Mad Professor (19 page)

Today there's one who's scored a huge amount of copper wire, I know him a little bit, the other tweakers call him Rumbo. Rumbo is shirtless, warmed by his own chemical furnace, wearing a handmade copper mesh helmet on his head, sitting on the curb making more mesh helmets with a pair of rusty pliers. His hands dance in the rhythmic, repetitive motions of a large industrial machine. I'm so busy watching Rumbo that I fail to notice when the black SUV pulls up to the curb.

The doorbell rings, and then the three Men in Black are nosing around my partitioned-off box of warehouse space. My giant, over-friendly dog Larva is jumping up on them. Hella isn't here; she left early for her job teaching dance at an Oak-town high-school. I have a sweet, faint memory of her kissing me good-bye on her way out at dawn.

It's not immediately clear what the SS wants. There haven't been any threatening posts in the guest book of late. Maybe this is just practice for the Trainee, who's asking lamer and lamer questions, like whether I have to pay for the bandwidth my site uses, duh. I'm not about to tell him I pay a thousand dollars a month, it would make me sound like a stalker. He's not going to grasp that significant media art like The Prexy Twins doesn't come cheap. Before I have to fake some kind of answer, the Boss's cell phone rings.

“It's for you, Wag,” says the Boss without even answering it, which is kind of odd. He hands me the ringing phone from the inside of his coat. For a second I can see his pistol in his shoulder holster. The phone is a heavy little jobbie with a scramble unit clamped onto its base, the kind of thing my hacker friend Ben Blank would love to take apart and analyze. Not that I'm thinking about Ben right now. I'm too busy wondering who the SS has for me on the phone.

“Hi-i-i, Wag, this here's President George Bush,” goes the telephone voice. “How you today?”

I'm quite surprised. “I'm doing well.”

“Let's get right to the point,” says George. “I got an unusual type of, kind of problem situation on our hands. One of my advisers, Condoleezza, she estimates, opinionizes, that you can help us out. Did a search and you popped outta the spook databases or some such, we're graspin' at straws. My family and I'd be most appreciating that you would take on an advisorial role–fly down a day or two of your time at my ranch in Crawford, Texas.”

“Will, um, Jenna be there?” I can't make much sense of what George is saying, and I'm jumping to the conclusion that he's calling because Jenna wants to meet me. She's got to be looking
at my site, right, 27 percent of my hits are from Austin, and I've got a really bitchin' photo of myself posted if you mouse around for it, shows me bearded, blank-faced, and with a third eye Photoshopped into the middle of my forehead. How could any country cowgirl fail to be intrigued? Yes, Jenna's half in love with me, and she's been begging Daddy to fly me down, like to help her with her University of Texas remedial math homework or to give a classroom talk about starting your own ISP. Jenna's redneck volleyball friends won't like me, goes without saying, but I'll win them over and what the fuck is wrong with me anyway, am I completely nuts? I don't even like Jenna Bush, honest.

“Yes and no,” answers George, sounding sad. A pause and then he switches to the bullying presidential tone you hear on the news clips. I've never seen him on TV, actually, but I've downloaded plenty of video. When I look at a screen, it's got to be something I can hack.

“And that is exactly precisely the problem you gone haveta help us deal with,” George declaims. “I'm not gonna describe it to you on the, not paint a picture on the telephone. The operatives are in place to bring you in.”

Go to Texas? What a truly bizarre thought. Like going to Antarctica or to the inside of the Sun. Maybe this is all a put-on. The voice sounds a lot like George Bush, but on the other hand it's just possible that it's Ben Blank.

Ben and his friends in the Mummy Bum Cult posse are deep into voice filters and digital phone phreaking. They rent a basement under Market Street with, yes, an actual mummified bum in one of the far corners, a decades-old corpse that's air-cured down to leather 'n bone.

Ben likes talk about advanced AI tricks like evolving neural nets, but in fact he and the other Mummy Bums tend to slap
together undocumented opcode hacks with never a thought to remembering what they've done. The main neural nets he's evolving are the ones in his skull. But the Mummy Bums get some surprising things to work, which is why I'm half-wondering if this Bush call might be one of their pranks.

