<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #18

“It’s time” said Cessus. He reached up and twisted off one of his rubberized dreads and placed it carefully on the table between them. Midway through its length it was banded with a glowing blue ring.

“This thing starts blinking, you start chatting into your comp and slowly go out to the elevators. Punch the third floor — it’s another restaurant — and take the stairs down to the front. Then get a cab and go home. You got that?” He stood up, adjusted his shirt.

“Where’re you going?” asked Fede.

“To the bathroom” said Cessus.

He turned and left.

Fede was suddenly aware of the fact that he was sitting in front of a melted bowl of ice cream, a newspaper containing a metal-mesh signal shield, and a hidden tracking antenna through which they were hijacking a connection from somebody’s house a half-mile away.

The waiter appeared, collected the dish and Cessus’s empty coffee cup, and disappeared.

Fede realized this was the first time he’d been alone since he’d found out about the Boers and all the trouble. Up until now he’d just been reacting, doing what he was told. And what the hell were they doing messing with Disney, anyway? The megacorp had become world renowned for their vicious investment and takeover cycles, leading the way in overseas labor exploitation and almost single-handedly reworking the World Trade Organization committees in their favor. Disney had become synonymous with sweatshops, black market trafficking, and stock manipulation. They’d pioneered the concept of corporate armed forces, generating a marketing spin-off to DARPA which eventually partnered with and was then sold to the U.S. government. Along the way they’d bought a couple third-world countries and used their citizenships as testing grounds for new products. The Disney nations were wonders of Darwinian downbreeding and ongoing corporate propaganda as enforced by law. They were scary, scary places.

Cessus had a right to hate them, although Fede didn’t know why he was so willing to go head-to-head. It was only business, after all.

In any case Tonx was out there risking his ass right now, and by extension so was he. If they were hijacking Poulpe from them Disney sure as hell weren’t going to sit around idle while they waited for him to come back. Defectors from Disney didn’t last very long unless they got under some other corp’s wing, and even then the battles for custody lasted forever. The Disney passport wasn’t so much a permissions slip as a title of ownership.

Scary shit, and not exactly what Fede had been planning to do with himself. He was supposed to be studying, following the courses along a prescribed path to corporate security. Part of him had actually considered working for Disney; if you got a good contract they made sure you were set for life. Instead he was about to help steal from them.

Fede crossed his arms and stared out at the city moving slowly by beneath him. He tried hard not to think about Disney. The data streams in front of his eyes flowed on, modulating against the view, rippling the houses and cars below like water over rocks. Cessus had spent a long time just watching it work, scanning for anomalies, letting error-checking routines and monitoring tripwire software get a solid handle on what normal was. He’d held forth at Fede for a while about patterns, about the parts of your brain that recognized and managed large data sets without your conscious thought. Cessus seemed to think that the 90 per cent of the human brain that didn’t seem to be doing anything actually did a lot, that it acted as a hugely subtle modulator for the electrical signals being used by that ten per cent that people could monitor. Fede had started to get interested until Cessus lapsed into theories about ESP and government mind control.

But he had made some good points. Fede knew that sometimes, when he was coding, he’d get so caught up in the overall pattern, the structure, that he’d code good-sized chunks without thinking about the specific lines he was writing. Those lines worked, they fit into the structure perfectly, but they’d been written by some other part of his brain. The module that handled the rules for code had done its job, and Fede hadn’t had to think it through character by character to do it.

He was beginning to understand how Cessus could do the same thing with network monitoring.

“How do you tell how cold it is by looking out the window — barring obvious indicators like snow?” he’d asked. Fede hadn’t had a good answer, had said “I just know.”

“That’s right” said Cessus. “You just know. Because your brain there knows how the light looks at that precise time of day in certain humidity and under particular wind speeds. Your brain knows that if the shadows are just so it must be cooler, that if the road is just that wet it’s a particular humidity. You don’t think about it, you just know.”

Fede had remained unimpressed.

“It’s the same with code, or network monitoring, or anything else you see on a screen. A good coder can often find the problem spot in code just by tabbing over it. He just seems to be able to find it, know what I mean?”

Fede did, but didn’t understand the implication. “So what?”

