Dateline, The Ice Palace. I really should continue to call it Neuschwabenland, but now that the United Nations is here, and ostensibly in charge of things, they want it considered by name. Kind of like being in Neo York City while in New York State.
And I say ostensibly, because, even with all the blue helmets in the world down here, and Mr. USA along for the ride, there is no question as to who's really running the show. If you had any doubts, you need only look right up at the sky and understand what's going on, about 300,000 miles up.
Deep Ten, possibly the most powerful weapon on or around Earth, just got punked by SPYGOD.
The last two days were insane. SPYGOD spent the night out under the stars and came back in, still drunk, blue as a smurf, and raving like an Old Testament prophet. As they nursed him back to whatever constitutes "health" for someone who apparently can't freeze to death, he went on about things he'd done a long time ago and forgotten about, and things and people The COMPANY had at its disposal.
Then he started explaining, feverishly, how those seemingly disparate elements were going to be placed together, within 48 hours, to achieve the result of finding where GORGON had hidden itself. They just stared at him, wondering if the extreme cold had turned his brains to rock candy, but when he pulled one of his many hidden guns out and started threatening to turn theirs to smoking hot pate -- his words, not mine -- they got the message, and hopped into motion.
I have very wisely stayed out of the way, mostly looking after my kids. Every so often we'd get word that things had gone according to the weird, non-euclidean flow chart SPYGOD was calling a plan, but the exact logic was escaping us.
(Not that we were really discussing it, per se. I was more interested in getting them up to speed on 21st century race relations and cultural norms. That and watching Mr. USA stomp around the hallways and fume because he still can't get into The Chamber.)
Of course, it all makes sense, now.
I don't know how he figured it out -- who does? -- but SPYGOD learned that GORGON was using Deep Ten's communication systems for their own purposes. Specially, they were running all their comms traffic right through it, making them harder to track.
That's one piece of a puzzle to finding them, right there. But the trick would be being able to match that one, small piece up with one of the other pieces constituting the sheer mountain of electronic signals going in and out of Deep Ten.
Saying that a massive number of defense platform satellites in a ring around the Earth and Moon has a lot of communications traffic is like saying that Neo York has a lot of people. Now try finding the right one based only on a partial description.
Especially when the channel is unauthorized and hidden away.
But apparently, back in the late 70's, SPYGOD's last visit to Deep Ten included him making a few undocumented additions to the main platform's communications network. Specifically, he installed a "wonderwidget" -- again, his words -- that allowed him to tell if someone was trying to gain unauthorized access to it.
(It may have also allowed him to gain unauthorized access to it, himself, but he's clearly not wanting to talk about that. I still have a circular dimple in the middle of my forehead from the gun barrel he pressed there to make that point abundantly clear)
So that's some help, but not much. You've still got a lot of people -- mostly other nations -- trying to gain unauthorized access to Deep Ten. So now we've gone from looking through all Neo York for one partially described person to maybe looking through Brooklyn.
Now what? Now SPYGOD gets The COMPANY to use the Flier's systems to completely reset the satellite network around the Earth for a full minute -- something that happens all the time, apparently -- so as to cut off all incoming traffic to Deep Ten.
They also throw the until-now hypothetical internet kill switch for exactly one minute. This ensures that no one is using the net to get into anything they shouldn't be, which wasn't exactly a clear explanation, but makes a certain kind of sense.
Then he has those hyper-sexed young scientists he's got working around the clock at the Heptagon to use something SPYGOD clearly doesn't want talked about -- another gun-dimple in the head for me -- to project a very large, very real looking threat just off Deep Ten's main platform.
Home movies, apparently. Underwater footage of those poor killer whales, all drunk on the vile, penguin liquor ABWEHR had been subsisting on this entire time.
Shot from certain angles, in certain kinds of light, the whales look like strange, alien beings. No doubt that's why Deep Ten's crew, human and android, immediately raised the zero shields and protected themselves from any kind of electronic intrusion.
SPYGOD keeps saying every good plan has triple redundancy. I think I'm understanding that now, because, after their main source of communications was shot down three times in a row, GORGON was apparently among the first to make contact with Deep Ten as soon as they realized those were just holographic killer whales.
So we narrowed the search from all of Brooklyn to a small brownstone on the east end. And it wasn't too hard to track them from there. In fact, it was downright easy.
And it was easier still to make sure the first message they got back from Deep Ten had a little surprise package -- a virus with a certain video by Rick Astley as its centerpiece. It'll just keep opening window after window to launch a new video application, playing that one, special song, until their computers crash from overwork.
It's a joke, but a deadly serious one. It's SPYGOD's way of saying he's coming for them, and they'd better be ready.
I'd be lying if I said I was comfortable with all of this (An Internet Kill Switch? Really?) and I really did not appreciate the circular indents in my forehead. But I'd also be lying if I wasn't feeling something akin to sheer admiration for this man and his ability to pull plans out of seemingly nowhere, along with guns, liquor, and things I don't want to know the use of.
I don't know if this is embedded bias or stockholm syndrome, but when he's not chasing me down the hall with a gun or threatening to blow up the UN Building because the Blue Helmets stole his personal go-cart, SPYGOD continues to remind me why he's running The COMPANY. There are times when I am actually very glad he's handling these sorts of things.
And I'd say that even if he wasn't lurking around out there, stark nude and roaring drunk, seeing how many UN personnel he can shoot in the ass with alien love penis pellets (do not ask) until they finally man up and take him down.
Randolph Scott, for Alternet, hiding for dear life.
(Randolph Scott is listening to Night of the Hunter (30 Seconds to Mars) and still sticking with the bottled water)
No comments:
Post a Comment