BLIT - a short story by David Langford
BLIT
a short story<br>by<br>David Langford
It was like being caught halfway through a flashy film-dissolve. The<br>goggles broke up the dim street, split and reshuffled it along diagonal lines: a<br>glowing KEBABS sign was transposed into the typestyle<br>they called Shatter. Safest to keep the goggles on, Robbo had decided. Even<br>in the flickering electric half-light before dawn, you never knew what you<br>might see. Just his luck if the stencil jumped from under his arm and unrolled<br>itself before his eyes as he scrabbled for it on the pavement.
That would be a good place, behind the 34 (a shattered 34) bus stop.<br>This was their part of town; the women flocked there each morning, twittering<br>in their saris like bright alien canaries. A good place, by a boarded-up<br>shop window thick with flyposted gig announcements.
Robbo scanned the street for movement, glanced at his own hand to be<br>reassured by a blurred spaghetti of fingers. Guaranteed Army issue<br>goggles -- the Group had friends in funny places -- but they said the eye<br>eventually adjusts. One day something clicks, and clear outlines jump at you. He<br>flinched as the thick plastic unrolled; then the nervy moment was past, his left<br>hand pressing the stencil against a tattered poster while in his right the<br>spray-can hissed.
The sweetish, heady smell of car touch-up paint made it all seem<br>oddly distant from an act of terrorism.
He found he'd been careless, easy in this false twilight and through<br>these<br>lenses: there were tacky patches on his fingers as he re-rolled the<br>Parrot. A<br>few hours on, in thick morning light, the brown women would be playing<br>the wink<br>game.... Jesus, how long since he'd been a kid and played that?<br>Must be<br>five years. The one who'd drawn the murder card caught your eye and<br>winked, and<br>you had to die with lots of spasms and overacting. To survive, you<br>needed<br>to<br>spot the murderer first and get in with an accusation -- or at least,<br>know where<br>not to look.
It was cold. Time to move on, to pick another place. Goggles or no<br>shatter-goggles, he didn't look back at the image of the Parrot. It<br>might<br>wink.
SECRET * BASILISK
Distribution UK List B[iv] only
... so called because its outline, when processed for non-hazardous<br>viewing,<br>is generally considered to resemble that of the bird. A processed<br>(anamorphically elongated) partial image appears in Appendix 3 of this<br>report,<br>page A3-ii. THE STATED PAGE MUST NOT BE VIEWED THROUGH<br>ANY FORM<br>OF CYLINDRICAL LENS. PROLONGED VIEWING IS STRONGLY DISRECOMMENDED.<br>PLEASE<br>READ<br>PAGE A3-i BEFORE PROCEEDING.
2-6. This first example of the Berryman Logical Image Technique<br>(hence<br>the<br>usual acronym BLIT) evolved from AI work at the<br>Cambridge IV supercomputer facility, now discontinued. V.Berryman and<br>C.M.Turner<br>[3] hypothesized that pattern-recognition programs of sufficient<br>complexity<br>might be vulnerable to "Gödelian shock input" in the form<br>of data<br>incompatible with internal representation. Berryman went further and<br>suggested<br>that the existence of such a potential input was a logical necessity<br>...
2-18. Details of the Berryman/Turner BLIT<br>construction algorithms are not available at this classification level.<br>Details<br>of the eventual security breach at Cambridge IV are neither available<br>nor<br>fully<br>known. Details of Cambridge IV casualty figures are, for the time being,<br>reserved (sub judice).
"IRA got hold of it somehow," Mack had said. "The<br>Provos. We<br>do some of our shopping in the same places, jelly and like that ...<br>slipped us a<br>copy, they did."
The cardboard tube in Robbo's hand had suddenly felt ten times as<br>heavy.<br>He'd expected a map, a Group plan of action; maybe a blueprint of<br>something<br>nasty to plant in the Sikh temple up Victoria Street. "You mean it<br>works?"
"Fucking right. I tried it ... a volunteer." He'd grinned.<br>Just<br>grinned, and winked. "Listen, this is poison stuff. Wear the<br>goggles<br>around<br>it. If you fuck up and get a clear squint at even a bit of the Parrot,<br>this is<br>what you do. They told me. Shut yourself up with a bottle of vodka and<br>knock the<br>whole lot back. Decontamination, scrubs your short-term visual memory,<br>something<br>like that."
"Jesus. What about the Provos? If this fairy story's got teeth,<br>why<br>haven't they ...?" Robbo had trailed off into a vague waving<br>gesture<br>that<br>failed to conjure up a paper neutron bomb.
Mack's smile had widened into an assault-course of brown jagged<br>teeth,<br>as it<br>did when he talked about a major Group action. "Maybe they don't<br>fancy new<br>ideas ... but could be they're biding their time for a big one. Ever<br>thought<br>about hijacking a TV station? Just for an hour? Don't think things like<br>that,<br>it'll be bad for you."
... Dead TV screens watched him from another cracked shop window, a<br>dump<br>that also rented Hindi videotapes. That settled it for them. Why<br>couldn't<br>the<br>buggers learn English? The Group would give them a hint: the Parrot<br>stencil was<br>already in position, the can sliding out of his pocket, fastest draw in<br>the<br>west. At school...