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 embarrassed 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 nobody 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 assumption 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.
6
Jara awoke groggy the next morning, hoping the past two days had been some sort of paranoid hallucination. After yesterday's grim pronouncements 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 assorted Pharisee tribes were tripping all over themselves to declare they had nothing to do with the hoax. Talk on the Data Sea had shifted 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
