Here & There
Page 54
Hannah gave into it every month. Katharsis might remove any new malignancy, but it couldn’t correct a genetic predisposition. “And see if the Geminis have time for me later this post-perigee. Have the Inquisitors found anything yet?” Hannah had to keep up the pretense of a witch-hunt even with her TAs.
“They have canvassed only a quarter of Prescience Archive as of yet.”
Hannah nods. “It will take time. Keep me informed.”
“Are you not returning to the Athenaeum with me?”
Even through the foglet veneer, her TA perceives the invective in Hannah’s gaze.
“Shall I update you through your Cochlear?”
Hannah shakes her head no, knowing full well she would be disengaging all neuroplants equipped with GPS. “Don’t bother. Just upload it to my Herald Feed.”
Her TA nods, folds her hands together and opens them like a book. “In veritas.”
“In veritas,” Hannah echoes, and watches her TA head off to the Athenaeum tower. Before Hannah even makes it down the marble steps of the Forum to the InstaTram, the foglets have shimmered into the facade of an overweight, unshaven, unkempt TunnelTechnician.
HANNAH’S EYES GLOW GREEN in the dark tunnels of the datacombs. The gallium arsenide Omnibus GEN CX+ optic implants had clicked on automatically when the door had slid shut. They always make her feel like she’s looking through aquamarine glasses. She shivers in the cold air of the tunnel. Geothermal cooling has its drawbacks, even if it does keep the servers at a stable 288 degrees Kelvin. Her foglets vibrate with warmth in response. She turns left at the next turn, led by her CartographEYE. Hannah’s confident she could navigate the tunnels of ancient data beneath the city with her eyes closed, having visited him so often down here. Hubris does not trump a simple download, though, and arrow impulses that flash through her visual cortex with every twist are simply reassuring encouragements of her mental mapping capabilities.
The auto-gating function of her Omnibus implant kicks in as she pushes open the door into the vast, brightly lit datacomb chamber. A robe and hood decorated with both Bright and Amaranth Pink sit balled up on a chair.
“Hello, Hannah,” he sighs, continuing to tinker with the Kefitzat Haderechon machine.
Hannah’s the only one who visits her husband here, who even knows about here. Other than Holloway, of course. But the good doctor’s refugee status didn’t afford her much motility. She could hardly leave the Sanctuary, let alone access the restricted datacombs.
“Hello, Anaxagoras.”
His black-and-white locks dangle to his shoulders. His sinewy muscles flex beneath his gray cotton shirt. He always sheds his Sophic uniform whenever possible, preferring a more ascetic, utilitarian garb. Though a few annums older than her, Anaxagoras holds his shape well and moves with the lithe grace of a craftsman, rather than the dignity of a senior Sophos. The lines of age sharpen the appearance of his focus more than the chiseling of time.
“Good after-apogee, Chancellor,” QT’s disembodied voice echoes around the room.
Hannah acknowledges the Quantum Thought AI with her phonetic nickname, “Good after-apogee, Cutie. Looks like you’ve been busy.”
Anaxagoras nods while interfacing with a holodesigner. His hands manipulate virtual nano-architecture. He tweaks the design slightly and QT extrapolates the ripple effect on a macro-scale. “Almost finished sharpening the aether amplifier,” he states while continuing to tweak.
“I was referring to the Prescience Archive.”
Anaxagoras pulls his hands out of the holodesign. He turns and rests them on the railing that circumvents the massive Kefitzat Haderechon machine. He half sits, half leans on/against it, wipes his brow, and looks at her. Well, at least his artificial irises focus on her. There’s no telling what private images he also has layered across his mechanical pupils. His ocular enhancements have no trouble penetrating the illusion of her foglets.
“You look tired, love.” He rubs the back of his wrist across his forehead and wrinkles his nose at her.
“Of course I do,” she sighs, exasperated, but also relieved to be truly seen by someone. “What do you expect? I just came from a Council meeting. The seven Sophos are quite discombobulated by the Ascendancy preparations, not to mention the archival anomalies.”
“The Prescience Archive is intact. I made sure of that. And the reduction of areal density even made the whole server run smoother.”
“Intact, yes. But it’s been infiltrated. And apparently thinned out.”
Anaxagoras rolls his eyes. “I bet none of them even know where the Prescience Archive is, let alone what’s in it. Tell them it was a glitch. A cataloging code loop that kept recounting the same memory mass and aggregating it as new, and one of Cutie’s probes finally caught and corrected it.”
“Which is precisely what I’m planning on the Inquisitors uncovering,” Hannah snaps back with an anger that surprises her.
“You sent those zealots?” He shakes his head. “Talk about overkill. Why not just send a Votary assassin?”
Hannah takes a breath. “So you brought the Initial 8 back here?”
Anaxagoras nods. “Dr. Holloway and I thought it was time.”
Hannah works to mask her distaste at his mention of the outsider. The Psykhe had been infecting his mind ever since she’d arrived. Dr. Holloway’s affirmations of his anxieties are aggravating his conscience.
“Is Restor8ion ready? You really want to tear the Initial 8 out of the Divinity Drive and try to reconstitute them?” Hannah asks, already knowing the answer. She simply doesn’t want to believe, having hoped this day would never come.
“Close enough.”
“What does Cutie think?”
“Anaxagoras’s adjustments suggest a high probability of stable manifestations,” QT’s disembodied voice chimes in.
“Will it destabilize the D Drive?” Hannah asks.
“In spite of the integral role they have played in it, the Initial 8 were never fully integrated into it. Disentangling them presents a hyperbolically low probability of any destabilization,” QT assures her.
“Satisfied?” Anaxagoras asks, crossing his arms.
Hannah sits on an overturned crate. “You don’t have to resurrect them. You can’t know what’s going to happen when they’re reconstituted. It’s never been done.”
“We have an obligation—”
“Capability does not necessitate inevitability.”
“Not to science, Hannah. Ethically. They never should’ve been there in the first place.”
“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 Restor8ion. 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. Restor8ion 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 Restor8ion 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 datacombs. I’m forwarding you the coordinates. DataMine 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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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.
Topics: Data and security
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www.browndailyherald.com/2013/04/1/storage-wars/
███████ shaman or charlatan: