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Six Kinds of
Darkness In Eclipse,
the start of the trilogy, Europe has been devastated by a NATO-Soviet
war triggered by the KGB hardliners after a Central Committee coup
ends the Glasnost era. To maintain security NATO has brought in a
private security firm, The Second Alliance, to police its turf. The
SA is in fact part of an extreme right-wing plot led by a charismatic
preacher, Smiling Rick Crandall. The cabal believes that Hitler lacked
efficiency and stability: their plans are at least as cruel. In a raid on
one of the concentration camps--designated Processing Centers--the
New Resistance, a loose alliance of many disparate groups, finds prisoners:
Every one of them had been bound in the stuff, tied together, squeezed
in so tightly there was barely room to move or breathe. Torrence recognized
the hard but prehensile gray plastic as sparks shot from the clippers,
severing it. Restrain-O-Lite, it was called. Used by British cops
to hold large numbers of prisoners after a riot; the stuff absorbed
static electricity and gave it off when you moved—about a fourth
of them had died in the restraints; were hanging there, rotting. Some
had rotted free, slipped to the floor. The others were starved, bruised,
cold, bleeding from the shackle cuts, drained of dignity. At the end
of the first book a rocker, Rickenharp, has taken the top of the Arc
de Triomphe. Playing a wildly amplified guitar and singing rebellion,
accompanied by the staccato of assault rifles and the basso percussion
of mortar, he taunts the SA. They destroy the Arc, its environs, and
its occupants, with a Jaegernaut--an enormous swastika-like
metal wheel. By the end
of Eclipse Penumbra the score has been evened somewhat; the
space colony at L5 has been taken by the technicki--the workers, and
the SA has suffered losses, especially in North America, but it still
has the upper hand in Europe. In the third act (Eclipse Penumbra),
we meet Jerome-X, musician and video-hacker (a la Captain Midnight)
as he prepares for a show in London.
"We backstage,
now. Gimme a kiss." She crushed him to her, and he gave in. She
broke it off herself, looking him in the eye, almost nose to nose.
"You know de protocols?" "I know
the UNIX protocols. I know the systems call code to log on as a superuser.
I know how to evoke the debug function. If they haven't changed the
debug function." "Dey probable
haven't, 'cause dey use a rented system. High security, but rented.
If dhey have changed it, fuck 'em, we'll log off and dey won't be
able to trace it to an aug chip. I think de back door is still open
on dis system--" "Where'd
you get it from?' "De anarchist
underground. Plateau subsystem bulletin board." "Some
of those Wolves'll give you fake codes just to get their rivals in
trouble." "Dese
ain't Plateau Wolves, these are Plateau Rads. About de only people
I met on the Plateau I trust. Dey got a guy used to be a hacker for
SAISC till he found out what dey were into. He knows de system's back
gates." "The anarchist
underground cooperates with the NR? You'd think they'd say fuck off.
The NR wants to establish the old European republics. That's not very
anarchist." "Anarchists
hate de Fascists worse den de Social Democrats, worse eben den de
Republicists. Dey scared, like ever'body else out in de cold, boy.
..." [later, out
in the crowd ...] They ordered
vodka martinis and sat hunched together between two groups of sweating,
almost-naked men giggling over cocaine fizzes. Advertisements blinked
up the cocktail straws; taped music groaned like a machine about to
break down. On the walls, videopaintings recreating scenes from medieval
paintings of the Crucifixion and Resurrection flickered through sequence
in doleful chiaroscuro; occasionally the images of Christ alternated
with other figures, paintings by Paul Mavrides and other icons from
the erstwhile post-acid House era; Timothy Leary ascending into heaven,
riding a floppy disk like a flying saucer; William Burroughs and Laurie
Anderson waltzing through a concentration camp while starveling camp
victims played Strauss on orchestral instruments; Kotzwinkle shooting
skull-shaped dice with William Gibson; Bob Black and the minimono
star Calais chained to Stephen Hawking's wheelchair; the American
guru Da Free John with an arm growing from his forehead, arm wrestling
with an arm growing from the forehead of Rick Crandall; Robert Heinlein
goose-stepping with Adolf Hitler and Le Pen; Rickenharp falling into
the rubble of the collapsing Arc de Triomphe; Ivan Stang adding twentieth-
century paper money to the flames under the stake on which a grinning
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs is being burned alive; David Bowie eaten
cannibalistically by a demonic horde of twenty-first century pop stars;
Buddha making love to Mrs. Bester, the President of the United States.
And back to
the dead but numinous body of the scourged Christ, his head in Mary
Magdalene's lap. [and now the
show begins ...] He was into
the system. Jerome felt it before he saw it. He was in. The computing
work was done by the left brain -- and the camouflage by the right
brain. The right brain was singing. Singing the chorus to "Six
Kinds of Darkness," while the other part of his mind worked with
the chip. The right lobe singing .ls1 Six kind of
darkness, spilling down over me Six kinds of
darkness, sticky with energy The left lobe
hacking London UNET:
ID#4547q339. Superuser:
WATSON. The left lobe
of his brain working with the chip, which emitted a signal, interfaced
with a powerful microcomputer hidden among the micalike layers of
chips in the midi of Bone's synthesizer; Jerome-X seeing the Herald
on the hallucinatory LCD screen of his mind's eye: London UNET,
ID #, date, assumed "superuser" name. ... Scanning, at
the root, for the branch of the system he needed. Scanning for:
Second Alliance International Security Corporation: Intelligence Security
subdirectory ... Watching from
the audience, Patrick Barrabas remarked (and was unheard in the blare)
that Jerome-X had a funny, contortionistic way of dancing as he sang.
His eyes squeezed shut, his hands waving as if over typewriter keyboards.
... Not playing the "air guitar," but typing on the air
keyboard. ... Jerome was
typing the commands out. Using a technique Bettina had taught him
to implement more complex commands; seeing through his aug chip by
radio trans to a powerful mainframe. Typing physically on a mental
keyboard. The chip fed
him tactile illusions and read out his responses through its contact
with parietal lobe, reading the input from the proprioceptive sensors
-- sensory nerve terminals -- in the muscles, and kinesthetic sensors
-- tactile nerves -- in the fingers: Jerome's movements translated
into cybernetic commands. His rapport with the aug chip essentially
creating a mental data-glove, a data-glove that materialized only
in the "virtual reality" holography of consciousness. As Jerome sang,
Darkness of
the Arctic Six months
into the night Darkness of
the eclipse forgetting
of all light Six kinds of
darkness Six I cannot
tell ... Finding his
way through the darkness in the forest of data. Taking cuttings. Taking
information. Planting something of his own ... --John Shirley |
