She glanced back at the ziggurat and nearly retched. There it sat, in three dimensions-the evidence of her final degradation in the bio/logics trade. There has to be some way to stop this from happening.

Jara stood at her window and watched the London evening crowd go about its business. Of course, it wasn't a real window; Jara couldn't afford an apartment with exterior walls on her meager fiefcorp stipend, and had to settle for flat viewscreens. But how easy it was to just tune in an exterior view from the building and pretend. Down below, hundreds of people bustled around the public square, thousands maybe, casually perusing the Data Sea with hardly a thought to the bio/logic programs that ran their lives. Bio/logics regulating their heartbeats, bio/logics keeping their appointment calendars, bio/logics pumping sensory information into their skulls every second.

Jara's mind buzzed with evil possibilities as she fell into the familiar game of what's the worst that could happen. What would happen if panic overtook the market tomorrow and people started pulling money from their Vault accounts? What would happen if Horvil's trepidations became reality and the Pharisees really did launch a black code attack? Or what if-perfection postponed!-some unconnectible lunatics figured out a way to sabotage Dr. Plugenpatch? Jara's eyes darted to some anonymous pedestrian making his way across the cobblestones below, and suddenly he was no longer anonymous.... He was an important businessman who would wake up tomorrow in Beijing or Melbourne or one of the orbital colonies, Allowell maybe.... He tries to grab a batch of stock reports off the Data Sea while he drinks his morning nitro, and nothing happens.... His blood pressure starts rising, he's supposed to close a big deal today. What the heck is he going to do now? ... The OCHREs in his body frantically ping the Plugenpatch medical databases for advice on how to keep his blood pressure down, and what to do about his congenital heart condition. ... But Dr. Plugenpatch doesn't respond.... The room goes dark, the lights go out....

Get a hold of yourself! Jara thought. You're giving Natch way too much credit. One man can't bring the whole Data Sea crashing to a halt on a whim. The Pharisees aren't going to launch a black code attack tomorrow. What's the worst that could happen? A few fiefcorps will lie low for the day, that's all.

She switched the window display to a peaceful Irish countryside and tried to get back to work. The three-dimensional flowchart on the table silently mocked her: GULLIBLE. UNTRUSTWORTHY. UNDEPENDABLE.

"f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k!" Jara cried aloud, slamming her hand against the bare walls. She couldn't just sit back and let this happen. Natch had to be stopped. He had to.

"I'm telling you," said Horvil, "they're talking about it all over the gossip networks. I'm not making this up! Go check it out for yourself if you don't believe me."

The woman pursed her lips skeptically and regarded Horvil with a penetrating look. It was the kind of dubious stare that muckety-mucks from the creeds had been giving him his entire life, long before he was old enough to deserve them. Then she cast a spiteful glance at Horvil's apartment, which the engineer had carefully arranged in a tableau of dishevelment: half-eaten sandwiches mingling freely on the floor with dirty clothes, pieces of broken furniture, and the occasional bio/logic programming bar. The elderly woman sighed and turned back to smoothing the wrinkles on her purple suede robe. The state of the robe seemed more important to her than Horvil's dire warnings of enemy attack.

"Creed Elan has contacts in the Defense and Wellness Council," she said. "We have people in the Meme Cooperative. If everyone is panicking about Pharisee black code, why haven't we heard about it?"

"Heck, I don't know. I'm not a Council officer. Who knows how a wave of rumors like this gets started?"

"I don't care how a wave of rumors like this gets started," she mimicked cruelly. "I'm more interested in knowig how you, of all people, end up on the crest of it."

The woman's name was Marulana-at least, Horvil thought her name was Marulana. These rich old crones from Creed Elan were all interchangeable. They sc.r.a.pped amongst themselves to be the first to solicit your donation for their silly charity events, but when it came time for you to ask a favor of them, they were nowhere to be found. All Horvil knew for sure was that she was a bigwig in Creed Elan-one of the handful of minor bodhisattvas that ran the organization. She was also one of the women his Aunt Berilla frequently had over for lunch in that gaudy calcified estate of hers on the West End.

