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Rational Conduct

By Kevin Tatro (US)

Chapter Twelve

Natural Selection

Chapter 12 - Natural Selection

It was almost high noon on Sunday when David rang the doorbell at the small home on the corner lot.  The wind was blowing slightly, and the tired, unshaven, sloppily dressed middle age white guy, was sure he heard the whistling of a tune from a Clint Eastwood flick.  Sounded like High Plains drifter. 

The home was average.  Small like the rest of the middle class neighborhood.  David could hear the TV reports now. “He seemed like a nice man.  Quiet.  Sort of kept to himself.”

“Sandy.  …  You and I need to talk.”

Sandy seemed a bit surprised to see David.  He actually asked him in and David helped himself to deeply padded green armchair in the living room.

After a long silence Sandy asked.  “Who are you?” 

No answer.

 “Do I know you?” 

No answer. 

“What do you want?”
David only heard the Clint Eastwood movie, They say you’re the fastest gun in the west.  It was quiet in that little room, and David’s voice changed a bit in his own head and he hear the tall, tough Eastwood reply,  ‘Is that what they say.’

He was totally calm.  He had nothing to loose.  And he was deadly.

The long silence was killing Sandy.  He looked uncomfortable to start with, but this was making him mad.  Crazy mad, like insane mad, not angry mad, but scared mad. 

David looked him straight in the eyes.  Not speaking.  In his mind, he had a little brown cigar clenched in his teeth.  He stared at his enemy almost willing him to die.  But he wasn’t going to shoot anyone.  He was much scarier than that.  He was the grim reaper.  He had God on his side and he was going to start cleaning house.  He was staring at a dead man, and the victim knew it.  The victim had already conceded defeat and he somehow knew what was coming.  David was sucking in the atmosphere.  He was sucking the life from this dude.  Smelling it with no need to say a word.  He needed nothing from this man, but somehow felt a bit sorry for him, and thought he might give him a clue before sending him to meet his maker.

“Sandy, a little girl has been kidnapped, and I think you may know who did it and where she is.”   He stood up and walked over to the window and looked out while Sandy continued to stand near the front door a bit surprised. “I know you’ve got a computer in the back room.  I know you get paid for using it, and I know that Sandy Adwert died three years ago.  What I don’t know is just how smart you are.”

Sandy looked nervous.  He was no Brian Tiernan.  He was taller than David but was a slight man of about fifty, with pasty white skin, a mop of thinning brown hair, and a hunched stance.  He was wiry and weak looking, and it was obvious he had smoked so many cigarettes his lungs weren’t going to let him live much longer anyway.  The home stunk like a giant ashtray.  The walls even looked tinted like the layers of nicotine that covered them.

“Sandy, you are a bad person.  Really screwed up your life.  I’m going to give you a chance to change all that.  I want that kid back, and to do that I’m willing to do just about anything, including killing you”

Sandy didn’t flinch.  The nervous look had passed.  It was as if the initial introduction had already killed him.  Like he knew he was already dead.

“Your life is over.  Help me get the kid back and you’ll die a happier man.”

Not a word was spoken as David followed Sandy into the first floor bedroom where a computer laptop sat on cheap metal desk.  Sandy bypassed the computer and sat at the desk and began writing on a yellow legal pad.  Twenty minutes the two stayed there not saying a word.  Sandy sitting, writing and  David standing, watching.

When Sandy was done he looked up at the corner of the desk where there were a dozen small bottles that looked like aspirin containers.  There had been labels on them, but they were peeled off leaving only the remains of the sticky labels blocking the view of the light pink liquid inside.  Without a word, Sandy opened and swallowed four of the bottles, gave a slight smile at David and walked into the living room.  He sat in the green cushioned smoking chair, but didn’t pick up the cigarettes next to him.  He lifted the remote and turned on an old black and white western staring Ronald Reagan.  Neither criminal said a word as Sandy’s eyes drifted shut, and he fell asleep forever.

Methadone was a wonderful drug.  Clear and tasteless.  A cheap super powerful replacement for heroin.  Hitler’s mad scientists had actually invented the stuff.  Junkies craved the stuff, but anybody with a few bucks could stand outside a treatment clinic and buy as much as they wanted.  The clinics colored it so it didn’t look like water.  An experienced doper would much rather have the real stuff along with a bit of cocaine.  At $100 a bottle Sandy had no trouble buying all he needed.  One bottle would have given the average junkie and incredible high.  Two bottles of that high a dosage may have killed even a veteran heroin addict, but four bottles that had been made from six…Sandy had said good night for good.  He had been waiting for this day.  Had planed for it, and accepted his fate.

