These Strange Loops functioned especially well because the Double-Cross experts had early on fed the Germans the primordial Strange Loop, "Most of your agents are working for us and feeding you Strange Loops."
Many German agents, it later turned out, had managed to collect quite a bit of accurate information about the Normandy invasion; but many others had turned in equally plausible information about a fictitious Norwegian invasion; and all of them were under suspicion, anyway. German Intelligence might as well have made its decisions by tossing a coin in the air.
Tobias Knight kept a safe-deposit box in Switzerland in which he stored, one sentence at a time usually, stray bits of true information he had managed to glean from the blizzard of deceptions in which he lived.
The first note in the box, for instance, said:
The CIA was actually founded in 1898. I haven't found out yet why they made it public in the forties.
The second note was even stranger. It said:
Special and General Relativity are both true!!!
This had been provoked by a profound search through old science books and magazines, after Knight discovered that most of the Official Science released to the general public was actually 97 percent mythology, intended to serve as a cover or screen for the real science used by Unistat to frustrate its enemies.
There were lots of other notes like that-Maxwell's equations seem sound, I don't think there's any flummery in Newtonian mechanics, and so on-but others were far weirder.
Such as:
Velikovsky was right.
And:
All the flying saucer books, pro and con, are written by Mounty Babbit's department in Naval Intelligence.
And:
There are robots among us,
And:
Some of what the Birchers say is correct: the whole government was taken over by Communists about forty years ago.
Knight had a fantasy that someday he would turn these notes over to an Objective Historian who would then write a book informing the future of what had actually been going on in the twentieth century.
Of course this was a dream; all the history departments had been taken over by Intelligence Agencies sometime around 1910, he knew.
And he also knew that there were so many Strange Loops in the Intelligence system that he himself had been deceived many times. Maybe as much as 30 percent of his notes were false, he morosely estimated.
THE WALKING GLITCH
AAAOOOOZORAZAZ-ZAIEOAZAEIIIOZAKHOE-OOOYTHOEAZAEAAOZAKHOZAKHEYTY-XAAL-ETHYKH-This is the name which you must speak in the interior world.
–jesus, Pistis Sophia
Simon the Walking Glitch entered GWB in Washington at 9:45 that morning.
Simon was an ectomorph: tall, lithe, cerebretonic. His hair and beard were absurdly long and he sometimes smoked weed during working hours. GWB kept him on the government payroll only because he was a genius in his field, which both they and he knew, and because he had long ago inserted a tapeworm in the Beast which edited all input on him to conform to a profile of Perfect Executive, Loyal Citizen, and Cleared for Top-Secret Access.
He was the agent of the Invisible Hand Society within the government's own highest echelons.
Simon was not the son of Mr. and Mrs. Walking Glitch of course. He had actually been born Simon Moon, in Chicago, thirty-four years ago; but the name "Simon the Walking Glitch" had been adopted by all of his friends for nearly ten years now. A Glitch, in computer slang, is a hidden program which lies deeply buried in a computer, waiting to flummox, fuddle, and Potter Stewart the head of the first operator who stumbles upon it.
Simon had encountered his own first glitch one day in 1974, on his very first job in the computer department of Bank of America in Los Angeles. He had tried to run the payroll program on the computer, ordering the machine to begin printing the checks for payday-a very ordinary job, usually. This time, however, the machine refused; instead of running the program, it typed out on the console:
GIVE ME A COOKIE
Simon smiled, not a whit fazed. He had played games like that back in college. Obviously, some earlier programmer had inserted a glitch or catch-me-if-you-can loop, instructing the computer to refuse certain programs (probably selected at random, to make it harder to de-bug) and type out GIVE ME A COOKIE instead.
Simon Moon knew a great deal about getting around such gremlin programs; that had been the chief sport in Computer Science back at M.I.T. He set to work with a zest, enjoying the contest with his unknown and vanished opponent.
In half an hour Simon realized he was confronting a Trapdoor code. According to the latest mathematical estimate, it would take four million years of computer time- give or take a few centuries-to crack a Trapdoor code, so Simon resigned from the contest gracefully. He typed out:
A COOKIE
The machine responded at once:
YUMMY, THAT WAS GOOD. THANK YOU. BEGIN PROGRAMMING.
And things went smoothly again.
Simon stayed on with Bank of America for a year and a half, and he ran into the Cookie program only three more times. The Mystery Programmer had evidently left only that one small glitch to mark the territory as his or hers for all future programmers who would work there.
In 1978, working for HEW, Simon came across a more amusing hobgoblin circuit. This one worked only at night. In the daytime if you wanted to run a program, you merely typed in your name and your GWB number, and the computer would accept your input. At night, however, it always replied to your name and number with:
CRAZY, MAN. WHAT'S YOUR SIGN?
Simon learned that this did not happen at random, but every night, and only at night. Whoever had put it into the computer had a very accurate idea of the difference between the day staff and the night staff.
And sometimes the machine would carry the conversation a bit further, such as typing out:
SCORED ANY GOOD GRASS LATELY?
Or:
I'VE BEEN WANTING TO TELL YOU WHAT LOVELY EYES YOU HAVE.
Simon enjoyed this kind of thing so much that he became Mr. Super Glitch incarnate. All over Unistat there
Now are computers on which Simon once worked and at totally random intervals they are likely to type out selections from the Gnostic Gospels such as:
NOT UNTIL THE MALE BECOMES FEMALE AND THE FEMALE MALE SHALL YE ENTER INTO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Or various Zen koans like:
THE MIND IS BUDDHA: THE MIND IS NOT BUDDHA
Or Strange Loops of the family of:
THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE IS TRUE. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE WAS FALSE
Simon was shameless. Many of his computers type out totally indecent proposals, like:
SLIP YOUR REHNQUIST INTO THE SOCKET AND I'LL BRIGGS YOU UNTIL YOU EXPERIENCE TOTAL ECSTASY.
Others spout nihilist and subversive slogans:
WHAT THE EYES SEE AND THE HEART COVETS, LET THE HAND BOLDLY SEIZE
Or:
SHOW ME A NATION THAT DOESN'T CHEAT THE TAX COLLECTORS AND I'LL SHOW YOU A NATION OF SHEEP