[ENDURING FREEDOM]

DENNIS COREY

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[I]
The Hercules clone came down hard on the crumbling asphalt. Half of the soldiers in the
passenger compartment were sleeping and most of the balance were fully tuned out, their
attentions seized by MP3 jukeboxes and MPEG tubes. Eben Lance gazed out the window as the
compartment separated from the side of the plane and hover-scooted across the airfield, followed
closely by a tight cluster of modular printmetal fuel tanks and cargo crates. The skeleton of the
Herc slid on down the runway. Sprinklers popped up and sprayed the wheels with a liberal dose
of molten soldergumi. A few meters on, the wings caught the first guide wires. A group of fresh
modular parts hauled themselves up the wires and began to settle into place. More crate-clusters
bounced down the runway in pursuit. The newly-arrived boxes had not even reached the
terminus when the turboprops shrieked back to life and the giant plane lifted off the far end of
the runway, receiving a light spray of pesticide from an ill-looking wiremesh Quonset tower.
As the troop-trap docked to the jetway with a pneumatic hiss, an orange-suited man with an
EMP whip was herding a subsequent round of boxes onto the runway to await the next touch-
and-go transport.
Eben's platoon, the 7085th Temporary Reinforcements, was led by their one-legged NCO into
a giant chamber, one of the four compartments of the terminus complex. They were greeted by a
singular and unpleasant smell. The NCO issued a few orders in a shrill bark and took off at a
quick hobble towards a large blast door. The platoon fell in behind him. Eben quickly realized
that the hidebound amputee had no uncanny sense of direction. He was merely following a
weathered yellow line painted on the ground.
They were adrift in a sea of slouch-hatted infantry men. Roomba-simulacra buzzed around
their feet at wicked speeds, following narrower painted lines on the smooth syncrete. Brown
crates bearing the names of major defense contractors perched haphazardly on carts, auto-
rickshaws, and kei trucks as they made orbits of the large room. The yells of soldiers mingled
with the whirs of motors and the beeps of reversing trucks. The temps arrived at a blast door,
which, in a flat voice, requested an open code. McOfficer pointed a wand-like device at it and
clicked. Nothing happened. He cursed, shook the remote, and tried again. The door yawned
open. A transport truck was revealed. It was old, internal-combustion. The metal frame appeared
decrepit and the wall panels were covered with some sort of moss, likely a trauma-proof breed. A
man bearing a giant infowar machine gun sat atop the vehicle. He spoke to the NCO in quick
Boston-accented teamster sociolect. He was a defense contractor and would be taking them to a
military base. As the DefCon gestured them into the truck, two other privateers appeared and
climbed into a nearby Humvee.
The Bostonian took the wheel of the venerable truck and started the engine. The platoon
loaded up and the hatch fell closed behind them. The seats were bolted down to the floor in rows.
The truck was musty. Stalactites of cable spaghetti were affixed to the ceiling, and there were
high shelves covered in tied-down netwar implements: sat relays and uplinks, video screens
displaying feeds of the street outside in true color and infrared, and whitebox computers with
mil-spec flat panel monitors. Small, tinted, carbon-glass windows were set into the walls. The
military compound was crowded with trucks, Jeeps, and diplomatic-plate sedans and wagons.
Lanes were painted on the Tarmac, but very few vehicles seemed willing to acknowledge that
fact. Indeed, there seemed to be no form of traffic control at all. Just ahead of them, a fortified
transport bus broadsided a Toyota wagon. The wagon honked angrily as its tensegrous fibermesh
writhed to repair the dent. A passenger leaned out the window and fired a flare gun at the bus.
The flare stuck to the side of the bus and fizzled out. More honking ensued and the wagon spun
off on a new course.
The truck left the compound and found a corrugated highway. The Humvee followed closely
as the road gradually became less crowded. The truck sped into the desert. Occasionally, cars
would pass: old, rebuilt Japanese sedans and pickups, compact electrical three-wheelers, and
gasifier-powered hackvans. Irregularly, the mossy truck would encounter a desert community:
low shackitecture structures clustered together near a leafy oasis, generator, or solar grid. The
sun began to set, lighting the sky in beautiful Turneresque orange-and-yellow patterns. The truck
pulled into the left lane to pass a caravan. Turbaned men sat in uncomfortable-looking bolt-on
chairs atop covered trucks. Safe behind windscreens, they roasted kebabs on portable stoves as
the trucks trundled along on open road. The eyes of burqua-swaddled women appeared in the
windows below. It seemed that as the troop truck passed by, the men huddled closer to their
warm stoves and talked with less animation.
As the sun melted into the desert sands, someone in the front of the truck flipped a switch and
the netwar screens went dark, their alert viridian power LEDs ceding to a sleepy amber. Eben felt
the need to do likewise.

He awoke the next morning, feeling jet-lagged. The CCTV screens were back up, and a hard
drive was whirring overhead. A plastic-haired DefCon was walking down the aisle, distributing
K rations. Eben signaled for one and the privateer-steward threw it in his direction. He slowly
unfolded the origami case and disentangled the hotplate. He then folded out the legs and shook
the papercraft container to heat it. Breakfast was a sausage and egg-substitute bagel with
rehydrated milk. All the food was printed. He reminisced with the man next to him, one Private
Konrad, about real breakfast food.
The texture of the road changed slowly. To the left was a sheer dynamited cliff and to the right
was what could only be described as a suburban slum: part bazaar, part squatter colony, part
trailer park. The truck overtook a roofless Volkswagen minibus full of dark-skinned nomads. A
robed mendicant on a motorcycle pulled up behind the bus and began to yell and wave his free
hand in the air. One of the nomads wrapped up some cured beef in tin foil and threw it to the old
man, who thanked him and zipped off.
On they went. The sun rose quickly and the truck heated up. Screens flickered overhead as
someone turned on an ancient climate control system, which seemed to be designed more to cast
white noise than to serve its nominal purpose. A light desert-camo aircraft appeared over a far
sand dune. Two goggled pilots sat atop it. The craft flew very low to the ground and was flimsy.
It looked like it was from a consumer kit, made of mostly cardboard paper and vac-molded
plastic. One of the tech recruits identified it as an ekranoplan. The craft circled as its pilots
messed with a laptop, and the truck left it behind in the sands. At length, Eben drifted off to sleep
again.

Upon waking, Eben noticed that the truck was no longer in the desert: there were tightly-packed
shops on both sides of the now narrow road. They had reached a city. The truck crept along busy
avenues and beneath fading signs written in flowing alien print. The voices that drifted through
the truck's walls had a unique impression on the newbie soldiers: the language was entirely
foreign, but rolled in comforting phugoids: a mystic up-and-down sine wave of speech. There
were footsteps on the roof and one of the CCTVs revealed that a couple of the DefCons were
strolling around on top of the truck with impractical and intimidating-looking weapons. They
wore loud magboots and bulky canvas body armor. All the armor was OEM, made in Chinese
factories. There was no standard uniform. One of the contractors was looking around through
infowar sunglasses, another was talking on a disposable cell phone. The windows of the Humvee
behind them had been shaded out.
The DefCon truck joined an ad hoc caravan of several military transport vehicles, some
marked and some unmarked. Little jalopies ran recklessly about them, vanishing into hidden
garages and tight alleys. The trucks moved slowly into a more developed area. Condemned
skyscrapers stood stolid and sad. The multinationals had long since moved out, and the buildings
were abandoned to squatters. At first, nomad tribes would spend short nights in the building
lobbies and local crazies would occasionally hole upon in penthouse offices, but after a while,
underemployed engineers and organizers from the urban slums looked for resources and roofs
and realized that the builders of these buildings were not coming back. Slum communities
moved into the skyscrapers and appropriated them for their own homes. They re-engineered the
security systems and the networks, planted rooftop gardens, and began to physically mod the
buildings, turning offices into apartments, cubicles into playgrounds, conference rooms into
smoking parlors, and atria into bazaars. They shooed out or made peace with the tough urban
rodents and birds, grew brewed ivy on the walls for fortification and energy, and baked bubble
nests onto the sides of the reinforced-steel buildings for more room. Some of the larger buildings
hosted giant defense fountains and homespun helipads. This was an inner city undergoing
spectacular urban menopause, not likely to ever again see a gentrification boom. It was
completely unmanaged, yet boasted statistics any urban planner or city manager would swoon
over: constant population growth, low violent crime, and high rates of industry, though the
nature of the economy defied definition. It was at once a utopia and a poorhouse.
Opium-laden slothmen, penniless computer hackers, and all manner of soothsayers, snake
charmers, laptop assassins, and warlord mafiosos watched from above as the US Army rumbled
by in their distant Matchbox trucks.
[II]
Eben pulled out his omni as they entered the base. The entrance was guarded by two vaporware
railguns that had probably never fired a shot. They had been guarding the entryway for decades,
ever since the base had been erected as a "temporary" green zone for a long-defunct urban
combat team. The guns were pointed outwards towards the inner city and, in apparent
confirmation of Eben's guess, lacked any firing or loading mechanisms. They were weed-choked,
graffiti-covered obelisks, but good security theater nonetheless.
Eben pulled a standard color-screen omni out of his rucksack. He had canceled all his SIM
cards back in the States. The omni still would connect to land-based networks, and the base, as
he discovered, had several ISO-compliant infowar nets. The omni logged on to one of the public
nets and chirped happily. Eben pointed the device at the railguns and read their alt text: "CRM-
114 LONG RANGE WEAPONRY. ASSEMBLED NEW TREDEGAR METALWORKS."
The roads at this base were well-kept, and, in extreme contrast to the air base, the cars and
trucks actually obeyed the rules of the road. The truck passed by a desultory smattering of
buildings on the way to the unloading zone, and Eben's omni identified them variously as
"SERVER GREENHOUSE," "CHOPPER BASE," "REDUNDANT MISSION CONTROL,"
"RAPID PROTOTYPING FOUNDRY," "BARRACKS," and "COMMODES." On the last
structure, an RFID throwie that some grafhacker had tossed onto the sloping roof also pinged the
phone with its own alt text: "VENEREAL DISEASE EXCHANGE."
The truck chattered to a stop under a trellis which was host to a bioluminescent breed of desert
plant. The temp platoon made their exit of the vehicle and inhaled the comparatively fresh
outside air. They would only later learn that it was not in truth outside air, as the entire green
zone was covered in a balloon-suspended selectively permeable bioplastic filter. The base's
biowar expansions stretched high and low. The filter extended from desert floor to high above
the buildings and had several gelatinous slits for aircraft ingress and egress. At ground level, the
bag was anchored into plastic nurdles buried below the sand. The nurdles were installed beneath
the original base as a defensive measure, but were later reprogrammed and repurposed: they
could be melted into foundations for new buildings, they could function as data storage drives or
melt into underground ethernet lines, and they could inhale and exhale to change the temperature
of the base.
The Humvee was not in sight. The raggedy DefCon teamsters saluted the NCO with faux
flourish and drove off in their hooptietruck with an intent to find a paymaster and subsequently a
bar. McOfficer ordered the men into formation and waved his infowar wand in the air. An
anthrobot scooted across the lot and addressed him. "Calvary greetings! I am Lieutenant Colonel
John Squeaky Duh'Geeky Many Jars the Younger! I hereby relieve you of command of this
unit!" The robot was an effervescent meter-tall chromejob that spoke in a high-pitched but
otherwise humanesque voice. It was a Stumbler, a gray-market bot built by cottage industry
hackers in China. The industrial design was a bit lacking, as most Stumblers were based on
generic botboxes with minimal case modding, but the software was impressive. Stumblers, or
"Syntax Stumbling Heuristics Robots" if the manuals were to be believed, were an attempt to
squeeze maximal functionality out of minimal hardware. They had basic bioneural brains and
were loaded with open-source learning platforms. The bots, upon construction, would be given a
few days on the internet, usually running distributed computing botnets in the background
(indeed, some of the whiteboxers would spend more of their reputation server credit on PR for
their teams than they would on their actual product.) They would access forums, databases,
open-license and public-domain literature, and content sharing sites, where they would learn
simple grammar and thought constructions. The content was free, and the hardware had only
minimal economic cost. By reading and watching the net, the robots could easily create more
bioneural connections without the need for bespoke or high-end brains. After the brains had
undergone sufficient machineurogenesis, the bots would be taken off the net and would undergo
Turing tests and sociability reaction programs. Any robots that failed their tests would simply be
wiped and re-initiated. Those that passed were sold, through middlemen, to first-world
institutions: multinationals and bureaucracies, which were the only remaining organizations that
would tolerate such low quality bots. Squeaky was a noobie, not more than a few weeks old. Of
course, he was no Lieutenant Colonel. The Stumblers had the annoying habit of lexical
regurgitation and young Squeaky had pirated far too many war movies.
The roguish bot attempted an elaborate about face and fell. It rolled, righted itself and began a
comical march toward a nearby structure. McOfficer saw no reason to linger. The soldiers
collectively hesitated for a moment and then went off after the bot, marching in a narrow
column. They reached a tent where several officers and many bored-looking enlisted men sat on
cheap modular chairs. The officers were energetically haggling over the men, trading military
reputation credit for new men to augment their ranks. They would approach individual soldiers,
scan their ID badges, and haggle over them while the soldiers sat bewildered. After a slow
compromise was arrived at, the Assignments Officers would demand their cut and the deal
would be finalized. Eben sat and watched several negotiations in fascination before setting his
sunglasses to maximum and turning on his omni.
His omni was a feature-heavy, though UI-weak, Linux machine. Eben activated the radio
function and scanned the local channels. Most of the radio stations were mesh networks, but one
or two still used centralized transmitters. Eben found, mostly, strange wailing music and men
talking in smooth nonsense. One of the lower-frequency channels was playing a syndicated BBC
feed, and a few were playing ultra-popular American music. Eben flipped off the radio and
settled into a playlist of his own.
After a long while, the men came to him. He was "sold" for a fairly good price (in his own
approximation) to a man representing, by proxy, the 555th Battalion. The trader spoke into one
his his several cell phones. "Six-two and you've got a deal." He scanned Eben's ID and
wordlessly handed him a transfer slip, which chirped that he was to report to a bus station across
the way.
The bus station constituted several infowar displays under another trellis. The appropriate bus
arrived after some thirty minutes. It was an old-fashioned hydrogen-powered machine with a
whiny engine. Eben was borne into a corner of the base filled with slapdash barracks, examples
of foreboding institutional architecture. After several confusing turns on painfully narrow roads,
the bus deposited him in a dark square. The square had been designed as a gathering place for
off-duty personnel, but was serving as a communal trash gyre. The transfer slip told him to
proceed west on Second Street. Other bus passengers were dispersing hesitantly into the early
night. Eben saw only one street sign, representing a four-lane street, the largest he had seen
inside the base. The sign read, in large screen-printed block letters, "HELL BOULEVARD."
Eben accosted a passing soldier. "Excuse me, could you tell me where to find Second Street?"
The soldier took the slip from his hands and studied it for a moment. "Hmm, yes, I suppose I
could."
 He returned the slip and walked off.
Eben tried a few other individuals and got similar results. They seemed to delight in his
cluelessness. This was not a breed of soldier he had known in the States. He decided to stroll
down the boulevard. The street was vacant despite a few lone uniformed men and the occasional
jalopy. A flock of ornithopter drones flew by. The yellow sodium light of the street lamps played
off their bright silver, and the flapping UAVs appeared as angels flying speedily on light,
shimmering wings over Hell Boulevard.
A pickup truck rounded a corner onto Hell. It bore a "Question Reality" bumper sticker, had
teflon skis in lieu of back wheels, and was blasting loud, uncomfortable music. Two men
squatted in the bed of the truck. One wore infowar glasses and a pork-pie hat. The other was
hatless and had absurd-looking sideburns. They both were dressed in fatigues. The first man
pointed to the ornithopter flock, and the second raised a homemade artillery piece. He fired into
the flock. The projectile was a net, and a number of drones were ensnared. The others fled in all
directions. The hunter-salvagers hooted and banged on the cab of the truck. They lowered the
netted ornithopters into their vehicle and took off down a side street.
A wheel-footed Stumbler approached. Eben flagged it down and asked for directions. It
directed him on a not altogether logical route, insisting on a categorical avoidance of left turns.
He thanked the robot and set off. At length, Eben arrived at a sprawling building which bore a
print sign and matching alt text: "555th HQ." He entered and found a dingy lobby. Several men
sat clustered around a table at the far end of the room, playing a card game. There was a wall-
mounted computer, to which he addressed himself.
"Private Eben Lance reporting for duty."
The computer was displaying a marquee: "555th Infowar Goons - Battalion Headquarters." It
processed his request, then replied with a block of on-screen text. "Pvt. Lance will report to C
Company command, Rm. 202." Room 202 was not difficult to find. A lone Stumbler sat at a
giant wood desk. Eben addressed himself to the robot, which welcomed him warmly in idiomatic
streetspeak. The bot offered him a choice of rooms. Eben chose a single. The robot squirted him
the room's hash key and returned to standby mode.
Private Lance's room was small, dark, musty, and unpleasant-smelling, but otherwise quite
comfortable. An LCD on the wall directed that he was to report to tutorials the following
morning at 0800 sharp. He dumped his rucksack on the floor and quickly went to sleep.
[III]
The telescreen woke Eben at 0700. At his door was a small box containing a simple mil-spec
omni, still hot from the printer. After he performed his morning routines, the omni offered to
direct him to the mess. Breakfast was fried protein matter. At a few minutes to eight, his omni
buzzed and directed him to the first class of the day, "Applied Malware Attacks." The class was
held in a lecture hall located in a large building across the street from the 555th's Headquarters.
The teacher, a slovenly NCO, read from a print textbook. The textbook was written by some
script-kiddie "expert" and contained material that could be found on any hacker tube. Much of
the class dealt with downloading pre-built hacker programs from established basement-dweller
nets and pointing them at insurgent servers. The rest of the classes were similar: they were large
lecture-style affairs led by self-important bureaucrats.
In his first class and his fourth, Eben found himself sitting next to a friendly man named Royle
Lester. Lester had a portable noise-damper and affixed it to his desk at the beginning of each
session. He was a tall and energetic fellow who was not infected with the oppressive cynicism
and malaise of most of the other people Eben had met in the base. Lester was constantly pulling
omnis out of his pockets and checking them. He was at once engaged in two multiplayer net
games, a collaborative coding project, several black-market equipment deals, and many unrelated
and desultory IM conversations.
At lunch, Lester invited Eben over to a crowded table and they got to talking about life in the
base. Lester had been a member of the 555th for three months, making him, in his own
approximation, an established veteran. Eben was curious about a number of things and got to
asking Lester about the command structure of the base.
"Who's in charge of the 555th?" he queried.
Lester had no idea. "I checked the orgs last week," he admitted. "John Somebody, I think."
Eben laughed. How could an enlisted man not know who his commanding officer was?
Lester launched into a lengthy reply. "Well, it's like this. You remember that base in Iran a few
years back where there was the mutiny? Well, stuff like that happens all the time in this army.
Maybe not on that scale, definitely not that much publicity. You get a bunch of conscripts in a
base commanded by your average military infotards. They decide they want more pay, better
food, better treatment, whatever. And they realize that they're sitting on top of millions of dollars
worth of defense hardware. So what happens is they swipe a few auth codes, maybe get an
officer in on it, and raid their own weapons lockers. Then they hole up in a building, flash the
ROM, and plant kevlar-kudzu on the walls. In a few minutes, they have a highly defensible
position. Usually, after that, they start printing stuff: pamphlets, computers, weapons, drones,
transmitters. They can set up pirate radio stations, frak up all the repservers, and cause general
mayhem within a base." Lester paused to place a bid on one thousand pairs of standard-issue-
clone tube socks. "In one of the Canadian bases last year, some rebs actually trojaned the
hierarchy servers and started ordering all the shock troops outside their compound to attack each
other. Now, minimutinies like this happen a lot, more than you'd think. A lot of of them are very
well covered up. What ends up happening in a lot of cases is the brass calls in an counter-
terrorist team. The counter-terrorists actually spend way more of their time doing internal cover-
ups than they do fighting real terrorists. So a few black helicopters land and you generally never
hear from the rebs again. The next morning, the brass will order a new building, send home a lot
of letters to mom and pop, and bribe or threaten the journalists and upstart bloggers. So, yeah,
you don't hear about a lot of these incidents.
"The first thing the brass tried to do to stop these mutinies was to place a prohibition on tech.
You could only own certain devices that were on an approved list. Well, that was doomed from
day one. So they quickly realized that they had to do something really, kinda, different. And
someone came up with this approach they call 'Rotating Standardization.' The idea being that
there has been so much - uh, natural systemic decentralization that no one really needs to be in
the same place for all that long. Damn! It's got malware!" He pulled the battery out of the omni
he had been tapping on and threw it over his shoulder. A sanitation robot appeared. "What was I
talking about?" Eben reminded him.
"Okay, yeah. Everybody gets a pretty similar training back in US bases: how to march, how to
shoot, how to die. And so unless you are a specialist, it doesn't really matter where you are in a
fight or even where you are in a war. The only difference between a soldier in the Antarctic
campaign and one in Poland is the type of uniform he wears. For all I know, next week I might
get assigned to an aircraft carrier. The only people who really need anything more than grunt
skills are the DefCons and the specialists. And yeah, the brass can pretty much reasonably
assume that all the grunts are interchangeable, which is the reason why we have a new battalion
commander every week. Half of them don't even bother to show up at the base in person.
Naturally, by moving say a quarter of a battalion every month, the odds of mutiny are decreased.
Training is irrelevant, transportation is inexpensive, and there are collateral advantages: troop
morale, by any standardized measure, increases."
A bell rang and the two men left the mess hall, still in conversation. They had determined that
they shared the next two classes as well. They had a bit of time before the next block, and they
came to a mutual and unspoken agreement to walk slowly and aimlessly down the street. Hell
was brighter by day. Occasional UAVs hummed overhead and a constant stream of vehicles
passed: infowar buggies, giant military trucks, and the occasional backfiring, overcrowded
jalopy. Lester greeted a rotund man who had been moseying down the street in the opposite
direction and introduced him to Eben as Slick. Slick began to relate a story to the two, the sort of
military urban legend that even Eben had heard three lifetimes worth of.
At once, all of the infowar vehicles were thrown to the side of the road, as if by a divine
magnetism. Three heavy hovertrucks sped down the middle of the street. They were completely
black in color with heavily tinted windows and seamless doors. The people on the pavement
stopped still as the trucks passed noiselessly. Eben noticed that Slick had his hand to his gut and
Lester's fingers stood uncharacteristically still on the omni. The trucks were gone. LEDs began
to blink again on the infowar cars and electric motors kicked back into gear. "What was that?"
"Those were the Sirens. They call 'em that because once you hear their song, you're never
gonna hear anything else, ever. They're a... hmm... a counter-terrorist org, a prog-rock band of
sorts."
"I'd contend they're more of a death metal group. The Sirens drive around with all kinds of
DARPA shit, mostly sonic weapons. They have directional speakers, atom amps, and all these
overpowered tone generators. The Sirens 'perform' for targets who are really dug in, bunker
dwellers and troglodyte sysadmins. The other thing about the Sirens: no one knows who they
are."
"That's a rumor, Roy. The names of the First Army Musicians are posted in Public Records."
"No they ain't. A few buddies of mine went to PubRec. The list is real but the names, well, we
logged on to the cod. We checked out the names and they had all died long ago."
 Slick grunted heavily and said nothing.