“So anybody can do that. Once you learn a basic skill it becomes automatic, right? You can peel potatoes without thinking about it — you just do it. It’s boring. Coding isn’t like that because you have to think about how you use the skill. Sure you can write code — the writing part is automatic — but figuring out how to write the code to addresses each individual aspect of the overall program can require a lot of thought. That’s the overhead you’re imposing. It’s just a matter of recognizing that your conscious mind isn’t the part that ‘knows’ coding, or ‘knows’ what packet loss looks like. Your conscious mind is just an orchestra conductor. It’s not playing the flute, it’s telling the flute player to play. So if the flautist is doing his job just fine, why don’t you leave the conductor bloody well enough alone?”

Fede scoffed. Cessus was constantly making stupid analogies like that, abstract comparisons that didn’t make any sense. It was pissing him off.

“You’re not making any sense. Are you saying you’d code better if you didn’t think about it? That you could hack systems better if you stared off into space and let your fingers mash the chord?”

Cessus had just smiled a smug grin and turned back to his tripwires and data logs, the screen over his left eye sliding forward and into place.

Now Fede was left watching the same data streams flow in front of his vision, waiting for Cessus to come back. He knew that at some point Pharoe’s guys would act and Cessus’s daemons would snap into place, injecting fake TCP data packets in place of the real output from the Gaterville ISP. There was no point in starting that process any sooner than necessary, and with any luck the injection would be seamless. But Fede and Cessus both knew there was no such thing as perfect. There’d be some clue, and Fede’s job was to watch for it, to map it out and see if it got caught.

It was simple, mindless watching, and as Fede sat still he kept coming back to what Cessus had said. He’d experienced that jolt of knowing before, of scanning over code without really thinking, of just letting your eyes go and suddenly — wham — you knew you were looking at the problem. It didn’t happen all the time, but when it did it was effortless. Fast and efficient. But unreliable. It seemed stupid to Fede that Cessus would endorse thinking that way all of the time; “leveraging the massive” he’d called it. “Your brain’s perfectly capable of parallel processing all on it’s own. Don’t try to implement your own resource management” he’d said.

It was crazy talk. But Fede couldn’t forget it. Some part of it made sense.

His brain clicked, his thumb and forefinger tabbed a sequence, the screen split. On the top half the data continued to stream by, unchanged. Normal. The bottom half contained the buffered data from the last ten seconds of those streams, the most recent at the top. Fede stared. There is was — three packet handoffs, all identical. Packet handoffs happened sequentially, and error checking would have launched a correction sequence to verify any break, if the Gaterville ISP had caught it. He was looking at the slip, the error where Cessus’s fake data had slid into the stream, and there was nothing. They were in.

“Nice” murmured a voice in his ear.

Fede jumped, banged his knee on the table, and tried to discreetly scan the restaurant.

“Figured you’d catch on fast, boy-o” said Cessus’s voice. There was the faint sound of a urinal flushing. “Don’t worry about those packet handoffs — I already deployed a log cleanup to cover the drop. As switches go it wasn’t bad.”

The sounds of hands being washed, of paper towels being yanked from a dispenser, of shoes clicking over tile filled Fede’s ears over his comm. He’d almost gotten his heart out of his throat by the time Cessus had returned to the table. He gently re-affixed his dreadlock, put the newspaper back in the briefcase.

“Our work here is done. Let’s pay the bill and go home. I deserve a treat.”

“You deserve!” growled Fede. “What the fuck was that? Leaving me alone out here? You scared the shit out of me!”

“Period of maximum risk” said Cessus. “It was wiser for us to be apart should the mouse have been watching.”

Fede looked up at Cessus, bewildered.

“If they’d busted in here they would have gone for me first” said Cessus. “If there were only a couple agents you might have been able to get away while I holed up in the can. At the very least you could have pleaded ignorance in court. It was actually,” Cessus stood up, paused while his glasses receding to the sides of his head, “safer for you.”

He turned and walked to the waiter’s desk, paid with a credcard. Fede stormed by, past Cessus and towards the elevator bays.

“Excitable lad” he heard him say to the waiter. “Insisted we come up here to watch birds and then jumps half out of his skin when he sees one. Children these days, no sense for nature.”

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