“You remember our conversation about quantum computing?” “Yes, roughly.”
“A quantum computer would theoretically perform data functions using ions—which are difficult to get, control and manipulate. That’s why real quantum computing is still mostly a dream. Not even the Hand has that kind of hardware. But. But.”
“But?”
Alif ’s eyes gleamed. “But you could do almost the same thing if you could get a normal silicon-based computer to think in metaphors.”
The sheikh’s rheumy gaze sharpened. “If each word has layers of meaning—”
“Yes. You do understand, you do. I knew you would. It was that analogy you made to the Quran that got me thinking in the first place. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction. The stag and the doe and the trap. Instead of working with linear strings of ones and zeroes, the computer could work with bundles that were one and zero and every point in between all at once. If, if, if you could teach it to overcome its binary nature.”
“That sounds very complicated indeed.”
“It should be impossible, but it isn’t.” Alif began typing furiously. “All modern computers are pedants. To them the world divided into black and white, off and on, right and wrong. But I will teach yours to recognize multiple origin-points, interrelated geneses, systems of multivalent cause and effect.”
He could hear the sheikh shifting on his feet.
“When we spoke about the Quran, I was only trying to understand what you wanted to tell me about computers,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to use it so literally—”
“I’m not using the Quran,” said Alif tersely. “I’m using the Alf Yeom. The Quran is static. You aren’t supposed to change a single dot. You have to be trained to recite the words correctly, because if you mispronounce a single one, it’s not the Quran anymore. The Alf Yeom is something dynamic, changing. I think—I think it changes, I mean the book itself, depending on who reads it—the dervishes saw the Philosopher’s Stone, but I see code.”
“Knowledge must be fixed in some way if it is to be preserved,” said the sheikh. “That’s why the Quran isn’t meant to be altered. There were other prophets sent to other peoples, but because their books were altered, their knowledge was lost.”
“I can compensate for that,” said Alif, feeling less sure than he sounded. “It must be possible. The Hand believes it is. He was going to translate the strings of metaphor into strings of commands.”
“But the book is ancient! Its writers couldn’t have known anything about computers.”
“They didn’t need to. It’s not what they said that matters, it’s the method they used to say it—the way they encoded the information. They threw everything they knew into one pot and developed a system of transmitting knowledge that could accommodate the contradictions. It’s that system I want to replicate in your computer.”
Alif ’s fingers paused on the keyboard. A vision pressed itself against his sinuses from inside his head: Dina, outlined in black against their rooftop in Baqara District, her veiled face a floating interruption of the dust-pale minarets strung out along the horizon. She held his copy of The Golden Compass like an enemy flag. Alif blinked rapidly. The screen in front of him came back into focus.
“I’m still not sure how it all connects,” he admitted.
“If that is the case, I would be very careful,” said Sheikh Bilal. “The greatest triumph of Shaytan is the illusion that you are in control. He lurks on the forking paths, lying in wait for those who become overconfident and lose their way.”
“I have to code,” said Alif. He heard the swish of cotton robes as Sheikh Bilal withdrew.
The sun had grown more persistent, throwing an intricate pattern of light and shadow on the floor as it came in through the wood-latticed window. His head began to ache as he bent to his task. Every so often he could hear the sound of rifles, and once or twice something heavier, a dull boom like distant thunder. The noise always ceased abruptly, replaced by the desultory calls of sparrows in the courtyard outside. Despite the sun, Alif had the sense of some malevolent pressure in the air around him, a sentience he recoiled from investigating too closely. This too came in waves, and when they receded, Alif could half-see Vikram, who appeared to his fevered consciousness like a coil of dark matter uncurling itself against the invisible threat. Alif could tell the man was tiring.
