Cyberpunk Part 10

?ILLEGAL DIRECT ERROR, it said.

Maybe it was my group ID. I tried getgid.

?ILLEGAL DIRECT ERROR, it repeated.

Something screwy was going on. I tried to grep the ID file; the screen went nutzoid in low-res graphics, erased itself, and said ?SYNTAX ERROR.

This was getting serious. I went straight to adb, the operating system deb.u.g.g.e.r.

?SYNTAX ERROR, it said. But now it was showing only the bottom four lines on the screen!

Lewellyn looked over my shoulder. "Having trouble, son?"108 I leaned back in the chair, ran my fingers through my stubbly hair, and said, "You sure this thing is working?" He tilted his head back and looked at the screen through the bottoms of his gla.s.ses.

Quiet, he said, "Son? What in G.o.d's name is an ADB?"

A real ugly feel started to creep up my back. "What operating system does the Apple II use, sir?"

He was still squinting at the screen through the bottoms of his gla.s.ses. "You didn't load the operating system. You're still in BASIC."

BASIC? Oh fritzing great, the lang with training wheels!

"I think," Lewellyn said soft, "we'd better start over." He turned to a shelf, and pulled out a flip-top box full of big plastic squares. "These are floppy diskettes," he told me. "You boot the operating system off diskette."

I sighed relief. For a moment there, I'd been afraid that the d.a.m.n antique stored data on clay tablets.

That afternoon, Lewellyn taught me all about floppy diskettes, booting up, and PR# commands. When he wasn't looking I slipped the Starfire out of my pocket and plugged it into the power strip; I couldn't find anything to jack it into, but at least I got its batteries back up to full charge.

I shot a couple hours building a rep with Lewellyn and pretending to be impressed by his primitive cyberskills. Just before I left for evening mess call, he took me into his deepest confidence and showed me a diskette labelled "s.p.a.ce War," then told me I was free to use his gear any time.

Hey, just what I wanted: Unlimited access! Sure, Lewellyn was a putz, and his equipment archaic to put it mild, but I had a place to hide out and at least one older who knew which end of the keyboard to sit at!

The more I thought about it, the better I felt. Eight weeks to go, a quiet place to hang out, a chance to get to know the Starfire. I figured I could tolerate 8 more weeks- And then, Operation Revenge. For a mo, I wondered if Dad realized109 what they were teaching me at the Academy. I was learning lots of really useful things. He was going to be in serious trouble when I got back.

By the end of mess, I was smiling so big and feeling so good I didn't even remember what I'd had for dinner. In fact, I didn't even mind it when I got back to the bunkhouse and Scott put Angina Pectoris on his boombox for the 5 X 1014th time!

Along about the 1015th time, though, I did start to get a little cranky.110

Chapter 0E.

Starting in July, we got a big time thunderstorm every third morning around 3 a.m., like clockwork. If I thought it was possible I'd swear the Academy arranged the storms, just to make our lives miserable. One week Payne pulled us out of lecture and sent us out to deta.s.sel a cornfield: Four days of hot, dirty, work, and soon's we got the d.a.m.ned job done a big storm came through and stomped half the field flat. The next week another serial was putting together a prefab bunkhouse: The night after they got the last roof truss up a truly wicked storm came along and took the roof right off again.

By the middle of month the trees were lush and green, the raspberry bushes were tough as barb-wire, and the obstacle course had turned into a monster truck mud bog. Payne just kept right on pushing us, all the while shouting stuff about jungle warfare, but even he had to admit it was ridiculous the morning we got down to the firing range and found the guns under a foot of water. In the first evidence I ever saw of him being even slightly human, he sent some divers down to unlock the rifles, and thereafter we could fire standing up if we wanted to. (I noticed my scores got definite worse, though.) The pseudoschool went about the same as always. Lecture, battle, a.n.a.lysis; lecture, battle, a.n.a.lysis. Lawrence Borec got totally into the roleplay and somehow learned to save all his hostility for the game; I found out in lecture one day he really was Macedonian. ("Not Yugoslavian, dips.h.i.t," he said. "Not Bulgarian, not Greek, and above all, not Serbian." Me being a Harris, from wherever it is that people named Harris are from, I don't understand this fossil nationalism business at all.) That explained the Macedonians. We Thebans, on the other hand,111 turned into the Poland of the Peloponnesian Wars and got real expert at losing. Sometimes we lost dramatic, like the time we danced around until we had perfect position on the Athenians, only to have the proctors rule us too tired to keep fighting (that's how Scott learned about the fatigue factor). Other times we just got stomped into a wet, greasy smear by the Spartans as they were on their way to fight somebody important.

