question is not inside the patients,” Yuri explained, his intonation, his body language, unrecorded. “It’s much, much larger. These beings are but an unnatural body for something that once had a body of its own.”
Those in authority did not permit him to speak for long. Luckily for Yuri, times had changed since the days of “ten years without right of correspondence.” He found himself on one of the prisoner trains from which he had so often recruited, never to be seen again.
So ended Pilcrow’s story, at 30,000 characters exactly.
To say that Olivia had questions would be the great understatement of modern times. She had questions for herself: Is it true? Does it have anything to do with what happened to my brother? And she had questions for Pilcrow: Can you prove any of this? Are you in Russia? Can you send me Yuri’s writings? Can you send me the trial transcript? Can you send me everything?
Again Pilcrow made her wait. A week later, she had his reply.
“I can do you one better,” wrote ¶. “I have the program.”
Of course, she was skeptical. She’d been painfully close to acquiring it before — far closer than a promise from an anonymous prankster in a back corner of the Internet. There was the time in Johannesburg, following up on one of the thirty-seven incidents she’d identified, when the mother of the victim promised her the CD-ROM — the same mother who died in a traffic accident the week before Olivia arrived. She had no claim on the CD-ROM any longer, not that anyone seemed to know where it was.
There was the time in Chicago, when she paid good money for a hard drive. They showed her the source code. She had chills seeing it on the screen. Then she got home and found the drive blank. There was the time... well, there were a lot of times, a lot of close calls on her way to 0-for-37. Which left her with the closest call of all: the floppy disk her brother had used in that Sunnyvale basement.
After the incident, the computer and its peripherals disappeared. When Olivia asked after them, her parents delivered a stern lecture about focusing on Andrew’s health and leaving “what happened” in the past. “We trashed it,” her mom told her, but this was a lie. Olivia knew it was a lie. They wanted her to move past the mystery of Andrew’s attempted suicide. They would say anything.
She was surprised, then, when she broke into their home a few years later and couldn’t find the computer anywhere. A neighbor spotted the intruder and called the police, who hauled her off and notified the homeowners. Here was the catalyst for a full rupture between daughter and parents, which had been a long time coming.
Her break-in wasn’t a total loss, however; her parents never realized that she had bugged their phone line. So she had a tape of the call on which her mom said, “Is it such a good idea for you to have that old stuff? You see what it’s doing to your sister,” and Andrew said, “Don’t worry, Mom. I have it in a safe place. You know I’ve moved on.” And her mom: “I know you have, sweetheart.”
Copyright © 2021 by J. J. Carswell
