The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [96]
“What’s troubling you?” Laurel asked.
“You are.” He waved a hand toward the door, and Laurel realized he’d used the plural. “You seem like good people, but you know next to nothing about whoever is pulling the strings or their motives. Ideals have a nice ring, but this reeks of a political struggle—one of the age-old battles for power after which nothing ever changes. Chances are, the players will regroup to tally up their wins and losses after mopping up the spent pawns in the field.”
“You mean that regardless of the outcome, even if it becomes public, what the DHS …”
“Right. If it ever becomes public. Perhaps the threat of blowing the lid is all our unknown master puppeteers need to achieve their ends. If so, we are nothing more than a troublesome loose end.”
“Twenty years ago, a cover-up like this couldn’t have happened,” Laurel said.
“You mean the Internet?”
Back in the ‘30s, artists and writers had waged a vicious campaign to change the rules, or lack of them, governing the Internet. Naturally, film, play, book, media, and music producers had supported the initiative with enthusiasm. As a result, the last glimmer of real freedom the world had ever known disappeared almost overnight. The exercise had been a remarkably simple two-step operation under the cover of intellectual property protection. Part one of the process entailed placing government-controlled server farms in high-security buildings buttressed by a new generation of supercomputers. Once the hardware was in place, individuals and organizations were given six months in which to migrate to the new servers. Then part two came into effect: Before a private server, network, or Web site could be housed, every piece of content needed a hard-crypto electronic signature to identify its author.
Against all predictions, the public uproar faded rapidly, because authorities leveled a morally unshakable argument: The new laws didn’t reduce anyone’s freedom to post whatever they wanted, providing it hadn’t been stolen.
Surfing remained unchanged; anybody could browse the World Wide Web and download at leisure in relative anonymity. But uploading was a different matter. To upload content, the files entered a short quarantine until the sender’s identity could be certified—a procedure lasting a few minutes. Whoever published an item whose authorship was disputed became blacklisted from further postings until the matter was settled. Any content backed with a banned signature would never reach the server. Naturally, dissidents—and a few nations—had tried to fool the system, and some managed to upload “delinquent” material. But it was a short-lived victory. After a flurry of stiff prison sentences and even banning entire countries from the Web for protracted periods while the software was purged of glitches and the procedure fine-tuned, anonymity was eradicated from every scrap of data on the Web. Like its predecessor, the Wild West Web had finally been tamed.
Laurel straightened but didn’t shift her feet. “I follow your line of thinking, but you’re wrong. This is not only a matter of ideals.” The silky feeling of his warm toes was too delicious for words.
He waited.
“He’s my father.”
Floyd jerked his head toward Russo as if harboring the hope she could be referring to somebody else. “I—I’m sorry.”
“So am I, but parents are hard to choose.”
“I meant—”
“I know.”
“So puny idealism had little to do with your involvement in this operation.”
“You sound relieved.”
“Few ideals survive past sophomore year, and those that do owe much to delusion and wishful thinking.”
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I believe the center inmates are an obscenity. I’ve gambled my life to stop it.”
“But you said—”
“That man is my father, but he’s also a stranger. I’ve been told he happened to contribute his sperm, but I had never met him before.” Over the next few minutes Laurel painted verbal-shorthand sketches of her upbringing by the Coles, the only parents she’d ever