Chapter 395: Dicing With Fate

Monday, September 17 to Sunday, October 21, 2007

Getting a bug was easy. I sneaked out again in the wee small hours of the morning, flew to Portland, where I stole a few each of several different varieties of bugs from the FBI, including parabolic mics, suction cup bugs that could be attached to the outside of windows, and different types that transmitted or just recorded what they heard. I even took some video bugs although I didn't think I'd use them with my current set of baddies. I also stole a good supply of batteries, chargers, the operating manuals, tape recorders and a lot of the FBI's other associated equipment in case it might be useful one day. Taking that much equipment out of the FBI's storeroom amused me, which was why I took so much of it.

I didn't want to fly home with so much metallic stuff but I could risk flying it around Portland at a very low altitude, so I temporarily left it on the FBI's roof while I searched around the area for a company that had a lot of packages piled up ready to be picked up. I found a suitable company, flew my loot there, extracted the manuals, packaged everything else in that company's own boxes, addressed them to myself, and left my boxes with the others that were already in the outward goods area. Then I flew home with the manuals.

My loot arrived mid-afternoon, by which time I'd already read the manuals from cover to cover because some of the bugs, transmitters, receivers and audio processing equipment were quite tricky to set up and use. With Dad's and Prof's help - because these toys were cool - we set up my planned system in the Adults' living room to make sure we had everything working, and then we waited until it was dark.

I returned to the baddies' base and started my operation by sticking a suction cup mic on the middle of their largest living room window. The rest of that system's required equipment was already set up, including my having the earphones on. Like most windows in Corvallis, it was double-paned, but I got fairly clear reception on my first attempt - I'd stolen good gear. The baddies weren't saying anything interesting at the moment, but the main purpose of the window bug was so I'd know if the people inside got suspicious of what I would be doing next: installing a much better full-time bug.

I needed to create quite a large hole under the eaves to get my equipment into the roof-space. I chose a place hidden behind a large tree's branches. I pushed the branches away then burned through the eave because smashing or drilling would've been too noisy. A couple dozen small, overlapping, max-heat blobs applied directly to the wood along a nearly foot-long length of the eaves made it catch fire, whereupon I canceled the blobs and created an airtight box around the inside and outside of the burning area, snuffing it out. Repeating that a few times weakened the wood so much that it was easy to push through it to make the size of hole I needed. I sprayed the area with water from a plastic water bottle that I'd brought with me. Into the roof-space went the bugs, transmitter and cabling.

The roof of this house had line of sight to our Adults' House so my bugs were going to report home using a direct beam rather than a wide-area broadcast. I didn't want to put a transmitter on the roof because the baddies might discover it when they next adjusted their communications equipment, so I was using one of those fold-up mesh dishes, similar to an umbrella. I flew it into the house's roof-space far enough that there was enough room to open it up and point it roughly in the right direction.

The baddies' living room had a light fixture hanging in it, so it necessarily had a hole in the ceiling for the light's electrical wiring. It was therefore easy to thread the mic down the light fixture's cabling hole and into the fixture itself. The mic was now exposed to the air in the middle of the living room so should easily pick up their speech.

Dad had shown me how to splice my bug's base station into the house's power cable, and two cables from the base station to the dish provided its power and data.

All the lights were green, so it was only a matter of getting the dish pointed to where we had erected the receiver at my home. It was behind a window in the Adults' House, in a box covered in thin gauze so no one could see what it was. I used a neighbor's phone to call Dad's cellphone then hung up after one trill to alert them to the start of the sound check.

I did my best to aim the dish at the right window of our house, that being somewhat tricky as the roof blocked my vision. I had to place my sight blob immediately behind the dish and move the blob in the direction it was 'facing'. Once the blob was through the roof, I could see whether it was heading toward the receiver. It wasn't, so I guessed how much to move the dish and tried it again, until it looked reasonable. Julia didn't react. The people beneath me were talking and their TV was on, and the dish was transmitting, so those aspects were fine. After a few seconds of not getting any feedback, I tweaked the angle of the dish and waited again.

