Chapter 21

“I’m sorry, I just don’t get it,” Katherine said. She was getting a lot more irritated than I had expected. The problem was, so was I.

“A computer virus,” I repeated, searching for the magic explanation to make it clear to these socalled geniuses. Although Solomon had explained deliberate computer sabotage was unheard of in this society, I still couldn’t believe the concept was so hard for intelligent people to grasp. “It’s like when a human gets a virus. You get sick as it starts attacking various parts of the body.”

She stared at me, trying to interpret my words into terms she could understand. She evidently wasn’t having any luck. She finally gave it up, and decided to explore my analogy.

“What do you mean by ‘sick’? What parts of the body does this virus attack, and how does it do it?”

“What the heck, don’t you people ever get sick!” I asked in exasperation.

“Define ‘sick’,” she insisted, just as exasperated as me. “How can I know if we do it if I don’t know what it means?”

“What the hell!” I exclaimed. “Sick. A feeling of great physical discomfort. Symptoms of nausea, headaches, disorientation, hot and cold temperatures, vomiting, bodily weakness, diarrhea. What can I add? Total physical distress you can’t control.”

Katherine looked positively revolted, maybe feeling a little ill herself

“Actually, no,” she insisted. “Most people don’t get sick very often, by that description. We take a lot of inoculations shortly after we’re born, and they pretty much immunize us to most of those kinds of things.”

“But I went to a doctor’s office, and it was really busy!” I protested.

“You went to an outpatient surgery center,” she corrected me. “Ninety percent of those people were there for elective procedures. Like you were.”

“But there were so many of them. And you seem to have quite a few physicians around,” I pointed out.

“In a world where the population is in the billions, even a tiny percent of the population doing anything looks like a lot,” she explained impatiently. “People still have accidents, they still have babies or suffer sports injuries. But mostly they have problems because they’re old. Because we have so few illnesses or serious diseases, we have a lot of old people, you know. In fact, most of the physicians in the world practice some sort of geriatric medicine.”

“Oh,” I said. Well, that made sense. The more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. I studied her features thoughtfully.

I still didn’t know what it was about Katherine that attracted me. In many ways, she was still a young woman, although probably only four or five years my junior. She had a slim figure, basically attractive features, and a very intelligent and lively air about her. Nothing to get excited about, right? Yet I was, and I couldn’t help it. For some reason I was extremely attracted to her, even more so than the time I had seen her in that fake SF video, and I just couldn’t get over it.

Still, knowing she was Solomon’s girl, I was determined to hide any feelings I had towards her. It wasn’t just a matter of disloyalty to my kin and heir. There was also the fear that, either between her and Solomon, or just through the strange machinations of how Time might act, I could possibly screw things up in the here and now. No matter how I felt personally, it just wasn’t worth the risk. Still, I had my regrets.

I stood up and started wandering around the lab. It was not the same as the one I had originally landed in, but it was very similar. I wasn’t aware how many such labs and office complexes Solomon had set up, and didn’t want to know. This was the third I had stayed in, as Solomon had decided to keep moving, just in case. In that way, they certainly did remind me of some terrorist group.

“How many members would you say there are to the cause of the Revos now?” I asked suddenly.

“I beg your pardon?” Wafer said, clearly surprised by my non sequitur.

“I mean everyone, right down to the people you suspect would be willing to support the cause if they could be sure you’d win, and they won’t be punished for supporting you.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Wafer wondered.

“Just in round numbers,” I insisted. “Nothing specific, maybe to the ten thousand or so. Or even the hundred thousand. Whatever round figure you feel comfortable with.”

“Well, that’s really hard to say,” he hedged.

“Of course it is. But why don’t you give me your best guess? After all, nothing really rides on this little exercise, does it?”

“No, of course not,” he agreed, obviously suspicious that something must. “Uh, well, in very round numbers, and just based on the feedback we keep hearing from people who are trying to help further the movement in different Regions, I guess I’d say somewhere in the vicinity of twenty billion, eight hundred and forty three million, two hundred and thirty thousand. I mean, just in very round numbers.”

“Holy smoke!” I exclaimed, truly impressed. I’d had no idea. “That’s a phenomenal number!”

“Oh, well,” Wafer said deprecatingly. “That’s only a good start in terms of the total world population.”

