The engineer smiled. The panic of the world coming to an end had already given way to the open vistas of a mathematical challenge. "Sure, it looked authentic," he explained. "It's not hard to make a forgery that looks official at first glance. You could probably find black code on the Data Sea that'll do the trick. The hard part is getting people not to take that second or third glance." Horvil summoned a virtual tablet in the air and began making sketches. "And you could probably do the same thing with the signatures ... if you knew bio/logic encryption theory inside and out ..."
Jara cradled her head in her hands and began rocking back and forth. She interrupted Horvil's musings in mid-sentence. "Horv, have you checked the dock at the fiefcorp in the past few hours?"
Horvil had already ventured far afield into chaos theory and fractal patterns, but Jara's question brought him back to familiar territory with a sickening thud. He shook his head.
"I can't believe we fell for this," Jara croaked. "Natch did it. He went ahead and launched all those programs onto the Data Sea this morning, when nobody was paying attention. NiteFocus 48, EyeMorph 66, everything."
"A-and the Patels?"
"Pushed back their NightHawk release until tomorrow. Routine last minute error-checking, their channelers are saying."
There was a very easy syllogism to follow here, even for someone who had not studied subaether physics and advanced bio/logic calculus like Horvil had. Natch had spread rumors of a black code attack.... There was such an attack, or at least a fake one.... The attack had created confusion in the marketplace.... Horvil didn't want to solve the problem. He wanted the whole thing to disappear, to vanish like the multi pedestrians on the street had vanished.
But the Defense and Wellness Council spokesman had no such hesitations. "The perpetrators of this crime may not have launched an actual attack on the Vault," he said, his voice preternaturally calm. "But nevertheless there has been an attack-an attack on the people's assumption of safety and security. And that is something the Council cannot abide."
On cue, a row of ghostly figures materialized behind the spokesman. Council officers all, adorned with the white robe and yellow star, steely dartguns holstered at their waists, the inexorable mastery of the Data Sea written on their brows.
"This disruption has been thwarted, as all attacks against the public welfare are thwarted," continued the small Asian at the van guard of the officers. "To the perpetrators of this act, let me say this:
"The Council will not forget. The Council will not forgive. The Council will bring you to justice."
Jara looked at the man with his index finger pointing towards the audience, the implacable representative of Len Borda's will. She remembered Natch's statement barely twenty-four hours ago: We're going to be number one on Primo's, and we're going to do it tomorrow. It had been so easy. Natch's had not been a statement of intent so much as a prophecy, a foretelling of an event already preordained. When she looked into the Council spokesman's eyes, she could see the same force of will.
Insanity, Jara thought. There's no other word for it.
6
Jara awoke groggy the next morning, hoping the past two days had been some sort of paranoid hallucination. After yesterday's grim pronouncements from the Defense and Wellness Council, she had prived herself to the world and slunk straight off to bed like a wounded animal. Now she discovered she had slept for fourteen hours straight, a Horvilesque achievement.
Anxious for something familiar, Jara fell back into the morning routine she had been forced to abandon by Natch's crazy plan. The routine went like this: Sit up and project the news feeds on top of the plaid blanket. Tune one viewscreen to the morning commentary by Sen Sivv Sor. Tune the other to the editorial by his rival, John Ridglee. Order a steaming cup of nitro from the building. Fetch nitro from the access panel at the left side of the bed. Activate Doze-B-Gone 91.
A few minutes of peaceful routine were enough to convince Jara she was okay. Enough to convince her that a small niche had been carved out for her somewhere in this hardscrabble mountain called the bio/logics industry. Almost enough to convince her she would survive another eleven months.
Insanity, insanity.
The chatter about yesterday's "black code attack" had already slowed to a trickle. Everyone who had claimed financial losses in the panic had quietly recanted during the early morning hours. Representatives of the assorted Pharisee tribes were tripping all over themselves to declare they had nothing to do with the hoax. Talk on the Data Sea had shifted focus from the attack itself to the Council's behavior during the crisis. Why did Len Borda send an underling to face the crowd at Melbourne instead of appearing himself? How did the Council plan on pursuing the offending parties? Other drudges were bemoaning the fact that vast swaths of the public had been deceived by such a simple stunt. Technology had kept the world so secure for so long. Had society become slothful and complacent?
The speculation merely elicited a yawn from Jara. She moved past the mundane news about TubeCo's financial woes and deaths in the orbital colonies, waved away the parochial gossip from her L-PRACG and the solicitations from programming supply companies. The news feed on her blanket shifted in the blink of an eye to the bio/logic industry reports.
The lead headline:
Natch Personal Programming Takes #1 on Primo's
Jara let loose a tidal wave of messages on her boss. She stood on the red square in her hallway sending multi requests and ConfidentialWhispers by the dozens, enough to cause a major headache. Anyone but a trusted associate would have automatically been cut off by the Data Sea by now. Still, Natch could have prived himself to her communiques with the barest thought. What are you waiting for, Natch? Jara asked. What are you afraid of?
Finally, one of her multi requests got through. Jara took a deep breath and activated the connection. Multivoid whispered its sweet promises of oblivion for a scant few seconds and then abandoned her in Natch's foyer. A viewscreen right in front of her face broadcast one of the early nudes of Baghalerix.
Voices drifted into her ears before the connection was stable enough for her to process them.
"Ratings? Who really cares about ratings?" came the first voice, cool and butter-smooth and almost certainly enhanced with bio/logics. Natch.
"Well, you do, from what I've heard," replied the second. Jara stood for a moment, trying to remember where she had heard that scratchy growl. A male voice, at least twice Natch's age. And then suddenly she placed it: the drudge Sen Sivv Sor.
So the feeding frenzy has begun, thought Jara bitterly. Everybody wants to talk to the new number one on Primo's.
She wondered when her fiefcorp master was planning to bring her in to the conversation. Or did he just plan to keep her dangling at arm's length? She studied the ballooning belly of the woman on the viewscreen and tried to decide if her boss had chosen this particular painting to send a message.
"Of course it doesn't hurt to have high ratings," Natch was saying from around the corner. "It's good for morale, it's good for business. But I don't care if we're number one on Primo's or number one thousand, as long as we deliver the highest quality programming. If I can look back at the end of the day and say we've done the best job we can do, then I can sleep at night." Yes, Natch had definitely modified his voice; Jara recognized the laid-back cadences of SmoothTalker 139.
"But the Patel Brothers managed to pull back ahead of you in only forty-seven minutes," said Sor. "Number one for less than an hour! Come on, Natch, tell me that doesn't rankle you."