Coils

Chapter 8

Speeding along through the dark tube of the night, towns and country rush together… The lights are bright beads, the sound of the engine soothing in its monotony. I had lapsed into a half-drowse in quick reaction to the day’s events…

I was moving along at about one hundred-fifty kilometers an hour in one of the safest vehicles on the road. The truck was powered by large and expensive batteries, which were still economical because of the recent cheapness of electric power. A competing line of vehicles was fueled by hydrogen, clean and non-polluting, available now in unlimited supply again because of the cheap electricity produced by solar power. Both were largely the result of advances made under patents held by Angra Energy, with their vast new power installations producing electricity across the Sunbelt.

I remembered vividly how the substance of some of the patents had been obtained. I was guilty of industrial espionage, though I wondered whether any statute really covered the specific methods I had used. Morally, though… Well… This was not a suitable time for soul-searching, though I wondered why it bothered me now when it hadn’t then. Or had it? Or had I changed? Or both? There was a memory somewhere that I couldn’t quite reach.

The truck I rode was completely automated, traveling only on specially equipped highways, though more and more roads were being fitted with the necessary equipment. Usually, they drove in one special lane. It was plainly marked, so that human drivers could avoid it if they wished. Actually, though, the automated tracks had proven safer than the traditional kind, and very few people objected to sharing the road with them.

All of this meant that I was safe, for the moment. But there were really a number of things I should be about. Only, it felt so good to be stretched out here on the right seat, which converted into a cot, my head propped slightly to see the lights in the sky as well as those along the way. The wind whistled about us, engines hummed below. Peripherally, I was aware of steady transfers of data, and this too was good. Every minute, I was getting farther and farther away from the scene of my troubles.

The cot was there, as well as some elementary plumbing, for the same reason that the truck was still fitted with a full set of manual controls and two seats. The Teamsters’ Union had been given large blocks of stock in companies profiting from this accelerated trend to automation. They no longer raised serious objections to the gradual cutback in the number of drivers’ jobs, but the issue of requiring a live driver on board was not completely dead. It had not exactly been a Big 10-4 all the way—more a forty-roger, finger-wave, 10-65. So, the trucks still came equipped and continuing negotiations still raised the possibility of some form of featherbedding. For which I was, at the moment, grateful. This because, in addition to the facilities, I had also located some freeze-dried food evidently left by the last human driver or passenger. I had eaten enough to take the edge off my hunger before I had collapsed the seat and stretched out, overcome by fatigue.

All right. I had to provide for my continuing safety. Which meant that I had to know as much as I could before I allowed myself the luxury of sleep. There was still too much that I did not know about this freight run and everything connected with my passage, and there was only one way that I could discover more—

Click. Clicket. Clicketderick.

Down, twisting, into, through, expanding now, out branches and sub-branches… Dots of light… Break-voids… The elegant symmetries of the programs and contingency programs within the onboard computer… Laid out like an incandescent formal garden… No scents here, however, and sense coded… Pause and consider its ways… The rest will come. . .

The computer steered and controlled speed, receiving information on road conditions and other matters through a communications strip buried in the pavement. Its radar probed continually on all sides for other traffic and for unexpected obstacles. In principle, it was similar to the manner in which the Hash Clash moved along the channels among the Keys, obtaining information from broadcast units on their banks. And at the same time as this one managed the driving, it was monitoring engine performance, the condition of the brakes and all other systems.

I passed in analogue through these various functions, coming to understand them as I did so. And this, in turn, provided a number of insights into the overall design. I coiled further then, attacking the travel-code. There were a number of obscurities—bits with no immediately apparent referents, the precise meanings of which would have to remain unknown until they were actually called into operation—but the general picture began to fall into place. It seemed likely that our destination was Memphis.

Further, further… Winding through the programs… The biggest question of all still pended… The Why still waved and fluttered like a bright banner before me… I ransacked the instructions until I came upon it—strange, and at the same time familiar…

Ricketerclick.

I withdrew from the bright microcosm, puzzled.

I groped beneath the dashboard then for a small first aid kit which the computer’s inventory had told me should be present. I located it and brought it out. I found some bandages and an antibacterial ointment within.

There was also a small drum of water with a flexible hose and a tap nearby. I drank some and used some more to wash my cuts. I applied the ointment then and covered the wounds.

Running in darkness like a company of migrating creatures, untouched and untouching, the great trucks bent their course across the land. We maintained a precise distance from the one before us. If a car cut in there was an immediate adjustment. The lane in harmony lay to the central beat of the mechanical heart. I felt the stern march of its program all about me. Yet—

I had seen it there… My signature. As plain as if it were in longhand. I had seen it as I had seen that it was the hand of a stranger rather than Cora’s which had left the message back at my condo. It made no sense… And yet it made sense.

