The Egg Code

Book by Heppner Mike

I. Back in the Day

The Nature of Systems 1989

It had been years since a man had touched her like that. Strong hands molded her body, her hips and soft shoulders, reminding Kay of dear Macheath Tree, dead these twenty-one years. The past two decades had been hard on the woman. All she wanted now was a respectable end, maybe a nice luncheon, a kind word from the vice president. The folks from Georgetown could even send down an assistant chair to deliver a few unfelt sentiments. Today we honor . . . the usual bullshit. She'd heard it all before, starting at Harvard, where the youngsters from Biological Sciences had worked hard to destroy her husband's program (and what an entire department couldn't accomplish with all its collective ill will, a shattered glass stamen managed quite nicely in the spring of '68).

Yes, a kind word from the veep. Not this new guy, though. It wasn't that the poor fellow was such a simp, or that he'd fudged on his military background. But they should've known not to pick an extremist. The right-wingers belonged here, in this building. Let's keep the centrists in the White House, where they can't do any harm.

From where she now stood–head down, watching her reflection in the bright marble floor–Kay could see all the way up her dress, the pleated fringe spreading wide around her sneakers. The floors in these federal buildings were too damn shiny. Still, it excited her to watch the dress sway every time those hands pressed into her sides, fingers hot and firm against her thick cotton underwear, his knees touching hers, forcing her legs apart, so controlled, yes, we will not miss a single step, Mrs. Tree, we will execute the steps in the proper order.

"Sorry about the added security, ma'am." The young man at the northeast entrance passed her wristwatch through the metal detector one last time and gave it back to her. "Inauguration," he explained.

"That's all right." She smiled, feeling sexy as she put her watch back on in front of the guard. "I love getting frisked," she said. "It's better than having a husband."

Past security, she continued down a hallway and into an empty reception area. With the swearing-in taking place across the river, most of the Pentagon was closed down for the afternoon. Kay had known George Bush for years, and had high hopes for his presidency. The media take on the new president as some sort of bumbling idiot was a joke. As anyone who knew the real story would tell you, Bush was the balls. Even back in '73, it was Bush who'd urged President Nixon to ignore the Democrats, to insist upon his beloved rationale, national security, even if it meant endorsing a few indiscretions. This might not have been very good advice, but it certainly wasn't cowardly. It always made Kay smile, the American public's willingness to manufacture its own misinformation.

On the third floor, she caught up to Mitchell Frenkle, deputy director of the DCA. He walked carefully, trying not to spill his coffee on his way past the elevators. "Hi, Kay. Recognize the joint?"

"Sure, it never changes."

The man groaned. "Well, we like to play around with our acronyms every now and again, but what the hell."

The door to Frenkle's office opened automatically as they reached the end of the corridor. Swissshhh . . . space age! Kay looked over her shoulder, nervous around these hi-tech contraptions. The door closed behind them.

"Look who's here," Frenkle said. His outer office was spacious, with three secretaries' desks and a leather sofa, some magazines on the coffee table. A middle-aged man in a light suit half-rose from the sofa and shook Kay's hand.

"NSF, I'm Barney Crain," he said. "It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Tree." Christ, she thought. First the branch, then the name–these people in Washington sure have some weird priorities.

Still holding Kay's hand, Crain asked, "When are you folks over at Georgetown going to send us some decent interns?"

Kay took her hand back. "When we have some decent students, Mr. Crain." It was returning to her now, the Washington josh. Almost a form of social currency in these parts.

Frenkle broke in: "Crain is head statistician for the National Science Foundation. He'll be working with us today." He led the way into the next room and closed the door. On his desk, an answering machine fluttered its red eye–six quick flashes and then a pause. He shook his head. "I tell people to use the e-mail, they don't listen."

"Give it time." Crain tossed a pair of high-density floppies onto a round conference table and settled into his chair. Hitting Play on the answering machine, Frenkle listened to his messages, the usual Inauguration Day blather.

