That Nietzsche Thing (9 page)

Fuck me.

Three C’s...not a direct translation from the
Latin, but certainly a repetition of theme. A respectful
reinterpretation of first principles?

No, it was too crazy to even conceive.

The whole United States of America in the
grasp of an apocalyptic cult? President Cassidy? The whole NeoCon
movement? The Hot Kids, the youth of America?

Now my imagination was just running away from
me.

It was bullshit. Nothing I could ever prove
in a million lifetimes. All I had was three letters scribbled on a
wall, and that, I very much suspected, would quickly vanish once
Constantine’s investigators arrived.

But ideas like that had an uncomfortable
habit of sticking in the craw. It was the first, vaguely rational
explanation for the Fed’s Wardship of Seattle and their total
overreaction to the Montavez case. If the girl had found evidence
that Q, the man, was in Seattle...and the Geneing Rosicrucians had
gotten to her before she’d told anyone...

I reached for my bomber and took the e-reader
from my pocket.

She’d decoded it somehow. She must have.
Dark’s Last Novel
. Q. She’d bought the original copy...why?
To trade it with the Rosicrucians? For what?...for something that
had let her decode the novel. But they’d figured out what she was
attempting to do and stuffed her in that dumpster. But she’d
decoded the novel first, and the copy on the e-reader was the only
one she’d had.

She’d decoded it on this. Somehow.

I stared at the e-reader. If O’Day couldn’t
decode it, what did I think I could do? But, had O’Day even tried?
He’d just recognized the file and thought it was all a joke.

Still, I knew nothing about cryptography, and
I had no access to computing resources. Even O’Day’s equipment was
probably still off-line. The Rosicrucians had done their job well.
I had nothing. Just the e-reader and some crazy idea that our
government was firmly in the hands of a satanic cult.

But none of that would matter if I knew the
decrypt key. Everything O’Day had been talking about, all ninety
years of cryptanalysis, had been attempts to brute force the
encryption. They’d tried every known key hoping to stumble on the
right one. But Vivian Montavez had found the key itself. Or deduced
it from the evidence she’d collected. You didn’t need computers, or
a specialized understanding of cryptography if you had the key. You
just punched in it and
bam!
Like an ATM. Any douche, even
me, could do that.

I had to get back into Vivian’s head, figure
out what she’d figured out about Dark. She’d done my trick, gotten
inside Dark’s head. Dark was just another dead body, after all,
dead for ninety years. Not murdered perhaps, but it didn’t matter.
For Vivian, Dark was also in the enviable position that he couldn’t
interfere with her investigation.

I tapped at the e-reader until I got to the
decrypt menu. The ebook version of
Dark’s Last Novel
shipped
with a decode routine. The whole enticement to buy the book was
that, maybe, you’d be the one to figure out how to decrypt it. If
the eggheads had done their work right and correctly identified the
custom cipher Dark had used, then all a reader needed to do was
type in the correct code.

It was easy as that.

Vivian had done it. She’d found Q. But what
did the daughter of a powerful, NeoCon/Rosicrucian senator know
that the entirety of the Internet had missed?

What had she traded that blessed copy of
Dark’s Q to the Genie Rosicrucian’s for? If I knew that, I’d
already have the book decrypted. I looked around the room; it
couldn’t be something physical. Nothing in the apartment looked
out-of-place. Except...

I held up the e-reader and looked it over.
This? I’d instantly pegged this as the only odd item in the room
the first moment I’d stepped into Montavez’s apartment. It had
never jived with the rest of the décor.

This? I turned the e-reader over in my hands.
She’d traded the Genies a twelve-hundred buck copy of
Dark’s
Last Novel
for a five buck e-reader? It made no sense. Unless
it had data on it that she’d erased...no, she hadn’t expected to
get killed. She’d no time to erase anything. She hadn’t been trying
to hide her tracks.

No, she hadn’t traded the book for the
e-reader.

She’d traded for something else. Something
ephemeral. The key to decode Q? But that was a blasphemy to the
Rosicrucians – at least the Genie kind. They’d never give up that
information, even if they’d had it. Which they didn’t, because if
they did, the iconoclastic Rosicrucians would have stolen the
knowledge long ago and decoded the book and none of this was have
ever happened...

