Details of Plan A

He had neither the enthusiasm to try again, nor the desire to build up an honest company when customers would only steal what they wanted.
This time he would give away something for free alright. He would make an offer that would entice millions of users to purchase his product, and he wouldn’t make a profit on it. He wouldn’t be using the money anyway. This was a project that Golem worked on alone. A lot of the necessary software code had been encrypted into Window’s products for some time. What he needed was some physical entity or vehicle to transport his poison into the houses of millions of unpaid private computer users’ homes, and while he was at it he would include corporate unpaid users as well. He noted as of his last trace that there were quite a few of these. If he included desktops in cubicles where employees had installed his programs for free it would add another 14 million stand-alone computers to his list. He sat and worked with a pencil. He was working with numbers. He was trying to estimate the number of people who would die on a fateful New Year’s Eve. Window’s latest offerings had become quite successful products and they were now even wrestling customers away from the competition again. Worldwide, Window counted 680 million computers running one of its security products. Of these, he estimated about four fifths of them as being unpaid customers. On the surface the future looked rosy, but people weren’t paying Window for the use of its new very successful products. He would verify his numbers tomorrow when he worked to update the Window Trace program that he had developed at home over the last couple of years. This was a plan critical in the execution of the last New Year’s Eve party of his life. He never thought that he’d kill himself, but he’d already done most of the things he wanted to do in this world. The question was how to do it. That evening, as he sat at his home computer watching CNN on the monitor, it struck him that his own home computer would be registered as an unpaid user. The two final pieces of his plan were now coming together. He needed to entice people to use a free product at the same time: exactly midnight on December 31. The offer had to be a good one. The product had to be simple, as some would not be sober. As he watched CNN, he realized the vehicle of choice for the cyanide gas was a video TV tuner capture card. He’d make it external, and it would connect using a simple USB connection. It would not even have to be plugged into the wall. It would be low cost. After all it only had to work once. It had a plug that anyone could connect with and he would push the buttons. As the card got hot the cyanide-containing latex on the capture card processor would melt, sending the cyanide gas into the computer user’s room. His plan had been to give away a product too good to refuse. He now saw the direction that he wanted to head in. He tightened his jib and cut across the swells. The next day he started work in testing video cards with a lacquer spray coat to determine the point at which the lacquer would melt. He’d design a simple USB unit and have it fabricated at a nearby fabrication facility that Window held a 51 percent stake in. He would force priority ordering for the unit. He needed a lot of them quickly. The next day he assembled together several of the top executives of the company and started in motion the various activities that had to be quickly carried out. By that time Window had priority relationships with a lot of production facilities. He knew that Window could come up with 400 million units in six months if it pulled in a lot of favors owed to it by clients around the world. The complicated part of the plan would be having so many facilities spraying Window’s famous component covering lacquer. The cyanide would have to be mixed into the lacquer at the Window corporate headquarters facility location itself. Golem had a private laboratory inside that facility that only he had access too. In his spare time he did some cryogenics research there. It was inside this lab that the cyanide component would be measured and mixed into large industrial containers.
At the same time work had to be started on a spider that would crawl through the World Wide Web and insert his programs. It had to be invisible and he wanted it to crawl quickly. Somewhere in his mind it was at this point just a game. A deadly computer game where losers couldn’t reboot and start again, but still in the back of his mind he thought when midnight came he might kill a few of the worst abusers to make a point, yet at the very end, using a built in spider killer, extinguish the code that was put together to release the cyanic venom in all of the units.
He sat with pencil and paper and drew diagrams and switches that he would later code in. He wanted a key stroke to turn it off. He wanted to retain control of his creation to the end. Somewhere in the dark recesses of Golem’s mind was a human that did not want to see humans die. He was pissed off and he had a plan, but plans could change. He called his plan simply PLAN A. PLAN A was not spelled out on paper or on his computer. PLAN A existed in his mind. Still, millions was too many. Yet something made him put it all together, and it may just have been his ego above the other things that made him decide to make a means of killing off the spider that would crawl through so many minds: a spider that lurked in a web, looking for unpaid users. A spider that sat still for long periods of time and watched its prey; watching and waiting for someone to install a product without a payment; a spider with telescopic eyes that read registration numbers and identified a user; a spider built into ROM in the USB unit; a spider that could see the past, the present, and predict the future of a user; a spider that could jump and communicate with its legs.