He could have verified her name in a heartbeat on the public directory, but it didn't really matter. Horvil knew this was going to be a short conversation anyway.

"You want to know how I heard about this?" Horvil gulped, looking for a quick way to foist Marulana's suspicions on someone else. "Natch told me." He gave her a conspiratorial shrug as if to say, Crazy world. You never know when you're going to get swept up in another rumor or scandal. But what can you do?

"Oh, Natch told you," replied the creed official with deepening suspicion. "Somehow that doesn't surprise me." Horvil had no doubt she would recognize the name. Ever since he had signed on with the fiefcorp, Natch's name had been spreading among the Elanners like a virulent cancer. Aunt Berilla's influence, no doubt. "So you hear that a major black code attack is imminent, and your first instinct is to contact your spiritual mentors at Creed Elan. Is that it, Horvil?"

The sarcasm in her voice was palpable, almost a third partic.i.p.ant in the conversation. "Listen, your holy creedfulness," said Horvil. "I don't expect you to panic every time you hear a strange rumor. But this is me talking! You guys know me. My family's been sh.e.l.ling out credits to support Creed Elan since the beginning of time." And I haven't paid any attention to your dumb creed activities since I was a kid. I don't even pretend to understand what kind of morals and values you people teach anymore. I'm not sure I ever did. "I'd just hate to see your fine customers-er, const.i.tuents-get sucked dry because some black code caught them unaware."

"I'm certain our devotees will be just fine."

The engineer lost his patience. "Why do you always have to look for ulterior motives? Do you think Creed Elan has a-a monopoly on good intentions?"

"No," Marulana replied drily. "We simply know from experience that the only people fiefcorpers care about are themselves." She threw a vulture-like frown in Horvil's direction. Then her multi connection winked out without even a goodbye.

Horvil collapsed back to the couch, frustrated, sending a stack of grubby pillows to the floor in the process. So much for family connections, he thought. At least he could be comforted that the state of his apartment would make it back to Aunt Berilla.

Jara stood in the atrium of the Meme Cooperative's administrative headquarters. All the other governmental and quasi-governmental agencies built their offices in Melbourne, under the imposing shadows of the Prime Committee and the Defense and Wellness Council complexes. Not so the Cooperative, which chose the lonely orbital colony of Patronell as its base of operations for no reason Jara could discern.

The building followed the same bland architectural recipe that all bureaucratic buildings used these days. Start with a base of stretched stone and flexible gla.s.s to provide that chic curved effect. Throw in a clump of rice-paper walls to show solidarity with the past. Add impos sibly high ceilings. Coat every available surface with viewscreens, and auction off the advertising s.p.a.ce to defray construction costs. Mix in a crowd of thousands. The result: instant nausea.

But Jara was not there to study architecture. She was there to do the right thing. She was there to report Natch to the Meme Cooperative and stop this insanity before someone got hurt.

The very idea was absurd, and it grew more ridiculous with each step she took. Who are you going to tell? And what are you going to tell than?

Jara didn't know; she just knew she had to tell someone. She tamped down that tiny voice inside suggesting she use the information as leverage to get out of her apprenticeship contract. No, I'm not just doing this for myself I haven't sunk to Natch's level yet. Natch's plan wasn't just dangerous to the capitalmen who had grown fat off the fiefcorp boom, or the degenerate fiefcorpers like Natch and her old boss Lucas Sentinel, people Jara would just as soon see dest.i.tute. The plan also made a mockery of the Primo's rating system that had served the public for seventy years. People trusted Primo's to uncover shoddy programsprograms that did not obey Plugenpatch specifications, programs that could theoretically overload bio/logic systems and cause fatalities. Primo's was not perfect by any means. Its interpreters could be petty and inaccurate and just plain spiteful. But who else was there to turn to, really?