Ack! I was thinking in circles. I was
screwing myself into the ground. I took a wild stab at the decrypt
key:
Corpus
, I typed. The e-reader’s little speaker beeped a
long, sad whammy. I tried
Dark
then
Galronts
. Two
more whammies.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a dictionary work,
or anything connected to Galronts. Otherwise the brute force
attacks, or the million Internet geeks guessing at a million
consoles would have hit on it. I tapped the paperweight e-reader on
my knuckles and tried to think. What did Vivian know that a hundred
thousand cryptographers didn’t?

Geneing. The answer ambushed me out of
nowhere. Vivian Montavez had made some unique discovery linking
Geneing and A.E. Dark. Following her trail, I’d done the same. Q,
used to denote the progenitor of the Geneing epidemic, the most
hated man in America, was somehow linked to Q,
Dark’s Last
Novel
.

I’d initially thought that Vivian was
attempting to decode Q in order to find Q the man, but there was a
serious possibility that the opposite was true. What if she’d been
seeking out Q, the man, to decode Q, the novel? What if there was
something about Q’s genetic drug/virus that served as a key to
Dark’s unbreakable encryption?

I leapt to my feet and reached for my bomber.
The autopsy report for Vivian was folded up in my inside pocket.
She’d died a Genie, the testing indicated, but she’d obviously not
lived like one. The apartment I was sitting in was solid evidence.
So, she must have taken the Geneing dope just before her death?
Why? Why throw her life away like that? If she hadn’t been
murdered, the Geneing would have quickly killed her. Unless...

I flipped through the pages, to the genetic
report on Montavez’s DNA. Normally, I only ever glanced at the last
line, the one that said, positive or negative. But now I looked
over the scientific gobbledygook before it. The talk of genetic
markers and redundant strands.

What if there was not just a simple
correlation between Geneing and
Dark’s Last Novel
, what if
Geneing
was
the key to
Dark’s Last Novel
?

Literally.

Hidden somewhere in the genetic code that the
virus modified...the stream of G’s, A’s, C’s and T’s that
designated Geneings marker...it certainly looked like a block in
encrypted text...

But it was impossible! Did they even know
about DNA in 1964? They certainly didn’t have gene therapy. And the
first known case of Geneing would have been sixty years in the
future. But nevertheless. What had Dark said? When the technology
existed to decode the book, humanity would be ready to read what
was in it? Maybe he hadn’t meant computing power to brute forcing
the encryption, but the decoding of the human genome to the point
where we could decode a redundant genetic strand.

It was impossible! Insane. As insane as the
idea that our government was controlled by a cabal of Rosicrucian
cultists. But like that idea, once this one got into my head, I
couldn’t get it out. I began to key in the genetic marker into the
e-reader, but it was far too long.

I needed a computer.

I stormed out of the apartment and down to
where I’d parked the Accord, on a side street, before the riots had
begun. It was safer up there on Queen Anne, away from the rampant
property destruction. And my whole life was in the trunk. I dug
around, found my old iBook and sprinted back up the stairs, back
into Vivian’s apartment.

Fumbling with the power cord, I booted the
laptop and reached for my phone in my bomber. As the desktop loaded
on the computer, I dialed O’Day’s number.

“What?” he answered the phone. Sometimes I
think my life would be a lot smoother without caller ID.

“Hey Day, how’s the lab?” I asked. I logged
onto the SPD VPN and brought up the digital copy of Vivian’s
autopsy report. That I could cut and paste.

“How do you fucking think? They poured
gasoline on my servers and set them alight! Fuck you, Sasha, for
getting me involved in whatever you’re investigating...”

I highlighted the string of characters that
was the genetic marker for Geneing and pasted it into an email.

“I’m calling to get you even deeper involved,
O’Day.” I hit send on the email. “I’m sending you a text string I
want decoded.

“Oh no!” O’Day protested. “Not a fucking
chance!”

“Even if it decrypts
Dark’s Last
Novel
?” I teased.

O’Day was silent.

He was silent so long I figured he’d hung up.
“Hello?” I asked the line.

“I’m still here,” O’Day’s voice came back.
Flat and unemotional.

“Just look at the email and tell me if it’s
something that can be decoded.”

More silence. I let O’Day work.

“That looks like a DNA string,” O’Day came
back. “That’s not a code.”

