Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

Bob walked around the bunker, transformed the green plastic walls into windows on the Southern California night. The air filled with abstractions, the status of his people and his equipment, the reorganization of his share of the analyst pool. He grabbed some coffee from the machine by the door and settled down at a very ordinary desk just a few feet from the launch area.

"Patrick?"

His second-in-command appeared across the table. "Sir?"

"Who-all have we got tonight?" An unnecessary question, but Patrick Westin produced the official list. The Marine Expeditionary Group consisted of four twelve-marine maneuver teams. Call them squads; everyone else did. Back in the twentieth century, Bob's "command" would have rated a second lieutenant. On the other hand, the MEG controlled thousands of vehicles (though most were the size of model airplanes) and enough firepower to finish almost any war in history. Most important to Bob Gu: Everyone in his group had been through combat training as tough as any in the past. They were marines. Patrick called them all in for a short meeting. The room stretched back from around Bob's desk and for a few moments pretended to be an auditorium. Everyone looked cool; it had been a long time since anything had gone Really Wrong within CONUS. And were a big part of the reason why .

"We'll be here four hours," said Bob. "Hopefully, the time will be a very boring snoop. As long as that's the case, you're free to stay in staff areas adjacent to your vehicles. But most of you have been on my watch before. You know I want you to keep your eyes open. Keep up with the analysts." He waved at the analyst pool. For a CONUS Southwest watch, this amounted to about fifteen hundred dedicated specialists, but with connections leading down to hundreds of thousands of services and millions of embedded processors. Tonight, Alice was in charge of the pool, and already the changes were evident, the three-dimensional rat's nest transformed with a clarity rarely seen outside of managers' dreams. Aside from her marvelous reorganization, the display was completely conventional. Between the humans who had clearance and could communicate directly there were hundreds of color-coded associational threads. The mass of the lower levels was constantly aflicker, weights and assessments and connections shifting from second to second.

Bob pointed at the reddish threat wackos that were always part of the mix. "What have we got to worry about for the next four hours?" The analysts behind the red nodes spewed out their consensus list and supporting pointers.

But even the paranoids didn't have much to say tonight:

Action issues

Possible Anti-Librareome protest at UCSD

Belief circle riot a near certainty

Possible organized participants

Jerzy Hacek belief circle

CIA assessment of Indo-European connection

Scooch-a-mout belief circle

CIA assessment of Central African connection

CIA assessment of Sub-Saharan connection

CIA assessment of Paraguay connection

RIAA report to Congress

Commercial entities

Possible threats to infrastructure

Proximity to Critical National Security Sites

General Genomics

Huertas International

Increased illegal computation imports

Orange County

Los Angeles County

Off-scale low probability estimate linking preceding items

Law enforcement issues

FBI vice raid at Las Vegas Splendor Farm, a near certain event

Possible request for intelligence support

DEA enhancement-drug raids in Kern County

Possible request for intelligence support

Possible out-of-area activity

Pacific Islander settlements in Alberta

Persons of Interest

Arizona

California

San Diego County

Increased short-term South Asian visitors

Others

Nevada

Recusal advisements

Bob let the list hang for a moment.

"Ha," said one of the gunnies. "At least the policias won't be a problem." Denying the law-enforcement requests should be easy tonight, not like for kidnapping or murder prevention.

A tech sergeant flickered highlights across the UCSD event cluster. "This is what will keep us busy." Her light paused, expanding on definitions. "What? This is a fight between belief circles? I never heard of such a thing."

One of the youngest marines laughed. "You're just getting old, Nancy. Cross-belief strife is tragic new."

Bob didn't try to parse the slang, but he'd heard enough from Dad and Miri to get the point. He expanded the description of the expected riot. "It looks like a combination of twentieth-century protest and modern gaming. It should be as safe as most public events. The problem is the location." There was so much bio-lab work near UCSD that any instability was a concern. "This is worth a lot of your attention. Note the stats on foreign interest." He moved on to the links in Persons of Interest. As usual, those expanded into the tens of thousands. At one point or another almost everyone — unless they were dead, in which case they might still count for bioterror paranoia — came under scrutiny. "I'm not going to ask you to dredge through the Pol or this watch will last all year. But follow what the spooks throw up at you — and watch for real-time changes." That last was classic wisdom, proven in dozens of disasters and disasters-avoided so far this century. The analysts always had a million suspicions, but when they hit the hard cold world of real time, success depended on whether the operational folks had been paying attention.

And then there was the item that stood a little down from all the others: Recusal Advisements, that is, team members who might somehow compromise this watch. Normally, that was the most paranoid list of all — but his crew would see no cloud of detail here, not even links. Such advice was Eyes Only for himself and his backups. In practice, if there had been any serious problems there, they would have been taken care of well before this briefing.

"Questions?"

He looked around. There was a moment of silence, marines drinking in the details of the moment, answering a lot of questions for themselves. Then the young slang-slinger spoke up. "Sir, the equipment, is it the same as for a technical-threat overseas mission?"

Bob looked back into the young eyes. "The boost gear is lighter than usual… That's the only difference, Corporal. We're here to protect, but ultimately that means to protect the whole country." The whole world, some would say . "So, yes, we're carrying a full strategic load." He leaned back and gave a look that included all his marines. "I don't expect any problems. If we pay attention and do our jobs, this will be just another peaceful evening for the people of California."

He dismissed the crew, and the room shrank to its true dimensions. Patrick Westin had a few follow-up questions about squad deployment, and then his image departed, too. Bob Gu turned down his augmentation and for a brief moment there was just his table and chair, sitting by the coffee machine. On his right was the doorway that led to real hardware. With luck, he wouldn't see any of that tonight.

Bob — > Alice: Are you cool?

Alice — > Bob: Cool and clear. The UCSD thing will be good practice for my lab audit. Talk to you after. That is, after the watch was complete. Tonight Alice was top analyst; if she weren't currently Trained for the audit, she might have been the operational commander. She was one of only a handful of people qualified for both jobs. In either role, she was a joy to work with — as long as he didn't have to think about the sacrifices that made her performance possible.

He finished his coffee and brought back his visuals, now fully customized. He checked again with Cheryl Grant. She was ready to go. Okay, for the record: