"Okay," he said. "Break time's over, you two. Cinquetta, there's a backlog of field reports for you to wade through. Alphon, the collective have some questions about a situation they've been monitoring. Oh, and it seems our late host is making an announcement in Chicago." He raised his phone and showed them the screen.
Cinquetta glanced at the image of a South Asian woman and then gave Ferd a puzzled look. "I don't understand. That's not Ms. Butler."
He grinned. "You're right. But she just introduced herself as 'Maira Bundis'. It seems my old friend has managed to outlive her years! But seriously, that's Eshana Thandri, from the Chicago contingent of the Hacker Collective."
She knew the name, but until now didn't have a face to put with it. This was the woman who had hijacked one of the drones sent to silence Quince after the rescue, and used it to go after the rest of them. Wary of violating their trust, she asked if it was a private communication.
Ferd shook his head. "No. This is open. Our friends at Soylent News made sure the IP's been spread across who knows how many social networks, and the feed's backed up by redundant off-grid tunnel IPs as well. There's nothing going to shut this down."
She smiled and activated the recorder while 'Maira Bundis' described some of the more memorable flash actions that had followed the government's bungled attempt to silence Quince. The transit shutdown in Chicago, which was carried out by a virally-spread mod to the ubiquitous tracker bugs that the CTA relies on to match capacity to demand, had sent the heuristic schedulers for the city's air, rail and tube traffic into a wild oscillation that brought them down as well, sending shockwaves across the transportation networks."
The door opened, and two men in military uniforms that still had loose threads where their insignia were torn off entered and came over to listen. Marc and Jason were part of the force that had been sent in to abduct Quince after the HyperLoop rescue, but chose to switch sides instead, and escorted him and the others back here. Cinquetta checked the time. They'd just been relieved from watch duty.
"Similar tactics," 'Maira Bundis' said, "had been used in other cities across the world, causing wave after wave of chaos that incited otherwise docile workers to take to the streets. When their collective anger reached critical mass, spontaneous demonstrations broke out, and people started demanding that their city governments get things working again. Well, you can imagine what happened next. The media started parroting official statements that Alphon Quince had organized it all, and that he'd done it with the help of his horde of obedient tech workers."
Cinquetta winced, remembering how the complicit press had framed the disaster in Greenland. There wasn't even a mention of all of the workers who were also killed. As if nobody mattered except the wealthy power brokers at the conference.
"It didn't take long," 'Bundis' went on, "for the techs in the streets to publicly tear those assertions to shreds. The fire's been lit. Now we need to direct it. Meet Victor Schandrul."
The image switched to a conservatively dressed man with a very serious, hyper-intelligent look in his eyes. "I'm a Heuristics Analyst," he said, "and there are some things that you all need to know. Alphon Quince has already told you that, until recently, the Hacker Collective has been stepping in to shore up the technical infrastructure that we all rely on. When they stopped, innumerable problems were laid bare in the communications and transportation networks, and it suddenly got a lot more dangerous to travel. Well, they weren't the only ones."
Quince crossed his arms and nodded appreciatively.
"My job at the Port of Chicago has been to tweak the scheduling systems to compensate for the very real fact that the models we've relied on about how things work no longer reflect reality. They haven't for decades. Weather forecasters were the first to run into this problem, way back at the beginning of the century, when the effects of climate change were just starting to assert themselves. Their job got a lot harder when the Gulf Stream shut down and we ended up with a permanent nest of hurricanes in the Atlantic. But now, the physical systems we rely on are being affected as well. The reason for this is that the mutant resin-eating bacteria that Mr. Quince told us about have been decimating those systems. The destruction of the Golden State Barrage was just the beginning."
Cinquetta looked over at Quince. He'd closed his eyes, and let his head roll back. He looked like a weight had been lifted off him. She made a mental note to remember how relieved he looked watching Schandrul's statement.
"Dams, sea walls, aqueducts, HyperLoop supports, you name it" a whole gamut of physical infrastructures, are on the knife-edge of failure. The locks on the Chicago and Calumet Rivers here have to be babied to prevent them from cracking, and the same thing is true at ports around the world. All of these things will fail because they were built with resins. But none of this is because of terrorism. Alphon Quince is not your enemy. Neither are we, the techs entrusted with keeping your world running. But there is an enemy here, one that's been manipulating world events for centuries. They've tricked up the world's economy to suck the few hard-earned dollars we make from every one of us, and they've used governments and corporations to do it. I'm talking about the world's central bankers: the blood-sucking cabal of banking behemoths that run the world from Basel. The same group that owns that resort in Greenland, and that conducted a power grab when some of their less-accommodating pawns were murdered."
Quince was grinning now, and his eyes showed the same fire she'd seen when he addressed the press after his rescue. What had been a solitary struggle to tell the hard truth was finally spreading. The man was breathing faster now, and excitedly tapping his fingers on the table as he watched the small screen.
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