The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [15]
Dottie only allowed herself these painful fits of insecurity when she was really, really happy. It had taken Van ten years of marriage to figure that out, but now he understood it. She was spoiling their perfect day because she had to. It was her secret promise to an ugly, scary world that she would never enjoy her life too much.
Normally this behavior on her part upset Van, but today he felt so good that he found it comical. “Look, honey, so what if you got some bad news from your lab? What’s the worst thing that can come out of all that? Come on, we’re rich!”
“Honey bear,” Dottie said, looking shyly at the spotless tabletop, “you work too hard. Even when you’re not in your office, you let those computer cops push you around all the time.” She picked up the other catalog again. “This funny chair you like so much? It’s waterproof. And we do need some kind of porch chair. So get this one, and you can keep it outside. Okay?”
“Two?”
Her mouth twitched. “One, Derek.”
“Okay then!” One chair, just as a starter. One chair would be his proof-of-concept. Van beamed at her.
The television grew more insistent. Dottie glanced over her shoulder at it. “Oh, my goodness! What a terrible accident.”
“Huh.” Van stared at the smoldering hole in the skyscraper. “Wow.”
“That’s New York, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Boy, you sure don’t see that all the time.” Van could have walked to the little TV in three strides, but on principle, he spent thirty seconds to locate its remote control. It was hiding in a heap of catalogs.
Van turned up the TV’s volume. An announcer was filling dead air.
Some big jet had collided with the World Trade Center.
Van scowled. “Hey, that place has the worst luck in the world.”
Dottie looked puzzled and upset. Even Ted looked morose.
“I mean that crowd of bad guys with the big truck bomb,” Van explained. “They tried to blow that place up once.”
Dottie winced. It was not her kind of topic.
Van fetched up his ThinkPad from the floor. He figured he had better surf some Web news. These local TV guys had a lousy news budget.
Covertly, Van examined his e-mail. Thirty-four messages had arrived for him in the past two minutes. Van flicked through the titles. Security freaks from the cyberwar crowd. Discussion groups, Web updates. They were watching TV right at their computers, and instantly, they had gone nuts. Van was embarrassed to think that he knew so many of these people. It was even worse that so many of them had his e-mail address.
Van examined the television again. That television scene looked plenty bad. Van was no great expert on avionic systems, but he knew what any system-reliability expert would know about such things. He knew that it was very, very unlikely that FAA air traffic control at Kennedy and LaGuardia would ever let a jet aircraft just wander accidentally into a downtown New York skyscraper. New York City had a very heavy concentration of TRACONs and flow control units. So that couldn’t be a conventional safety failure.
However. An unconventional failure, that was another story. An ugly story. Van had once spent a long, itchy three-day weekend with FEMA in Washington, watching information-warfare people describing the truly awful things that might be done by “adversaries” who “owned” federal air traffic control systems.
Since there really was no such thing in the world as “information warfare,” information-warfare people were the weirdest people Van knew. Their tactics and enemies were all imaginary. There was a definite dark-fantasy element to these cyberwar characters. They were like a black flock of the crows of doom, haunting an orc battlefield out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Van was reluctant to pay them any serious attention, because he suffered enough real-world security problems from hacker kids and viruses.
Van did recall one soundbite, however. A bespectacled infowar geek, all wound up and full of ghoulish relish, describing how every aircraft in the skies of America would “become