I reclined myself completely, to where only gangs of passing stars were visible beyond the window. More thinking was definitely in order, and I stoked my tired brain and sought the tracks of reason.

The instruction that the truck stop back when it did to pick me up had not been a part of its original programming package. I had seen the alterations in its instructions, and it had been plain to me that I had somehow put them there myself. I had ordered the truck to stop for me. But how? I had never done anything like that before, had never been able to, was not even certain how to go about it.

And then I was uncertain of my uncertainty. There was the matter of the transposed digits when the policeman had punched out my SR number. Had he really made a mistake, or had an alteration occurred in the signal itself? I wondered. Was my signature on that one, too?

And the odd behavior of the monorail cars back at the terminal… I had been striving to do—something—as Willy Boy applied his cardiac arrest routine. Even then, could I have been operating at some new level?

I again recalled Marie’s words—“…getting better at what I do”. Had my ability continued to develop, along new lines, during its long period of quiescence? Had all of the recent stresses to which I had been subjected then forced me to use it in this new range, my much-abused subconscious pulling the strings?

If this were the case, and if I could learn to do it consciously, I saw a travel insurance policy suddenly presented.

But I continued to rack my still-incomplete memory. Nothing. I had always been a passive receiver, monitoring the internal activity of data processing equipment. I could not recall a single earlier instance where I had ever actually altered the programming. Now, it seemed that it could not have come to pass at a more appropriate time.

Terdickterclick.

… And around and in, again. The magical landscape lay all about me. I sought the place my mind chose to perceive as a fiery waterfall dropping into a bright yellow pool… Yes. There.

I plunged into the pool.

Down, down… Down through the immaterial linkages with the communications strip beneath the pavement… Now, like an underground river, flung… Rushing, off and away, into the vast, interconnected network of terminals and processors and junctions… What I had in mind would require adjustments at both ends…

Now, could I affect the pattern of the flow?

I willed it. I pushed. Spread out myself, both here and there, I strove to alter things at both the broadcast and reception ends, to change the characteristic signal which continuously reported the vehicle’s position to the central traffic control systems. On the far end, I worked to alter the record, to make it suitable and proper…

I watched the bits fly by, like a line of blazing bees…

Success.

I had disguised the vehicle I was riding in. When Barbeau discovered that I had not been hit and killed trying to run across the highway and that I could not be located on the other side either, he would begin to wonder who or what might have stopped at night to pick up a bleeding refugee. Let him wonder. Let him look. This truck had not passed that way.

I trickled through systems for the sheer pleasure of the ride, resisting the temptation to tamper in small ways for the fun of it. A feeling of enormous elation passed through me at the realization of this new aspect of my power. If Barbeau only knew what I had now, what mightn’t he offer me?

Cora? And my life?

No. I did not want to work for him again. I would find another way. But first…

I lost control for a moment. My mind was filled with weather maps … I was lying in a field being rained upon, watching the advance of a high pressure front. It looked like a huge H in the sky… Miles away, I realized that my real body was yawning … I… I was falling asleep… My mind was drifting … I had done what I had set out to do… and now it was time to go back… but it was so pleasant just to drift into and out of the data-bases, floating on the systems streams, stroked by the pulses… washed by the baseball scores … I was…

I slept. Never before had I dreamed in the coils of the data-net, never before had I surrendered my consciousness in such a state. But the fatigue had caught up with me—and I was gone—before I knew it…

Asleep in the arms of the data-sea, asleep in the coils of the deep…

I dreamed. I dreamed as I had never dreamt before, and only fragments protruded above the skyline of wakefulness, later…

I dreamed that I was a computer—a vast, unsophisticated one—existing in a kind of Limbo. A shadowy figure came and stood before me. While I did not exactly know this individual, it was not unfamiliar.

It moved to a keyboard and punched out a query—I do not remember what—requiring that I search my data-banks.

Whatever it was that it wanted involved an extraordinary amount of information. My printer hummed and the copy began to emerge.

The dark figure took the printout pages into its hands without tearing them loose and began to scan them at a rate which equalled my rate of output. They passed in a steady, shuffling cataract into accordian-pleated heaps upon the floor. Gradually the figure, still reading, was immersed within them.

When I ended my response the papers were swept away as by a sudden gust of wind, and the figure keyed another question. Again I responded. And again. And again.

Finally, it was typing upon my keyboard—something long and involved which did not really require a response on my part. It was trying to program in—well, tell me something. This input went on and on and on, and I was not really understanding all of it. Frustrated, the figure tried several more times…

All that I remembered, from the crazy games the waking consciousness plays with dream materials, was, NET LOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS, IMPEDIMENTS REMIT…

Amazing, the order in which a recovering memory recovers, the images in which we clothe things, the commonplaces within the mysterious, and vice versa.

