Carrying my second suitcase, a carryon bag, I got a room in a hotel a few blocks away. There I unpacked the other computer and the last modem. When I’d connected them to the phone I was finally ready to start. I called the first hotel room, the one with the computer, and used that phone to call room 2. With room 2 as the number of record I called a value-added network, one of those companies which channels your local call into long-distance modem connections. And through that, I made my first real call to the offices of Consumer Liberation.
Back when I was getting past the lower levels of hacking I had the great fortune to pick up a woman one night who knew one of the masters, Annie-O, a genuine cross-gendered computer outlaw. I’m not sure what it is about computers and gender people, maybe something to do with changing realities. But it’s certainly true that people like Annie can slide into locked programs the same way they slide from one gender to another. There was something else about Annie-O that made it unforgettable to meet her. She was an enactment master, a woman of power, having led her sisters across gender and spirit barriers over many years. Annie let me apprentice myself to her, and though we both knew I would never really find my way in the virtual worlds (“It’s your clinging to a fixed gender,” Annie would tell me), I did learn enough for operations like breaking into Consumer Liberation.
Basically, I set up a dummy program which imitated their own, so that someone who tried to hook into them would get me asking “Password, please?” and think it was them. Mr Legitimate Caller dutifully typed in the password, at which point I hung up. This brought him back to the real program, asking “Password, please?” He no doubt assumed he’d typed wrong the first time, entered the password and thought no more of it. Only now, I knew the magic words as well. Thanks, Annie.
Only—there wasn’t all that much to learn breaking into CL. Oh, if I’d been some insurance flunky I might have checked out their secret plans for enactments against malpractice fraud. Or I might have run up lists of planned rallies and other trivia. But as for secret goals and agendas, there just didn’t seem to be any. Consumer Liberation in private wasn’t all that different than their public image.
The Devoted Ones did not seem to figure much in the daily running of the organization. Everyone appeared grateful for the recognition bestowed on them by the Living World, not least because it impressed the public and drew people to their rallies. But the people who ran the organization, “Timmerman’s Tigers”, as Spiritweek called them, were all lawyers and cared more about investigations and legal actions than mass blessings.
Maggie Tunnel Light hardly existed in CL’s files. In my quick search I found only seven references to her, none of them of any significance. What was she doing there? She didn’t work with the Tigers. She appeared to work directly with Timmerman. But how? Why was she there?
I did confirm one of my intuitions. I ran a check on the number of files for particular issues. In the past year, more and more resources had gone into one subject—banking. One of Timmerman’s chief lawyer hot shots, Samuel Jervis, appeared almost obsessed by what he called in a memo “the deep structural rot in the edifice of American banking”. While the subject had only crept into Timmerman’s speeches, the Tigers were pursuing it ferociously, gathering and analyzing masses of information, setting up task forces—bank failures, massive loan defaults, overnight millionaires, government coziness with bank directors and corporate raiders. It wasn’t possible even to begin following it all, other than to get a sense of how maddening it was for the Tigers. Jervis’s most recent memos talked of needing a “focus”, some particular revelation that could get people’s attention long enough to make them see what was happening.
Feeling dissatisfied, I backed out of Consumer Liberation’s database. Now for the big guys, I thought. Time to break into the SDA.
The Spiritual Development Agency was of a totally different order than Consumer Liberation. No cute dummy program was going to get me SDA passwords. However, I had something better. A phone number. Annie-O and her people considered what they did to be a sacred obligation, opening tunnels between the virtual world and the physical. For Annie, secrets threatened the flow of spirit energy between the worlds, and so they dedicated themselves to cracking open the walls as soon as the government tried to seal them up again. It wasn’t enough just to break the secrets, they had to share them. They couldn’t publish them, but they could make them available to anyone whom they’d invited into their network. I’m not sure what it was that Annie saw in me, a fixed gender person after all, but when she gave me the phone number for “the list” it was all I could do to keep from crying. I knew the kind of trust it meant.
I left the hotel and went to a diner with a pay phone in the back by the toilets. It had been two years since I’d tried the number. Now, holding the horn in one hand and a quarter in the other, I found myself scared that the number I had was no longer any good, that I’d come to a dead end, and scared most of all that it meant so much to me. I wasn’t just doing it for myself, I knew. I wanted to impress Alison. I wanted to march into her office with some answers, tell her to go to hell, and then march out again. And something else. The more I looked at this Timmerman thing, at what was happening at his rallies, at this Margaret 23 who didn’t seem to be doing anything, the more I just knew that there was something wrong here. Something that needed to reach the light. I jammed the quarter in and punched the number.
A computer voice told me, “Please state the name of the organization and sub-branch, if applicable. You have seven seconds.”
“Spiritual Development Agency”, I said. “Registration and function of Benign Ones to specific parties.”
There was a pause and then the voice came back with a five-word phrase. A moment later, the line went dead. A small smile grew to half my face as I put the phone back on the hook. “All right, you bastards,” I whispered. “I’m going to get inside you.”
Back to the hotel room. More nerves as I got my lines running again and moved my way into the SDA. As I took a breath before using the pass phrase, I sprinkled the keyboard and monitor with a few extra grains of my personal mix of spirit powder, given to me by my parents’ Teller on my inner ecology name day after my first period. I typed in the phrase and a moment later the screen came alive with instructions, and I knew the files lay open for me.
I started with the Happy Twins, Albert and Jeannette, just as a check. I didn’t learn anything new, though I have to say I wasn’t expecting to. It was Maggie Tunnel Light I was really after. First I verified the few facts I knew, her appearance last year, her immediate registration as a Benign Agent for—and this surprised me slightly—not Consumer Liberation, as the Twins had done, but Alexander Timmerman. Timmerman, I thought. Why Timmerman personally?
I went on to explore just what it was Margaret 23 did for Timmerman. And here the SDA files didn’t seem to help any more than the newspapers. “Advice.” “Support.” “Encouragement.” What did that mean? What did she do? And why didn’t her file say what she did?
Okay, I thought. She’s Timmerman’s personal agent. Let’s go back to the beginning of his connection. I asked the SDA computer to give me an account of the Summoning, when Timmerman drew her out of the Living World to do whatever it was she did for him.
I stared at the screen. “No reference.” In some way, I was phrasing the question wrong. But why? It seemed straightforward enough. I decided to backtrack, start with the basics again. I asked it when Timmerman summoned her. “No reference.” I shook my head. The damn machine just gave me the date, only a few minutes before. I began to wonder if some Malignant virus had invaded the SDA systems. A nice idea, I decided, but couldn’t it have waited until after I got what I needed? But no, Malignant Ones in a system usually filled the screen with gibberish. I was just asking the wrong questions.