Page 6.

Chapter 4

Senator Donald Taunton, after leaving the Vice President’s House on Observatory Circle, had his driver take him home to his ten room house in Falls Church.

A widower whose children were grown and long gone from home, Taunton lived alone. He had only his Senate seat to live for, and now they were going to take that from him. It wasn’t right, any of what they were doing. Taunton took great care to feed his three little old rheumy-eyed dogs, the oldest of which he’d had for 15 years. He and they grown old together, so to speak. Somehow, old age had come quickly after Taunton’s wife had passed. He went about the quiet house, puttering, fussing, making sure all the doors were locked and bolted. He mashed up their dinners in three little bowls, as they’d been accustomed since his wife had still lived. Senator Taunton, wearing slippers on the cold tile floor, and wearing his bathrobe, stood in the kitchen waiting until the little dogs stopped twitching, one by one, and lay still on the kitchen floor. He took his .38 special from the kitchen drawer. He walked through the pantry and into the solarium in back. There, across a wintry landscape, he could see the many stars winking in a clear black sky. He was in no hurry, but in time he brought the gun up and put the muzzle up against the roof of his mouth. He breathed evenly and calmly, almost as if asleep. Staring into the lovely innocence and purity of eternity, he pulled the trigger.

The Vice President’s message and the attached list of names traveled at light speed from the mountain chalet to a relay in Bryson. There they joined other data routed to a fiber-optic relay station in Missoula, Montana. The storm system had knocked out a power station in Missoula, so amid a burst of other data the e-message streaked to a com satellite rolling 38,000 miles above the earth. The solar powered moonlet mirrored the data down to a transponder in Gander, Newfoundland. Cruising along a fiber-optic stream through New York City, and Roanoke, the memo flashed into the nation’s capital and joined other traffic heading into the computer network linking the Vice President’s (Admiral’s) House to the Government info net. Just as the Vice President stepped out of the chalet and hugged his children, the e-message joined a queue in the local data stream. Somewhere in the capital, a squirrel gnawed on a cable, killing itself and forcing a switch to close. For two seconds, parts of the net browned down, running on minimum power in backup mode. The system did a self-check at a million terraflops per second and made a backup copy of every file, including the Vice President’s message, to store in a temporary database. By the time the Vice President stepped into the van outside the chalet, the browndown was over, hardly noticed, little more than a brief flicker of lights. The Washington, D.C. net resumed full operation. The original message streaked into the Vice President’s computer in Washington, which would be accidentally, perhaps not, cleared of all files the next morning when Federal police began to shut down the building as part of the investigation. In an underground bunker near the Library of Congress was the city’s temporary backup database. There, 125,000 ceramic super-chips, each the size and shape of a piece of writing paper and with its own read/write interfaces, hung stacked pagoda-style amid power and relay buses in mid-air. The atmosphere in the bunker was chilled to near zero degrees to prevent overheating the circuits; it was heavy in nitrogen to prevent condensation. Technicians walking the catwalks wore silvery atmosphere suits with oxygen tanks on their backs. Articulated tubes carried their exhaled breath to a plastic bag worn on the belt; here and there steam leaked from the breathing apparatus. The walls were lined with ceramic composites to block outside electro-magnetic fields. In this eerie and inhuman environment lived the backup copy of the Vice President’s memo, amid bank records, personnel files, department store transactions, military purchase receipts, payroll ledgers, every recordable transaction in modern life. The backup of the Vice President’s memo sat in a storage chip whose virtual address was Carousel 49, Directory Z.

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