Crypto sci fi: The Talking Kit

[Blank Frank]

Mary tried to ignore the sobbing of her sister in the next room.  It
had been two days since They came to her village and she was still in
shock.  Two days is the minimum time to wait, Alex had said, before
Talking.  Alex was the fellow from the Engineers Sans Frontiers who
had given her the Kit.  This was not first time she had to use it, but
it was over a year ago... she tried not to remember.

The ESF had come into her wartorn country, as they always did
whereever they saw the poverty that follows tyranny.  The Engineers,
Mary had heard, got their money from some anonymous group of
California Norte businessmen, from that place they called
Sallay-Vallay, but Mary knew little of such distant things.  They had
the geopolitical immunity of the Red Circle or Docteurs Sans Frontiers
agencies but were more like the Corps of Engineers.

The ESF had come to build (or rather, repair) the roads into the
villages.  This was permitted by the Rulers, it was after all free
help.  They could set up  generators but that was about all that the
Rulers wanted the peasants to have.  There were not enough trusted
police to monitor all the calls if every village had phones, after
all.

Besides the bulldozers, chainsaws, and other machinery for turning
jungle into road, the ESF brought equiptment that let them stay in
touch with their headquarters.  They had some kind of telephones, that
didn't need wires.  But their communications were as controlled as the
peasants.  Armed soldiers loitered around the engineers' base and kept
an ear towards the phone station.  The ESF were guests of the Rulers,
dismissable at their whims.  Much like the Soldiers dismissed
peasants in night raids, only with less permenance.

.......


During her regular chores, Mary snuck out to The Place where she had
buried It.  Under the jungle mould was an olive drab case that she
brushed off and lifted out onto the ground.  She unlatched it and took
out the metal box within.  Then she put the waterproof case back under
cover.  She moved away from that site, taking the metal box.

Sitting down, she took a key from around her neck and unlocked it.
Inside was a pocket-sized computer, a solar panel and some batteries,
and a small tin that originally held mints but now had electronics
inside and a pair of buttons and LEDs outside. There were some other
cables in there too.

Mary knew none of these words, indeed she could not read or write.
But Alex had explained to her how to use it, and made her demonstrate
what he had taught until she was confident.

Mary slid the little black stone on the side of the larger, silvery
slab with the shiny window.  It beeped, lit up, then pictures appeared
in the glowing window.  A little blue line at the bottom of the window
was  most of the width of the window, which was good: it
meant she wouldn't need to fill up the little yellow cylinders, which
took a day.  You had to put the cylinders into metal holders in the
back of the blue plate and then leave the plate in the sun for a day.
Blue side up.  And the cylinders had to be pointed the right way, though

there were little pictures near the holders to show you ---the
cylinders had a nipple on one end and were flat on the other.  The
ends had different markings, too, one like the cross worn by the
missionaries who occasionally visited, and one a single line.

It was also possible to make fuel by turning the handle of a little
gadget that Mary had seen, which was good because you didn't have to
wait for the sun, but she didn't have one of those.  One of her
neighbors had a radio that worked with such a handle; turning the
handle for a minute would play about half an hour's worth of music
from the one station that they could hear.  You could see inside this
radio, and there was a coiled spring in there, and it rapidly turned the

shaft of something that actually made the fuel for the cylinders.
Turning the handle coiled the spring, which then turned the
fuel-maker.  How spinning a shaft could make fuel was beyond Mary's
comprehension, but it worked.  The missionaries had been impressed by
Mary's ability to turn fur into fine thread with a spinning shaft, but
you could *see* that; making radio-fuel by spinning was invisible.
That radio had also been a gift from another fellow with the ESR.

The little window now showed a padlock, which told Mary that the box
had checked itself over and was healthy.  She also looked at the sides
of the box, and saw that the wax along its sides was unscratched.  It
wasn't wax exactly, it was wax that hardened into stone, "metal poxxi"
Alex had called it.  It made it very difficult to open the window-box
(except for where you put the cylinders into it), and nearly
impossible to open and put back together without it being evident.
But no one had found the buried case or opened the locked tin or
changed the insides of the window-box.  Alex had explained that she
was trusting the box to protect her secrets, and that if someone
tampered with it it might tell them.  Mary buried these gifts well when
she could not have them with her directly.

Mary studied the box in her hands.  The green thunderbolt of the ESF
was blinking in the window now.  She touched it, and recited a phrase
which she had spoken to the box when Alex had made the box "hers".
Alex had said to memorize that phrase, and tell no one.  And to speak
it only to the box, and only when you are alone with the box.  The
phrase itself made little sense, it was a rhyme her daughter had come
up with when she was younger.  The box, for its part, seemed to know
her voice, because she had to repeat here rhyme a few times when she
had that bad cold.  After a moment, the box chimed and flashed a
picture of Alex as a way of greeting her, then presented several
pictures.

She touched the picture of someone talking.  This caused the scene in
the window to change, presenting her with two little colored squares.
One of them would make the box remember what she said; the other went
back to the first set of window pictures.  Mary touched the first
square and began talking.  When she talked louder, the square was
brighter, and when she spoke softer, it was dim.  Finally she stopped
talking, and after a few seconds the box knew she was done.

Now the box showed her arrows which she knew let her listen to her
message, and decide to send it, save it, or forget it.

She listened to a few seconds of it to make sure it worked. She didn't
think she sounded like the voice she heard, but Alex had said that you
hear yourself differently, and the voice from the box was saying, in
her language, what she had just said.  She wiped away a tear, for she
had described what They had done to her sister's village.

....

