Salvation полностью

“Don’t see it myself. Like I told Jaru, this Utopial society of hirs isn’t the answer. The way they’ve insisted any immigrants’ second generation is always omnia is a dead end structure. All it’s done is create a separate culture—which, incidentally, never stops whining on about its superiority. That always ends well.”

“Then it is not unusual for such a culture to be subject to attack from ideological rivals.”

She pulled a face. “I don’t buy it. This is an odd assault. There’s something else going on here.”

“What?”

“Mother Mary!” she said out loud. “I don’t know. I don’t get hired to figure things out. My bit’s the simple part at the end.”

“Talking to yourself?”

Kandara looked around. Jessika was standing on the other side of the pool, a small smile on her lips as she held up a couple of wineglasses.

“Sorry,” Kandara grunted and climbed out of the pool. “I was trying to work something out. Don’t know why I bother. Altmes aren’t exactly G8Turings.”

Jessika gave her one of the glasses. “Something wrong with this crime-fighting setup? I’m so disappointed you think that.”

Kandara grinned. “It’s fucking amateur hour. If this is how they tackle fanatics, the whole Utopial concept is doomed. You should pack your bow and arrows and head for the hills.”

“Yeah, I’ve been biting my tongue since I got here.”

“Didn’t you tell Kruse we need professionals to work something like this?”

“Actually, Oistad and Tyle are good at what they do. And you and me, we are the professionals.”

“Mother Mary help them.” Kandara raised her glass in salute and sipped some of the wine; it was sweeter than she was expecting, and nicely chilled. Not bad.

Jessika glanced into the kitchen, where Kruse was now back at the table, in earnest conversation with the other two. “What we lack is leadership. Kruse and her Bureau were assuming that if you bring me and Tyle and Oistad together with a decent G8Turing, we’d have no trouble tracking down the perpetrators. Then all we have to do is stand back while you go in and eliminate them.”

“Yeah. But there’s something about this whole sabotage thing that bothers me.”

“I know. They can’t see it, but the cost-benefit ratio is all wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“People like Kruse, they genuinely don’t get old-economy finance. Too enlightened. Here, if something needs to be done, it is done. Hey presto! With post-scarcity resources, no one thinks about the cost of anything, until you reach macro-projects like terraforming. But those are all political decisions reached democratically, and the manufacturing facilities are incorporated into what passes for this society’s budget. If something is truly expensive in terms of resources, you don’t borrow money to pay for it, you act rationally and spread the cost out, devoting what you can afford each decade. Timescale isn’t so important now that we all live for a couple of centuries. It’s all very nice and rational.”

“Living within your means.”

“Exactly. Which is why they don’t see the problem. It costs commercial companies a lot to place an industrial espionage team here. Most of them pass themselves off as immigrants, converts to Utopials, looking for a better life and embracing the great new future culture. Immigrating here is easy enough; this is the second time I’ve done it. The only real requirement is that you agree to have baseline genome editing for any kids you have after you arrive.”

“So that they’re omnia. Yeah, ideologically that stinks.”

“To you, yes. And it does kind of reinforce the difference between us and them.”

“Actually, I liked Jaru’s equality theory. Fuck knows I put up with enough shit from misogynistic pricks while I was in the military. I just think…there’s got to be a different solution. Write me down as an old reactionary, I guess.” Kandara grimaced at the slip and drank some more wine.

“So this is how a standard industrial espionage goes,” Jessika said. “You’re a professional gang tech that gets hired to steal data. You settle in your new town and go to barbeques with your neighbors, play sports in the local league—basically, blending in. But by night, you’re a secret supervillain, you spend your time online black-routing malware to try and bust medical research files. You succeed, and your corporate employer earns a billion wattdollars from a revolutionary new headache vector. Like I said earlier, it’s cheaper than paying a research team. Cost effective. But this…You get no benefit other than making your ideological enemy better prepared to resist further sabotage. Who can afford it?”

“There are a lot of zealots out there. Trust me, cost never deterred fanatics.”

“Okay, so where did this sabotage team get their money from? Their digital ability is astonishing. Tyle is convinced their routines were formatted by a G8Turing, and there aren’t many of them anywhere. So far only governments and the bigger companies have them.”

“I don’t know,” Kandara said. “Maybe we are overlooking the obvious?”