Infoquake Part 3

PLEASE PROTECT YOUR HOLDINGS.

The Vault has detected a DNA-a.s.sisted decryption attack directed at your account. Your holdings have not been compromised ...

The fiefcorp apprentice smacked her hand loudly against the wall and stomped off to the living room. Jara instantly regretted it. Blank walls weren't so bad in the kitchen, but in living s.p.a.ce they seemed like an accusation. She didn't want the world to come to an end before she had made some kind of mark on this place.

"You know what we have to do," Jara said grimly to the engineer, who had followed her out of the kitchen.

"What's that?"

"We have to go to the Council and tell them what we know. They'll listen."

Horvil's jaw dropped. He was too stunned to speak.

"Horvil, can you live with something like this on your shoulders?" she bellowed. She started to pace, Natch-like. "I mean, deceiving greedy fiefcorp masters is one thing. Even deceiving Primo's. But what about those people out there who are going to suffer the consequences?" Jara's sweeping gesture encompa.s.sed the London commuters visible from the window. The multied businesspeople hustling to meetings, the families scampering across the square looking for safety, the street performers in the midst of some apocalyptic pantomime at the foot of Big Ben. "What if the medical networks break down? What if the multi network collapses? What if this black code attack sparks a total panic? What if people die, for process' preservation?"

The engineer coc.o.o.ned himself in a ball on Jara's couch, as if his voluminous stomach might provide some insulation against the calamities of the world. "But ... but ... I'm sure that Natch wouldn't-that he didn't ..."

Jara refused to give any ground. "I don't know how he's involved in this. Maybe he heard a rumor on the Data Sea weeks ago. Maybe he had a hand in putting this black code together. But he knows something. We can't just ignore that, Horvil! We can't just let people die! The Council might need Natch's information to help stop the attack." I know Natch has been your best friend practically since birth, Horv, but sometimes you've got to look out for your own a.s.s. Do you think Natch cares one way or the other what happens to you? "Horvil, there comes a point where we have to put this Primo's nonsense behind us and think of the people out there."

The engineer was starting to crack. "All I ever wanted was to be a bio/logic engineer," he whimpered, as if this were the most relevant statement in the world. "All I ever wanted to do was help people." He peered up at this pint-sized woman with the ma.s.s of curly hair standing over him, but there was no mercy forthcoming.

Can't you see that I'm trying to help you, Horv?

Don't you realize this could be just what we need to do to get out of these miserable apprentices.h.i.+p contracts?

And then Horvil narrowed his eyes, puzzled. The color gushed back to his face all at once. He looked as if his tongue was struggling to catch up with the information in his head. Finally, the engineer shook his head violently, banished the display on the viewscreen with an outstretched hand, and summoned forth the craggy visage of Sen Sivv Sor.

BLACK CODE ATTACKS OVER.

Defense and Wellness Council to Make Statement

Jara could afford only one outgoing multi stream at her apartment, and it would have taken too long for Horvil to physically traipse back to his place on the other side of London. So the engineer had to rush down the street to the nearest public multi facility, something he hated to do. He didn't care how many times the Council guaranteed the safety of these public connections and how many guards they posted; you could never really feel comfortable letting your body stand slack in a room full of strangers while your mind was off elsewhere. Life in the world of meat and bone could be so inconvenient.

Apparently, word of the Council's impending statement had hit the streets. People started vanis.h.i.+ng throughout the block as they slid into multivoid and prepared to open new connections. Horvil arrived at the public multi facility just in time to claim the last open red tile. He breathed a sigh of relief, and stepped into the s.p.a.ce between a fat j.a.panese businesswoman and a wiry Indian man who seemed to be a technician of some kind.

"We didn't have to multi over here," said an amused Jara when Horvil finally caught up to her in the crowd. "We could have stayed at my place and watched the press conference on the viewscreen."

Horvil sniffed. "How much fun would that be?"

They were standing in the Defense and Wellness Council's main auditorium, its public face. Everyone knew the Council had moved its real base of operations to a new compound of unknown location. The auditorium was a fat wedge that might have represented 20 percent on some vast pie chart-a number that roughly approximated the Council's public approval ratings.

