Chapter III
"So that they are, as they swear, in absolute ignorance how this fire
should come;
which is a strange thing, that so horrid an effect should have so
mean and uncertain a beginning."
-- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, February 24, 1667
Despite repeated phone calls, Taro was unable to reach Reika for the rest of that day, or the next one, either. But there was nothing he could do in that area, so instead he turned to preparations on his presentation.
Half a lifetime ago, Taro Okada had vowed to justify his failed existence by devoting himself to the destruction of an evil that, apparently, only that despised minority, the hackers, were aware of. The conversion of lowly computer manufacturer Tachibana Labs into world-dominating Tachibana Networks had proceeded at a snail's pace for fifty years, which was why it had never been prosecuted as a monopoly. The key to the company's power was the complete control of all means of communication on the planet. Like the Ministry of Information in 1984, Tachibana Networks determined what was true and what was false. The reason it had not been toppled by a spontaneous uprising of the people was because the shadowy Committee that ran Tachibana never resorted to pettiness: at the global level, Tachibana was ruthless, but its employees paid the same prices for food and luxuries as everyone else, and the company would never stoop to defending even an executive vice president who exceeded the speed limit. The only crimes the company would permit themselves were those so vast that no one had thought of writing laws against them yet. This meant that all the company had to fear were the lone hackers, attacking both from within and from without. All had failed, and all had been erased from existence, along with anyone of any importance who had ever known them.
There was a time, it seemed an eternity ago, when Taro might have been able to take Tachibana's defenses down by a frontal assault. But that was back when everyone had been rooting for Tachibana as the little PC manufacturer against the giants of the industry, companies Tachibana was to crush so thoroughly that no one today remembered their names. Young Taro the hacker wasn't interested in saving the world, he had just wanted to prove his superiority. The Knights appealed to his ego: they treated him as an equal, as an adult--despite knowing his age--when there was no other grown-up who even so much as noticed him. They made him an acolyte, initiating him into their philosophy of the One Truth and teaching him a handful of pretty tricks.
Taro was never sure what he would have done if he had had the opportunity to work out what the Knights were truly up to before the truth had been thrust into his hands: a seemingly-trivial e-mail message, read and deleted before he had thought out its meaning. It revealed the KIDS Technology the Knights had used to kill dozens of petty enemies and to lure hundreds more into pointless suicides. He had tried to contact the Knights to find out the truth, but instead was intercepted by a police cyber-stakeout.
What followed was a long period of being used and using others. The police hid his identity, while the other hackers lionized him. The crucial moment for Taro to reveal that he had had help came and went, and soon he was stuck with the reputation of the most brilliant hacker of all time, the one who had single-handedly infiltrated the Knights and sabotaged the group from the inside. Taro found it increasingly difficult to live up to this reputation. Meanwhile, the minority party in the government was running an anti-hacker campaign, and the Knights trial was a goldmine for them, in that the suspects were actually guilty of the crimes brought against them, and they invited upon themselves the hatred of the public by their unrepentant behavior. Their "One Truth" was revealed to be the false goal of all would-be tyrants: that naked power is the only goal worth pursuing, that happiness is making another do what he hates, and to make him love you for making him do it. With these kind of villains to work with, the plotters in Nagatacho ward were able to "elaborate" on the statement by the "anonymous kid hacker", and dozens of crimes unrelated to the Knights were added onto the original charges, most infamously the near-total collapse of the world's economy the year before. Taro, far more interested in the worship of his hacker followers, paid no heed as endorsements were written in his name, endorsements designed to fan the hatred of the public against the hackers. Finally there was an election, the minority party came back into power, and laws were passed, infamous laws that ended the anonymity of the Wired, laws that Tachibana would later use to legitimize their power.
The hackers now turned on their idol, but Taro had beaten them to the punch. Betrayed by those he trusted, Taro signed off the Wired, seemingly for good. And so matters would have remained if his former friends hadn't started disappearing off the face of the earth--it soon became clear that Tachibana was behind it all.
Taro had not given up on humanity, not entirely, and that was because of the fact that he had never been exposed by the sender of the KIDS System e-mail. Someone had sent that message: either the "perfect hacker" that Taro wasn't; or a member of the Knights who had realized too late the human cost of so much lust for power, and was willing to face death to see justice done. In either case, Taro felt he owed it to that sender to do something to atone for his selfishness. If he couldn't reverse the IP Registration Act, at least he could make sure Tachibana didn't make things worse.