He worked steadily. His fingers knew what he needed to do before his mind did. Pieces of the fragmented Hollywood hypervisor were still useable; he plugged lines of the familiar code into the sheikh’s machine, watching with satisfaction as algorithmic towers grew before his eyes. Every so often he paused to re-read a portion of the Alf Yeom, separating the frame story into two threads of code: Farukhuaz, the dark princess, became a set of Boolean algorithms; the nurse, her irrational counterpart, non-Boolean expressions. There was nothing he could not interpret numerically. The numbers themselves, like stories, were merely representative; stand-ins for meaning that lay deeper, embedded in pulses of electricity within the computer, the firing of neurons in Alif ’s mind, events whose defining elements blurred and merged as he worked.
The sunlight strengthened until nearly midday, when the lattice over the window served its purpose, folding a matrix of shadows into one flat stretch of shade. Alif marveled as the sheikh’s office went suddenly cool and dark. Centuries ago, a woodworker had measured the changing angle of light against this room’s east-facing wall, and built a wooden screen that would provide shade in the hottest part of the day without interrupting a scholar’s view of the courtyard. It was simple, elegant. Alif felt a pang of envy—his own creation, when it was finished, would be neither simple nor elegant. It would be a lumbering, evolving miasma, a vastness, perpetuated by the sheer pressure of information. It would be capable of functions beyond counting, but collectively it would be meaningless.
Dina appeared in the late afternoon. She brought a glass of tea and a plate of foule that had obviously spent a long life on the inside of an overheated tin can. Alif sniffed at it before taking a bite. “It’s all there is,” said Dina. “We can’t exactly send out for food.”
Alif studied her. She kept her eyes downcast; the translucent skin of her eyelids was discolored, as if from bruising or sleeplessness. He held out the plate.
“You eat it,” he said, “You need your strength. You should be lying down anyway.”
Dina made a restless motion with her good arm.
“I’ve eaten. It’s gone quiet outside—Vikram says the street is still blocked and there are snipers on the rooftops. We’re under siege.”
“Are we on the news?”
“You are. And they’re using your fake n—your handle. They’re calling you a terrorist.”
Alif let his head roll back, closing his eyes. His name. He thought of Intisar breathing it in the dark, sanctifying it. To see it made so ugly and public was worse than the terrorist label, which he had seen applied to loftier and better men.
Dina pressed the tea glass into his hand. “You never told me you work for Islamist groups.”
“I don’t work for anybody. I work against the censors.”
“But you’ve helped the Islamists.”
“I’ve also helped the communists. And the feminists. I’ll help anybody with a computer and a grudge.”
“Okay, well, I’m just telling you that the newscasters on City Today haven’t been making such fine philosophical distinctions.”
“Of course they haven’t. They never do.” Alif shoveled a spoonful of foule into his mouth. Dina lingered, glancing around the office at piles of file folders and books.
“What is it that you’re doing?” she asked after several moments. Alif set his mouth in a thin line.
“The Hand stole my greatest idea,” he said, “Now I’m stealing his.”
“What’s the point? The only way you’re leaving this place is in handcuffs, with a black bag over your head.”
br /> “It doesn’t matter. By that time I’ll have bombed out their entire system. All the data they have on me or my friends or anyone else in the City will look like scrambled eggs. He won’t be able to use Tin Sari to hurt anybody else. They can kill me if they want—I’ll still have won.” A thrill went through his body. The scent of the Alf Yeom roused something unfamiliar in him, a dormant athletic instinct that made him want to run and rend and rip until his opponent was beaten. A small part of him was frightened by the ferocity of his own aggression. He quelled it.
“I don’t like it when you talk like that,” said Dina. “Like you’re some kind of hero from one of those novels you’re always reading.” There was a quaver in her voice that made Alif look up. Moisture rimmed her lashes. Guilt replaced his aggression. He half-stood, bungling his feet in the legs of Sheikh Bilal’s desk chair.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to upset you. Please don’t cry, you have no idea how unfair it is when you cry—I can’t do anything but what I’m doing.”
“I can’t help it,” Dina whispered, little catches in her voice, “I’m so tired. I don’t want to be here. I’m scared of whatever is going to happen next, but I want it to happen—not knowing is even more terrible.”
