The Egg Code Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  I - Back in the Day

  The Nature of Systems - 1989

  Two Views of the War - LONDON

  PITTSBURGH

  II - Dipshit, U.S.A.

  Old Man, Alone - 1998

  Our Fine Community

  III - A Bad Marriage

  Author’s Note

  Transcript of Stiessen-Hasse Meeting, June 17, 1972

  The Favorite Scarf - 1980

  Break - 1989

  IV - Another Not-Very-Good Marriage

  The Tree with Four Trunks - 1998

  Paper

  Sheesh - 1998

  V - The Terrorist

  I Want Some Answers

  The Fear of Being Touched - 1998

  The Divine Ray of Inspiration

  Coming Together

  The Morning After

  VI - Go Girl

  Portfolio

  The Plot Thickens Somewhat - 1998

  The Black Man in America

  VII - A Brief History of the Printed Word

  The Flow

  VIII - P.O.P.

  The Seedy Side of Office Politics - 1998

  Thriller - 1984

  The Plot Reaches New Levels of Thickness - 1998

  IX - Two Excerpts from Many Voices, One Vision by Madonna Hasse Skye

  The Tale of Tsin-gah and the Secret Star

  The Tale of Jen-teen and the Second Draft

  X - Promises Made

  The Concerned Parent - 1998

  Who Speaks for Our Children?

  Night!

  XI - Seeds of Discontent

  The Egg Code

  XII - The Passion of Martin Field

  Listings for the First Week of September, 1995

  The Seven Bridges of Königsberg - 1992

  Listings for the Second Week of September, 1995

  By the Balls - 1993

  Listings for the Third Week of September, 1995

  XIII - Prodigy

  A September Stroll - 1998

  Sheesh Redux

  XIV - Book Deal

  The Adam Syndrome

  Skye Versus Skye

  XV - Virus

  Chapter 2

  Your Tax Dollars at Work

  Creative Bullshit

  XVI - Promises Kept

  The Fall Campaign - 1998

  Skeletons!

  XVII - Promises Broken

  The Price of Fame

  Polymicroniphate

  XVIII - When Good Things Happen to Bad People

  The Thickness of the Plot Attains Critical Mass

  Sheesh Is Rich

  XIX - The Sad Poor Me Chronicles, Volume One

  The Disease of Disease

  Closing In

  Tales from Typographic Oceans

  XX - It Can’t Happen Here

  0001011101001101000110

  Get Down! Get Down!

  XXI - Suckass

  My Darling Boy, Who’s Going to Be a Dentist - 1966

  Sheesh at Rest - 1999

  XXII - Fuck Technology

  I Had an Unpleasant Conversation Today

  Am I Being Perfectly Clear?

  This Is the Exciting Part

  XXIII - A Brief History of the Internet

  The Third Death - 1968

  Dateline: Washington, D.C.— July 27, 1974

  Women in Science - 1988

  The Planning Stages

  XXIV - Back to the Womb

  Parthenogenesis

  Rights My Ass

  XXV - Throat

  The Rightness of Dying

  Broke

  XXVI - Survivors

  Thank You

  John Steinbeck Was a Friend of Mine

  The Rules

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For

  my parents

  and

  David Plante

  Qui librum mendis undique scatentem habet, certe non habet librum sed molestiam.

  —Johannes Froben

  The buyer of a book full of misprints does not really acquire a book but a nuisance.