One Monday Borec's Macedonians formed an alliance with Deke Luger's Athenians and blew the Spartans right off the table, and that's how we learned that alliances were okay. The next day Scott cut a deal with Borec, and in return for all our desserts for the rest of the week, the Macedonians joined us in a half-hearted way on Wednesday and stabbed us in the back and linked with the Athenians again on Friday.

"Alliances," the proctor pointed out afterwards, "are based on mutual advantage, and have nothing to do with whether you like your ally."

I was starting to get real tired of listening to Mister Diplomacy's boombox.

The rules kept evolving, too. Supplies became a tangible on the board; one Monday the Spartans and Athenians formed an alliance, Sparta supplying the muscle and the Athens supplying tons of grain, and they looked d.a.m.n near unstoppable-until the Thracians (another footnote like us Thebans) sent a small unit in the back door and burned their granaries. It was just exact like the time that bozo opened an Iranian front in Peshawar and cut my fuel lines. The Spartans wheeled and marched on the nearest enemy granary, but two moves into the a.s.sault they ground to a stop and the proctors called time.

"This is the lesson of Alexander's march across the Gedrosian Desert!" the T.I. of the day said, backlinking us to the last lecture. "The belligerant force left the bulk of their supplies at their initial base, and did not adequately defend them.

"This is a recipe for disaster! A supply line has a definite tensile strength; stretched too far it's very easy to snap." The T.I. turned to Lawrence Borec. "General Larius: How could the Spartans have obviated this situation?"112 I flagged they never asked Scott questions anymore. I guess they were getting tired of hearing him say, "Huh? Well, I dunno dude, y'know?"

I sure was. I don't know how I ever thought he was even half as derzky as Rayno.

By mid-July, everything we did was focused on the game. They replaced the rulebook with a three-ring binder, and we started getting a set of insert pages every day. Domestic politics entered the game the week the Athenians took the field with Deke Luger barred from the room: Seems they were getting tired of his bonafide Bonaparte swagger back in the bunkhouse (They were tired of it? They should have asked us!) and his citizens took a vote of ostracism, sent him into exile for a week.

The Thracians had their fifteen minutes of glory the next Wednesday, when the Spartans whacked everybody but Thrace, then were recalled from the field four moves away from total victory. The Thracians were declared the winners by forfeit, and the Spartan general was furious. "What d'y'all mean, helot revolt?" You could always tell when the southern-fried jarheads were mad; they forgot to hide their accents.

"Sparta is an object lesson in the clumsiness of the police state," the T.I. explained, patient. We had a different T.I. that day; a tall, blond guy named Schmidt, who always talked quiet and calm. "Most of the actual work was done by helot slaves. Only true citizens could join the army.

What this means to you is, the more effectives you put in the field, the fewer true citizens you have back home to keep the helots suppressed."

The Spartan general swore softly.

"There is another way," Schmidt said, a wicked twinkle in his eye.

"The Spartans originated right-wing death squads. You can kill all suspected helot revolutionaries."

The Spartan general's face brightened.

"Of course," Schmidt added, "pursuing that policy makes it a virtual113 certainty that the helots will revolt. And it cuts down on the number of slaves you have-," he shrugged, and smiled, "-so you have to pull effectives from the field to do actual productive work. Sort of like the deep South after the First American Civil War."

The Spartan general refused to rise to the bait. With a grumble, he turned to his adjutant. "Billy Ray, how many effectives can I really use?" The adjutant started flipping through the rule book, looking for that data. He wouldn't find it; I knew that rule book backwards and there was nothing like that in it.

Billy Ray found a table and ran his finger down the page. "Ten percent, tops," he said. "Five percent'd be better."

Now wait a minute! I flipped my rule book open and started whipping through the pages. Dammit, I knew that data wasn't in there!

