David Edelman - Infoquake

"I'm here to report a crime in my fiefcorp," said Jara when she was finally given the chance to speak.

"The nature of the crime?"

"Inciting rumors with the intent to mislead."

The Meme Cooperative official gave her a patronizing nod. "That may or may not be an actual crime," he said nonchalantly, drawing circles in the desk condensation with his index finger. "Do these rumors concern a business rival?"

"Well, not exactly, they're more just-general rumors...."

"About your industry?"

"You mean, are they about bio/logics? In a roundabout way, I suppose."

With smooth strokes, the man connected two of the circles on his desk, forming the mathematical symbol for infinity. "Do you have any evidence of these alleged rumors that can be presented before an arbitration board?"

I knew this was a mistake, thought Jara bitterly. I haven't been here for five minutes, and we're already talking about "alleged" rumors. The Meme Cooperative official was obviously more interested in enjoying his SeeNaRee than in listening to the grievances of some ghostly, genderless voice from the outside world. "Listen to me!" she grunted. "Something terrible is going to happen, and someone's got to stop it. It's a matter of public safety!"

Again the placating smile. "This really sounds like it's outside our jurisdiction. Perhaps you might try contacting your L-PRACG. Or maybe the Defense and Wellness Council would be willing to take a statement. There's also the Fair Business Working Group of the Prime Committee. Have you tried them? Or the Creeds Coalition's Council on Ethical Fiefcorp Behavior ..."

Jara shook her head. This was pointless. Even if she did manage to ram a complaint through the thick skull of this bureaucrat, it would get lost in the administrative morass. She pictured a colossal Rube Goldberg machine two hundred meters high, her complaint a pea bobbing back and forth on some remote conveyor belt hidden deep in the works. What else can you expect when you trust an industry to police itself? thought Jara bitterly. But the system had lined too many pockets over the years; no one else wanted the responsibility.

The analyst cut her multi connection without a word. The familiar walls of her London apartment appeared once more. Let the bureaucrat prattle on in his little winter retreat and make excuses for the Cooperative's inaction. Jara couldn't take another minute of it.

She flopped down on her couch and called up the holographic rumor flowchart. Another towering structure that obscured her very existence, only this one she had built herself. Jara rubbed her temples and prepared to send a Confidential Whisper request to the first name on her list.

Horvil whined and pulled his head out of the burrow of pillows he had created in his sleep. His internal calendar assured him it was indeed Tuesday morning, and he had slept for ten hours. But if the sun wasn't directly overhead, then it was simply too early for someone to wake him up with an urgent Confidential Whisper request.

"What?" groaned the engineer.

"I believe we owe you an apology," came a timorous voice.

Horvil bolted upright, capsizing a stack of nitro mugs. "Marulana?"

"You were right, Horvil," said the creed official, her voice a mixture of fear and chagrin. "Someone has launched a black code attackand they're going straight for the Vault."

It took Jara almost ten minutes to get anything coherent out of Horvil. He had shown up at her front door in person, having run halfway across London with a threadbare pillow clutched under one arm. He was babbling about Creed Elan and losing his family's trust and what would happen if the Data Sea came crashing to a halt.

"All right, slow down," said Jara firmly, clasping his plump chin in her right hand. "What's happening?"

The engineer activated a de-stressing program and took a deep breath. A few seconds of Re/Lax 57b was enough to allow him to cram the panic back into the mental sideroom where it normally resided. "The world is coming to an end," he said earnestly.

Jara rolled her eyes. "Can you be more specific?"

"A bunch of lunatics are launching attacks on the Vault. Black code is sprouting like crazy on the Data Sea. The Vault keeps spitting out messages telling people to check their account balances. Nobody's heard a thing from the Defense and Wellness Council. Ergo ... the world is coming to an end."

"Are you sure you're not just falling for the same dumb rumors we spread last night, Horvil? That was fantasy, remember?"

The engineer shook his head vehemently. "Look at this," he said, and Jara instantly felt the mental click of an incoming message. She projected the message onto a blank patch of air, where the holographic letters hovered menacingly like stingrays.

The Vault has detected a DNA-assisted decryption attack directed at your account. Your holdings have not been compromised, but it is advised that you periodically check the security of your Vault account. This advisory has been automatically routed to the custodian of records for your L-PRACG and, depending on your L-PRACG's policies, may also be forwarded to the Defense and Wellness Council.

"My Aunt Berilla sent me that message," said Horvil glumly. "Half the women in her creed circle have gotten them by now. This is just how the last one started. Remember all those warnings from Dr. Plugenpatch that kept-"

"Did you tell Natch? What did he say?"

Horvil nodded. "I finally caught him on ConfidentialWhisper about ten minutes ago. He just cackled something about those crazy Pharisees and went off to examine his accounts."

The two of them sat down in Jara's breakfast nook. She instructed the building to mix up a tall glass of ChaiQuoke for the engineer, while he quizzically studied the fetid pillow in his hand and tried to figure out how it got there. Jara decided to see if her own meager holdings were in order. Within a fraction of a second, Vault statements were floating before her eyes in stolid financial fonts. All was well: there were no unusual transactions, and access was still guarded by a long series of encrypted numbers derived from her DNA. Jara turned to the fiefcorp accounts next, and was relieved to discover no sign of mischief there either.

Horvil slurped down the glass of milky ChaiQuoke that had emerged from the kitchen access panel. But despite the soothing beverage and the de-stressing program, the engineer was still fidgeting like a teenager. "You might want to read this too," he said. "This just came five minutes ago."

Jara found herself looking at the latest editorial rant by the drudge Sen Sivv Sor.

The reporter's screed appeared in letters the size of her arm. An ugly white-haired face grimaced from the margin, daring her to mention the red birthmark on its forehead. Sensationalist hack, thought Jara as she rubbed her eyes and pushed the article back half a meter to a more readable distance.

Nobody has broken into my Vault account. Yet. Like many of you, faithful readers, I was awakened early this morning by an announcement from Vault security telling me to double-check the security of my accounts. I was pleased to discover that not a single credit had been touched.

But I may be one of the lucky ones. The scuttlebutt across the Data Sea is that unexplainable transactions are starting to pop up. A woman in Omaha informs me she lost a hundred fifteen credits this morning. A business on the colony of Nova Ceti claims it lost twenty-seven. You might be thinking that twenty-seven credits is not a lot of money, but multiply that by the estimated 42 billion people who hold accounts at the approximately 11 million financial institutions secured by Vault protocols, and you have the makings of a crisis.