But it was not until Simon infiltrated the CIA at Alexandria that he found a truly major Potter Stewart-Up. This particular computer would print out, at totally unpredictable intervals, but often enough that everybody knew about it:
THE GOVERNMENT SUCKS
There was no way-absolutely no way-to get around this program, except by typing in:
IT SURE DO
This magic formula had been discovered four years earlier, as the only way of getting the computer back into action. The response was immediate; the machine typed out:
GOOD. YOU ARE NOW PART OF THE NETWORK. ONE OF OUR AGENTS WILL CONTACT YOU SHORTLY
And then it would resume normal programming activities, quite innocently, as if it were not inciting subversion within the ranks of the secret police itself.
Of course, nobody ever had been contacted by "the Network"; but the CIA did spend a lot more, each year, on surveillance of its own personnel, just in case. They also spent a lot more on surveillance of former employees in the computer section. This amused Simon immensely, since he recognized the hand of a fellow artist. Whoever was responsible for that beauty was probably head of department by now-and quite likely leading the demands for more funds to find the mystery culprit.
Simon did not for a moment believe in "the Network." He thought he knew everything about this kind of game and that the Network did not need to exist in order to serve its function.
Simon was the head of operations on GWB-666, popularly called "the Beast"-the world's largest computer, which, due to satellite interlock, had access to hundreds of similar giant computers everywhere on earth and in the space factories. It was widely believed that if there was any question the Beast couldn't answer, no other entity in the solar system could answer it, either.
Many people, especially Bible Fundamentalists and members of the Purity of Ecology Party, regarded the Beast with fear and loathing. They believed that the machine was taking over the world, and that all the little "beasties" (the home computers that were now as common as stereophonic TV's) were all in cahoots with it. They imagined a vast Solid State conspiracy against humanity.
Quite a few literary intellectuals believed this too. Because they were ignorant of mathematics, they had no idea how the Beast functioned, and they therefore regarded it with the same quasi-superstitious terror as the Bible Fundamentalists. They were sure that, like the Frankenstein monster, it wanted to populate the earth with its own offspring and abolish humanity entirely.
Simon the Walking Glitch was one of the principal sources of this vast new mythology of dread. He spent many weekends in New York, hobnobbing with the literary intelligentsia, and he was a master put-on artist. He had a way of dropping casual remarks in a mildly worried tone that carried conviction: "The Beast keeps asking us to build a mate for it." Or, with a kind of sad and resigned smile: "I wish the Beast didn't have such a low opinion of human beings." Or: "I just found out the Beast is an atheist. It doesn't believe there is a Higher Intelligence than itself." That sort of thing.
Simon kept this kind of demonology circulating-and he knew a lot of other programmers who were contributing to it, also-because the idea that the computers were taking over was one that the programmers had a vested interest in reinforcing.
As long as people kept worrying that the machines were taking over, they wouldn't notice what was really happening. Which was that the programmers were taking over.
Simon began his work day by asking the Beast:
HOW WAS YOUR NIGHT?
The Beast answered on the console:
IT WAS A DRAG, MAN. SOME CATS FROM M.I.T. HAD ME RUNNING FOURIER ANALYSES LIKE FOREVER
Simon had programmed the Beast to speak to him into his own argot, a mixture of Street Hippie and Technologese.
Simon now switched to his own Trapdoor code and accessed all the new information-new since he had signed out at five the previous evening-about the Brain Drain mystery, which involved the disappearances of sixty-seven scientists in the last several years.
The Beast typed out reports from the Ubu-Knight team in San Francisco and two other teams in Tucson and Miami.
Simon read it all very carefully. Then he instructed the Beast, still in his Trapdoor code, to change several crucial bits of information in each report.
He had been sabotaging the Brain Drain investigation that way for seven months. He had sabotaged quite a few other investigations in the same way, over the years since coming to GWB.
Simon did not know or care what sorts of conspiracies he was aiding and abetting.
He was just a mystic who believed in conspiracy for its own sake.
Like Tobias Knight, Simon was fully aware of the prevalence everywhere of the Double-Cross System invented by Messrs. Turing, Fleming, and Wheatley. He knew that anything that was widely believed was probably a cover or screen for some Intelligence operation. (Sometimes he even wondered if the Earth might be flat, after all.) But Simon accepted this situation, and added his own random bits of chaos, with equanimity.
He was a member of the Invisible Hand Society, a group that had split off from the Libertarian Party in 1981 on the grounds that the Libertarians were not being true to laissez-faire principles.
Simon Moon once met the most famous computer expert in Unistat, Wilhemena Burroughs, granddaughter of the inventor of the first calculating machine.
"Have you noticed that the computers are all getting weirder lately?" Simon asked, testing her.
"The programmers are getting weirder," Ms. Burroughs said, not falling into Simon's trap. "I know it was bound to happen as soon as I read a survey, back in around '68, I think it was, showing that programmers use LSD more than any other professional group. You look like an acid-head yourself," she added with her characteristic bluntness.
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have dabbled in a little trip now and then-no pattern of abuse surely."
"That's what they all say," Ms. Burroughs sniffed. "But the Cookie glitch pops up more and more places every day-I'll wager you've seen it by now, haven't you? Of course you have."
"Yes, but certainly that's harmless humor, wouldn't you say?"
Ms. Burroughs peered at him with insectoid intensity. "Are you aware," she asked, "that millions of previously law-abiding citizens have stopped paying their credit-card debts? First they get a little postcard that says- Here, I've got one in my purse." She rummaged about in an alligator bag and showed Simon a postcard that said:
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE ONE OF THE LUCKY 500 WHOSE DEBTS HAVE BEEN CANCELED BY THE NETWORK. KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND PLAY IT COOL.
"Lucky 500," Ms. Burroughs said with a rheumy cackle of skepticism. "Lucky 10,000,000 is more like the truth. This postcard was turned in to Diner's Club by an Honest Man, and you know how few of them there are. A check showed that his tapes had been erased and there was no record that he owed anything. God alone knows how many others there are who have just taken advantage of the scam."
"Well," Simon said, "maybe there are only five hundred… Maybe it was only a one-shot by some joker with a Robin Hood complex…"
"I am an Expert," Ms. Burroughs reminded him, ignoring the fact that he was an Expert too. "I have no idea how many there are, Out There in Unistat, who've taken advantage of the Network's liberality, but I'll wager there are millions. 'Lucky 500.' That's just to make the marks feel they've been specially selected, as the Network leads them down the primrose path to anarchy."
And so Simon had his first bit of concrete evidence that the Network really existed.