Then it dawned on me. It wasn't in the Theban rule book. Separate rules for separate armies. Just like geopolitical level Peshawar. Oh boy.

The Spartan general was doing some calculating, his lips moving silent, his fingers wiggling. "Five percent? Good G.o.d, that's-"

"Five hundred in a good year," Schmidt said. He turned to the rest of us. "By the way, starting next Monday losses are c.u.mulative. Each week is a generation. So you will need to protect your breeding population, or you will be out of the game, understood?"

Scott was staring at a wasp that was flying up near the ceiling, tapping its way along the rafters; he snapped his head down to nod affirmative, then looked at me with What did he say? in his eyes.

Speaking of breeding populations, I could think of one real good candidate for a retroactive vasectomy.

Schmidt was talking to the Spartan general. "This is especially a problem for you," he said soft. "Under Spartan law, male citizens cannot marry until they're 30. Even then, man and wife live apart. Your reproduction rate is very low."

I kicked back in my chair, and blew off some relief. Cruel to their kids, hooked on a death-before-dishonor att.i.tude even worse than Bushido, governed by the gerusia-a bunch of stodgy old farts who114 made the Politburo look d.a.m.n near open-minded- and now this! The more I learned about the real Sparta, the happier I was to be Theban.

By the end of July, Sundays had turned into my definite refuge day.

We'd start the day off with a toned-down inspection, go through just a little drill and a mild harangue, then form up on the quad for generic church services. All the rain had turned the quad into a simulated rice paddy, and after awhile the academy chaplain-being allowed to be almost fully human- realized we were standing ankle-deep in mud and started keeping church blessed short.

The b.u.t.thole Skinheads, though, being chronic jerks, couldn't resist the opportunity to screw off. The last Sunday in July they finagled themselves into the back row, carefully set their hats on the ground, and snuck off. An hour later, when church was over and they were missed, they jumped sudden- excuse me, suddenly jumped-out of one of the nearby outhouses and started telling some stupid story about sinking into the mud and having to climb back up through the latrine.

Payne gave them about thirty seconds. Then he smiled, paternal, and suggested that there might be more cadets down there, so they'd better go back and shovel it out to make sure.

The rest of us went off to breakfast. By this time the b.u.t.thole Skinheads were getting pretty familiar with shovelling out latrines, so they were done quick. Half an hour later, Stig came into the mess hall, kicked the bigger lumps off his boots and stood his shovel in a corner, then got his tray and sat down with the rest of us Thebans.

I think me and Mister Style set a new speed record for finishing breakfast that morning.

Sunday afternoons were the high point of my week: Liberty time.

Four whole hours of doing nothing. I could go back to the bunkhouse and get my civvies on; I could wander anywhere in or around the academy I wanted. For four hours, I wasn't a Theban anymore, and I wasn't an Involuntary, and I wasn't anything but Mikey Harris, kid,115 normal, unit of (1). Even Payne stopped shouting at me, provided I stayed out of his way and didn't do anything real stupid.

I suppose I could have tried to go runaway. The vidiot who'd gotten depantsed tried that, in early July. The Spartans had been giving him a real hard time; dumping buckets of water on him while he was gone Tommy, that sort of thing. So one Sunday he tried to stow away on the mail plane.

Idiot. The plane wasn't scheduled to leave until Monday. He turned up missing at evening mess, of course, and the Grade Fives were out half the night looking for him. When they found him, about0/ 30/0/ , they took him back to their camp.

Piggy Jankowicz'd gotten off easy. Hearing the vidiot's stories about the Grade Five camp and watching him do punishment for a week was enough to convince me.

But not everybody. One of the Spartans was having a real hard time-there were all kinds of weird status things going on among the jarheads that I, being an Involuntary, never got updated on-and the last weekend in July, he took off on a carefully planned runaway. Squirreled some food; found a map; even stole a compa.s.s, someone said.

This one the Grade Fives didn't bring back. Instead, a couple days later the rumor started going around that someone'd seen them bringing in pieces of b.l.o.o.d.y uniform and a fresh killed bear. A well-fed looking bear.

