And so, Good shall triumph over Evil, always.
He tapped the letters of the code into his palmtop as they were coming for him. He wished the ignition sequence had been shorter. He wished his hospital friend’s last thoughts had been more succinct.
I
T HAD, THOUGH,
he thought, not been the worst of deals.
The device had not exploded, lives had been saved, including his own. He had been beaten until it was no longer possible to be revived for another beating, but he was safe from the Organisation, as his implant had been removed via a transfusion of blood.
That was until the nurse he had never seen before had brought the letter to him this morning.
If you do not come for us, we will surely come for you.
I
T HAD SPOOKED
him, there was no doubt about that, but now the old man, the greatest novelist America had ever produced, was offering him a deal he did not yet understand, and was telling him about his early years as a failed writer, telling him enough, certainly, for him to earn a fortune by selling his exclusive story to the press, if only he could provide some kind of proof.
“Yes,” he could hear the old man say in that characteristic throaty whistle of his, “those old stories were dear to my heart, I loved them even if they were bad, I loved and cared for every one of my characters like they were my children.”
He nodded as best he could. “Go on,” he said in his own half strangled voice.
“I did the deal, though, and they killed every one of my books, and all those trashy one-dimensional characters that I loved so much. It hurt me, Joe, it hurt me so bad, but in return I got The Gift.”
He still did not understand.
“I’m dying, Joe, and now I’m offering you that same gift.”
S
O, WHEN THE
Organisation finally broke into the hospital, they found the man they thought was Joe Hilfiger, and pumped him just as full of lead as one human being could take.
They only realised their mistake when they noticed the dead man still had all his fingers on his left hand.
The pale white girl called Bonnie was mad as hell and some kind of civil war broke out in the Organisation along racial lines: blacks against whites.
A
S FOR
J
OE,
he became the Next Big Thing in the American literary canon, and he won a Pulitzer this and a Nobel that, and his ex-wife took him to the cleaners for alimony, and his children grew up to be brats and the subjects of his last Great Novel, and still he could never find real happiness.
H
E TOLD ME
, as he lay dying, just before he passed me The Gift, that he still missed Honey Sweet and the cowgirl whose name he could never remember.
IT
TANITH LEE
Tanith Leewas born in 1947, didn’t learn to read until she was nearly 8, and started to write aged 9. Since becoming a fulltime writer in 1974, she has written some 100 books, about 270 short stories, 4 radio plays, and 2 episodes of
Blake’s 7
. Her latest publications include the novels
To Indigo, L’Amber
, and
Killing Violets
(Immanion), and the short story collection
Cold Grey Stones
(NewCon Press). She lives on the Sussex Weald with husband, writer/artist John Kaiine, in a house full of books, stained glass, plants and cat fur.
I
T BEGAN—LET
me rephrase that: the occurrences began
—
early in March of 20 (see Ref. File 906 AC).
Calder started to notice what was happening about mid-March, but quite negligently, as one would (and as, indeed, one did), and put it down to the usual incompetence of type-setters, scanners, and/or computers. At this point nobody else referred to it in his hearing, let alone spoke to him in person on the matter. This, of course, was while the—shall we say, for want of a better term—
Interference
was, or seemed, mostly confined to printed material, i.e. books, magazines, newspapers and journals, circulars, and other paper hardcopy of this sort. The problem entailed merely a constant recurrence of a single word, generally out of place, and having no relation to the surrounding text.
Presently, however, the Interference spread. Calder was himself astonished one morning when, typing up a memo on his personal Securist L.T., what he took for an invading (and unwanted) advert popped up, not to one side but at the centre of the screen. As a rule various security provisos on these machines eradicate the chance of
any
advertising getting through. The very occasional rogue intruder was thrown out by the latent S and D systems. Calder, having activated the more aggressive S and D response, watched as the Interference duly vanished. He resumed work. Yet ten minutes later, as so many of us have similarly experienced, the interruption reappeared, this time rather larger, and flashing in an annoying and palsied way. Now, too, Calder found he was unable to get rid of it. Accordingly he left the Search and Destroy system active, but otherwise put his memo to bed, filling the remainder of the shift with other duties. The following day, at 10 a.m., on re-awakening the machine, Calder saw that not only had the S and D failed to expunge the intruder, the thing now occupied the entire screen. Nor was it to be ousted.
The Interference comprised, as almost everyone in possession of any sort of up-to-date technology and employing the English language was by now witnessing, the single letters I. and T. in bold black, and caps, on a blank white background. As Calder, and most of us, immediately named it, the word
IT
.
Professionals summoned to Calder’s machine (and to countless others, the bulk of them being in the UK and the States), were also unable to free up the screen. Until at about 3 p.m.—five hours after its arrival—the word flashed off. A mystery, then. But worse was to come. I hardly need to tell any of you, as the phenomenon persisted, that the word thereafter recurred every morning at approximately 10 a.m., and lasted until approximately three in the afternoon. Or the hour equivalents of these times on the other side of the Atlantic. And elsewhere, wherever English is in use.
By the fourth day of the nuisance, too,
IT
was appearing in many and various other intrusive situations. No model of TV was exempt from constant interruptions which, although they did not entirely block viewing for a solid five to six hours, manifesting for a minute at a time or less, still recurred continuously, amounting in some cases to over thirty appearances in any given hour, both by day and during the night. Cinemas and view-parkswere not spared either. The loss to business was considerable, and even the sale of DVDs and Blu- or Green-ray also plummeted dramatically, as even pre-recorded movies made in an era prior to current developments soon proved susceptible to what was, by now, called the
IT
Virus.
