<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #22

Fede had been coding more or less nonstop since they’d returned from the tower. Cessus had celebrated by smoking a fistful of weed and then munching three banana splits. He talked nonsense the whole time, his formerly lucid self-dissolving into a nonstop stream-of-consciousness tirade. Fede had the feeling that Cessus’s being fully together was a rare event, but decided to take a chance when he reappeared in his bathrobe after a hot shower. The Chinese firewalls used a weird mix of homespun iptable rules and port-knocking systems, and Fede couldn’t figure out how to propagate his code via the P2P networks because of it.

Cessus had sat quietly sipping a glass of grape kool-aid, a Cheshire grin plastered across his face, and produced a finely detailed description of the network architecture the Chinese were using to sidestep outbound data access. He’d grasped the essence of Fede’s problem and fit it against a deep understanding of the networks in under a minute. And this while, clearly, completely stoned.

“How the fuck you do that, man?” asked Fede, after he’d recovered his wits and run some preliminary scans against the networks to see if it would work. The results were positive; it’d take a few hours to code up the right routines, but it would do the trick.

“Do what?” asked Cessus back at him, grinning again.

“How do you just figure it out like that? You’re all fucked up but you get what I’m after right off and give me a good answer. You some kind of genius?”

Cessus laughed, a long soft barking howl.

“No, man. I just know how to allocate my brainspace. I was telling you in the tower but you were too busy trying to defend your own gestalt. And no, it isn’t easy. Takes a whole lot of meditation to init concurrent and complete lobal access.”

Fede stared at the man for a moment, a grimace of disbelief wrapping itself across his face.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked, against his better judgment.

Cessus smiled again.

“Let me make it simple for you, Feed. You’ve been training all your life to grind through information and pack it into your brain one letter, one digit at a time. That’s good, that’s how you own data; by chewing up and understanding each part. But once it’s in there” Cessus reached over and rested the tip of one hot finger on Fede’s forehead “it’s up to you how you use it.”

He leaned back, put his palms flat on the table. “Remember we were talking about how sometimes, when you’re coding, you stop thinking about the individual lines of code? How you see the whole shape of the program and some other part of you does the actual coding?”

Fede nodded, cautiously.

“That’s a state of whole-brain awareness. You’re focused on the task at hand, but not at the expense of all the other processes. You play any sports? Meatspace stuff?”

Fede shook his head.

“If you did you’d know what I mean. I used to play combat sims, even real paintball games. After a while you get in a zone where you aren’t thinking about your opponent’s gun, the turn of the next trail — you’re just listening. Your whole brain listens, processes all the data you can absorb through all your senses, organizes it all into one coherent picture of your situation and how you’re going to react. That’s what your brain is designed to do.”

He got up and tore open another packet of grape soda powder, dumped it in his glass and topped it with water from the fridge filter. “What humans have that dumb animals don’t is the ability to augment an immediate situation with additional information. We can learn abstractions previously, and bring that knowledge into play in the immediacy of the present. You can learn what the range of an opponent’s gun is, and then know when he’s staring you down if you’re safe or not. But.” Cessus stopped standing before the table, pointed at Fede over the top of his glass, “that doesn’t mean you have to stop everything else to think about it.

“Once you own the data, really know it, you can let the rest of your brain handle it. That’s what I’ve specialized in, man. Owning the data I absorb, and letting my brain do all the preprocessing. When I make a run, I spend a lot of time frontloading information about the situation and setting up peripheral inputs.

“When I was starting out I had whole walls of color bars, music feeds set to reflect data streams, all kind of shit. Turns out you can train your brain to notice pretty much anything as background information, though, so eventually I just put up traffic streams. That was what you were watching while we were in the tower.”

Fede stared at the tabletop, at the ring of water where Cessus had set his first glass of Kool-Aid.

“So you don’t think at all?” he asked.

“No, man. I think liminally. I make myself open to the multiprocessing the rest of my brain gives me. I let the other 90 per cent inform the ten percent I know of as the present, as myself. You can do that shit with drugs, but it’ll cost you. Train yourself to do it, though, and you’ll be able to program with all your knowledge at once, any time.

“Of course” he laughed “you may end up staying in that state most of the time, which is what I do. It’s liberation, my man. It’s being present to the complete reality of your experience during the only moment which exists, the white hot instant of now. That’s zen.”

