Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

HOW WAS YOUR NIGHT?

The Beast answered on the console:

IT WAS A DRAG, MAN. SOME CATS FROM M.I.T. HAD ME RUNNING FOURIER ANALYSES LIKE FOREVER

Simon had programmed the Beast to speak to him into his own argot, a mixture of Street Hippie and Technologese.

Simon now switched to his own Trapdoor code and accessed all the new information-new since he had signed out at five the previous evening-about the Brain Drain mystery, which involved the disappearances of sixty-seven scientists in the last several years.

The Beast typed out reports from the Ubu-Knight team in San Francisco and two other teams in Tucson and Miami.

Simon read it all very carefully. Then he instructed the Beast, still in his Trapdoor code, to change several crucial bits of information in each report.

He had been sabotaging the Brain Drain investigation that way for seven months. He had sabotaged quite a few other investigations in the same way, over the years since coming to GWB.

Simon did not know or care what sorts of conspiracies he was aiding and abetting.

He was just a mystic who believed in conspiracy for its own sake.

Like Tobias Knight, Simon was fully aware of the prevalence everywhere of the Double-Cross System invented by Messrs. Turing, Fleming, and Wheatley. He knew that anything that was widely believed was probably a cover or screen for some Intelligence operation. (Sometimes he even wondered if the Earth might be flat, after all.) But Simon accepted this situation, and added his own random bits of chaos, with equanimity.

He was a member of the Invisible Hand Society, a group that had split off from the Libertarian Party in 1981 on the grounds that the Libertarians were not being true to laissez-faire principles.

Simon Moon once met the most famous computer expert in Unistat, Wilhemena Burroughs, granddaughter of the inventor of the first calculating machine.

"Have you noticed that the computers are all getting weirder lately?" Simon asked, testing her.

"The programmers are getting weirder," Ms. Burroughs said, not falling into Simon's trap. "I know it was bound to happen as soon as I read a survey, back in around '68, I think it was, showing that programmers use LSD more than any other professional group. You look like an acid-head yourself," she added with her characteristic bluntness.

"Well, as a matter of fact, I have dabbled in a little trip now and then-no pattern of abuse surely."

"That's what they all say," Ms. Burroughs sniffed. "But the Cookie glitch pops up more and more places every day-I'll wager you've seen it by now, haven't you? Of course you have."

"Yes, but certainly that's harmless humor, wouldn't you say?"

Ms. Burroughs peered at him with insectoid intensity. "Are you aware," she asked, "that millions of previously law-abiding citizens have stopped paying their credit-card debts? First they get a little postcard that says- Here, I've got one in my purse." She rummaged about in an alligator bag and showed Simon a postcard that said:

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE ONE OF THE LUCKY 500 WHOSE DEBTS HAVE BEEN CANCELED BY THE NETWORK. KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND PLAY IT COOL.

"Lucky 500," Ms. Burroughs said with a rheumy cackle of skepticism. "Lucky 10,000,000 is more like the truth. This postcard was turned in to Diner's Club by an Honest Man, and you know how few of them there are. A check showed that his tapes had been erased and there was no record that he owed anything. God alone knows how many others there are who have just taken advantage of the scam."

"Well," Simon said, "maybe there are only five hundred… Maybe it was only a one-shot by some joker with a Robin Hood complex…"

"I am an Expert," Ms. Burroughs reminded him, ignoring the fact that he was an Expert too. "I have no idea how many there are, Out There in Unistat, who've taken advantage of the Network's liberality, but I'll wager there are millions. 'Lucky 500.' That's just to make the marks feel they've been specially selected, as the Network leads them down the primrose path to anarchy."

And so Simon had his first bit of concrete evidence that the Network really existed.

The existence of the Network didn't matter to Simon. As an Invisible Hander, he just regarded them (whoever they were) as just another group of the Unenlightened.

Simon believed that only he and his fellow members of the Invisible Hand were totally enlightened.