Elsewhere, as we know, the word appeared—often very startlingly and frequently, for example flooding out the lights of New York’s Times Square, or the neons of London. Electronic advertisements and public news screens were reduced to lunatic confusion, electric billboards and amusement displays (Tate Modern not excepted) were rendered useless, meaningless.
It was at this point that even battery-driven clocks, watches, landline phones or mobiles, electric ovens, even certain light-fitments, began helplessly to broadcast the—by now—anathematic sign of
IT
. Soon car headlights joined the increasing mayhem, causing, it has been estimated, at least three thousand minor to major accidents in the London area alone. Not long after, for concordant reasons, trains were withdrawn, shipping docked and all planes grounded. A State of Emergency was declared.
As every one of us doubtless remembers too, by this juncture the whole world was becoming involved. What had been initially identified and labelled as the
Western Plague
(which certain cross-religious militant fundamentalist factions had flaunted as an undeniable symptom of the justified rage of God) had extended, or more correctly
blossomed
, throughout the whole European and Middle Eastern landmass, burgeoning next in Russia, India and China consecutively, and so to the farthest East, and the deepest extremities of North and South, from Greenland to Antarctica.
Health issues of course by then were of great concern, since hospital equipment had become dangerously obscured, while such miracle advancements as digital visual, or audial, implants were now rendering their users virtually sightless, or deaf.
Nuclear Power Stations meanwhile had been placed in stasis (Ref. File 907 BD). The defence sites of all major nuclear nations were on permanent
Plus Alpha
alert.
The world teetered, as has been affirmed, on the brink of an abyss. For all our advancement, our techno-genius and pure ingenuity, to
this
we had been brought by the solitary, absurd and horrifying word
IT
.
A
S THE MAJORITY
of us are now aware,
IT
was not how the Infererence was presenting in those regions which did not employ either English or Amerenglish as their prime language; as in, say, Mandarin Chinese, or the elegant tendrils of Arabic script.
Calder was the first person who brought to my attention the fact that only two letters, or their representatives, nevertheless
ever
made up the sum total of the signature ‘Word.’ What showed here as
IT
was, in French,
DE
, and in Maltese
RA
. Afrikaans had it as
AK
. The Shona tongue of Zimbabwe as
VI
. While Russian, if transcribed from the Cyrillic Alphabet, was
NO
. Only very rarely did individual pairs of such letters form an actually recognizably existing word, such as had happened in English. Some play was subsequently made where the letters produced a word
not
in the recipient country’s own vernacular, but that of some other country—as with the negative possible of the Russian—
NO
. Or the Maltese
RA
, which might seem to connect with the supreme god of the Ancient Egyptians. All such might-be clues were to little avail, demonstrably. None bore fruit. Nor would anything, for some time.
Calder worked tirelessly throughout this phase. He worked too, as many of us now had to, by night, since the obstructed periods continued to obtain between 9.00 or 10.00 in the morning and 2.30 to 4 p.m.—or their comparative timeframes elsewhere on the globe.
By then almost six months had elapsed. England, at least, was in a state of near breakdown (a condition not quite unmirrored abroad). As advised, we kept to the Complex, using the technological facilities here, grateful for the emergency stocks of oil-lighting and candles, dorms, washrooms, and the copious canteen complete with bar; although gradually, inevitably, all rations were running low (even where fridges and freezers were themselves capable of working, the loss of central power both from the National Grid and the in-house generator caused constant shutdowns, as I hardly need remind anyone, I believe). Outside the walls and gates of the Complex, there had been riots across the Capital, and other English cities, as in Wales, throughout the North, and the Republic of Scotland. Ireland’s condition we could not fully judge, as she communicated minimally, and then not at all. Which, it must be admitted, was by now also true of Pan-Europe and the US.
That morning, Calder came to my official room.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I’ve unearthed some information which, as you know under these circumstances, may well be dubious. Even so, I think you should see it. Whether we go further after that, obviously I leave to you.”
The CM, despite flashing
IT IT IT
, made us strong coffee, and we sat down at the Long Table.
T
O START WITH,
Calder explained, he had worked with random theory, putting into his machine a selection of possible reasons for the onslaught of
IT
, these being logical, or fanciful, or downright off-the-wall (such as the notion that some foreign power had employed highly talented hacker-vandals to introduce a Western worldwide so-called Checkmate Virus, which had then proved too successful, and infected the enemy originator as well). The Analysis of the computer duly returned sober conjectures on everything Calder had mooted. “Some,” he told me, “would make plots for damn good movies.” However, nothing came up in the judgement of the Analysis to show any of the theories to be either properly feasible or ultimately legitimately viable. After this Calder simply tried what is often termed Random Strikes; that is, putting into the computer brain either carefully concocted, or randomly picked word or number sequences (this is rather like throwing dice). From these the computer computed two hundred formulae that
might
trigger such an effect as the deadly
IT
. Again, nevertheless, hard Analysis never quite concurred with any of the scenarios, whether narrative or abstract.
During this period, Calder was, as were other suitable personnel, also monitoring, via adjacent machines, the progress of a selection of the multitude of space hardware, and info satellites, which had ceased to function in any understandable manner post the incursion of
IT
.
“I was just packing up for the shift,” he said. “I mean, it was around 7.30 a.m. and I wasn’t getting, I thought, anywhere fast. I hooked the monitor machines back into the Analysis brain for survey until the IT-cut-out point around 10.00. I was just going out the door when the Analysis code-called me back in.”
Calder returned to the computer, and asked what was wrong.
The computer told him that a series of the numerical Random Strikes had shown a sudden strong compatible with a partial signal, emitting from one of the lost satellites. Until that moment, any of the jumbled signals emanating from these sats had been, or seemed to be, whether in language or numbers, gibberish, even to the computers. Now, coupled to Calder’s established number sequences, some sort of readability might be detected.