The following morning, Eben woke to a squeaking omni. He looked at the ever-demanding
machine. Instead of his daily schedule, there were large block letters: 'RAID TIME!!!1!!11!
Assemble CLARK oh-eight-hundred, ready to pwn.' The announcement had obviously been
dictated to a Stumbler and scribed in the bot's own (overly eager) idiolect. Eben felt a potent
rush, two parts excitement and one part anxiety. He showered and broke fast speedily, then
assembled a few cheap omnis and realized that the enthused anthrobot hadn't left noobie
directions to whatever Clark was. He recalled noting an intercom system on the wall and, after
several minutes of contending with the archaic and abstruse interface, was able to hunt down
Lester's room. He buzzed it, but there was no answer. He recalled the Stumbler in Room 202,
but, upon arriving, found the room empty. There were thirty minutes before his top-secret
mission was to start and Eben had no idea where to go. He took at last to the street. After a few
blocks on Hell, he spied a group of Stumblers rolling along hurriedly while P2P gossiping on
their infrared channels. He descended upon the robogaggle and, exercising proper human-bot
etiquette, plucked one of the robots off the ground by its shiny, dome-shaped head. The robot
cursed in binary and then greeted him with a mock-polite "Howdy." Eben offered a passcode and
requested directions to Clark. The annoyed bot made eye contact with one of Eben's omnis,
which squawked to indicate a transfer. Without delay, the Stumbler wriggled from the private's
grip and skated off. Eben plucked out the omni, which informed him of a received .gmap file. It
was a collaborative map of the base, generated off-record by mesh networks of Stumblers.
Though Eben did not know it, this map was years more up-to-date and far more feature-heavy
than the official military maps of the base. It had street view stills of every intersection and
various points of interest. (Which to the robot's eye greatly differ from human points of interest.
This map overlooked all the absurd socialist-realistic soldier-proletarian statues in major
barracks squares, but included such subcategories as 'Interesting Sidewalk Design' and 'Mad
Crazy Cabling Jobs.') Eben presently cared not for the crowd-soured data pools and robotically-
induced feature creep, and headed straight for the search bar perched atop the interface, which
found him Clark Meeting Hall.
Upon entering the hall, Eben ran a familiarity ping and discovered Slick hanging out with two
country-punk types near one of the walls. He greeted the three, but had no wish to linger, and
found a seat whereat he sat, scanning about on his omni, until eight sharp. Just as the timeservers
struck that hour, a garage-style door opened and in bounded an officer. He was dressed like
General Custer and was closely followed by an entourage of human and bot aides.
"Good morning, boys and girls!" His energetic southern-toned voice rang over the hall's PA.
"I'm Colonel Dan and I'll be leading this morning's raid. Jehovah, proof the room." A bot began
squirting orders to the hall, instructing doors to close, fans to spin, and counter-bugs to activate.
"The Islamic Irredentism Blog Roundtable and Courts Union, of which you are all aware," No
one was. "Has for some months controlled heavy printers somewhere in the downtown locale.
Last night, an informant of ours tipped us off as to their probable location. Our infobots did some
recon to confirm this and are flying in to report to us. In fact, they should be here..." The Colonel
consulted an omni. "right about now."
An ultralight aircraft bounced off of a plexiglass window/wall and landed in a
discombobulated and ridiculous manner next to the building. Jehovah, the Stumbler, did not miss
a beat. "They could teach..." The Colonel kicked the diminutive robot off the stage with a heavy
combat boot, but the damage was done. The entire room chorused, "monkeys to fly better than
that!" The robot bounced, then landed on its castors, and rolled up against a Jersey barrier, its
emoticon face all smiles. A side door opened and the passengers of the aircraft entered: two
Stumblers followed by a humanoid pilot bot. The bots exchanged a digital handshake with
Jehovah and his netbot krewe and lit upon the stage. The Lieutenant offered a brief introduction
for the bots and sat in an uncomfortable-looking chair. One of the recently-arrived bots, an
infovore with RAF roundels on his casing, began, "I am T. S. Blogger de Grogger the
Magnificent. As the Lieutenant no doubt informed you, we have the location of the insurgent
print shop. Screen, please." A map appeared. "Here is our target, an abandoned Tesco just
outside of the city." The screen zoomed in to a fancy CGI rendering of a large building. "Here
you see the locations of the major printers." Dots and rectangles began to appear on the model.
"The building is primarily armed with Gauss lasers, here, and piezoes, behind these trellises of
biokevlar. Additional countermeasures may include malware mines and infowar decoys.
Lieutenant."
The officer jumped up. "Mission HQ will be the adjacent building, a squatter tenement." He
rotated a finger above a multitouch surface. "This building is occupied. The locals have not been
warned, and the mission will involve Class B Temporary Cohabitation." No one knew what that
was, either. "We'll have several cannons on the roof of this building, pointing down at the target.
I will lead the mission from my chopper and T. S. here will do ground force coordination. The
majority of the assault will take the form of an aerial battery, which shall commence at roughly
0930. Ground forces will cluster behind portable cover and charge the print shop only if
command deems it necessary."
Eben's attention shifted to the soldier to his left, who was covertly filming the presentation.
The soldier noticed Eben's glance, turned to him, and whispered "It's for the cod," as if that was a
reasonable explanation. Eben knew that the external nets had been disabled ever since the bot
had proofed the room, so he did not judge the recording as a risk to the security of the mission,
and thought no more of it. The Lieutenant was wrapping up. "...a standard ad hoc platoon
organization, with one bot coordinating per platoon per truck. We roll in five!" The room erupted
with cheers and hoots. Several flares spiraled upwards towards the tall cantilevered ceiling.
Groups of beige and white Stumblers entered through a portal, borne by steam-powered carts.
They dispersed into the crowd of slouch-hatted soldiers and tossed out colored comm units as if
they were Mardi Gras necklaces. Eben caught a dark blue comm and pinned it on his uniform,
which changed tint to match.
The flimsy back wall of the room lifted and the men streamed out. Eben saw insignia of all
degrees of units: infowar goons, salvage grunts, engineers, sysadmins, and many more he could
not identify. He followed the broad backs of two other dark blue-clad soldiers. He was outside.
He could no longer hear the shouts of the humans and robots over the deafening motors. All
manner of heavy craft streamed by: hovercraft wallowing on hoverskirts, armored trucks sagging
on giant traction wheels, and choppers hanging precariously from rotating blades. Drones and
bots zipped freely between the vehicles, silently proposing and counter-proposing spatial
realignments to the distributed infowar brain: move this chopper three meters to the left, land that
drone on a charging station, launch hoverboards 0373 through 0400.
Eben followed the dark blues into a wheeled military truck. The driver, a budget-model
robochauffeur, was honking madly. A Stumbler vaulted over a seat and handed Eben a heavy
hemispherical object. It was a standard battle kit housed within a rigidified helmet. Eben
removed a light body armor kit from the helmet and strapped it to the outside of his uniform,
then set about preparing the gear. He fiddled with a haptic panel on the uniform until the
miniature tritium reactor fired up. The armor began to inflate. He then removed the remainder of
the contents of the helmet and sprinkled a packet of seeds onto the top of the membranous
headpiece. After he had seeded it, he sprayed a bit of nutrient-laced water upon the helmet and
the Chia took root and grew before his eyes. He donned the helmet, noticing in the process that
his hair was still wet from the morning's shower, and set about unfolding the origami rifle. As he
did this, he took a look outside. His transport was just passing the vaporware railguns on its way
out of the base. The air above was thick with flying machines.
The truck was an open-top model, long removed from the assembly line. The engine grunted
unhappily as it tore down the road abreast of several other vehicles in the large formation. The
dark blues were a varied group and none of them seemed to know each other. What a cruel thing
this Rotating Standardization is, Eben thought, when a soldier cannot go to battle alongside his
buddies.
All at once, the formation of trucks and transports was beset upon by a raggedy and
disorganized troupe of auto-rickshaws. Concurrently, a cluster of homebrew aerial vehicles took
off towards the military airships with a similar purpose. They were merchants. A rusting vehicle
pulled alongside Eben's truck. It was steered by a young child, and a bearded man was perched
on the roof. It kept pace with the truck and the merchant began to chatter in broken English.
"Havings jailbroken firearms, Linux omnis, battle dress, grenades. All kind of item for lowest
price."
The truck's Stumbler took offense. "We are in the middle of a military operation! You cannot
sell goods to my men!" His eyes flashed red (somewhere in the #7- prefix, an angry red, as
opposed to cute red, bashful red, or any of the other reds the Stumblers had standardized in their
emotional-response roundtables) as he spoke. The merchant atop the rickshaw waved an
infowand at the bot and it fell to the floor, its face a contorted blue screen. The soldiers in the
truck, like their comrades in the other vehicles, were possessed of a latent anarcho-capitalism.
Without so much as a thought for the fallen Stumbler, they began pointing at items, haggling in
terse shouts while rolling along at a speed of fifty kilometers per hour. Eben found himself
negotiating for a PP7 pistol, reasoning that a non-infowar weapon could come in handy in a
fight. He talked the man down to 200 dollars and an omni in trade, and proceeded, after running
a quick zero-out of the omni's drives, to make the trade by loading the items onto one of the
trader's beat-up drones, which ferried the items across the rift. He received the weapon and
tucked in into his uniform's shirt pocket. The uniform beeped happily, then said, in its squeaky
voice, "Your delicious Coca-Cola is sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Would you like me to chill it,
sir?" Eben chuckled at the identspoof of the weapon and responded in the negative. The trader
supplied a few more dangerous-looking items to the men and women in the truck, then waved
goodbye and barked a command to his son. The rickshaw sped off down a side street with other
merchant vehicles. The entrepreneurs seemed to sense that the formation of trucks was drawing
close to its target.
They sped into a warehouse district. Eben's attention was diverted to a ledge of the truck's
railing. The ledge was diagonally oriented and painted yellow and white with black block text
declaring, in standard military agrammatical empty-threat terms, "NO STEP." In the center of the
O, there was a fly. It sat perched perfectly in the middle of the letter, clinging effortlessly to the
speeding vehicle. It seemed almost preternatural, an insect suspended in time, its lustrous thin
wings forever catching the light of the desert sun. Eben focused his consciousness on the fly. O
hideous little bat, Eben intoned, the size of snot.
Eben blinked.
The world exploded.
[IV]
Eben's truck had not yet reached the ex-Tesco when the fighting began. Supersonic dive bombers
fell shrieking from the sky to deliver their malicious bags of tricks: fractal bombs, glue drops,
horrendous automalware packets. Eben saw smoke and bright green tracer flares overhead. The
building below was heavily planted-upon. The walls were covered with bioengineered vines of
all descriptions, so strong and thick that they had broken the trellises and guides and themselves
formed the exoskeleton of the building. The first lines of infantry were approaching the edifice
under small arms fire. The tenement, barely visible through the smoke, had been host of the
initial fighting. Shock troops representing the insurgent printers had counter-stormed the building
and engaged in a skirmish against loosely composed teams of specialists. The air was thick with
mass-printed drones, so much so that the choppers carrying payloads of artillery rounds and
pieces could not land on the building's roof. They described wide circles around the tenement,
the men on board looking with anxiety and helplessness at the commando units within. Resident
squatters ducked, crawled, and screamed as they attempted to avoid the combat.
The bot in the truck had awoken and was rubbing its dome-like head. "Cleared for stims!" it
shouted. A few of the soldiers had bought stronger meds from the merchant, but Eben was
content with his standard-issue adrenaline/caffeine slug. He injected half a vial, fumbling with
the needle in the bouncing truck, and followed up with a shot of antihistamines and preventive
antibiotics. The rush (from the former injection, he hoped) hit him as he spun up his rifle. The
truck rolled to a stop behind an inflated barrier and the Stumbler jumped off, beckoning the dark
blues to follow. They clipped their rifles and crouched behind the barrier. A network of trenches
and portable walls was forming behind the initial breastworks that the first lines had laid. Eben
saw several nests full of bespectacled sysadmins and hackers screaming and typing with
voracity. Up ahead, the trenches were packed with uniformed soldiers. Fire was being traded
between the print shop and the earthworks. Fractal bombs popped overhead, causing the
hydraulics in Eben's helmet to squeeze and release in frightening patterns. The soldiers in the
earthworks were holding their positions comfortably against the occasional and brief bouts of
fire from the Tesco, but most of the men that Eben passed were not operating their weapons.
A particularly strong cluster of fractal bombs went off just as the dark blues reached their
firing line, not coincidentally squeezed between two other dark blue platoons. Their bot eagerly
issued a weapons free, and Eben turned his rifle on the building, aiming for a high growth of
viridian plants. He clicked the rifle to "corrosive" and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.
He tried again. The rifle spoke. "Danger! Avoid friendly fire! Avoid friendly fire!" More fractal
bombs went off overhead, along with several chains of bright blue ordinance that whistled as it
fell. A mustached man who stood next to Eben shouted something in his ear, presumably about
the infowar snafu. Eben guessed that the building had been wired with hacked IFF transponders,
a giant identspoof. He snapped on his goggles to confirm and read the structure's alt text, crisp
against the haze of weapons smoke: "USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN."
A chopper flew by, spraying the ground troops with what looked like pesticide. He was later to
realize that it was an anti-radiation treatment. A tall grunt with very close-cut hair panicked and
started yelling. "They've got lightning! They've got lightning!" Many more soldiers picked up the
cry and several broke ranks and started running back towards the trucks.
There were tall robots on the roof of the Tesco. They began to lower wrecking ball-simulacra
from giant fishing poles. Giant sparks of electricity branched out from the wrecking balls. The
first spark hit a chopper, knocking it out of the air. The next hit a bubble-barrier not far from the
dark blues' line. Eben's artifical adrenaline mixed with the sultry radiant heat of the lightning. He
was beyond fear. A man not far from him was flung ten meters in the air. Was it a man or just a
suit of armor? The sparks became concentrated on the tenement, then hyperactively refocused on
the ground troops. A fuel truck was hit and exploded.
Eben heard the thunder of the Tesla coils. He heard the shouts of wounded and burnt men. He
heard the whistle of surface-to-air missiles. Then, he heard, quite clearly, the hiss of gas
canisters.
His mind yawed.
Gas! Gaaaaaaaaaaaass... Quick boys......

Eben awoke slowly in a hospital bed. He was being tended to by two chattering machines, early
model medibots. They soon noticed that he was awake, and quickly assured him in speech-synth
that he was well and back in the base. He saw an IV on his arm.
"What's this?"
"A ba-sic anti-rad-i-a-tion drip. The com-bat zone was hit by a small nu-cle-ar de-vice. No-
thing to wo-rry a-bout."
"May I walk around?"
"Please."
As Eben stood, he discovered that he was wearing a hospital gown. He had light scratches on
his face, but was otherwise unharmed. He gripped the IV pole and started slowly walking away
from the bed. He felt slightly drugged. After passing through a door flap, he emerged into a
hallway. Medics, mostly bots, were rushing past, carrying bioplastics and bags of anti-rad
solution. An omni rang on his sleeve. He hadn't even noticed it before. He whistled for the omni
to accept.
"Hello," he said weakly.
"Eben, this is Royle Lester."
"Hey, old man. Where'd you get my number?"
"Looked it up on the cod. Someone's been dumping all the hospitalitization data, y'know."
"The cod?"
"A fish genus. Um, we'll talk about it later. So how'd it feel getting nuked?"
Eben affirmed that he was holding together. Lester was late to some kind of meetup and sent a
casual goodbye ping.

