Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [136]
For a moment Bleibtreu-Fèvre seemed about to follow Donovan’s example and fly into a cult-leader rage, but then he relaxed into a calm that was (but of course) almost unnatural.
‘We find ourselves at an impasse,’ he said. ‘However, I must say that, if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about what your local authority might think of your actions. They may be overthrown in a matter of days, perhaps hours.’
‘Since when,’ she asked scornfully, ‘has that been a consideration?’
Bleibtreu-Fèvre didn’t register that she was responding to an insult. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In the very near future, in those hours or days, one of two things will happen. Either Space Defense will destroy the datasphere or the datasphere will pass beyond human control. When the bombs fall or the Watchmaker’s descendants come out of the walls, death may be the best you can pray for. I shall continue to assist Donovan. Contact us if you change your mind. Goodbye.’
click
Melody Lawson stared at the vacant space for a long moment. She was shaken by the Stasis operative’s conviction, but now that it came to the bit, now that she had to choose between her duty and his story, she just didn’t believe it. She distrusted the US/UN agencies, she disapproved of enhanced humans on principle, and the whole Watchmaker rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them. But she also knew there would be no end of false alarms, lying wonders, false prophets with a Lo! here and a Hi! there, before whatever the real thing was came along. Indeed, they were part of the reason why the real thing always came like a thief in the night or (to update the simile a couple of millenia) like a secret policeman in the early hours of the morning.
The only way out, apart from blind faith (an option she discarded with an alacrity that would have dismayed her pastor), was to go by the best available evidence, the most economical interpretation of the data. It all pointed to a terrorist offensive; and the probability that she’d been drawn into some elaborate scam perpetrated by God-knew-what faction in the global security forces outweighed that of the emergence of electronic intelligence.
Terrorist offensive…that was coming all right, and Beulah City was well prepared for it: Warriors mobilized, aerospace defences on full alert, electronic countermeasures beating through the networks like radar beams. One particularly gratifying side-effect of Donovan’s retreat was that it had enabled her to sweep the ANR’s Black Plan routines out of Beulah City’s hardware for the third time in ten years. Putting a stop to that had been worth the embarrassment of finding out what the rebels had been getting away with.
Let Bleibtreu-Fèvre worry about AIS. She just hoped to God she never found herself standing before a Commission of Inquiry into the Recent Insurrection and late Disturbances of the King’s Peace, Etc., talking about offshore accounts.
Jordan jumped as cool fingers slid across his ears and eyes and lifted the glades and phones away. His cheek brushed Cat’s as she reached over his shoulders and disengaged his hands from the datagloves.
‘What—?’
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Easy. It’s done.’
She skipped back as he sat up and spun the chair around.
‘What’s done?’ He didn’t mean to sound irascible. The comms room was empty, its air jelled with cigarette smoke.