Infoquake by David Louis Edelman Read Free Book Online

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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