“It is? Jumping Jehosephat. I sure don’t want to know what the total population is, then.”

“The number is less than forty percent.”

I was so stunned by those figures I almost lost my train of thought. “Jesus,” I repeated. And, by God, I meant it. No wonder they needed so many geriatric doctors!

“Uh, well, anyhow, that seems like a fantastic number to me,” I finally managed to blurt out. “And how many people actually started the Revos movement?”

“I suppose that depends on your definition,” Katherine finally got back into the conversation. I was glad she reentered without my having to prompt her. She also seemed interested in where this was going. “In the most limited interpretation, Wafer and Teknos were the original founders of the movement, in that they conceived the idea and started creating tools to help bring about some action. You know, the total vids, emails, that sort of thing. Of course, we all know nothing substantial would ever have happened without Solomon. So you’d probably have to say the movement truly started with three people.”

“And, of course, yourself.”

“No,” she denied flatly. “I came along well after it had started, and have contributed what I could. I certainly don’t flatter myself that I made anything substantial happen, as far as the Revos go.”

“Okay, fine,” I agreed. “So let’s say three. A movement that now includes more than twenty billion people – bloody hell, I still can’t believe that’s less than half your world’s population! – started with only three people. And it’s undoubtedly still spreading wildly today, right?”

“I think that’s safe to assume,” Wafer said, going way out on a limb.

“So let’s pretend those three were the virus I was talking about earlier,” I said, addressing myself to Katherine this time.

“What! But you implied this virus thing was something totally negative. Are you saying the Revos movement is in some way negative?”

“No, no! Not at all,” I protested vehemently, knowing I was already on dangerous ground with her. “Let’s say that in some way this virus could be somehow beneficial. I mean, it is beneficial, okay, in exactly the same way the Revos movement will eventually be beneficial in changing your society.”

At least she looked like she was willing to listen rather than bite my head off. But I knew I’d better get to the point before the biting started.

“I’m just trying to give you another analogy. A more positive one this time,” I assured her. “Let’s say this Master Server thing is your society, and this virus I want to introduce into it is the Revos movement. It starts as only a tiny thing, like with three people. It’s an idea, a small command in the vast complex of all of the existing computer commands inherent in the system.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Wafer nodding, as if he were getting a glimmer of what I was trying to convey. Katherine still didn’t seem like she was there. But her expression was certainly open minded, maybe even ready to be positive, so I pressed on.

“So this little command, its purpose isn’t to run any specific program or to perform any regular set of tasks. Instead, just like the original concept of the Revos, its purpose is to make the system think, to create a little chaos into the normal working of things. Ultimately, it’s intended to cause the very fabric of the established order to begin to disintegrate under the weight of new and very different ways of reacting to the same stimuli. And, like the Revos movement, the command is written to be selfreplicating. That means it’s not depending on the original command to perform the action in one memory cell at a time. It’s actually writing code into each of those new cells so they’ll not only retain their new coding, but will impact as many adjoining cells as they can in the same manner. Where before the people watched what the Zaibatsu did and accepted those things as the way it was, the way they must be, now they look and wonder why it can’t be better. Where once the computer system ran in neat little patterns that always caused the credits to flow in a certain direction, or kept the records in straight paths the program writers had intended, now the data goes contrary to what the pathways dictate. Now, positive may become negative, debits may become credits. And, because it’s all linked together, the entire system eventually starts to fall apart.”

“I see it!” Wafer proclaimed excitedly, practically bouncing up and down in his gravchair. “I see it! This virus thing will move so quickly, affect so many other memory cells and programming centers that, by the time it’s finally detected and counter-commands are written, it will be so inherent in the system it will be virtually impossible to stop!”

“Yes,” I agreed happily. “That sums it up exactly.”

“Well, it sounds good in theory,” Katherine agreed a little too reluctantly, I thought. “But I wonder how you’ll ever get this virus thing introduced into the Master Server. After all, it’s a computer command, not some disease that can be transmitted by casual contact, right?”

“Well, it’s not airborne like a real virus, of course. But, in many ways, it is fairly easily transmitted. I don’t see much of a problem with introducing the virus into some of the computer systems right here in this city, and maybe in New York just to be sure, and then letting it migrate to the Master Server.”

“For one thing,” she retorted, “you’ll never get it past the screening system.”