  —Translation appears in Five Hundred Years of Printing, S. H. Steinberg

  ACCLAIM FOR Mike Heppner’s The Egg Code

  “A work of striking independence. . . . Our pleasure in the novel comes from Heppner’s astonishing formal inventiveness, his consistent metaphoric resourcefulness, his love of words and syntax, his superb ear for voice and dialogue, and his wonderful sense of humor. Heppner makes literary invention the real hero.” —Arizona Daily Star

  “In this impressive debut novel, Heppner tackles his complex subject with a sure hand, creating a story that heartbreakingly displays the eternal frailties of human nature.” —BookPage

  “The most impressive literary debut since Pynchon’s V. Mike Heppner is an astonishing writer, and The Egg Code plants him in the middle of our town square, eyes blazing, hands in motion, brain spinning and his mouth going a mile a minute, delivering one brilliant home truth after another.” —Peter Straub

  “The best book of the year. . . . Heppner is a bold, uncompromising author capable of negotiating the literary chasm between technological mumbo-jumbo and real emotional depth.” —Philadelphia City Paper

  “An undeniably entertaining read.” —Madison Capital Times

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to thank: Richard Abate and everyone at

  ICM, the Allan family, Linda Burnett, Nicholas Christopher,

  Michael Cunningham, Stephen Dueweke, Gary Fisketjon and

  everyone at Knopf, Joshua Furst, Gina Gionfriddo, Lauren Grod-

  stein, Gordon Haber, Victoria Haggblom, the Henfield Foun-

  dation, Marjorie Heppner, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Richard Locke

  and everyone at the Columbia University Writing Program, Priya

  Malhotra, Adam Mansbach, Tim Naylor, Betsy O’Brien, Amber

  Qureshi, Paul Selig, Dani Shapiro, Suzanne Sommerville, Peter

  and Susan Straub, Dr. Lutz Wolff, and anyone I may have forgotten.

  Special thanks to Christa Crewdson.

  In memory of Georgia Hill.

  I

  Back in the Day

  The Nature of Systems

  1989

  It had been years since a man had touched her like that. Strong hands molded her body, her hips and soft shoulders, reminding Kay of dear Macheath Tree, dead these twenty-one years. The past two decades had been hard on the woman. All she wanted now was a respectable end, maybe a nice luncheon, a kind word from the vice president. The folks from Georgetown could even send down an assistant chair to deliver a few unfelt sentiments. Today we honor . . . the usual bullshit. She’d heard it all before, starting at Harvard, where the youngsters from Biological Sciences had worked hard to destroy her husband’s program (and what an entire department couldn’t accomplish with all its collective ill will, a shattered glass stamen managed quite nicely in the spring of ’68).

  Yes, a kind word from the veep. Not this new guy, though. It wasn’t that the poor fellow was such a simp, or that he’d fudged on his military background. But they should’ve known not to pick an extremist. The right-wingers belonged here, in this building. Let’s keep the centrists in the White House, where they can’t do any harm.

  From where she now stood—head down, watching her reflection in the bright marble floor—Kay could see all the way up her dress, the pleated fringe spreading wide around her sneakers. The floors in these federal buildings were too damn shiny. Still, it excited her to watch the dress sway every time those hands pressed into her sides, fingers hot and firm against her
thick cotton underwear, his knees touching hers, forcing her legs apart, so controlled, yes, we will not miss a single step, Mrs. Tree, we will execute the steps in the proper order.

  “Sorry about the added security, ma’am.” The young man at the northeast entrance passed her wristwatch through the metal detector one last time and gave it back to her. “Inauguration,” he explained.

  “That’s all right.” She smiled, feeling sexy as she put her watch back on in front of the guard. “I love getting frisked,” she said. “It’s better than having a husband.”

  Past security, she continued down a hallway and into an empty reception area. With the swearing-in taking place across the river, most of the Pentagon was closed down for the afternoon. Kay had known George Bush for years, and had high hopes for his presidency. The media take on the new president as some sort of bumbling idiot was a joke. As anyone who knew the real story would tell you, Bush was the balls. Even back in ’73, it was Bush who’d urged President Nixon to ignore the Democrats, to insist upon his beloved rationale, national security, even if it meant endorsing a few indiscretions. This might not have been very good advice, but it certainly wasn’t cowardly . It always made Kay smile, the American public’s willingness to manufacture its own misinformation.