Cessus stopped and stared intently at Fede, his ruddy eyes glistening wetly in the dim light of the kitchen. Then he laughed, long and loud, and reached out to rub his hand roughly over Fede’s head.

“Come on, white boy. Come on upstairs and let me teach you how to think.”

Fede spent the next several hours with a strip of duct tape wrapped across his forehead, brainwave monitors stuck with gel against his scalp, a collar of galvanic-skin response indicators, pulse and breath rate sensors snugged up against the small of his neck. Cessus ran him through three hours of tests, three hours of progressively less entertaining games. The games were simple; maneuver a bouncing ball through a series of platforms, steer a boat through a bunch of buoys, fly a glider over a mountain landscape. There was no joystick; control over each game depended on Fede calming himself and reaching a state of near-pure alpha waves; the closer he got to what Cessus called ’the zone’ the better he did at the game. After the first couple hours, tired and cranky, Fede was able to recognize what he had been talking about. It was the same space Fede tried to reach when programming normally, when dissecting new code; that pure empty feeling of just doing. He’d been there before, he went there all the time when he coded. But it was hard.

Around midnight Cessus and Fede were sucking down a veggie pizza from Cessus’s favorite Italian delivery, arguing about how the process of frontloading a programs’ shape every time was wasteful. Cessus felt you could just scan the code and know the thing, and program from there, but Fede wasn’t convinced. He did know that Cessus was on to something with his hippie-dippie brainwave shit, though. When he’d gone back and looked at the Chinese P2P modules after spending three hours on Cessus’s games he’d slipped into it easily, found the match between the routines and the port-knocking systems almost by accident. He was more focused on the feeling than the code.

Still, he found that the code he was producing was buggy and full of stupid errors. It was sloppy.

“That’s your disbelief, grasshopper. The more confidence you have the less you’ll trip yourself up” said Cessus.

Just then Marcus came into the kitchen, saying nothing, and started mixing himself a huge mug of protein shake. He glared at the two of them.

“What up, Marcus?” asked Fede. Cessus slapped a quick hand on his arm, shook his head at Fede. He raised his other hand, palm out towards Marcus. The huge man was already starting to lean over towards them, his lips curling back over his titanium shark teeth. Cessus led Fede upstairs, the pizza forgotten.

“What the fuck, Cessus?” asked Fede once the door to Cessus’s room was shut.

“What the fuck, Feed” replied Cessus. “Why are you dicking around with Marcus when he comes down from a fight? You got to be able to tell when to leave a man alone, boy.”

Fede recoiled. “Boy? Marcus is a friend of mine. I know if he needs leaving alone.”

Cessus smiled, shook his head slowly. Something crashed downstairs. Something big and heavy, but Cessus didn’t flinch.

“No, Feed. You don’t. Marcus has a whole lot of chemical lines wired through that chassis, and when he’s in a fight he uses all kinds of things. He comes home like that you just leave him alone, okay? I appreciate you considering him a friend, but trust me.

“Sometimes you just got to leave a man alone. Now...”

Cessus turned and pulled out a long piece of glass. Putting it on the low, candle-wax covered table in front of him he took out a packet of white powder out of his bathrobe and dumped a small pile on to the mirror. Fede stepped back.

“I don’t use, Cessus” he said.

“Don’t give me that shit. You’ve used since your fingers first hit a keyboard, you just haven’t had to buy anything for it” said Cessus. “I’ve been training on those games for six years now. I was two years in before I got to what you sat down with today.”

He looked up at Fede, his eyes flashing.

“You’re a natural, Feed. Your code is tight, you got the knack. You know how to learn, how to make your brain take it in. Most important, you got discipline. But you keep holding yourself down to the status quo. You’ve been taught your whole life to code by the rules, use the same stupid routines every average script kiddie out there uses. You’ve seen the work of pros, you know it isn’t the same.”

He pulled a razor out from under the table and cut the powder expertly into six half-foot long lines. The razor went back under the table and he took out a short black straw.

“You could be a pro, Feed, if you bust open the bullshit you’ve reigned in your mind with. I’m not proposing a habit here” he gestured at the lines, “I’m proposing a one-way ticket to your taking back control of your mind.”

Fede stared at the mirror. Cessus sat back and crossed his arms, his legs folded beneath him. A long moment passed.

“What is it?” asked Fede.

The next sixteen hours went by fast.

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