After that, I stopped thinking about running out. Instead, I hard coded my Sunday afternoons for one task; keeping my Real World ident.i.ty current in my mind. The jarheads usually went down to the firing range and shot themselves deaf, the vidiots went Tommy and vedged out, the comikaze just stared at his vidslate (the batteries had c.r.a.pped out sometime in late June), the Slammers and b.u.t.thole Skinheads-aw, who cares what they did?, and Scott and the rest of the Thebans went back to the bunkhouse.

Me, I was getting real tired of listening to Angie Pectoris, so I went to the library and hung out with Mr. Lewellyn. Three weeks to go. Just116 three more weeks to tough it out.

Lewellyn's Apple II turned out to be a semi-fun machine, in a truly limited kind of a way. I mean, working with it must have given Lewellyn the same kind of feel some olders get from restoring old private cars. I admit I got some pride (and more than a little surprise) from just being able to make the d.a.m.n thing work. But every time I went to the library I'd end up asking myself, Is this feeling truly worth having to spend four hours listening to Lewellyn correct my grammar?

I decided it was. If nothing else, the library was the only place in the Academy where I could hide out and explore my Starfire. It processed rings around the Apple! Every Sunday I cooked up something new, tucked it away in bubble, and burned its params in my living memory.

When I got back to The World and CityNet I was going to be downright dangerous!

For contrasters, when Lewellyn was watching I twiddled around with the Apple, and that was kind of like teaching a pet brick to do tricks. Lewellyn used a file handling program, FID (FIle Developer), a lot. The only fun thing I came up with was cracking into FID and tinkering around with it until the name had new meaning: File Intercept & Destroy. Along about the first of September--after I was long gone-- it'd start eating his files. But do it in such a random-like way it'd take him weeks to figure out it was the program, not him.

Aside from sucker-trapping the Apple, what else was there? Only s.p.a.ce War, the lamest game in creation. Ultra-crude graphics, no sound to speak of, no hit points or charisma or anything interesting. It was just pure logistics. Sometimes Lewellyn and I played each other one-on-one or two-on-two; most of the time he was busy, so I split up control of the four nations/empires/whatever with that little dim computer and wished it had enough smarts to learn from watching me.

Each player built ships, launched attacks, and tried to take over other star systems. All sides had the same level of technology, so the whole game really came down to one question: Who controlled the most117 production capacity? If you could destroy the other empires'

manufacturing centers and protect your own, you won. No exceptions.

Geez, even the Academy's war game was better than that!

After a while I figured out that there were a couple hardcodes in the game, made it real predictable. No luck factors, no randomization, no technological leaps. Surprise counted a little, but not much; coordination counted more. Ma.s.sing a fleet and then attacking always worked better than launching small units and trusting everyone to arrive at the objective at the same time. It always took at least three-to-one numerical superiority to overwhelm an entrenched defender, and two-front wars were always disastrous. Most importantly, I had to manually keep track of what I'd deployed, because otherwise the little idiots'd just follow orders and I'd wind up watching reinforcements get slaughtered following up lost causes.

Once I'd finally flagged the last of the hardcodes, the game got boring to the max. So one day I started tearing the program apart and improving the code, just for the h.e.l.l of it. I added valor; I added random s.p.a.ce monsters that could eat ships in transit. By the end of July I'd reworked s.p.a.ce War into true fun, and the only untouched spot in the whole thing was a little glop of hex up in the initialization section which I a.s.sumed was the original programmer's ID.

One Sunday I decided to decode that, too, and redo it. I mean after all, the program was mostly mine now, right? I tore into the hex, converted it to ASCII, looked it over.

The original programmer was Ralph Lewellyn. And he'd written it less that five years before.

"I was trying to impress the Colonel," old Lewellyn said, when I inquisitioned him about it. He had a weird, faraway look in his soft blue eyes. "It was just after I was hired, son. The summer boys were doing galley warfare that year, and I couldn't believe the primitive way they were conducting the games. So I decided to write a simulation using the same rules." Lewellyn looked at me, sad. "War never changes, you know. The tools of the trade change, but the basic business never does."118 I looked back at the star map on the video tube, and realized with a start that a lot of the hardcodes closely matched the params of the Peloponnesian War we were fighting on the sand table-and for that matter, the basic rules of Peshawar. Sudden, it all clicked together.

s.p.a.ce War, Peshawar, and the ancient Greeks: it was all the same game.