Eben was released from the hospital later that afternoon. He had spent the day wandering around
as the gown (which had woven itself into street clothes) recorded his metrics. He returned to a
closet full of new uniforms and a subcampaign ribbon. After dinner, he had a full block of free
periods. Lester's number had an away message, so he settled in with an omni and started
scanning the base's nets. It was generally boring info-infill. A few divisions had functional sites
or server drops, and there were a number of disorganized shared directories. Most of the nets,
like the meatspace roads in the base, were crawling with little bots which maintained some
facsimile of order. Eben found a cluster of rep-servers and conversation forums, but they seemed
to be a bit too tidy to be real. External net access was blocked for some IP ranges and throttled in
all the rest. He found no mention anywhere of the battle he had participated in that morning. An
updates site mentioned the dishonorable discharge of a Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Bobbit. In the
metadata was a still picture of the Lieutenant from that morning's mission pow-wow. "The
hammer falls heavily around here," Eben thought. He felt confused, and resolved to think on the
events of the day when he could muster more perspective and clarity. Presently, his mind was
still taken by the drugs and sleeping potion beckoned.
The next morning, as Eben left the 555th's mess, headed for the first class of the day, he saw
an unsettling sight. Tall, gaunt, and pigeon-toed lordotic robots were walking in a column down
the middle of Hell. They were identical in form-factor to those he had seen on the roof of the not-
Tesco the day before. Most were black in color, and some bore inscriptions and evil-looking
graffiti in cursive nonsense script. Every fifth bot held one of the spark gap machines in its surly
hands. Eben involuntarily stumbled and almost fell. At his previous assignment in America, he
would have immediately called his commanding officer, but here, he had none. He did not know
the IP address of the Military Police, so he dialed the only number that was as yet in the contacts
of his new omni: Lester's. The cold, fell bodies of the robots swoosh-clanked past as Lester
picked up. Eben described the bots to him.
"Oh yeah, the lighting rods. They're a new acquisition. I think they roasted a thousand of our
people yesterday. So of course we had to get us some."
"You mean the brass bought these?"
"Natch."
"Who'd they buy these bots from?"
"Why, the terrorists of course. Look, Eben, I was just about to call you. Friend of a friend got
the dailies, so I've logged us both out of classes for today. Hope you don't mind."
"Not at all, that's swell."
"Um, if you're up for it, I got a few things planned, might be fun. You wanna come along?"
Eben felt well-rested, for he was. The last few days had seen him in a bed for almost half of
his cycles. The recomplications of international travel, a long truck ride, and a small nuke had
taken their various tolls, but Eben's circadian clock was getting its act together and the
adrenalines, anti-rads, and sleeping potion were all wearing off, or at least had counteracted each
other to such an extent that Eben felt more awake, aware, and ready then he had in days. The
shock/countershock of the robots, which were still marching by before his eyes and the good
news that he need not attend the ridiculous script-kiddie tutorials furthered his willingness.
"Sure, I'm game."
"Listen, I'm at the garages. I'll be in front of the 555th HQ in five minutes."

Lester's ride was a beat-up internal-combustion Volkswagen 181, held together by bio-paste and
duct tape. It had no roof. "Who needs one?" Lester reasoned. "It never rains in the bag."
As they bumped down the road, Lester spoke candidly. "I was kinda concerned about some
things yesterday. First, obviously, about the people going into combat, their safety. That wasn't
really a big worry, though. Most of the time there's a very low fatality rate on mission, but, as
you n'doubt know, when the infotards fuck up, they fuck up good. Like, yesterday, they coulda
just dropped the bomb and been done. But nukes are expensive and tough to clean up. Minimal
Realistic Effort, they call it. Basically a big excuse for institutional-scale laziness. Second thing,
though. I kinda thought you mighta been a, um, day-tripper."
Eben was familiar with the term, having heard it at his previous assignments. A day-tripper
was an agent, usually just a bounty hunter, who served short terms in different military guises,
hunting down small-time black- and gray-marketeers.
"I wasn't worried about going to prison or anything, but the costs of high-grade tamperware
and a quick reassignment are getting very high these days, and I'm comfortable at present in the
555th. But yeah, since the Geiger went off in my omni just now, I can be pretty sure you are
more or less who you say you are."
Eben chuckled.

The jalopy clattered to a stop on an astrograss field next to several parked two- and three-
wheelers. Several casually-dressed people stood in a circle near the middle of the field. Lester
flashed a friendly sign and walked over. He introduced Eben to the group, rattling off the
nicknames or handles of those present. A tall man whom Lester had identified as Sam spoke.
"We've got ten. Let's suit up."
Sam whistled up the antigrav that bore the suits. The game was a form of folk rugby. "One
ball, two goals. Don't leave the field, don't fly too high, and don't kill anyone. That's pretty much
it."
The suits arrived. They were military abandonware models, ninja'd from some tech landfill.
Eben had never before seen a superman suit IRL. Lester was the first to suit up. He slapped on
the light plastic shielding and leaped three meters into the air. The thrusters burned blue as Lester
hovered. "Cool, eh?"
Eben had managed to put his suit on correctly by the time the team captains had been selected.
Lester was floating off with the rest of the bunch, jabbering in jargonese. Eben took to the air
awkwardly, but almost had his balance by the time he reached the group. He was picked by the
captain of the team Lester was on. The other team began the game possessing the ball, which
was a large silicone football-simulacrum.
The suits were chipped to a max thruster speed, and the only way to exceed that velocity was
to take dives. For this reason, one or two players from each team would fly around high above
the action and dive-tackle the ball handlers. This Lester explained to Eben as they prepared for
the tip-off.
In the opening minutes of the game, it was all Eben could do to follow the ball around the
field. He tried a few flips with varying success. The ball covered ground slowly, as it was
difficult to attain a break-away and even harder to maintain one before the dive-bombers. Most
of the movement was in micromanagement, control, and short strategic laterals. Eben's first taste
of the action came ten minutes into the game, at a height of about five meters. A woman on the
other team had out-microed a teammate of Eben's, and had sent the latter spiraling downwards
into the ground. The opponent grabbed the ball and headed straight for Eben, attempting a mid-
air kung fu kick. Eben thrustered to the side to avoid the impact, then swung back and caught the
opponent by the backside of her uniform. He pulled his thrusters to full reverse just as she went
for full ahead. The opposite motions counteracted, and they hung in midair. Eben tried a few
unsuccessful jerky lateral motions as he looked around. The closest other player was some
fifteen meters away, and represented the opposing team. Lester was overhead, though far away,
and the other six players, including the one who had taken a nosedive, were all occupied in
handling each other. Eben present-mindedly maneuvered his current opponent to act as an
ablative shield for the impact of the oncoming one. The approaching man unconcernedly grabbed
one of the legs of the female opponent and burned his thrusters at max. There was no positional
micromanagement: it was a simple matter of two versus one. The opponents skimmed down the
field with Eben attached. There was nothing he could do besides cling to the morass and hope
Lester arrived presently.
Luckily, Lester was undelayed in swooping across the field. He descended rapidly to a height
below the pile-up, then turned upwards in an approximation of Pugachev's Cobra, breaking them
up. As Lester grappled with the woman for the ball, Eben found himself pinned by the other
opponent, who had an uncanny sense of balance. Eben tried a few microfeints, but the other
seemed to be able to predict his moves. They slid up and down through the air. The man, still
holding Eben's arms, landed on the ground and gained a good footing. He then proceeded to give
Eben several disorienting wallops and throw him through a brick wall. The wall shouted in pain,
but Eben felt none, as his suit absorbed and distributed the jolt. The wall was already beginning
to heal as Eben picked himself up and flew back into the game with brio. He had realized that in
the suit he was practically immune to pain, and decided to play with that in mind.
Over the next hour and a half, Eben played without the inhibition of instinct. He managed to
accrue four points by the end, topping a few of the more experienced players. Had the players'
suits no auto-resolving function, they all would have been horribly grass-stained and sweaty by
the endgame. Nonethless, there was universal agreement to visit a bar.

The biowar filters, counter-infiltration whaleware, general country- and military-wide

prohibitions, and all the various sensors, scanners, sniffers, sonic and ultrasonic ears, and
spectrum analyzers employed by legions of MPs and minor robocracy/bureaucracies could do
absolutely nothing to stop the flow of alcohol into the base. The jalopy convoy pulled up before a
nameless bar. It was made of foam and sandwiched between two barracks buildings located
somewhere in the military/industrial infill between Hell Boulevard and Purgatory Road. The
inside was dark and a number of anonymity-protection disco balls hung from the ceiling. Eben's
omni panicked and he squeezed the tactile controls. Someone in the party pinged for a
sequestered booth and they were led to a small cubicle with a round table and a net link.
After a few rounds of drinks, the conversation began to flow. The whole party was, after all,
behind a decent privacy filter and growing more and more inebriated.
"Well, we were on the northwest side of the building yesterday." The large man who had
thrown Eben through the wall was speaking. "So we didn't get gassed, we just got nuked. But
getting nuked didn't bother me much. You know what did? When the cleanup teams went in after
the mushroom cloud settled, they found no evidence of humans. The whole operation was
unmanned, it was all bots and printers run by proxy."
"Well, we gotta get used to that. They won't have human grunts in the future. Eventually, they
probably won't have mobile bots. It'll all be Armageddon machines or large-scale malware
dousing."
"But before you even start talking about a giant hacker IP netwar, don't you realize they've
been considering having a completely bot-supported war since like the turn of the millennium?"
"And it hasn't happened, yes. The only people doing LANparty-war are the insurgent gangs.
We, being the military, can't do that. Beyond the obvious red tape we'd need to clear, there's
always the occasional story in the news with a headline like 'Milbot goes beserk, five die.' The
reporters will telescope any disaster out of proportion. What nobody seems to get is that if a
battlefield is one hundred percent bot and zero percent wetware, the worst a misfire can do is
cause property damage."
 Lester spoke. "But that's an idealized vision. You don't have human-free battlefields. Besides,
that's military futurism. How does a giant gunbot deal with a five-year old with some corrosive
goo?"
"Huh?"
"The scenario is basically that we go in with a powerful bot and a little kid comes out, jumps
onto the bot, and starts painting it with goo, or otherwise destroying its functionalities. Which
pretty much presents the bot with two choices: surrender or kill a kid."
"What if we outfit the bots with tasers?"
"Yeah, that's a possibility. We give the bots non-lethal weapons, malware, pogo sticks, smoke
and mirrors. But it's a question of practicality. Can the military code faster than everyone else?
The answer's no. As quick as we give our bots non-lethal weapons, they'll give the kids
countermeasures."
"So you're saying that meat-people are going to be fighting wars forever."
"Unless bots become sentient. Then bot sabotage would harm sentient life, and thus no longer
deserve sympathy. The question that you'll want to ask isn't, 'will humans be fighting wars
forever?' It's 'will sentients be fighting wars forever?' And the answer is probably yes, provided
that people keep on fighting wars. The exception to the harming sentience thing is this: bot-parts
might become modular and fungible. In which case the little kid will run over and steal a bot's
arms rather than use goo. It will stop there from being fighting, but will not harm the sentient
part of the machine. Of course, wetware might become swappable too."
"Oh man, future war's gonna be so much fun. It'll be all, 'You bastards, you stole my eyes.'"
"Okay then, but won't the multinationals and infotards put DRM in the eyes or something and
ruin hot-swaps?"
"That's predicated on the assumption that there will be multinationals making the eyes." Eben
found himself speaking. "I'm pretty sure that we are going to see two trends in the near future,
the first being devolution of power directly to people and the second being de-emphasis on
brand." Lester and a few others nodded. "It used to be a lot easier to control the flow of
information and, by extension, the speed and direction of political power. But now, knowledge
and media, both cultural and political (if there remains a difference) can be promulgated through
onion routers, proxies, DNS drop points, so on. Any attempt by a government to destroy such
content would be akin to finding a fire in an infinitely large wooden labyrinth and putting it out
with gasoline. So, by definition, networks defy control. You can run filters and all kinds of
1984ware on my network, and I can subvert it by using simple encryption or by running a cable
out the window and down the block.
"And with what knowledge, exploits, and hacks I can download from the nets onto my drive
and into my brain, I can increase my personal sphere of influence without furthering
governments, NGOs, multinationals, churches, or anyone else who would in the past have stood
to gain from increased personal power. I can learn to build off-the-grid like the Amish or the
nomads and become a greater person without becoming a greater citizen, a greater consumer, or
even a more infamous criminal whom people can unite against.
"And brand. QC and machination have evolved in manufacturing industries to such a point
that Dell or Honda or Raytheon cannot make significantly better products than Matsushita or
Daihatsu or the whiteboxers who we buy most of our defense hardware from. That is coupled
with rebadging and recomplicated by standard and quotidian hacks and jailbreaks. For instance,
if I go to buy a car, a Chevy for instance, even provided that it isn't just, say, an Isuzu with a
different nameplate, how do I know that the vehicle is American? It might be made mostly of
Chinese OEM parts. So the use of any conception of quality is shattered by the globalization of
parts networks. To go even further, all advertisement is based on basic lies: battery life, fuel
efficiency, network strength. In all of these cases, whatever is claimed is not likely to be the
actual value. Not only is the nameplate lying, so is the feature list. And add to all of that
jailbreaks and hacks. If I want to run Windows, my best solution is to get a Mac omni because of
virtualization, and if I want to run the Macintosh OS, my best bet is to get a PC because of
price/performance curves and the brand tax. And each omni will run the other's software with
only very basic haxies. So in terms of physical industry, brand is losing its relevance: I can no
longer trust name-brand over Brand X when I'm buying washboards or gadgets or even bots.
"But what about information industries? Brand is no longer relevant there either. Indie records
are coming out far ahead of big labels in sales. Think about that. Sales, not even shares on pirate
networks, but sales. The third world has reached a level of tech infrastructure at which people
can easily become fluent in English, (or at least net-English) so there is no advantage a tech
support office in Des Moines has over one in Dehli. Any advantage programmers, engineers,
advertisers, or writers at multinationals had over their kin has been negated by net links. All the
simpler, non-Turing-compliant service industry sectors are run by bots, and the rest are no longer
safe from the generic brand man. Moreover, I have no reason to choose the senior and better
established companies when I'm looking for a telecom provider, an ISP, or, for that matter, a
bank. The nature of failsafes and pass-off agreements destroys any brand-stability inherent in a
long-term contract. One month my SIM card bills are going to AT&T, the next month they're
going to Upstart Wireless LLC, and the next to Shiny Happy Telecom of Guangshou. And, ever
since the Google breakup, everyone on the nets has just been building off of everyone else's APIs
to the point where anyone's net-based service industry sector is indistinguishable from their
competitor's."
Eben paused for a sip of synth and a woman in khakis jumped in. "Yeah, and the bigger
institutions are even more likely to do stuff like run psych tests to figure out how much
resistance they need to offer in order to stop you from getting an RMA or terminating your
contracts. Brand might just become the antithesis of what a consumer is looking for. A buyer
does hold the innate assumption that whiteboxers and gen-brands have a lower cost than branded
items. In the future, rather than having a brand, a company might try to cast itself as a zero-
publicity entity and hide rather than be seen."
Lester agreed. "I'd bet people who are willing to collectively give resources for a work of
public art would probably pay to remove the exact same piece of art if it bore a brand name.
Brand equity is basically disappearing."
"But we really weren't talking about brand, we were talking about future war."
"So I guess what I was getting at is that if there is a biowar breakthrough, the American
military will develop a standard, likely well-encrypted, for the biological code of their soldiers.
All the other guys will eventually do the same, and the codes will be broken rapidly, and it will
get ridiculous."
"DARPA can make the gooware, for all I care, as long as Microsoft doesn't."
"Useless Mactard. MS doesn't make bad software, they just make dull software."
"Dull and functional, eh? What about the latest version of Windows?"
The conversation went downhill from there.

