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‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘This place is a black hole for the state and for the terrs – nothing to stop them getting in; it’s getting out they find difficult. Nobody’s signed the Convention here; the Settlement doesn’t apply; we’re not in the UN. We don’t have any of these stand-offs in a state of war. What we have instead is a trade-off, anarchy and what the movement calls law and order. Anybody can carry a gun, and anybody who uses one without good cause is liable to get wasted. So they’ll have to work their way round to us, and before they do – give it a few days – we have lots of options. Vanishing into the crowd by going deeper into Norlonto. Going public and datagating the whole deal. Taking to the hills. Crossing the water—’

‘Ireland?’ Janis looked shocked.

Kohn had been there, handling security at one of the many conferences that could be safely held only outside the Kingdom. It was a strange place, that other Republic, a black-and-white photograph of the colourful enthusiasms he remembered from his childhood. United, federal, secular and social democratic, a welfare state where you got liberalism shoved down your throat from an early age, with vitamin supplements…It had been a disturbing experience because of its very ambiguity, like tales his grandmother had recounted of visits to East Germany. He tried to shrug away what he suspected was on Janis’s part a lingering prejudice from years of Hanoverian disinformation.

‘Think of it like cryonics,’ he said, getting up to go to the bar.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘As an alternative to death there’s a lot to be said for it.’

Her laughter followed him, but he could see she wasn’t convinced.

Jordan snatched the VR glasses off and pressed the heels of his hands against his tight-shut eyes. The dull kaleidoscope of false light made the other afterimages go away. Then he opened his eyes and reassured himself of the solid and insubstantial realities around him.

He had been looking for information about the Black Plan. The ANR itself denied all knowledge: his cautious inquiry resulted in its garish VR/PR office dwindling abruptly to a dot in the distance. Then he had turned to the competing newslines of the radicals and libertarians and socialists, his search patterns hauling in a succession of titles that floated up past him as he checked them out one by one:

eu.pol

us.lib

fourth.internat

sci.socialism

soc.utopia

freedom.net.news

fifth.internat

alt.long-live-marxism-leninism-maoism-gonzalo-thought

theories.conspiracy

soc.urban-legend

comp.sci.ai

news.culture.communistans

left.hand.path

That last one had been a mistake. It had rattled his nerves so much that coffee could only calm them, not still them entirely. The whole net, this evening, was like jangled nerves. The afternoon’s system crashes had set off claims and counterclaims, wars of rumour. Cross-tracing Black Plan and Watchmaker references had scored dozens of hits as transitory anomalous events – from the crashes to bombings to disappearances of well known militants to emergency hands-on audits in Japanese-owned car factories – were attributed to one or the other, or both.

Jordan sipped coffee and ran the rumours through the hand-held’s freeware evaluation routines and his own mind. It took him about a quarter of an hour to arrange the possibilities in a spectrum. At one extreme of inferences from the net the Black Plan was already the Watchmaker, and was being used by the Illuminati through the Last International and its front organizations – including the Fourth International and the Fifth International and the International Committee for the Reconstruction of the Libertarian International – to take over the world by flooding the market with Black Plan products recognizable by barcodes all of which contained the number 666. At a minimum, though, there was definitely something happening on the Left, using the term in a fairly broad and paranoid sense to include the ANR and the Left Alliance and parts