Breach (Analog, #3)

by Eliot Peper

It was like public speaking. No matter how many times you did it, the butterflies never went away.

This was why she was here. To chase exquisite agony as desperately as those losers holed up in Houston.

Which left Emily bereft of the digital prosthetic that was a sixth sense.

The feed was the global brain in which every human was a single neuron. It was the forum for trillions of ongoing conversations, the library of all human knowledge, the cognition that drove every car and train and plane and drone, the source of all media and entertainment, the information infrastructure that made civilization possible, the vast and intricate clockwork on which the world ran.

Obscurity was wealth’s most potent shield. Without it, the playing field became uncomfortably level.

They had been careful to cover their tracks, very careful. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be a stray thread somewhere.

I’m not betting the security of my portfolio on a clever disinformation ploy.”

the easiest way to seize control of the future is to build it ourselves.”

True seduction had far less to do with carnal delights than with enigmas.

It was like trying to explain crimson to the color-blind or summarize all of mathematics in a limerick.

the faint smell of cat piss that she’d never entirely been able to get rid of,

the occasional thumps and moans of her upstairs neighbors trying to get pregnant again

Emily had lived to see her personal sense of manifest destiny collapse under its own weight, taking everything else with it.

When ambition became an end in itself, even in the service of the greater good, it stripped you of your humanity.

A dome of stars wheeled above, light finally arriving after countless centuries spent traversing the void separating earth from distant suns, photons from the past illuminating the present, a cosmic time machine that confirmed human insignificance, a guard against the hubris that had ruined her life.

jacked into a muse like a toddler sticking a fork into a power outlet.

They had exploited a backdoor into the feed, and doing so had opened a backdoor into exploiting each other.

Ultimately, everything she had accomplished was built on doing and trading favors.

On Emily’s seventh birthday, her mom had given her a telescope. They’d set it up in the backyard, and Emily had been shocked at the new intimacy of the cosmos.

the burgeoning sense that if she paid attention, the world could make sense, that its secrets could be understood and mastered.

that knowing how the telescope functioned enhanced its magic,

that humans had made this thing that brought them closer to infinity.

You could follow any hobby down a rabbit hole of obsessive curiosity. Emily loved learning. Which was why she hated high school.

There is no justice, just us. Watching his fingers dance in the air, she thought about how the only honor to be found was the kind you fashioned for yourself. When politics was poisoned by corruption, nothing was more important than the promises you made to your friends.

Did all the little clues people left in their wake sum up the lives they led?

“Diplomats,” said Dag, “are people who murder you politely.”

his stories had been the soundtrack to her stargazing, polished by retelling until they were smooth pebbles in her heart.

“The thing I took from that particular story was how we have to be perfect. We can’t settle for saving the king or the kingdom. We have to save both, or lose everything.”

This was a kingdom where the very thing that made it so beautifully efficient was also the thing that made it vulnerable. Power gave you leverage and made you a target at the same time.

And when people follow, take your lead, it’s intoxicating and isolating in equal measure. Every objective you achieve becomes yet another layer of lacquer on the mask that separates you from everyone else, that warps their perception of you and your perception of yourself.

The way people look at me now . . .” His narrow shoulders slumped. “There is nothing on earth more terrifying than adoration.”

There is never going to be a perfect time to make the change the world needs. There will always be reasons for delay.

I’ll win a sumo championship before oligarchs happily open their purses.

On a borderless planet stitched together by feed, nothing conceals the fundamental unfairness of some people owning almost everything while everyone else fights for the scraps.

The feed’s greatest achievement is that it has become a utility, a basic human right.

That’s the plan. She almost said it out loud but caught herself just in time. Death wishes weren’t things to broadcast to the world.

When relationships become tools, your humanity starts to leak away.

I find my own asshole endlessly fascinating.”

Emily closed her eyes, and Pixie opened them.

Where had that confidence gone? When was the last time the world made sense, that events conformed to her plans?

At this scale, wealth was simply a proxy for power, fungible for its political, social, and other equivalents.

this was precisely how human societies had operated throughout history, that modern humans had simply renamed what had once been termed nobility to make ourselves feel better.

It was the same power trip that petty bureaucrats savored when they raised impediment after impediment to her teenage autonomy.

It was the apathy that drove so many people to disenfranchise themselves through cynicism.

Understanding how things came to be frees us to imagine new possibilities.

Ultimately, the only power we have is to choose how we see the world.

That’s the thing about being queen. The bigger your realm, the bigger the bull’s-eye on your back.

“This conspiracy is a symptom of inequality,” said Javier. “Lowell and his cohorts are able to kidnap, murder, and manipulate at will because their wealth makes them nearly untouchable. Allowing that much capital to accrue to so few people puts the entire system at risk.

By charging more to those with more and funding the feed with the proceeds, we’ll be creating the level playing field that Sofia is so keen on.”

Our current fee structure is regressive. By charging all individuals the same fee, we force the poor to pony up a much higher percentage of their income than the rich.