Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [78]
Moh joined in, continuing: ‘Three, three the Rights of Ma-an, two for the worker’s hands working for their living-oh, and one is workers’ unity which ever more shall be so!’
Josh drew a blue line of smoke under the question of the project. ‘Well…how’s workers’ unity coming along in the Young Rebels?’ he said.
‘We’re always arguing,’ Moh confided. ‘Some of the comrades think we should be more against the government and some of us say we should be more for it because the right are against it.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Uh, well, I was thinking – is the Republic a workers’ and peasants’ government?’
Josh coughed in a suspicously vocal way and said, ‘Hih-hihh-hmm, ah, even allowing for peasants being a bit thin on the ground in these parts, I think we’d have to say: “No”. But these categories (you know what that means? good) aren’t really useful here. We’re in a new situation. It’s a radical democratic government. It isn’t socialist but the capitalists don’t trust it. So things are a bit unstable.’
They talked about politics for a while. Eleven years old and having just joined the party’s youth group, Moh understood the politics he’d learned from his parents as an adventure that spanned generations like a space programme: behind them the pioneers who’d risen in Petrograd, fallen in Vorkuta; ahead the Alpha Centauri of workers’ power and human solidarity; beyond that the infinite universe of socialism – the bright world, a world without borders, without bosses and cops. He felt proud to be part of it, arguing at school with right-wing teachers, marching on demonstrations, reading up.
‘Well, Moh, these hands have gotta work for their living-oh, so you better—’
‘Split!’
Josh gave him five, gave him ten, laughing, and Moh left.
But later that day he came back, and over the next weeks he and his father, almost without noticing it, fell into a way of working together: Moh fetching manuals and looking things up, helping with testing and debugging, watching the system grow. Josh talked and thought he was talking to himself, or over Moh’s head, and all the time the logic, but not the function, of the programs was becoming something that Moh grasped without knowing that he knew.
‘You OK, Moh?’
He blinked and shook his head. ‘Yeah, I’ll be…’
‘You using or what?’
‘No more than usual,’ Moh said. He forced a smile. ‘What did you say?’
‘Josh wrote it. The CAL system, remember?’
‘“CAL”?’ Janis frowned at them both. Jordan’s eyes widened.
‘Computer-aided logistics,’ Kohn said. ‘I remember.’
‘Never seen it documented,’ Bernstein said, ‘but it couldn’t have come from anywhere else. I’m not saying he did it all, but that was the core. Nobody else could’ve done it.’
‘Why not?’
‘’Cause nobody else wrote Dissembler.’
This time the shock was different. No memories, no flashbacks. Just a falling feeling.
‘You’re telling me,’ he said to Bernstein, ‘that my father wrote Dissembler?’ His voice creaked with disbelief. ‘How do you know?’
The lines on Bernstein’s face deepened, momentarily showing his true age. ‘It wasn’t talked about, back when you were a nipper. But –’ He gestured at his stock and smiled sourly. ‘I’ve met a lot of ex-members since. Some of ’em in the bottom of a bottle, if you catch my drift.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before? About that and the Black Plan?’
‘Like I said. Thought you knew. Anyway, the Black Plan was a bit of a dodgy question, even in the Party. Not many people knew about it, I can tell you. Only the Central Committee and the fraction that was in the Labour Party and beavering away in the Republic’s Economic Commission. Your old man was the best software engineer they had. Course they used him. The man who wrote Dissembler!’ Bernstein laughed. ‘You know he released it as freeware? Could have been a millionaire, at least, but he didn’t hold with patents and intellectual property and all that. Talk about