One’s and Zero’s by Shawn C. Baker
One’s and Zero’s
by Shawn C. Baker
It was in 1957 that it happened. A young lad then, I lived in Ohio with my mother, but had been spending the previous several days in New York visiting her older sister. We were on the subway coming back from some shopping excursion or something when suddenly my eyes began to burn. The uncomfortable and briefly frightening sensation lasted only a minute, and somehow neither my mother nor my aunt experienced similar symptoms. But when we arrived at the last stop before we were to exit something else started to happen.
First there was the scream from the other end of the car. This coincided perfectly with what my memory can only show me as a rapid onset of startling hallucination. As a seven-year-old kid I had no idea as to what that was or what exactly was happening, but the scream fit perfectly with my vision’s almost instantaneous shift. Everywhere the mundane and dirty colors of the subway car surged and snapped, fracturing off into cartoon horrors; impossibilities that were terrifying to one reared with seven solid years of the world’s limitations and restrictions sewn into him.
I was just learning the world and now it was dissolving.
How long this all lasted or what exactly happened in the real world while the drug took my immature mind to unknown depths of space and time I do not exactly know. My guardians’ accounts have always bordered on being as mangled as my own, as both women tell of the interminable period of terrifying speculation and crisis as their son/nephew began screaming and acting sick and disturbed. In the end they brought me to the hospital, where an apparent outbreak of madness had the building turned into a jam-packed frenzy that my mother later told me incited ideas of the end of the world in her.
Several long hours in a waiting room, surrounded by other people trying to find out why their husbands or mothers or children were screaming and pissing and laughing and all of a sudden going insane. That was the cure. Just the time it took to fade out. My aunt tells me almost every time I see her without fail how amazing it was when all of that noise and trauma and pain just stopped, all of it almost instantaneously. Years later we would discover through investigative journalism and the release of declassified documents how the CIA had been experimenting with the then fledgling hallucinogenic compound LSD-25 on the unsuspecting populace of the country. One of the incidents often quoted as an example was that of an undercover agent, a misting bottle and the New York Subway system circa, you guessed it, nineteen fifty-seven.
You always read about stuff like this, disaster brushing up against the lives of so many people, but it becomes surreal once you become one of those people who were there, as opposed to just a bystander reading about it.
Any way, it was this incident that I trace everything back to.
Returning to Dayton Ohio I resumed my childhood, but somehow, as time progressed and my brain and personality developed, some weird things began happening to me.
Synesthesia is the name given to the phenomena of merging senses. Like “seeing” music or tasting color, this is a deep-rooted occurrence within the outpost of the senses, and it marks a operating level of the brain that is unlike the typical when dealing with everything from the aforementioned colors and sounds to even more complicated concepts such as mathematical equations or units of time.
Imagine being a nine-year-old boy, sitting down to do your math homework one day, a subject you normally hate, and the numbers themselves begin to move and appear before your very eyes as not just shapes but shapes within a larger context.
Think of caveman hieroglyphics. The abstract symbols and images are not the things they were drawn to represent. So to I learned as a young child that the numbers of our mathematical system were not the things they represent. We have always been told that math is an abstract concept; I was just the first modern man to see the numbers for what they truly were.
I will never forget the feeling of bizarre isolation and bewilderment that set in on that first day when I saw the intelligence behind the number three. That was the one that appeared to me first. Indescribable in current language except to say it was something like the idea of three individual limbs, all connected through purpose instead of form. In my head I heard static for a second and thought of its intent to communicate. I do not remember much after this. It is my view now, looking back, that from that point on they were communicating with me all of the time, certainly through all of my acceleration through mathematics. They communicate unlike us, not with words or movements even but in an advanced network of conceptsÉ it’s all so hard to frame in words. Like trying to make someone else understand how important an aspect of a dream felt; I just can’t pass along the experience.
This was something I learned the hard way, as the more sustained in my new discoveries I became at this young age, the more the adults around me began to worry. Words like autism were bandied about, and my mother began to pray every night that her only son would be okay. What no one understood was that as it moved around inside me I began to change for the better.
Eventually around my tenth birthday I was admitted to a neuro-logical research and treatment unit at the nearby University as an inpatient. Apparently everyone was worried that I had gotten worse. Remarkably however, one thing pointing to my functioning was the fact that my attitude and schoolwork had never been so good.
At the University I was under the constant surveillance of a Dr. Connelly. My time here lasted several years, however in my growing understanding of the abstractions surrounding our human world this did not appear to be the case. This is a strange period in my life when I spent as much “time” in some far off place within my head interacting with the alien concepts I was struggling with as I did being conscious of the pristine hallways of the University’s hospital.
The numbers were showing me secret codes to access all manner of reality. Apparently they had been trying to do so with various humans for centuries. The number three explained to me it’s attempts to enlighten various people within our race who would receive his messages as the number 111, but mostly just took the phenomenon at face value and assigned some typical religious scenario or, his words, “new age gobbledygook” to it.
