his office. I went there a couple of hours ago in person and the area was sealed off by our friends from the Puzzle Palace. He’s not at home either. I suspect the worst…
By the way, guys, you might want to keep an eye on each other for the next couple of days. Just in case.
Signed,
Yr frndly spk “Eve?”
“Bob?”
“Green fields.”
“You phoned me to say you know someone with hayfever?”
“We both have hayfever. It may be terminal.”
“I know where you can find some medicine for that.”
“Medicine won’t work this time. It’s like the emperor’s new suit.”
“It’s like what? Please repeat.”
“The emperor’s new suit: it’s naked, it’s public, and it can’t be covered up. Do you understand? Please tell me.”
“Yes, I understand exactly what you mean…I’m just a bit shocked; I thought everything was still on track. This is all very sudden. What do you want to do?” (I checked my watch.) “I think you’d better meet me at the pharmacy in fifteen minutes.”
“At six-thirty? They’ll be shut.”
“Not to worry: the main Boots in town is open out of hours. Maybe they can help you.”
“I hope so.”
“I know it. Goodbye.”
On my way out of the house I paused for a moment. It was a small house, and it had seen better days.
I’m not a home-maker by nature: in my line of work you can’t afford to get too attached to anything, any language, place, or culture. Still, it had been mine. A small, neat residence, a protective shell I could withdraw into like a snail, sheltering from the hostile theorems outside.Goodbye, little house. I’ll try not to miss you too much. I hefted my overnight bag onto the backseat and headed into town.
I found Eve sitting on a bench outside the central branch of Boots, running a degaussing coil over her credit cards. She looked up. “You’re late.”
“Come on.” I waggled the car keys at her. “You have the tickets?”
She stood up: a petite woman, conservatively dressed. You could mistake her for a lawyer’s secretary or a personnel manager; in point of fact she was a university research council administrator, one of the unnoticed body of bureaucrats who shape the course of scientific research. Nondescript brown hair, shoulder-length, forgettable. We made a slightly odd pair: if I’d known she’d have come straight from work I might have put on a suit. Chinos and a lumberjack shirt and a front pocket full of pens that screamed engineer: I suppose I was nondescript, in the right company, but right now we had to put as much phase space as possible between us and our previous identities. It had been good protective camouflage for the past decade, but a bush won’t shield you against infrared scopes, and merely living the part wouldn’t shield us against the surveillance that would soon be turned in our direction.
“Let’s go.”
I drove into town and we dropped the car off in the long-stay park. It was nine o’clock and the train was already waiting. She’d bought business-class tickets:go to sleep in Euston, wake up in Edinburgh. I had a room all to myself. “Meet me in the dining car, once we’re rolling,” she told me, face serious, and I nodded.
“Here’s your new SIMM . Give me the old one.”
I passed her the electronic heart of my cellphone and she ran it through the degausser then carefully cut it in half with a pair of nail-clippers. “Here’s your new one,” she said, passing a card over. I raised an eyebrow. “Tesco’s, pay-as-you go, paid for in cash. Here’s the dialback dead-letter box number.” She pulled it up on her phone’s display and showed it to me.
“Got that.” I inserted the new SIMM then punched the number into my phone. Later, I’d ring the number: a PABX there would identify my voiceprint then call my phone back, downloading a new set of numbers into its memory. Contact numbers for the rest of my ops cell, accessible via cellphone and erasable in a moment. The less you knew, the less you could betray.
The London to Scotland sleeper train was a relic of an earlier age, a rolling hotel characterized by a strange down-at-heel ’70s charm. More importantly, they took cash and didn’t require ID , and there were no security checks: nothing but the usual on-station cameras monitoring people wandering up and down the platforms. Nothing on the train itself. We were booked through to Aberdeen but getting off in Edinburgh-first step on the precarious path to anonymizing ourselves. If the camera spool-off was being archived to some kind of digital medium we might be in trouble later, once the coming AI burn passed the hard take-off point, but by then we should be good and gone.
Once in my cabin I changed into slacks, shirt and tie-image 22, business consultant on way home for the weekend. I dinked with my phone in a desultory manner, then left it behind under my pillow, primed to receive silently. The restaurant car was open and I found Eve there. She’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt and tied her hair back, taking ten years off her appearance. She saw me and grinned, a trifle maliciously. “Hi, Bob. Had a tough meeting? Want some coffee? Tea, maybe?”
“Coffee,” I sat down at her table. “Shit,” I muttered. “I thought you-”
“Don’t worry.” She shrugged. “Look, I had a call from Mallet. He’s gone off air for now, he’ll be flying in from San Francisco via London tomorrow morning. This isn’t looking good. Durant was, uh, shot resisting arrest by the police. Apparently he went crazy, got a gun from somewhere and holed up in the library annex demanding to talk to the press. At least, that’s the official story. Thing is, it happened about an hour after your initial heads-up. That’s too fast for a cold response.”
“You think someone in the Puzzle Palace was warming the pot.” My coffee arrived and I spooned sugar into it. Hot, sweet, sticky: I needed to stay awake.
“Probably. I’m trying to keep loop traffic down so I haven’t asked anyone else yet, but you think so and I think so, so it may be true.”
I thought for a minute. “What did Mallet say?”
“He said P. T. Barnum was right.” She frowned. “Who was P. T. Barnum, anyway?”
“A boy like John Major, except he didn’t run away from the circus to join a firm of accountants. Had the same idea about fooling all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time, though.”
“Uh-huh. Mallet would say that, then. Who cracked it first? NSA? GCHQ? GRU?”
“Does it matter?”
She blew on her coffee then took a sip. “Not really. Damn it, Bob, I really had high hopes for this world-line. They seemed to be doing so well for a revelatory Christian-Islamic line, despite the post-Enlightenment mind-set. Especially Microsoft-”
“Was that one of ours?” She nodded.
“Then it was a master-stroke. Getting everybody used to exchanging macro-infested documents without any kind of security policy. Operating systems that crash whenever a microsecond timer overflows. And all those viruses!”
“It wasn’t enough.” She stared moodily out the window as the train began to slide out of the station, into the London night. “Maybe if we’d been able to hook more researchers on commercial grants, or cut funding for pure mathematics a bit further-”
“It’s not your fault.” I laid a hand across her wrist. “You did what you could.”
“But it wasn’t enough to stop them. Durant was just a lone oddball researcher; you can’t spike them all, but maybe we could have done something about him. If they hadn’t nailed him flat.”
“There might still be time. A physics package delivered to the right address in Maryland, or maybe a hyper- virulent worm using one of those buffer-overrun attacks we planted in the IP stack Microsoft licensed. We could take down the internet-”
“It’s too late.” She drained her coffee to the bitter dregs. “You think the Echelon mob leave their SIGINT processor farms plugged into the internet? Or the RSV , for that matter? Face it, they probably cracked the same derivative as Durant a couple of years ago. Right now there may be as many as two or three weakly superhuman AI s gestating in government labs. For all I know they may even have a timelike oracle in the basement at Lawrence Livermore in the States; they’ve gone curiously quiet on the information tunnelling front lately. And it’s trans-global.
