Saviors 101

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

“The Software that Runs the Universe.” And Jeremy was supposed to fix it to save creation?

He hadn’t been able to sleep with that one running around in his brain. So, he’d come back to his best place for thinking, the massive computer station that filled half the living room.

Maybe Cassandra was lying.

That was it. If she was lying, then he wouldn’t believe her, which would convince him it was true. But if it was true…then he wouldn’t believe her.

Crap!

Cassandra had crashed in his parent’s bedroom and Virgil was sprawled out on the couch, snoring loudly while bad-ass mayhem on the big screen TV was thankfully turned from blood-red to dust-brown by Jeremy’s dismal housekeeping skills. The sound was off because the poet said he’d already knew the scripts and they sucked; it was the imagery of Hell on Earth that he enjoyed.

Twisted SOB, but maybe all poets were. He didn’t know any, except Nancy Munro. And her poems barely had the weight of butterflies in spring. Too happy a life. Too little angst. No nine circles of Hell in her life.

He hadn’t had much experience with truth, except one time: his mother wanting to be as far as possible from his father.

A quick search on his index revealed that his father had never played Little League. Never hit the grand slam homer that was the wonder of the State Championship. It had all been an invention to browbeat his son.

Jeremy pulled a couple film versions of Dante’s Inferno and set them running on the screens across the top. The 1912 silent movie with its first-ever cinematic full-frontal male nudity was a yawner. The 1967 version had nothing to do with Dante other than the title and that the lead character was a poet and a fool. The 1935 version had possibilities, just having Spencer Tracy on the screen as the carnival barker was worth the time of day.

His next search was for all historic references concerning Cassandra, though she’d told him they were even less accurate than if he’d made it up himself. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Kassandra was a pretty cool woman and Cassandra said that she didn’t mind that characterization a bit, though it was only a little more accurate than Homer.

One arm of his search engine had scrounged up a QuickTime bootleg of his mother’s first lesbian Canadian porn film, where her character name had been Cassandra. He set her film with the pair of silicone-based, voluptuous redheads, actually brunettes with wigs that slipped and paint-on freckles that smeared, on the upper left screen. It was kind of an homage, he figured, the sanest picture in the whole mess.

And on the three central screens the collection, processing, and codifying of his massive indexing system, Betsy. The name was growing on him, even more than just its utility in making Virgil twitch every time he said it.

The first screen of his processing engine was running through the raw data of the Internet. Site by site, line by line, ignoring all blocks, firewalls and security settings as if they weren’t there at all. That was the cool bit about programming down at the layers he did.

Most programmers were up at seventh-generations stuff like Dreamweaver, Bryce, and all that noise. Few of those wastoids could program in XML, never mind a decent fourth-gen language like C. Now the guys who actually wrote things like C and PERL, they needed respect, building a path for grumpy hardware to talk to lame-ass programmers was a cool task.

But if you really wanted to get into it, you had to get down to the architecture. And the best of it, most people didn’t even know this layer existed. The very bottom of the heap. Architecture was his favorite bit. How the hell a poor, beat up electron, wandering along a silicon maze three atoms thick and twelve wide, could be counted as a “1” instead of a “0” was so close to magic that it was worth respect. That’s where he’d written his index and why it could do the things it did. Chraze was a layer or two up, but Betsy, she had serious guts.

At that level, there were no firewalls. There were no redirections. There was simply the electron layer of the Internet. The bottom layer of the entire data world. He’d found a path to Mecca, and sent his robot spiders out along it to seek knowledge. And boy did they thirst for knowledge.

The middle screen was what they brought home. Endless strings of information that perhaps no one cared about, or knew about. It even unearthed that early website that had been so famous among pioneer Internet users, a hundred-and-fifty dollar a year URL which showed a picture of an old toilet. No one on it. Nothing in it. No Flash animation. No shits and giggles.

URL.

Toilet.

Very primal.

Very pure.

He flipped over to it just to relish the essential cleanness of the concept, if not the commode. If they’d had hit counters back then, it would have made sss’s percentages look low by comparison. Of course there were a few million less URLs in those days. And a billion less pages.

But that toilet was still one of them. An icon to its prestige of place in history.

Here, on his middle screen, unsorted, as yet uncataloged, passed the electronic knowledge of humankind. A naked babe, probably named Bambi or something else original, touted Hustler’s $10 million offer for one of the Presidents Bush’s daughters to pose nude, now organized right next to a fine photo of Dubya and his girls at www.whitehouse.gov.

Articles describing Barbara Streisand’s stage fright were right next to her latest stock trades which were now big enough to measurably impact the DOW Industrial average. And Barbara Walters danced nearby with anyone who would sign her dance card.

The third screen, Betsy’s data matrix screen, was the one that Cassandra had admired. That was the moment when he’d decided that he was in love with Cassandra, now that he looked back on it. Not that he wanted to ever, you know, do the dirty with a woman that old, though her body still looked buff through the flowing blue cotton robe she wore. She was more the woman you hoped to wake up next to when you had a few thousand years under your belt.

He loved that Cassandra had noticed not just what he’d done programmatically. No, it was the moment Cassandra had turned to him and patted his arm. The moment when she understood what the purpose of his catalog was.

He flipped through screen after screen at a rate that would have given the poet a migraine.

He rotated the infinite dimensions of the data matrix and could see the patterns beginning to glow. There was shape, form, function to the data stored on the Internet. A deep secret lay in that forming shape at the heart of the world’s accumulated information.

Now if only he knew what it all meant.