Mary put the computer in one pocket, then remembered that the she had
to check that some of the cylinders had fuel for the tin.  Again, the
cylinders had to point in the right direction, but there were pictures
showing how.  She put some into the holders on the bottom of the tin
and pressed a red protrustion, which caused a red light to
light.  When she stopped pressing, the light went off.  This meant
that the tin had fuel too.  She put the tin, with cylinders still in
their holders, into a pocket on the other side, and trudged off
further into the forest.

Now she had to find one of the wires.

........

Which had she used before?  The one by the East Hill she remembered,
so this time she would go right at the Big Rock and use the wire on
the West Hill.  Alex had explained that when you use a wire, everyone
can hear you, so its important to use different wires and different
times, so anyone who'se trying to find you has a harder time of it.

........

She rested after she found the tree with the wire.  She ate some hard
bread
and cheese, and her mind drifted to the story Alex had told her.  The
window-box remembers what you said to it.  It makes what you said
"smaller" and hides it in a krypt ---the missionaries had mentioned
krypts, they apparently kept corpses in them, something that disgusted
her, but these were strangers, from far away, after all.  Maybe they
didn't have wood to burn to purify the bodies, so they *stored*
them... ick.  So the window box, picking up the train of thought,
takes my voice, shrinks it, hides it, then tells it to the tin...

Mary jerked, realizing that she might have forgotten to bring the
cables, but she had grabbed them without realizing it, they were in
the same pocket as the tin.  She didn't want to have to make the trip
out to the wire twice.

The tin uses the wire to shout my hidden voice, she mused.  How
ironic, They try to keep us silent, so we are forced to shout ---with
hidden voices.

And Alex, miles away, was able to hear the inaudible shout, unhide it,
and pass it on.  It was like the radio Mary's neighbor had, she
realized, only the radio shout was not hidden.  Alex had explained
that even if They were listening, they would not hear her voice on
their radios.

And while Mary could only talk to Alex, Alex explained that he could
talk (and write!) to people far away.  Many people; and all their
conversations could be private.  Mary didn't see how this was
possible, her Talker only worked with Alex in the field camp, but
that's all she needed and Alex said it made it easier to use if it
worked this way.

Mary pressed the red button again, and the light indicated the
batteries hadn't dislodged.  She found one cable and plugged one end
into the tin, attached the other to the wire which went up into the
tree.  Then she took another cable and connected the window box to the
tin.  The ends of the cables had different shapes and there was only
one way to fit them together.

Ok, now she was ready to shout.  She pressed a different, green button
on the tin, which caused a green light to glow.  This button stayed
pushed-in when she took her fingers away.

Then she went to the window-box, and found the picture of the letter.
She tapped this twice, and a picture of two gears turning was animated
on the screen.  There was also a short line displayed, which grew as
minutes passed.  This was like the fuel-line, the longer the line the
more voice had been shouted.  In fact, as Mary waited, she saw the
fuel-line shrink.

But the gears stopped and the picture changed back to the green
thunderbolt.  This meant that her voice had been sent.  She hoped Alex
would listen to it soon, because it was urgent.  She knew that Alex
didn't have to be listening, that his window-box would hold her voice
for him like it held it during the jungle-walk to the wire.

She pressed the green button again and the glow stopped.  She then
moved the stone on the window box and its window darkened.  Pulling
the cables loose, she slipped them into her pocket, hid the end of the
wire, and departed.



......

A lot had happened.  Their had been more fighting, and distant flashes
and booms, and talk that They had been replaced.  Mary had heard of no
more raids for some time, and people from the "new" goverment had
eventually visited and explained that Fear was over.  They even tried
to explain a list of "rights" or "freedoms" that Mary now had.  Mary
thought this was rather scary, perhaps a trap, but over the months
that followed she saw that one could speak, or travel, or meet freely
and that They did not roam at night any more.

There had been talk that the Gringos had helped the resistance, which
had been hopelessly weaker than the well armed Rulers had been.  There
was now talk that vehicles with the ESF's green thunderbolt had been
seen in the city, and so Mary found an excuse to travel there.

She stayed in a church there, which was accustomed to helping the
locals when they came to town, and had the priest there try to contact
Alex
through the ESF people in town.  During the last day she could stay
before returning, the priest explained that he had contacted Alex but
that he was unable to visit; but he had sent something for her.

The priest held a small black box in his hand, different from the ones
in her Talking kit, and led her to another room.  He turned on a large
box with a window that glowed, but showed no picture.  He slid the
black box into an opening in the large glowing box, and moving
pictures appeared in the big window.   There were rows of Outsiders,
dressed more like the missionaries than Alex's more jungle adapted
garb.  The priest explained.

"This is a movie of the Gringo Rulers, and they are deciding what to
do about the Tyrants they helped us evict.  Many of them distrusted
the Tyrants but had no evidence of his crimes ---did you know that all
our
telephones were listened to, back then?"

"Anyway, this is a real movie.  About four months ago.  The Gringos
are trying to deciding if the Atrocity stories have any truth.  This
was hard for them, because they are far away, you know, and They
controlled what the world thought about us.  But this is the meeting
where they decided to help us."

That is nice, Mary interrupted, somewhat hypnotized by the moving
pictures.  But what has this to do with me?

"Look there.  Do you recognize him?"  Alex was there, he was facing
the rows of people dressed like missionaries, and he was holding
something up.  Everyone was looking at him.  What an odd thing to send
me, Mary thought; I can't make out his face very well.

"Wait, dear, I have to turn the volume up." said the priest, twisting
a knob.  And Mary heard that voice.. the one that the window-box
repeats when she talked to it.. saying what Mary had said.. to the
Gringo
Rulers..

(c) 2000