After a few more rounds and some fruitless drunken wardriving, Lester delivered Eben back to
the main barracks. "I have a bit of business to attend to," said he, and set off to a
LANparty/fleamarket.
Miraculously, Lester's auth codes were still working the next day. There was no superman
game scheduled, but Lester knew of another interesting hangout. They met at the garages at
0900. Lester opened a paper box of ham and egg sandwiches which he had diverted from the
galleys. The porcine Slick joined them, a few minutes late. He had a more legitimate alibi: an
assumed sick day. The trio set off in the unwieldy Volkswagen. Lester drove quickly, his eyes
fixed to the screen of a Mac omni. He held a loud conversation with Slick in the front of the
vehicle, while Eben luxuriated in half-sleep on the comfortable sofa-simulacrum that had long
ago replaced the Volkswagen's stock back seats. Foreboding institutional buildings faded in and
out of blurry periphery in the mellow light. They arrived in some fifteen minutes at one of the
base's airfields. The morning saw the greatest multitude and variety of planes, so the scene was
like that of a less-than-animated air show. Planes and light craft swooped and screamed
overhead. A few groups of GIs sat in clusters on a grassy rooftop, clustered around chem-grills
and illegally parked vehicles. Lester drove his car up an access ramp, past several scary-looking
signs, to the roof of the structure in question, which turned out to be a disused hangar. They
parked near a corner and Eben looked to the sky.
The conversation between Slick and Lester had slowed after conditions became more
hospitable to conversation. The former had devoted his energies to the remaining sandwiches,
and Lester was attempting to shoot some photos of aircraft against the rising sun. As Eben had
discovered in the days before, Lester shared his infrastructuralistic bent, and the two soon were
trying to identify the craft overhead, looking to the canards, engines, and heights of the planes
for clues. Slick resumed what was (Eben assumed) his quotidian social behavior: rapid IM-
pinging, punctuated by the occasional grunt.
After a while, Eben asked his companion: "Hey Lester, what's this cod I've heard about?"
"The cod. Stands for 'Corollary Open Databases.' Here, lemme show you." Lester pulled an
omni from his glovebox, booted it, and typed a seemingly random string of numbers and letters
into the address bar. He was greeted by an error: "Gateway failed."
"Damn." He tried another string of characters. It also failed. The third combination worked.
The omni resolved a simple screen with a list of categories and a search box. Lester handed the
device to Eben.
There was a logo in the upper-left: a cartoon CCTV camera engaged in a staring contest with
the Eye of Providence. The page itself was wiki-style, white text over a black background. Eben
did not like the colors, so he flipped the screen's gamma before exploring the page. Many of the
categories seemed to be self-preservationistic: pages and pages listing IPs where the cod itself
could be accessed. Several of the other categories on the main page looked more interesting. One
directed to a list of active duty rosters, and another to a series of leaked infotard memoranda.
Eben's attention turned to a newish link: "Skirmish and Nuclear Detonation at Site 41003." The
page corresponding to that link was lengthy and desultory, but bore some resemblance to the
post-Wikipedia-divestiture wikis Eben knew of. Occasional comments bore [Citation needed]
and [Refactor] tags, and a clear and nails-on-chalkboard painful attempt at neutrality was evident
in the writing. The article was lengthy and incorporated multiple links to lists of dead and injured
personnel, video and audio recordings of mission briefings and combat itself, and eyewitness
accounts. It confirmed that the print shop was unoccupied by sentient beings at the time of the
fight. The edit history was a long list of obfuscated IP addresses, most likely coming from
proxies or anonymity net exit nodes.
 Lester indicated a small craft with elliptical wings buzzing overhead and Eben paused his
scrolling to look. The craft trailed a black flag with a white saber, the emblem of a known
insurgent group. It landed and taxied to a halt, where it met a black SUV. Several short men in
white robes stepped from the plane and bowed to black-clad security goons who surrounded a
decorated officer in a blue dress uniform. Eben zoomed in on the man with his omni, but saw
that he was wearing an identity shield over his upper body. The party departed into a wide
hangar.
"What was that?"
Slick fielded the question. "Those are the people we're fighting against."
"The insurgents?"
"You could call them terrorists, or extremists, or fundamentalists, if you think it fits better."
Slick had not looked up from his omni.
"What are they doing here as guests?"
"Look, kid." Slick was not much older than Eben. "America doesn't like long wars. We try to
avoid them. Vietnam and Korea were long wars, but we really weren't fighting against little
Asian countries, we were fighting against them and their neighbors the communists. Since then,
we've generally kept it short and sweet. Somalia, Kosovo, even the first desert wars at the end of
the 20th century. That's an American war plan: propaganda, in, and out in under a year. But what
about us? We're sitting in a base in a comparatively small and sparsely-populated country.
America has help from a handful of other nations. This should've been over a long, long while
ago. Why do you think we're still here?"
"Well, they tell me the enemy is well-entrenched."
"Hmm. That's not altogether untrue." Lester coughed and Slick went on. "They certainly aren't
dug in in the desert or the mountains. Every conceivable technology for finding bodies or
machinery has been used on that sand." Slick gestured widely. "And with high levels of success.
But we're still here, right? The enemy is entrenched, but no longer in the desert. Most of the bad
guys are dug right into our institutions. We give them business, they give us arms and someone
to blow up occasionally. The defense contractors in America still ship in huge, impractical planes
and tanks, but most of the stuff we actually use against our enemies comes from our enemies."
"But aren't they fighting a war of principle?"
"Sure, and a lot of murderous crazies remain. That's why you still hear about IEDs and suicide
attacks. Unfortunately, there's no way of telling the real terrorists apart from the other salesmen."
[V]
A month later, Eben was rotated to a division across the street from the 555th. Days passed
quickly and without definition or focus, consumed by endless military busywork, and ending in
prayers for elusive daily codes off the authservers. Lester kept in touch by IM, but automated
firewalls were constantly trying to stop their communications.
Eben was spending more time on the cod. He had covertly installed a proxy server on a public
computer, and was accessing the wiki on his omnis via that connection. He soon figured out a bit
about the workings of the site. A lot of the databases and infodumps were stored on fly-by-night
hosting services around the world, but the meat and bones of the cod were hosted on a hidden
serverfarm somewhere in the city. The articles on the site were multifarious. Most dealt with
day-to-day operations, workable hacks, network idiosyncracies, and where to find downloadable
malware packages. Eben began to contribute casually under an anonymized handle. He would
take pictures of construction projects throughout the base, report sightings of the Sirens and other
undercover groups, and run port scans from his proxied machines.
Eben felt that he was beginning to establish a foothold in the base. He installed his proxies and
malware on several shared computers, made friends with some of the bots, and had a presence on
repservers and underground classified forums. He bought a few servers and created an IRC
room, which a small group of network-drifters found and used to share code and links. He did
not want to pay for a car, but, on a whim, bought a motorized bike from a fellow soldier who
received an urgent and unexpected transfer note from the division's Rotating Standardization
Bureau.
The bike had been debranded and a succession of owners had left it devoid of any serial
numbers or identifying marks. Like most of the vehicles in the base, it had been converted to run
on a mitochondrial germ-drive. It ate most organic matter, and the exhaust smelled delicious.
There was no need no get a license, because privately owned vehicles (though they outnumbered
any other classification in the base) were, de jure, illegal. Eben found his range greatly expanded
with the purchase of the bike. He attended the superman game regularly, and scouted around on
cod pseudo-missions, which rewarded him with feedback on the repservers.
Regardless of all attempts of the infotards to inhibit it, culture survived in the base by the very
skin of its teeth. Eben found, on his rambling, half-asleep motorcycle rides around the base, fliers
and alt-texts advertising all kinds of things: clandestine car-projector showings of pirated films,
underground radio stations, and ephemeral markets, bars, garages, machine shops, network
shares, and concert venues. His drives were lengthy, destinationless, and without organized
schema or purpose. Here and there, he would make notes on infrastructural projects or passing
military vehicles. He would stop at dumpsters to dive for tech goods, which he sold on intranet
fleabays.
One week into his new assignment, Eben's omni conveyed another call-to-arms. He was to
report to a building across the base at 1600 sharp that very day. He logged out of his afternoon
activities with the passcode proferred in his orders and left early. After stopping by a PC vendor
for some omni RAM chips and a new ECU for his bike, he arrived at what the stumbler-map
denoted as a cheap and secure garage complex. The garage was under a large dome-shaped trellis
suspended between two buildings and was run by a mickeymouse parking-anarchy group, who
probably tithed heavily to the military authorities. After parking and locking the bike, he set off
for the building, which was not far down the road. It was an ex-hospital, and the briefing was to
be held in a conference room of sorts. There were some 25 people in attendance, dressed in
uniforms representing various services and designations. A single Stumbler appeared on stage at
roughly fifteen minutes after the hour. It introduced itself as "Frasier Kim Il-Sung" and
announced that they were raiding a major and significant serverfarm near the edge of city limits.
The robot announced that it was to be a completely land-based mission, as the insurgents running
the server had intel on all aerial activity.
The men and women assigned to the force were herded out to a cluster of combat vehicles,
which had rolled up while they were waiting in the building. They were loaded into the heavily-
armored minitanks, which set off at an alarming rate. The tanks soon joined others, and a column
of a hundred or so vehicles were heading down Purgatory to the gates. Once in the city, Eben
logged on to one of the abundant free-access darknets. He needed no proxies to get to the cod,
and its IP address resolved very quickly. At the top, in large, bold letters, was a new article:
"Order 098K7D: RAID ON THE COD SERVER FARM." Live streaming video showed the
tanks rolling through the empty streets, and databases below listed the serial numbers of each
tank involved and the names of all those within. Eben found his own name, and checked the
names listed on his omni with those on the nametags of the people around him. They matched.
Frantically, he scrolled down the article. He read: "The squadron of miniature tanks will be
intercepted nonviolently at [Location TBD] by technicals representing the COD servers, and will
return to their base at about 1800 the same day. It is advised that independent merchants do not
accost either party, as they may be endangered."
The first truck appeared off to the left of the column. Masked men in the bed of the vehicle
tossed handfuls of gluefoam bombs into the tight column of tanks. The tanks slowed, and more
trucks arrived. Some tank robochauffeurs tried to veer off of the road on to side streets, and
others ordered fire at the rapidly-circling technicals. Neither approach was very effective, and
within seconds, all the tanks were stuck in place. The column commander was forced to admit
defeat and call in the solvent crew from the base. Eben sat in the warm vehicle for a drudgerous
half-hour as the choppers circled overhead, raining odorless solvent on the tanks. He occupied
himself by F5ing the cod article and injecting some observations of his own into the stream. A
backup aerial strike force had departed the base not long after the glue fiasco, but was halted by
heavy antiaircraft fire. A third team, made up of covert counterterrorists, arrived a few minutes
later at an empty building. The evident jokes about server migration were not missing from the
infostream. By the time Eben arrived back in the base, the cod was hosting a donation drive for a
new server facility. Their IPs had been shaken around, and many of the intranet chats were abuzz
with new addresses and routing instructions.
The physical conflict was augmented by a lengthy netwar that lasted for roughly two weeks
thereafter. The cod was continually bouncing from IP to IP, fleeing from fly-by-night ISP to pay-
per-terabyte cellular net and back. The infotards at the base called in a netwar strike from the
Langley servers, but codheads in the city cut all the outgoing and incoming physical netlinks
before the warrant was served in Washington. The cod then blacklisted traffic coming in from all
the cellular netlinks, and the servers at the base went one-on-one with the recently-displaced cod
servers. The base servers DOSed the cod, which responded by going distributed. A seemingly
endless succession of codheads bought plans on cheap hosting sites and made twice-and-thrice-
redundant backups of everything on the cod servers. During this first phase of the conflict, Royle
Lester, ever the profiteer, was bending pennies out of the infinitely complicated network of local
webhosting companies. His high-APM tapping on omnis wore out several cheaply-constructed
screens as he bounced from translation server to FAQ page to e-payment site. Eben was keeping
a lower profile, occasionally chop-pasting cod copypasta to his IRC nodes and keeping in
occasional contact with wikibuddies on the cod itself.
During the first days of the netwar, it was soon realized that, as the infotards and their bots
concentrated on the nets and links outside of their base, many of the internal networks were
becoming stagnant. GIs and neo-cyberpunk DefCons inside the base were quick to capitalize on
this, exploiting, ARP-poisoning, and even in some cases destroying computers within the base.
Daily codes were a dime a dozen, and common soldiers were beginning to get at the higher auth
codes, which gave them upper-echelon nets access. Phreaks among the grunts started working on
an elegant havoc, canceling divisional events such as tutorial sessions and group drills. Some
particularly fiendish hackers even discovered the auth codes for the robot maint teams, and
began ordering the sweeperbots and packet punchers to do irrelevant and contradicting tasks,
while, right under their noses, the base burned with netwar. Meanwhile, the infotards called in a
mobile server facility from NATO, and supplemented this by systematically destroying the
smaller ISPs which were aiding the cod.
Thus began the second phase of the netwar. As Lester was dumping ISP stocks and the
military banks were buying, a mobile server touched down in a lot at the base. It was a high-
security organ, packed in numerous redundant shipping crates. It glowed green with
exceptionally high-grade bioluminescent fungi. No one was allowed within 15 meters of the
structure. The cod had nowhere to run, though a source on the homepage claimed that physical
copies of the data had been transported to secure locations "just in case." The NATO server was
routed into the base's nets, and the fun began. As soon as the server hard-booted, it began
spewing orders and pings at a furious rate. The soldiers in the base, who had for several days sat
on their authcodes and watched, seemed to come to a collective subconscious decision to take
action. Every server, microcomputer, and omni in the base was soon turned against "Big Green."
The NATO machine handled admirably, but softwalls near the server began to detect higher and
higher heat levels. The military authorities replied in kind, first by sending out armed humvees
into the the streets of the base, then by ordering partyvan raids against all known repservers.
Certificate servers started going down the next day. The titles to thousands of vehicles were lost
or inaccessible, but this only made the rank-and-file madder. Chat nodes and omni hosts were
going out, and most of the base's IP addresses would throw the querier into infinite loops. By the
final phases of the conflict, entire upstart DNS servers would be booted up for the first time in
the morning, would become IP-constipated by lunch call, and were either abandoned or taken
down by nightfall.
It was mutual assured destruction. The cod was nowhere to be found, and the base's nets were
mangled and rerouted ad absurdum. Black helicopters came by night and spirited the NATO
server away. The maint teams were ordered to rebuild the entire net infrastructure in the base.
Routers were flashed and entire wiremesh lines were re-laid. By the time the base was back
online, the cod was as well, occupying the same range of IP addresses that it had before the
netwar.

The repservers had to be rebuilt. Most any records that survived the repnuke were of disputable
legitimacy. This reboot gave noobs like Eben a comparative advantage. Rep points were cheap in
the coming weeks, and the daily code servers were slow in returning to their normalcy. This gave
Eben many free hours.
 Eben, of course, had many other advantages during the reconstruction. He was a relatively
technically skilled individual, and, thanks to his good attention to detail, his personal nets had
come through the whole affair with minimal collateral damage.
With the repserver reconstruction, there came some systematic changes. Newer software
versions and patched code sprung up on the network. One of the features that originated from
this was a collaborative rewards network. The old systems would allow rep points to move on an
account-to-account basis, but the newer software allowed groups of people to create and
maintain stockpiles of points, which could be sent as a bundle. Advantage was quickly taken of
this feature. Entire platoons would team up to offer rewards for dailies and giant distributed
movements would offer significant bounties for countermeasures to annoying malware.
The single highest reward on all the repservers was being offered for the antidote to a piece of
software called the blindwørm. It was an expertly-written worm of unknown origin that had
appeared in the post-netwar days. Its modus was that it would immediately flash the BIOS of any
PC or omni it infected, then sync with every known anti-virus update server and intelligently
defeat any installed anti-virus that it met. It could then use the remainder of the infected
machine's resources to create or join a botnet and serve files to its peer computers. The only
possible downfall of the software was that it was far from invisible. As soon as it installed, it
would, in flashing the BIOS, demand a reboot. During this first reboot, all splash screens would
look normal to the user, but the OS would be incredibly slow, from which the user could
determine that the infection had occurred. Subsequent reboots would destroy all pretense of
subtlety. Splash screens would be replaced with skull-and-crossbones emblems and the desktop
screen would quickly flood with hundreds of popups. At the time, however, the virus did little
else. Though the platform could easily play host to a powerful botnet, no such botnet formed.
The virus, as was discovered in the code comments, was an experimental beta. Even in
prerelease, it was much feared by the base's techies. Information leading to the creators of the
worm was to be rewarded richly with rep points, and an anodyne even more so. The worm
already had a powerful foothold in the base's nets, and had bricked several of Eben's omnis.
Indeed, "Blind Omni" and "Ø omni" were among the most popular search terms on intranet
classifieds, as technosalvagers scrambled to buy and part out cheap omnis which were incurably
infected by the worm.
Eben tasked himself with finding out more about the worm, if not for the repserver points and
props, then simply for the access to a powerful new tool. His compatriot Lester, as usual, had
some insider info: the email address from which the first copy of the address had entered the
base. The address suffix was a popular email anonymity service, which Eben recalled a fellow
soldier, one Nicholas Shelly, mentioning back at basic training. On a whim, he sent an email to
nshelly@army.mil. Most soldiers despised their officially-issued email addresses and never used
them, but Shelly seemed like a present-minded fellow, and had perhaps redirected his military
account to one of his civvie addresses.
The auth servers had regained their rhythm, and things were back to normal in the base. Eben
was expected to attend three meals and six hours of drills and military activities per day. Though
the schedule was both flexible and relatively permissive, he found his logged-in time to be
largely ill- or idly-spent. There were only so many muttered conversations about popular movies
and rumored goings-on that he could have with the loutish private who stood next to him at
preprandial assemblies. He still sustained an active repserver presence, and had improved
markedly at the superman game, scoring twelve points in a single 90 minute session, thrice his
showing in the first game. After the game and the subsequent bar visit, (the conversation was
dominated by a bespectacled soldier who spoke discursively on AI design) he arrived at his new
quarters to find a buzzing omni. Shelly had written back, and sent along the email addresses of
two individuals who worked at the company which managed the anonymity service.
Eben wrote a polite letter to the first, describing the situation and requesting information about
the specific account. As he expected, the admin took a stand on principle, and refused to provide
any info, even if the cause was a good one. Eben used a darknet search engine to find a court
order originating from the same state as the anonymity server. He then whited out the form and
re-wrote the information. This form he sent to a spoof-server, which then forwarded it to the
second contact's address while pretending that it originated from an address similar to the court's
legitimate email servers. Within hours, Eben had the IP from which the malware disseminators
had logged on. The account, as Eben found, had been inactive for several weeks, and had, prior
to that, been used to send test packages of the malware to several personal addresses which Eben
did not recognize. The IP address that had been used to access the the email was, as Eben
suspected, from a proxy server. Fortunately, the proxy was using a common software package.
The following day, Eben went to a public WiFi share, a cafe in the base, and logged on to a
different proxy server. He first went to an exploits site. Here, he found a tech manual describing
the probable location of the proxy's databases and several workarounds for the security software.
He executed the first workaround, and gained live access to the database. Without delay, he
executed a reverse-search for all queries leading to the email server. As he expected, the IP
address itself had been anonymized. The ISP listed was, to Eben's surprise, that of his own base.
Lester was less surprised, and opined over IM: "Probably, the malware was devved by the
military or some DefCon. Maybe they're planning a raid, but I'd kinda think it's more likely that
they just need to improve their botnets."
Eben looked up from his omni. Two MPs had just entered the cafe and were heading towards
him. They wore light blue uniforms that would have looked absurd in any other context and
carried nonlethal weapons at their hips. The first addressed Eben: "Are you Private Eben Lance,
407th Infowar?"
Eben hit the kill switch on his omni. "Yes, I am."
"You'll come with us, please, sir."
[VI]
Eben spent the next two hours in a dull, institutional room filling out a number of dilatory
bureaucratic forms. By the second or third form, Eben had realized that he was not being arrested
and was instead undergoing some elaborate reassignment process. Eventually, he was brought
before the robot assistant of a subadjunct undersecretary. The bot was a veteran Stumbler with a
Bondo-stained chrome chassis. It sat at a cheap desk with a green-shaded lamp and spoke
quickly: "I am Beelzebub Genocide Stonefield Stanislas de Gaulle. I represent the UnderSec-
SubAd for Internal Espionage and I would like to offer you a job."
Eben nodded warily. "Shoot."
"We need you to infiltrate the American military."
"I think I have already done that."
"Bravo." The bot chortled mechanically. Its eyes blinked several times. "I am afraid I am
being serious, though. There is a rogue platoon which we suspect is selling military goods to the
insurgents."
"I'm new here, but isn't that allowed?"
"Yes, hmm. No. Let me clarify. Any commerce or unauthorized contact with the insurgency
violates procedures and is illegal. However, as you have no doubt seen, most everyone in the
base buys from the local insurgent groups. The insurgents undersell even the Chinese, and they
have much better street tech than we do. We may make the best tank or chopper, but they will
have the superlative Molotov or jammer. As such, if we buy from them, the war can be less
bloody and more honorable, as we and they will have the same effective tech (modulo our large,
clunky, and showy whaleware.) We have numbers, but they have local support and the guerrilla's
advantage. We have all the tech developed by DARPA and the large defense contractors, but
they have a constant flow of cash (from us.) Thus, everything is a giant, ongoing, constant
stalemate. America keeps pumping money in and few people are killed. The defense contractors
get their contracts and for the natives, well, for the natives, insurgent, merchant, or otherwise, it's
a better deal than any foreign aid plan.
"This whole game, the establishment of bases, the procurement of arms, everything, is
predicated on the assumption that no one will win the wars on terror, if winning is even a
possible objective any more. The military doesn't want to win because they'll be out of the public
eye and their funds will be slashed. (In an era where any real war would mean near-instant
destruction of both parties, how is a large military organization possibly even tenable?) And the
insurgents don't want to win because they would return quickly to poverty, and, besides, would
likely end up fighting counter-productive civil wars amongst themselves.
"So this whole mess of a war (or Operation or Ongoing Police Action or whatever you will
call it) is a sort of gentleman's agreement. We say that we won't trounce them, they agree not to
actually try to win at any time, and the only real conflicts on which the military has to expend
resources look a lot more like last week's netwar then last millennium's bayonet charges.
"But, since the gentleman's agreement is both unwritten and officially nonexistent, there exists
an assumed state of ideological war. And, in an ideological war, you run the risk of someone
becoming ideologically charged. This explains the nuking at the Battle of the Tesco, an incident
with which you may be familiar. Excuse me."
The bot reached down and connected a USB cable to its abdomen, then continued.
 "As I was saying, the Tesco incident involved a print shop. While maintaining a print shop is
illegal, that law is not, and cannot be, enforced, simply because every building in the city has a
printer's operation of some sort. What happened there was the printers started running off heavy
arms rather than food or bicycles or tech. And that offended the sensibilities of some infotard or
another, who ordered up a raid. So the precedent is basically this: the bad guys can keep on
planting car bombs and running malware strikes ad infinitum, but the line is drawn at the point
where they start acquiring more serious weapons. By dint of that, we have the current situation.
The platoon to which I will rotate you, if you choose to accept this mission, has violated the
gentleman's agreement. As such, it is my duty as a representative of the American military to
remove them from the market."
"Wh... why do you want me specifically?"
"The infotards pay a lot of money to train a cadre of knowledgeable, skilled agents. These
people are so highly valuable, in fact, that it becomes a losing financial proposition to have them
do almost anything, besides take out the highest-profile and/or most egregious targets. So most
of our agent selection involves grepping the repservers for reliable and savvy types among the
rank-and-file, then enlisting them for simpler missions.
"Now, about your specific assignment. I've found in my years that a lot of the people who sit
in that chair don't really want to, as they put it, 'sell out.' That said, I can establish for you that
this is an unequivocally morally defensible assignment."
"Please."
"Certain insurgent groups (chiefly smaller ones) become militant. The larger groups, who are
more interested in commerce then in fighting, attempt to locate and snuff out these more radical
radicals, but, in the mean time, these smaller groups cause a great deal of damage. One of the
things they try to do is to purchase and use serious arms of the type that even we find rarely
financially sound for long-term use. They don't care about finances because they are
ideologically, not financially, concerned - to wit, most of their money is stolen. Unscrupulous
dealers in our ranks, a group which includes the platoon to which you will be sent, will exploit
these situations and sell to these people. Think about it: if a significant amount of ideologue
terrorists buy shock-and-awe machines from our people and use them against us, then this war
against insurgents will escalate into a real war against real insurgents. That would be bad,
because America, being America, cannot lose. We can stalemate forever, but failure is not an
option. If these weapons were to be sold, then we will see more fighting and more buildup.
"As to your role in the operation. You will be given a temporary identity and attached to the
offending platoon. You will create recordings of evidence: weapons, conversations, databases, et
cetera. I cannot authorize the disbanding of a unit with no evidence, so your mission is nothing
more than a function of bureaucratic requirements. I will submit the data you gather to my peers
and you will be rotated on to another division to continue your career. Further, you will be
rewarded points to both your official and civilian repserver accounts. Here are the amounts."
The robot squirted a small file to Eben's omni.
"The troops in the platoon will be sent home. No additional punishment will be levied against
them. This, in appeal to the moral sensibilities of our human agents, is standard procedure for
such incidents. The arms dealers have discovered an easy 'Get out of jail free.' Many of them are
conscripts, and the remainder probably won't be too unhappy to be headed home.
"As a matter of disclosure, I will add one more thing. While the prosecution of the criminals
will be an internal legal proceeding, our contract, that being the deal I am striking with you for
the infiltration of the enemy base, is an unofficial affair. Various daylight regulations require all
operations of my section to be logged (an obviously impractical procedure, and ill-serving of our
agents,) and, besides, getting auths for an official spy mission would take many, many cycles of
paperwork.
"Please, at your leisure, look over the figures and consider our offer. If you are interested in
the job, email me at the address listed in the file which I have sent you by tomorrow at noon. If
you come up with any questions, feel free to ask them of me before then. Thank you."

