Here & There (74 page)

“Ah.” Hannah nods and purses her lips. She knows it is futile to argue. The mad old genius long ago inoculated himself against rhetoric. Still, she must try. “Your ethics? Or Holloway’s?”

“Ethics are not subjective, Hannah, no matter how your precious Council votes on them. They stand apart from judgment.”

“You sound awfully judgmental to me.”

“Because you’re hiding pathological ambition behind a block of warped utilitarianism.”

“You’d trade an entire society for the fate of eight?”

“The
8
are part of your ‘society.’”

“You physikists, you’ll play the Merlins of war, killing half of the world and making it so the other half can’t live without you.”

“Now
you
sound like Dr. Holloway. Wars are fought over ideologies, not science.”

“And you’ll undermine both with Restor
8
ion. Ascendency needs to be oneway. Its isolation not only protects it from our meddling, it insulates us from whatever nightmares they might dream.”

“It insulates you from the possibility of an exodus from a realm that might not be the heaven on earth you assure everyone it is. You’ve raised Descartes’s Demon and now you’re worried you can’t keep him collared. Dreamed dreamers screaming themselves awake, never knowing they’re asleep. Just because others spread around your bullshit, doesn’t mean you can plant a handful of magic beans. If the Lyceum can’t handle a little shake-up every now and then, maybe it’s not worth protecting.”

“The Lyceum which gave you Cutie, I’d like to point out.”

“They didn’t give me QT. They assimilated her away from me and exponentiated her to their own ends.” There is venom in his voice. He frowns at Hannah. “Why must we have this fight again? I know you see the truth of it. I know you see the blood on our hands. The sin of this evolution we ushered in.”

His guilt has been there since they came to Lyceum. A burr on his mind that stowed away with them on their Kefitzat exodus and the accidental ascendancy of the Initial
8
.

Anaxagoras has taken her hands in his and kneeled down before her. His eyes look to hers. He reaches up to her cheek, the foglets part and pull back away from the magnetic field emanating from his subdermal interface implants. He sees and touches the real her beneath the sheen.

Hannah presses her hand against the back of his and holds it against her wrinkled cheek. “What is evolution except a virus, a mutation that has to spread from host to host, a venereal transmission passed down through generations, until there’s a critical mass of infected carriers large enough to produce its deformity on a large scale? There was never an Adam and Eve, there was a mutation. Some alpha anomaly in Patient Zero, who had to rape ‘his’ sister/daughter or seduce ‘her’ brother/uncle, to begin the begetting of the line. An act of incest was necessary to start it all, the sin of sins. Incest, rape, infection, ostracism—those are our origins. Evolution is sin by its very nature.”

Anaxagoras pulls his hand back. “So then why are you fighting it?”

“You’re trying to reverse it, put the genie back in the bottle. Restor
8
ion is a mistake. Nothing can come out of the netherwhere of the D Drive.”

“Incest was forever proscribed as a taboo for the purpose of self-defense. It’s a code set up to protect our original mutation from any further tampering, inoculate it against some other infectious deformation. A hypocritical anathema, an act of self-preservation and fear.”

“There’s too much at stake,” she says.

“For what? To save those we trapped in there?”

“We didn’t trap the Initial
8
. Not on purpose. Not by design. It was their fault. Their prying programs that pulled them in when it was only supposed to be Alpha through Delta in the first Kefitzat Haderechon. It is their retribution. I will happily let the past rot for the sake of the future.”

“I can’t.”

Hannah stands. “You could be made to.”

Anaxagoras crosses back to the machine and laughs. “The Lyceum fighting against its patron saint? I don’t think that would fly politically.”

“The Lyceum won’t fight you, simply honor you as a martyr to science. Anaxagoras the Apostate.”

The threat hangs in the air, but Anaxagoras doesn’t flinch. Rather, he begins tinkering again. “I don’t think you’d choose widowhood over truth.”

Hannah sighs and turns toward the heavy door. “At least let me know when it’s ready. Before you do anything.”

“I couldn’t imagine Restor
8
ion without you.” Anaxagoras continues to tinker.

Hannah opens the door.

“In veritas,”
Anaxagoras calls after her.

“In veritas,”
she reflexively echoes.

