Sail with New Freebooters

by Mike K-H

About this story

Several years ago, when I was trying to learn to write, I produced this light-hearted short story with a near future sci-fi theme. Some aspects of it are now commonplace, but the main premise is still (thankfully) fictitious to the best of my knowledge.

One very kind person flattered me by criticising it mercilessly as if it were a piece of serious literature, but I don’t think I’ll ever get round to rewriting it with her criticisms in mind.

I’ve published it in full on the net a couple of times, but I doubt if more than thirty people have seen it, so I’m re-publishing it here as a 4-part serial to make it a better fit with the short attention span we have all developed. I have also added references to a few bits of supporting material to help those to whom various aspects of the story will be unfamiliar.

UPDATE: It has become a 3-part serial because that seemed to work better.

Episode 1 - gone bush

The window shrank slowly to an icon. Excess water dribbled out of it, forming a puddle through which I read the message:

“THIS ONE’S FOR YOU, PETE SMITH. I’M GIVING YOU 48 HOURS START BEFORE I LET IT LOOSE ON THE REST OF THE WORLD. SORRY IF I’VE INTERRUPTED ANYTHING. NARAYAN.”

I switched off the modem and went outside the modified Land Cruiser to brew a coffee and think in the shade of the awning. The virus must have been sitting out there on the Net waiting for me, and only me, to sign on. I didn’t plan to let any other component of it make contact until I was ready.

Inside the Cruiser, my satellite phone rang. Caller identification was the first sensible facility they’d added to communications networks, and I’d made full use of it once it could be tied to automatic call screening. My ‘gone bush’ profile was running, and that only accepted calls from one source. I reached through the doorway and extracted the handset.

“Hi, Robin.”

“Hi, Pete. I’ve got five days’ peace and a Tsodilo commission. Are you accepting company? If so, where are you?”

“Your SatPhone’s the only number I haven’t barred. Where are you?”

“Small Qango Hill.”

I nodded. Some customer was going to get a better-than-average set of photographs of Botswana’s ancient rock paintings. The Tsodilo Hills by the Okavango Panhandle are the best-known and most prolific source, but Small Qango Hill is one of a group of rocky outcrops in the Savuti area of Chobe National Park, which also boasts a number of less well-known ones.

“OK. See you this evening. I’m just leaving Nxai Pan.” Instead of naming the small, bare campsite of which I was the sole occupant, I gave her a GPS position for a rendezvous later in the day.

She laughed. “I don’t even have to look that up. See you at the airstrip around 15:00. I have to restock in Maun. I presume we’re camping at Baines’ Baobabs.”

Robin was right on both counts. The daughter of a trading family, she’d been born in Botswana only a few years after it stopped being the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and had spent most of her school holidays in the bush with her parents. These days, well-equipped and carrying both a satellite phone and a GPS, some of the most dangerous hazards she faced were donkeys, cattle and other drivers while she was batting along the blacktop to Maun and across to the turnoff to Kudiakam Pan. If she’d had the time, she’d probably have driven all the way along the bush tracks instead.

I went back into the Cruiser and started running my virus analysing tools against Narayan’s invader. Like many of the top-of-the-range workstations around these days, it had multiple processors, but unlike them, I had the means of booting up one processor independently, with a diagnostic operating system that resided only in ROM and on CD. The operating system and the complete tool set were on read-only media and therefore immune from infection. It was just like running an external monitoring device.

First I checked all the known executable code. Nothing amiss. Then I looked at the macros and other forms of imbedded code in word processors, spreadsheets, presentation designers, appointment schedulers, drawing programs, and even the small set of advanced games I had on my system. Nothing. This was beginning to look like a real challenge.

Banging your head against a wall usually incapacitates you long before it causes any noticeable damage to the wall. It was time to take a break and stand back from the problem a bit, so I left one of my tools hunting through a hundred gigabytes of hard disk for anything that looked like a string of machine code while I took a drink, a sandwich and a pair of binoculars and went over to the shady side of a rocky outcrop known locally as a koppie.

A family of dassies (rock hyrax), looking like fat charcoal-grey guinea-pigs, scuttled back behind the nearest rocks as I approached. The ones higher up remained, watching me. Several brightly-coloured lizards were playing statues in the crevices. I finished my sandwich and swung the binoculars up to focus on a white speck circling high above an area sparsely scattered with stunted thorny acacias. Only a select few species of raptors hunt in this arid territory, and my guess was confirmed when the binoculars revealed broad, white wings with thin black bars along the trailing edge, white underbody and black head. A black-breasted snake eagle. Better than last week, when the white speck riding a thermal with a strange, dancing motion had turned out to be Botswana’s national flower - one of the polythene supermarket bags that adorn the thorn bushes around all inhabited areas.