I look across my room at the Men in Black. They have metal wristwatches, shiny shoes, and gel in their hair. Man, these are definitely government agents. The Boss SS man makes an impatient gesture, wanting me to hurry up and answer George fucking Bush.

“I normally charge a consultant's fee,” I say. Like this kind of request comes up all the time. “And travel.”

“Don't never mind about paperwork,” says George. “My boys will reimburse anything reasonable. Keep it under your, keep your lip shut off the record. I'll see you tonight. We'll have barbeque. Lemmie have a last word with my agent.”

So I hand the phone to the Boss, he does a few yessirs, hangs up, and then says something to his men—not a real word, just a number. Something like, “Let's four-six-six the site.”

The action code sets the Muscle and Brad the Trainee to clearing away my piles of dirty clothes so they can get at my computer. They're gonna take my machines, which happens to be just what the FBI has been itching to do on account of the FoneFoon worm, but I've been making them wait for their court order to come through, and even then I'm only going to copy stuff onto DVDs for them, not hand over my sacred machine! I try and explain this to the Boss, but he waves me off. The SS doesn't worry about legal shit. And if I try and stop them, they might kill me.

I do some yoga breaths and force a grin as the Muscle yanks loose my sacred beige box, snapping its cables like the nerves
and blood vessels of a crudely extracted tooth. Ow. And then my other machine as well. Yoga breath.

Well, whatever happens, my info's secure; I can pretty easily recover it. First of all, it's stored on the Dogyears servers. And if, Dog forbid, something were to happen to those, I've been using a very gnarly Mummy Bum hack for saving my data in watermark form.

Something like a big image or a sound file, you can flip some tiny percentage of the bits, and it'll look or sound about the same. And you can use these flipped bits to save data you care about. It's called a digital watermark. The word “watermark” is from the way you can hold a dollar bill or a quality sheet of paper up to the light and see a pattern of light and dark, which is the old kind of watermark. The Mummy Bums have a killer little applet that'll break into a target server and munge your whole hard disk contents into watermarks in the sounds and pictures on the server. Me, I've got Dogyears backed up onto an Amsterdam music site. When you listen to the Lincoln Logs play “Stink Bowl,” you're reading my e-mail, dude.

“Can I keep this?” I say, holding up my laptop. “There's no particular data on it, I just need it to—to think and live and breathe.” The Boss nods.

I pack the laptop and some relatively clean backup clothes in a little canvas bag, and then I pause to handwrite a note to Hella. “Gone to Texas with the Men in Black! Don't worry. Consulting gig. Back soon, I'll call tonight. XXX Love, Wag.” Writing the note I'm thinking about Hella's high forehead and her wide smile. Her low, intimate voice. She's a beauty. I don't mention Jenna or George Bush on the note.

My housemate Charles is in the shower, talking to himself in a variety of British-sounding voices like he always does. Like,
“Hello, Professor Elbow! After you, Sir Smelly Ankle. Cor, I never seen the like o' this rain!” Charles is surprised when he steps out wrapped in a towel and sees me with the Men in Black. He kindly agrees to keep an eye on Larva while I'm gone.

And then we're outside. The black SUV's stubby antennas have attracted the attention of Rumbo the copper-helmeted tweaker. In the minute and a half it takes The Muscle to stash my computers in the back, Rumbo has ranted three-point-seven hours' worth of convolutional thought patterns.

“Yep, a whole gollywog pile of copper down by the Bay,” squeaks the tweak. “Piles of microwaves storm through our heads. Don't forget to recycle the wire in Wag's computers. Train tracks got copper under 'em: I've seen it. I'll strip it all out for you and give you half the profit; you ride shotgun and haul the load. Any monocrystalline copper, I keep for my helmet, you understand. There's enough copper in my hat to string it around the entire Bay. Copper helmets protect the Head from the Microwaves. See that little box with the antenna on the lamppost? They're on every block. 5.4 gigahertz. Repeaters peaters peaters peaters peaters. . . . This city is gonna be full of slave servo brain matter, I tell you.”