Horvil had actually been here in person once, during his requisite tour of the Melbourne governmental facilities. He remembered seeing the entire city laid out before him during the descent of the arriving hoverbird craft. If he had the power to see through the dozens of hanging pennants to the west and the stretched stone wall beneath them, he could have seen the Prime Committee complex and the Congress of L-PRACGs. To the east lay the headquarters of the Creeds Coalition and the chief lobbying arms of TubeCo, GravCo, and TeleCo.

Jara pinged the Council's multi information node. "A hundred and twelve million," she said, gazing around at the a.s.sembled crowd of multi projections.

Horvil whistled. This black code attack had shaken people up. It looked like only twenty thousand, of course; in situations like this, the network conveniently abandoned the illusion that multi projections inhabited Cartesian s.p.a.ce. "Any sign of Merri? Or Vigal?" he said.

"Public directory says Merri's here somewhere," replied Jara. "But no word on Serr Vigal. He wouldn't come out here for something like this."

"And Natch?"

Jara looked at Horvil and shook her head with a frown.

At precisely three o'clock (London time), there was a decrescendo in the background chatter of the crowd. Lights that had been glaring at full intensity dimmed to candle strength. Horvil held his breath and watched the stage below for the towering form of High Executive Len Borda.

But the man who materialized on center stage wasn't him. A white-robed and yellow-starred figure approached the podium. The man, a pureblooded Asian, was little more than half Borda's height, and had only a third of his girth. He stood patiently for a moment, dispensing that arrogant Council stare.

Borda's underling did not give his name or rank. He simply opened his mouth and began to speak in a dead monotone. "My word is the will of the Defense and Wellness Council," the man said, "which was established by the Prime Committee two hundred and fifty-two years ago to ensure the security of all persons throughout the system. The word of the Council is the word of the people."

Horvil shuddered involuntarily. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jara doing the same. They had heard this opening dictum thousands of times in dramas, news reports and speeches, and yet it still had the power to send ripples up and down the spine. Horvil was convinced the effect was bio/logically enhanced.

"Today, rumors have circulated on the Data Sea that the Vault was under black code attack by Pharisees," continued the Council officer coolly, as if system-wide panic was an expected hazard; the total at the bottom of a spreadsheet column, the predictable outcome of a wellweathered formula. "Many irresponsible words have been written about the so-called vulnerabilities of the financial system and the supposed failings of the Defense and Wellness Council.

"High Executive Borda wishes it to be known that these rumors are completely without foundation. There was no black code attack this morning."

Even through the sound-deadening programs of the Council auditorium, Horvil could hear the murmur of a million raised voices. He remembered his pathetic sniveling at Jara's apartment, his panicked dash across London, and felt an embarra.s.sed flush cover his face. The engineer risked a peek at Jara. Her nostrils were flaring.

The anonymous Council spokesman pressed on, either oblivious to or unconcerned by the crowd's reaction. "The attack this morning was not a product of bio/logic engineering, or of black coding skill. It required nothing more than the ability to make clever forgeries and the will to deceive.

"These forgeries of Vault security messages were designed to fool the public into believing their financial holdings were under attack. What the perpetrators hoped to accomplish with this ruse is unknown. High Executive Borda believes the forgers' goal was to sow panic in the marketplace. Suffice it to say these messages have been tracked down and eliminated."

Jara seemed disoriented. She took a step backwards and turned her focus away from the diminutive Council spokesman, who began to recite a numbing series of technical statistics. "I don't understand," she ConfidentialWhispered to Horvil. "You can't just forge a message from the Vault like that. You'd need DNA, atomic signatures, who knows what else."

Horvil tilted his head in thought. "It's not impossible."

"Horv, we saw those messages. They said they were from the Vault. They looked authentic. They had valid signatures."

The engineer smiled. The panic of the world coming to an end had already given way to the open vistas of a mathematical challenge. "Sure, it looked authentic," he explained. "It's not hard to make a forgery that looks official at first glance. You could probably find black code on the Data Sea that'll do the trick. The hard part is getting people not to take that second or third glance." Horvil summoned a virtual tablet in the air and began making sketches. "And you could probably do the same thing with the signatures ... if you knew bio/logic encryption theory inside and out ..."

