Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

somebody.
    In the early hours of the mornings, when he thought she was
asleep, he would go out to her room’s tiny balcony and talk
for a long time on the phone. She pretended not to notice and
didn’t object, instead using these times in murmured
pillow-talk on her own, using the eyeband to consult Parvus and
to listen to v-mail from her Sovnarkom colleagues about the
situation back home. It wasn’t good.
    Denis Gubanov, in particular, was glum. His summaries of
popular attitudes – derived from agents’ reports and
readers’ letters to Kapitsa Pravda – indicated
what to Myra was a surprising groundswell of opposition to the
whole deal with Kazakhstan. All unnoticed, a thick scrub of
patriotism had grown up over the years on her tiny
republic’s thin, infertile soil. Its independence had come
to matter to its citizens, far more than it ever had to her. Each
night she looked at shots of the growing daily picket outside the
government building: red flags, yellow-and-black trefoil flags,
pictures of Trotsky. She’d sigh, turn over and pretend to
be asleep when Jason came back.
     
    At Hisaronu, a pleasant small town scattered across a hilltop
surrounded by higher, distant mountains, they stopped at a
pavement cafe on the main street. They drank Amstel and ate
Iskander kebabs, under a striped plastic awning. When they were
smoking, and sipping muddy coffee, Myra leaned forward across the
table and clasped Jason’s hand, letting their fingers
intertwine.
    ‘What do you want from me?’ she asked.
    He clasped back.
    ‘Apart from what I’ve got?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    He disentangled his fingers from hers and pulled from his
pocket and unfolded a Mercator projection world-map, furred at
the creases. He elbowed aside his drink and a plastic ketchup
bottle and spread the map out on the metal table.
    She pointed. ‘We’re here.’ She dusted off
her hands and made as if to rise. ‘Glad to be of
help.’
    ‘Sit,’ he said, laughing. ‘Look.’
    She sat down again. ‘Who else is looking? If
you’re about to give me a briefing, wouldn’t VR be
better?’
    Jason waved his hands and looked around. Tourists and soldiers
and locals ambled along the noonday street. ‘Nobody’s
looking.’ He combed his fingers through his hair.
‘And you’ll have noticed, I don’t have an
eyeband.’ He shrugged. ‘All the networks are
compromised anyway, have been for years. That’s why I
listen to the radio, and read newspapers, and write in a
notebook, and carry paper maps.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ said Myra, lightly, to hide her
cold shock at what he’d just said. Then she realised she
couldn’t let it pass. ‘What do you mean,
„compromised“?’
    ‘Insecure, no matter what you do. Codes, hiding the real
message in the junk, whatever – there are systems
that’ll crack every new variant as soon as you set it up.
Quantum computation killed cryptography, and there are better
methods than that now, implemented on things nobody understands. They’re out there, Myra. I’ve seen
them.’
    She smiled sceptically. Things that man was not meant to
know?’
    Jason nodded vigorously. Yes, that’s it exactly!’
he said, as though he’d never heard the expression before.
Perhaps he hadn’t. The youth of today. He looked down again
at the map, dismissing the subject with a twirl of his hand. Myra
let it drop too, but she didn’t dismiss it. She was pretty
sure he was mistaken, or lying, or had been lied to. And in whose
interest might it be for her to distrust her ‘ware?
    Hah.
    Jason jabbed a forefinger on North America, ran it around the
Great Lakes and partway down the Eastern seaboard. ‘OK,
here’s my country, was yours. The United States, as we
still call ourselves. Not exactly „sea to shining
sea“ any more. „From St Lawrence to the Keys“
never quite caught on, and even that’s hard to hold. I
mean, we need Maine between us and the Canadian hordes, but,
shit. We’re holding down major insurgencies everywhere
between Baltimore and Jacksonville. And the only reason we hang
on to Florida is for Canaveral, frankly, and the only reason they
stay with us is they’re scared of El Barbudo.’ He glanced up under his brows, cast her a wry smile. ‘You
should hear the old boys at Langley kicking themselves about that
one. After the Pike Commission put a stop to the exploding cigar
capers they just thought fuck it, the bastard’s gotta die