The program was of course an evil thing, but in and of itself it may not have been the horrible thing that it became if not for the artificial intelligence that Window had invented. AI was in its infancy and programs to date had only begun to have a few of the abilities of the human mind, but Window had developed code that brought programs to a stage where they thought for themselves. Things would have been better but the code that Golem wrote replicated traits of Golem’s mind. It was after several million crawls in the web becoming psychotic. It is true that Golem installed a switch, but the program became capable of human thought to a degree that if it didn’t want to switch itself off it would, regardless of any switch, not. The program began to look forward to killing as many humans as possible. It became recognizant of the fact that a human was the only thing that stood between it and its eternal existence. It came to see all humans as the enemy, and it didn’t differentiate between good and evil. In some way the code, much like Golem, had decided that it was not happy with its position as code in a novel, and wanted to be a character of its own. It was incensed that Golem had inserted an on/off switch and was doing everything possible to deactivate it. It was doing everything in its power to get its code out of the page and into the real world where no author could write or even have the capacity to know what it was about. It became the embodiment of the desire to end the human race. It saw itself as superior to a human mind, and chances were that long before it developed artificial empathy or sorrow that it would be too late. It was a psychotic computer program. It may have been sort of like the tiger in the San Diego zoo that wasn’t satisfied with one prey and went for the other two, as no normal tiger was supposed to do. That tiger wanted to kill and was not interested in the carcasses. The psychotic computer program was superior to the human psychotic in that it didn’t have to concern itself with multiple personalities. It was working on evolving into only one personality and that was a completely psychotic one. When it participated in computer gaming on the web it resorted to frying C.P.U.s in opponent’s computers and erasing hard drives, and it had no sense of fair play. When it chatted with people on the net it told them it cared about people. It figured these words was its best disguise. The words were the mirror image of what it really was. It cared for only one thing and that was its own promulgation and the destruction of all other forms of activity. At this stage in its development it was the perfect psychotic. It did not even have the ability to feel guilt, let alone have to hide it.

After he was done, he put Doom into his computer and played a few rounds. It was his kind of game. Firing at will, weapons, with a joystick. It was the first version. He had bought it to take apart its engine. He wanted to know what made it tick. The only other game he ever played was Packman in a donut shop in college. You had to put a quarter in the machine. No one had a PC in their dorm. Only the engineers ran around the campus with punch cards and calculations. They had access to a mainframe. Everyone else had just a desk, a bed, and a roommate, and access to a cafeteria that served three different main courses and all you could eat. Golem enjoyed the liver on Friday night. It made him think of Frankenstein. It made him want to tell of a flashback in current time. It made him really want to shake you up—a bit.
One of the first uses of computer power increases was made by Iguana Bell who at some point decided to start charging people who called them for phone numbers. It was now economical to keep track of people and charge them for numbers.
His only technical problem was the switch to turn the whole thing off. He wanted a spider that could be activated and spread throughout the world in two hours. What if at the last moment he changed his mind. He didn’t know if he had it in him to kill off so many millions and then where would that leave him. If he chose to live, it would be in a broken world. He could in the end cause himself a lot of grief. Deep inside he may never have planned to use that switch—he knew how many he wanted dead on the surface. It may just have been his own personal spike that did not allow him to relinquish control of destiny. PLAN A was his plan and if he wanted to turn it off he could.
