Rainbows End (43 page)

“How far till we’re in enemy territory?” said Robert. Miri held a finger up to her lips. She gestured, and silent messaging paraded across his vision.

Miri — > Robert: Your pdf says they only control a small part of GenGen. But I bet they can hear a long ways. Stick with silent messaging.

 

Robert fumbled with the box at his belt. The keypad display helped, but typing was tedious. All the tricks that Juan had taught him were nearly useless without Epiphany.

 

Robert — > Miri: Ok.

Miri walked in almost perfect silence, and Robert tried to imitate her. In fact, with Winston and the others gone, things were very quiet in Huertas country. Maybe they were as alone as the Mysterious Stranger had claimed, shielded from friends and enemies alike.

Miri must have been reading as they walked. More sming appeared. Miri — > Robert: I didn’t know about “Alfred.” It was curious that she didn’t wonder about the Mysterious Stranger. He tapped a few cramped words. Robert — > Miri: Wht cn we do?

Miri — > Robert: Well, there’s Mr. Smart-Aleck’s list. She waved at the air, and a page of the Stranger’s pdf popped into view.

 

Page 17
What you can do to defeat Alfred
First off, even I, your mysterious friend, am not sure exactly what Alfred is up to (but I am afire with curiosity). Here are some possibilities.

(l)To blow up the bio labs, classic straightforward terrorism. But don’t you think he went to rather a lot of trouble if that’s all he wants to do? It would be a gross under-employment of everyone’s talent. If this is the scam, you will be the heroes of the day, my hands in disabling those little boxes you and your friends planted — but your fame will likely be posthumous. My condolences!

(2)To sabotage some component of the labs, maybe in a way that won’t become evident till much later disasters. This is almost as stupid as (1).

(3)To install (or cover) some fiendishly clever Man-in-the-Middle software that gives Alfred de facto ownership of research done in that part of lab that you, Robert, infested for him. This would be cool, and it is my personal favorite (see my discussion of fruit flies in Chapter 3). Unfortunately for Alfred, this caper is so far blown that I doubt it will survive the audits that will surely come raining down. In this case, you two can help by grabbing anything that Alfred has not yet hidden.

(4)In the failure of case (3), or perhaps as his original plan, Alfred may take advantage of your cabal’s efforts and
outship
biologically interesting materials from the labs.

[Diagram of the pneumo tube transport system] [Picture of GenGen’s UP/Ex launcher]

To what end? Oh, the usual terrorist possibilities — but more likely, something weird and interesting. I’m confident I can identify such activity, and you — my loyal hands — can physically prevent the loading and outshipment.

For the moment we are all in the dark about this. But once you enter the perverted GenGen area, I should be able to contact you again. Be careful, be quiet, and Watch for Me in Your Sky!

Miri’s words were overwriting the text even before Robert finished reading it.
Miri — > Robert: This guy is always so modest.

Robert grinned. Then he read her message a second time. And he thought back to all his conversations with Sharif, to the mystery of True-Sharif and Stranger-Sharif and… SciFi-Sharif.
Oh, my God
. Robert — > Miri: How much of sharif ws u?

She glanced up at him and for instant her intensity was transformed into a dazzling smile. Miri — > Robert: I’m not sure. Sometimes we were all mixed together with the real Zulfi. That was almost fun, hearing what the others asked and what you answered. But way too often, I was frozen out and it was just Mr. Smart-Aleck.

Robert — > Miri: The Mysterious Stranger.
Miri — > Robert: Do you really call him that? Why?
Robert — > Miri: Yes.
Because of the magic he promised
. But he didn’t type that out.
Miri — > Robert: Well, I think he’s nothing without us.

Everything was still dark beyond their little pool of light, but now the walls were closer. They were almost back to the sky tunnel.

Robert — > Miri: Whn will yr mom and dad gt here? Kids spying on family members and reporting to the government — that feature of tyranny is so much simpler when the family itself is mainly government agents.

Miri — > Robert: I don’t know. I didn’t tell them.
Where is tyranny when you need it
! For a moment, Robert couldn’t think of anything to say. Robert — > Miri: But why?
Miri stopped for a second, looked up at him with that patented stubborn stare.