  On the third floor, she caught up to Mitchell Frenkle, deputy director of the DCA. He walked carefully, trying not to spill his coffee on his way past the elevators. “Hi, Kay. Recognize the joint?”

  “Sure, it never changes.”

  The man groaned. “Well, we like to play around with our acronyms every now and again, but what the hell.”

  The door to Frenkle’s office opened automatically as they reached the end of the corridor. Swissshhh . . . space age! Kay looked over her shoulder, nervous around these hi-tech contraptions. The door closed behind them.

  “Look who’s here,” Frenkle said. His outer office was spacious, with three secretaries’ desks and a leather sofa, some magazines on the coffee table. A middle-aged man in a light suit half-rose from the sofa and shook Kay’s hand.

  “NSF, I’m Barney Crain,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Tree.” Christ, she thought. First the branch, then the name—these people in Washington sure have some weird priorities.

  Still holding Kay’s hand, Crain asked, “When are you folks over at Georgetown going to send us some decent interns?”

  Kay took her hand back. “When we have some decent students, Mr. Crain.” It was returning to her now, the Washington josh. Almost a form of social currency in these parts.

  Frenkle broke in: “Crain is head statistician for the National Science Foundation. He’ll be working with us today.” He led the way into the next room and closed the door. On his desk, an answering machine fluttered its red eye—six quick flashes and then a pause. He shook his head. “I tell people to use the e-mail, they don’t listen.”

  “Give it time.” Crain tossed a pair of high-density floppies onto a round conference table and settled into his chair. Hitting Play on the answering machine, Frenkle listened to his messages, the usual Inauguration Day blather.

  “Hi, Muh-Mitch? Thuh-this is Dan here.” Coughing, the voice deepened. “That’s Mister VeePee to you, pal, heh-heh. Just kiddin’ there. Luhlisten—”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Frenkle deleted the message, then joined the others at the table. Crouching down, he inserted both disks into a hard drive and hit the power button. The lights dimmed theatrically as a sixty-inch monitor came down from the ceiling. On the screen, a blue image showed an outline of the forty-eight contiguous states. White lines curved from one point to another, like missiles launched and exploded halfway across the country.

  Blinking at the bright screen, Crain resumed his original thought. “Telephones are so bloody old-fashioned, it’s pathetic. Even the utility companies have wised up. I still remember AT&T, back in ’64, ’65, AT&T telling Paul Baran that packet switching was a doomed concept. Now they’re all lining up. You’d think this was the only thing we do.”

  Kay tried not to listen as the two men traded inside jokes about the eggheads at AT&T. She hated computer talk. She’d been around it ever since coming to Washington in 1969, and to this day she still favored the lunchtime solitude of her office to the chatter of these swashbuckling men with their hi-tech delusions. Who among them could muster up the same passion for a Strauss opera, those last liquid moments of Der Rosenkavalier , say, with the voices seeking chromaticism and yet still reaching with a backwards longing for the court and parlor? Macheath always preferred Verdi to Strauss, but he and Kay never argued about such trifles. So the man had a thing for “La donna è mobile,” so what? At least he had a wide range of interests. Botany, yes, of course, and glassmaking, but also Scottish literature, typography, Bauhaus art and architecture, combat theory, semantics, even cross-country skiing. He cared about things, you see. For all their talk of the coming information revolution, men like Frenkle and Crain were ignorant of the world beyond the network. These men craved information, but only for its statistical value. Information was something to be channeled, transmitted, systematically converted, broken down into packets and later reassembled as text and color. The last thing anyone wanted to do was read it.

  “Kay, we’re looking at an overview of the system as it stands today. I’m sure you’ve seen something like it before.”

  She pulled her glasses out of her purse, then peered up at the screen. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t been paying much attention lately.”

  “Kay’s been too busy teaching cryptology to graduate students,” Frenkle said, making it sound like an indulgence, a housewife’s distraction. Kay’s been taking a pottery class on Wednesdays.