The first step Eben took was to consult Lester. The bot had given him a valid set of daily codes,
so the remainder of the day was free for him. Lester was in a military "conference," but this did
not seem to delay his IM response times. Eben told of his conversation with the bot. Lester had
of course heard of such proposals, and had been offered one before. He had declined, but
explained to Eben that the robot who had offered him the job was in known ill-repute on a
repserver he at the time frequented. Lester went on to inform Eben that most such missions pose
no danger to the agent, saying, "if they're cool enough to sell arms to the locals, they probably
aren't the shoot-the-messenger types." Lester thought of these secret service headhunters as
similar to used-car salesmen, but recognized that there was a lot of variability between them.
This bot seemed to be trustworthy in both their opinions.
Eben searched around on the repservers for mentions of the bot Beelzebub, but references
were few and vague. Nonetheless, the robot's charming manner and pedantic chatter (coupled
with the significant number of repserver points offered in the file) had gotten through to him, and
he ultimately decided to accept the mission. He wrote the bot a short email to that effect and sent
it later that afternoon. That gave him a day to collect some spy gear.
It being the first (and in all likelihood, last) espionage assignment of his life, Eben saw fit to
buy a few pieces of recording equipment. Though minimal risk would be assumed in simply
taking photos or video of evidence with his omni's cam, (even if he was detected while recording
the property of the arms dealers, he could claim to be engaged in documentation for the cod)
Eben grabbed a few omni screens which he had snagged from a trashbin a few days before and
brought them down to a nearby black-market computer shack. The shop, run by a half-rusted
robot, consisted of a roof of a sponge-like material suspended between columns of disused oil
barrels. Ancient desktop computers were stacked to the ceiling, while newer omnis luxuriated
beneath glass displays. After a good deal of lively haggling, Eben was able to barter the lot of
omni screens for several gadgets: a Bluetooth buttonhole camera, a paperclip voice recorder, and
a personal signal jammer.
Upon returning to his quarters, Eben found a response from the bot. His rotation orders were
being processed, meaning that the Assignments Officers had to agree on a proper amount of rep-
credit to flip him to the arms dealer platoon. Eben felt a confusing mix of emotions upon
introspection: on one hand, he was being sold on a closed market for illegal currency to
paramilitary lawbreakers after having agreed to rent out his services (unskilled services, at that,
little more than videography) in return for a small sum of credit, but on the other, he had just
become something not far-flung from a secret service agent, a veritable James Bond of the sand
and syncrete. Was he an infowhore or a modern-day warrior? Tomorrow might tell, he thought,
as he drifted into dreamland.

Eben Lance was in a large stadium fit for the game of American football. There were two teams
lined up at the 50 yard line. The quarterback of one team put the ball in motion, and its custody
was soon transferred to a large, fearsome man.
The man moved slowly and with determination. A first defender came to tackle him, and he
yelled, "Jiang Zemin!" while cutting the man down with an axe he had seemingly grabbed out of
mid-air.
"Deng Xiaopeng!" A defenseman fell to a blow from a mace.
The offender seemed to be infinitely skilled with a number of weapons, which seemed to grow
out of him, Eben realized as the massacre moved slowly down the field. Also, for what reason
was he yelling the names of Chinese political leaders?
Was it a matter of coincidence that all of these men had names comprised of a monosyllab
followed by a disyllab? Was this a consequence of Romanization? Eben racked his brain for
other names of Chinese leaders. The Chinese government was known as a very secretive
organization, were their leaders just imaginary Big Brother figures, constructed to appease an
authority-hungry populace?
"Hua Guofeng!" From where had the large pigskin-carrier gotten that spear?
Eben was not sure if he himself could ever lead China, even if called upon by the Chinese
populace in a time of great need. While that was unlikely to happen, accounting for the fact that
"Eben Lance" was not Chinese, could his name semantically fit the bill? Or would it translate as
"Lance Eben?"
"Zhou Enlai!" Wait a second, he was never Paramount Leader.
And could the footballer be going in reverse chronological order? It looked like it, but Eben's
knowledge of 20th century Eastern politics was lacking.
"Chiang Kaishek!" Another defenseman fell.
The large man had nearly reached the end of the field. He stopped. One defender remained
between him and a touchdown.
The last defender was Eben Lance.
Eben panicked. He looked about for a referee or some other figure of authority. A man in
white and black stripes arrived. The large man was still stationary, eyeing Eben from five meters
away. The referee looked upon the two adversarial players and upon the general carnage on the
field behind them. He then walked over to the man facing Eben, patted him on the back, wished
him good luck (old chap,) and left the field.
For this time, both players had remained motionless. Now, the offender’s eyes flicked from
Eben's head to his hands. Eben looked down and saw he was holding a large medieval lance.
A lance! His namesake! And the other man was unarmed! Eben hoisted the weapon to his
shoulder as he had seen done in the movies and charged.
The other stood his ground until Eben was almost upon him, then, with incredible speed, drew
back his hand and knocked the lance aside. Eben's momentum carried him on.
"Mao Dzedong!" The man dealt Eben an enormously powerful kick in the balls.
That cry was anachronistic, thought Eben ruefully. Chairman Mao came to power after
Chiang. American footballers are not so intelligent after all.
Such force had been imparted upon his testicles that Eben took flight. As he began his ascent,
he saw the man reach the end zone, drop the football, and dispassionately leave the field. Not a
smile, as far as Eben could tell, crossed his face.
And still upward did Eben fly. He passed over the upper deck of the stadium. He flew in
retrograde over a small, brightly lit city. He flew upward, towards the stars. Strange, he thought,
for the game was surely played by day.
 Such are dreams.
Then, Eben reached the apex of his aerial voyage, and began to fall.

The omni revealed that, overnight, Eben's rotation had been approved. No doubt the infotards
had received some nudging from Beelzebub's department. Eben felt renewed confidence. The
people he was working for had an inside man within the impenetrable ranks of the Assignments
Officers. He pinged for a courier, and a trashcan-sized bot appeared at his door. He loaded some
uniforms, superfluous omnis, and spare parts into the bot's receptacle, then punched "storage" on
the display screen and entered a password. The transfer orders listed his new assignment as
"1024th Detached Salvagers" and gave an address that was halfway across the base. He went
downstairs, grabbed a slice of awful NutriBread from the mess, and departed on his bike.
The traffic poetry of an on-hours military base was the polar opposite of that of a city. Almost
every transport was a cron job: leave this warehouse at 0712, arrive at that mess 0744. Most of
the drivers whom Eben passed were robots, and even they looked bored or lost in deepthought
cycles. Outside the bubble, thought Eben as he whizzed past a troop transport, it's 7:30 AM, but
here, it's 0730 hours. He felt as if he was ensnared in an mirror universe: no longer did his mind
bother itself with issues of American dollars, rent, or even AM and PM. He had an alternate
clock, an alternate market, and an alternate set of logistical considerations. He passed another
generic brand gray truck and wondered: how many months has it been since I have seen a Ford?
The open-source maps program considered his Stumbler map and spoke in an even monotone.
"Next left onto YYZ-2112 'Shaggy Street,' then arrive at destination on left." So many years and
engineers still hadn't gotten text-to-speech anywhere close to the real thing.
The building Eben was to conduct his mission in was a large, warehouse-like facility with
mottled-green biopaint. He squirted an Open order to the heavy door, and it protestingly slid to
reveal a noisy interior. Tired-looking men looked up from their machines at him. The man
closest to the door addressed him hastily. After Eben explained that he had just been rotated in,
the other gave him directions to the office of "the foreman."
"The foreman" turned out to be a bald Technical Petty Officer named, ironically, Robert Thief.
Thief assigned him to an inventory position. "You will work with a bot, marking down the ID
numbers and quantities of the items entering our warehouse," he said, handing Eben a large, pad-
style, omni. He then informed Eben of hours, quarters, and meal availability, and assigned him a
semi-permanent IP address range on the intranet.
Most of the men in the platoon were gruff soldiers of the type Eben had learned to avoid. The
bot he worked with, however, retained a relatively high level of geniality. It was a base-model
Stumbler, one of the early prototypes with buggier neural nets. The pre-1.0 models were rare
around the base, as most of them, over time, became moody, oscillating rapidly between
adorable and sociopathic. This Stumbler had somehow managed to retain a constancy of
personality even greater than that of most of the newer net-fed bots Eben had met.
Eben's first attempt at data-gathering was to try to hack the giant omni to send its logs to a
memory card, so he could bring a copy of all of the inventory data to Beelzebub. The omni,
unfortunately, was brickware. The already-underpowered platform was further crippled by silly
proprietary software. Eben was barely able to use the abstruse interface for its intended purposes.
He returned to his original plan, activating the tiny camera while attempting, with the bot's help,
to log the great amount of goods which were passing before him.
Trucks from around the base were pulling in and out of the old warehouse, which was clearly
supporting a major black-market operation. As well as weapons and ammo, many other devices
and peripherals sailed before Eben's station: rack-mount servers, boxes of ecowar seeds, pallets
of keyboards, and crates of servos and transmitters for microelectronic drones. By the end of the
day, Eben had seen a good sample of the items that the Salvagers processed. He also had
gathered enough evidence to damn the platoon to hell and back in any military court.
Beelzebub had perhaps been less than honest with Eben: he had not disclosed that the
Salvagers also dealt in legitimate (or at least not as illegitimate) items. It was possible, though,
that he did not know this. In any case, the Salvagers had more arms passing through their
doorways than comparatively less harmful goods. Eben thought the whole operation
reprehensible. When he went off duty at 1700, he left the building and sent a message to his
robot employer, who replied quickly, inviting Eben to his office.
Eben arrived there and presented a memory card containing the day's recordings. The robot
touched it to its round head and nodded. "Well done. We'll shut their op down tomorrow."
"I have one request. There is a bot I worked with. Here's his reg number." Eben squirted a
datafile to the Stumbler. "I'm wondering if you can spare the axe in his case."
"Okay, that can be arranged."

A few days later, Eben found a repdoc detailing the breakup of the 1024th on the cod. Most of
the document was boring, detailing which contraband weapons were found in the search. A few
details did interest Eben: Thief and two others had been arrested and were awaiting trial at one of
the base's internment facilities and all of the thoughtbots in the service of the Salvagers had been
ordered destroyed. Beyond that, the report speculated that the remainder of the Salvagers had
been discharged, a conjecture that Eben confirmed by browsing through newer rec-dumps on the
cod. Thief's name and the two others were listed as "Suspended" and the robot's reg number did
not divine any results for Eben (though it did show up in older, archived databases.)
Though Eben thought that Thief and the other honchos did deserve jail, he felt that the
Beelzebub bot had lied to him. His repserver accounts had been credited with more or less the
amount promised, but he had little recourse. He knew that if he contacted Beelzebub, it would
claim that matters were beyond its control. In all probability, any email to the bot would just
bounce, and, if he got through thereafter, it would reason that its policy of not speaking with
Eben was arranged for the altruistic purpose of maintaining the latter's anonymity.

Eben was again rotated, this time to a server greenhouse. The move was unexpected, as Eben had
learned that most of those who worked in the military servers were trusted vets. Perhaps his
newly-bolstered military repserver accounts had landed him there. It was, in any case, a desirable
posting. Hours were short, the work was tolerable, and the food was (incrementally) better. After
swabbing in each morning, Eben was left more or less to his own devices. His was one of the
smaller and less significant server facilities in the base, and ran no critical operations. The server
greenhouse was the workplace of three other techs who served in the same capacity as him and
an oft-changing group of forty or so skilled programmers, many of whom worked for small
DefCon firms. The position which he and the other three shared in six-hour shifts was roughly
half-way between grunt and sysadmin. He kept his eye on a small army of bots, who in turn
interfaced with the server's vitals: growth rates, temperatures, water circulation, soil pH, drive
status, and so on. Whenever problems arose, Eben was authorized to take standardized steps to
reach a solution, and, if they failed, he was to call in the expert sysadmins, techtard specialists
who were paid obscene hourly wages for their labor. In his capacities, Eben was loosely attached
to an infowar battalion, with whom he shared accommodations. As his position was somewhat
more critical, (and his presence every day was verified by his colleagues in the greenhouse) daily
auth codes no longer benefited him. He was, however, allotted one day off each two weeks, and
a weekend each month. Beyond that, one of the other techs made him a standing offer to cover
for him in return for rep credit.
Life was easier without the stresses of formal military discipline. Eben spent his time in the
greenhouse monitoring nets traffic, browsing around on the nets, and playing board games with
robots. In off-hours, he would spend time in the common area of the infowarrior battalion and
occasionally take out his bike on long rides. He saw Lester once or twice a week. As well, he
began to become friendly with some of the programmers, holding long discussions with them.
While some of the programmers were run-of-the-mill infotards, the majority were erudite and
incisive-minded individuals, among the more well-adjusted people he had met in the base. Their
conversations together ran from philisophy to technology to religion. Eben had quickly realized
that the programmers in the greenhouse did not often hold discourse on their own software. In
many cases, they were working on classified projects, and in others, they simply found it boring
to discuss their own work.
One day, however, Eben was discussing something with two programmers in a break room.
Lon was the monk-like wizard who wrote database software, and Nils was a bespectacled fellow
with a broad face. The latter, though far younger than the former, was still a good ten or fifteen
years older than Eben. They had been talking about their shared affection for older print issues of
such classics as National Geographic and Popular Science. On a whim, Eben remarked, "I
remember in a lot of those magazines, the tech-heads used a phrase, um, 'programming
language.' D'you guys know what that is?"
The others burst out laughing, then, out of politeness, the elder techie explained. "Well, y'gotta
understand, it wasn't always that you could just dictate to a computer and it would understand.
The first programmers literally had to write in binary. You know what that is, right?"
Eben had learned base-2 in math class, and affirmed.
"Hmm. For the first few decades after that, computers weren't so smart. You actually had to
write everything out in these weird shorthand languages with a lot of punctuation and silly stuff.
A lot of kids learn them in tech history classes and there is interest from the retro movements,
but outside of that, they're all but forgotten nowadays. I guess over time, the languages that
people were using were becoming less abstruse, no, more elegant. Eventually, it came to the
point where you could pretty much write in English and the machines could understand. As AI
got stronger, you could do even more, like show the computer an example of what you want and
have it replicate it.
"Naturally, the early days of vernacular programming languages were fun, if not very
productive. A lot of the time, someone would write a logic interpreter and anther guy would
throw Hamlet or something at it. But eventually, things smoothed out a little. Speech-to-text got
better too. So instead of reading manuals or taking courses to learn this stuff, and then spending
hours writing and debugging, you could just pull out your omni and say something like, 'New
program. Email all the people on my mailing list, ask for their meatspace addresses, and attach
that to their contact info.' And the computer understands."
Eben knew this much about the more modern UIs, but allowed the oldster to go on.
"And the other great thing is specificity. You can say, 'Hey, turn the screen blue.' You can also
say "Turn pixels 1-1024, rows 1-768 the color (0, 0, 255.)' Or even, 'Turn the screen the same
shade of blue as in this picture.' So, since the outmoding of unique programming languages,
programming has gone from syntax-focused to being more about logic, flow, and ease. The 'nerd
barrier,' as it were, gets abolished and programming becomes accessible: more like cooking and
less like aircraft maintenance."
Eben listened to the same for several more minutes.

It was one of the techs who told Eben about the WiFi Project. The state of the base's wireless
networks was dismal. For the sake of security and often because of bandwidth constraints, the
base was predominantly set up with wired nets. There were almost no wireless networks, and
those that did exist were often secured by passwords. Word in the base was that there were more
jammers than real networks in the 802.xx standard range.
The project was a ground-up affair. Some subgroup of anonymous soldiers had simply agreed
to begin building a free wireless infrastructure. Routers were incredibly cheap, but there were
practical considerations that made the project a lot more difficult than your average urban-
renewal or guerrilla WiFi bash. For one, the jammers. But the issue was more than technical.
Much of the brass disapproved, vaguely citing security as their rationale, even once told by
project representatives that the nonmilitary routers were connected not to the base's sensitive
intranets but to lines running out of the base to DNS servers in the town and beyond.
The issue of power for the routers had been effectively solved. One ingenious tech had
wrapped a router hamburger-style in photovoltaic foil and another had planted a bioengineered
algal bloom straight on the circuit board. Both approaches, though inglorious in appearance,
sufficed to provide power to the routers. As for physical networking constraints, all the routers
were meshed: one machine, if not directly connected to a network, would route its traffic through
all of its neighbors until a net-connected router could be found.
The project needed manpower and botpower. Routers had to be set up, looked after, and
occasionally replaced and jammers had to be overcome. News of the subversive network spread
rapidly by word-of-mouth, and soon, people all over the base were spending time, money, rep
points, and effort haphazardly constructing networks. It was good form on the part of the
originators of the idea to not centralize the network, which would have provided an easy way for
the MPs to take it down, but this had its revenge: different segments of the network were built
according to various theories and with non-interoperable hardware. At times, the admins of two
physically neighboring nets would end up in in border disputes.
Regardless, the network born of discord, fueled by chaos, and powered by infighting grew
very quickly through the base.