“Dina—”
“And when you talk like that, like you don’t care about what happens to you, like there’s no one who would miss you and worry about you, it makes me want to scream. You can be so stupid about these things.”
Alif sank back into the chair, feeling bereft. He swallowed the remainder of his tea. In the thrall of some mysterious impulse, he kissed the rim of the glass twice before handing it back to Dina. Her fingers closed around the imprint of his mouth.
“Bless your hands,” he said hoarsely. She turned and left the room.
* * *
By the time evening fell, Alif had begun to shiver. The air was not cold; the stone walls of the office radiated a pleasant warmth accumulated during their long hours in the sun, but the combined pressures of coding and fear and a night without real sleep weighed on his body. Alif knew he was dangerously tired. He was alarmed by the thought of making a mistake, creating a digital tick buried too far within layers of code for him to find without serious effort. On an ordinary day his own fastidiousness would have kept him from reaching this point; many times he had interrupted himself on the downward slope of a coding jag and slept or eaten or washed, reasoning that time was less costly than error. Now he felt the pressure of each minute. Some higher brain function recognized the absurdity of spending his last hours of freedom alone in front of a computer at a task he might not even finish, but he ignored it, struggling instead to maintain the trancelike level of focus he needed to continue.
As night drew on he began to dream. He imagined the columns of code on his computer screen were instead a tower of white stone, growing up and up as he typed. He adorned the tower with the climbing jasmine and dusty yellow hibiscus that grew in the garden of the little duplex in Baqara district. He imagined himself at the top of the tower, surveying his domain like a general. At midnight a golden foot appeared on the edge of his field of vision.
You’ve come back, said Alif.
I’m back, said Princess Farukhuaz. The foot retreated beneath a gauzy black robe. He regretted its passing. Farukhuaz knelt next to the desk, or on the white stone of the parapet—he had lost the ability to distinguish between them. She put one hand on his knee, her slim fingers laden with gold and tipped in red henna. His shivering increased.
You are building a tower, she said, up and up and up, and at the very top I am waiting. All things are possible at the top. All things take whatever form they like. They will call you a transgressor but I will call you free.
Yes, said Alif, that’s what I want.
You’re very close, said Farukhuaz.
He accessed the State mainframe almost without thinking. The firewalls that had been erected to protect their official intranet seemed trivial to him now, as decorative and breachable as the Old Quarter Wall that surrounded their literal fortress; a tourist attraction. Alif felt as though he was looking down at it from a great height. Grids of code spread out within the wall, representing government email accounts, municipal security, the City budget office. Largest of all, occupying an almost satirical amount of RAM in a well-cooled room full of blade servers somewhere, was the intelligence bureau.
Alif was bewildered. For years he had written off his own bravado; he and Abdullah and NewQuarter01 and all the rest were, at the end of the day, hacks, not revolutionaries. As much as he hated State, the idea of physical confrontation made him ill. All his efforts had been the product of fear, an anonymous finger in the face of men he would never have to confront face to face. He had always assumed State crushed people like him because it could, not because it saw them as a real threat. The vast, energy-leeching intelligence grid told him otherwise. This was a government terrified of its own people.
The Hand lurked there, a scavenging mathematical mass, unleashing worms in their millions upon the digital City. Alif recognized the payload they carried. Tin Sari was bundled in their guts, ready to be injected into dissident hard drives like parasitical DNA.
Alif took a moment to marvel at the craftsmanship that had gone into creating the Hand. To call it a carnivore system was insufficient—one might as well call the Pyramids a collection of headstones. It functioned out of a single, central ISP. The usual packet-sniffing protocols had been replaced with something much more dynamic; software that could learn and adapt to usage patterns of each individual target, eliminating the false alarms that often occurred when search terms were used with a negative bias. The mark of a single personality was clear throughout its design: the man who had programmed it was inventive, surgical, with a mind that melded orthodoxy and innovation. That he understood the metaphorical capacity of machines was obvious; he had intuitively incorporated some of the basic elements Alif was using to build his tower.
