Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“Where’s the nearest big camp of Moderators?”

The Canton Market had been a Texas tradition since the 1850s. Every weekend before the first Monday of the month, traders, collectors, flea marketeers, and random gawkers gathered from hundreds of miles around for three days of hands-on commercial scrap-and-patchwork. Naturally this ancient and deeply attractive tra-dition had been completely co-opted by prole nomads.

Oscar, Greta, and Kevin found themselves joining a road migration heading northeast toward the makeshift city. In Kevin’s rented junker, they fitted with ease into the traffic: tankers, flatbeds, gypsy buses, winter-wrapped roadside hitchhikers.

In the meantime, Oscar and Greta climbed into the backseat together, to see to one another’s scrapes, welts, and bruises. Greta was still handcuffed, while Oscar’s bro-ken head had barely clotted. They sat together while Kevin munched a take-out sandwich and wiped the fog of breath from his car’s cold windows.

Checking one another’s injuries was a slow and inti-mate process. It involved much tender unbuttoning of shirts, indrawn breaths of hurt surprise, sympathetic tongue-clicking, and the ultragentle dabbing of antiseptic unguents. They’d both taken a serious pounding, in normal circumstances requiring a medical checkup and a couple of days of bed rest. Their heads swam and ached from the knockout gas, a side effect only partly curable by temple rubbing, brow smoothing, and gentle lingering kisses.

Greta was stoic. She forced him to share her personal hangover cure: six aspirin, four acetaminophen, three heaping spoonfuls of white sugar, and forty micrograms of over-the-counter lysergic acid. This melange, she insisted authoritatively, would “pep them up.”

In the late afternoon, they left the crowded highway and darted east on an obscure country dirt road. There they parked and awaited a rendezvous. Within an hour they were joined by Yosh Pelicanos, who was piloting a rental car with his own satellite locator.

Pelicanos was, as always, efficient and resourceful. He had brought them laptops, cash cards, a first-aid kit, two suitcases of clothes, plastic sprayguns, new phones, and last but far from least, a new, yard-long bolt cutter.

Kevin had the most extensive experience with police handcuffs. So he set to work on Greta’s bonds with the bolt cutter, while Oscar changed clothes inside Pelicanos’s spacious and shiny rental car.

“You people look like three zombies. I hope you know what you’re doing,” Pelicanos told him mournfully. “All hell is breaking loose back at the lab.”

“How’s the krewe handling the crisis?” Oscar said, tenderly shaving the hair from the ragged gash above his ear.

“Well, some of us are with the Strike Committee, some are hol-ing up in the hotel. We can still move in and out of the lab, but that won’t last. Word is that they’ll seal the facility soon. The Col-laboratory cops are going to break the Strike. There are Buna city cops and county sheriffs cruising all around our hotel, and Greta’s committee is too scared to leave the Hot Zone… We’ve been sucker-punched, Oscar. Our people are totally confused. Word is out that you’re criminals, you’ve abandoned us. Morale is subterranean.”

“So how’s the float going on our black-propaganda rap?” Oscar said.

“Well, the elopement pitch was very hot. How could a sex angle not be hot? I mean, basically, that’s the outing move that we always expected. They’re circulating photo stills of you and Greta at that dump in Holly Beach.”

“Those Louisiana state troopers had telephotos,” Oscar sighed. “I knew it all along.”

“The sex scandal didn’t break in the straight press yet. I’ve had dozens of calls, but the journos can’t get any confirmation. That’s just a typical sex smear. Nobody in the Collaboratory takes that seriously. Everybody in Buna already knows that you’re having sex with Greta. No, the serious attack was the embezzlement rap. That’s dead seri-ous. Because the lab’s money is really gone.”

“How much did he steal?” Oscar said.

“He stole the works! The lab is bankrupt. It’s bad. It’s worse than bad. It’s beyond mere bankruptcy. It’s total financial wreckage, because all the lab’s budgets and all the records are trashed. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even the backups have been targeted and garbaged. The system can’t even add, it can’t update, it churns out nonsense. It’s a total financial lobotomy.”

“American military infowar viruses,” Oscar said. “Huey’s loot from the Air Force base.”

“Sure, that had to be military,” Pelicanos nodded. “People have brought down national governments with those things. The lab’s computers never had a chance.”

“How long before you can restore functionality?” Oscar said.

“Are you kidding? What am I, a miracle worker?” Pelicanos was genuinely wounded. “I’m just an accountant! I can’t repair the dam-age from a military netwar attack! In fact, I think someone’s been monitoring me, personally. Every file that I’ve accessed in the past two months has been specifically destroyed. I think they’ve even screwed with my own laptop — some kind of black-bag job. I can’t trust my own personal machine anymore. I can’t even trust my off-site records.”

“Fine, Yosh, I take the point, it’s out of your league. So whose league is this in? Who’s going to help us here?”

Pelicanos thought hard about the question. “Well, first, you’d need a huge team of computer-forensics specialists to go over the damaged code line by line … No, forget that. Investigating and describing the damage would take years. It would cost a fortune. Let’s face it, the lab’s books are a write-off, they’re totaled. It would be cheaper to drop the whole system off a cliff and start all over from scratch. ”

“I think I understand,” Oscar said. “Huey permanently trashed the lab’s finances. He’s ruined a federal laboratory with an interstate netwar attack, just to get his krewe off a few corruption hooks. That’s appalling. It’s horrifying. The man has no conscience. Well, at least we know where we stand now.”

Pelicanos sighed. “No, Oscar, it’s much, much worse than that. The Spinoffs people were always Huey’s favorite allies. They knew they were next up on Greta’s chopping block, so last night they re-belled. The Spinoffs gang have launched a counterstrike. They’ve sealed and barricaded the Spinoffs building, and they’re having a round-the-clock shredding orgy. They’re stealing all the data they can get their hands on, and they’re shredding everything else. When they’re done, they’ll all defect to Huey’s brand-new science labs in Louisiana. And they’re trying to convince everyone else to go with them.”

Oscar nodded, absorbing the news. “Okay. That’s vandalism. Obstruction of justice. Theft and destruction of federal records. Com-mercial espionage. All the Spinoffs people should be arrested immedi-ately and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Pelicanos laughed dryly. “As if,” he said.

“This isn’t over,” Oscar said. “Because our kidnapping fell through. We have the tactical initiative again. Huey doesn’t know where we are. At least we’re well out of his reach.”

“So — what’ll it be? Where should we go now? Boston? Wash-ington?”

“Well …” Oscar rubbed his chin. “Huey’s next moves are obvious, right? He’s going to crash the Collaboratory just like he did the Air Force base. Thanks to his infowar attack, there’s no money now. Soon, there will be no supplies, no food … Then he’ll send in a massive crowd of proles to occupy the derelict facility, and it’s all over.”