Miri — > Robert: Because you’re my grandfather. I knew you never meant to hurt me. I knew you must be hurting inside. I knew Bob must be wrong about you. I figured that if I could help you out from a different direction, you’d get better. And you did get better, didn’t you?

Robert managed a nod. Miri turned and marched on.
Miri — > Robert: But I messed up. I thought Smart-Aleck was all I had to worry about. Wherever you broke in, I thought there’d be instant alarms — and me and Juan being there might make things go better for you. Now Juan is

She hesitated, then reached out to grasp his hand. Miri — > Robert: Juan is hurt
bad.
Her hand trapped his fingers. No matter. Robert had no sensible reply except to squeeze back.

 

Miri — > Robert: But Dr. Xiang is out there. She’ll call for help. And Mr. Blount should be calling the real 911 by now. Meantime, it’s up to you and me down here.

There were surprises in almost every one of Miri’s sentences, and if he could have spoken aloud or typed freely he would have asked a hundred questions. Juan? Xiu Xiang? Miri? So many friends, doing so much to save an incompetent old fool and his fellow fools.

The ground bounced elastically against their feet. They were passing through the sky tunnel, back into GenGen territory.
The Animal Model?

Even on a slow day, thousands of certificates got revoked every hour. It was a messy process, but a necessary consequence of frauds detected, court orders executed, and credit denied. All but a handful of revocations were short cascades of denied transactions, involving a single individual and his/her immediate certificate authority, or a small company and its CA. Perhaps once a year there would be a significant cascade, usually when a large company ran into uncompromising creditors and a court order was delivered to a midlevel CA. Even more rarely, a revocation might be part of a military action, as in the fall of South Ossetia. In theory, the revocation protocols worked with arbitrarily large CAs… but until this night, no apex certificate authority had ever issued global revocations. And Credit Suisse was one of the ten largest CAs in the world. Most of its business was in Europe, but its certificates bound webs of unmeasured complexity all over the planet, affecting the interactions of people who might speak no European language.

Tonight all those unknowing customers would learn of their connection. The failures spread as timeouts on certificates from intermediate CAs and — where time-critical trust was involved — as direct notifications. In Europe, airplanes and trains came smoothly to a stop, without a single accident or fatality. A billion failures were noted, and emergency services moved — with varying success — into action.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security noticed the failures and the growing collateral damage. Analyst pools in the U.S. reached out to the other Great Powers and conferred under emergency protocols established years ago. Chinese Public Safety, the Indo-European intelligence services, the U.S. DHS — they all agreed that a category-one disaster was in progress, a really
bad
software failure or a novel terrorist attack.

In certain corners of Indo-European intelligence, understanding was more precise. Considerably more precise.

 

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: So I have done it. Has it had any effect on Rabbit?

So far there were only small failures at UCSD, just a few certificates timing out. That was enough to make some projections: The crowds had not consciously noticed the changes, but the library riot was due for an abrupt and ignominious end. Even more than the analysts had guessed, Rabbit had been behind what they had seen tonight, and now that support was rotting away.

Down in the labs, Rabbit had been an almost invisible intruder. Confirming the
absence
of that intrusion was not easy, but Alfred’s analysts had a consensus:

 

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: Communication failures are up, but not in our core operation. Rabbit is still here, but he’s losing flexiblity.

 

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Losing flexibility? By damn, we need more than that. What about his two agents? What are they doing?

 

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: They’ve wandered out of our area. That wasn’t precisely true, but the Gus and what remained of Rabbit were properly diverted.
Now I just need a few more minutes
.

Rabbit was under pressure. He always told himself that he performed best under pressure — though usually the pressure was not so immediate, nor his opponents so powerful and humorless. Other than some of the low-ranking analysts, Rabbit didn’t know anyone on the Indo-European side who could take a joke.

