Torrence sighed. After Roseland was gone from the room, he allowed himself to laugh.
The gunfire from outside ceased completely, and in another two minutes Torrence heard Steinfeld’s voice in the hall. And then Marshall’s.
Jerome and Bettina held hands. That was one connection between them. The other one was on the Plateau.
They were remote-jacked into the consoles in Badoit’s suite in the New York Fuji-Hilton Hotel; most of the year, the suite was empty. Badoit kept it just in case he should need it.
The gear had been moved in this afternoon, all of it selected and tweaked to Leng’s specifications. It was ten p.m. Outside, there were sirens and traffic and the yellow guttering on the horizon of a fire in one of the rooftop shantytowns.
But here, the shades were drawn, the suite’s sound-block fields dialed to silence. And the two of them sat in a dark room, closed eyes sealing them into deeper darkness, consciousness turned inward, fixed on the particular continuum of sheer data and signification that was the Plateau. They roamed a cybernetic steppe where there was no night or day, and eyeless wolves stalked and sniffed, sensing everything. For Jerome and Bettina, there was only the Plateau and the communion.
At first it was a communion with one another, through the chips. Like jamming on instruments together, only it was the riffing of an immaculate symmetry of numbers, of frequency coordinates and geometrical imagery; of key words and phrases and rippling concatenations of triggered mental associations. Then a new stage, the joining: they were working as one unit, moving into the System, finding their way together into the computer linkage that informed the Grid.
There they met the others.
From all over the planet: the wolves of the Plateau, tolerating, now, intruders on their turf; certain computer criminals with an urge to tinker with global politics. And the anarchist underground, the Libertarian information networks, the revolutionaries with other orientations: Communist, Socialist, anarcho-syndicalist; the Liberal Democratic Capitalist party; the apolitical who simply hated the Fascists; Catholic nuns and other Christians acting out of Christ-inspired conscience; the Buddhists; the Mossad; reps from the intelligence service of the People’s Democratic Republic of China; chip-aug’d agents working with Marshall at MI-6; agents from Sweden, from the NSR, from India, from Egypt; Badoit’s own chip-aug’d agents; agents from the People’s Republic of South Africa; from Cuba; from Iceland; from Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, the People’s Democratic State of Chile; from Canada’s intelligence service; from the Democratic State of Unified Korea; from Australia, from New Zealand; from Arabia, from the Palestinian state; from Libya, Chad, and Algeria. And one from Luxembourg.
Many were normally enemies. Now they were united in fear, hatred, or repugnance for the Second Alliance.
Each of them was cerebrally implanted, chip-augmented, skilled on the Plateau. All were linked to the Grid through the international televid system. Each performed two functions at once.
Top function: transmitting the media capsule that Smoke had put together.
The ground had been prepared by Smoke’s media conferences, the furor over Hand’s testimony; by the images of the subhumans, of the Jægernaut, of the Processing Centers. And there was a sudden interest by the Internet newspaper, the Washington Post, kindled by Hand’s connections there.
Worldwide curiosity was whetted. Now came the blitz, entirely illegal but grounded in an inarguable moral foundation: the warning about the Racially Selective Virus.
The blitz, the capsule:
Poignant selections from Hand’s video. Hand’s testimony. Barrabas’s vid. Barrabas’s testimony. Jo Ann’s testimony. Her extractor data (editing out some of the key specs for the racially selective pathogen). A spokesman for Lord Chalmsley and British intelligence confirming that the captured viral samples were large amounts of lethal racially selective pathogen—an announcement sponsored by the British Labor Party, the opposition. Over the objections of the prime minister’s staff. Quotes from Jerome’s computer-break-in documentation further linking the SA to the pathogen. The relationship between the SA and the virus that killed two hundred thousand people in Berlin overnight: something the world was still reeling from. Then there was the strong implication that the SA had been testing a variation of the Racially Selective Virus that went wrong. There was digi-vid from the Processing Centers, testimony from Processing Center survivors, testimony from escaped SA political prisoners. The information that Crandall was dead, his version of the Gospel as fallacious as his appearance on television: an animation put together by SA’s Inner Circle; evidence that Larousse’s appearances were computer and holographically enhanced. The true relationship between the SA and SPOES. The Second Alliance’s hidden agenda for Europe…
And then they saw the video of the dead in Berlin—Army trucks carting their stacked bodies… A wide camera angle on the square outside the Brandenburg Gate… An unconstructed jigsaw puzzle of corpses; a field of the dead. The street curb to curb a river of vomit and blood, an archipelago of the dead in the monstrous flow of it; the dead in cafés and shops… The dead in their cars, in frozen traffic, still sitting at their steering wheels… In one section of Berlin, around the NATO headquarters and near the ghettos, it was a city of the Dead. A necropolis.
Statements crackled from angry NATO authorities. NATO officials who’d previously collaborated with the Second Alliance were now carefully distancing from them. The political tide was turning.
The pirate blitz was slickly put together, edited for minimum dryness and maximum impact. Three versions had been worked up by Hand—all of it narrated by Hand—in A, B, and C formats: versions dubbed into seven languages.
And all of it went into the Grid whether the Grid wanted it or not, carrying, somehow, the immediacy and urgent authority of a Civil Defense alert. The aug-chip conspiracy worked together, overwhelming the cybernetic defenses of the media network. It broke in all over the world, effecting political revelation through media piracy, simultaneously and continuously, over and over, saturating the world with truth. Even the billboard-size propaganda TV screens in Paris and in other SA-held territories were co-opted, taken over, pirated: appropriated. Liberated. In most cases, the viewers saw the whole thing twice before the Second Alliance gave up trying to block it cybernetically and simply switched off the power.
Via satellite. Via ground-based transmitter. Via cable. Via wifi. Via microwave and even radio. The truth as guerrilla action.
And each media capsule ended with a challenge to the Second Alliance: Meet us at the United Nations to repudiate us. Bring your evidence that what we say isn’t true. Meet us in Geneva. Meet us in the International Court. Anywhere! Our facts against yours. Let the world decide who’s telling the truth. We challenge you!
No, that’s not the absolute end of the capsule; there was one thing more. Video of the Jægernaut that smashed the Arc de Triomphe; of Rickenharp and Yukio, rocking and fighting, as the inexorable juggernaut of oppression crushed them into the rubble…
At the climax of the video, coming up gradually from a soft background whisper to consummate as a thunderous, echoing chord: Rickenharp’s music, his Song Called Youth, his electric guitar playing the score for this movie, this documentary that was also a military assault. Rickenharp’s composition as martial marching music. The beat of an insistence on justice; the squeal, the rock ’n’ roll peal, of a demand for freedom; the medium as the message.