It took three tweaks before Julia walked in front of the window talking on her cellphone. Before I'd left home she'd told me that she'd do her best to have a long-winded conversation about fashion. I'd apologized for making her role in my plan so onerous. My radio blob saw the point source transmission of Julia's cellphone for three seconds before she hid it again by walking out of the window frame back behind the large, metal serving tray we were using to block my radio blob from seeing her phone's signal when she wasn't wishing to show it to me. Seeing her signal for three seconds meant "three out of ten", which wasn't very good so I tweaked the dish again.

Julia's cellphone signal was exposed in the window for six seconds this time.

After several more tweaks, I'd got it up to eight, which I thought was probably good enough. That was my families' opinion of how easy it was to hear the voices, on a 1-to-10 scale, and it was quite likely that the mic's location stopped us getting any better than an eight. I called Dad's phone again, letting it trill four times before I hung up. More than two rings meant: "Finished this stage, starting the next." Which was to successively bug the baddies' kitchen, master bedroom and the house's mini-office. The process was so similar to what I've already described that I won't describe it again. The bugs were all wired to the same dish as it multiplexed its signal back to our house, where we'd already configured it to be split and sent to four different tape machines.

After calling called Dad's phone again at the end of the home-office test, the next stage was an easy one: Dad was to walk out on to the roof of the Activity Level. He'd be inside a wooden frame we'd made, over which was fixed a black sheet. He'd be wearing a crash helmet too. I wanted to know whether the baddies' infrared cameras were sensitive enough to detect Dad. He was the largest member of my families so if they couldn't see him, then they shouldn't be able to see me. There was very little ambient light where Dad was going, so he shouldn't appear in the visible spectrum either.

I watched their screens carefully, seeing nothing. After a minute, Julia walked in front of the living room window again, letting me know that Dad had returned inside.

I sent another four trills. The next stage was for my families to place several innocuous calls, calling from their landline, their and my cells, while I watched to see if there was any reaction below me.

There was none. That didn't mean the baddies weren't doing it, as this might just be the visual observation post with another team on audio, but it had been worth doing the test anyway.

After Julia gave me her signal again to let me know they'd finished, I called Dad's phone and let it trill quite a few times, which meant "Finished." I'd told Julia it meant: "Finished and get back to bed because I'll be coming home horny." It's important to keep my helpers' morale up. Mine too, come to that.

I'd been looking through the baddies' house in odd moments and there'd been no improvement in my chance of getting hold of any useful information visually. The only difference was one guy was missing, which had worried me a little until I realized I was being silly because for all I knew twenty other guys were 'missing' too, as I had no idea of the size of this team.

I collected my gear and went to climb back into Prof's car's trunk, that being how I'd hidden my departure from home.

The multi-channel receiving system was part-computer and part-tape and it was possible to listen to different segments while the tapes were recording everything. It was also possible to skip silence on the playback, which I'd thought would save us a lot of time but turned out to be less useful than I'd hoped because the baddies in the living room kept the TV on and talked crap almost nonstop. Keeping up with how much listening we needed to do was a 24/7 operation and we couldn't get anyone else to help us, so each of us had to pull some tape baby-sitting duty.

^

Apart from learning more than I ever wanted to know about many sports, over the next few weeks we did learn some interesting things:

• They ALWAYS called each other by number. There was never a slip, which was inhumanly consistent of them unless they didn't know each other's real names.

• Half of them were foreigners, mostly from the Eastern Bloc. We got that from the sports talk, their accents, and they sometimes said things like, "Back in Prague..." Some of them used foreign words sometimes, presumably when they didn't know the correct English, but "English only" was a rule that was quickly enforced whenever any of the foreigners started speaking 'foreign' to each other. They seemed a distrustful bunch.

