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Information War
Long, wide passageways, dimly lit by dusty skylights, faint scent of mold rising from the worn carpets. I walk through the halls, eyes almost closed, hands outstretched, feeling the faint aura of information pressing in from all sides. I know my way around. I'm the only person here, so no-one is likely to rearrange the furniture. Besides, I can tell where the doors and other passages are; I can sense the gaps in the aura. I open my eyes and regard the walls. From a point ten centimetres above the floor, up to the ceiling, four metres above, each wall is lined with bookshelves, and each shelf is filled with books. Hundreds of shelves in each passage, dozens of passages, nine floors straight down, full of them. The largest library left on earth; all mine. I recalled a line from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (second floor, second passage, fifth shelf, third from the end): "The blessing in a book lies in its being read." "Yeah. By me." Of course, I couldn't claim to have read them all. But I prided myself in knowing where most of them were, even without recourse to my computer index. The older volumes were stored on level eight (just above the supply warehouse), in a neutral atmosphere; if I wanted to look at them, I had to put on a respirator and goggles. One day, when the scavengers outside had looted enough working computer equipment for me, I'd scan them all. Just so there would be a backup. The building had originally been intended for use as a bomb shelter. It was built during the fifties, when the Soviet-American nuclear war scare was at its peak; had declined during the eighties along with the former Soviet Union and had been refurbished during the late nineties when the Sino-American nuclear war scare had become prominent. Unfortunately for the government dignitaries who'd tried to get in when the bombs started flying, I'd found it first. I have videotape of them clawing at the main door, kicking the security keypad and then being torn apart by the mob just before the bomb hit. Fortunately all the electronics in the building were shielded from the EMP, otherwise the microwave screens wouldn't have kept the mob away. I found myself the sole bastion of electrical power (geothermal energy), information, food and communication in the city. There were a few data links still up; tattered strands of the net running on deeply buried optic cable. Through this I learned that there was a commune some six hundred kilometres north of here, near where Sydney used to be. These people had electricity part of the time - solar panels and looted car batteries for accumulators - a few working machines, farms and what they referred to as a library. Less than a hundred books. I was very careful what i told them over the net, in case they decided to send an expedition down to borrow from my collection. The defences could hold off the scavengers in what was left of Melbourne, but they might fail under a concerted assault from outside the city. There were one or two communities in the suburbs that were electronically active, too. The net was a lot less cluttered, these days; there were only about two dozen of us, world-wide. Some of the satellite links to Europe still worked, although the only place in America that still talked to the rest of the world was a house in New Jersey that had somehow escaped the devastation. A terminal nearby pinged at me; I went over to it and pressed a few keys. A digitally compressed video signal was coming in. I displayed it in a window on the screen, turned on my camera; it swivelled to focus on my face. It was Falconer. She had the next largest collection of books after mine; not a bad set, considering that it was privately owned and less well defended than mine. We competed for the resources of the ruined city, bribing the scavengers with food; mine, canned, from the warehouse; hers, fresh, from her gardens. I used to wonder what stopped scavengers simply raiding her vegetable patches; then I learned about the electric fence she'd put up, supposedly to keep the snails off her lettuces. The digitised image waved at me cheerfully and held a book before the camera; Amphigorey II, by Edward Gorey. I allowed my eyes to narrow. She grinned and cut the connection; I turned off my camera, sat back and smiled to myself. She'd heard that I was looking for that book, and couldn't resist gloating at having finally found a copy. I went down to the sixth floor (children's books), picked out a Moomintroll book that I knew she didn't have, one that I had three copies of (selecting the poorest copy) and locked it in a brushed steel case with a pyrex window, bashing the security tumblers with a hammer until they were irretrievably jammed. There was no way to get it out, now. I went down to the warehouse, fetched a large can of UHT Spam; I'd bribe the next scavenger who came along to take the book over to Falconer's place. I grinned, imagining her shaking the case, trying to read the book from the outside, wondering if she dared try to cut the case open with a blowtorch. This was information war at its dirtiest. |
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