Down to Camelot

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 23/01/10

And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot.
~The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennysen

In the highest gneiss cleft of the Roan Highlands, surrounded by outcrops of lichen-covered rock, stood a tower concealed by red-granite slabs.

A forest of fir covered the mountain ridges leading up to this citadel, and at its base was a clearing filled with masses of crimson Rhododendron, red Clay lilies and flaming Azalea. Chiseled out of the tower itself, camouflaged by mica-speckled boulders and flanked by lush ferns, was a stone stoop that led to a recessed and massive, gunmetal gray door.

On the other side of that locked door was a cavernous steel vestibule stacked with crates, boxes, and cartons that had been brought by shadowy figures dressed in khaki fatigues who appeared intermittently from out of the woods. At the far end of the vestible was an elevator that led up to the top of the tower, to the five-room apartment where Elaine worked and lived.

Elaine had not left this keep in many, many years. Sometimes it seemed to her as if she’d always been there, been born and raised and schooled there. Her past seemed reduced to vague dreams about training facilities in Virginia and North Carolina, or lessons about advanced systems and information technology, cybersecurity, and surveillance. She moved from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen to living room to work-station every day in the same way.

She sat in front of a Cray XT5 computing complex, one of three, and skated her eyes along the bank of LCD screens that filled a wall from floor to ceiling across from her. These were her windows to the world outside. In them she could see anywhere, into anything, and look at anyone.

Her orders … her orders … she tried to remember what those might be. She operated by schedule, by habit, by rote.

At one in the morning she placed her operations on auto, dimmed the fluorescents in the ceiling, and left the hundreds of flashing and flickering lights behind her. She invariably walked to her bathroom first to brush her teeth and take her pills. Then she moved to her bedroom where she unzipped her olive-drab coveralls and undressed, then slipped under the white sheets of her bed. At seven in the morning she arose once more, to shower and pull on another pair of clean olive-drabs before eating her breakfast at the small, round chrome table in the kitchen.

She tried to remember who she was; Elaine the universal spider, gathering information, relaying information. She wove massive amounts of facts together and passed them on. To whom, to where, she wasn’t exactly sure. There was network surveillance, corporate surveillance, and social network surveillance. She tracked the trackers, watching Magic Lantern and CIPAV trails, extracting and analyzing data from Carnivore and ECHELON. She monitored systems everywhere. She only knew the world as a reflection, as an image in high definition. She interpreted sensory input by refraction.

“Sentinel Five, Sentinel Five,” her primary communication monitor alerted her in print but not by voice.

“Everything is fine,” she answered aloud.

“Who is the target on camera B6 UK 103310? What is the purpose?…” the system asked with strings of letters in a sans-serif font.

Elaine glanced up and then stared at the designated screen; she saw a young man and a young women making love. She took a sip from her coffee mug. The same one she’d had for … how many years … the exact number eluded her. Which was ironic, she realized. She knew the exact amount of chipsets used by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency but she couldn’t remember how many years she’d been in this place. “I need to know,” she said. “What’s going on….”

“You are the one who tells us,” came the response, unfurling like a banner.

She focused her eyes on the sex, the couple, their movements and sounds. “I want to know what’s going on outside.” she said.

“Logistics, security, discipline, threat-reduction,” the monitor blinked.

Elaine stood up, pushing back her chair with an unfamiliar scraping sound. “There is nothing out there,” she murmured. “It’s coming apart.”

She walked to one of her auxiliary keyboards and typed commands, then flicked her fingers on glass. The entire display of LCD monitors abruptly lit up with news programs, talking heads, images from most of the major capital cities of the world. Several focused on chaos and devastation, smoke and fire.

All the screens went green. The monitor in front of her displayed, “You will commence application REPAIR 565 — you will proceed to your bathroom and the medicine cabinet….”

Elaine took a deep breath and turned in place, contemplating, as if seeing for the first time, the technology that surrounded her.

There was a sharp ringing sound. It was harsh and jarring; it took several seconds for Elaine to recall what it was. Somewhere, amidst this most sophisticated and complicated equipment, somewhere there was a telephone. Elaine laughed as she tuned out the noise.

Phrases in extra-large type such as “REFRESH PROTOCOL” and “RESTORE CONTROL….” scrolled left to right on several of her monitors.

Elaine thought about her options. She had never taken the elevator down — if she tried to do so now, she’d be physically stopped by the weapons defense system. There were no windows, there was no other way to leave that she knew of. There was only one thing she could do — pull the plug. She understood how the power grid operated, the locations of junction boxes, the points where the array was weak or blind. It would have to be an instantaneous act, accomplished smoothly without hesitation. She’d be trapped of course, the elevator dead, the front entrance sealed. She wondered how long she could survive until they came to get her. And if someone did show up, would it be to rescue or to terminate her?

She turned to her right, and sauntered calmly in the direction of the closest fuse box that sat just above the floor.