Time and Temperature - Part 4

Each of 4 parts will end with a code that you may choose to solve using information within the story, but be careful with the information you reveal.

- 4 -

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

•

“What do you mean, French?”

“I think it’s some kind of foreign code or something,” I told Allen.

“Where are you getting this stuff, dude? Are you into something bad?”

“What? No, man. Like I said, it’s a game my dad and I play. Are you gonna help me or what?”

“Sure. I just don’t know where to start.”

I stared at the jumble of letters for a long time and then, with no kind of thought or plan, I found my arm around Allen’s thin neck. He made little whistling noises and I tried to squeeze hard enough to silence them. I thought about those flattened cicadas, their legs and wings twisted and jerking. When he jabbed a sharp elbow into my ribs, I snapped out of my red daze and let him go.

He gulped air for a minute or two, watery eyes wide. I thought he’d start yelling at me once he caught his breath, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he picked up the code book and started flipping through it while shooting quick, wary glances at me.

“Here,” he finally said. “This must be what you’re looking for.”

I took it from him and saw that ‘Vigenere Cipher’ was printed at the top of the page in bold letters. Below that were the words ‘Le chiffrage indéchiffrable.’

I closed the book and put it in my backpack. “Your dad’s computer,” I said. “Does it have a jack in it. Like for a phone line?”

“I think so. We’ve never messed with it though. I guess you can connect to bulletin boards and stuff if you have a modem.”

“You need to write another program,” I told him. “It’ll be a more complicated one.”

“For what, the French code?”

“No. To create a way for networks of computers to talk to each other. To make it easy so that everybody will want to do it. Everyone will be connected.”

“That sounds neat, but I don’t know how to do that.”

I fixed my eyes on him. Cold, like my dad used to do. He rubbed at his throat.

“Okay, Mark. Cool.”

•

I didn’t dial the number again for a long time.

Sitting in classes, I would watch the teacher write things on the chalkboard while my mind wandered through fantasies of ultimate power, control, authority. I thought about materialism and relativity. In my imagination, a version of me performed acts of great cruelty. Hot blood flowed over black cables. My teeth ground ones and zeros into bone dust.

I reached down from the cold of outer space to crush enemies beneath my fingertips.

On the wall outside of science class there was a flier that read ‘After School Computer Club. Sign up here!’ Below that were lines and a few names. I took a pencil from my pocket and wrote on it.

Mark Z.

•

Two weeks later, we got a call from the prison. They said my dad had been in a fight and was stabbed 139 times. No one was at the funeral but us.

“He’s just atoms and molecules,” I said to my mom’s wet face. “We’re all just molecules.”

She couldn’t understand.

That night I waited until everyone was asleep and got a notepad and pen from the junk drawer. I sat on the kitchen floor, the curly phone cord clicking softly against the wall beside my head.

I punched the numbers.

I listened to the robot read advertisements. Tell the time. Say the temperature. The message ended. I said nothing. The silence rattled my ear drum.

The silence breathed.

“Influence,” I whispered.

“Who,” he asked. “Who do you have influence over?”

The house was dark, quiet. “No one.”

“A condition that we shall have to remedy,” he said. “The network that will someday connect every mind on this globe is like a musical instrument that is still in the process of being conceived. Many will learn to play this instrument, but you must be among the best. A virtuoso. You will drink transistors, breath code, devour the future. And when you have mastered the medium, you will achieve ultimate power by controlling, manipulating, even creating from whole cloth the most important ingredient, the one thing capable of achieving total influence. Of making you a god.”

I moaned as my loins ached and my mouth filled with saliva.

“The thing that you must master is not money. Not information. Not politics or religion or drugs.”

I did not want to ask.

I would kill to know.

“What is it?” The dam broke and my tears burned acid down my neck, crept hot under my shirt. “What will I need to control to become God?”

His final code came in a kind of spoken laughter. Not human or machine, but alien to earthbound ears.

3-5-4

7-8-3

9-1-2

12-7-6

16-5-5

I wrote the numbers on the wall.

Then the line was dead.

The voice was gone.

I hung up, left the house, and took my first shaky steps on the long road to dominion.

•