Greg Bear: Mariposa

Jane did not find any of this exceptional. Her new office was far more comfortable than the one at the old Naval station on the banks of the Potomac.

The security was no worse, and definitely more effective.

At the end of each work period-usually in the small hours of the morning-she returned to her apartment and her daughter, dismissed the government-provided nanny, a woman with excellent bodyguard credentials, and assumed her favorite role-devoted single mom.

She was very good at everything she did.

Jane approached the door to her office. Beside the door, a black sign with silver letters warned that this was a "Faraday Room."

The room snitch checked her security codes one last time, unlocked the door, and opened access to the banks of office computers, clearing her for work.

Her machines never shut down.

She watched as wide ranks of rectangular displays brightened, switching from low-power mode.

Results of the day's searches started cascading down the line like flipped cards in solitaire. She sat in her special chair-the one item she had brought with her from the old Potomac building-and flexed her fingers before highlighting with airy gestures the top items on her evening work chart.

The room swiftly interpreted her motions either as writing, drawing, or command and control.

On the small bulletin board hung to the left of her monitors, ten months ago-while preparing for her current operation-she had tacked a printout from a Congressional Budget Office report.

Many nations, coming out of a long financial downturn, and having acquired assets such as at-risk real estate from beleaguered banks and other institutions, find themselves asset rich but increasingly cash poor. The United States, with debts on the order of fifty trillion dollars and an unfortunate habit of triggering recessions, is thought by a majority of nations to be the greatest threat to financial stability in the world.

Investor and debt-holding institutions fear that a disruption similar to that of 2008-2009 will push the world economy over the edge, bringing on yet another worldwide crisis, this one of dire proportions.

Created in 2009, the International Financial Protection Corporation (IFPC) is an international fund that contains and controls a cumulative 85% of U.S. debt through all of its participants and investors.

The United States has agreed to certain strict conditions, contingent to obtain necessary further loans from IFPC. Those conditions have not been revealed to the public.

Below that, she had pinned a second printout framed top and bottom with blue scribbles from her boss.

The following internal warning from the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury has never been released to the public and, god willing, never will be.

In order to qualify for all necessary further loans from IFPC, the United States executive branch, with the agreement of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and three congressional committees, has agreed to a special troubled nation loan protocol.

Certain national assets are valued and offered up as collateral. Central authority is ultimately invested in an automated system known as MSARC-Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control-which can trigger massive reallocations and call in loans, effectively putting a debtor nation into instant receivership.

Should MSARC decide to act, collateral assets guaranteed under the loan agreements will immediately be transferred to IFPC.

Financial corporations and investment funds around the world can then call the political shots through a Reallocation Committee.

If MSARC so decides, for the first time in our history, foreigners will hold almost complete economic and political control of-and so they will own-the United States of America.

MSARC poses the greatest threat to this nation since the Cold War-maybe greater.

And it's our own damned fault. We do hate paying taxes, and we do love all our precious government services. Squealing piggies at the trough.

Her boss was prone to expressing himself vividly. Nevertheless, she read the posted pages before beginning her work every evening. They neatly bookended the current plight of the United States.

The monitor on her far right-smallest and most antique, losing pixels and fading in the corners to autumn gold-was devoted to displaying a simple digital clock.

The clock counted backward, second by second.

It now read 14 days 13 hours 5 minutes.

The amount of time left before MSARC began formally judging America.

MSARC was allowed access to information that once would have been considered closely-held national secrets. Its central computer banks in Geneva relied on a network surveillance capability that in two years had come to rival many in her own agency.

MSARC also had access to the records of major corporations with government contracts-all but Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas, one of the biggest holders of U.S. government contracts. That exemption had been passed by congress with hardly a ripple, so many members were beholden to Talos CEO Axel Price. Price had taken a particular interest in MSARC some years back, even serving on a fully briefed government advisory committee.

The first item on Jane's evening agenda was following up on a list of MSARC queries. Stopping or interfering with those queries-or even tracking them-violated the loan agreements, so Jane was discreet, using the full range of search and masking capabilities available to Spider/Argus.

This evening, the list included only thirty queries, concentrating on the Federal Reserve and a number of major software corporations.

The latter might be of interest to other analysts. She copied them to a separate office that evaluated long-term patterns of foreign interest in private business.

More sobering still, MSARC's command center in Geneva was only now ramping up to full capacity-the moment of truth tracked by her backward-counting clock.

No one knew how extensive and powerful those systems were. It was possible Spider/Argus would be completely shut out by a superior program.

Whenever Jane conducted surveys on that particular question, her web "helpers"-thousands of subroutines running in machines everywhere from Cheyenne Conserve to Iron Mountain to right here in Tyson's Corner-came back with results that gave her the spooky feeling she-Jane Rowland herself-was being closely watched by something with almost preternatural instincts.

Human or machine, she could not even begin to guess.

There was evidence this presence was working on behalf of MSARC.

There was also evidence that MSARC was not even aware of its existence.

That contradiction intrigued Jane.

She loved this sort of puzzle.

The second item for this evening was the most important. She was arranging for a brief but powerful ripple of net inactivity-amounting to a thirty-second denial of service-spreading across hundreds of server farms in the northwest and the southeast, with the ultimate goal of helping an agent infiltrated into Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas.

His code name was Nabokov.

Jane knew almost everything about how the Talos computers accessed the outside world, and how they protected themselves against being accessed. Nabokov was poised to take advantage of a maintenance hole in Talos's infranet to download data crucial to a joint investigation, a rare instance of S/A cooperation with an outside agency-in this case, Alicia Kunsler at Bureau East.

Killing a few minutes time, Jane pushed her wheeled chair over to her relaxation station-a hot plate, sink, small refrigerator, and rack of cups-and made herself a cup of her favorite, white tea.

Cup in hand, she rolled back.

One-handed, she used a keyboard to type in a warning of the impending system-wide interruption, alerting national security masters throughout Tyson's Corner that this was not the beginning of a foreign assault.