A priority of Eben's, besides throwing tiny routers left and right as he rode into work on his bike,
was to set up a node of the WiFi Project in his workplace. The tinted glass of the server
greenhouse contained some element that totally blocked outside wireless access, which stymied
his goal. Using docs from an intranet jollyroger site, he constructed some unorthodox signal
repeaters. The first device he made simply translated the data it received over the network to
light pulses and back. The device was one of the standard algae-powered routers, which were by
then being sold under-the-desk at more or less every tech-merchant shop in the base, connected
via serial to a breadboard holding a camera and a trio of infrared LEDs. The LEDs were mounted
inside a case that resembled a small telescope, (in fact, the designs called for the dissection of a
standard-issue pair of field glasses) which was in turn mounted on a servo. The servo, a
miniature engine with great precision, allowed Eben to rotate the tube without having to be
present, (an obvious boon given that he had a drone place it in a nook on the roof of a nearby
shack) and the scope itself, along with the foil within, served to make the light signal acutely
directional, so that it could only be seen by a keen-eyed robot, and even then only if the bot was
looking directly at it from the right angle and distance. Incoming packets would would be
converted to blinks of the LEDs, and the camera would read incoming blink data so that it could
be converted right back. This method of I/O slowed down the connection a little and was
unreliable on very foggy days, (not often a problem in the base except for when the atmoformers
malfunctioned) but was almost undetectable, especially when coupled with a few net jumblers
and WiFi mirrors Eben placed on some other nearby buildings.
Eben would have simply situated a router which directly connected to the first inside the
greenhouse, but he realized that any point within line-of-sight of the neighboring roof would be
easily visible to nosy bots within. Thus, the next phase of the signal sat on the roof of the
greenhouse. The roof was dusty, from which Eben assumed that it was rarely visited. Even then,
the cleaning bots that would inevitably visit were dumb animals, incapable of finding a well-
hidden router. The next piece of hardware was an analogue of the first, with scope, cam, LEDs,
and router. He housed it in a small enclosure, which he painted the same color as the roof of the
greenhouse, so as to prevent it from being seen from above. This device had another component
as well, a small vibrating engine from an old cell phone. When the second router received data
from the first, it would pulse the little engine, which would rattle the windows of the greenhouse.
After running some computer models, inputting what he supposed to be the size, shape, and
material of the greenhouse windows, Eben found a frequency that the average bot could not hear.
He made several copies of the third device, the simplest and least expensive. It was simply a
router coupled with a very sensitive electric ear and a speaker, such that it could communicate
through sound and vibration with the second router. He loaded a version of router firmware onto
these machines that would try to confuse triangulation attempts by frequently channel-jumping
and by bouncing their signals off of larger objects. Now it was just a matter of placing these
devices inside the greenhouse.
On the first day after the build, Eben ducked out of security cam range and planted one of the
ears on top of a high shelf. Some of the techs were surprised to see the wireless network in their
omni-dashboards, but life went on normally for a few days thereafter. On the third day after the
router went live, one of the milbots awoke. It was a dull-red robot with a breadbox form-factor,
and outside of the scope of Eben's command. His assumption was that the bot received its orders
from some proxy source within the base. Most of the time, this bot would hibernate on a dock in
a corner, donating its cycles to its overlord organization. Occasionally, it would scoot over to
another cluster of robots and exchange some quick comm-gibberish. Thus, Eben barely noticed
when it crawled past slowly on its small treads one morning. He only gave the machine a second
thought once he had tripped over it for the third time in as many hours. Then, he realized what it
was doing.
Eben watched the bot out of the corner of his eye as it trundled around the base, eyes blinking
on their stalks. Its search seemed erratic in direction, but was probably driven by some obscene
robot logic. Two more hours passed and the robot began walking up the walls and onto the
ceilings, weaving around foamboard insets and onto the pseudoglass inner shell. Eben's shift
ended. When he showed up the next morning, the milbot was hibernating and the first router was
gone.
It became a game of hide-and-seek. Eben hid new routers, sometimes several at a time, under
cabinets, inside server cases, in the root systems of plants, and in storage lockers. The milbot
kept busy, trying desperately to find the new ears. It eventually found everything, as it had 24
hours a day to methodically devote to its new purpose. At length, Eben became more skilled at
hiding the routers. He also had to adapt new methods of placing them.
Eben had placed the first several routers himself, ducking away from the CCTVs. He soon
realized that this was untenable: some vigilance program would eventually scan the CCTV logs
and realize what he was doing and an automated reprimand would arrive one morning at his
door. Eben needed a new modus. He bought a bat-drone from a bindlestiff merchant on the
sidewalks of Hell Boulevard and gave it a set of instructions. The drone was to wait until an
appointed time, then piggyback a techie through the greenhouse double doors, avoid the pest
defense lasers for as long a possible, and place its payload, a router, at such-and-such a place.
The drone was a great success: it flew faster than the frame rate of the cameras and kept the
lasers confused for several minutes. Upon Eben's return, he found yet another network
broadcasting within the greenhouse.
The techs quickly grew accustomed to the an uncensored, non-throttled, net connection.
Productivity, interestingly, increased among the programmers: the spectrum of distractions had
not grown significantly, and much of their software was easier to test on an open, neutral
network.

Eben's nemesis had evolved. It was now a hunchback, equipped with an external power pack to
support its running for days on end. Eben cursed this evolution, then realized that it might as well
serve his tactical plans.
Using his spycam, Eben recorded the robot sporting the pack. When he arrived at his quarters
later that day, he logged on to a project router (there were now seven within range of his fifth-
story barracks apartment) and searched for the serial of the power pack. Happily, an internet
merchant sold the device and shipped to AFO/APO addresses. Eben purchased one, using real
money for the first time in a while. The military networks, naturally, did not support e-
commerce.
The pack arrived not long thereafter, in an inconspicuous brown box. Eben got to work
quickly. The pack he had received was surplus, and had bad batteries, which Eben replaced with
newer, slimmer, gel-polymer cells. He then spent a few days miniaturizing the router-ear
hardware, getting it to fit into the remaining space in the pack.
The next morning, Eben "accidentally" stepped on his nemesis the milbot. He bent down,
ostensibly to see if it had sustained damage, and slipped off the robot's power pack, replacing it
with his. The robot, if it even noticed the swap, would likely attribute it to electrical outage
pursuant to human-caused damage and spend no more than a few cycles of diagnostics on the
affair.
With that, Eben had a new mobile router.

Over the next weeks, all of Eben's other access points slowly disappeared. The final fixed-
location router took the robot five days to discover. (It had been hidden in a bomb-proof trash
can.) The robot's ramblings did not cease after that piece of hardware vanished. It continued
moving about the floor, walls, and ceiling of the place, looking for a last mysterious signal,
which, for some reason, its sensors always reported as being close by. Eben reasoned that
eventually, some other subset of milbots would be ordered down to the greenhouse to look for
that last router, but that might not happen for some time, because the infotards were stretched
thin in dealing with the WiFi Project.
No specialists ever arrived. Two weeks later, the infotards shifted their policy from unspoken
repression of the project to unspoken détente. The breadbox went back to sleep at its dock. Eben
placed a few more routers throughout the base and waited a few days, but it did not stir.
The network had high uptime, but it was still very slow due to the workaround tech. Eben was
considering burrowing into his greenhouse with a wire or using more IR-repeaters.
Eben was still churning over the idea mentally when the second netwar began.
[VII]
At 0300 one morning, Eben received a call on his omni. The servers were overheating, he was
needed at once. The buses were not running, he was to arrive by his own means. Something is
up, Eben thought. The buses always run.
Nonetheless, Eben had been reminded endlessly of the importance of urgent calls during the
scant orientation preceding his greenhouse assignment. His tired mind moved slowly as he
jumped onto his bike and aimed for the greenhouse. The roads were packed. He passed vehicles
of every description, most of which he had never before seen on the roads. The perfume of
biofuels made the air delicious.
He arrived in 15 minutes, cutting off a Cushman truck to make it to the greenhouse's lot,
which was guarded by brutal-faced MPs. He flashed his ident badge at one of them, who seemed
to take no notice. So much for the additional security.
The air in the server room was at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, far above the normal 68. The upper
windows were closed and sealed, however, presumably to protect against some (imagined) threat
of biowar germs. Theo, the shift four sysadmin and highest-ranking of Eben's colleagues, had
taken control, setting up at a desk in a small room near the middle of the greenhouse. Over the
next few weeks, this became the "War Room" to the soldiers and contractors within. Theo sat on
a grey rolling chair. The desk before him, a spartan creation of wood and biopaste, was cluttered
with omnis, papers, thumb drives, cell modems, and solder-screwdrivers. Directly before Theo
was an enormous computer, a laptop, that probably weighed five pounds. It was archaic in
appearance, but Eben's approximation was that it was as much as ten times faster than a standard
omni. Cables ran from the laptop to the floor and across the room. Cables! A man in blue
overalls was hammering at a miniature HVAC behind Theo's desk. It seemed to be reluctant to
start.
Theo did not recognize Eben by sight, (they had never met as meat) but Eben realized who he
was and introduced himself. Theo nodded, then handed him an omni. "Check this server, get
back to me in ten minutes max."
On the main floor of the greenhouse, several horticultural teams had deployed. They were
spraying the plants and taking their metrics, bringing in new plots and weeding out the cultures
that were dying of the heat.
Eben kept busy. Coolant started to seep into the atmosphere when the temperature hit 100. The
odor of the air changed noticably at about 105. Someone opened the windows, but netwar
protocol dictated that all open windows be guarded by selective filters, bulky dark-green
machines that hummed loudly and did nothing except slow the airflow rate into and out of the
greenhouse. It was 0700 and 115 degrees. By 0900, the netwar policies had been rewritten. A
team went around removing the offending filters from the windows. The temperature continued
to rise. Most of the server processors, as well as their associated drive controllers and
motherboard busses, had been force-overclocked. Those horticulturalists who were not sprawled
out sleeping on the plastic support beams were engaged in the task of speed-growing new plants
to replace the dead (the turnover rate for the last 5 hours was nearing 150%) and going around
injecting plastic and silicone into the leaves and stems of the living flora on the greenhouse floor.
As the sun rose, Eben was still running individual metrics on server machines and performing
hot-reboots. He barely had enough free time to drink some of the strong, nicotine-enhanced
coffee, nevermind to check the cod or watch the base's traffic throughput, which he imagined
was astronomical. Maintbots were setting up a white canvas shield above the greenhouse's
windows to mollify the sun's rays, giving the whole facility a weird diffused light. The bay doors
had been opened and the traffic outside, which had not abated, could be heard.
The DefCons were cheery but tired. They had no real stake in the affairs of the base's net and
they realized that the overtime pay was accumulating nicely. Besides, to them, the netwar was a
break from the daily monotony of routine.
The specialists had set up tables and desks on the greenhouse floor. Correspondence was no
longer being delivered by IM, due to the unreliability of the network. Messages were written in
longhand and delivered desk-to-desk by bot couriers. The desks themselves were arrayed loudly
with omnis, traditional computers, servers, drives, and assorted technoswag. A full quarter of the
DefCons were employed in the rote process of booting drives from an ever-growing stack and
cleansing them of malware.
Eben, though technically the fourth-in-command in the greenhouse, did not have any
managerial issues to deal with. Theo kept camp in the War Room, and had established an ad hoc
council of civilian experts to assist in his decision making. He played very by-the-book and tried
to avoid controversial calls.
At about 1200, Eben had a minute of downtime, and pointed his omni at a site on the nets. His
WiFi Project routers were still broadcasting, but the nets were in chaos. His query caused the
status wheel to spin for a while, then give up. He could still see a large number of infowar
devices in his portscanner, but the cod and other external sites would not resolve.
The temperature leveled a little after midday and started to sink. A few of the DefCons were
called off to other parts of the base, so Eben was moved to bot duty. He rolled old anthrobots out
of the greenhouse's storage closets, and tried to assemble as many as possible of the incomplete
and broken bots into working models. It would have been fun work on any other day, or any
other sleep schedule. It was 1500 when he emerged from an underground storage locker,
carrying two bots, to find the the first supply truck had arrived. It bore a standard-issue mobile
food printer and several large military tents. Eben imagined that the situations in the base's print
shops and quartermasters' warehouses were similar to that of the greenhouse.
He spent the rest of the afternoon building bots. It was simple work, for the most part, and
rewarding. He snapped the modular positroneuromuscular parts together, seeking combinations
that lit up. Once a whole bot had been assembled, its eyes would light and it would thank Eben
for creating (or resurrecting) it. That was the best part. Really, the task of re-assembling the
robots should have been kept up over the years, but the military, in spite of its claims of thrift,
preferred buying newer robots and letting the subjectively "obsolete" models collect mothballs.
Most of the bots Eben found in the locker were older and less mentally spry, but were still useful
in the context of military logistics. It was a waste, thought he, that some of these charming and
hardworking bots had spent so long without power.
It was dark when Theo said to him, "We probably won't need you in the next few hours. Keep
your omni on, in case we have another emergency, but go back to your quarters and get a bit of
sleep."
Eben stepped out into the base at large, which was still a few degrees cooler than server. It felt
a little different than normal to him. He plucked out his omni and scrolled over to the
"Environment" tab. Sure enough, the ambient temperature of the base's air was 77 Fahrenheit, a
full two degrees higher than the normal operating temperature. This meant two things. First, that
the machines in the base were leaking heat into the environment, no surprise to Eben. Second,
though, and more surprising, was that the base's active thermal control systems, which operated
by systematically opening or closing the slits in the base's biofilter, were off line.
The base was sealed.

This netwar was much more intense than the previous one. The base had just been totally
rewired. Most of the servers were cleaned and reset by maint teams in the wake of the first
netwar. The WiFi Project, also a derivative of the first netwar, had recomplicated things. On top
of the hardbooted military network sat an organically grown, compartmentalized, anarchy of a
net. Outside of the base, the cod had re-formed. The codheads had done a much better job of
preparing their database against attack. The cod databases sat behind strong firewalls and were
several times redundant.
Interestingly, the cause of the second netwar was unknown to the GIs. There was no reported
attack, physical or net-based, against the cod servers. In all likelihood, it had all just snowballed
from some insignificant event: a router had reset or a noobie sysadmin sent an ill-written ping,
then a program took countermeasures and a hostile hardware device noticed the processor
turboing and militated against it, and the dominoes fell. The WiFi Project operated on standard,
non-secure, infowar channels, and nearly every device in the base was connected somehow, from
giant orgservers and sophisticated bots down to cellular devices, flashlights, and cafeteria trays.
The earlier phases of the netwar led more people to turn more machines on, as Eben did with the
obsolete bots, in order to gain greater netshare. This caused the giant mesh network to expand
farther, and the whole thing to get out of hand in hours.
The network went into hostile mode very early on into the netwar. All of the infowar devices
could see their immediate neighbors, but data stopped flowing freely. The netwar became, and
increasingly so as it went on and cables were cut, about controlling individual devices. The
base's Stumblers competed to build giant maps of the devices on the network. The process of
sending an email to a buddy across the street involved systematically gaining (and keeping)
control of individual devices in a chain leading to his position. It was slow work. Each device
had to be found using a portscanner, then compromised and seized.
An unfortunate soldier parked his car in the wide, astroturf median of Hell Street, in a network
dead zone between two populated barracks buildings and down the street from a bot-repair print
shop. Before the batteries died, it had changed (virtual) hands 1,500 times. The unlucky fellow
had to get all of his drives replaced the next morning.

Eben had worked and slept through the first 24 hours of the netwar. He woke again to a buzzing
omni ordering him to the greenhouse. The situation had sedimented somewhat. A ceiling-
suspended portable pneumatic tube network now linked the desks and offices of the greenhouse
workers. Eben found, in a corner, a desk upon which there sat a hastily-printed nametag which
bore his name and rank. Two military-grade omnis sat on the desk, and it had piled up with job
requests from the night. He made a series of gestures, representing a login, into an omni and set
to work.
For the next shift-and-a-half, Eben ran around the (now almost temperate) greenhouse,
engaged in odd assignments: checking thermotabs on servers, weeding out plots of green plants,
and keeping bots in line. He had greater leisure on the second day than on the first, so he was
able to check (what remained of the) netfeeds and consult with his colleagues in an attempt to
figure out what was going on outside of the greenhouse.
After the hours of busywork, Eben left the greenhouse, tired, yet eager to become involved in
the ongoing netwar. On the way to his bike, he noticed a Stumbler laying down a skinny cable on
the side of the street. He accosted the bot and asked what it was doing.
The bot replied: "This is the base10 project. It was started last night by an anonymous group
of soldiers. It is an attempt to provide low-bandwidth, secure access to the soldiers and citizens
of this base. The present goal is 10mbps per building, insufficient to launch serious malware
attacks, but enough to ensure basic communication to each barracks."
Eben entered the nearest barracks-looking building. The entrance computer was displaying an
error code, and did not try to prevent his unauthorized ingress. He sat on an old sofa in the dreary
lobby and removed one of his more elaborate omnis from its case. The omni, as he suspected,
had several modular cable jacks. A self-routing ethernet cable ran across the floor. He lifted the
cable, shucked a seam, and squeezed it apart. He then ran a cable of his own from the omni to the
newly-revealed joint and pinched the connection closed. He was online.
The base10 network was using an antiquated software package. The network was home to
little more than a chatserver, which was extremely crowded. Eben created an account, then ran a
search for one of Lester's screen names. The search came back positive. Lester, as luck would
have it, was online.
Lester typed rapidly. He was hanging out at a local pspace meet. Eben should join him.
A pspace, Eben knew, was a physical analogue of a net. Items were sold, files shared, and
games played. This pspace was taking place in an abandoned hangar in a less populated part of
the base. Old furniture, beat-up vehicles, and battered technology had been piled in to the large
building. Eben found Lester sitting at a discolored round table, surrounded by a group of omni-
toting soldiers in casual wear. Eben knew one or two of them by face, and knew all by their
handles.
This pspace meet had a more serious air to it than most. Though the hangar's intranets had
been cordoned off from the outside net and were still healthy, the greater network was clearly not
so. The individuals in the room felt the fear that this might be their last chance to access a
network before the entire base froze. Still, trades in physical goods, digital items, and stocks
were moving very quickly. Repserver credit was becoming less readily available, so the
economy shifted into a ridiculous barter market, with traders screaming out their wares in bold-
faced chat boxes. Several other pspaces had been set up throughout the base, and trucks were
constantly coming and going, ferrying items to and fro. The majority of the items were not
weapons or netwar implements, but were food, tech, and survivalist tools.
Eben had good reason to suspect that this netwar would be worse than the last. He took a
bench at the pspace and opened an account on the temporary repserver. The organizer of the
pspace had arranged, as a service to the attendees, for courier-bots to buzz around the room and
process requests. They were dumb bots, but they were pre-infowar, so they could not be effected
by the net-storm outside. Eben tapped twice on the lid of a passing courier and asked it to get
some supplies from his storage locker. He entered one of the classifieds chatrooms and began to
involve in the trading.
Eben was one of the few who had the perspicacity to realize that all the infowar tech in the
base would be useless in the days ahead. The infowar-compliant devices were closed-source and
often locked in to their proprietary standards. Once the bot had brought back the items he
requested, he categorically traded off all of his infowar belongings, reasoning that those items
would be easy to replace after the netwar. When he sold, he made sure to transact in American
dollars and other currencies that would not be impacted by the netwar. A few unofficial
currencies had sprung up in the wake of the first netwar, but Eben was almost sure that their
certificate servers would not be in such good shape after the second.
Selling the infowar swag left Eben reasonably well-off in liquid assets. He traded for a few
items: a thermos-sized generator, a portable printer, and an old-fashioned ebook reader. Eben
reasoned that he had no need to be very engaged in the netwar. He could let the ideologues have
it out, and maybe pick up some cheap tech at the end of the affair.

MPs broke up the pspace not long after Eben left. There were to be no more such meets for a
while.
Eben woke up the next morning and his omni was no longer connected to a military network.
He rode down Hell to his morning post. The situation was the opposite of the last night's.
Defoliant bombs, malware packages, and network DMZ blackboxes were being sold on the
sidewalks of Hell Boulevard.
The greenhouse had settled into a stable hectitude. Eben's desk had a small stack of tasks,
which he completed in a few hours. After that, he saw no reason to linger. He went off on his
bike, in an attempt to figure out the situation on the ground. He drove aimlessly through the more
populated areas of the base. The traffic was heavy, composed mostly of unofficial vehicles. Most
of the soldiers in non-vital positions were off-duty on dailies.
Paymasters, quartermasters, and shady backdoor pseudomilitary spy operations had closed
their doors. The base's lower bureaucracies were copping out. Tents had been set up in squares
and public places, and makeshift billboards had gone up with IP addresses and proxy figures,
advertising newly-formed net sites. The base's maint teams were running around in frenzied
activity, unmatched in excitement by all but the Stumblers, who were busy gathering data for
new databases and keeping up their incredibly complicated social network.
As Eben approached the outer border of the base, he saw a sight that gave him pause. Several
meters outside of the base's bioplastic boundary sat a black milk-truck style vehicle. There were
other similar vans at ten-meter intervals in both directions. Not all the vehicles were of the exact
same type, but they shared distinguishing features: heavily tinted windows and government
plates.
The base was sealed, perhaps, but it might not be for long. Eben shivered involuntarily, then
turned a tight U and went to Hell to get some bombs.