“The what?”

“I’m afraid that’s probably true,” Wafer agreed reluctantly. “You see, even though the Zaibatsu may not have to worry about these computer virus things, there is still the constant fear of data corruption. Since the Master Server contains what you might call the ultimate test of the correctness of all personal data, there is an incredibly intricate screening system for every single item allowed to go into the memory banks. I don’t know the details, but it’s fairly common knowledge that every single datum stored has been verified against a number of check systems for correctness. You can imagine how important that is for everybody’s confidence in the system. In the case of some sort of new command codes being introduced into the central system, I can’t imagine how such corrupted data could possibly get through the screening process.”

“You’d probably have to implant your virus directly into the Master Server itself,” Katherine claimed.

“Damn!” I exclaimed. This didn’t seem to be a monkey wrench in my plan as much as a well-stocked hardware store. From what Solomon and I had discussed briefly before I came to the future, I had gotten the impression that writing the program would be the hard part, not introducing it into the system. Now it seemed there were two Mt. Kilimanjaros to climb.

“So how do we get close enough to sabotage the Master Server?”

“That’s impossible,” Katherine said bluntly. “The Master Server is kept in a city called Tokyo, which is in the Nippon Region. It’s one of the smallest Regions in the world, but undoubtedly the hardest to penetrate, in almost all senses of the word.”

“You mean Japan?”

“I think the primary country used to be called Japan,” she shrugged. “As you know, there hasn’t been a true ‘country’ for more than a century. It’s all regions and districts now. Anyhow, the Nippon Region, which also includes a lot of little islands that used to be called Phillips Islands –”

“The Philippines?”

“Yes, that’s it. Anyhow, the Region is now under one Zaibatsu. Tokyo is the central city, and where they keep the MS. It’s the ideal guardian for the Master Server both because of the area itself and also because of their Regional Engineer.”

“Why is that?”

“Oh, my. Wafer,” she said, obviously grateful to hand this one off, “you’re the history buff, not to mention the expert on the MS situation. Would you, please?”

“Well, I’ll give it a shot,” he agreed. “I guess we should start with the history, then.” He thought for a few seconds, evidently figuring out where to start. “Are you familiar with the word ‘Bushido?”’

“That’s the warrior tradition of ancient Japan, isn’t it? It involves the Samurai, if I remember correctly.”

“Absolutely,” he nodded in relief. “If you understand Bushido, that makes it a lot easier.”

“I didn’t say I understood it. I’m aware of the word and sort of what it means,” I corrected him.

“Close enough. If you know that much about the Japanese culture of many hundreds of years ago, you might be better able to understand why many of the population – especially those with the power – are still fiercely loyal to the Zaibatsu concept.”

“Which is?”

“Without going into great detail, the Zaibatsu concept is the business system that was formulated in Japan after World War II. It helped that tiny nation get back to being a world power without the military clout. It had to do with sort of a pyramid business structure, which eventually became so prevalent it’s now the basis for our whole economicsociopolitical structure. Briefly, it’s parent corporation on top of parent corporation until you get to the major holding and controlling corporation, which was, and still is, called the Zaibatsu.”

“Oh, I see! I thought that’s what you called the governments these days. Solomon more or less explained all this to me when he told me about his early life, but I guess my mind was so locked into the traditional form of government I didn’t really get it. So, what you’re saying is, the Japanese sort of invented this Zaibatsu concept. Now that the system they developed controls the world, even if the Japanese don’t directly, I guess this old Bushido pride still makes them keepers of the faith. I mean, even if most of the rest of the world is gradually becoming turned off to the system.”

“Very good, Barney!” Katherine said enthusiastically. I preened a little at the compliment, but managed to keep from saying anything that might spoil the moment.

“Yes, exactly,” Wafer confirmed. “Of course, that’s only the psychological part to it. The Nippon Region, and of course Tokyo, is still one of the most difficult places in the world to travel to. Back in your day it was just the geographic location. It’s a set of islands that are fairly well separated from the mainland. Now, given our travel restrictions, you can’t exactly just sneak across a border, can you?”

“But you’ve got the TDM!” I objected. “Can’t you just pick a place and a time to arrive and go there?”

“To a certain extent, sure,” Wafer agreed. “Assuming we can identify a location that’s actually accessible without being immediately spotted.”