• They didn't plan anything. They were called by a low numbered person and told to do something specific and detailed. Their job was to collect the equipment they needed from where it was left for them, carry out the tasks, report back, then wait to be called about the next job.

• It was clear that the group I'd found was only the tip of the iceberg, but they never gave away any information about the rest of the 'berg. I gained the increasingly strong impression that these guys were mercenaries who didn't know or care who their bosses were.

• There was some talk about what they'd do after this job was over, from which I got the impression that this was an open-ended job which could last a long time. They hoped it did because they were happy with whatever they were being paid.

• There were standing instructions that they were often reminded of. Not to get within five hundred feet of me was rule #1. Preferably not to get any of their equipment within five hundred feet either, although some jobs required it. I several times heard things like, "Yeah, yeah, I know it's deadly. I won't fuck up." So presumably these guys knew about the Guardian Angel and were wary of it. I was pleased they weren't saying "I know HE'S deadly."

I'll describe several of their jobs to give you an idea of the sort of shit they were up to. For descriptive convenience, I'll categorize them as either recurring jobs or oncers. Recurring jobs included:

• Collecting samples of my hair after my haircuts, which Julia makes me get frequently because image is important. A baddie entered the hairdresser's after I left and used a covert tube down the inside leg of his trousers to suck up hair off the floor.

• Watching my movements, primarily by using the satellites; there had to be at least a dozen of them judging by their having 24-hour coverage. I sincerely hoped they hadn't been launched specifically to spy on me because that'd be a very scary degree of commitment. I got Ava to take my car for a spin up the highway one night and I learned that they were able to call up immediate helicopter support. I got Ava to repeat it the next night and I tailed her from very high above. When the chopper arrived, I snooped it. I discovered that my car had luminescent paint smeared on its trunk that was not in a visible light spectrum. The helicopter had a wide-angle 'invisible' light that excited the paint and displayed the bloom on a screen in front of the pilot. I learned its frequency. I followed the chopper until Ava had returned home and the chopper returned to its base in a farmer's field outside of Albany. I snooped it and its crew thoroughly, but pointlessly as they were clean of any clues. They even had a stack of different tail number decals they could swap between, as one example of the measures they were taking to avoid revealing anything useful.

• Knowing about my car's paint smear, I checked and easily found out that all our families' vehicles were similarly smeared. I later learned that it was more of a chemical than a paint, and it lost effect or got washed off fairly quickly as renewing it was another of their recurring jobs. They were annoyed every time they saw our family vehicles being washed. We did NOT increase the frequency of that.

• Stealing our trash on trash collection days.

One-time jobs included:

• Collecting my fingerprints.

• Getting hair samples from everyone in the families, including the roots. That took them a while, especially because Donna was growing hers longer.

• The most common type of one-time jobs were attempts to gain information about the angel. They took laser and thermal measurements of the air around me and our home. The thermal measurements were done by an extremely sensitive infrared camera they set up in a tent on their property and aimed on the front slope of ours. I deliberately showed them that the angel didn't register on infrared to encourage them to stop using that technique because there was too much danger of them catching me flying. They also used a millimeter radar detector similar to the ones that are getting installed in airports these days, the ones that can see through clothes, so they could see if I was carrying anything to create the angel's effects. They were testing every angel possibility they could think of, from the air above to the water below, as they were also intercepting our drainage water so it could be tested for exotic elements the angel might give off. I'm sure they would've done a lot more angel experiments but they must've been difficult to think of given the continual absence of ANY positive result, leaving them with nothing to follow up on.

• Ron's body completed its transformation into Mark's shortly after our return from Noumea, including the well-tested changes 'requested' by my girls. We held off announcing it for a few days hoping to solve the surveillance problem quickly. When that proved intractable, we announced the completion of the transformation in order to con(vince) the public into believing that the resurrection was real. That created a renewed media and public frenzy. A much smaller one than last time but it still gave the surveillers opportunities for one-time accesses to me. We carefully managed our actions over these days to prevent the baddies from having too much access to us or our property.

