Infoquake by David Louis Edelman Page A

messages have been tracked down
and eliminated."
    Jara seemed disoriented. She took a step backwards and turned her
focus away from the diminutive Council spokesman, who began to
recite a numbing series of technical statistics. "I don't understand," she
ConfidentialWhispered to Horvil. "You can't just forge a message from
the Vault like that. You'd need DNA, atomic signatures, who knows
what else."
    Horvil tilted his head in thought. "It's not impossible."
    "Horv, we saw those messages. They said they were from the Vault.
They looked authentic. They had valid signatures."
    The engineer smiled. The panic of the world coming to an end had
already given way to the open vistas of a mathematical challenge.
"Sure, it looked authentic," he explained. "It's not hard to make a forgery that looks official at first glance. You could probably find black
code on the Data Sea that'll do the trick. The hard part is getting
people not to take that second or third glance." Horvil summoned a
virtual tablet in the air and began making sketches. "And you could
probably do the same thing with the signatures ... if you knew
bio/logic encryption theory inside and out ..."

    Jara cradled her head in her hands and began rocking back and
forth. She interrupted Horvil's musings in mid-sentence. "Horv, have
you checked the dock at the fiefcorp in the past few hours?"
    Horvil had already ventured far afield into chaos theory and fractal
patterns, but Jara's question brought him back to familiar territory
with a sickening thud. He shook his head.
    "I can't believe we fell for this," Jara croaked. "Natch did it. He
went ahead and launched all those programs onto the Data Sea this
morning, when nobody was paying attention. NiteFocus 48, EyeMorph 66, everything."
    "A-and the Patels?"
    "Pushed back their NightHawk release until tomorrow. Routine
last minute error-checking, their channelers are saying."
    There was a very easy syllogism to follow here, even for someone
who had not studied subaether physics and advanced bio/logic calculus
like Horvil had. Natch had spread rumors of a black code attack....
There was such an attack, or at least a fake one.... The attack had created confusion in the marketplace.... Horvil didn't want to solve the
problem. He wanted the whole thing to disappear, to vanish like the
multi pedestrians on the street had vanished.
    But the Defense and Wellness Council spokesman had no such hesitations. "The perpetrators of this crime may not have launched an
actual attack on the Vault," he said, his voice preternaturally calm.
"But nevertheless there has been an attack-an attack on the people's
assumption of safety and security. And that is something the Council
cannot abide."
    On cue, a row of ghostly figures materialized behind the
spokesman. Council officers all, adorned with the white robe and
yellow star, steely dartguns holstered at their waists, the inexorable
mastery of the Data Sea written on their brows.
    "This disruption has been thwarted, as all attacks against the
public welfare are thwarted," continued the small Asian at the van guard of the officers. "To the perpetrators of this act, let me say this:

    "The Council will not forget. The Council will not forgive. The
Council will bring you to justice."
    Jara looked at the man with his index finger pointing towards the
audience, the implacable representative of Len Borda's will. She
remembered Natch's statement barely twenty-four hours ago: We're
going to be number one on Primo's, and we're going to do it tomorrow. It had
been so easy. Natch's had not been a statement of intent so much as a
prophecy, a foretelling of an event already preordained. When she
looked into the Council spokesman's eyes, she could see the same force
of will.
    Insanity, Jara thought. There's no other word for it.

    Jara awoke groggy the next morning, hoping the past two days had
been some sort of paranoid hallucination. After yesterday's grim pronouncements