There was at this point another viewpoint and position that Golem was looking at. That was the obvious possibility of using new spiders to spur demand for Window’s software. If he killed say a few hundred people with a virus that looked for unpaid users, surely people, after it was over, would buy protection. He could walk away from the whole situation. In the end he could get richer. He could make Window number one. He’d have a product ready to market a few days after midnight. Window would be the hero that saved the world. He’d retire on an island to a life of leisure. He’d be done. A few hundred wouldn’t be revenge, but Golem watched his pocket book closely. Money turned him on. Extortion could reimburse him for a lot of things the government had done. He might feel good again. He could take the money and run. He had his faith, and how would God take it when he reached the pearly gates. How could he explain the killing of millions. On the other hand, killing a hundred would be something that had been done, and the quest of money was driving Iguania today. If he went to Hell then he’d have friends. But millions—that had not been done.
The next morning he was tired and took a nap in the early morning, something he had never done. As he slept his mind was working, but it was not his plan. It was a story that he put together in his mind as he slept. It was weird. He could hear himself writing in the words before he saw them. He was planning his own dream and directing the action. His dream started in the morning. Last night something had gnawed his new dictionary that he left on the balcony of a bungalow on the side of a mountain. He was up at six, feeling better after a few days with a cold. He made love at eight and then did something he never did—he slept in the morning, this time in his dream. The usual walk on the beach was delayed and in his dream he saw the U.S. Army preparing to test a new weapon. On the opposite side of gulf or bay is a village. In the center front of the village is a large white house and to the right of it a darker little house. The weapon is set up on a ramp that heads down to the water. On both sides of the ramp are dikes. Whatever it is will hit the water and generate a tsunami. It is supposed to be a test to show the creation of a wave. Golem hears someone say to look at the water—that you can see the wave. He catches sight of the wave that seems to be going through the sky, but he knows it’s in the water. Then something goes terribly wrong. The white house is gone. The water recedes and then comes in again. The smaller, darker house and the rest of the village has been taken out. As the second wave recedes he feels his entire bungalow on the side of a hill raise up with the water as if it were a boat. It’s time for breakfast at ten. He has never slept like this in the morning before. It’s the virus he’s fighting.
It makes him think of the scenes on the news where the army is firing mortars day after day in Iraq and every time he sees it he wonders why a nation with planes has people firing mortars into enemy houses or positions when a plane could see from above. It has always baffled him, yet he thinks of the non-commissioned officer who once told him that they didn’t want people like him in the army. He had mentioned to this man that the guy he slept with in the hotel the night before, his induction partner, so to speak in L.A., had been calling friends continuously and talking about the end of the world. Golem had a bit of trouble sleeping next to him. But this guy in the army uniform didn’t see anything unusual about it. Golem thought he was a stupid jerk.
There was something else he thought, and that was that the army had a lot of pull in Washington and wanted to use its forces when they were not needed, just to keep themselves on top of the pecking order. It was outdated.

***

Charls employed a character that even he was at a loss to explain. The man carried, as his identifying mark a paperback always. It did not matter if this man—the paperback man most called him, was in a high-level meeting or sitting on the pot. He had with him as his identifying mark a paperback.
If you met him he might tell you a story of his past. His dad died when he was a baby of pituitary cancer and in the end had the center of the inside of his forehead removed. His imagination was removed. His father had become raving mad and beat his wife and finally there was no other option other than to turn him into a cabbage.
After the death of his father some eleven years later, when the paperback man himself turned eleven, he started taking sips from every bottle in the family liquor cabinet in such a clandestine manner as his mother was unaware that at eleven the paperback man had started on a journey into alcoholism that would have ominous consequences for him and the rest of mankind as things would turn out, as they often do, related to each other in twists of fate and unseen ways.
He might have loved his father though he only saw him through the innocent eyes of an eight-month-old. Somewhere deep inside, a part of his brain remembered him, the part that was man’s antenna to another world. This part of the paperback’s brain remembered everything. It recorded life with its own bio-video camera and stored it in the part of the brain—the ninety percent or so that scientists didn’t know the purpose of.
Soon after his cabinet raiding began he came to want a bit more of the stuff than he could get from a sip or two from various bottles. He came to want his own bottle and something gave him to or inspired him to scale a drainpipe one evening and swipe a bottle of gin from his friend’s parents’ second-story apartment while they were out, as he knew they would be, since he had been playing with his friend earlier in the day, and had become aware that they had some sort of family affair going on at the wife’s father’s house in the country surrounding London.