"Hi, Muh-Mitch? Thuh-this is Dan here." Coughing, the voice deepened. "That's Mister VeePee to you, pal, heh-heh. Just kiddin' there. Luh- listen–"

"Shut the fuck up." Frenkle deleted the message, then joined the others at the table. Crouching down, he inserted both disks into a hard drive and hit the power button. The lights dimmed theatrically as a sixty-inch monitor came down from the ceiling. On the screen, a blue image showed an outline of the forty-eight contiguous states. White lines curved from one point to another, like missiles launched and exploded halfway across the country.

Blinking at the bright screen, Crain resumed his original thought. "Telephones are so bloody old-fashioned, it's pathetic. Even the utility companies have wised up. I still remember AT&T, back in '64, '65, AT&T telling Paul Baran that packet switching was a doomed concept. Now they're all lining up. You'd think this was the only thing we do."

Kay tried not to listen as the two men traded inside jokes about the eggheads at AT&T. She hated computer talk. She'd been around it ever since coming to Washington in 1969, and to this day she still favored the lunchtime solitude of her office to the chatter of these swashbuckling men with their hi-tech delusions. Who among them could muster up the same passion for a Strauss opera, those last liquid moments of Der Rosenkavalier, say, with the voices seeking chromaticism and yet still reaching with a backwards longing for the court and parlor? Macheath always preferred Verdi to Strauss, but he and Kay never argued about such trifles. So the man had a thing for "La donna è mobile," so what? At least he had a wide range of interests. Botany, yes, of course, and glassmaking, but also Scottish literature, typography, Bauhaus art and architecture, combat theory, semantics, even cross-country skiing. He cared about things, you see. For all their talk of the coming information revolution, men like Frenkle and Crain were ignorant of the world beyond the network. These men craved information, but only for its statistical value. Information was something to be channeled, transmitted, systematically converted, broken down into packets and later reassembled as text and color. The last thing anyone wanted to do was read it.

"Kay, we're looking at an overview of the system as it stands today. I'm sure you've seen something like it before."

She pulled her glasses out of her purse, then peered up at the screen. "I don't know," she said. "I haven't been paying much attention lately."

"Kay's been too busy teaching cryptology to graduate students," Frenkle said, making it sound like an indulgence, a housewife's distraction. Kay's been taking a pottery class on Wednesdays.

"God, how dull," Crain muttered. "What's to teach?"

"Not much, I guess," Kay said. This was something her youngest daughter, Lydia, had never learned. Around men, sometimes it's best just to let things go. Leaning back in her seat, she added, "The most promising students, I pass on. I send them across the river to Frenkle."

"Where they are never heard from again,' he laughed with insane abandon." Pleased with his joke, Frenkle cut the banter short. "Anyway. Here nor there."

"Agreed. So, Kay, to bring you up to date . . ." Crain tapped the mouse button, causing the image on the screen to fade behind a grid. "Ignore all that. I'm sure you're familiar with the old ARPANET."

Frenkle glared across the table. "Jumping the gun a bit, aren't you Crain?"

"Old, new, whatever, we need to start somewhere." A new picture hovered across the screen, depicting the original four IMPs set up by Bolt Beranek and Newman in the late sixties. Seeing this again, Kay remembered the time, her own life back then. Things were different when her husband was still alive. Macheath's world was a world of slow communications, where one had to choose each word carefully, for every mistake meant endless backtracks, cross-outs, crumpled pages in the trash can. Had he not died in 1968, would he too have shelved such habits in favor of newer, speedier modes of communication? Had technology itself brought about this blanding of shared thought?

"As you can see," continued Crain, dragging his mouse to erase the map. "That system has since been replaced by a larger, more complicated array of nodes."

Annoyed, Frenkle set down his coffee. "You write it off so easily," he said. "Those IMPs supported our activities for nearly two decades."

"Relax, Mitch. Credit due. But we all knew years ago that the network eventually would grow beyond the capacities of any single agency. If it didn't, we would've failed."

Frenkle folded his arms. "I just want Kay to understand the topography as it stands."

The two men stared at each other, then smiled. It really was silly, in a way. This whole thing.<...