Infoquake (6 page)

I knew this was a mistake, thought Jara bitterly. I haven't been here for
five minutes, and we're already talking about "alleged" rumors. The Meme
Cooperative official was obviously more interested in enjoying his
SeeNaRee than in listening to the grievances of some ghostly, genderless voice from the outside world. "Listen to me!" she grunted. "Something terrible is going to happen, and someone's got to stop it. It's a
matter of public safety!"

Again the placating smile. "This really sounds like it's outside our
jurisdiction. Perhaps you might try contacting your L-PRACG. Or
maybe the Defense and Wellness Council would be willing to take a statement. There's also the Fair Business Working Group of the Prime
Committee. Have you tried them? Or the Creeds Coalition's Council
on Ethical Fiefcorp Behavior ..."

Jara shook her head. This was pointless. Even if she did manage to
ram a complaint through the thick skull of this bureaucrat, it would
get lost in the administrative morass. She pictured a colossal Rube
Goldberg machine two hundred meters high, her complaint a pea bobbing back and forth on some remote conveyor belt hidden deep in the
works. What else can you expect when you trust an industry to police itself?
thought Jara bitterly. But the system had lined too many pockets over
the years; no one else wanted the responsibility.

The analyst cut her multi connection without a word. The familiar
walls of her London apartment appeared once more. Let the bureaucrat
prattle on in his little winter retreat and make excuses for the Cooperative's inaction. Jara couldn't take another minute of it.

She flopped down on her couch and called up the holographic
rumor flowchart. Another towering structure that obscured her very
existence, only this one she had built herself. Jara rubbed her temples
and prepared to send a Confidential Whisper request to the first name
on her list.

Horvil whined and pulled his head out of the burrow of pillows he had
created in his sleep. His internal calendar assured him it was indeed
Tuesday morning, and he had slept for ten hours. But if the sun wasn't
directly 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."

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."

"Well, it's either that or ..." Jara let the sentence trail off.

The engineer leapt to his feet, face as pale as the droplet of
ChaiQuoke piloting its way down the grooves of his chin. "Come on,
Jara. There's no way he could've done that black code himself. I mean,
yeah, Natch is one of the most brilliant programmers out there, but to
break into the Vault? The Pharisees and the Islanders and who knows
how many other lunatics have been trying to do that for decades. You
think he just cobbled together some black code to crack open the
financial exchange system in his spare time? He's not that smart. No one
is.

Jara grimaced, conceding the point. Humans had limits. It was an
axiom she felt she would be wise to remember. "Okay, okay. So what
are the other alternatives?"

"Are the messages fake?"

"I don't think so. They look authentic to me. The signatures check
out."

"Maybe he's involved with the Pharisees. Maybe somebody warned
him ahead of time. But wait-that doesn't make sense either. The
Pharisees don't use ConfidentialWhisper or multi or-or anything.
They'd have no way to get in touch with him." Jara could see Horvil
sliding back down into the mental quicksand. He was flailing his arms around in increasingly wide arcs to match the mounting decibels of his
voice. "You know Natch likes to ride those tube trains in circles for
hours on end. Maybe he's going to the Pharisee Territories ... or
meeting the Pharisees halfway ... or-"

"That's ridiculous. Natch is not holding secret meetings on the
tube with a bunch of violent lunatics. He just isn't."