*Nowadays Tim from ECHELON goes by the handle "Tim from PRISM and XKEYSCORE," but one thing's consistent: Tim's always been really hard to write about.
From: ZEITGEIST, a novel, by Bruce Sterling (Bantam Books, 2000), pages 254-257.
http://www.amazon.com/Zeitgeist-Bruce-Sterling/dp/0553576410
Starlitz heard his satellite phone ring. Starlitz found that he was able to move his hand. He was able to push the answer button. He was able to emit one ritual utterance.
"Hello?"
"Deus ex machina." The voice on the phone had a distant, flattened tang. The sonic highs and lows had been clipped off through compression.
"What's that?" Starlitz asked.
"Try to say it. Speak aloud. Say 'deus ex machina.'"
"Why?" Starlitz asked warily.
"Because that is my story line, man. 'Deus ex machina,' the spook in the machine. You're stuck in the thematics, Starlitz. You're in a crisis of the master narrative. You can't go forward, can't go back, no way out. That is your situation on the ground there. So then, the god comes out of the divine sky-car and saves your bacon. And that's me. That's where I have to come in. You with the story yet?"
"Uh, yeah."
"So here I am, man."
Starlitz scratched his dazed and sweating head. "This is Tim from ECHELON, right?"
"Yep! I'm here in the flesh!"
Starlitz looked around himself. Viktor was staring at him with puzzlement, existential horror, and vague dawning hope. Zeta was looking fixedly into the trees with her jaw slack and her shoulders hunched.
"I don't see any 'flesh' here, Tim."
"Look up," Tim suggested.
Starlitz examined the blue sky. Satellite surveillance? Could that be it?
"Look down."
Starlitz looked at the earth. Motion detectors? Seismographs?
"Look all around." Vidcams?
"Your pants are falling down," said Tim triumphantly. "Left caret grin right caret. Semicolon hyphen right parenthesis."
"Hey, Dad," said Zeta. She pointed hesitantly into the empty air. "Who is this guy? What does he want?"
"What does he look like?" Starlitz parried.
"He looks like Bill Gates, sort of. If Bill Gates had thicker glasses and a shitty government job."
"Ha ha ha," said Tim through the phone. "What a sense of humor. Let me shake your hand, little girl. You can call me Uncle Tim."
"He says he wants to shake your hand," Starlitz said. "He says his name is Tim."
"Well, okay, I can hear him," said Zeta. She clasped the empty air and shook it vigorously. Then she winced in disgust as invisible fingers tousled the top of her head.
"Moments like this make it all worth while," Tim recited mechanically into the phone. "Protecting America's vulnerable youth from the threat of international terrorism. That's what I'm all about."
"What the hell is going on?" Viktor demanded suddenly. "What is that ugly black shadow out of the depths of the forest?"
"He says he's come to help us," Starlitz said.
Viktor jumped a foot, clutching his backside with a shriek. Suddenly Viktor's wallet hung in midair, yawning open and disgorging business cards and various forms of currency into the tall grass.
"Hey!" Viktor demanded, clenching his fists. "Tell it to stop!"
"Tim," Starlitz said into the phone, "my associate's kind of upset that you're going through his private business affairs there."
"Fuck him," Tim said cheerfully, in the same flat voice. "What's he gonna do about it? This Russian punk's got no fucking options." Tim tossed the wallet aside. "He's broke. And he's small time. He's not of major surveillant interest."
A look of frantic desperation entered Viktor's eyes. He wasn't taking this at all well.
"Viktor, chill out," Starlitz said. "Let me pass you the word, man. This is ECHELON."
"Did you say ECHELON?" said Viktor.
"Ever heard of it? Shall I spell it for you?"
"Of course I've heard of ECHELON!" Viktor protested. "ECHELON is the legendary capitalist global surveillance system. It's the worldwide signals intelligence directorate! ECHELON is the crown jewel of the antiprogressive Dark Forces!"
"Uh, yeah. That would be the alleged phenomenon."
"ECHELON is run by the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand. It uses undersea-cable taps, and surveillance satellites like 'Aquacade,' "Rhyolite,' and 'Magnum.' It taps the Internet through its major routing centers and does comprehensive word searches on email traffic."
"Hey, shut up," Tim protested over the satellite phone. "That's all totally classified."
Starlitz put the phone on his shoulder and squinted in the sunlight. "Can you actually *see* Tim, Viktor? I can hear him over this satellite phone, but I can't see a damn thing. It's like the guy's installed at hardware level and totally user transparent."
"I can see a kind of black, hideous, paranoid shape," Viktor reported. "It's like some faceless, oozing nightmare that covers the whole earth."
"What do *you* see, Zeta?"
"I can see him fine. I can hear him too. I can even smell him. He doesn't change his clothes very much."
"I'm a busy guy," Tim complained.
"He looks just like my geeky math teacher. You know, the math guy who used to go out during recess and look up our skirts."
"Girls don't like math," Tim grumbled. "Colon hyphen left parenthesis."
"I like math fine, Tim. I just don't like *you.*"
"Look, I don't have much time to waste here," said Tim, obviously irritated. "I got eighteen acres of vintage Crays under a hill in Fort Meade, and we're way behind on our comprehensive Y2K upgrades."
"Oh yeah," Starlitz nodded. "I mighta known."
'Why did you bring a little girl to a Level Three national-security incident? That's not professional. You clowns are lucky that I even showed up."
"You're not supposed to show up, Tim. I never called you. I don't know why you're here." Starlitz shrugged.
"Well, then, let me get *you* up to speed, newbie," said Tim briskly. "I mean, you can't even *see* me, because I am, like, light-years beyond your shabby, street-level, hard-boiled little discourse. Because ECHELON is, like, the Olympus of networked globalization. We're so far beyond your mental grasp that we're literally unspeakable. Mere mundane user dorks like you can't even *raise the topic* of ECHELON in any discussion of contemporary reality. Because at ECHELON we're huge, omniscient, omnipresent, and totally technically capable. We've been secretly saving the bacon of the Anglo-American empire since Alan Turing was blowing guys in bus stations. We're always taping everything, but we Never Say Anything. You get me so far?"
"Yeah, no, maybe."
"So that means that a guy like me has no conventional path into the narrative. None at all. I'm *always* the deus ex machina. I mean, the twentieth-century master narrative just doesn't work, unless I remain way behind the curtain, and always super-secret. If ECHELON's abilities and activities become common knowledge and a public issue, the whole world is transformed. Outing ECHELON disrupts all the basic political and social assumptions. It throws the whole twentieth-century story straight off the rails. It's like you're filming some kind of BBC British teatime drama, and a giant writhing kraken comes up out of the Thames."
"Cut to the chase, Tim. So, why do we have the honor?"
