ANALOG PROPERTIES OF DIGITAL CIRCUITS

ANALOG PROPERTIES OF DIGITAL CIRCUITS

By Andrew Paul Grell

“First, let me say good work being able to contact me. But why on earth would I need a mask? I don’t leap over tall buildings in a single bound, you know, or wear my underwear on the outside, either. And I’ll save you the trouble of asking your next question. I don't have an origin story. I have a hypothesis about what happened. One hypothesis. Obviously neither collectively exhaustive nor, of course mutually exclusive. A sufficient but likely not necessary condition. I’m as much in the dark about the particulars as you are, Toots.” Regent Osgood was ‘cooperating’ in an off-book facility just off Center Street in Manhattan’s civil administration area, tucked between Mr. Jimmy’s Dumpling House and the Mah Jong hangout in Columbus park. The room, complete with the mandatory K-cup machine and coffee accoutrements, could have been used for conferences in any second-tier law practice. Except for the four sets grommets on the table one would assume were for power and data cables but were more suited for shackles and cuffs. Some nuts sunken into the floor were likely to bolt down chairs. President Spade’s visage hung from one champagne-colored wall, next to an American flag and a bit of heraldry bearing the motto “Simul Justus et Pecador.” Appropriate.

“Would you mind telling us your hypothesis?” G-7 Morris Grady’s irritation that he had been placed in charge of a woo-woo case, an X-File episode, was clearly evident in is his voice. X-Files weren’t real, and neither was the Fringe Division.

“Depends. Ever been a ranch hand? A cowboy? Or are you a city slicker? Rhetorical question, of course. You’re from Brooklyn, you went to Erasmus Hall for High School and then Fordham. So I’ll talk about the hypothesis under the rubric that I was on a U.N. sanctioned, United States supported environmental mission to Mongolia. The part they used to call Outer Mongolia. I’m a rancher with a PhD. I help other ranchers, well, ranch. My purview was to identify range and arable land that wasn’t spoiled by waste products from China’s incessant search for rare earth metals, mitigate existing contaminated deposits, and determine the effects on wild forage, fodder, and planted crop farming. We picked 30 test zones and classified each zone by contamination level and by soil abundances of various rare earth metals. One of the co-op fields, the modern version of the family-based Arad system, had a statistically significant advantage over the others. I was invited to a congratulatory harvest celebration. Seven days of eating meat cooked between saddle and horse’s back, fermented mare’s milk, and the finest vegetable produce in either Inner or Outer Mongolia…”

“Mr. Osgood, what does this party have to with your, um, change?”  G-6 Loretta Mitchell was apparently in charge of keeping the wheels on the wagon.

“Listen, Toots, I just laid out everything you need to know if you want to try to find a cause.” Regent lit up an American Sprit black, scanned the Feds’ faces, and blew a few smoke rings.

“Mr. Osgood, there’s no smoking in the building.”

“Obviously, Budrick, that’s not an operational statement. Since I’m smoking. Right here in the building. Be a good boy and grab a couple of the sugar cubes next to that fancy coffeepot. Chop chop.”

Morris decided to play along and se where this would lead. He tossed the sugar in front of the visitor, who fished the lighter back out of his pocket and slid it over to the head Fed in exchange.

“Light the hexahedron on fire, Bubba.” Try as he might, even with the fancy torch lighter, Morris couldn’t set it ablaze. “Sweety, be a doll and get a cup of water over here, would you?” She came back with it, following her boss’s lead. The stony guest handed the smoke to Loretta. “Rub some of that ash onto the sugar and try it now.” The cube burned with a light like a dim candle, and she tossed it into the water before she lost any fingers. Regent crushed out his smoke in the interstice between three wood knots on the old-growth table, pushed his chair toward the wall—it wasn’t bolted to the floor—and put his back to his hosts as he stood up.

“I don’t think we’re finished, Mr. Osgood,” Loretta tossed out.

“Of course not, Toots. If you want me, I’ll be on a bench in the little park across from Foley Square. Smoking.”

The two Feds gave it enough time, they decided, to let their star think he could autohelicate. On the contrary, Regent was waiting, smoking, tossing peanuts to the family of squirrels in one of the park’s paltry trees. He had three falafels, a Snapple Peach Iced Tea for Morris and a Boylan’s Birch Beer for Loretta spread out on the bench. The pair’s facial expressions posed their shared question for them.

“Really? What kind of chimera superhero would I be if I didn’t know what you folks had to drink with your lunch? When President Spade put out the tweet about the coffee trade deal with West East Timor, it took me about 12 seconds to find the coffee importer who had just made a contribution to the Spade campaign and would net about thirty million from the deal. And then another 12 seconds to flood the tweet with replies about the real story. But that’s not what you’re after, is it? Neither of you are enamored of the “best head of state” in the history of the world, are you?”

“Why don’t you tell us more about what happened, now that we’ve all had our needs met? Or have we?” Loretta was not going to let Regent’s use of “Toots” go unchallenged.

“Alright. The lucky range land was laced through and through with Didymium compounds. When we ran tests, it had gotten into the crops, the fodder, the livestock. Not enough to be poisonous, or even dangerous.”

“Sorry, what is Didymium,” Morris asked. 