• Spiking my food in a restaurant so I threw up and got the shits, letting them collect vomit and shit samples. Being a spy is a very glamorous job.

• The Kids - by which I mean the occupants of the Kids' House, so excluding Donna - booked a weekend in New York for a show and possibly a little clothes and other shopping. I had no idea how the behind-the-scene controllers learned about our trip, but it caused a flurry of activity as the local baddies got orders to set up several experiments in our hotel room, which the caller knew the hotel and room number of. Obtaining an EEG reading and a blood sample were the two experiments I objected to the most. They also wanted another of my shit samples presumably because the previous sample had produced some weird results, so they were going to rig the hotel toilet with a holding tank. No way was I going to let them get EEG and blood samples so we simply arrived in New York on Saturday morning, did everything we wanted to do then flew home late in the evening, calling the hotel to apologize and letting them charge us for the room anyway.

Except for the New York incident, we'd so far - about four weeks since our return from Noumea - let them carry out nearly all of their plans as they were mostly innocuous and we didn't want to alert them to our eavesdropping. When it seemed easily believable we'd do something that prevented their experiments happening or working, as that would delay their operation, giving me more time to find out about them. I needed that time because I was making next to no progress in backtracking them, and what little progress I did make was only going very short distances before hitting dead ends. It was very frustrating and worrying. Forward tracking - searching the FBI's, CIA's, etc., databases for any sign of an operation involving me - was obviously not going to work because of the level of paranoia these guys had and how careful the Government had learned to be after Majestic Countdown's demonstration of skill at accessing computers. Given forward tracking's dismal chance of success and the very real risks involved in trying to get sight blobs into places like Langley, that approach was closed off.

I did things like steal more equipment from another helpful FBI storeroom and put GPS trackers on the baddies' cars. I could download their journeys whenever I wanted, but the trouble was that they never went anywhere that led to anything useful. They were deliberately isolated, and even when their next job needed new equipment, they were told where to pick it up after it was already placed, and it was always in different, public locations. Their controllers were being so careful I was sure that the people who delivered equipment were also ignorant, mercenary cutouts.

I used a DMV computer to do a search on one of the cars parked in their garage. I'd previously noticed another Corvallis car which had a license plate with only one character changed, so after the first search, I immediately did the second on the local car, hoping that if the first did ring any alarm bells, they might see the second and believe the first was a typo. The address of the registered owner of the first car existed, but there was no one living there with the name of the car's purported owner, and the occupants seemed to have been there for years.

I got suspicious of the baddies having cash but no ATM cards. They were buying groceries but never seemed to run low on money. I found an ATM card in a drawer in the kitchen. I borrowed it, took it to a bank and got their account number. The balance was $700-odd dollars and the account had become active a month before our Noumea trip with a $2,000 deposit made by TT (telegraphic transfer) from a Cayman Islands account, with a $400 withdrawal at the local supermarket two days later, then frequent withdrawals thereafter, mostly at the supermarket and video store. Every month another $3,000 was TT'ed in, with occasional small extra deposits that I guessed were to cover incidental expenses. The account holder's residential address turned out to be a likely fake too, and bank statements were sent to a PO Box. I went to quite a lot of trouble to set up a video bug pointed at the PO Box, but it was cleared by a courier company that held on to everything they collected.

There was much more happening in both directions - me to them and them to me - than what I've described, but you should have the idea by now. The key point was that I'd used up all the covert, non-risky things I could think of to get information on these people, and I'd effectively gotten nowhere, as had all the other dimensions' Marks that I'd heard about. The only inter-dimension information I got was that it appeared likely that none of the Marks with less than five merges had this surveillance problem. Meanwhile, the baddies were starting to get unacceptably invasive, as indicated by the spiked restaurant food and New York hotel room examples.

