The mutations we set into the system began to take effect the next morning. MOL data enterers, sitting down at their terminals, coffee cups in hand, saw on their screens the message: "Would you mind if your major medical coverage were instantly dropped? (Enter Y or N to continue)." An "N" looped them back to the identical question. A "Y" cleared the tube and put up a string of phosphors reading, "Then please make some noise about your colleague James Steadman," before freeing the terminal and dropping the users into their ordinary dialogues.
Midmorning, when the firm's remote clients began requesting digital transmissions, the modems behaved flawlessly, the reports came over the wires, and the remote printers executed the ledgers without hitch, until the bottom line. Just where the balance should have been, the slavish dot-matrix printer pasted a boldface, near-letter-quality Q:
Q: Your company is financially linked to an insurance organization that does not honor the spirit of its contractual commitments. What can you do to keep it honest?
A: Drop a line to the CEO below.
Underneath, the dumb printer knocked out the appropriate address. Two lines beneath, like the denouement sports score doled out only after the public service announcement airs, appeared the accurate but upstaged bottom line.
Surprise blits began to infiltrate banking facilities in distant parts of the city. Tellers presenting transaction receipts to customers found that the innocuous little slips, universally distributed for the express purpose of being instantly thrown away, carried the announcement that today in history a certain stroke patient in a hospital in a neighborhood across town was about to be turned out onto the street. The slips were still thrown away, but not before a few of the bottle-messages reached civilization.
By afternoon back at the MOL offices, the day shift's crisis management, printing out the first batch of the day's mass statements, noticed, after several hundred had been printed, something wrong. Each otherwise faultless statement contained, in the bottom strip of the universal financial form usually reserved for such stuff as "We wish each one of you a warm and personal New Year," the emergency signaclass="underline" "A stroke victim is about to be cut loose." Just below came a random selection from the "Yes" pile Dr. Ressler and I had made from my stack of quotes of the day:
In a few years we have learned virtually to ignore things that would have petrified the world….
Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!
For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being….
I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
Care is heavy, therefore keep you, You are care, and care must keep you.
Le vent qui éteint une lumière allume un brasier. For a rough translation, please call…
Verses-turned-viruses under the pressure of environment. Each message contained a contact where curiosity could be directed. Some quotes were canonical, others more transient. We'd clipped from Bartlett's, the daily newspaper, private stock, selecting on how well they made anonymous tragedy real. Others we picked for the roll of the words. Still others had nothing to do with Jimmy. We just liked them, favorite bits of recognition.
The first, astonished operator to notice this issue of literature all over the credit union forms may have tried to abort and restart the statement run. If so, he got exactly the same result, with whatever parameters he called up the print job. A glance at the tampered file, any attempt to list its logic, showed it scrambled beyond recognition. The daytime operations staff faced a few unacceptable choices. They could go over the thousand statements by hand with a black magic marker. This would take prohibitively long and would raise more curiosity than the snippets themselves; worse, it would not look professional. They could fail to send the batch out at all, which would result in stiff penalties for failing to meet the DP contract. Or they could send the infected financial stubs out as is and hope, as with the personal New Year's greetings, that no one paid any attention.
This they elected to do, notifying the targeted insurance executives whose numbers appeared, assuring them firm to firm that this sabotage was not the work of MOL but of some runaway individual from within. When Dr. Ressler and Todd showed up for work that evening, they were taken into police custody.
I sat home alone that night, expecting the phone to ring. I had no idea what was happening to them, although I suspected they had been rounded up. Every ten minutes I had to check myself from going over to the offices, now doubtless crawling with software experts trying to crack Dr. Ressler's Chinese box. I scoured the city news, waded through the schoolchildren slayings and neo-Nazi resurgences, but there was no mention of anomalous mass-mail hijacking. I could not see the statements going out or eavesdrop over the relay circuits. I had no way of finding out whether we'd succeeded in grazing the banking industry with our tetanus prick.
When my doorbell went off, I almost tore a ligament. I opened without even checking. It was the last visitor I expected: Annie. "You shouldn't be here," I shouted. But I wasn't about to let her leave, now that she was. Annie was pale with excitement. Acting publicly and illegally, taking legitimation from the cause itself, was so new to her that she shook to talk about it. She was discovering the thermodynamics of pressure politics and wanted, that very evening, to expand into it like nature filling its abhorred vacuum.
I gave her the apartment tour. She was as surprised at my assemblage of escapist Victoriana as her lover Todd had once been erotically charged by it. She kept snatching looks between me and all the embroidery, as if I were having her on. We sat in the living room pouring drinks, the radio news on low in the background, polling the air for waves from the pebble we'd chucked into it. Annie was transformed on activism: could we succeed in saving Jimmy? If insurance companies ran at a profit, wasn't that essentially exploitative? Weren't the central money centers the same ones who were fanning the fires in Central America and Africa? I told her I didn't know.
I didn't mind her talking. It filled the space. At one point she stopped and, complete non sequitur, announced, "You know. I've been thinking a lot about all the talks you and I used to have. You might be right about at least one thing. Species don't hold static. They don't keep still." The first awful concession: she wasn't admitting anything else. But she let me know, made me take responsibility for ruining her faith for good.
When she made to leave, I walked her to the door. There— having written down everything else from that year, I can hardly suppress this — we fell into a fumbling, confused moment, and all at once found ourselves kissing. I don't know who I was putting my mouth to. But Annie was definitely kissing me, attaching to me by her hands with the same excitement of discovery she'd had on arriving. We struggled and broke off. She looked at me, imploring, needing, hoping I might now ask her back in. I stood still and let her leave as if nothing had been transacted.
On day two of the information blitz, the mechanical messages were shuffled and sent out again a little differently. Dr. Ressler had inserted a clever routine that made sure, even though the idea-genes were distributed randomly, that no target received the same message twice. The enhanced statements went out to a new batch of recipients. Our doctored programs also began dispatching little-known facts: premium-to-payment ratios for major medical plans in the U.S.; number of days in a hospital bed required to wipe out average life savings.