"Well, son," Lewellyn was rattling on, "Just about the time I finished the program, I discovered that Colonel Von Schlager absolutely hates computers. Believes that they make it too easy to be detached and emotionless; too easy to make command decisions that throw lives away. That's why you game on a sand table, in a closed room. The Colonel's theory is that you have to smell each other's sweat, and feed on each other's excitement. You must-have you gotten to platoon-level actions yet?" I shook my head. "Oh," Lewellyn said. He took off his gla.s.ses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and then started cleaning his gla.s.ses on his shirt tail. "I don't know much about the Colonel's past,"

he said at last, "but something terrible must have happened. When you get to platoon-level actions, you'll discover his Number Three rule: Always look men in the face before you order them to their deaths."

Dim, slow, I started to remember something. About how I always played a tank platoon in net Peshawar; about how I really hated those anonymous net generals who sent me out to get killed. Hated them even more than the enemy.

Lewellyn sighed heavy, and shook his head. "I often wonder what tremendous guilt it is, that makes the Colonel the tortured thing he is today."

I was still processing what Lewellyn had said about platoon-level actions. "The Number Three rule? What's Number One?"

Lewellyn looked up at me, snorted a little laugh, and said, "The Number One rule around here, son, is Keep Your Head Down. I carry that one close to my heart! The Colonel took one look at s.p.a.ce War, said, 'Don't ever show that to me again,' and I didn't. As a result, I still have my job!" He smiled, and made a hands-up gesture with his crooked old fingers that took in the room and everything. "You have to admit119 that this isn't a bad way for a retired widower to live, don't you?

Beautiful country, all the bland food I can eat, and all the books I can read. My kids wanted to put me in a nursing home."

His eyes suddenly focused on something only he could see, and the look on his face turned so bad I thought he was sick, at first. Then I realized there were tears coming up in the corners of his eyes. "You have no idea what it was like before," he said, soft. "Ninety million aging Anglo voters, all voting for people who promised us Guaranteed Medical for the rest of our lives, all demanding the absolute best for ourselves. We turned the world upside down: welfare recipients became walking organ banks. Immigration for sale, if you were willing to donate a kidney. The second cla.s.s citizen ghettos, the Evolution At Work policies." He sobbed, shuddered.

"It took my wife five years to die," he said, not really to me. "The home kept her body alive years after what should have been a fatal stroke, trying new procedures, attempting useless surgery. So they could keep collecting her MediMaint payments, you see? It wasn't a hospital; it was a warehouse for dying bodies." His voice dropped to a whisper.

"When I go, I want it to be here. Where the medical vultures can't get one last insurance billing out of me."

Lewellyn shook his head, snapped back into focus, and looked at me. "I suppose this must be pretty morbid for you, son. If you don't mind, I think I'll just... " He got up, and started for the door.

Then he thought of something, and turned around. "Say, you remember how I said that I always find my best ideas by accident, while looking for a different book?" I nodded. He turned to a shelf, and picked up a fat old dustcatcher. "I was looking for a book on Shiloh," he said, "when I found this for you. I think you'll find it useful." Tossing the book to me, he turned and toddled out the door.

I looked at it a while, running my fingers over the cracked old leather. This sucker was old! Silverfish bait, for sure; the pages were practically flaking apart. No name on the binding, and no cover art. I could almost feel boredom seeping in through my fingers.120 But what the h.e.l.l, the old guy meant well. I opened the cover and looked at the t.i.tle page. A History of the Peloponnesian War, adapted from Thucydides by Reverend somebody-or-other. Feeling a little excitement, I flipped to the index. Yup, it was all there: Names, dates, tactics.

I turned back to the tube, and looked at s.p.a.ce War. I couldn't quite ID the feeling, but at last I decided there was something wrong about taking Lewellyn's name out of the program. Sure, he was a putz. The original code was mediocre, at best. But he meant well. He was really trying to help. Sure, there probably weren't ten more computers in the whole world this thing'd run on, but it didn't seem fair to erase him completely.

I settled for changing the ID and adding one line. Now it said, "Original program design by Ralph Lewellyn. Mods by Mikey Harris."