If Primo's can be undermined, thought Jara, then what in the world can you depend on?

The fiefcorp a.n.a.lyst wasn't sure where her feet were taking her, but now she discovered they were heading towards a department called the Fraudulent Fiefcorp Practices Division. She could see the office now, just past the viewscreen hawking a program called Feminine Mystique 242.37a. Natch's fiefcorp had received its share of warnings from this office before, and Jara had walked these halls more than once to plead the company's case before an arbitration board. She could have filed a complaint from home, of course, but this was the only way if she wanted to remain anonymous. Without proof that the pet.i.tioners were real people, the office would be flooded with data agents from dishonest fiefcorps.

Judging by the long line of multi projections, there were plenty of disgruntled consumers willing to put in the extra effort. Jara scanned the queue and discovered a dozen people who had carefully scrubbed their public profiles to protect their anonymity. She herself had taken this prudent step before opening the multi connection to Patronell; anyone who pinged the public directories with Jara's image would see her name as Ca.s.sandra and her locality as Agamemnon's Palace. She doubted anyone here would get the joke.

A fine dust of boredom settled on the pet.i.tioners. Every minute or two, the line would shuffle forward. The silence of strangers, the doldrums of public s.p.a.ces.

Forty minutes later, Jara reached the head of the line. An incoming message welcomed her to the Meme Cooperative and offered a map to guide her through the office to her designated inspector. She took a deep breath and dove into the labyrinth of cubicles.

"Come in, come in," urged the caseworker when she finally reached his cube. A slack-jawed fellow with Scandinavia in his eyes.

Jara walked to the stiff-backed chair opposite his desk and found herself ankle-deep in snow. The walls of the cubicle had disappearedalong with the rest of the Meme Cooperative building-replaced by a frozen tundra. SeeNaRee, Jara thought with distaste. She could practically hear the familiar SeeNaRee slogan she had seen on a thousand viewscreens: If you can't go to the places you love, why not bring them to you? At least it was good programming; her toes were already starting to freeze.

"I am required by the charter of the Meme Cooperative to inform you this is an anonymous conversation," began the official in a tired voice. "To ensure your confidentiality, neither I nor any of my col leagues can see you or otherwise identify you, your gender, or any of your distinguishing characteristics without your express permission, except to confirm your presence on the multi network. A sealed recording of this conversation will be stored in our archives for a period of no less than ..." The nondescript official droned on for another minute as he gazed myopically in the direction of his visitor's chair.

"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 mora.s.s. 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 a.n.a.lyst 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 a.s.sured 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. n.o.body'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.

PLEASE PROTECT YOUR HOLDINGS.

The Vault has detected a DNA-a.s.sisted 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 COUNCIL ASLEEP ON THE JOB-AGAIN.

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.

n.o.body 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 scuttleb.u.t.t 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 inst.i.tutions secured by Vault protocols, and you have the makings of a crisis.

Now the question on everybody's lips: Where is the Defense and Wellness Council?

Rumors that the Pharisees were planning a major black code offensive have been circulating for days in the drudge community. High Executive Borda must have heard them too. Certainly, he must have figured out that today is a major religious festival in the Pharisee Territories. And if that's the case, then why wasn't the public warned ahead of time?

We haven't seen a successful black code attack on the Vault in years," a source inside the Defense and Wellness Council told me. "It's a totally distributed system running millions of different protocols and locked down on the submolecular level. How far do you think these fanatics are going to get?"

But is High Executive Borda naive enough to think that the march of technology won't eventually ...

Jara waved the scrolling text into oblivion. She could predict the rest of the article anyway. Sor would make his typical excoriations of the Council for being so secretive, and insist that Len Borda be held accountable for his inaction. Then he would segue into his standard rant about the moral decay of society.

"See what I mean?" moaned Horvil, head in his hands. "The world is- "Shut up," Jara barked.