  “God, how dull,” Crain muttered. “What’s to teach?”

  “Not much, I guess,” Kay said. This was something her youngest daughter, Lydia, had never learned. Around men, sometimes it’s best just to let things go. Leaning back in her seat, she added, “The most promising students, I pass on. I send them across the river to Frenkle.”

  “ ‘Where they are never heard from again,’ he laughed with insane abandon.” Pleased with his joke, Frenkle cut the banter short. “Anyway. Here nor there.”

  “Agreed. So, Kay, to bring you up to date . . .” Crain tapped the mouse button, causing the image on the screen to fade behind a grid. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the old ARPANET.”

  Frenkle glared across the table. “Jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you Crain?”

  “Old, new, whatever, we need to start somewhere.” A new picture hovered across the screen, depicting the original four IMPs set up by Bolt Beranek and Newman in the late sixties. Seeing this again, Kay remembered the time, her own life back then. Things were different when her husband was still alive. Macheath’s world was a world of slow communications, where one had to choose each word carefully, for every mistake meant endless backtracks, cross-outs, crumpled pages in the trash can. Had he not died in 1968, would he too have shelved such habits in favor of newer, speedier modes of communication? Had technology itself brought about this blanding of shared thought?

  “As you can see,” continued Crain, dragging his mouse to erase the map, “that system has since been replaced by a larger, more complicated array of nodes.”

  Annoyed, Frenkle set down his coffee. “You write it off so easily,” he said. “Those IMPs supported our activities for nearly two decades.”

  “Relax, Mitch. Credit due. But we all knew years ago that the network eventually would grow beyond the capacities of any single agency. If it didn’t, we would’ve failed.”

  Frenkle folded his arms. “I just want Kay to understand the topography as it stands.”

  The two men stared at each other, then smiled. It really was silly, in a way. This whole thing.

  “Okay, Mitch. Good point.” As Crain spoke, different views of the network passed across the screen. “It is now January 1989. The IMPs of the past are largely worthless, since high-speed routers—manufa
ctured by IBM and maintained by the Gloria Corporation—provide us with a more efficient means of controlling traffic. This new development, quite naturally, will diminish the role the Defense Communications Agency plays in determining network priorities.”

  “Getting out of the computer business, Mitchell?” Kay smiled.

  Frenkle paused to finish the last of his coffee. “We’ll always be around, Kay,” he said.

  Crain continued his presentation. “The demographic makeup of groups using these networks will change dramatically over the next few years. With the rise of personal computers, the Net will soon host dozens—possibly hundreds—of sites maintained by unknown individuals. Security issues will become more and more of a factor. The need to keep a clear perspective on where information is originating from, how it moves along the network, and where it winds up is of critical importance.”

  “I sense a bottom line around here somewhere.”

  “Oh, she’s good.”

  “Of course she is, Barney,” said Frenkle. “It’s Kay’s job to see the words behind the words.”

  “Well, since you asked, the problem is this.” On the screen, the map gave way to a drawing of an RS/6000, T-3 compatible bit processor. Flow arrows demonstrated a progression through an in point, into a computer core, and then out along a variety of links. The diagram did not indicate the size of the contraption; it could have been as tiny as Frenkle’s teacup or as large as the Pentagon itself.

  “What is it?” Kay asked.

  “The Gloria 21169. Your key to a better future.”

  “It’s a router,” Frenkle snapped. Crain’s sense of dramatics seemed to be getting on his nerves.

  “It’s a very bad router. Or so we think. Let me bore you with some theory for a moment.” More symbols, more diagrams. The picture on the screen clarified nothing, even though Crain’s tone of voice suggested that it did. “The network has always functioned as a hierarchy of layers. This is not likely to change. It only makes sense that as long as there is a network, there will be a distribution of roles. This is the nature of systems.”

  “Take a tip from Uncle Sam.” Frenkle rubbed his nose, feinting at each nostril with a bent finger. January allergies rustled in the throats of both men.