“You know this individual?” asks the Boss. “He's among your circle of friends?”

“I know him just a bit.” A few months back, I let Rumbo show me what he said was the secret labyrinth path into a really choice abandoned warehouse I'm curious about. This was before Rumbo got into his copper coat-of-mail helmet-against-microwaves thing. Back then he was more into a
Lord of the Rings
bag. We walked around through empty sewers for a couple of hours with flashlights, Rumbo leading me, my sister, and Charles. Charles says he took acid 300 times, and the last 250 times were
horrible bummers; he says he's a slow learner. But Charles was the one who finally realized it was nuts to be walking around inside a sewer with a tweaker leading the way. The fact that Charles figured this out before me makes me wonder about myself. I think I'm spending too much time on my computer.

The Boss Man in Black is staring at me. For a second I have a bad feeling I've just said all these thoughts out loud. But, no, he's just doing the intimidation-via-eye-contact thing. I for sure don't want to engage in any conversation about the lamppost cell antennas at this time. The FoneFoon caper clued me to the potency of those little boxes. “Rumbo's harmless,” is all I say. For his part, Rumbo's had enough of the federal stink-eye, he's back on the curb across the street, his twitching hands busy with the pliers and the wire.

But the Boss is still watching Rumbo. “Deploy the seven-seventy-six,” he tells the Muscle. “Might as well take care of that mission too. I'd say this looks like the ideal neighborhood.” The big guy goes around to the back of the SUV and opens it up again. He's going to leave my computers after all? But, no, he's digging down into the spare tire compartment, pulling out a dusty white brick tightly wrapped in transparent plastic. The way he's glancing around makes it clear he's doing something shady. And now he pitches the brick across the street; it slides to a stop right near Rumbo. It's a fucking key of meth!

“Look what fell off Santa's sleigh!” whoops Rumbo.

As we drive off, a horde of tweakers converges on the brick.

+   +   +

We head south toward San Francisco Airport, which seems fine to me. But then, shit, it turns out the Men in Black want to make
a side trip to the server hotel to bag the rest of my Dogyears hardware. They're fully out to ruin my business. All these insidious connections between AOL and the Elephant Party are filling my head as we ride the elevator to the server hotel's third floor.

The building has major security; it's full of cameras and hand-scanning equipment. I have a white card with a hologram of the ProxPass logo. ProxPass has a monopoly on all the hand scanners in the USA. Every now and then, another business or ISP will get hacked and they'll hire me to harden their servers. They tell me a building and locker number, call up ProxPass headquarters, and voilà: my ProxPass card and palm grant me access to another server room. The ProxPass logo has a nonsensical graphic of some computer circuit. Normally, I open doors by pressing my pass to a black square on the wall, stick my hand in a gray box, wait three seconds for the click of the door lock, and then pull the door open. The delay is due to all the gray boxes talking to a central ProxPass server somewhere in Texas. Before George came into office, there wasn't a delay. ProxPass's fast peer-to-peer authentication was replaced with a countrywide big-brothering system. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the Elephants getting paid off by AOL.

The Boss walks up to the scanner on the third floor, and pulls out an ultra blue card with a little hologram of—is that Jenna? I can't believe my eyes! The door clicks open when the Boss's card is still a foot away from the reader. No hand scan or network check needed with an SS Jenna Card!

The server room is noisy and cold. On those rare hot days in San Francisco, I walk my dog down to the server hotel, and check my e-mail in the cool confines of the Internet backbone. After spending an hour in the server room, I start to have auditory
hallucinations. My mind always tries to pull sense out of chaotic patterns.

No one else ever hangs out in the server room except Ben Blank. In fact, he rents a whole three-foot-by-five-foot cage and has a little office desk and a mini keyboard called the Happy Hacker. Most people do a minimal configuration on their servers and then return to cubicle land. Not Ben, he likes the idea of being directly connected to his hardware. He says the only safe network is a network of two computers.