Every environment is full of adaptive systems competing to establish themselves, some that we would classify as intelligent, others not. Once, I’d tried to get a grant to research the possibility that the world’s polyethylene molecules have become a complex adaptive system, which has managed to outsource its own species reproduction to the collective skills of humanity and its machines. The Faculty, smarting under the lashes of a media investigation into wastage of funds on trivial and irrelevant research, accused me of making a deliberate and offensive joke. I still believe that, even if that specific hypothesis was invalid, my research would have made valuable contributions to the domain of artificial intelligence.

I returned to the Cruiser. My scanner had found a pattern, or rather a pattern of patterns. A piece of dynamic art that I used as a screen saver was infected.

My tools represent very complex relationships as coloured three-dimensional models, and they were showing me an image that looked like multi-coloured coral with a white fungus growing all over it. Little white blobs were connected by fine threads that covered the surface of the coral, which represented my screen saver. Each blob represented a small segment of virus code, and each thread showed a link to another segment. Creating a tool to purge a system of this brute wasn’t going to be easy, and I still didn’t know how it had got in.

Although I can make pretty wild lateral jumps in live brainstorming sessions, my subconscious regularly does a better job, and it doesn’t give me a headache, either. I decided it was a good time to leave the campsite.

All my equipment was firmly clamped in shock-proof mountings, so I didn’t need to pack. All I did was shut down and power off, leaving only the SatPhone active. Two minutes later, I was under way, sometimes clattering along on hard corrugations, and at other times crawling through soft sand in low ratio four-wheel drive.

It was fairly hot - about forty-five Celsius - and very dry, but I always drive with the windows open and enjoy direct contact with the shimmering heat outside. If you drink plenty of water, dry heat is easy to tolerate, and although the Cruiser would happily travel at 140 kph over the hard, corrugated stretches of road with the windows shut and the aircon going full blast, that’s not my idea of fun. I don’t go into the bush to behave like a highway commuter, and in any case, even with the 200 litres of diesel that she carries, the disastrous effect on fuel consumption would mean an unwelcome detour into civilisation to fill up before I tackled each really long stage.

There’s not much to see out here in the middle of the day, but I enjoy the horizon-to-horizon view of sparse, stunted scrub. If you get out and walk, use good binoculars, and poke around under stones, there’s plenty of life; but only the birds and the smaller creatures are still active. The sort of beast you can see easily from a vehicle conserves its energy for the cooler periods around dawn and dusk: I kept rolling, arriving at the empty airstrip in the early afternoon.

I didn’t want to leave the engine running, but even minimal air-conditioning plus computer and communications gear would run my batteries pretty low over the next two hours, so I started up the auxiliary generator before settling down in front of my keyboard with a long, cool drink to hand. I stared at the fungus-covered coral image and let my mind wander.

My subconscious had covered a lot of ground already - I found myself remembering articles about human immunology, and remarking how what had once seemed almost magic had turned into an incredibly mechanical process, with funny-shaped bits fitting neatly into funny-shaped holes, and researchers finding harmless things which either latched onto the funny-shaped bits or bunged up the funny-shaped holes. Maybe I could find something common about the sites each part of this new invader chose to inhabit: I carefully tweaked some of my tools and set them loose again, then went outside to pull out the Cruiser’s side awning and set my table and chair under it.

I tried reading but I was feeling fidgety, so I went for a walk, carefully examining the ground, looking for the plants whose tubers provide a foul-tasting but life-saving source of water, and trying to read small animal tracks as I went. It kept me engrossed for a while, but I had risen early and the heat was making me sleepy. I returned to the awning, erected a camp bed, and lay on it. The warm breeze that sprang up lulled me to sleep, and was directly responsible for my rude awakening half an hour later, when I was tipped out of bed.

I lay perfectly still, eyes closed, listening and smelling, piecing together what had happened, taking great care not to excite whatever was responsible. Then I grabbed Robin’s legs and capsized her, triggering a noisy wrestling match which lasted for several minutes.

“Pax! It’s not fair that I’m ten times as ticklish as you! Let’s get something to drink.” I struggled free and stood up, panting, determined to prolong the tension as long as I could.

“Pete, you were just too tempting a target, nose in the air, catching flies and snoring away. I thought I’d forgotten to switch the engine off!” Her face was glowing under the tan, and her eyes were wide, sparkling. She played the game the same way as I did, letting us both simmer as long as possible.

Chobe maps

• Baines Baobabs. The brilliant white is Kudiakam salt pan.
• Savuti camp. Small Qango is near here.
• Makgadikgadi Pans

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