David felt a little remorse, but he was already going to hell.  Maybe he would meet Sandy there.  As he got into the Audi, he removed the latex gloves, started the car and headed for a diner he had seen on the way in.  At a booth in the corner with the standard red plastic seat, David sipped hot chocolate as he read over Sandy’s notes.  None of the names or addresses matched the list Artie gave him.  The rest of the writing made no sense at all.  He didn’t even know what he had been given, and wished he had kept Sandy alive long enough to ask.

David had planned to hit New Jersey next.  Though there were plenty of New York names on the list, he thought a little geographic variance might be useful.  He didn’t know what Sandy’s list meant yet, but he knew every name on Arties’ list was a bad guy.  He was heading for Jersey with a cold calculation.  He felt as though he still had his humanity, but somehow had a job to do, and that entailed killing people.  Like work, he didn’t feel as though he really enjoyed this, but it was just something that needed to be done, and he had to do it.  It kept him occupied and free from delusions.

The laptop became the connection for Artie and David.  Artie’s generals continued to download stuff from remote sites.  Artie had worked this crew for nearly two days straight, directing his own little army of computer geeks through the world of child pornographers, sadistic crazies, human merchants, money crazed sickos, and whoever else was involved.  They had come across the FBI, CIA, State Police, Secret Service, Russians, Israelis, Germans, and a variety of other cyber police and worldwide government agencies. 

Moving through the world’s network of computers was easy for Artie and his crew.  They had been everywhere a million times before, and had no rules.  They didn’t need to follow the law or worry about being fired if they infringed on somebody else’s turf.  Artie had the best systems in the world, the best people on the planet, and more money than anybody but the largest players.  He had enough lawyers to keep his identity and whereabouts from anybody, and a security team that made Iraqi President Saddam Hussein look easy to get at.  He was basically invincible, yet what he was finding scared him.  It scared him big time.

Artie knew the web was bigger than any government agency.  It was an easy place to hide and get lost.  Bigger than the multinational corporations and their prying eyes.  Bigger than all the governments in the world.  Too much for all of them combined.  Artie had been approached numerous times to help the CIA, the Secret Service, or any number of people who thought they were more important than the next.  He had turned them all down because the machines that gained him access to the web were his alone.  These machines and his knowledge made him king.  Only as king, he had no desire to rule. That made him even scarier.  It made him God.

 All Artie wanted was knowledge for knowledge’s sake.  He sucked information in and processed and analyzed it faster than anyone.  He was way beyond all of them put together, because he followed no rules, and obeyed no laws.  He operated from above.  Out of sight and out of reach, but now everyone was watching his machines work.  He had made a mistake, let them in, and now they knew he existed, and were looking for him.

They were miles away from him and yet could be on him in an instant.  Until today, they had no idea how to chase his technology.  He didn’t know who they were, but he knew they were there.  He saw them and sometimes even allowed them in a bit to see how good they were.  They provided him with little pleasure with their antiquated machines and dedicated but far from spectacular talents.  They lacked funding and freedom, and Artie could offer both to the brightest in the world.  His guys were the best and could betray him, but Artie was way beyond most mortals, and he held all the keys.  The randomness of his system was his safety as no one could follow him in his general pursuit of knowledge.  Randomness kept him safe until now when he had a purpose and that purpose could be followed, tracked and maybe even exposed.  Artie was vulnerable right now.  He knew it, the feds knew it, and anybody else who may have been watching from the shadows knew it.  This was dangerous work.  Artie now had a purpose, and this purpose could kill him and his game.

David knew none of this.  He felt a strain in Artie, but had no concept of why.  David interpreted the strain as a lack of sleep and fatigue from all his incredible work.  He had no idea of how simple it was for Artie to do what David had seen.  Even if Artie tried to explain it to him, David would have only grasped a small portion of what Artie was involved in every day.  Artie had the capability of rendering every government useless.  He could move money anywhere in the world at will. He could change documents, ownership, everything.  He was like the god of digital information.  All-powerful and scary as hell to all the powerful people who knew he existed.  The only thing that kept the world from total information collapse was Artie.  If he felt like it, he could destroy the world as we know it.