“No, but—”

“There just isn’t enough variation in the
text for a strong cipher. G, A, T, C. You can’t hide a message in
that string.”

“How can that be?” I asked. “Don’t computers
only use two characters? Zero and one? Isn’t the whole of human
knowledge encoded into two characters? Here you have four.”

“Hmm, well...” O’Day replied.

I’d done it, I’d stumped O’Day. He hated
that. He was the kind of guy who had to have an answer for
everything. There’d be no stopping him now until he could tell me
exactly why I was full of shit. “I once attended a symposium, and
one of the speakers postulated that since the nucleotides of DNA
only form two unique bonds – Guanine with Cytosine and Adenine with
Thymine, never Guanine with Adenine or Thymine, and never Adenine
or Thymine with Cytosine – then DNA was, for all purposes
binary.”

“Come again?” I said. He’d lost me at
Guanine.

“That it’s not G-A-T-C but G and A, and T and
C. If we designate the G-A pair as one and the T-C as zero then we
get...” O’Day went silent.

“What do we get?” I finally asked. Was he
working on something? Had a Rosicrucian come along and cracked him
across the back of the head? “O’Day? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here,” he muttered. “Let me pass
the result through a Feistel key schedule...fuck!” O’Day was so
surprised that he dropped his phone. I could hear it clatter to the
floor.

“O’Day? O’Day?” I screamed into my phone. I
climbed to my feet and ran a frustrated hand through my hair. Come
on O’Day, pick the fucking phone back up... “Day? What did it
decode to? Day? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” O’Day voice came back, distant
and echoing. His voice returned to full-throated normalcy as he
returned his phone to his ear. “It just took me by surprise, that’s
all.”

“What did?” Tell me you idiot! “What did the
code decode to say?”

“I...I don’t really know,” O’Day said
solemnly.

“What is it?”

“Cain-300”

“Cain-300” I asked, confused. “Cain? As in
the bible, Cain? As in Cain and Abel? As in Mark of Cain?” Then a
cold shiver hit me, right down the middle of my spine.

“C-A-I-N, as in son of Adam and Eve,” O’Day
confirmed. “Dash, three-hundred.”

“That’s crazy, but...” I reached for the
e-reader.

“Where’d you get that DNA string from,
anyway?” O’Day asked.

“You’d call me crazy if I told you,” I
answered. I typed out C-A-I-N-3-0-0 into the e-reader’s decode
window and received an audible whammy in return.

“What was that noise?”

“That e-reader you had. I was trying the text
on Dark’s novel.”

“No,” O’Day said with irritation. “You’re not
thinking like A.E. Dark. This is a guy who encrypted the title of
his book –
the title.
Think about that? The decrypt key to
the book isn’t going to be plain text. It, itself, will invariably
be encoded...”

“What? Are you speaking English?”

“If we take the un-decoded text from the DNA
string, it fits perfectly as a fifty-six bit key for a DES
cipher...”

“Yes?” I prodded, impatiently. “Yes?”

“...pad it out to sixty-four bits and invert
it. Then when we XOR the result...”

“What?” I screamed at my phone.

“Oh fuck,” O’Day exclaimed. “Oh fuck, oh
fuck, oh fuck!”

“What?!”

“I’m getting text!” O’Day laughed. “I’m
fucking getting English text!”

“Don’t fuck with me, O’Day. Because I
couldn’t take it.”

“No, no!” O’Day screamed. “Here, I’ll send
the key to your e-reader. It should start to see what I’m
seeing.”

I looked at the e-reader in my hand. The
decode dialog filled with string of text, then closed itself. There
was an interminable pause as an hourglass appeared on the screen.
Please God, I said to myself, no whammies, no whammies, no
whammies.

Then it started to decode.

Right there before my eyes,
Dark’s Last
Novel
started to spit out page after page of clear text. I’d
done it! O’Day had done it! The novel was decoding! I couldn’t
believe my eyes.

“Motherfucker,” I said. There was little else
to say.

“Yeah, totally,” O’Day agreed, then repeated
solemnly. “Motherfucker.”

I read the title page of the book, perhaps
the first eyes to do so in over ninety years. The real title of
Dark’s Last Nove
l came as no surprise. Perhaps I’d already
guessed it in the back of my mind. But there it was in black and
white before me:
The Source
. Of course. What other title
could the book have ever had?