big.
A bunch of junk scrolls up Randy's screen. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, it begins, and then there's a paragraph of information about what a great idea the Crypt is and how anyone who gives a damn about privacy should get an account here. Randy truncates the commercial message with the whack of a key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command
telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com
and gets two gratifying messages in return: one saying that a connection has been established with Tombstone, and the next saying that a S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets
tombstone login:
which means that he is now free to log on to the machine right across the street from him. And now Mr. Randy has a little decision to make.
So far, he's clean. The bits coming out of his laptop are encrypted; so even if someone is monitoring the local packet radio net, all they know is that some encrypted bits are flying around. They cannot trace any of those bits to Randy's machine without bringing in an elaborate radio direction-finding rig and zeroing in on him most conspicuously. Those encrypted bits are eventually finding their way to laundry.org up in Oakland, which is a big Internet host that probably has thousands of packets rushing in and out of it every second. If someone were tapping laundry.org's T3 line, which would require an enormous investment in computers and communications gear, they would detect a very small number of encrypted packets going out to crypt.kk in Kinakuta. But these packets would have been stripped of any identifying information before leaving laundry.org and so there would be no way to tell where they originated. Now, crypt.kk is also an anonymizer, and so an entity tapping its staggeringly enormous T5 line (a job on the order of eavesdropping on a small country's telecommunications system) might theoretically be able to detect a few packets going back and forth between crypt.kk and Tombstone. But again, these would be stripped of identifying information, and so it would be impossible to trace them even as far back as laundry.org, to say nothing of tracing them all the way back to Randy's laptop.
But in order for Randy to get into Tombstone and begin actually tampering with the evidence, he must now log on. If it were a poorly secured host of the type that used to be legion on the Internet, he could just exploit one of its numerous security holes and crack his way into it, so that if his activities on the machine were discovered, he could claim that it wasn't him-just some cracker who happened to break into the machine at the very moment it was being seized by the cops. But Randy has spent the last several years of his life making machines such as this one impregnable to crackers, and he knows it's impossible.
Furthermore, there's no point in logging on as just any old user-like using a guest account. Guests are not allowed to tamper with system files. In order to do any meaningful evidence-tampering here, Randy has to log on as the superuser. The name of the superuser account is, inconveniently, 'randy' and you can't actually log in as 'randy' without entering a password that only Randy would know. So after using the very latest in cryptographic technology and trans-oceanic packet-switching communications to conceal his identity, Randy now finds himself faced with the necessity of typing his name into the fucking machine.
A little scenario flashes up in his head in which he sends an anonymous broadcast message to all laundry.org users telling them that the password for the 'randy' account on 'tombstone.epiphyte.com' is such and such and urging them to spread this information all over the Internet as fast as possible. This might have been a decent idea if he had thought of it an hour ago. Now it is too late; any sentient prosecutor tracing the time stamps on the messages would be able to prove that it was just a blind.
Besides, time is running low. The discussion across the street, which is just a shrill hubbub at this distance, is rising to some sort of climax.
Randy has meanwhile booted up his browser and gone to the ordo.net home page. Usually it's a pretty dull corporate home page, but today all of the blurbs and quotidian press releases have been obliterated by a window showing live color video of what is going on in front of the building (or rather, what was going on a couple of seconds ago; coming over his miserable low-bandwidth radio link, the video changes frames about once every three seconds). The video is originating from Ordo itself, where they've evidently aimed a camera out the window and are slamming the images straight out over their very own T3 line.
Randy glances up just in time to see the guy who invented the term 'virtual reality' walking across the lot, deep in conversation with the executive editor of
'Bruce!' Randy shouts.
Bruce falters and looks over in Randy's direction. 'Randy,' he says.
'Why are you here?'
'Word on the street is that the Feds were raiding Ordo,' Bruce says.
'Interesting. . . . any particular Feds?'
'Comstock,' Bruce says. Meaning Paul Comstock, who, by virtue of being Attorney General of the United States, runs the FBI. Randy does not believe this rumor, but in spite of himself he scans the area for people fitting the general profile of FBI agents. The FBI hates and fears strong crypto. Meanwhile another Secret Admirer type shouts, 'I heard Secret Service!' Which is even creepier, in a way, because the Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department, and is charged with combating wire fraud and protecting the nation's currency.
Randy says, 'Would you be open to the possibility that it's all a Net rumor? That what's really going on is that a piece of equipment inside Ordo's offices is being seized as part of a legal squabble?'
'Then why are all these cops here?' Bruce says.
'Maybe the masked men with assault rifles drew them.'
'Well, why did the Secret Admirers show up in the first place if it wasn't a government raid?'
'I don't know. Maybe it's just some kind of spontaneous self-organizing phenomenon-like the origin of life in the primordial soup.'
Bruce says, 'Isn't it just as possible that the legal squabble is a pretext?'
'In other words that the squabble is sort of like a Trojan horse put together by Comstock?'
'Yeah.'
'Knowing all of the parties involved, I'd rate it as unlikely,' Randy says, 'but let me think about it.'
The noise and intensity of the argument in the Ordo parking lot spike upwards. Randy looks at the video window, which unfortunately has no sound track. The transactions between frames come as isolated blocks of new pixels slapped up one at a time over the old, like a large billboard being posted sections. High-definition TV it ain't. But Randy definitely recognizes Avi, standing there tall, pale, and calm, flanked by one guy who's probably Dave the Ordo president, and another guy who's obviously a lawyer. They are literally standing in the doorway of the building and facing off against two cops and none other than Andrew Loeb, who is in rapid motion and hence poses an insurmountable bandwidth problem. The Internet video gear is smart enough not to mess with parts of an image that aren't changing very much, and so the planted cops get refreshed maybe a couple of times a minute, and then just in a few rectangular image-shards. But Andrew Loeb is waving his arms around, hopping up and down, lunging towards Avi from time to time, pulling back and taking calls on his cellphone, and waving documents in the air. The computers have identified him as a bunch of pixels that require a great deal of attention and bandwidth, and so somewhere some poor algorithm is churning through the high-pressure slurry of compressed pixels that is the image of Andrew Loeb, and doing its level best to freeze the most rapidly-moving parts into discrete frames and chop them up into checkerboard-squares that can be broadcast as packets over the Net. These packets arrive in Randy's computer as the radio network passes them along, i.e., sporadically and in the wrong order. So Andrew Loeb appears as a cubist digital-video artifact, a rectilinear amoeba of mostly trench-coat-beige pixels. From time to time his eyes or his mouth will suddenly appear, disembodied, in the center of an image-block, and remain frozen there for a few seconds, crystallized in a moment of howling rage.
This is weirdly mesmerizing until Randy's startled out of his reverie by a clunk. He looks over to see that the van he's blocked in wasn't abandoned after all; it was full of Dwarves, who have now thrown the back doors open to reveal a nest of cables and wires. A couple of the Dwarves are heaving a boxy apparatus up onto the roof of the van. Cables run out of it to another boxy apparatus down below. The apparatus is electrical in nature-and doesn't appear capable of firing projectiles-so Randy decides not to pay it much attention for the moment.
Voices well up across the street. Randy sees some cops climbing out of a cop-van carrying a battering ram.
