Robert — > Miri: Ok.

Miri walked in almost perfect silence, and Robert tried to imitate her. In fact, with Winston and the others gone, things were very quiet in Huertas country. Maybe they were as alone as the Mysterious Stranger had claimed, shielded from friends and enemies alike.

Miri must have been reading as they walked. More sming appeared.

Miri — > Robert: I didn't know about "Alfred."

It was curious that she didn't wonder about the Mysterious Stranger.

He tapped a few cramped words. Robert — > Miri: Wht cn we do?

Miri — > Robert: Well, there's Mr. Smart-Aleck's list. She waved at the air, and a page of the Stranger's pdf popped into view.

Page 17 What you can do to defeat Alfred

First off, even I, your mysterious friend, am not sure exactly what Alfred is up to (but I am afire with curiosity). Here are some possibilities.

(l)To blow up the bio labs, classic straightforward terrorism. But don't you think he went to rather a lot of trouble if that's all he wants to do? It would be a gross under-employment of everyone's talent. If this is the scam, you will be the heroes of the day, my hands in disabling those little boxes you and your friends planted — but your fame will likely be posthumous. My condolences!

(2)To sabotage some component of the labs, maybe in a way that won't become evident till much later disasters. This is almost as stupid as (1).

(3)To install (or cover) some fiendishly clever Man-in-the-Middle software that gives Alfred de facto ownership of research done in that part of lab that you, Robert, infested for him. This would be cool, and it is my personal favorite (see my discussion of fruit flies in Chapter 3). Unfortunately for Alfred, this caper is so far blown that I doubt it will survive the audits that will surely come raining down. In this case, you two can help by grabbing anything that Alfred has not yet hidden.

(4)In the failure of case (3), or perhaps as his original plan, Alfred may take advantage of your cabal's efforts and outship biologically interesting materials from the labs.

[Diagram of the pneumo tube transport system]

[Picture of GenGen's UP/Ex launcher]

To what end? Oh, the usual terrorist possibilities — but more likely, something weird and interesting. I'm confident I can identify such activity, and you — my loyal hands — can physically prevent the loading and outshipment.

For the moment we are all in the dark about this. But once you enter the perverted GenGen area, I should be able to contact you again. Be careful, be quiet, and Watch for Me in Your Sky!

Miri's words were overwriting the text even before Robert finished reading it.

Miri — > Robert: This guy is always so modest.

Robert grinned. Then he read her message a second time. And he thought back to all his conversations with Sharif, to the mystery of True-Sharif and Stranger-Sharif and… SciFi-Sharif. Oh, my God .

Robert — > Miri: How much of sharif ws u?

She glanced up at him and for instant her intensity was transformed into a dazzling smile. Miri — > Robert: I'm not sure. Sometimes we were all mixed together with the real Zulfi. That was almost fun, hearing what the others asked and what you answered. But way too often, I was frozen out and it was just Mr. Smart-Aleck.

Robert — > Miri: The Mysterious Stranger.

Miri — > Robert: Do you really call him that? Why?

Robert — > Miri: Yes.

Because of the magic he promised . But he didn't type that out.

Miri — > Robert: Well, I think he's nothing without us.

Everything was still dark beyond their little pool of light, but now the walls were closer. They were almost back to the sky tunnel.

Robert — > Miri: Whn will yr mom and dad gt here? Kids spying on family members and reporting to the government — that feature of tyranny is so much simpler when the family itself is mainly government agents.

Miri — > Robert: I don't know. I didn't tell them.

Where is tyranny when you need it ! For a moment, Robert couldn't think of anything to say.

Robert — > Miri: But why?

Miri stopped for a second, looked up at him with that patented stubborn stare.

Miri — > Robert: Because you're my grandfather. I knew you never meant to hurt me. I knew you must be hurting inside. I knew Bob must be wrong about you. I figured that if I could help you out from a different direction, you'd get better. And you did get better, didn't you?

Robert managed a nod. Miri turned and marched on.

Miri — > Robert: But I messed up. I thought Smart-Aleck was all I had to worry about. Wherever you broke in, I thought there'd be instant alarms — and me and Juan being there might make things go better for you. Now Juan is

She hesitated, then reached out to grasp his hand.

Miri — > Robert: Juan is hurt bad. Her hand trapped his fingers. No matter. Robert had no sensible reply except to squeeze back.

Miri — > Robert: But Dr. Xiang is out there. She'll call for help. And Mr. Blount should be calling the real 911 by now. Meantime, it's up to you and me down here.

There were surprises in almost every one of Miri's sentences, and if he could have spoken aloud or typed freely he would have asked a hundred questions. Juan? Xiu Xiang? Miri? So many friends, doing so much to save an incompetent old fool and his fellow fools.

The ground bounced elastically against their feet. They were passing through the sky tunnel, back into GenGen territory.

28

Even on a slow day, thousands of certificates got revoked every hour. It was a messy process, but a necessary consequence of frauds detected, court orders executed, and credit denied. All but a handful of revocations were short cascades of denied transactions, involving a single individual and his/her immediate certificate authority, or a small company and its CA. Perhaps once a year there would be a significant cascade, usually when a large company ran into uncompromising creditors and a court order was delivered to a midlevel CA. Even more rarely, a revocation might be part of a military action, as in the fall of South Ossetia. In theory, the revocation protocols worked with arbitrarily large CAs… but until this night, no apex certificate authority had ever issued global revocations. And Credit Suisse was one of the ten largest CAs in the world. Most of its business was in Europe, but its certificates bound webs of unmeasured complexity all over the planet, affecting the interactions of people who might speak no European language.

Tonight all those unknowing customers would learn of their connection. The failures spread as timeouts on certificates from intermediate CAs and — where time-critical trust was involved — as direct notifications. In Europe, airplanes and trains came smoothly to a stop, without a single accident or fatality. A billion failures were noted, and emergency services moved — with varying success — into action.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security noticed the failures and the growing collateral damage. Analyst pools in the U.S. reached out to the other Great Powers and conferred under emergency protocols established years ago. Chinese Public Safety, the Indo-European intelligence services, the U.S. DHS — they all agreed that a category-one disaster was in progress, a really bad software failure or a novel terrorist attack.

In certain corners of Indo-European intelligence, understanding was more precise. Considerably more precise.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: So I have done it. Has it had any effect on Rabbit?