Vernor Vinge: Rainbows End

Over the next two days, the CDD analysts proceeded down their trees, extending and pruning — all the time exercising statistical restraint; this sort of work could generate more mirages than the marketing hobbyists had ever dreamed. Just the topic list would fill an old-time phone book. Here are the good parts, dramatically arranged:

There was no connection between the buying surge and the honeyed-nougat advert. This conclusion was not based upon theoretical analysis: CDD showed the advertisement to small response groups. All of the half-time publicity was similarly tested. One of the stadium displays — an advertisement for a dating service, which had aired only briefly — caused occasional interest in nougats. (The dating-service advert was a bit of design-artist excess, its background of intersecting lines a distracting moire pattern.) Proceeding down the test tree, the dating-service advertisement was played for a number of specialized audiences. For instance, it had no enhanced effect on persons with antibodies to the July 23 Pseudomimi-virus.

The dating-service advertisement did provoke nougat lust when shown to those who'd been infected by the earlier, July 18 Pseudomimi, the one that CDD had properly reported .

As a child, Günberk Braun had often daydreamed of how, in an earlier time, he might have prevented the firebombing of Dresden, or stopped the Nazis and their death camps, or kept Stalin from starving the Ukraine. On off days, when he couldn't move nations, little Günberk imagined what he might have done in 1941 December 7 at a radar outpost in Hawaii, or as an American FBI agent in the summer of 2001.

Perhaps all young boys go through such a phase, largely ignorant of historical context, simply wanting to be savior heroes.

But when Braun considered this latest report, he knew he was in the middle of something as big as his childhood fantasies. The July 18 Pseudomimi and the advertising at the football match — together they amounted to an extremely well disguised test of a new weapon concept. In its developed form, such a weapon would make the Sunrise Plague look like a malignant toy. At the least, biological warfare would become as precise and surprising as bullets and bombs: slyly infect a population with the slow random spread of disease, all but undetected, and then bam , blind or maim or kill — singly with an email, or by the billions with a broadcast, too quickly for any possible "defense against disease."

If Braun had been a CDD person, this discovery would have precipitated immediate alarums to all the disease defense organizations of the Indo-European Alliance, as well as to the CDC in America and the CDCP in China.

But Günberk Braun was not an epidemiologist. He was a spook, and he was paranoid even for that. Braun's fire drill was under his personal control; he had no trouble suppressing the news there. Meantime, he used his resources in the EUIB and the Indo-European Alliance. Within hours, he was deep into a number of projects:

He brought in the best cult expert in the Indo-European intelligence community and set her loose on the evidence. He reached out to the military assets of the Alliance, in Central Africa and all the failed states at the edge of the modern world. There were solid clues about the origin of the July 18 Pseudomimi. Though this research was not bioscientific, Braun's analysts were very similar to the best at CDD — only smarter, more numerous, with far deeper resources. Even so, they were lucky: over the next three days, they put two and two (and two and two and two…) together. In the end, he had a good idea who was behind the weapons test.

And for the first time in his life, Günberk Braun was truly terrified.

Within the intelligence services of the Indo-European Alliance, there were a handful of bureaucratic superstars, people such as Günberk Braun of the EUIB. Hopefully, their identities were unknown — or a mass of contradictions — to the general public. The superstars had their own heroes. In particular, when people like Günberk Braun were confronted with the most desperate problems, there was a place to get help. There was a certain department in India's External Intelligence Agency. It didn't show up in EIA organization charts, and its purpose was happily undefined. Basically, it was whatever its boss thought it should be. That boss was an Indian national known (to those very few who knew of him at all) as Alfred Vaz.

Braun took his terrifying discovery to Vaz. At first, the older man was as taken aback as Braun himself had been. But Vaz was a fixer. "With the proper human resources, you can solve almost any problem," he said. "Give me a few days. Let's see what I can dig up."

In downtown Barcelona, three days later:

The rabbit hopped onto the unoccupied wicker chair and thence to the middle of the table, between the teacups and the condiments. It tipped its top hat first at Alfred Vaz and then at Günberk Braun and Keiko Mitsuri. "Have I got a deal for you!" it said. Altogether, it was an unremarkable example of its type.

Alfred reached out and swiped his hand through the image, just to emphasize his own substance. "We're the ones with the deal."

"Hmph." The rabbit plunked its ass down on the table and pulled a tiny tea service out from behind the salt and pepper. It poured itself a drop or two — enough to fill its cup — and took a sip. "I'm all ears." It wiggled two long ones to emphasize the point.

From the other side of the table, Günberk Braun gave the creature a long stare. Braun was as ephemeral as the rabbit, but he projected a dour earnestness that was quite consistent with his real personality. Alfred thought he detected a certain surprised disappointment in the younger man's expression. In fact, after a moment, Günberk sent him a silent message.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: This is the best you could recruit, Alfred?

Alfred didn't reply directly. Instead, he turned to the creature sitting on the table. "Welcome to Barcelona, Mr. Rabbit," he said. He waved at the towers of the Sagrada Familia, which soared up and up from just across the street. The cathedral was best seen without virtual elaboration; after all, the reality of Gaudi architecture was gaudy beyond the imagination of modern revisionists. "Do you have any idea why we selected this location for our meeting?"

The rabbit sipped its tea. Its gaze slid in a very un-rabbity way to take in the noisy crowds that swept past the tables, to scan the costumes and body-plans of tourists and locals. "Ah, is it that Barcelona is a place for the beautiful and the bizarre, one of the few great cities of the twentieth century whose charm survives in the modern world? Could it be that on the side, you and your families are taking touchy-feely tours through Pare Güell and writing it all off on your expense accounts?" He stared at Braun and at Keiko Mitsuri. Mitsuri was frankly masked. She looked a bit like Marcel Duchamp's nude, built from a shifting complex of crystal planes. The rabbit shrugged. "But then again, maybe you two are thousands of kilometers away."

Keiko laughed. "Oh, don't be so indecisive," she said, speaking with a completely synthetic accent and syntax. "I'm quite happy to be in Pare Güell right now, feeling reality with my very own real hands."

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: In fact, I'm in my office, admiring the moonlight on Tokyo Bay.

The rabbit continued, ignorant of the silent-messaging byplay: "Whatever. In any case, the real reasons for meeting here: Barcelona has very direct connections to wherever you're really from, and modern security to disguise what we say. Best of all, it has laws banning popular and police snooping… unless of course you are the EU Intelligence Board."