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."
"Then maybe he has a source in the Defense and Wellness Council."
Jara snorted. "Horvil, we're getting nowhere. Natch doesn't have sources anywhere. The only people he talks to are you and Serr Vigal. Everyone else trusts him even less than I do."
They were both standing now, venting their inner turmoil at each other. Jara turned away from her fellow apprentice and stalked to the other side of the kitchen. Suddenly, the news began flooding into her consciousness once more, overrunning the hastily erected barricades she had put up so she could concentrate on her conversation with Horvil. Drudges of all political stripes were bickering in public about the sums of money that had vanished. The Council was maintaining complete silence about the situation. Jara's younger sister in Sudafrica sent her a panic-stricken message asking for advice. And then, without thinking about it, Jara opened a message from the Vault authorities.
The Vault has detected a DNA-assisted decryption attack directed at your account. Your holdings have not been compromised ...
The fiefcorp apprentice smacked her hand loudly against the wall and stomped off to the living room. Jara instantly regretted it. Blank walls weren't so bad in the kitchen, but in living space they seemed like an accusation. She didn't want the world to come to an end before she had made some kind of mark on this place.
"You know what we have to do," Jara said grimly to the engineer, who had followed her out of the kitchen.
"What's that?"
"We have to go to the Council and tell them what we know. They'll listen."
Horvil's jaw dropped. He was too stunned to speak.
"Horvil, can you live with something like this on your shoulders?" she bellowed. She started to pace, Natch-like. "I mean, deceiving greedy fiefcorp masters is one thing. Even deceiving Primo's. But what about those people out there who are going to suffer the consequences?" Jara's sweeping gesture encompassed the London commuters visible from the window. The multied businesspeople hustling to meetings, the families scampering across the square looking for safety, the street performers in the midst of some apocalyptic pantomime at the foot of Big Ben. "What if the medical networks break down? What if the multi network collapses? What if this black code attack sparks a total panic? What if people die, for process' preservation?"