HANNAH WAITS UNTIL THE
INSTATRAM
carries her a few clicks from the tunnels before activating her neuroplants. She scrolls through the Herald Feed while waiting to connect with her Prime TA. The Inquisitors found no evidence of infiltration in the Prescience Archive. Rather, they discovered there had been a glitch. A cataloging code loop that kept recounting the same memory mass and aggregating it as new, and one of QT’s probes finally caught it and corrected it. As a result of the reduction in areal density, the entire Archive was operating more efficiently.

“Yes, Madame Chancellor,” her TA’s voice piped directly into her Cochlear.

“Alert the Votaries,” Hannah sub-vocalized. “Have them dispatch a Purifier to the
d
atacombs. I’m forwarding you the coordinates.
D
ataMine the entire area. Not a soul, nor a kilobyte gets in or out without triggering a detonation. In the meantime, put some TAs on drafting a Herald release about outmoded engineering and a new refurbishment project.”

“On it, Madame Chancellor.”

“Could the Geminis make time?”

“They’ve made accommodations for you.
In veritas
.”

“In veritas,”
Hannah echoes as she disembarks from the
InstaTram
in front of the Hippocratic Hall. Her Katharsis is long overdue.

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China’s stock czar investigates high-speed trading tap

By
█████ ██
and
███ ███

SHANGHAI
 | Wed Jan 16, 2012 6:01 AM GMT

Jan 16
█████
- 
China
’s top securities regulator, who has for months been trying to revive the international stock market, has uncovered multi-year trend of high-speed microtrades transacted microseconds ahead of millions upon millions of large-quantity Chinese orders in overseas markets.

On Monday, Guo Shuqing, the chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), shocked the International Market with the announcement of a suspected trading scandal. Correlative data shows that since 2001 millions, if not trillions, of minute trades preceded almost every large Chinese stock order. Stocks would be bought microseconds ahead of Chinese investors and then sold for fractional profits as the demand from the foreign order pushed up the price. The prescient purchases were always small decentralized orders that easily glided beneath any regulatory radars.

While any of the individual profits amounted to fractions of a cent at best, the aggregate of these microtrades could total billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Authorities as of yet have been unable to locate any trading tap or malicious software, however they have been able to determine that all of these microtrades preceeded orders directed through an older satellite launched by CSG in 1998. All trades made through this telecommunication hub have been frozen and any further transaction traffic suspended.

“This is a huge hit to market confidence,” retail investor Qi Junjie said in his microblog. “Foreign banks finally succeed in liberalizing China’s stock market, and the Chinese investor finds himself behind his own coattails.”

Guo assured a forum on Monday that China has taken swift and effective security measures. He took the opportunity to speak out against floating the exchange rate of the local currency, Renminbi, a long-disputed issue between China and the US. Guo also commented on how this level of advanced eavesdropping might only be attained with the resources available to a government. The US, along with several European countries, has denied any knowledge of and participation in these suspicious trades. The US Treasurer even went so far as to assert that any threat to the international market was a threat to the global economy.

Mainland China shares dropped to 7-1/2 month lows on Tuesday, with the CSI300 index of the top Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares falling more than 20 percent since early December.

While foreign investment still only accounts for around 18 percent of the overall mainland China equity market, the psychological impact the scandal has had on local investors is significant.

Over the past few weeks, Guo has made numerous attempts to breathe life into the stock market and bolster market security. But investors turned a deaf ear, drastically constricting trading activity.

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A

SCIENCE & RESEARCH

Storage Wars

CCV invasion

By
███ ███████

Contributing Writer

Friday, Apr 1, 2013

Brown’s Center for Computation and Visualization appears to have been tampered with over the weekend. The entire Center, which provides virtual and physical hosting for the entire university, automatically shut down early Sunday morning as the result of a sudden EMP surge.

After rebooting the servers, Brown’s CS Department determined that while all data remained intact, the archive aggregate was apparently several thousand terabytes “lighter.” Neither the CS team nor a group of independent security consultants have been able to determine what, if anything, is missing.

Though not conclusive, inside reports do allude to some suspicious activity late Saturday emblematic of the recent cyber attacks traced back to Chinese hackers at Jiaotong University. McAfee classified these actions as part of an espionage campaign.

Previous infiltrated institutions include the
New York Times
, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Lockheed Martin, the
Wall Street Journal
, Coca-Cola, Stamford, University of Michigan, and Duke.