Read Online Self's punishment by Bernhard Schlink - Free Book Online

certainly wasn’t the rascal or prankster – could he be the blackmailer? According to everything I’d ever gathered about computer criminality, people who worked with a computer could also use it for criminal purposes, but not make a mockery of it.
    The next morning I went to a radio repair shop before breakfast. I’d tried out the stereo again and the interference had gone. That really did annoy me. I can’t abide unpredictable machinery. A car may be roadworthy and a washing machine still wash, but if the last, most insignificant indicator light doesn’t work with Prussian precision, my mind will know no rest.
    I got a competent young man. He had compassion for my lack of technical know-how, almost called me ‘Grandpa’ in friendly condescension. Of course, I know that radio waves aren’t brought to life by the radio – they’re always there. The radio merely makes them audible, and the young man explained to me that practically the same circuit that achieves this in the receiver is also present in the amplifier and that, under certain atmospheric conditions, the amplifier may act as a receiver. There was nothing you could do about it, just had to accept it.
    On the way from Seckenheimer Strasse to my café in the arcades by the Wasserturm I bought a newspaper. At my kiosk, lying next to Süddeutsche is always the Rhine Neckar
Chronicle
and for some reason the abbreviation RNC stuck fast in my head.
    When I was sitting in Café Gmeiner, coffee in front of me, awaiting my ham and eggs, I got that feeling of wanting to say something to someone but not remembering what. Was it related to the RNC? It struck me that Tietzke’s interview with Firner hadn’t appeared in the paper yet. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. Hadn’t someone spoken to me yesterday about the RNC? No, Oelmüller had said the RCC had had reason to trigger the smoke alarm. That was apparently the office responsible for the smog alarm and analysis of emission data. But there was something else I wasn’t getting. It had something to do with the amplifier functioning as a receiver.
    When the ham and eggs arrived I ordered another coffee. The waitress didn’t bring it until I’d asked for a third time. ‘Sorry, Herr Self, there’s a lot of static in the air today. I’m miles away. I was taking care of my daughter’s boy last night because the young folk have a subscription for the opera and got back late yesterday. Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
went on and on.’
    A lot of static, miles away, long-distance. Of course, that was it, the long-distance reception at the RCC. Herzog had told me about the direct emission model. The same emission data are also recorded in the RCW system, Oelmüller had said. And Ostenteich had spoken of the online connection with the state monitoring system. Somehow the computer centre of the RCW and the RCC had to be connected. Was it possible to penetrate the MBI system via the RCC? And was it possible that the people at RCW had simply forgotten this? I cast my thoughts back and remembered clearly that there had been talk of the terminals in the plant and of telephone lines to the outside when we’d been discussing possible breaches in the system. A cable running between RCC and RCW, as I was now picturing it, had never been mentioned. It belonged neither to the telephone lines nor to the terminal connections. It differed from those by not being a mode of direct communication. Rather a silent flow of data migrated from the various sensors onto tape. Data that interested no one at the plant and could be immediately forgotten unless there happened to be an alarm or an accident. I understood why the musical confusion on my stereo had preoccupied me for so long: the interference came from inside.
    I played around with my ham and eggs and the multitude of questions going through my mind. Above all I needed additional information. I didn’t want to speak with Thomas, Ostenteich, or Oelmüller now. If they had