Read The Celestial Instructi0n for Free Online Page B

did, the supranational extent and infiltration
of the Crux into political and economic life or its hundreds of billions of
dollars in wealth scattered from Luxembourg to the Isle of Wight; nor did Hu
fear the Church’s mercenaries or assassins working as if by the fear of the
word of a God, or something very far beyond God. He did fear their incompetence
and meaningless viciousness. Casual, arbitrarily applied violence incurs many
wasted motions, Hu thought. Apply material force only to achieve a specific
end. You amplify that force only when it is coordinated within an overarching
plan.
    Now, Hu respected the Church of the Crux even less
after his team had broken the Crux database of confessionals and operations. They
had never suspected that the firmware in their laptop batteries could transmit
a trojan behind their firewall. This was ironic, as the reason why we
collaborated with the them in the first instance was because whatever the US
Department of Commerce knew, therefore, the Crux knew and, in turn, we knew.
They had no idea.
    Stuxnet and Duqu were just toys compared to the
seemingly mystical powers of his children to conceal and nuance covert channels
from the ordinary noise of life. Hu looked at the dusty display of an
electronic picture frame, now inactive; besides it, in a plastic bag, an ordinary
battery-powered toothbrush, returned to China because it stopped working after
a few months plugged into American’s houses and the de facto network of the
power grid. Listening and recording. GPS, power fluctuations, the echo of
induced data flows from routers, laptops, access points and servers. Day in and
day out. Returned for salvaging its toxic metals and its encrypted gold. What
is it a toothbrush knows? As it turns out, passwords, statements and billets
doux, commercial letters of intent and other intimate designs. A cordless
toothbrush!
    How does a snake emerge from the chaos of subatomic
soup? A description of complex organization animates itself. The knowledge of
good and evil itself is easily transmitted through anything capable of conveying
information, whether overt, covert, side effect, or completely unintentional. Much
simpler than throwing a clump of mammalian DNA in a marriage-bed: is something
in the world the case, or not? That whereof one can speak, one may not be
silent. That one original bit is the basis of everything.
     
    The boundary between organic life and an electronic
computer virus is permeable, diffuse, diaphane. An act of intercourse transmits
a score or so megabytes of data, how much more so in the simplest network
processor? This time we are subverting, denaturing a tool blindly relied upon
by the West; the next time—sometime after my life on this earth—we will
transmit engineered life, first here, then throughout the universe as simply as
lighting a kerosene lamp or guttering a candle. And we will be the masters of
those we engineer as certainly as one who fills a pond with carp.
    He thought of the encrypted message he would send
to Voide through one of the church attorneys. Not gloating, not threatening,
simply encouraging to complete their assigned task. Their attorneys make a poor
shield when facing four million men, five trillion dollars, and eight thousand
years.
    In fact, Manager Hu at this instant was the most
powerful man on earth. He bent his spotted hand with the frayed serge cuff
toward the teacup. The West was hefting rocks while the East was fletching
quarrels. Now, the West ignores its systematic vulnerability to network
attacks, even as it depends more heavily upon its networked civilization. Meanwhile,
China has learned the power of tongues: it knows how to cast spells. Spells
that can bind, blind, confuse, and behead.
    But for now that power depends upon absolute
secrecy, waiting for the overwhelming stroke of an electronic sword.

Chapter 16
     
    After sleeping most of the day until the sky was
darkening again under the cool incoming fog, Joex set up his netbook