Three was the harbinger. I understood everything and wanted more, and it obliged by showing me vistas of existence and understanding on a deeper, more primal level than possibly any man had seen in millennia.
Of course it was about this time when Dr. Connelly began suspecting something of importance was happening within me. My penchant for advanced number theory, as a twelve-year-old boy blew everyone away, so much so that Connelly began conducting his further inquiries in this area in private, so as not to alarm the general populace of the hospital staff.
Eventually his work leaked out through one of many CIA plants gathering intelligence within the University, and an emissary from Wright Patterson air force base was sent out to meet with Connelly. Another day I’ll never forget among all of those I have forgotten was the day that Dr. Connelly pulled me aside and told me that I would thereafter be out of his hands. The government tech boys had gotten wind of my developing abilities and evidently had some kind of case file to compare it to. They were taking me back with them to the air force base.
The numbers in me jumped at the opportunity, but the decaying twelve-year-old boy saw the final death of any hopes that I would be able to have a normal childhood ever again.
Wright Patterson is a building on a plot of land in the human city of Dayton, Ohio. It is located in an area denoted as a “State”, within a larger context of many states, all comprising one massive world entity, The United States of America. Within the many walled rooms and chambers I was assigned my home in an area called Sub Sector B. This was my home, my school, and my playground from twelve to seventeen. Here I had my bed, my desk, various odds and ends of toys allotted to me in a half-assed attempt to not completely destroy my human qualities as a child. In fact, out of all of the “subjects” I encountered in Sub Sector B, I had the most toys. The amount was actually amusingly disproportionate. The others (I never knew what any of them were there for) clung to their childhoods in reality. They cried for their mothers, fathers and friends. They wanted to see the sun. The “doctors” that presided over all of us were depriving them of things of that world to try and stimulate their work. With me however, it was just the opposite. They wanted to anchor what they called my “rapidly fading humanity” in an attempt to try and gradient my metamorphosis.
They were afraid of what I was becoming, but wanted it too.
I had no interest in the toys. They were the belongings of someone who had ceased to exist almost entirely by this point. Three months into the program and all I wanted to do was work on the computers they gave to me. At first they baffled me. Intrigue filled me as I studied the intricate algorithms and equations that fed the minds of these massive, artificial brains.
I wanted to understand these mechanical beings that lived on numbers because in them for the first time in a long time I found someone I could relate to.
Here were electronic synapses, the same as in me, in us, except housed in massive silicone or metal chassis and chips.
Machines that operated like I did.
The computers themselves added an entirely new realm to my relationship with the numbers. Now there was a mutual playground; a physical place where I could meet them face to face and learn more about reality from them.
They had a mission for me.
This time Three came with Four, and Four promised that soon I would meet his superior, Five. After that they told me, the numbers became very important. Six was instrumental in our Universe, but had vowed not to take an active role with humans ever again after a debauched incident with a Scottish mystic. Seven was the inverse of Six, in metaphysical terms, and the last two were of such a nature that I would not be able to actively discuss them until my training was advanced in many ways.
What were those ways?
The mission.
The mission was complex, with many little moves over the course of years and years that would eventually add up to a massive proliferation of the numerical forces all over the human world, binding mankind so tightly to numbers that the numbers themselves could start to control us, guiding us silently in ways that they felt would benefit the overall course of nature.
This would be accomplished in the early stages by my working with the fledgling computers; streamlining them, rebuilding them, shrinking them so that they could fit any- where. Watches, cars, kitchens, eventually even in our bodies. Chips to track and control, impregnate and nurture. I would be the bridge between my race and theirs.
Sound like science fiction? This was decades ago, and if you think I’m crazy, take a look at the world you live in. Think about the products and machines that enhance and simplify your life. Think about the chip that might be in your dog, or the Senator that argues in the latest Newsweek for putting them in babies. Think about the U.S. economy, no longer on a gold standard. Your money is not based on anything of this physical world, rather it is based on percentages; credit, interest and profit. In other words, numbers.
Shortly after the final time they contacted me I made the first of my breakthroughs. I began moving around the ideas of vacuum tubes, or analog signals, which were the capturing of natural, physical signals and sampling them with ones and zeros. Even the natural world we were dealing with would be excised in favor of the Number’s representation of them.
Years later we would apply this to people and places themselves with the advent of virtual reality.
My progress accelerated as the numbers moved my mind in new ways. My humanity became entwined with the abstract existence of the numbers within me, so that I could effortlessly intuit how best to maneuver any problems that came my way in their regards. Equations became an inter-dimensional language to me, a means of communicating and exchanging. My overseers at the hospital became amazed at my progress, but they also became more frightened than ever.
Something was going to break.
The world began to change. Digital technology began to proliferate. The ideas associated with “Living” began to change.
Rumors of course, as is their nature, rose throughout the years. We go from immature everyday sciences to handheld computers and telephones in under fifty years and well, let’s just say since previous development had appeared slow and steeped the fringe elements that question this kind of thing can come up with nothing but alien spacecraft scenarios.
Or Atlantis. Yeah, that one I love.
