overhead, then it was simply too early for someone to wake him up with an urgent Confidential Whisper request.
'What?' groaned the engineer.
'I believe we owe you an apology,' came a timorous voice.
Horvil bolted upright, capsizing a stack of nitro mugs. 'Marulana?'
'You were right, Horvil,' said the creed official, her voice a mixture of fear and chagrin. 'Someone has launched a black code attackand they're going straight for the Vault.'
5
It took Jara almost ten minutes to get anything coherent out of Horvil. He had shown up at her front door in person, having run halfway across London with a threadbare pillow clutched under one arm. He was babbling about Creed Elan and losing his family's trust and what would happen if the Data Sea came crashing to a halt.
'All right, slow down,' said Jara firmly, clasping his plump chin in her right hand. 'What's happening?'
The engineer activated a de-stressing program and took a deep breath. A few seconds of Re/Lax 57b was enough to allow him to cram the panic back into the mental sideroom where it normally resided. 'The world is coming to an end,' he said earnestly.
Jara rolled her eyes. 'Can you be more specific?'
'A bunch of lunatics are launching attacks on the Vault. Black code is sprouting like crazy on the Data Sea. The Vault keeps spitting out messages telling people to check their account balances. Nobody's heard a thing from the Defense and Wellness Council. Ergo ... the world is coming to an end.'
'Are you sure you're not just falling for the same dumb rumors we spread last night, Horvil? That was fantasy, remember?'
The engineer shook his head vehemently. 'Look at this,' he said, and Jara instantly felt the mental click of an incoming message. She projected the message onto a blank patch of air, where the holographic letters hovered menacingly like stingrays.
The Vault has detected a DNA-assisted decryption attack directed at your account. Your holdings have not been compromised, but it is advised that you periodically check the security of your Vault account. This advisory has been automatically routed to the custodian of records for your L-PRACG and, depending on your L-PRACG's policies, may also be forwarded to the Defense and Wellness Council.
'My Aunt Berilla sent me that message,' said Horvil glumly. 'Half the women in her creed circle have gotten them by now. This is just how the last one started. Remember all those warnings from Dr. Plugenpatch that kept-'
'Did you tell Natch? What did he say?'
Horvil nodded. 'I finally caught him on ConfidentialWhisper about ten minutes ago. He just cackled something about those crazy Pharisees and went off to examine his accounts.'
The two of them sat down in Jara's breakfast nook. She instructed the building to mix up a tall glass of ChaiQuoke for the engineer, while he quizzically studied the fetid pillow in his hand and tried to figure out how it got there. Jara decided to see if her own meager holdings were in order. Within a fraction of a second, Vault statements were floating before her eyes in stolid financial fonts. All was well: there were no unusual transactions, and access was still guarded by a long series of encrypted numbers derived from her DNA. Jara turned to the fiefcorp accounts next, and was relieved to discover no sign of mischief there either.
Horvil slurped down the glass of milky ChaiQuoke that had emerged from the kitchen access panel. But despite the soothing beverage and the de-stressing program, the engineer was still fidgeting like a teenager. 'You might want to read this too,' he said. 'This just came five minutes ago.'
Jara found herself looking at the latest editorial rant by the drudge Sen Sivv Sor.
The reporter's screed appeared in letters the size of her arm. An ugly white-haired face grimaced from the margin, daring her to mention the red birthmark on its forehead. Sensationalist hack, thought Jara as she rubbed her eyes and pushed the article back half a meter to a more readable distance.
Nobody has broken into my Vault account. Yet. Like many of you, faithful readers, I was awakened early this morning by an announcement from Vault security telling me to double-check the security of my accounts. I was pleased to discover that not a single credit had been touched.
But I may be one of the lucky ones. The scuttlebutt across the Data Sea is that unexplainable transactions are starting to pop up. A woman in Omaha informs me she lost a hundred fifteen credits this morning. A business on the colony of Nova Ceti claims it lost twenty-seven. You might be thinking that twenty-seven credits is not a lot of money, but multiply that by the estimated 42 billion people who hold accounts at the approximately 11 million financial institutions secured by Vault protocols, and you have the makings of a crisis.
Now the question on everybody's lips: Where is the Defense and Wellness Council?
Rumors that the Pharisees were planning a major black code offensive have been circulating for days in the drudge community. High Executive Borda must have heard them too. Certainly, he must have figured out that today is a major religious festival in the Pharisee Territories. And if that's the case, then why wasn't the public warned ahead of time?
We haven't seen a successful black code attack on the Vault in years,' a source inside the Defense and Wellness Council told me. 'It's a totally distributed system running millions of different protocols and locked down on the submolecular level. How far do you think these fanatics are going to get?'
But is High Executive Borda naive enough to think that the march of technology won't eventually ...
Jara waved the scrolling text into oblivion. She could predict the rest of the article anyway. Sor would make his typical excoriations of the Council for being so secretive, and insist that Len Borda be held accountable for his inaction. Then he would segue into his standard rant about the moral decay of society.
'See what I mean?' moaned Horvil, head in his hands. 'The world is-
'Shut up,' Jara barked.
Sen Sivv Sor had a devout following of several billion who hung on his every word. And he was but one among hundreds of thousands of independent commentators competing for readership. Now that the drudges were involved, Jara knew it was only a matter of time before panic whipped across the Data Sea like a tsunami.
And so it did.
While Jara sat quietly with Horvil in her breakfast nook, messages started rolling in to her mental inbox. Urgent warnings and sheepish apologies from the same friends and family members she had spoken with just last night. A letter from her L-PRACG administrator urging calm. Offers for useless 'black code protection programs' from desperate fiefcorps that traded on unsavory bio/logic exchanges. Jara bristled at all the confusion.
'Listen to this,' said Horvil with a nervous laugh. 'There's a rumor going around the Data Sea that High Executive Borda is dead.'
Jara snorted. 'Maybe he got caught in that orbital colony explosion that just killed half a million people.'
Half an hour drifted past like a thunder-laden stormcloud, full of bad omens. Jara tuned her viewscreen in to the public square outside, expecting to see thousands of Londoners rioting in the streets. She saw nothing but the usual Tuesday afternoon traffic. But could she detect an edge to the crowd, an impatience, a fear of the unknown? Or was that simply the everyday background hum of anxiety? Too many choices to make, too many consequences to consider.
'You know this couldn't possibly be a coincidence,' said the analyst.
Horvil rested his cheek on the cool plastic of the table and sighed. Obviously, this thought had occurred to him too. 'So you think Natch knew a black code attack was coming?'
'Maybe. You know that he's hip-deep in the black coding culture.'
'Jara, I've seen those `black coding groups' on the Data Sea that he follows. They're a Joke. A bunch of kids talking about mods for bio/logic programming bars, how to boost OCHRE transmission frequencies, shit like that. If one of those people launched an attack on the Vault, then I'm a Pharisee.'