That’s how he broke into my machine, said Alif. He was speaking a language none of my firewalls understood. He was speaking a language I myself did not understand, not then.
Yes, said Farukhuaz, but you have something he does not. Something he covets.
I have the Alf Yeom.
You have me.
Alif looked down into the digital plain below him. It was easier to strike here, from above; the binary world was still flat. He stood apart from it, ears ringing with the music of the spheres. The tower churned beneath him.
Unleash it, said Farukhuaz, destroy it all.
Alif typed in a series of execution commands. Immediately the plain began to glow with activity. Alarm after alarm was tripped as anti-malware programs rushed in to contain the damage, attempting to shut down non-critical functions to block Alif ’s progress, creating a kind of burn perimeter between him and State’s most sensitive code blocks. He laughed; Farukhuaz laughed. It was so easy now. He was above. The perimeter was a smudged circle beneath him, a child’s pencil drawing on a piece of paper, devoid of any depth. He sent himself into the heart of the State intranet.
The Hand roused. It lumbered to its feet, reeking of ionized air and dry metallic bones, revealing a level of functionality Alif had not detected. He reeled backward, recalibrating. Breeching the confines of the State intranet, the Hand began to attack the base of Alif ’s tower, slicing away layers of code through a mirroring protocol of a kind Alif had never seen before.
Break him, whispered Farukhuaz.
I don’t know how! Alif felt a swell of panic as his creation began to shudder. Desperate, he began an elaborate code-switching operation, changing the state of the data the Hand was attacking faster than it could attack. The shuddering lessened. Alif steadied his breathing. The panic in his chest, born of adrenaline with nowhere to go, turned swiftly to a sulfuric, thwarted rage. The Hand had taken his love, his freedom, his name; yet those things mattered less to him now than destroying the man who had taken them. They were an acce
ptable sacrifice.
Alif turned on the electronic beast. It had weak points. There was no system that did not. His creation altered itself and its methods until it found them; errors that Alif now recognized not as computational limits, but as failures of imagination. His creation was better, higher, operating in a realm of near-consciousness, unbound by dualities. The tower rose. It spread its roots into the guts of the Hand itself, injecting the beast’s most basic infrastructure with multivalent statements it could not process. The Hand fell back with a silicon scream, retreating behind the burn line of the intranet.
Elated, Alif turned to pursue it, but found the entire edifice looked smaller now—alarmingly small. The height made him giddy. Farukhuaz’s arms were around his back, her veiled head resting on his shoulder. She coaxed him in words he only half-heard, but he couldn’t breathe; the altitude, her arms, the lack of oxygen in this electrified stratosphere, everything pressed down on him at once. He began to see spots of light. He shook his head to clear them, but instead they coalesced into something that spanned the horizon, arcing upward toward an improbable nexus—not a face, not eyes and ears and a mouth, but a bright mass unnervingly akin to all those things.
Alif was pierced by a memory: he floated in a skin-bound pool, naked, curled upon himself. His mind was sluggish, as if unformed; he could not distinguish between his body and the saline world around him. Suddenly the pool was lit from all sides by this very object, this non-face: time had begun then, and he had known himself to be alive.
The nexus grew brighter. Alif cowered before it, overcome by an emotion he could not identify.
Where are you going? it asked.
Alif couldn’t find his voice. He had made a grievous error. The code was unstable. As he traveled dizzily upward, no longer certain of his control over what he had created, he realized that in his zeal for innovation he had sacrificed the integrity of his knowledge. The base of the tower was blurring as data failed to cleanly replicate itself, leaving uncertainties, gaps in its theoretical DNA. The tower could not hold long. He was approaching some kind of ceiling; a point at which the super-adaptable nature of his coding scheme would no longer compensate for its inherent instability. If you told knowledge it could be anything it wanted, there was a risk it would degenerate into nothing at all.