There were quite a few risky things that I could do, but the trouble with my doing risky things is that they might blow up in my face very quickly. I knew these baddies had a lot of resources, but that's all I knew, so was unable to guess how violently they might react to my showing that I knew about them. Nor could I guess whether they'd include my families in their reaction, which meant that my families had to go into very effective hiding before I started taking overt action against the surveillers.

^

While the above had been going on, my families had been suggesting everything they could think of to help me. Unknown to them, I'd also been working behind the scenes on another approach. Actually, "beside the scenes" would be a more accurate phrase, as I'm talking about the parallel dimensions.

One approach I had available was to take advantage of their being so many Marks. 80% of the Marks I contacted during the four weeks since we got back from Noumea were experiencing this surveillance, and they reported much the same proportion among their five-merge contacts too. Ever since I'd achieved my fourth and fifth merges, the frequency of our déjà vu's had given us not-too-inconvenient opportunities to try to gain some knowledge about the science behind déjà vu merging. We'd been able to conduct different types of experiments, collect statistics, etc. We'd learned some things, but nothing urgent or profound [some of them are mentioned later when they become appropriate]. That these experiments were ongoing made it easy for us to think of helping each other with the "Surveillance Problem", as indicated by the cross-dimensional help idea being suggested by the first Mark who had warned me of the problem back in Noumea.

We could do something like put the word out across the W-Dimension for a couple of weeks that we'd all roll three dice on a particular date. Any Marks that rolled triple-1s (1 chance in 216) would then do a risky strategy and then use subsequent déjà vu's to let the waiting Marks know what happened. One experiment we'd done ages ago was to generate random numbers in several different ways to see if there were any mechanisms that influenced cross-dimensional randomness. Rapidly determined random numbers, such as by rolling dice, produced values that were independent across dimensions. Slowly determined random numbers, such as the rainfall on a particular day, were highly dependent across dimensions. Rolling dice would be a fair way of choosing which Marks to take risks.

Putting the word out through all the five-merge Marks was practical given that the surveillance problem was lasting weeks. We get almost exactly ten déjà vu's per week, so if one of us had an idea and started spreading the word through his déjà vu's, then after the first déjà vu there'd be two Marks with that idea, after the second déjà vu there'd be 4, then 8, 16, etc. After one week (10 déjà vu's) there'd be 1,024. After two weeks 1,048,576 (call it a million). After three weeks 1,073,741,824 (call it a billion).

There are two important assumptions in those calculations. The first being that the idea started with a single Mark, which is clearly not the case with this problem, but this is also a general discussion. An idea coming from just one Mark is very unlikely as we tend to think alike. How many Marks had the idea would probably depend on how weird the idea was and how unusual its inspiring event was across the W-Dimension.

The second assumption is that the number of Marks is infinite. We were sure it wasn't a low number. Tens of thousands seemed the bare minimum; with millions, billions or even more seeming as possible as any other number. If there was a fairly low number of us (say 100,000) then the idea-spreading process would soon be hitting Marks that'd already heard the idea, slowing its spread. Whereas if there were billions of Marks, the idea's spread wouldn't be slowed until hundreds of millions of us had heard it.

There was also a third minor assumption - more of a simplification really - that none of us would be asleep when his déjà vu arrived. That wasn't significant enough to matter. [While I think to mention it, we sometimes have déjà vu's between Marks in different situations. You may recall that happening to me when I was waiting to get stronger so I could push the floors inside the partially ruined Fort Dodge lab. We've never had or heard of a déjà vu between a sleeping and an awake Mark, presumably because their minds are too different. We were slowly accumulating information like that; it was interesting but hardly useful.]

To decide on the optimal strategy for having only some Marks find out what strategy worked to solve the "Surveillance Problem" - as we had began calling it - we needed to know two pieces of information:

1. How many weeks it'd be before the Surveillance Problem got badly out of hand, forcing the "Waiting Marks" to act - those of us waiting to learn what the "Risk-Taking Marks" learned.