I awoke back inside my own skull and feeling somewhat rested. There was a moment of disorientation, and then the entire previous day’s doings returned to me. I sat up and looked out of the window. Countryside, with a pre-dawn paling of the sky off to my left…

I took a drink of the flat-tasting water, my throat feeling rather dry, then used the sanitary facility. I washed and combed and sponged a few spots from my clothing. Then I opened some nourishing but otherwise undistinguished rations and broke my fast while staring ahead and trying to remember something that seemed very important

Something had happened. What, I was not certain. I did not doubt that I had actually altered the truck’s signal and its reception. But there was something more. While not on a level with Hans Castorp’s, perhaps, I felt that my dream did hold some significance. Maybe I was really a computer dreaming I was a man.

The truck gave a sudden lurch, and I looked up in time to see a girl in bluejeans, a heavy sweater and tennis shoes pass out of sight to the left. What the devil was she doing in the middle of the highway? Then, up ahead, the figure of a young man crossed before me—not too quickly, and not at all like a person running for his life. His movements were studied—with almost a dance-like quality to them. The radar, of course, picked him up immediately and my truck slowed. Then he was left behind, in the interlane area on my left, passing as the similarly garbed girl had passed.

Shortly, we braked again. There was no one before me, but naturally my truck would brake if the one before it braked, and it of course would brake if the one before it braked, and so on down the line.

Another jerk, and we were going more slowly. Another—

We passed two more of the youths, who had obviously repeated their predecessors’ performances here farther along the line.

And then I recalled having seen or read something concerning the practice. They were referred to variously as truck-bashers, truck-dancers and truck-dumpers. They got their kicks—usually in the early morning or late at night, when there were few witnesses passing in the “live” lanes—by dancing into and out of the automated lanes on the big highways. Knowing that the vehicles’ radars would detect them and that their computers were programmed to keep them from striking foreign objects, they were aware of their own relative safety. Some merely enjoyed causing alterations in the speed and flow of the long lines of automated vehicles. Others had somewhat more catastrophic aims, in that their objective was to so alter the trucks’ speed in a short period of time as to overload the control systems and cause a long chain of accidents to occur. Of course, there was some danger to this—outside of one’s possibly passing into the “live” lane while it was active—for they were gambling on the skill of the very same robot drivers whose systems they were attempting to overload.

Was it just kids indulging in the newest way of getting lacks? I wondered. Or was it yet another incarnation of Luddism—that old imperative to smash the evil machines which are wrecking life as we know it—now transferred from sinister engines to the computerized, the automated?

Or might it be neither of these, but something running deeper still and possibly a thing slightly more encouraging? I was reminded of something one of my professors had once said about ritual games and festal contests as being a general part of the human condition. Could the behavior I had witnessed represent a sort of modern rite of passage into the age of automation, an affirmation on the part of youth that man is still superior to his creations?

We lurched again. Damn lads! Irresponsible foolery is what it was. Too much time on their hands. They ought to…

… be out stealing industrial secrets?

Well, maybe I’d done a few socially unacceptable things myself when I was a bit younger. Of course, there had been reasons—if I could only recall them.

The ride smoothed out and we picked up speed again. Ritual ended, whatever. And the thing I had been trying to remember danced tantalizingly nearer.

The day continued to brighten. Haystacks and farmhouses emerged from the night’s retreating tide.

And then the image of the dancer recurred within my mind, flagrant passer in the dawnlight, arms waving through radar pulses, feet measuring some secret beat. To prove one’s self superior to the juggernaut by passing the body before it? To redirect the motions of the monster? To—

Redirect?

Change?

Alter?

Control?

The new, improved version of the power… I wondered. It should be possible for me to work my way back from here—terminal by terminal, connection by connection, through the data-net—coming at last to Big Mac, the computer banks at Angra Energy. The installation was hedged about with every conceivable security defense, to protect Angra from others doing what we had done unto them. There were codes and scramblers, a security kernel… Phrases such as “hierarchical design”, “stepwise refinement” and “Parnas modularity” passed through my mind, recalled from the days when I had worked to set up some of Big Mac’s protections. Of course, everything must have been overhauled, revised, refined, pushed to much higher levels of sophistication in the intervening years. But, on the other hand, it seemed that something similar might have happened to me. If I could penetrate Big Mac and reach the Double Z sector, I was certain that information concerning Cora would lie within. My rite of passage, perhaps, to the new state toward which I had been growing—if I could manage it…

All of these thoughts passed through my mind in a matter of moments, and I knew that I would have to make the attempt. Outside, the sun grew into the sky, spilling light across my path.

Petals open, birds sing, I coil…