Free Technobabel by Stephen Kenson Page B

something in there to help you, but no. The hardware is still good, and the casing is a bit beat up," he says, gently touching my bruised arm, "but now we need to check the wetware. Follow me." He gets up and makes to leave.
    "Where are we going?" I ask. The old man glances up at me over his shoulder, then begins slowly walking out of the room again. His voice carries back to me as he goes.
    "We’re going to see if you can find your name," he replies, and I quickly move to follow. Papa Lo guides me out of the room and into the hall of what I now see is a deserted church, made over by the Netwalkers tribe into part of their home, our home, I suppose, if I am one of them. The place still has a quiet air of the sacred to it; not a place where people live day-to-day, but where serious and important spiritual matters are handled.
    In the basement of the church there is a room I had not expected to see, but which strikes me with an overwhelming sense of Déjà vu as I step across the threshold. I know I have been here before.
    The room fills most of the long basement space. The low-beamed ceiling makes it feel somewhat cramped and close. The walls are covered with hardware, displays, and complex paintings and drawings done on the gray concrete with brightly colored metallic paints and chalk. The drawings are circuit diagrams, flow charts, algorithms, and other images: great open vistas of metallic towers against a dark sky and planes of warped geometry that make you think you could put your hand through the wall like it was only an optical illusion. They bring the cold gray of the walls to life and seem to shimmer and move in the flicker and hum of the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling.
    The floor of the room is a tangled mass of cables in a rainbow of colors, like a nest of snakes sleeping on top of one another. There are woven mats and pieces of equipment networked together, computers, displays, printers, small storage drives stacked up like musty books, and collections of things that blink and whir and hum with power. Seated on the floor like a praying monk is a boy, about twelve or thirteen years old. His eyes are rolled back, and the half-closed lids flutter in a strange kind of dream state. His hands are folded in his lap as in prayer and his lips move as he whispers something, maybe a mantra. The sound of it is familiar to me.
    "This is our lodge," Papa Lo says to me quietly, and I start a bit at the sound of his voice. I almost forgot he was there.
    "Our lodge?" I say, not knowing why I speak so softly other than the strong feeling I have that this is a sacred place.
    "It is our place to touch the power of the inner world and the spirits," he says. I look around the room and I know for certain this is like no lodge that I have ever seen or heard of before.
    "Aren’t lodges supposed to be full of skins and furs, crystals and herbs, with a big smoldering fire pit in the center? You know, drek like that?" I say.
    Papa Lo makes a low sound in his throat that I take as approval of my question. If he notices or is offended by the vulgarity, he makes no sign of it.
    "It is good you can recall such things," he says. "No, this is a different kind of medicine lodge. Quite unlike almost any other in the world. While the shamans work their magic by calling on the Awakened spirits of the land, we are in touch with something different. We touch the magic of the modern age, the Digital Age. Instead of the ancient powers of the land, sea, and air, we commune with the spirit of the Machine, the intelligence of the Matrix."
    "And who is ‘we’... the Netwalkers?"
    "Not entirely. We are part of the tribe, but we .. . you are special. Like the shamans to their tribesmen, we are the intermediaries between them and the otherworld. It is for those of us with the knowledge and the ability to travel into that world and bring back the knowledge it contains for the good of all.
    "We live outside of the so-called ‘civilized’ world,