2. How many Marks there were.

If there aren't many Marks (say 1,000 to make the example clear) and we had only a short time frame (say 2 weeks), then 1-in-216 might not get the word out well. We'd need to take one week to spread the word to do the dice rolling. With so few Marks in total, we'd quite often be déjà vu'ing with Marks who had already been told. After a week, maybe only 700 had gotten the word, and say only 600 of them were under surveillance. Rolling three dice for all 1s would give about 3 Marks to do the risky strategies. Then they had to get the results out in time for the rest of us to take advantage of them. If it took three or four days for the strategy to play out, maybe only two hundred or so Marks would get each result, and very few waiting Marks would get all the results if they needed to choose the best one before acting. In this scenario, it'd be necessary to roll only two dice, with those Marks that got double-1s doing a risky strategy.

Now considering if there are a huge number of Marks and we have at least seven weeks to work with. Three weeks to spread the news gets 1,073,741,824 Marks to play the game, and that's assuming the idea started with only one Mark. In which case we certainly don't need 1-in-216 of us to take big risks. That'd be nearly five million Marks taking risks. We wouldn't need five million risk takers, but only one. He can try a strategy and feed the results back to us. If it solved the problem, he's got weeks to send out the results. If it didn't work there's time for him to try something else. Under this scenario, we shouldn't roll three dice, but eleven, with the Mark that rolled eleven 1s being the unlucky winner.

Those are the sort of numbers we were tossing around in our own minds and during déjà vu's.

On September 25, just over two weeks after we'd returned from Noumea (so I'm backing up a little, as I've already mentioned that experiments were still happening four weeks after our return), and when school had resumed which made baby-sitting the listening post more of a nuisance, I had the following in a déjà vu:

One Of Them: <These guys are so paranoid and so heavily resourced that it looks like serious trouble. We could slow down their operation by exposing it, but with the resources they've obviously got that'd only be a temporary setback for them. The previous déjà vu we had, we got the word to do a test to get a feel for the number of Marks so we can make an intelligent choice for the parameters if we need to do something for real. Roll a die six times and that's your number. That's 46,656 combinations. The déjà vu's you do from now on, memorize each other's accumulating lists and see if you have a clash: a number common to both of you. It'll rapidly get to be too many, but we want to know how many numbers are compared before the first clash occurs. When enough of us have reported what our first clash number is, we'll be able to analyze how much sooner that is than when it should've been in an infinite population, and we'll get an idea if the population is significantly constrained.> (This isn't rigorously explained, but because our minds think very similarly we understood what he meant.)

One Of Us: <Sure, I understand. It's like what's called the "Birthday Paradox", but where you've got a huge number of rooms of people and you're trying to work out how many days in the year there are. This is tuned to only give an answer if the number of us is low. No one you met thought of a way of getting an answer for a large number of us?>

One Of Them: <Not in a practical time period with the constraints of the déjà vu experience and our memory. There are several methods that work well if we're willing to work on it for months or years, but the Surveillance Problem's time frame is too short so we have to brute force it.>

One Of Us: <Understood.>

I rolled a die six times, and I'm sure you'll be fascinated to know that I got 151633. I also worked out how many numbers I'd need to learn before a clash occurred. In an infinite population, I had a 50/50 chance of getting a clash on or before the 254th number, which I could easily memorize as it was only eight numbers per mind, and I could do that with both hands tied behind my back. It'd only take us a few days to accumulate lists about that long, so we'd soon be able to tell each other how many numbers it took for the first clash to occur. Once we knew the average of a few hundred first-clash occurrences, we'd have an accurate result. How much lower than 254 it was would enable us to calculate how many Marks were participating in this experiment (the average couldn't be greater than 254 because that required the impossibility of a greater than infinite population).