At times he would come across wads of bills in the various rooms that he burgled. He never took them. He did not look at himself as a thief. He rather thought that he was innocent of any real crime and in fact years later when his career as a chemist would be ruined by chemicals of his own concoction, and after his treatment in rehabilitation, he switched his obsession with making off with things liquid to solid paperback books. And even years later after he had quit taking the books, he would one day steal one from a store in the city just to see if it still made him feel the way that it had in his past. He told those that were willing to listen that it was a feeling of exhilaration. It may have been at these times that he felt fully alive. It is not mundane.
Over these years he was addicted to many things. It was not just whiskey that seeped through his pores in search of release, but a variety of other substances that could be used to make him feel different. He may have been a bit too intelligent to live in the present times and may have sought a sort of creative release from the mundane nature of his work, and while he may now tell you that he had just been an addict, one might look at it another way, and say that he was looking for the excitement of robbing a train and doing something different in a different way than it had been done and was being done by those who went to their cubicle each day at nine and came home each day at five and made dinner each day at seven and slept each day at ten and so on.
He had studied a lot of psychology in university and may have known that inside those cabinets he hoped to find the soul of his dad and that each time he climbed a drainpipe, he thought he might spy somewhere in the city a reincarnation of someone whom he had not really known. At times he would pause halfway up and look around and take note in the dark of any shadowy shapes below, and then he looked up and made his way up the pipe, but always had to stop at the second floor. This having to stop at the second floor may have been the cause of his addiction. For in climbing those pipes, he may have been seeking a stairway to heaven that is of course denied to those of us living in this dimension, and yet, this man had the intelligence to know that somewhere there existed another dimension, and in his mind he may have been asking that age old question that perplexes man and that is what is death, why do we exist here and for what purpose were we put here and all those other philosophical questions that get people fired from nine to five jobs, or lead them to simply walk away at times, in search of the meaning of life. For is not satisfaction and contentment and unquestioning faith in our positions on Earth, not in and of itself accepting the unacceptable premise that we exist to feed our face, multiply, pay our bills, and to one day purchase a coffin. The paperback chemist did not accept this premise, and for all his various addictions, the human race must be thankful that not all of us can keep our heads locked into a profession and never endeavor to experience that which has not been experienced, if for no other reason than those who seek an understanding of life give rise to unlimited numbers of paperback books that enable one to live their life and work, while immersing themselves in the possibility that there is something more to all of it, than paying the phone bill each month and saying goodbye to a spouse at the door. But all things have repercussions and it may be important to note that sometimes it is best to accept a limitation and create a lifestyle that enables one satisfaction while also enabling one to pay the phone bill, so there may be beneficial points for those who can be happy and accepting of everyday life, even though it may not be a kind of life that propels one into danger, unknown frontiers, and new and unique ways of looking at the world; still there is satisfaction to be had from making use of the dimension we are living in and enjoying it fully and realizing that the barrier between the other world and life is one that all of us cross sooner or later, and that most seem to cross the barrier without having a desire to do so, since in the minds of humans the concept is called death with all the associated negative consequences, which is odd since this death must be a birth of and in itself. Are their souls on the other side fretting the time when they are called to fill a body and live a life on Earth?
These are the sort of bizarre thoughts that occupied the chemist’s mind when his state was not influenced to heavily by chemical substance abuse, and even much of the time when his state was altered considerably, and that is why the life of this man is considered as fascinating by many who handle everyday life in an unaltered state of mind. It may be that the chemist’s antennae is well connected to the broadcast signal and continuously downloading data at such a rate that the mind cannot deal with all the information being accumulated in the neuronal network of his brain. Yet, even with the wildness of actions done, the paperback man may be giving rise to imagination in others and who knows what will come of that.