“The rejected element. It’s really two elements that always wind up close to each other, but never chemically joined. Neodymium and Praesidium. It’s used to make very specialized glasses for difficult environments. There’s a lesson in that. Sometimes you think you have a thing, and then you find out it’s a different thing. We now think that Neodymium, in the presence of some other agent in the soil of that part of Mongolia, passes through the blood-brain barrier. Whatever it is that happened…”

The telling of the tale was interrupted by the noise of two protests; one in front of City Hall and the other heading off the Brooklyn Bridge fifty yards away. “In any event, when I woke after almost two days asleep, and let me tell you, there is no hangover like a fermented mare’s milk hangover, I fished my tablet out of my pack and put it on the table in the room in the Yurt they had given me. I bent down to turn it on. But it beat me to the punch. It turned itself on. No hitting the home button, no PIN, no password, no biometrics. When I finally scanned the news, anything that looked like a lie was printed in orange, anything that looked true was green. I showed it to some of my team and some of the ranchers, nether group saw the color change. But neither group had reached the heights of inebriation or gluttony to which I had scaled that week.”

“Nobody else had any effects?” Loretta returned to cop mode.

“Bolomaa kept the stud book and was also the IT mistress as well as being the ‘school marm’ when class was in session. She was known as a hard partyer. She said the letters would dance on the screen and then say something else. Not many of the co-op members had any use for computers, though. But here’s the kicker. The goats started to steal anything with digital circuitry. Phones, laptops, PlayStations, anything. They wouldn’t give up their loot until someone came up with some chaffehay and ivy. I have some thoughts about a mechanism. But your mission is to weaponize me, isn’t it, Toots? Or at least duplicate what happened to me? Does your little boutique intelligence agency use honeypots as a tool? Perhaps we can work something out if you ditch the stiff.” There was a round of the trio valiantly attempting to tell the minds’ constructions in each other’s faces. The unanimous, but silent, agreement, was to sop up the remaining Tahina with the cut-off pita tops.

“I think a deal is a good idea, Mr. Osgood.”

“Funny, I know you have some issues of your own, but I never thought of you as a pimp, pal. You don’t even really know what I do; what kind of deal do you think you can make?”

“We’d like to hire your superpower.”

“And I would like to deal with people who know what they’re doing. How could you possibly think I would respond to money. I know every earnings report that’s exaggerated or finessed. I know every workout from every track between Belmont and Santa Anita that was fudged before it got to the Daily Racing Form. Take a powder, Pally, perhaps the dame got a higher score on the GMAT logical reasoning section than you did. Pick another bench, if you want to make sure things stay kosher. But you’re out of this loop. Welcome to Dumpsville, buddy, population you.” Agent Grady had no choice to do a lateral reverse and pick a bench with a view of his partner and the questionable character.”

“Well, Regent. May I call you Regent?”

“Of course, Loretta.”

“What is the thing we don’t understand? It’s a little unfair of you, since you never got around to telling us.”

“Analog properties of digital circuits.”

“Come again?”

“Heh, I wish. I talk a good game, but connubiality is off the table until I know more about what I’ve become. Did you ever plug something in and see a spark? Or turn on a wall switch and hear a little crackle? It would have been when you were little; they’ve pretty much engineered that out. You know, the special outlets where things are wet, kitchens and bathrooms. The ones with little lights and the button that says ‘TEST’? whenever a contact is made, just before, there’s a little tiny spark you wouldn’t notice. At that point, switches aren’t binary on or off. They’re in between. The spark sends out a tiny, little radio wave. I believe that what got into me allows me to receive those waves. Not from light switches, but from the trillions of flops from integrated transistor circuits. You know, your boss looks like he’s going to have a stroke. Should we let him back into the fold? Will this affect your career?”

“Trust me, Reg. Let him stew. What do the radio waves tell you?”

“Nothing really, it’s just clicks and pops to me. It’s what happens next that’s interesting. When I see the results of the flops as emails or Farcebook posts, I see the orange and the green. I also see red—a message that is intended for ‘good’—and blue for ill intent. Makes it easy for me, but there has to be something behind it. A field of force with an associated particle. I’m calling it the Qi particle. You know, remember the fad last century with Feng Shui? Qi is the driving force behind that.”

“You said you were a chimera. What are you a combination of?”

“I guess I’m a mash-up of a person and the digital world. The Qi field is persistent across time. I’m guessing that’s how I can find out about dangerous people by looking up and down their timelines. Oddly enough, and wiggle your fingers if I’m boring you, but if I know precisely how true something is, I can have no idea of how good or bad it is. The Qi field, if it exists, follows Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. Didn’t somebody prove that there are some true things that just cannot be proven to be true?” The digital prognosticator now looked at the agent from a new angle, possibly an angle Euclid never imagined.

“Yes, Kurt Godel, Einstein’s buddy at Princeton. So, Loreta… I showed you mine…”

“You might not like this.”

“I don’t like colonoscopies, but I have to deal with them.”

“Talk about TMI! Morris’s boss gave us a mission to find a mole. My partner doesn’t know all of the details.”

“But you do?”

“I do.” Morris was leaning forward on the bench, and the squirrels were scared at the program of tics and twitches that Fed displayed. “It was his idea to try to turn you into an asset.”

“And he’s the subject of the investigation, but he doesn’t know it?”

“Yup. Got anything for me?”

“Close your eyes and count backwards from a hundred.”

By the time she got to 72, DataMan had an answer.

“I don’t know if he’s the mole you’re looking for. But in 2017, he shared a bit of information about an Israeli modification to their FA-18as with a counterpart in MI6 in exchange for World Cup tickets. Does that do you?”

It was Loretta’s turn to invent new angles with which to view the reluctant recruit. “Listen, Reg, do you like Pina Coladas?”

“Sure thing. Do you like walks in the rain?”