Two heavy-duty gluebombs, ten malware-equipped firecrackers, and five heatseaking spider
mines later, Eben injected some rationality into his thinking. The black sheep outside did not
mean that the whole base would be leveled by partyvans. The brass might target specific
aggressors, buildings, and compounds within the base, but were not likely to categorically
destroy every edifice, vehicle, and soldier. If he kept his head down, Eben reasoned, he'd be fine.
He carefully set down a synthroglycerin tube that he had been considering and elected to return
to his comfortable room and ebook reader post-haste.
Eben was a few blocks from his barracks when all of his omnis began buzzing and chirping.
He grabbed one and checked the screen. He was receiving a broadcast from an emergency
infowar beacon, one of the few devices that had sufficient auths to wake his locked-down omnis.
The beacon was broadcasting from his server greenhouse, and the signal, a non-encoded text-
based message, instructed all server personnel to report to TERM 2.
Eben knew that he could evenly ignore the order, return to his room, and suffer no ill
consequences. His curiosity, however, was piqued. His first stop was the greenhouse, which he
found shrouded in smoke. Bots and fireteams were circling the facility and security vans were
parked in the lot. He did not approach the building.

The server greenhouses scattered about the base served as satellites to larger server farms. The
base had been built around one large unit, the TERM, which became TERM 1 a few years
thereafter, when a second was constructed. The base, at the time of Eben's service, had five large
server facilities, though the giant NATO server had occupied the position of TERM 6 during the
brief period when it was active.
TERM 2 was heavily guarded, though Eben, on cursory examination, determined most of the
security to be for show. It was set back from the road and sat behind several layers of tinfoil-hat
infowar DMZs. The parking lot held a tank (probably vaporware) and a line of foreboding MP-
issue motorbikes. Eben parked his own bike outside the facility, presented his credentials to the
guard at the gate, and entered the building.
Eben walked in to the giant, cement-walled facility and saw before him an anarchy of the sort
that could only be created through meticulous and calculated planning. The crowd of robots that
were rushing back and forth, climbing up treads on the walls, and jumping haphazardly into
delivery tubes and chutes were all acting upon navigational suggestions proferred by a quick and
powerful distributed intelligence.
Eben checked one of his omnis. It was getting no signal. Directionless, he took a few tentative
steps into the sea of bots. They scooted around him as they rushed past. A heavily face-painted
Stumbler appeared before him and waved for his attention. "I am Voodoo Master Moon Unit
Mamihlapinatapai Von Zubenelgenubi. Come with me."
The robot led Eben on a rapid and jaunty walk through claustrophobia-inducing corridors.
They arrived at a brightly-lit room where uniformed men sat before flat, industrial monitors. The
bot sat Eben down at a seat before a trio of screens, from which heavily-shielded cables ran in all
directions. It spoke quickly. "You have been assigned to a temporary troubleshooting position.
You will work at this station and your orders will arrive through this system." It indicated the
small screen on the left, which had already filled up with tasks. "The middle display is connected
to the internal KVMs. You have access to all systems sigma 3 and below. Ping this address to
request exceptions. You can request maint team action and server replacement with this system."
The bot gestured at the third screen. "In normal operation, there is prestige in solving the highest
percentage of issues on one's own, without calling in maint teams or drive erasures. The internal
repservers, however, have been suspended for this crisis. You will excuse me." The bot turned
and left without another word.
The majority of Eben's tasks were simple. Most involved computers that were running slowly.
He logged in remotely and ran freeware virus scanners or edited the registry files on the
offending machines. In a few cases, the work was more tedious, involving multiple reboots and
inelegant reinstalls or BIOS-flashes.
Eben worked for several hours straight. The infobots handling his schedule had apparently not
noticed that he had already clocked in a full day's worth of service at his old job that very
morning.
Eben left TERM 2 at 0100, and was very ready to return to his quarters. He was coasting down
Hell half-asleep when the general alarm broke out.
[VIII]
A robotic voice came through over the PA amid the discordant wailing of dozens of alarms. "All
act-ive du-ty per-son-nel, re-port to combat stations."
Eben scrabbled for one of his military omnis. His "combat station" turned out to be in a
building halfway across the base from him. The roads quickly became congested with traffic as
both private and military vehicles set off for desultory locations. It took forty-five minutes and
several side roads and alleyways for Eben to get to his combat station, a musty room in a bunker-
like building. Eben found the room half-full, due not to general neglect of orders, but to the
terrible traffic conditions outside. Eben waited in the room, listening to comm chatter, for a full
hour, as a few more GIs straggled in. At length, the brass gave a streets-clear order and MPs
cordoned off the arterial roads of the base. The soldiers who had not been able to reach their
attack squads now watched from the sidewalks as their fellow grunts rattled by in assault trucks
and minitanks.
The gates of the base opened at 0330. An incredible variety of heavy vehicles could be seen
streaming forth from all the exits. The entire active population of the base, minus the few who
remained on guard or had missed their rides, were in the caravan. Eben, sitting blurry-eyed in the
back of a light hovercraft, had heard all the rumors. Some GIs held that a war had been declared
across the border, others thought the base was being evacuated for fear of bio-agents. Others still
thought that it was a false alarm or a practical joke of some sort. The least unfeasible rumor was
that they were attacking the cod or some related organ.
Regardless, Eben knew he was in for a long night.

The phalanx of ground vehicles, with heavy aircraft buzzing overhead, struck straight for the city
center. The moon was a slender crescent, hanging in an unnaturally clear sky. From the rooftop
hydroponic gardens of the decrepit skyscraper city, the night was still, almost preteraturally so.
The distant overture of the American engines was the only noise to be heard.
The great phalanx of vehicles entered the city, weaving on shoddy pavement between silent
buildings. Eben clutched his newly-printed infowar rifle. He had not had the time to visit his
quarters and pick up his real weapon, the James Bond pistol. He reached for his bag, and felt the
outlines of the recently purchased bombs through the canvas fabric. He opened an omni. Its LCD
cast and eerie glow on the sheetmetal wall behind him. No networks available. The people of the
city had shut down their rotuers and infowar machines. No merchants rode out to greet this force.
The convoy streamed past locked doors and shuttered windows.
Eben was staring off to the right of the convoy. Before and behind were hovercraft, but the
geometrically rigid convoy abutted empty streets. He saw an unlit road running parallel to the
wide street that the military had annexed. The parallel road seemed still, but he saw faint shapes.
He squinted. There were boxy figures, the size of vehicles, moving on the pavement, matching
the speed of his own transport. He made to alert the bot who was piloting the hovercraft, then
suddenly realized who was on the parallel road. It was the partyvans, the black SUVs and milk-
truck-simulacrum SWAT team transports. A shadow army of men in black followed the regular
army to battle. Eben did not know whether to be confident or terrified.
Through slitted windows and plastic bubble nests, a host of natives looked down on the
passing army. From the tops of the higher skyscrapers, the entire American force could be seen,
as could the brightly-lit gates of Hell in one direction and a huge, warehouse-like facility in the
other, which any person in the city could have told you contained the new cod servers.
The people in the skyscrapers had no allegiance to the cod. Most of them could identify it as a
server hosted by some unknown NGO and aimed to provide neutral intel to the soldiers in the
base, but the cod did nothing for them besides make the Americans look silly, a task not overly
difficult to accomplish in those times. Indeed, even the more militant occupants of the buildings
did not have any unified allegiance against the soldiers of the base. Most of them were small
clans or communal organizations which had, within the context of the urban environment, their
own feuds with each other and their own financial purposes to further. A few of these orgs were
nominally anti-occupation groups, and of these, only a small percent actively practiced what was
known as "insurgency." They were just as likely to open fire on each other as they were to fire on
the army below. The night gave them ample opportunity to do both.

It was later hypothesized that the first shots had been fired upon the convoy not by an angry
terrorist, but by a military interest in the city on the payroll of the infotards.
The skyscrapers, being home to a significant group of paranoid communards and minor
warlords, were heavily booby-trapped. When the fire began, it was quickly compounded by
mines and killbots that had been planted among the buildings. The military had greater strength,
but they were in a compromised position, having to fire up at the buildings. Their opponents in
the skyscrapers, besides being able to hide behind plastic barriers and architectural nooks, could
effectively attack the forces below simply by dropping things on them. The battle was fought on
more fronts than that. American aircraft swooped down on the skyscraper roofs. Though the
buildings were well-equipped with antiaircraft weapons, the militants within could not stop aerial
transports from dropping combat teams on the roofs and balconies. The black vans which had
been following the army did not stop to engage in the major combat. They rode on, through the
skyscrapers, toward the cod server facility.
Eben found himself caught in the ruins of a wrecked hovercraft, which had been hit by some
unknown type of heavy ordinance. He took a hit of stims and struggled to open an emergency
hatch. Once he got it open, he attempted a volley of shots at a nearby window. His rifle clicked,
but did not fire. The environment outside was cluttered with identspoofs. The rifle would be
useless.
Gas canisters, glue bombs, and spiderweave mesh tangles were falling outside. Eben was able
to determine that most of the ordinance falling on the street was nonlethal. Still, he had been
taught that lenghty exposure was always undesirable. He looked around, remaining behind the
fold of the door. Most of the fire from the lower windows and balconies had been silenced, and
the street was safe with the exception of random falling missiles, which were becoming less
frequent. Eben held a quick conference with his fellow soldiers in the compartment, and they
decided (by consensus, for they had no commanding officer) to make a run for it. They dropped
their rifles in a pile in the corner of the vehicle and dashed out the emergency hatch. They
encountered minimal fire in the street, but ran full-on for the lobby of the nearest large building.
Eben and the others ducked inside and were met by a curious scene. The lobby was full of idle
military units. Heavily-armed soldiers lounged on crates, watching the fighting outside or
tapping on omnis. Two large, pre-infowar machine guns were perched on a plinth behind a thick
foamwall fortification, and were providing most of the fire from the lobby. A few killbots who
had survived the heavy malwareing patrolled the lobby, but most of the human soldiers were not
active. One of the supply crates had been discovered to contain fresh apples, and had been pried
open with an infowar gun. A man in a slouch hat offered Eben one of the fruits as he entered. He
declined.
A few supply trucks and Humvees had avoided the vehicle-killers outside and had entered the
lobby with the troops. Eben and his compatriots approached the largest truck, which was being
attended to by two Stumblers and a maintbot. It was an ancient Peterbilt with burn marks along
the body and several missing panels. By some divine luck, it was one of the weapons transports.
One of the Stumblers offered Eben and his compatriots their pick of small arms. Eben chose a
shotgun and a hammer-action pistol and held a short conversation with the bot. It established that
the lobby had been sealed off from the rest of the building. There was a staircase and blastproof
door between them and the stories above, which were presumably filled with unhappy natives.
"Confidence is high," said the bot, "that we can take out the door, but I estimate a high casualty
rate in the subsequent combat. Combat teams have entered this building through the doorways in
the roof and are working their way down. It is unsure whether our attacking would have success,
and there is presently no commanding officer for this group of soldiers. We have attempted to
radio for orders from a ranking officer, but have heard nothing." Indeed, Eben had not seen a
ranking officer since he left the base. The bot as well thought this was conspicuous.
Eben was in the middle of the greatest battle in the history of the city, and had nothing to do
but wait in a lobby. His previous tiredness had faded in the face of natural (and artificial)
adrenaline, and he felt overeager and purposeless.
One of the soldiers from his transport nudged his shoulder. "Hey, check your omni." Eben did.
The screen was full of unsecured wireless networks with anonymized names. Eben logged into
the first three and queried an IP address for the cod. Two of the three resolved and the iconic
home page of the wiki project appeared in his browser window.
The cod was in full swing. Several chat rooms and talk pages showed very high activity, and
Eben saw a number of new pages. There were links to live-updating maps of the battle, data
dumps from platoon records, and aerial videography from drones overhead. There was also a
very detailed article on the events of the past few hours. Apparently, the attack on the cod had
been ordered by proxy from Washington. The intent had been to surprise the cod sysadmins, but
the lag between the alarm and the exeunt of the soldiers from the base had given the cod time to
organize its resources. An article described the current situation in the inner city as "scattered
territorial fighting" and showed a Civ-style web of the alliances and allegiances of the larger
militant groups in the city, as well as addresses and satellite images of the buildings that were
host to the majority of the fighting.
The situation at the cod servers was detailed in another article. Presently, the cod "insurgents"
had created a minefield of malware bombs and gluefoam pits around their server facility. The
partyvans that had made it to the combat zone had set up a distributed sonic weapon and were
making the server-tenders in the building uncomfortable. The codheads were also being harassed
by military aircraft, but their antiair defenses were holding up. The cod facility was surrounded
by caches of drones and killbots, but they had insufficient firepower to assault the men in black
en masse and stand any chance of success. Instead, the codheads were releasing the bots cache-
by-cache, fighting a sort of guerrilla war, looking for any advantage. Even they knew that their
strategy was untenable against siege, and there was word of a retreat in the works.
The cod, in true wikiesque finery, was hosting several other recently-created articles that
pertained not directly to the combat, but to the general political situation. One such article was a
heavily-annotated list of upper-echelon military IPs that had accessed the cod within the past five
hours. It did not draw explicit conclusions, but lightly implied that the very people who were
trying to scram the cod were accessing it to develop their battle plans.
Eben looked up from his omni. The weird stucco-like material that had been slapped onto the
ceiling by the retreating militants was beginning to rain down on the room. As Eben took cover
behind a padded armchair, the first crack appeared in the ceiling. Seconds later, a circular
segment fell to the ground and a humaniform killbot was lowered down on a rope. It was a
fearsome machine, with giant binocular eyes and painted-on teeth adorning a flat face. It held a
light machine gun in each of its four hands. The bot surveyed the room. Most of the soldiers had
found cover, the rest were laid out on the ground. No shots had been exchanged. Both parties
were trying to determine whether the other was friend or foe. The bot made a decision and spoke.
"Coast is clear, descend." A group of twenty or so armored figures dropped consecutively onto
the floor, each scuttling aside to clear the area for the next. They wore the insignia of a
paratrooper squadron. Several spider-simulacrum killbots crawled around them, their stalk-
mounted eyes flashing red. The heads of curious skyscraper-dwellers could be seen around the
hole in the ceiling. One of the paratroopers, a tall man carrying a portable artillery piece and
several gas-canisters, spoke first. "I am Lieutenant Neo Itumeleng of the 12745th Temp
Paratroopers. We have secured the floors above. Who is your CO?" A bayonet-rifle-bearing
soldier volunteered that there was no such individual present. It was explained to the officer that
he was among a group of soldiers, both regular and irregular, who had no organization or known
commander, and had been assembled by fate. "Very well," said the Lieutenant, "I will take
command of this, um, detachment." This, no doubt, violated endless statutes and protocols of the
various military suborgans to whom the sundry individuals in the room belonged, but the
unspoken consensus was that Itumeleng's no-nonsense, macho style was admirable and a military
leader could benefit them in this hour. No objections were raised and the Lieutenant began
shouting out orders.
"Our objective is to reach the servers of the Corollary Open Database. Do these vehicles
operate?" A tech pointed out the functional machines. "Excellent. We move in five minutes."
Without delay, Itumeleng began scanning the identbadges of the enlisted officers around him and
reading their service records on his omni. He assigned temporary promotions to five people, two
from his platoon and three others. He assigned these five to separate vehicles and ordered them
to pick their inferiors sandlot-style and pile them into their vehicles. He installed himself in the
largest, the supply truck, and began picking technical advisers to accompany him. Eben was
among those chosen.
Eben entered the truck and found a lone flak suit, which he donned, and a sturdier-looking
helmet. The soldiers outside were running around, surveying the transports, and waking the
killbots. Eben, on his own initiative, dumped a few of the less useful and more volatile items
from the trailer.
Lieutenant Itumeleng had found a megaphone. He stood on the cab of the truck and addressed
the assembly. "We will proceed down the main boulevard and approach the cod facility. The
killbots will deploy before us and clear the path of mines and similar dangers. My truck will lead
the formation." Itumeleng issued orders to the five vehicle commanders. "All right. Let's be
heroes!" Any more words he might have said were drowned out by the roll and rattle of the
engines.
The spider-bots spread out ahead of the convoy and took off, small spotlights panning madly
back and forth across the wide street. Behind the supply truck were two Humvees with mounted
machine guns. These were followed by a minitruck, a Mastiff transport, and a light hovercraft.
They set an alarming pace down the road, swerving frequently to avoid wreckage. Itumeleng
stood upon the truck's cab. He cradled his artillery piece in one arm, and clung to the truck's
exhaust pipe with the other. Eben sat on the trailer a few meters back along with several other
techs.
It was by a combination of incredible luck and affected nobility that the convoy reached its
destination. The journey lasted some ten minutes, spent cantering between posturban buildings.
When they arrived, very little of the cod facility was left. Segments of wall were standing, and
the ground was littered with burnt and broken tech. The partyvans were gone. A few other
scattered groups of uniformed men stood on the edge of the wreckage. The driver of the supply
truck, seeing no reason to stop, drove into the field of debris. He stopped at some arbitrary
distance, a hundred meters or so into the ruins of the giant warehouse. There was a clatter as the
engines behind Eben cut off, then near-silence. The soldiers stepped out of their transports. They
were experiencing two surrealities at once: that of visiting a once-great building in ruins and that
of anticipating combat but seeing none. They began to disperse, walking slowly among the ruins.
Eben was staring a thousand yards into the ether, paying no attention to his surroundings. He
had chosen a south-easterly route, towards the rising sun. He was walking alone, slowly, only
half-awake. He realized that he had been without sleep for almost 24 hours straight.
He rounded a corner and heard a faint voice. "Didn't get out." He looked. A grey-haired, dark-
skinned man lay propped against a burnt-out rack of 2U servers. He wore bloodied robes and
tortoiseshell glasses. His voice was faint. "Give me your omni." Eben did this before he had even
consciously processed the request. The older man went straight for his browser history. "Hm," he
said, with a weak smile. "The cod. We had to keep it closed-source so the infotards couldn't
exploit it. The last backup of our data." He gestured to a green military backpack that Eben had
not previously noticed. "It's on you, kid." The chirping of a arachnidiform killbot could be heard
in the near distance.
"Go."
That Eben did.

The bag was heavy and Eben carried it several kilometers, passing detached groups of American
and alliance soldiers and enemy militants. The shooting had stopped and nobody had any idea
where they were going, or whether they were supposed to be retreating or moving forward. They
knew only that the sun had risen and that the cod had not seen the sunrise. Eben moved on.
He found, eventually, what resembled a used car lot. It was a grassy field full of vehicles
which had been towed from the streets that night. Most of them were four-wheelers of a smaller
size, and many were broken up or obviously damaged. Eben found one, an ancient Toyota Hilux
truck, that had visible keys. It was an ugly beast, but it cranked after a couple of tries.
Eben threw the bag in the back and set off in the direction of the base.

Eben tailgated a minitank through one of the smaller gates of the base. As he drove the near-
empty roads, his omnis buzzed from the dash. It appeared that the infowar nets were recovering
from the netwar. Occasional swarms of black vans appeared in his rearview and he pulled his hat
down and slowed to let them pass. They seemed to be rebooting the base's nets, moving from
server to server, deploying EMP bursts and grenades.
 He arrived at TERM 2. The guard checked his identpass as he entered, but did not seem to
notice the backpack. He tried to keep his pulse down as he wandered among the server racks. He
walked aimlessly for a few minutes and found a section of the building that looked like it held
administrative offices. He chose one at random and entered. At a large mahogany desk sat a
balding officer, filling out (dead-tree) paperwork.
Eben saluted and spoke. "Sir, Private Eben Lance reporting." He saw no reason for lying about
his name. He had been spied by endless CCTVs since entering the structure and, besides, his
surname was displayed on the pocket of his soiled uniform. "Cluster's gone wonky and we need
the hourlies to reboot."
The other did not look up from his desk. "NP, kid." He took the omni that Eben had proferred.
"What subsec do you work with?" Eben broke a sweat, but answered calmly.
"Fifth, sir." The officer looked up into his eyes for the first time and clucked.
"You guys are working late, eh?" Eben had chosen a number at random.
"Yessir. Skeleton crew, sir."
"Well, here's your auths. Better get down there quick-like, they'll be reissuing in a quarter of
an hour."
"Thank you, sir."
Eben shuffled out of the room and moved towards a section of the building that he had
previously decided was where the big iron was kept. The doors were heavy and opened only to
specialized auths. Eben moved quickly down the hallway and spotted, at length, a door that was
being held open by a syncrete block. He entered the room, which, by extreme luck, was empty of
techs.
Eben worked quickly. He grabbed some power cords from a rack and began hooking up the
hard drives from the bag. He took an AIO machine from the back of the room, booted it up,
hooked up the drives, and set up a payload server. He then infected it with a newish build of the
blindwørm from an omni. The screen blinked as it rebooted. It booted up to an innocuous-
looking splashscreen and he squirted over the hourly auth from the omni, then encrypted the
blindwørm's command software to a personal password of his. It booted and accessed the TERM
2 network seconds before the timeservers struck the next hour.
TERM 2 sat behind a heavy DMZ-type firewall, but once the offending code was on the
intranet and had authorization to access the net, there was no stopping it. It would spread with
the rebooting nets as military servers in the base accessed TERM 2.
Eben had planted the cod right in the base. If it took hold, of which he had little doubt, it
would go distributed on all the infected omnis and servers in the base.

