Hacking Heaven

Moraton Drax did his funky jig, as I stood nearby in his basement that was part computer temple, part electronics graveyard. Exotic circuitry, motherboards, cabling, drives, fans, casings were sculpted in mysterious formations, channels and conduits, like Angkor Wat fashioned from molded plastic, copper, aluminum, and silicon. And in the middle of it, Drax danced his smug little dance.

“I did it. I did it.” Left, left, right. “I did it. I did it.” Right, right, left. “I’m in. I’m in. I’m in.” One hand up, two hands up, sprinkle fingers down.

“That’s great, Drax. And only you know what you’re talking about, unless you finally got admitted to the Fairhaven Psych Ward.”

Left, left, right. “Better. Much better.” Right, right, left. “I got in. In in.”

I knew enough of Drax’s mania to be patient and let him do his dance.

High kick. Left, right, left, right, left, right. “In in in in in.”

He twirled twice and stopped, glittering beads of sweat collecting on his high forehead. “Genius is hard work. But it’s all paid off. I’m set now. I’m in.”

“Sure,” I soothed. “You’ve told me that about a dozen times. Where’d you get in?”

Drax went rigid and backed up two steps almost knocking over a teetering stack of glowing components. “Why do you want to know?”

I knew this paranoia, too. One hint that you were angling to snatch one of Drax’s secrets, which were legion, would clam him up. I’d found the best approach was to be honest. “I want to steal your secrets and ruin you.” This was true, but not in the way he understood.

Drax frowned and his eyes darted to his desk where his notebooks lay open, then his brow loosened and his long-fingered hands danced in front him. “Of course. Of course. Let me show you.”

He guided me over to a phalanx of sleeping monitors above his desk. With an abracadabra wave to unlock them, Drax awakened the panels which resolved into clusters of source code denser than the center of the Milky Way. Ultra cryptic.

I don’t think my jaw dropped, but Drax’s smirk told me that he was pleased at my shock. I couldn’t feign cool disinterest any longer. “What am I looking at?”

“Heaven.”

“What?”

“Heaven. You’re looking at heaven. I hacked it. I’m in.”

I couldn’t go there with Drax. I had to believe he was talking about some kind of hacker’s Grail, finessing his way into the servers of some tech giant like Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Huawei, or Alibaba. These were the web gods he’d once worshipped but now railed against. His tirades and manifestos on digital self determination, on neuro free will, on panopticonless privacy were infamous beyond the net neutrality firewall. A self-proclaimed techgnostic, Drax was a first class prophet and crank.

As always, I tried to humor him. “So, you cracked the password to enter the Pearly Gates?”

“Right into the Almighty’s source code. His boot files.”

“How?”

“Let’s just say The 9 Billion Names of God is not a very secure password,” Drax offered.

This was a level of Drax mania I hadn’t experienced before. “Whoa. Let’s back up. Why does Heaven have a password? It’s not a website. And though my catechism may be out of date, I still believe God is considered omniscient and omnipotent which would seem to dispense with the need for broadband connectivity.”

Drax’s long fingers performed a tricky entrechat. “You are thinking too prosaically. The Internet is not our doing, any more than the earth or galaxy is. We arose within it. We are the stuff of stars and not just hydrogen and heavy elements. At its core, we are information, the ability to access, manipulate and transmit data. That is being: transactional substantiation.”

He stepped towards me, and I drew back as he whispered, “Thus, the Supreme Being is the sysop for all creation. And now I know the back-door code.”

“Not possible.”

He waved away the phrase as if it were a pesky gnat. “No longer in my lexicon. Come, you must see.”

“Heaven?”

“Eventually, but like I said, we’ve got to go through the back door…actually more of a trap door.”

“What do you mean?”

Drax swiped at his screens in a cruciform motion and the room went dark. “We gotta go through Hell first.”

My eyes bled as we were ravaged by lolcats.