Jara cradled her head in her hands and began rocking back and forth. She interrupted Horvil's musings in mid-sentence. "Horv, have you checked the dock at the fiefcorp in the past few hours?"

Horvil had already ventured far afield into chaos theory and fractal patterns, but Jara's question brought him back to familiar territory with a sickening thud. He shook his head.

"I can't believe we fell for this," Jara croaked. "Natch did it. He went ahead and launched all those programs onto the Data Sea this morning, when n.o.body was paying attention. NiteFocus 48, EyeMorph 66, everything."

"A-and the Patels?"

"Pushed back their NightHawk release until tomorrow. Routine last minute error-checking, their channelers are saying."

There was a very easy syllogism to follow here, even for someone who had not studied subaether physics and advanced bio/logic calculus like Horvil had. Natch had spread rumors of a black code attack.... There was such an attack, or at least a fake one.... The attack had created confusion in the marketplace.... Horvil didn't want to solve the problem. He wanted the whole thing to disappear, to vanish like the multi pedestrians on the street had vanished.

But the Defense and Wellness Council spokesman had no such hesitations. "The perpetrators of this crime may not have launched an actual attack on the Vault," he said, his voice preternaturally calm. "But nevertheless there has been an attack-an attack on the people's a.s.sumption of safety and security. And that is something the Council cannot abide."

On cue, a row of ghostly figures materialized behind the spokesman. Council officers all, adorned with the white robe and yellow star, steely dartguns holstered at their waists, the inexorable mastery of the Data Sea written on their brows.

"This disruption has been thwarted, as all attacks against the public welfare are thwarted," continued the small Asian at the van guard of the officers. "To the perpetrators of this act, let me say this: "The Council will not forget. The Council will not forgive. The Council will bring you to justice."

Jara looked at the man with his index finger pointing towards the audience, the implacable representative of Len Borda's will. She remembered Natch's statement barely twenty-four hours ago: We're going to be number one on Primo's, and we're going to do it tomorrow. It had been so easy. Natch's had not been a statement of intent so much as a prophecy, a foretelling of an event already preordained. When she looked into the Council spokesman's eyes, she could see the same force of will.

Insanity, Jara thought. There's no other word for it.

Jara awoke groggy the next morning, hoping the past two days had been some sort of paranoid hallucination. After yesterday's grim p.r.o.nouncements from the Defense and Wellness Council, she had prived herself to the world and slunk straight off to bed like a wounded animal. Now she discovered she had slept for fourteen hours straight, a Horvilesque achievement.

Anxious for something familiar, Jara fell back into the morning routine she had been forced to abandon by Natch's crazy plan. The routine went like this: Sit up and project the news feeds on top of the plaid blanket. Tune one viewscreen to the morning commentary by Sen Sivv Sor. Tune the other to the editorial by his rival, John Ridglee. Order a steaming cup of nitro from the building. Fetch nitro from the access panel at the left side of the bed. Activate Doze-B-Gone 91.

A few minutes of peaceful routine were enough to convince Jara she was okay. Enough to convince her that a small niche had been carved out for her somewhere in this hardscrabble mountain called the bio/logics industry. Almost enough to convince her she would survive another eleven months.

Insanity, insanity.

The chatter about yesterday's "black code attack" had already slowed to a trickle. Everyone who had claimed financial losses in the panic had quietly recanted during the early morning hours. Representatives of the a.s.sorted Pharisee tribes were tripping all over themselves to declare they had nothing to do with the hoax. Talk on the Data Sea had s.h.i.+fted focus from the attack itself to the Council's behavior during the crisis. Why did Len Borda send an underling to face the crowd at Melbourne instead of appearing himself? How did the Council plan on pursuing the offending parties? Other drudges were bemoaning the fact that vast swaths of the public had been deceived by such a simple stunt. Technology had kept the world so secure for so long. Had society become slothful and complacent?

