she’s on board the train now, Maxine sees no reason to stop clicking—she clicks on the hostesses’ toe rings, on the chili-glazed rice crackers in the Oriental Party Mix they bring, on the festively colored toothpicks which impale the chunks of tropical fruit on the drinks, you never know, it could be the next click—
Which eventually it is. The screen begins to shimmer and she is abruptly, you could say roughly, taken into a region of permanent dusk, outer-urban somehow, no longer aboard the train, no more jolly engineer or bodacious waitstaff, underpopulated streets increasingly unlit, as if public lamps are being allowed to burn out one by one and the realm of night to be restored by attrition. Above these somber streets, impossibly fractal towers feel their way like forest growth toward light that reaches this level only indirectly . . .
She’s lost. There is no map. It isn’t like being lost in any of the romantic tourist destinations back in meatspace. Serendipities here are unlikely to be in the cards, only a feeling she recognizes from dreams, a sense of something not necessarily pleasant just about to happen.
She senses dope smoke in the air and Vyrva at her shoulder with coffee in a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER . “Holy shit. What time is it?”
“Not that late,” Justin sez, “but I think we should log off pretty soon, no telling who’s monitoring.”
Just as she was getting comfortable.
“This isn’t encrypted? Firewalled?”
“Oh, heavily,” sez Lucas, “but if somebody wants in, they’ll get in. Deep Web or whatever.”
“That’s where this is?”
“Way down. Part of the concept. Trying to stay clear of the bots and spiders. A robots.txt protocol is OK for the surface Web, and well-behaved bots, but then there’s rogue bots who aren’t just ill-mannered, they’re mighty fuckin evil, the instant they see any disallow code, they home right in.”
“So better to stay deep,” Vyrva sez. “After a while it can get to be an addiction. There’s a hacker saying—once you’ve gone Deep, never get back to sleep.”
They have reconvened downstairs at the kitchen table. The more loaded the partners get and the more smoke in the air, the more comfortable they seem to grow talking about DeepArcher, though it’s hacker stuff Maxine has trouble following.
“What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.”
“The crazy shit VCs used to go for,” as Justin recalls. “Back then, ’98, ’99, some of the places they were putting their money? You’d have to be a lot weirder than DeepArcher to even get them to raise their eyebrows.”
“We were almost too vanilla for them,” Lucas agrees. “Our design precedents happened to be pretty solid, for one thing”
According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.”
“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”
“At random.”
“At pseudorandom.”
To which the guys have also added designer linkrot to camouflage healthy pathways nobody wants revealed. “It’s really just another maze, only invisible. You’re dowsing for transparent links, each measuring one pixel by one, each link vanishing and relocating as soon as it’s clicked on . . . an invisible self-recoding pathway, no chance of retracing it.”
“But if the route in is erased behind you, how do you get back out?”
“Click your heels three times,” Lucas sez, “and . . . no wait,
Which eventually it is. The screen begins to shimmer and she is abruptly, you could say roughly, taken into a region of permanent dusk, outer-urban somehow, no longer aboard the train, no more jolly engineer or bodacious waitstaff, underpopulated streets increasingly unlit, as if public lamps are being allowed to burn out one by one and the realm of night to be restored by attrition. Above these somber streets, impossibly fractal towers feel their way like forest growth toward light that reaches this level only indirectly . . .
She’s lost. There is no map. It isn’t like being lost in any of the romantic tourist destinations back in meatspace. Serendipities here are unlikely to be in the cards, only a feeling she recognizes from dreams, a sense of something not necessarily pleasant just about to happen.
She senses dope smoke in the air and Vyrva at her shoulder with coffee in a mug that reads I BELIEVE YOU HAVE MY STAPLER . “Holy shit. What time is it?”
“Not that late,” Justin sez, “but I think we should log off pretty soon, no telling who’s monitoring.”
Just as she was getting comfortable.
“This isn’t encrypted? Firewalled?”
“Oh, heavily,” sez Lucas, “but if somebody wants in, they’ll get in. Deep Web or whatever.”
“That’s where this is?”
“Way down. Part of the concept. Trying to stay clear of the bots and spiders. A robots.txt protocol is OK for the surface Web, and well-behaved bots, but then there’s rogue bots who aren’t just ill-mannered, they’re mighty fuckin evil, the instant they see any disallow code, they home right in.”
“So better to stay deep,” Vyrva sez. “After a while it can get to be an addiction. There’s a hacker saying—once you’ve gone Deep, never get back to sleep.”
They have reconvened downstairs at the kitchen table. The more loaded the partners get and the more smoke in the air, the more comfortable they seem to grow talking about DeepArcher, though it’s hacker stuff Maxine has trouble following.
“What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.”
“The crazy shit VCs used to go for,” as Justin recalls. “Back then, ’98, ’99, some of the places they were putting their money? You’d have to be a lot weirder than DeepArcher to even get them to raise their eyebrows.”
“We were almost too vanilla for them,” Lucas agrees. “Our design precedents happened to be pretty solid, for one thing”
According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.”
“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”
“At random.”
“At pseudorandom.”
To which the guys have also added designer linkrot to camouflage healthy pathways nobody wants revealed. “It’s really just another maze, only invisible. You’re dowsing for transparent links, each measuring one pixel by one, each link vanishing and relocating as soon as it’s clicked on . . . an invisible self-recoding pathway, no chance of retracing it.”
“But if the route in is erased behind you, how do you get back out?”
“Click your heels three times,” Lucas sez, “and . . . no wait,
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