—AAC—
“…
In a private room in a private place, a private man put on his mask and went to work.
He was David Eng and Roberto Garcia, Lila Holmes and Sandra Stone. His alter egos lived in an apartment overlooking the Chicago River, and a stately house on Avenida Manquehue in Santiago—claimed offices in anonymous towers on the fringe of Phoenix and in the heart of Vancouver.
There had been other names through the years, a dozen years now, a parade of identities, some invented, some borrowed. There had been a chain of locked rooms and secret spaces, inhabited only by obedient machines put in place by trusted hands.
And behind those masks, another mask—the constant, the connection. His name, taken from a man forty years dead, was never spoken, for no one knew better than he how the nets were watched, what tricks could be played with the bit stream of the skylinks. He spoke with other voices, always changing voices, but those who heard him knew that the words were Jeremiah’s.
A construct in a silicon engine, an idea in the mind of a man, a weapon in a war of deceptions—Jeremiah was all of those. In the beginning, Jeremiah had been nothing more than these. But now the mask had been in place so long that the man who wore it had nearly disappeared, and it had become more and more difficult for him to leave the shadow places where Jeremiah was real and face the light outside, the world where he himself was real.
Necessity rescued him from that struggle. So much demanded Jeremiah’s attention, so many clamored for an audience, that there was little enough chance even to escape into sleep. The world never slept.
He had allowed himself but three hours this night, the merest nap. Yet when he awoke, he found nearly one hundred new messages awaiting him, captured and forwarded by the relayers, coders, and recorders, collated and sifted by the comsole’s secretary.
A third of them were reports from members of the Homeworld network. Another dozen announced new volunteers to join the order of battle. Fully half were answers to queries issued earlier. The remainder were nuggets of gold: a scattering of technical, financial, and logistical gifts offered for his consideration.
But the message list was only the beginning. Also waiting in queue were more than seventy news stories collected by the secretary’s search engine, as well as a hyperlog of real-time intercepts of new and ongoing skylink conversations. Too much. Far too much. He could not review it all, not nearly so. His spies were too good, his sources too many.
Undisguised, the sheer volume of traffic would have been a threat to the operation’s survival. But he had learned many tricks, invented several others. Intercepts were fragmented and dumped to null skylink addresses for his unregistered receivers to pluck out of the air and rebuild. Reports came in as innocent-looking packets quickposted as delete-on-receipt to the subscription services. Messages relayed from the four “mail drop” sites were laundered through a high-traffic business front.
But that was not the only danger.
Once, he had had it all in his hands, knew every thread in the weave. No longer. This thing he had created had its own heartbeat, and though he still guided it, he no longer controlled every movement. More and more of the correspondence was in the hands of Lila, the secretarial engine. More and more of the ancillary reports were archived unseen. The growing archive troubled him. It represented missed opportunities, needless errors, eager volunteers frustrated by his silence and driven to act on their own.
But he was only one man, one person pretending to be five, one mortal attempting to live up to a myth. He could not be everywhere, could not scatter his energies on a thousand points of light. His focus had to remain at the center: Sasaki, Dryke,
Mustering a decisiveness he did not feel, he began to sift through the priority items in the queue, dispatching them from the displays at a rate approaching one a minute. Even as he did, new messages and stories appeared on the list, underlining the Sisyphean futility of the task.
But making its way to him that moment was a message which would make him forget that futility for a while. Originating with Katrina Becker in Munich, it was following a tortuous path to reach him—bounced twice to a DBS, its headers stripped and replaced by a relayer, back-coded into a transparent file on DIANNA, and then unlocked with a key that had been sent weeks earlier.
When it appeared in the queue, his face brightened. And when he read it, he laughed and clapped his hands together in a moment of celebration.
For sometime while Jeremiah had been napping, the Munich virus had gone to war.
It had been months in the making, as almost all operations were. It had begun with a suggestion from without, as almost all operations did.
“Tell me your ideas, and Jeremiah will tell you when the time is right,” was the message which went out to the network, to newly vetted friends. And they looked into their own lives for the special opportunities offered there, building for Jeremiah a catalog of choices.
“I can do this to hurt them,” they said. “I can do this to help.”
Katrina Becker had come into the fold more than a year ago. Her vetting had been unusually prolonged, for the special opportunity she represented was dangerously attractive. Becker was a systems security technician in the engineering section at AT-Munich, the primary technical center for the Diaspora. Through her, he could have access to the closed world of
From the first, he had viewed Becker with dark suspicion. Nine years into a career with Allied, she claimed a change of heart prompted by a book she had read and a man she had met. The book was Danya Odon’s
Or so she claimed.
It took three months and several significant leaks of technical material from AT-Munich before Jeremiah was satisfied that her conversation was sincere. It had taken many more months to pick apart the secrets of the engineering network and build a virus capable of surviving its defenses.
Even then, he had hesitated. To use Becker to deliver the virus would be to sacrifice her. She was willing, even eager, but he had no one similarly placed, no way to replace the intelligence she delivered. Without a guarantee of success, and with a plenitude of other options, Jeremiah held both Becker and the virus in reserve, waiting to be convinced that the time was right or her usefulness was about to end.
Then came Dryke’s transparent attempt to trap him with the open gateway into the test environment. Jeremiah had at first been amused, then insulted. Did Dryke think that he could not tell the difference between real and calculated carelessness? Did Dryke think he would expect anything in the test partition except antibodies and backtracers?
Ego prodded him to answer the insult by making Dryke look foolish. But it was the fact that the delivery of the finished command package to
The day after the gateway opened, the virus was hard-coded in a tamper-sealed chipdisk and ferried to Becker in a delivery of perfume from a Belgian company. Two days later, it was installed in the Munich network. It had been waiting in hiding there ever since, watching for its trigger key. When the gateway was finally closed, the countdown began.
The virus was meant to alter the command package in a subtle way, modifying a calculation here, a data point there, changing a pointer, closing a loop. If it had succeeded, no one would have known of its handiwork until
But an antibody program, monitoring cryptographic checksums and integrity keys, spotted the change and came hunting.
In response, the virus abandoned its stealthy subversion and went wild.