The speculation merely elicited a yawn from Jara. She moved past the mundane news about TubeCo's financial woes and deaths in the orbital colonies, waved away the parochial gossip from her L-PRACG and the solicitations from programming supply companies. The news feed on her blanket s.h.i.+fted in the blink of an eye to the bio/logic industry reports.

The lead headline: PATEL BROTHERS UNSEATED BY RIVAL FIEFCORP.

Natch Personal Programming Takes #1 on Primo's

Jara let loose a tidal wave of messages on her boss. She stood on the red square in her hallway sending multi requests and ConfidentialWhis- pers by the dozens, enough to cause a major headache. Anyone but a trusted a.s.sociate would have automatically been cut off by the Data Sea by now. Still, Natch could have prived himself to her communiques with the barest thought. What are you waiting for, Natch? Jara asked. What are you afraid of?

Finally, one of her multi requests got through. Jara took a deep breath and activated the connection. Multivoid whispered its sweet promises of oblivion for a scant few seconds and then abandoned her in Natch's foyer. A viewscreen right in front of her face broadcast one of the early nudes of Baghalerix.

Voices drifted into her ears before the connection was stable enough for her to process them.

"Ratings? Who really cares about ratings?" came the first voice, cool and b.u.t.ter-smooth and almost certainly enhanced with bio/logics. Natch.

"Well, you do, from what I've heard," replied the second. Jara stood for a moment, trying to remember where she had heard that scratchy growl. A male voice, at least twice Natch's age. And then suddenly she placed it: the drudge Sen Sivv Sor.

So the feeding frenzy has begun, thought Jara bitterly. Everybody wants to talk to the new number one on Primo's.

She wondered when her fiefcorp master was planning to bring her in to the conversation. Or did he just plan to keep her dangling at arm's length? She studied the ballooning belly of the woman on the viewscreen and tried to decide if her boss had chosen this particular painting to send a message.

"Of course it doesn't hurt to have high ratings," Natch was saying from around the corner. "It's good for morale, it's good for business. But I don't care if we're number one on Primo's or number one thousand, as long as we deliver the highest quality programming. If I can look back at the end of the day and say we've done the best job we can do, then I can sleep at night." Yes, Natch had definitely modified his voice; Jara recognized the laid-back cadences of SmoothTalker 139.

"But the Patel Brothers managed to pull back ahead of you in only forty-seven minutes," said Sor. "Number one for less than an hour! Come on, Natch, tell me that doesn't rankle you."

Natch laughed the free and easy laugh that only the rich or the deranged possessed. "I give Frederic and Petrucio Patel a lot of credit. They didn't waste any time launching a counter-offensive. It's no wonder they've been number one so long. But I think we've proven our point: the Patel Brothers' days of dominating the Primo's ratings are over. From now on, they'll have to watch their backs."

Jara had heard enough. Obviously, Natch had no plans to include her in the conversation. She stalked towards the living room, her face a study in carefully controlled rage-and then stopped.

Perfection taint you! she screamed silently at her boss. The fiefcorp master had cordoned off the living room, blocking access as only the apartment owner could. It was an inhuman feeling, this sensation of just stopping, the inability to even make an effort to transgress. The designers of the multi network strove so hard to provide complete verisimilitude, and yet their method of access control utterly short-circuited human instincts.

"So what's next for the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp?" Sen Sivv Sor was asking.

Natch's grin was practically audible. "Kick the Patel Brothers out on their a.s.ses, of course." His imaginary audience let out a spirited cheer.

Jara gritted her teeth and fired off a terse ConfidentialWhisper. "This interview is over," she announced, "unless you want me to start bombarding him with all the evidence I've found about your little scheme."

There was a pause in the conversation. Jara could hear the rustling of clothing, a man arising from his chair. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to call it a day, Mr. Sor," said Natch. "Duty beckons. I've got a fiefcorp to run."

"Sure, sure!"

The a.n.a.lyst suddenly found the impenetrable barrier lifted, and swooped around the corner just in time to see Sor give Natch a final clap on the back. The drudge looked exactly like his pictures on the Data Sea; his craggy face, white mop of hair and distinctive birthmark would be recognizable anywhere. A second later, he disappeared. Off to rebroadcast the interview and play the bit part Natch had a.s.signed him in the drama of his life.