On the simplest level, Artie could wipe out David’s $50,000 college savings account, or see to it that the local bank teller didn’t get paid, and had all of her employment records purged.  He could make life worse for that bank teller by having her social security number disappear or have the number acquired by two thousand people at once.  He could give her a criminal record, or even have her fingerprints show up at a local crime scene.  These were the simple things he could do.  He could also make satellites believe there were missiles incoming.  He could make governments believe they were at war.  He could make a submarine turn upside down on a commander’s order to surface.  He could launch missiles, destroy satellites, and make Wall Street look like someone put it in a blender.  He was the only one in the world that had connections to it all.  He could do all this, but he didn’t.  He just watched from above like Gods do.

Artie had seen hackers get into nearly every system in the world.  He watched how they were followed.  He saw them arrested, and he often saw how they ran away.  Few ever got caught as the good ones were there to watch, and the amateurs were stopped before they ever got very far.  The creeps and criminals had a purpose, and that made them traceable and easy to capture.  Capturing criminals and bad guys is what the governments of the world were good at.  Wall Street and Hong Kong and London all had teams of experts just looking for someone trying to steal their money.  They watched out for terrorists, and were good at protecting their money.  The ability to search for a motive made their job infinitely easier.  Crooks and terrorists all want to steal money.  The world’s money police had to look at only one small percentage of all possible events, because that is all that was rational.  In their own little petty ways, the crooks kept the systems clean.

Artie wanted something different.  He wanted to know everything. He rarely slept. He was brilliant.  And he had discovered the keys that unlocked everything digital. He had the keys to the world and nobody knew who he was.  He watched from above where he couldn’t be seen.  The world’s police wondered who he was.  They felt he existed, but could not see him.  They had information to make them believe he existed, but they had no proof and relied on belief only.  They were scared of him, respected him, and revered him.  He was like a legend, with nobody ever actually having met him, and no proof he even existed.

Artie, through a front, had sold some of his technology to government and big business types.  Super computing artificial intelligence processing ability.  Hardware and software that was interactive and let them do great things they were previously incapable of.  The government could take trillions of bits of data on anybody whose name ever entered a computer system.  They could take this information and sort it.  They could look for patterns and motives and catch who they were looking for.  The feds could catch the bad guys and the conglomerates could search for new sources of income.  They all got what they need from Artie.

David only knew the quiet Artie.  He thought Artie was tired.  Artie didn’t get tired.  He rarely slept. And when he did sleep, others were working for him, and made the simple people on earth believe he never slept.  Gods don’t sleep.  God’s know everything, see everything, but never take an active role in anything.  That’s what makes them Gods.  Without proof that they exist, they are a mystery.  Never sure that they play a part or even notice they exist, makes them the unknown mystery.  Billions pray to God every day.  Some believe in fate, as if God has a special purpose for them alone, and that he has time to play with their lives.  Some think God is all caring and all-powerful, awaiting the arrival of the small people in heaven.  While nobody really knows who or what God is, they all try to make sense of the existence of something they cannot see or explain but somehow feel is there. But they all fear him, and want him to be on their side.

David didn’t believe in fate and he was sure he wasn’t bright enough to find a version of God he could believe in.  He also was no computer geek who thought of the net as a separate universe capable of hiding a God.  The world was a strange place that just was.  It simply existed.  Things happened, some of which he enjoyed, and some which posed a challenge.  Right now the world kind of sucked.

 If there were Gods, they might know what he was going through and be having a bit of a laugh.  But more likely to  David, there were no Gods looking down from above.  There was just his world, with events labeled good and bad.  Worlds within worlds where he tried to make sense of things.  Where his imagination was just as important as reality and the two often converged in an explosion of ideas that were impossible for his comprehension/ of the world to embrace.  Some of his world came from the hard objects in front of him, some from ideas, and a few from somewhere else.  It was this last class of ideas that scared him most.  These ideas didn’t seem to be his own.  These came from teachers, TV, newspapers, friends, and families.  These ideas scared him.  This is where he could be manipulated into believing the ideas were his own.  This is where he was right now.  He was Clint Eastwood whistling the tune from high plains drifter, going out to kill people.  What if he were the bad guy?