In Taro's mind, the problem with most hackers was that they wasted their talent. They sought out secrets, but only for the pleasure of knowing what no one else did. No hacker would tell you anything important unless it was a way to increase their fame. Taro decided to replace them with a program, the 5-P algorithm, the perfect, unstoppable hacker that would provide any truth you asked of it. With 5-P, it would become impossible for Tachibana or any organization to get away with their crimes. The best part was the fact that 5-P was already in demand by the public, in the form of an intuitive search engine that could produce facts in the endless sea of Wired opinion.
The 5-P took tremendous computing power to develop, the kind that could only be obtained by a major corporation or a university. But corporate sponsorship was out of the question. Realizing it couldn't control the non-Wired world by itself, Tachibana had begun gathering allies, eight conglomerates controlling vast sectors of the world's economy. With Tachibana's security applied in the protection of the Big Eight, the small group soon came to be the only international companies on Earth. Thus, Taro placed his hopes in the university system, racing through an advanced degree and becoming a professor about the time the world government was announced. But the comforting ineptness of a government bureaucracy would not be running the university, because Tachibana had also managed to grab control of the world's higher education systems, making Taro a Tachibana employee with at least another five years before 5-P would be ready. In case anyone had any doubts remaining about Tachibana's attitude towards hackers, Tachibana then lured the cream of the crop, a self-deluded debating society called the Virtuosi, into gathering physically at Cyberia, then wiped them nearly-completely out of existence with an overdose of nanite Accela snuck into all the drinks. To make the message perfectly clear, Tachibana announced the assassination to the world at large; the world government put Japan under blockade, but most of the world and certainly the vast majority of the Japanese declared Tachibana their saviors from the "Knights Reborn".
Taro responded to the total victory of Tachibana Networks by transferring from Computer Science to Mathematics, completely changing his personality in the process. From the moment of his first interview with his new employers, Professor Okada was seen as shy, bumbling, and completely unfit to operate in the real world. The amount of knowledge on the Wired was so immense that background checks, particularly one extensive enough to dig up a hacker past that was technically part of his childhood, were prohibitively expensive. Only by making himself look harmless to everyone he knew as well as on the Wired could Tachibana possibly be fooled into unleashing his program on the world. His other alternative would have been to re-write his past, a solution that Taro saw as being the sort of thing that Tachibana would do, and hence unthinkable. He tried not to think too much that living a lie wasn't much better on the moral scale.
Taro had finally finished 5-P six months ago, but he had refrained from carrying out his plan. At the time he had justified his hesitation in terms of what the program would do to the world after Tachibana and the Big Eight had fallen. 5-P would create a world completely devoid of privacy, and wasn't the invasion of privacy Tachibana's major crime? After 5-P, the only way anyone could keep anything to themselves would be to live as Taro had lived all these years, and that was a fate Taro wished on nobody. He suspected that the world might see him more as an Oppenheimer than as an Einstein. Those reasons were certainly cause to be hesitant, but the more significant reason was his growing attraction for the chairperson of the Mathematics Department. Despite the off-putting act he put on, Reika somehow managed to see the real human being inside him. It was a long, slow relationship given the woman's strong apprehensions about crossing the line of rank, and Taro could count on one hand the number of times she had called him "Taro" instead of "Professor Okada". But for the first time in decades, someone actually cared about him, and that hurt because there was a significant chance that Taro would be forced to erase his memory in order for his plan to succeed.
Like everything else, this eventuality had been carefully thought out. If Taro learned that Tachibana was getting ready to sic the legendary Men in Black on him, he would go to the Hydrostatic Research building on campus, there to be the victim of the department's memory-erasing machine. He carried the remote control with him constantly, disguised as a soapstone mouse on his key chain. Unlike heroes in spy dramas, he didn't have access to the obscenely-expensive technology required to record memories, so once he staged this accident, there would be no going back.
This brought Taro to the present day. Reika had forced his hand for reasons he couldn't fathom as yet. Maybe he should have told her what he was doing earlier, trusted someone for once instead of keeping to himself.
"Don't trust anyone." She had told him that like she had just found it out. But for Taro, the time when this hadn't been true were the days of "once upon a time" and "happily ever after".