Natch displayed no sign of the fatigue a normal human being would feel after four days without sleep. He looked alive, focused, handsome. Jara felt the familiar twinge of l.u.s.t stabbing through her abdomen and sneered it down.

And then, in the s.p.a.ce between one breath and the next, Natch's demeanor completely s.h.i.+fted. A mask was silently discarded. Now his eyes held nothing but sullenness, and the once-over he gave her spoke more of dismissal than command. Natch didn't even offer his apprentice a chair to sit in, but instead marched straight into his office. Jara stormed after him, trembling, only to find him standing at his workbench in the midst of a Minds.p.a.ce bubble. The donut-shaped code of NiteFocus 48-or NiteFocus 49, she supposed-surrounded him like a life preserver.

"What evidence?" grunted Natch.

Jara put her hands on her hips and mustered her best accusatory stance. "Evidence of what you did."

"And what exactly did I do?"

"You know exactly what you did, you son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h! You launched that fake black code attack yourself."

If the a.n.a.lyst expected an angry outburst from her master, she was disappointed. She would have even been rea.s.sured by one of his contemptuous laughs. Instead, Natch nudged a periwinkle-colored chunk of code with his left hand while he probed its cratered surface with the fingertips of his right. "What makes you think I did that?" he said.

"Come on, Natch! There aren't many people clever enough to pull off that little fandango yesterday. There's even fewer who would have anything to gain by it. I've seen you tinkering around with strange programs over the past few weeks, stuff that doesn't look like anything in our catalog. And then, of course, there's the fact that the so-called attack happened exactly when our rumors said it would."

"A happy coincidence."

"And was it a happy coincidence you put our necks on the line instead of yours? Did it occur to you that when the Council starts asking questions, the rumors'll lead back to Horvil and me? Not you, of course. You didn't have anything to do with those rumors. You were busy getting our bio/logic programs ready for launch, as the Minds.p.a.ce logs will clearly show."

Something she said finally penetrated Natch's thick skin. He worked quietly for a few minutes without speaking a word, the gears in his head clearly grinding away. The pause of a politician carefully phrasing a key platform. "If you really think I would do that to you and Horvil," he said at length, "then you don't understand me at all."

Jara studied the fiefcorp master's face carefully. Could he possibly be telling the truth? Could he be operating on a plane that far removed from everyday life? Or was this just another one of his acting jobs? She gazed into that unblemished, boyish face and wondered if there were any truths at all buried beneath its surface, or if truth for him was as mutable as programming code, subject to updates by the hour.

A minute rolled by, then two. Jara cursed her body as a turncoat, fired up Delibidinize 14a for the third time that hour. Can't he at least give me the satisfaction of turning Minds.p.a.ce off? she fumed. Finally, she straightened her spine and looked him squarely in the eye. "I quit."

Natch gave her a sly look. "Fine," said the fiefcorp master blithely. "Quit."

A stunned silence filled the room. Jara didn't move.

"Stop being so f.u.c.king melodramatic, Jara!" Natch burst out. He grabbed NiteFocus 49 with one hand and violently spun the virtual code around like a wheel, himself stuck in the spokes. "You've got less than a year left on your contract, and after that you'll have the option to cash out. You're telling me you're going to give up all those shares and start from scratch someplace else? Room and board for another four years? I know you better than that, Jara. You're going to stay right where you are and get filthy rich with the rest of us."

"I could turn you in to the Council."

Natch didn't lose a beat. "Without hard evidence-which I know you don't have-where would that get you? n.o.body wants to hire a whiner or a whistle blower. You'd be right back where you were when I found you: blacklisted by the major bio/logic fiefcorps, taking s.h.i.+t from second-rate imbeciles like Lucas Sentinel. And don't tell me the Council will get to the bottom of this, because they won't. Dozens of cases like this cross Len Borda's desk every week, and he's lucky if he can close a tenth of them."

"Then I'll tell the Meme Cooperative."

"Don't make me laugh."