Though most of the base was vacant, it would soon be swarming with soldiers, DefCons, and
bots. Before long, the new whereabouts of the cod would be known to the infotards. Eben's
makeshift web server would be shut down, and the personnel records and CCTV footage would
be viewed. From the moment the codhead gave him the bag, Eben was a marked man.
It was time for him to leave the base. He ground gears to his quarters, entered, and retrieved
his things. He also called up the courier bots, and met his remaining effects at a small automated
warehouse off of Purgatory. Waiting for his things by the side of the road, he wrote a short
message to his friend Lester, encrypted it, and sent it on a delay.
Eben headed out of the base. He had half a mind to simply go and turn himself in to the MPs,
but he had seen these situations (from afar) before. Many dollars and lives had been spent
fighting the cod, and the issue was political. There would be massive polarization of opinion, and
Eben would face a lengthy trial and a lengthy imprisonment. It was his opinion that if he laid low
for a few months, the affair might blow over and he might have privacy and discretion,
nevermind a much shorter term in prison.
The lanes leading out of the base were empty. Eben passed all kinds of incoming traffic: tanks,
troop-traps, and ambulances, but he was not once challenged by MPs. He passed the vaporware
railguns and went into the town. Buildings by the road were burnt and bullet-riddled. Eben
passed through a series of roadblocks, but his uniform got him through without a problem. The
town was as good a place as any to hide, but Eben did not want to get into the intricacies of
urban survival.
He kept driving on, into the desert.
[IX]
Eben had, in the past few months, traveled thousands of kilometers and called many places
home. His travels, however, had lacked romance and adventure. There were no sailing ships, no
covered wagons, not even a steering wheel before him for all that road. He had not been moving
about in the world, but had been moving within the military institution. The poetry of his travels
in the past months had lacked intensity or permanence. He had been traveling in cheap,
disposable vehicles, living in right-angle, rectangular, lowest-bidder institutional buildings, and
eating printed proteins. Riding under the giant railguns and past the block-letter city limits signs,
Eben felt a relief and a certain freedom.
The desert was a place of wonder. Eben had not driven far, but he was completely alone, his
little truck moving quickly down the wide road, its jarring geometries juxtaposed with the
tranquil curves of the dunes and drifts.
Eben felt the promise of the future. He could get the truck painted, gather his resources,
cultivate a new identity, and establish himself in the desert. He could do contract work for
bountyservs or simply freelance, refurbishing tech and watching the nets. Perhaps he would
show up at the doors of the base in six months as Eben Lance, perhaps he would remain on the
move more permanently.
Eben felt, as well, a sense of success. He had been entrusted with a difficult task and had
proven the right man for the job. He congratulated himself for keeping his cool while setting up
the cod server in TERM 2 and for escaping smoothly and calmly. Eben drove, scanning around
on the AM/FM radio. In the deep desert, the only stations he could pick up were local pirate
radios and monotonous bots reading off military RSS feeds.
"With the holiday season rapidly approaching, those personnel wishing to send Christmas
cards home to the States are asked to do so no later than August 13, due to a yearly mail rush at
that time."
Eben was, above all, tired. He had not slept in at least a day and a half. After about an hour, he
pulled over and joined an irregular cluster of vehicles at the side of the road. He twisted the e-
brake into position and fell asleep almost immediately.

Not four hours later, a black single-rotor helicopter descended from the sky and an autobot MP,
suspended on moonlit piano wire, read Eben his rights. A desertwar Chinook arrived on the
scene. Another robocop leaned out of the door of that copter and, after waiting for the first to
finish the tersely-worded list, shot a tranq into Eben's left shoulder.
Eben woke, confused but strangely rested, in a small jail cell. The walls were steel, and the
door was heavy, with an ostentatious security-theater lock and a slit of a window. An industrial-
grade LCD was mounted on the wall opposite the door. Eben addressed this machine.
"Where am I?"
"You are in a max-security cell in an undisclosed location."
Eben could tell from the air that he was back in the base. While each filter-contained military
environmental system was, in theory, to conform to the exact same specifications, there was
always a variance caused by some ridiculous onset of malfunctioning machinery or careless
incompetence. As such, each base and military environment had its own unique clean-room scent
and environment. Eben had heard all kinds of tales about this idiosyncrasy. According to some, a
new transfer's base of origin could be judged by the smell of his uniform. Others alleged that ex-
soldiers had flashbacks when exposed to certain halocarbons.
Eben asked the blue-lit screen a few more general questions, but it was less than forthcoming.
The entire facility had been sold out to DefCons. Eben was introduced the next day to a
blackhat headshrinker named O'Brien. O'Brien, a slight and intellectual-looking man, began by
asking Eben questions about his health and his satisfaction in the ranks. It quickly became clear
that O'Brien was not simply a prison psych, he was an interrogator. O'Brien spoke little, but
spent hours at a time with Eben, questioning him about the narrowest details. Whenever Eben's
story differed from O'Brien's version, he (the latter) would interject calmly, then allow Eben to
continue. O'Brien had a mellow and unassuming presence, but Eben recognized that his entire
play was psychological: he was assigned to get out maximal information with minimal damage.
During their first few sessions, Eben was afraid that at any moment O'Brien might thumb an
omni and masked men would enter, tie him down, and perform some perverse institutionally-
born torture on him, with water, or electricity, or fire. At length, Eben realized that O'Brien was
content to merely talk, letting Eben have the floor for ten minutes to his every one, acting as
shrink, confession-taker, and, on occasion, propagandist. In a session with O'Brien, they could
talk for minutes, even hours, on diverse and unrelated topics, but O'Brien would always,
sometimes very suddenly, direct Eben back to the original, by popping a random interrogative
question into Eben's raconteuring.
In a typical session, Eben would be lying on his back on his military cot, and O'Brien would
be perched on the ledge of the uncomfortable military-issue folding chair. Eben would be
forthright, in attempt to appear to yield fully to O'Brien's open and precise manner. Eben
answered completely any questions where the value of the answer was unhelpful to his
interrogator, and only withheld information that could help the infotards behind O'Brien in court
or could further incriminate Eben. Occasionally, he would be forced, by a wily line of questions,
to lie. About half of his lies were picked up on, and O'Brien would hold up a finger for a
moment, then ask, calmly, "Are you sure?"
O'Brien was clearly expected, in his interrogation, to uphold an official version of the story.
He refused to concede to Eben that they were in the base, though occasionally he let slip
accidental clues that they were. In their fourth session, O'Brien mentioned a battalion that Eben
knew to be stationed in the base. A few of the facts that O'Brien mentioned, Eben could neither
confirm nor deny, and O'Brien was very shrewd in speaking of these. What most dismayed Eben
was O'Brien's holding that Eben's malware attack had not been successful. At first, Eben denied
this possibility completely. O'Brien, however, continued referring to Eben's sabotage as
"attempted botnetting." In one early session, Eben grew angry at O'Brien, and said that he was
sure that his implementation of the cod had entered the base's nets. It was highly unlikely that the
military firewalls could stop the worm. O'Brien paused a moment, then spoke slowly.
"I'm not a tech, but even you concede, that, um." He paused and stared out the window for a
full two minutes. "That, rather, that you very hastily set up your um." He looked at his feet.
"Server." He looked up again, into Eben's eyes. "It is quite possible that the setup of this new
host within the network conflicted with some internal rule. It is also possible that, as the base's
nets were being-" He paused for fifteen seconds this time. "Rebuilt. As the nets were being
rebuilt, the worm could have failed to take hold. I have no access to the actual information, that
file is classified."
Eben replied that he recalled pinging the TERM 2 intranet to be sure that that his makeshift
cod server was working. O'Brien asked when he did this, and Eben replied that it was between
his booting the server and exiting the server room. O'Brien stood, and without another word, left.
O'Brien returned six hours later, carrying two omnis and a small moleskin pouch. He handed
Eben the first omni, which had a video jukebox app loaded. Eben pressed play. It was security
camera footage from inside the server room. He saw himself setting up the AIO machine, daisy-
chaining the drives, and booting the machine. Then, without checking his omni, he left. O'Brien's
face was serene and understanding. "You misremembered. I'm surprised your memories of this
day are as accurate as they are. You were in high-stress situations, and sleepdepped."
O'Brien used this as a catalyst to begin discussing that fateful day once again. "Tell me what
happened once you entered the TERM 2 building."
Eben mindlessly began on a lengthy account.
"I entered through the front gate, establishing my credentials for the security guard. I walked
without aim, knowing my purpose, but not my specific destination. I went to the..."
O'Brien cut him off suddenly. "What color were the walls?"
"What?"
"What color are the interior hallway walls of the TERM facility?"
Eben thought. "I don't remember."
"Take your time."
O'Brien had used this trick before. Eben mentally concentrated on his time in the TERM
building, but remained in doubt. O'Brien had spoken of this method as "Deep Recollection,"
advising Eben to let his mind wander occasionally, but gently guide his thoughts back to the
question at hand, asking himself general questions, then approaching greater specificity.
Eben sat silent for what felt like a quarter of an hour. O'Brien fixed his eyes on the far wall
and showed no signs of impatience or discomfort. Eben could have requested to not answer the
question, but he knew from his experience that O'Brien would not cease his requests for that
mundane and irrelevant detail.
Eben reflected on his two visits to the TERM, as a grunt and as a saboteur. He had only spent
a few minutes in the corridors, and did not have any specific recollection of them. He tried to
remember if the building had windows, and decided at last that it did not. He recalled it being
dark, and rather dim. He thought that the walls were a darker color. He first tried to think about
other places that he had been that had a similar feel, remembering a winery that he had visited
with his family many years before. He spent some time thinking of this, but realized, after a
while, that that would not help him solve the problem. He tried to recall what specific computer
equipment he had seen in the building.
One of the servers, he recalled suddenly, had been blue. And it had matched the wall color.
"They were blue, a kind of dark blue."
O'Brien looked up, slowly. "The walls of TERM 2 are dark green, covered with standard-issue
biothermal climate control paint."
This seemed feasible to Eben. "Oh."
"And what was the material of the walls?"
"I, I don't know."
"Take your time."
Again, Eben did. If the walls were biopaint, they would be textured. The military seemed to
favor the "popcorn" texture in their architecture, and Eben responded after another moment.
"Popcorned."
"The TERM 2 admins were beta-testing a more efficient biopaint that demanded an
uninterrupted surface for effective control." O'Brien raised his voice just a tiny bit. "The walls
were flat, textureless." He paused. "Continue, you were walking down the hall."
Eben continued his account, speaking in maximal detail. The experiences of seeing the footage
and deep-recollecting on his second visit to the TERM served to increase the level of detail he
could remember. O'Brien listened intently, interrupting frequently to correct minor details.
They spoke for three hours, a short session relative to some of the others O'Brien had led.
After this time had passed, O'Brien rose and offered Eben the second omni and the pouch. "This
omni," he began, "has unfettered wireless access and this pouch contains a powerful antenna. If
you wish to verify my claim that the cod did not take hold in the base, please scan the nets with
this machine."
It was a tacit acknowledgment by O'Brien that Eben was being held in the base, but, more than
that, it demonstrated great confidence in the more severe claim, that Eben had failed the cod.
Eben thanked his captor, but feigned disinterest. As soon as O'Brien left, Eben jumped upon the
omni and antenna. He spent the next few hours netscanning with the omni. The device was
clearly bugged, so he did not attempt to communicate with the outside. With the antenna, he was
able to connect to a number of routers, which he verified were connected to the base's intranet.
There was no trace of the cod or its derivatives. He tried using some tricks which he knew could
subvert attempts to routerspoof his address, but could find no evidence of duplicity.
The only conclusion Eben could draw was this: O'Brien was right.
[X]
The news of his failure threw Eben into a depression. He was no longer a hero. He had
squandered not only the cod database, but his own chances of leaving the military and rejoining
the civilian world.
O'Brien gave him council throughout this period. Some humanity filtered through his cool,
almost robotic, manner. Eben would speak for hours about his disappointment and his mistakes,
and O'Brien would listen attentively and remind him that his efforts were altruistic and not
entirely misguided.
"Indeed," said O'Brien, "the military leaders want to see each man so devoted to their cause
that he is willing to sacrifice his livelihood, or even his life, in it's name. Had certain firewalls
and rules not have been in place, you would have successfully re-initialized the um." A pause.
"Corollary Open Database."
O'Brien would speak in this idiolect when discussing politics or philosophy. It was almost
impossible to determine his own political proclivities. He used generalities when he could, and
stalled frequently.
Eben could tell that O'Brien was monitoring him more closely. His visits became more
frequent and protracted. Twice Eben repeated his request for an omni and an antenna. He thought
of different tests to guarantee that his previous readings were correct. On both occasions, his
requests were granted and O'Brien brought him those machines. Eben repeated his scans, using
simple nethacks to increase the wireless range and detect spoofing. On no network was he able to
find any evidence of the cod. His third request was refused by O'Brien. "You are in denial. You
will find no contrary evidence to my claims."

As a child, Eben had owned an old tube television that, after years of service, one day failed to
display color. Eben felt that the same metamorphosis had occurred in his own life. He accepted
prison reality passively, conversing with O'Brien, reading what few books were available to him,
and eating the printed food without complaint. Weeks passed.
One day, O'Brien visited him and seemed a bit less calm than usual.
"Your trial is set to begin in two hours."
"What?"
"You will be tried at Burton Hall for high treason and conspiracy to terrorism. The trial date is
today, and it is to commence at 1600 hours."
Eben cursed. "I must prepare a defense."
"No. You are being tried as an enemy combatant, and will be found guilty. Thus, you will not
appear at your own trial. A robot lawyer will defend you, using Defense Script 27B Stroke 6.
You are allowed to submit one brief in your own defense, which may be read, pursuant to the
judge's discretion, at the trial. It is recommended that you go to great lengths to disclose
information pertinent to your case. This may result in a shorter term of imprisonment. You are as
well to fill out these forms." O'Brien paused. "I have business. I will leave you now. I shall
attempt to attend your trial."
Eben had not been provided with an omni, but did have a pad of paper and an ink pen. He sat
on his bed for a few moments, digesting what O'Brien had said, then began to write.
 "The climate that typified the conflict between military authorities and the representatives
of the Corollary Open Database in our base was not unlike that of another conflict which took
place in recent memory. Recall the conflict between 'pirates,' disseminators of cultural media
through illicit channels, and the corporations, governments, and NGOs which claimed to
possess, control, and legislate flow of this information. Both of these scenarios involved an
entrenched and confident group of ordinary people who violated the letter of the law by
accessing the cod or by copying music, film, and literature. Both of these activities provided little
danger to society, but threatened the ability of controlling authorities to exercise power over the
population. In both cases, the pool of offenders was incredibly vast, and would have required
inhuman effort to control. The controlling authorities, without fail, decided to attempt to control
the population by using intimidation: randomly selecting violators, both major and minor, and
assigning ill-proportionate punishments to them.
As such, the criminal is not he who violates the law, (as every person cannot, by definition, be
considered a criminal, a criminal being one who deviates from the norm) a criminal is he who is
caught. Thus, I am a criminal. And I offer no apology. My case is unique, as my act happened to
be an attempt to re-instate the entire Corollary Open Database server, and set it up within the
base. This itself may appear to be an act of great treachery and conspiracy, but it was merely an
act of subversive netwrangling, no worse than setting up routers for the WiFi Project, running
cables for the base10 network, or assisting the Corollary Open Database in a time of lesser
need. Yes, had I gone directly to the Military Police, the Corollary Open Database software, as it
were, would not have seen regrowth in the base, but, given the cyclical nature of countercultural
patterns, I would be very surprised if this base would never again see similar attempts to
establish a like database. During my internment, I have been unable to keep in touch with the net
feeds, but I would be willing to bet that attempts of that sort have already been made.
Collectivized resistance is a funny thing. It is rarely well-organized, but each individual seems
always to know his role, as if by divine hysteresis. When the Corollary Open Database sysdamin
presented me with the drives, I knew mine. I ask your honor and the ladies and gentlemen of the
jury (pardon my lack of knowledge of your format if I am appealing to incorrect or improperly
identified groups) to consider not the sensational nature of my acts or their inflation in the
context of today, but to consider how history will view our scapegoating and our mindless and
silly devotion to an unachievable fundament, the very foundations of which contradict the actions
we are taking to advance it.

Please consider also my faithful cooperation with and forthright reporting of the
circumstances to Investigator O'Brien and my willingness to comply in filling out your forms and
submitting all necessary information."

Eben signed his paper and turned his attention to the forms which O'Brien had provided. They
had been generated by an infobot, who had no doubt been fed data on Eben's actions. Many of
the requests were routine. Eben filled out his name and rank, some personal information, and a
succession of military authorization codes, emplaced to confirm that Eben was who he said he
was. The next few pages dealt with his cod implementation. How many drives did he use, and
how many petabytes of information did he attempt to distribute? The question that unnerved him
was this: "What encryption algorithm and password or passwords were used in conjunction with
the attempted malware attack?"
Eben was sure that the cod had failed. Nonetheless, he felt a certain stigma preventing him
from giving up the password. He chose not to fill out that part of the form. He finished the
paperwork just before an anthrobot arrived to pick it up.
The robot leafed through the papers. It spoke. "You have not filled out the form com-plet-ely.
If the app-rop-riate pap-er-work is not filled out in its en-tire-ty, your ap-peal will not be con-sid-
ered." It handed back the papers. "Your trial had been de-layed for thir-ty min-utes. I shall re-
turn to col-lect the com-plet-ed pap-ers." The bot left.
Eben gave the matter thought. By simply filling out the papers, Eben could gain back years of
his life. But why, he asked himself, would the infotards want his password? The cod had failed,
so it was of no use to them.
Eben remembered challenging O'Brien, when, in one of their sessions, he had demanded a
sensitive, but useless, piece of information. It was one of the very few times that O'Brien had
been provoked into saying "we" rather than "I." Said O'Brien: "It's about full disclosure. We
must know that you are complying with our every request. It is the only way you can gain our
trust."

Eben put the pen to the paper, and began filling out the remaining questions. There was a knock
at the door. Eben looked up.
"Come in." There was the scrape of a magcard at the door.
The visitor was a Stumbler, shorter than most, wearing a miniature tricorn hat. It spoke.
"I am Sack Alien Horovitz. I am delivering a message to you."
The bot handed Eben a folded piece of paper, and left without ceremony, closing the broad
door and re-locking it.

The paper Eben held was the size of a sticky note, with text written in small bold all-caps and no
punctuation. Eben read.

THE COD IS AWARE OF YOU

Eben put the cap back on his pen, laid it on his un-com-plet-ed papers, and read on.

THE COD IS AWARE OF YOU

WE ARE AWARE OF YOU
EVERYTHING THEY ARE TELLING YOU IS A LIE
WE ARE PROJECT ENDURING FREEDOM
WE ARE LEGION

AND WE WILL SET YOU FREE