‘We’re always arguing,’ Moh confided. ‘Some of the comrades think we should be more against the government and some of us say we should be more for it because the right are against it.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Uh, well, I was thinking – is the Republic a workers’ and peasants’ government?’
Josh coughed in a suspicously vocal way and said, ‘Hih-hihh-hmm, ah, even allowing for peasants being a bit thin on the ground in these parts, I think we’d have to say: “No”. But these categories (you know what that means? good) aren’t really useful here. We’re in a new situation. It’s a radical democratic government. It isn’t socialist but the capitalists don’t trust it. So things are a bit unstable.’
They talked about politics for a while. Eleven years old and having just joined the party’s youth group, Moh understood the politics he’d learned from his parents as an adventure that spanned generations like a space programme: behind them the pioneers who’d risen in Petrograd, fallen in Vorkuta; ahead the Alpha Centauri of workers’ power and human solidarity; beyond that the infinite universe of socialism – the bright world, a world without borders, without bosses and cops. He felt proud to be part of it, arguing at school with right-wing teachers, marching on demonstrations, reading up.
‘Well, Moh, these hands have gotta work for their living-oh, so you better—’
‘Split!’
Josh gave him five, gave him ten, laughing, and Moh left.
But later that day he came back, and over the next weeks he and his father, almost without noticing it, fell into a way of working together: Moh fetching manuals and looking things up, helping with testing and debugging, watching the system grow. Josh talked and thought he was talking to himself, or over Moh’s head, and all the time the logic, but not the function, of the programs was becoming something that Moh grasped without knowing that he knew.
‘You OK, Moh?’
He blinked and shook his head. ‘Yeah, I’ll be…’
‘You using or what?’
‘No more than usual,’ Moh said. He forced a smile. ‘What did you say?’
‘Josh wrote it. The CAL system, remember?’
‘“CAL”?’ Janis frowned at them both. Jordan’s eyes widened.
‘Computer-aided logistics,’ Kohn said. ‘I remember.’
‘Never seen it documented,’ Bernstein said, ‘but it couldn’t have come from anywhere else. I’m not saying he did it all, but that was the core. Nobody else could’ve done it.’
‘Why not?’
‘’Cause nobody else wrote Dissembler.’
This time the shock was different. No memories, no flashbacks. Just a falling feeling.
‘You’re telling me,’ he said to Bernstein, ‘that my father wrote Dissembler?’ His voice creaked with disbelief. ‘How do you know?’
The lines on Bernstein’s face deepened, momentarily showing his true age. ‘It wasn’t talked about, back when you were a nipper. But –’ He gestured at his stock and smiled sourly. ‘I’ve met a lot of ex-members since. Some of ’em in the bottom of a bottle, if you catch my drift.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before? About that and the Black Plan?’
‘Like I said. Thought you knew. Anyway, the Black Plan was a bit of a dodgy question, even in the Party. Not many people knew about it, I can tell you. Only the Central Committee and the fraction that was in the Labour Party and beavering away in the Republic’s Economic Commission. Your old man was the best software engineer they had. Course they used him. The man who wrote Dissembler!’ Bernstein laughed. ‘You know he released it as freeware? Could have been a millionaire, at least, but he didn’t hold with patents and intellectual property and all that. Talk about a good communist. The Yanks were well pissed off: it ate through their controls and escrows like acid.’
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?’