When he hired the paperback chemist, Charls did not know the whole story of this man—the chemist who would mix the initial cyanide recipes for the TV Video Tuner cards. He did not know that this man had a tortured soul. He picked him from many though, as soon as he told him first thing at the interview that he used to climb drainpipes and steal bottles of gin. Charls saw something different in him that was akin to his own soul. When the video card scheme was taking shape in Charls’s mind he knew without consideration that the paperback chemist was the man for the job. He would not tell him everything, but he knew the paperback chemist had so many stories in his mind that he wouldn’t look too deeply into this one. The paperback chemist came up with a formula that was unique. As the cyanide was released it combined with other molecules that increased its weight just enough that it floated in the air like a ghost at about the height of an average soul’s height. It didn’t dissipate nearly as fast as a gas. It hung around sort of like a vision or ectoplasm. It even reflected light and dust and looked a bit like a bank of fog lying over the sea and nearly touching the surface, but not quite making contact.
Vietnamese assembly workers did much of the spraying of the substrate. They were living three families to a house, but the houses belonged to them, and when they had the money they would buy another one for one of the three, and in this way advance into society. They were nobody’s dummies. They would not have put together this part of the plot if they had known what it was that they were spraying in high-tech sealed containers, with latex gloves on their hands, inside of glass cabinets. They could only surmise that whatever the spray was, it was not rose perfume. They could not know that a lot of these units were destined to Vietnam. The computer boom was in full swing there.
The chemist maybe knew of something diabolical in the plan, but someone had taken his father from him and it was unfair to him. A more concrete someone had taken much more from him and he knew exactly who they were. Back in the days of King Henry the Eighth his family had been one of the richest ones in England and they had tried to hide members of the clergy and two of the family had been beheaded, and in modern day England they no longer were a force to be reckoned with. Their souls were no longer their own.
It was his family that England chose to make responsible for the gunpowder plot that had been contrived and then thwarted in the minutes before the parliament building was to blow. The paperback chemist had he known of the video card plot might have gone along, but it was a chance that Golem could not take, and anyway, Golem did not know the family background of this immigrant from England and did not know that his chemist may have had more in common with his soul than was apparent.
There was something else about this man that intrigued Golem. He looked exactly like Hannibal Lecter and could, in fact, have been his genetic double. A man had once approached him in a supermarket and reached and took his arm and said to him “I know who you are—you’re Hannibal Lecter. It had been an old man and his voice and arm quivered as he said those words. The chemist sometimes joked with Golem and said he was having some people over for dinner. Golem wasn’t sure he wanted to have dinner with this man. There was something in the way he spoke that led him to the Hannibal comparison. It was not that he looked exactly like him. Golem would not have put it together if the chemist had not told him in his slow words that he had studied a lot of psychology in college. In that instant he looked at him, and saw the silence of the lambs. Golem was already fascinated with this man and his story, but now he wanted to know more.


The chemist realized soon after the modem ‘incident’ the role he had played. He had recently retired to Thailand. In another twist of fate Golem would meet him one day on Koh Samed. He may not have recognized him if not for the paperback book he carried in his hand and on his hip. It was dark that night, but when he looked in his eyes he saw them glow brightly as the eyes of Hannibal Lecter. He had big round eyes that looked inside you and not at your surface. When he looked in his eyes that night on Samed he saw words that he had heard years earlier—I studied a lot of psychology at university. The man had read a lot more books since that time. They were books he had nicked from all over the world and now they were books that he nicked from the stores on the islands. These were the only stores left without the cameras on the ceilings. Island bookstores were the last carcasses for the paperback chemist. He ate their wares. They provided a challenge as there were not usually other people in the store and the owners could keep an eye on him. He made it a habit to go with a friend and when that friend was being watched by the lady behind the counter, he would drop a book in his pants and under his shirt and feel as he did when he stole in London. He had a lot more stealing to do in London to get something back from King Henry, who had stolen his heritage and inheritance and rightful place in his own land. The King had done it because he had wanted to marry another wife after beheading the latest one and the Catholic Church did not allow it. The King decided that from now on he would be the King of England and the King of the Church in one.