The Celestial Instructi0n Read Online Free

burn rocks for his cousin; once burned with the precious stolen wood
the stones were fragile enough to break into building material for his cousin’s
ever-growing compound.
    But hanging around the Internet cafes
run by Lebanese during the day, Sam would assist customers with their computers
and run errands for the manager in exchange for free use of the computers. He
would gas up the generator on its concrete pad and metal roof when the owner
infrequently decided to compensate for the daily power outages. Barefoot, he
had to scramble up to the roof and re-point the 2.4GHz antenna by hand when the
gusty torrent of the monsoon twisted it. He would chase out the lizards so they
would not infest the computers or bother the customers. Le 5000 per hour and Le
500 per printed page, no refunds. Sometimes he would play chess with customers
for cigarettes; he loved the exotic sounding names of openings he learned he
played such as the Sicilian Dragon or the Ruy Lopez. To the foreigners and
ex-pats he was a trained monkey, wiry and animated, but strictly an object of
entertainment. That was fine with Sam.
    During the fall during the monsoon
season while the torrents splashed and rivuled outside and Sam got tired of
hearing the flogging of a houseboy late fetching water or watching his cousin
drink four fingers of Scotch “to burn fat,” in candle light. Sam would walk
down to the cafe in the sweltering night to surf the web. He joined forums
dedicated to war, gaming, and forbidden activities; he explored the Darknet. He
create SSH clients and encryption tokens, he gained his cred writing a piece of
software that would plug into the old-time DES clients of automated tellers. He
and his ever-changing crew were responsible for the Bitcoin virtual currency
debacle. He listened to lectures in stellar renewal from Filippenko at Cal and
Abstract algebra from Goins at MIT. That Norvig guy was good. Sam’s English
improved. On the net, “Ouest” was his name on the net; at his cousin’s home, he
was 14 and didn’t own a pair of shoes.
    Over the months, Sam’s skills improved.
He had no way of knowing that his relentless self-learning without the
distraction of students, teachers, curriculum, and schools began to exceed that
of most western high-school, then college, graduates. Nevertheless, even if he
had, it would have been inconsequential to him. In Sierra Leone, there was
nothing he could do with that distinction. You had to pay school fees to get a
degree. You had to buy tutors or procure bribes to obtain high enough levels
that those credentials along with further suitable bribes, kickbacks, and
connections would get an appointment to a minor government job. Then as long as
“your man” stayed in power, you could make a career of extorting and
“facilitating” government business in order to accumulate a large number of
dollars. Eventually you would betray your corrupt co-conspirators and friends
in exchange for judicial immunity. Finally, with your remaining connections and
money, you could retire late in life to a small pensione in Paris or Rome where
you could entertain the more enterprising of your distant relations without the
ever-present need for a fly swatch.
    But this path did not appeal to Sam.
Sam did not know why he listened to lectures or puzzled out homework with a
blunt pencil and scraps of widely ruled newsprint. Sure, it started so he could
make a few dollars with a swindle here or a crack there. Now it was something
else. Just the frisson of finding things out. To be able to understand cryptic relationships
among jarring Fly-tree ideas and more simply, just to be able to do weird shit.
    March was the dry season in West Africa
and the dust did not help to hide the smell of sewage that evaporated into
sludge that clotted the gutters. It was sleepy and hot. Tsetse flies with their
praying wings and hungry proboscises were coming in to the city. Sam reloaded
the Darknet channel to update the thread. Something is