Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [79]
Moh remembered Bernstein, after the meeting all those years ago, talking about illegal software and what the Yanks did about it. He must have thought Moh would know exactly what he was hinting at.
‘So that was why—?’
‘That, and the Black Plan.’
Bernstein’s eyes held Moh’s gaze, as if his memories were as sharp and inescapable. ‘It means he’s still fighting them, Moh. “Wherever death may surprise us…” – remember?’
Only a sentimental affection restrained Kohn from punching him in the teeth.
‘Death is never welcome,’ he said after a moment.
Bernstein’s gaze inspected him, registered some shift in their relationship.
‘“Death is not lived through,”’ he said sadly.
Kohn thought about it and nodded.
‘I should know,’ he said.
He thanked Bernstein, said goodbye, and urged Janis and Jordan out of the mall, out into the sunlight. They walked to a ruined wall and sat on it, legs dangling, and talked. They were facing nothing but crumbling flyovers, sprawling squatter settlements: if they passed for anything it would have been backpacking students on a transport-archaeology trip. The ash of several cigarettes sifted to the ground as Moh told them what he’d remembered.
‘I still don’t see how this Black Plan is supposed to work,’ Janis said.
‘Nor me,’ Moh said. He’d never thought of the Black Plan as more than black propaganda until last night. Jordan grabbed his arm and Janis’s, almost making them topple backwards.
‘What—’
‘I know how it works,’ Jordan said, in a voice strained with trying not to shout. ‘He put trapdoors in Dissembler! That’s how it works! Because everybody uses Dissembler. Moh, man, your father was a hacker!’
‘What d’you mean, “trapdoors”?’ Janis asked.
‘Ways in,’ Moh said. ‘Trojan-horse stuff. Goes back a long way. The guys who wrote one of the first big operating systems planted some real subtle code in it that let them access anything it ran. If Josh pulled the same trick with Dissembler—’
The plan working through the market. He knew where that idea had come from.
‘Josh must have buried guns all right,’ Moh said. ‘Buried them in the Black Plan: sleepers, logic bombs. And one contingency was that the Republic would fall, that the revolution would be lost.’
‘And what do you think the first part of the contingency plan was?’ Jordan said. ‘I’ll tell you – set up something like the ANR!’
‘Well, it certainly enabled it,’ Moh said. ‘The story is that it siphons off money and supplies from all over the place. Computer-aided logistics, ha! But to actually build an organization?’ He held up the pamphlet he’d bought. ‘You’d need this kind of programme, not a fucking computer program!’ Jordan and Janis were looking at him as if he’d said something clever. He thought for a moment. ‘Oh, shit.’
‘Yes,’ Jordan said. ‘Look at it this way. It’s not just an analogy, it’s the same thing. It’s a selfish meme!’
‘I know about memes, ideas spreading; but why selfish?’
‘It’s – well, it’s a metaphor, right? For how ideas spread, replicate themselves. Like, ideas are exactly as interested in the brains they’re in as genes are in the bodies they’re in: just enough to get themselves copied.’
‘Like computer viruses,’ Janis added.
‘OK.’ Moh spread his hands. ‘And?’
‘If Josh built some political strategy into the Black Plan,’ Jordan continued, ‘where would he have got the ideas from? Where else but from his own Party’s programme, all his experience and reading about politics? The Plan is the programme – not the old pamphlet you got, not necessarily the ideas in any detail, but the set of practices that it codes for.’ He grinned knowingly. ‘Over the years it’s embodied itself in lots of organizations, isn’t that right?’
‘Well, yes,’ Moh said. It was a disconcerting view. ‘You’re saying the programme creates the Party, and not the other way round?’
‘Of course it does,’ Jordan said. ‘What do you think is going on in there?’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Just a different mutation of the ideas, infecting fresh