Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [135]
‘Melody Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre. As soon as he said it Donovan knew it had to be true. She’d worked with him, she’d been in the movement, she’d had years of experience of defending against his attacks…and she’d had access to his dataspaces for days. While he’d been developing specifics for the Kohns’ systems, she’d been doing the same for his!
He couldn’t blame her, really, for taking the opportunity to forearm herself against the time when the emergency was over and it was back to business as usual. Like wartime allies, spying on each other.
‘So we’re all right,’ he told Bleibtrue-Fèvre when he’d explained the situation. ‘We just ask her to stop, to give us a clear run at it.’ He let out a shaky laugh. ‘What a relief – just for a moment there, I thought we were doomed.’
‘Absolutely not.’
Melody Lawson glared at the flickering image of Donovan, who was obviously attempting his usual disconcerting trick of jumping from one screen to another and frustrated that he was failing, held on her most secure channel like a demon in a pentagram. The little hologhost brandished a match-stick at her, then a hand came into shot and caught his shoulder. He turned away and stepped out of view, to be replaced after thirty seconds of tinnily overheard altercation by another figure.
‘Mrs Lawson,’ said Bleibtreu-Fèvre in a smooth voice that affected her like a fingernail dragged down a blackboard, ‘I really must ask you to reconsider. The situation has deteriorated quite alarmingly. I assure you that to the best of my knowledge Donovan is telling the truth.’
‘I don’t doubt your sincerity,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘I doubt your interpretation.’
Her doubts over Donovan’s interpretation of events had grown over the past few days as her normal security work had redoubled to deal with the escalating challenge posed by the threatened terrorist offensives. She’d already admitted using her access to Donovan’s resources to develop defences against his software arsenal – it had been, even before she’d got really worried, almost a reflex response. With his usual sabotage out of the way it had been relatively easy to build on her vast previous experience to construct antigen systems keyed to Donovan’s distinctive fingerprint, the almost ineradicable impress of the personality on the program which now-standard protocols (developed originally to identify the authorship of biblical texts) could detect, and (again ironically) use a genetic algorithm to select their best match in the test of combat, replicate from it, go on from there…
What she was reluctant to admit was that her own freedom of action was severely curtailed. The general increase in paranoia within the enclave made it difficult for her to know just who might be watching her. Her own dubious past as a member of Donovan’s organization had never been held against her, but it was always there to be used if heads had to roll.
She’d responded to the chaos of the afternoon by throwing all of her newly developed search-and-destroy programs into the networks. When they’d had no effect she hadn’t lost confidence in them: she’d taken it as clear evidence that Donovan had no hand in the epidemic of system crashes.
And now her programs had proved themselves! Against Donovan’s best!
‘I’m not about to throw away a position so advantageous to my community, to say nothing of society in general,’ she told Bleibtreu-Fèvre, ‘on the strength of a scare story about AIS having taken over the world while we weren’t looking. I find it very suspect that this should have happened at the same time as various terrorist forces are obviously gearing up for an assault on their respective governments.