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"Why you, Leo?"

"Because we know! Because we can! For the sake of the survivors. I suppose." He shrugged. "There's no global... There's no formal, deliberate control over these or events, anywhere. Institutions have given up. vernments have given up. Corporations have given up. 'the people in the room, and the many others who are us and with us, we've never given up. We're the closest this planet has to an actual working government." ane looked around the room. They were agreeing with It wasn't any joke. He was telling a truth that they all and recognized.

"Some of us, most of us, are in the government. But there's not any government in the world that can stand up publicly, and say coldly and openly, that the eight billion people on this collapsing planet are at least four billion people too many. Jane, each year, every year, there are children born on Earth to equal the entire populaot Mexico. That's insanely far too many, and it's been that for eighty years now. The situation is so desperate mat working to solve it is like joining a bomb squad. Every war a bomb explodes, and it's a bomb made of human and every human splinter in that bomb means extincand carbon dioxide and toxins and methane and pestiand clearcutting and garbage and further decline.

There were a lot of ways out once, but there are no more alternatives now. Just people who will probably survive, people who probably won't."

"Leo's being a bit dramatic, as usual, but that's part of bis charm," said the woman, Rosina, with a fond smile at him. Rosina looked like a schoolteacher might look-a teacher with a taste for platinum jewelry and expensive facial surgery. "The Great Game is less romantic than iniaht sound. Basically, it's just another American secret and, and while those are common enough, they iasr long. We're very much like the southern resisace during Reconstruction. Like the Invisible Empire- e Ku Klux Klan. For a decade or so, the Ku Klux Klan was a genuine underground government! Where everybody took turns holding the rope for a minute. So nobody really lynched the darkie. You see, the darky just sort of perished."

She smiled. She said this terrible, heart-freezing thing, and she smiled, because she found it amusing. "And everybody involved went right back to being a county judge and a policeman and a lawyer and the owner of the hardware store. And next week they rode out in their hoods and masks and they killed again. That's exactly what it's like for us, Jane. It can really happen. It has happened. It's happened in the United States. And it's happened here be-fore, long before networks or encryption, or any of the really easy, safe, convenient ways to facilitate large conspiracies. It's not farfetched at all, it's not even hard. It's quite easy if you work at it sincerely, and it's very real, it's real like this table is real." She slapped it.

"Just because we few are dropping out of the game doesn't mean that the Great Game will end," said another poker player. He looked vaguely Asian, with a West Coast accent. There weren't any black people among these people. No Hispanics, either. Jane got the strong impression that ethnic balance hadn't been high on the agenda when they did their recruiting, however people like this did their recruiting. Floating Nietzschean Ubermensch IQ tests in obscure corners of networks, maybe. Intriguing intellectual puzzles that only those of a certain cast of mind could win. Little suction spots in the Net where people could slip into the Underground and never, ever come out... "Like AIDS for instance. That bug is a godsend, we might have cured it by now, but there are brave, determined, clever people who will guard every last AIDS variant like a Holy Grail... . A virus that kills sexually careless people! While at the same time lowering nnmunity, so that afflicted people become a giant natural reservoir for epidemics. It's thanks mainly to AIDS that new tuberculosis treatments become so useless so quickly... . If AIDS didn't exist, we'd have been forced to invent it. If it weren't for AIDS, we'd have ten billion people now, not eight."

"My dear friend Rosina has misled you somewhat with that ancient KKK analogy," said Leo, gently. "We're certainly not racists, we're very multicultural; we never aim to exterminate any ethnic group, we simply work consistently to lower global birthrates and raise global death rates. Really, our activity is no more a lynching than this F-6 is like a lynching. Like the F-6, it's a death remotely traceable to human action, but taking steps to increase the global death rate doesn't make death into murder. An epidemic isn't genocide, it's just another epidemic. Anyway, the vast majority of all our actions are perfectly legal and aboveboard, things that would never raise a second glance! Things such as... offering a scholarship to a medical student."

He poured himself some coffee and added steamed milk. "Instead of saving thousands of harmful human lives through public-health measures like clean water and sewers, why not train that doctor to do elaborate, costly measures, like neural brain scans? Usually, the heart and soul of a nation's public-health work are a few very lonely, very dedicated people. They are easy to find, and their organization can be structure-hit in a very subtle way. These selfless neurotics don't have to be shot out of hand or lynched by racists, for heaven's sake. Generally, all they need is a few kind words and a little gentle distraction."

"Yeah, a fad here, a twist there," said the Asian guy, "a brief delay in shipping to some hard-hit famine site, or a celebrity scandal to chase off news coverage of some lethal outbreak... The current muddled semilegal situation with drugs, for instance, that was a work of genius. .

A great source of finance for anybody's underground, and the people who shoot up heroin are extremely reckless and credulous. Street drugs will almost never be tested for additives, as long as they supply the thrill. There are narcocontraceptives-one shot makes a woman permanently allergic to the lining of her own uterus, something the woman would never notice, except that a fertilized egg will never adhere to her womb." He nodded sagely. "That works very well with mass inoculations too, if you can manage to contaminate the vaccines... . I suppose you could argue the technique's rather sexist, but we've tried covert sterilization with men, and statistics prove that the cohort of fertile women is the real crux of population expansion; it's all in the womb, that's just the way human reproduction works.....eople willing to take intravenous drugs are already flirting with suicide; there's no real harm in assisting them."

"Not to mention legalizing euthanasia on demand," said the second woman, testily. "And at least that form of suicide tends to be far more male-based."

"The whole military policy of structure hits was based on destroying enemy infrastructure-avoiding the political embarrassment of battlefield deaths so that the enemy populace died of apparently natural causes." It was the radio guy again, sitting ramrod straight in his chair before the scanner. "It was Luddism writ large-the first deliberate policy of national Luddism. That the practice of structure hitting quickly leaked into the American civilian populace only indicates the broad base of support for the practice... . Very much like the CIA and lysergic acid, if you don't mind a favorite analogy of mine."

Leo sipped his coffee. "I'm going to miss all of you very much," he confessed.

"I told you he was sentimental," said Rosina.

"It seems such a terrible shame that the talents of a group like this should be wasted on entirely clandestine endeavors. That you'll never have your real due. You all deserve so much better."

"Oh, none of us are any worse off than Alan Turing was," objected the second chess player. "Just more deep, dark, digital spooks."