Of course the real answers are always right in front of human beings, we have just trained ourselves not to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. Who needs intelligences from Alpha Centauri or wherever when you can communicate with the very building blocks of the everyday, material world around you.
I sold the human race out to the Numbers and we’re that much better for it.
What’s next?
…
This is where the communique stopped. Three years ago this came through on a closed circuit computer line, deposited in every email account nationwide. Service providers, frightened by the sheer size of what they called the ultimate email prank, contacted the appropriate government branch. They investigated and quickly became both baffled and spooked. Tracking of the message they found, was somehow impossible. This, of course, was unheard of. My agency was contacted and myself assigned.
Everywhere, the top levels of governments were growing nervous and afraid. And when too many different countries get paranoid they start getting antsy with their trigger fingers. Who can blame them?
Was this a prank?
Was this a threat?
Was this a warning, unfinished, disrupted by treachery soon to descend on everything and everybody? Or just select targets?
What everyone wanted to know was, “am I a target”?
I didn’t know the answers to these questions, but I knew where to begin looking.
If someone wanted to breach that many email accounts at once, all over the world, there is only one place to begin.
Echelon.
It has been a lesser “known” fact for several years that the governments of the world began collaborating on a top secret globe-spanning information collecting program that culminated within the last two decades with the installation of various satellite bases whose mission was to “catch” and filter all communications in the modern world. The program, named Echelon, receives all text, telephone and Internet usegroup transmissions or postings and filters them for specific words and phrases. Echelon, the most advanced and effective intelligence “weapon” in history is the only known means the sender could have used to send their message to as wide an audience as they did. Only thing is, how do you crack into a system as massive, and secret, as Echelon and piggyback-flip it’s signal for your own independent means without getting caught?
Of course this has insinuations bouncing off of every wall. Espionage, shadows of the cold war, yadda yadda yadda, you see where this is going.
People are getting nervous.
Correction, the wrong people are getting nervous.
I’ve been on this almost since the beginning and there’s no sign of an answer, because on all official levels no one in the US, UK, or any other European government will acknowledge Echelon’s existence, so that pretty much hinders my investigation.
The top-secret US intelligence agency I work for (one it’s no use touting the name of here because you wouldn’t have ever heard of it anyway) doesn’t even loosen people’s tongues. My badge is recognized and to a degree feared, yet it does nothing here, and that in and of itself should go to show how zip-lipped this whole Echelon situation is.
Does it exist? Yeah, it exists.
Will any of the maybe three hundred human beings in the world who know it exists acknowledge it in any way shape or form? No, of course not. But the men who punch my code still want me to track down the bandit who cracked the secret that doesn’t exist.
Confusing? You don’t know the half of it.
I find myself in uncharted waters on a daily basis. What’s worse is there’s a general type of panic spreading over a large portion of the upper offices, trickling down to many of the underlings I have to deal with as I make my rounds trying to drum up some kind of connection or idea as to who our perp is and what his actions mean. Is this science fiction nonsense? By the very nature of his words I find his story more than believable. If science and the sins of the CIA had created some kind of numbers mutant, capable of manipulating the building blocks of our computer reality, wouldn’t that at least come the closest to solving my unanswerable riddle? What that bodes as far as future action I know not, but it makes me think that it might be a good idea for everyone in the world to pull out the old wind up alarm clocks, maybe go buy a book on survival in the wild and start stocking canned goods, complete with a manual can-opener. If there is someone out there who can manipulate even the most mundane aspects of our digital world, well, we could be looking at a more progressive future, as is hinted at by several lines within the confessional, or we could be looking at something slightly akin to that Emilio Estevez movie, the one where all the machines take over and make an attempt to exterminate humanity in order to have the planet to themselves.
Either way, at least my snub-nose thirty-eight isn’t digital.
As I type this I sit on a flight to Madagascar. Some random document search turned up a prospective clue and I’m to investigate. Out in the thick of the jungle there appears to be some kind of large satellite base that has suddenly just popped up on our radar. It wasn’t there yesterday, or the day before, but by god, it’s there now and all the brass are freaking out. Brandy for breakfast, brandy for lunch, the Para-military anti-paranoia diet. All it really does is make everyone I have to deal with that much more difficult to deal with. I don’t know exactly why I’m writing all this down, logging the whole damned ordeal. I’ve always felt a kind of catharsis in writing things down, and that has perhaps never been truer than now. I talk to the page like it’s someone who can relate; someone who can understand and comfort me.
But it’s just a screen on a computer. An allocating sequence of one’s and zero’s that…
…
…
Maybe they do understand. Maybe they sent the satellite transmission that exposed their base in order to bring me to them.
Are the numbers actively recruiting?
Suddenly, as the treetops of the jungle come into view I realize that they have arranged all of this.
Everything.
And I think to myself, they have been listening all this time. They can and do relate, and it is perfectly within their power to comfort and understand me. Because after all, we’re all just samples of something bigger, and if they are here to show us how to improve the sample rate, who am I to argue?
Copyright 2005 Shawn C. Baker