Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [45]
‘Move yo ass, krautkiller!’ the big guy who’d spoken to him shouted at his back.
Kohn turned, more amazed than incensed at the racial sneer. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He looked at the man and felt a fastidious contempt.
‘“We are on the edge of darkness”,’ he said, quoting a recurrent green slogan. The man looked puzzled. Kohn waited until they were all on the truck and moving off before leaning out of the window and yelling as he passed, ‘and you are the darkness!’
He felt quite gratified by the banging the side of the truck took for that. At the union office, an old shopfront floor, his reminiscent smirk faded. They found a distinct lack of interest in their problem from the local officials. The lab-site crew stood around the scratched Formica tables in the refreshment corner and drank coffee while Mike made call after call – to the militia, to the client, to the union security – and got nowhere.
‘OK,’ Kohn said. ‘No more mister nice guy.’
He connected his phone to his computer and retrieved Logan’s public key, then tapped in Logan’s twenty-digit phone number and his own key. Logan’s voice came back, anonymous and toneless as a cheap chip. The processors couldn’t spare much for fidelity when they were crunching prime numbers that made the age-of-the-universe-in-seconds look like small change. The up-side was that cracking the encryption would take about as long.
‘This better be urgent, Moh. I’m vac-welding right now.’
‘OK. Greens blockading a job, nobody wants to know. Union, movement, militia. Something heavy leaning on them is my guess.’
‘Mine too. Talk to Wilde.’
Kohn watched his phone-meter’s right-hand numbers blurring for about five seconds.
‘Jonathan Wilde?’ he croaked at last.
‘The same. Tell him you’re from the light company. Gotta go.’
This time Moh was relieved to see the connection broken. He made a performance of putting away his phone and computer, while his mind raced. He stood up and looked around a dozen sceptical faces.
‘I think we got things moving,’ he said. He flashed them a rueful smile. ‘Finally. Mike, Stone, maybe you should get the union lawyer on to this one. Threaten to sue the research company. Breach of contract, condoning intimidation, whatever. Make something up. Same with whatever street-owner is allowing that so-called demo. Rest of us might as well call it a day. They’ll cough up our pay anyway.’ He sounded more convinced than he felt.
‘What about you?’ Stone wanted to know.
‘I’m going to meet The Man,’ Kohn said.
Wilde wasn’t exactly The Man – he didn’t employ anyone apart from a few research assistants now and again. The only position he held was a fairly nominal history lectureship at the University of North London Town. Now in his seventies, he’d been an anomalous figure for decades, regarded as a left-winger in the space movement, a libertarian space nut by the Left. He’d written some of the movement’s earliest manifestos (No More Earthquakes, The Earth is a Harsh Mistress) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists. He’d discovered a surprising number of cases where prominent political, military and law-enforcement figures had been (openly or secretly) conspiracy theorists. In the course of researching and expounding this thesis he had developed a vast and complex range of mutually antagonistic contacts and sources of information. He was widely regarded as the movement’s éminence grise, a suspicion which all the evidence of his lack of power, position and money only strengthened. Rumour had it that he had been behind whatever it had taken – blackmail, currency speculation, nuclear threats – to get the relevant committee of the Restoration