Sen Sivv Sor had a devout following of several billion who hung on his every word. And he was but one among hundreds of thousands of independent commentators competing for readership. Now that the drudges were involved, Jara knew it was only a matter of time before panic whipped across the Data Sea like a tsunami.

And so it did.

While Jara sat quietly with Horvil in her breakfast nook, messages started rolling in to her mental inbox. Urgent warnings and sheepish apologies from the same friends and family members she had spoken with just last night. A letter from her L-PRACG administrator urging calm. Offers for useless "black code protection programs" from desperate fiefcorps that traded on unsavory bio/logic exchanges. Jara bristled at all the confusion.

"Listen to this," said Horvil with a nervous laugh. "There's a rumor going around the Data Sea that High Executive Borda is dead."

Jara snorted. "Maybe he got caught in that orbital colony explosion that just killed half a million people."

Half an hour drifted past like a thunder-laden stormcloud, full of bad omens. Jara tuned her viewscreen in to the public square outside, expecting to see thousands of Londoners rioting in the streets. She saw nothing but the usual Tuesday afternoon traffic. But could she detect an edge to the crowd, an impatience, a fear of the unknown? Or was that simply the everyday background hum of anxiety? Too many choices to make, too many consequences to consider.

"You know this couldn't possibly be a coincidence," said the a.n.a.lyst.

Horvil rested his cheek on the cool plastic of the table and sighed. Obviously, this thought had occurred to him too. "So you think Natch knew a black code attack was coming?"

"Maybe. You know that he's hip-deep in the black coding culture."

"Jara, I've seen those 'black coding groups' on the Data Sea that he follows. They're a Joke. A bunch of kids talking about mods for bio/logic programming bars, how to boost OCHRE transmission frequencies, s.h.i.t like that. If one of those people launched an attack on the Vault, then I'm a Pharisee."

"Well, it's either that or ..." Jara let the sentence trail off.

The engineer leapt to his feet, face as pale as the droplet of ChaiQuoke piloting its way down the grooves of his chin. "Come on, Jara. There's no way he could've done that black code himself. I mean, yeah, Natch is one of the most brilliant programmers out there, but to break into the Vault? The Pharisees and the Islanders and who knows how many other lunatics have been trying to do that for decades. You think he just cobbled together some black code to crack open the financial exchange system in his spare time? He's not that smart. No one is.

Jara grimaced, conceding the point. Humans had limits. It was an axiom she felt she would be wise to remember. "Okay, okay. So what are the other alternatives?"

"Are the messages fake?"

"I don't think so. They look authentic to me. The signatures check out."

"Maybe he's involved with the Pharisees. Maybe somebody warned him ahead of time. But wait-that doesn't make sense either. The Pharisees don't use ConfidentialWhisper or multi or-or anything. They'd have no way to get in touch with him." Jara could see Horvil sliding back down into the mental quicksand. He was flailing his arms around in increasingly wide arcs to match the mounting decibels of his voice. "You know Natch likes to ride those tube trains in circles for hours on end. Maybe he's going to the Pharisee Territories ... or meeting the Pharisees halfway ... or-"

"That's ridiculous. Natch is not holding secret meetings on the tube with a bunch of violent lunatics. He just isn't."

"Then maybe he has a source in the Defense and Wellness Council."

Jara snorted. "Horvil, we're getting nowhere. Natch doesn't have sources anywhere. The only people he talks to are you and Serr Vigal. Everyone else trusts him even less than I do."

They were both standing now, venting their inner turmoil at each other. Jara turned away from her fellow apprentice and stalked to the other side of the kitchen. Suddenly, the news began flooding into her consciousness once more, overrunning the hastily erected barricades she had put up so she could concentrate on her conversation with Horvil. Drudges of all political stripes were bickering in public about the sums of money that had vanished. The Council was maintaining complete silence about the situation. Jara's younger sister in Sudafrica sent her a panic-stricken message asking for advice. And then, without thinking about it, Jara opened a message from the Vault authorities.