Rabbit looked out through a dozen cameras, everything that Alfred had suborned in the MCog area. His hands had entered the area just a few moments before; maybe that was what had panicked his enemies into their massive revocation attack. With a small and dwindling part of his attention he followed the wonderful riot around the library. Sigh. Alfred & Co had never guessed his connection with Scooch-a-mout, and yet… Who’d’a thunk they’d detect his affection for Credit Suisse CA? Or that the EU had such power over the certificate authority of a sovereign country?… Or that his own dependence was as broad as he was now discovering?

Rabbit had other apex CAs, though none so useful as Credit Suisse. They would suffice for a few more minutes. Where they didn’t, he had legal programs posting appeals against the most destructive of the revocations.

Meantime, focus on the fun things: What was Alfred trying do do? Sheer destruction? Intellectual theft? Rabbit was beginning to feel mean. He had been willing to settle for a secret back door into Alfred’s operation. Now, well, now he meant to steal it all. Starting with the fruit flies.

Rabbit reached out for his hands.

Robert remembered this area. They were back in the heart of GenGen country, the unending rows of gray cabinets, the crystal forests that connected them, the pneumo tubes. But up ahead was a sound like cardboard boxes being crushed.

The Stranger’s pdf had explanations for the abbreviations that were printed on the sides of the cabinets:
Dros MCog

Robert — > Miri: Fruit flies? This was where he had set down almost a third of the little boxes, having to crawl over above and between the cabinets.

 

Miri — > Robert: Yes. Did you read what Smart-Aleck claims about this? I don’t believe it.

“Hey, hey, my man!” And there was the Mysterious Stranger, Miri’s Mr. Smart-Aleck. His skin was practically glowing green, even in the shadows. The face was Sharif’s but the smile was inhumanly wide. “Talk as you please. Alfred discovered us here several minutes ago.” The Stranger looked around, as if expecting a visible enemy. “So now I don’t care if he hears you. Or me! What can you do, Alfred? You’re shutting me down, but I wager I’ll last another minute or two. Oh, I suppose you could shut down your own operation, too. I’d be instantly gone then.” He glanced back at Miri and Robert, and continued sotto voce. “If he does that, he’s truly desperate. And it won’t help him a bit, since you still have my pdf.
You’ll
still be here to destroy his underhanded plans.”

The Mysterious Stranger waved for them to follow. “Did you get to this part of my explanation?” He waved at the cabinets. “Molecular Biology of Cognition. MCog. And Alfred’s people have created the ideal animal model for their research.”

“Fruit flies?” said Robert. “I don’t believe it,” said Miri. “Fruit flies can’t think. What could your ‘Alfred’ — or you — do with them?”

 

The Stranger gave out one of its dismissive laughs, and Robert noticed Miri’s face jerk up. She might do better with this manipulator than Robert. After all, she wasn’t desperate for his help.

“Ah, Miri, you read but you don’t understand. If you had access just now to the wider net — and a few hundred hours of research — perhaps you’d understand that molecular biology depends more on data depth and analysis than it does on the particular class of organism. In his
Drosophila melanogaster alfredü
— is that what you call them, Alfred? — we have the metabolic pathways that are the basis for all animal cognition.”

Minus the editorial comments, this did look like some of the pdf.
They rounded a corner and saw the source of the sounds.

”
Viola
, Alfred’s three hundred thousand fruit flies, now being folded into convenient shipping cartridges.” The Stranger’s face and body bore less and less resemblance to the original Sharif. “But I must confess — I know what these little bugs are, but I don’t really know what Alfred has planned for them. Surely there are some marvelous diseases — cognitive diseases? — that might come out of such research. Or maybe he wants to get a head start on all the enhancement-drug people. Or maybe he’s into YGBM. But I do know — “

The fruit-fly arrays were being folded on a large transport table, much bigger than anything in Ron Williams’s shop class. The shipping cylinders rolled across the table, right through the Stranger’s body. The creature noticed this a half second late, but did a creditable hop back from the table.

“But I do know that he’s trying to ship them off-site.”
“So you claim.”

“Hey, trust me, Miss Miri. You’ve
met Alfred
. He’s the fellow who tried to kill Juan Orozco. The guy’s an evil loon. Ping the labels on these packages if you don’t believe me.”