middle-class dream. The ones that survived more than a few weeks or a single visit from the Border Patrol were on the net and wired to the future: There were business opportunities here, an informal economy to raise money for bribes. Invisibility was expensive. And that in turn meant business opportunities for kids like you. Your peers were mostly dumb, ignorant fucks who didn’t understand the risks and couldn’t imagine what could go wrong. You? Not so dumb, alarmingly precocious in your ability to take on responsible tasks—and utterly conscienceless. It was a combination that appealed to Riccardo, with his regular consignments of cocaine: And later on it appealed to Ortiz, with his far-more-valuable incubators full of unregulated A-life cultures, and Jerome, with the botnet and the fast- switching domains and the kidsnuff websites starring dumb, ignorant drifters whose luck had run out.
Over the course of another three years you came to the attention of the Operation, who offered you a scholarship and a signing bonus and, best of all, co-founder equity if you’d let them guide your talents and find you a suitable start-up to run.
Which brings you back to Edinburgh, and a sunlit morning in the New Town, and the phone in your head buzzing for attention.
“Yo.” You lick your lips as your eyes drift past a couple of cottontops to strip-search a MILF: “Able November.” It’s about 4:00 A.M. in California. This ought to be good.
“Afternoon, son. This is Control. Listen, I got the memo. I like the way you think, and if things were different, I’d say go for it. But right now our top priority is this MacDonald dude. We thought we had an arrangement, but we have some fresh intel this morning about what else he’s doing with his ATHENA project, and it is disturbing. We think he is shorting us. So I’m going to IM you his address, and I want you to go there right now. I’ve got a list of questions we want answers to and, and then you need to, uh, downsize him.”
You nearly trip over a loose paving slab. “I’m already on a police investigation’s radar! Are you trying to burn me?”
“Uh, no—” Control, Wendy’s boss, splutters for a moment. “We’re gonna hang the frame on the bad guys who are attacking us. After downsizing, I want you to go to your fall-back position—you got one, aintcha?—go to that mattress. They’re spreading so much shit that nobody’s going to notice another body when this goes down. We’ll get you out of Scotland in the back of a truck or a boat if we have to. Your DNA sample—there are ways of getting it cross-linked to another record, muddy the waters. Listen, I appreciate this sucks. It’s your operation, the business reboot, and it’s fucked before it got started, but, listen to this, if you do what we need here with MacDonald, we’ll make it worth your while. We gotta hold off ATHENA while the Issyk-Kulistan op winds down and you, you’re inside I.K. now, like it or not. We want you to tie up the loose ends in Edin-burg. Which means talking to Dr. MacDonald, then paying off that consul guy.”
“The honourary consul?” You inadvertently make eye contact with a small child: It cringes away, grabbing onto its oblivious mother’s hand for dear life. You hadn’t mentioned the mark in your report: It’s always best to keep your bolt-holes private. “What does he have to do with it?”
“Mid-tier distribution hub, son. He’s seen too much—the footsoldiers and the general both. He may not know what he’s seen, but if he spills his guts, someone else might put it all together. Plus, MacDonald recruited him.”
“MacDonald—” You stop yourself. Bits of the jigsaw are slotting together, and you don’t like the pattern they’re making. The earlier plan, to stick Hussein’s head above the parapet to attract enemy fire—sounds like he
“Exactly, son.” Control sounds warmly approving. “You can do that? Afterwards, the world is your oyster. Just saying.”
“I can do that,” you assure him.
FELIX: E-commerce
Bhaskar may have his high-rise presidential pleasure dome to squat and gibber in, but it is beholden to you —both in your capacity as chief of overseas military intelligence,
This particular hole in the ground is operated by the headquarters of the Twenty-second Guards Cyberwar Shock Battalion, who inherited it by way of a long and convoluted history of turf warfare and empire building from the former Soviet RSVN, who built it as part of their strategic nuclear dead man’s handle system. It’s buried two hundred metres under a mountain, in a series of rusting, dank, metal-lined tunnels that have long since outlived their original function. Ten years ago, funded by the last gasp of the oil money, your last-but-one predecessor had the nuclear command centre gutted and flood-filled with the latest high-bandwidth laser networking: Today its cheap-ass Malaysian Cisco knockoffs pack a trillion times the bandwidth of the entire Soviet Union at its height, which is to say about as much as a single MIT freshman’s dorm room. Getting that bandwidth hooked up to the public networks on the surface was a herculean task, and has permanently rendered the nuclear bunker unfit for its original purpose—but, as Kyrgyzstan had shipped all its warheads back to Russia three decades ago, you’re not too concerned. You’ve got a nuclearwar command bunker with Herman Miller conference chairs, Mountain Dew vending machines for your tame geeks, armed guards on the airlocks up top, and secure Internet access. A fair definition of heaven, to some.
(Although describing what you’ve got here as “Internet access” is a bit like calling a Bosnian War rape camp a “dating agency.”)
Here is your office: heart of a spider-web, wrapped around a hardused Eames recliner, keyboard sitting on an articulated arm to one side, headset to the other. All the walls are covered in 3D screens except for one, a bare metal surface studded with radiation sensors, air vents, and crossed by exposed pipes and cable trays. There’s a tatty epaper poster gummed across it, sagging in the middle: It shows a constantly updated viewgraph schematic of global bandwidth consumption, fat pipes sprawling multi-hued across a dymaxion projection of the planet, pulsing and rippling with the systolic ebb and flow of data. The screens on the other walls all contain heads, perspectives shockingly preserved as if they are actually there in the flesh, freshly severed.
Teleconferencing, actually.
“How much longer do you propose to keep on stringing them along?” asks the delegate from Maryland. (She’s blonde and thin as a rake and clearly addicted to amphetamines or emetics or both: You wouldn’t fuck her at gun-point.)
“They already realize what is going on!” The delegate from Brussels is clearly irritated by her naivete. The lip-sync in the teleconference loop is borked: The real-time interpreter net is clearly not keeping up with his waspish tirade. “It is inconceivable that they don’t. Perhaps they use this as an opportunity to diminish their headcount. Or perhaps the short-term financial gain really
“Twenty-four hours.” You cut in before his Belgian counterpart manages to crash the software. “That’s all we need for the wrap.”
“Twenty-four hours is too long!” insists the Europol delegate. “We are already have trouble securing for the operation. And these ‘accidents,’ they attract attention. I am hearing reports that are mortifying. What are you
“What precisely didn’t you consent to?” You raise one bushy eyebrow. “I seem to recall the negotiations over the concordat were exhaustive.”
“This!” A wild hand gesture sweeps into view briefly, providing insight. (The American or Japanese programmers who designed the auto-track for this conference system clearly weren’t thinking in terms of cultures that are big on semaphore.) “The agents your associates have deployed are killing people! That was not part of our agreement. This arrangement was to suck in the assets of organized netcrime for civil confiscation, leaving an audit trail to facilitate prosecution of the perpetrators. Extralegal assassination is, is unacceptable! What are you
It’s clearly running out of control, and you try not to sigh. “I am not
