“I’ve suspected from day one that El was responsible for Moab,” Corvallis said. “Up to a point it kind of made sense. The Internet—what Dodge used to call the Miasma—had just gone completely wrong. Down to the molecular level it was still a hippie grad student project. Like a geodesic dome that a bunch of flower children had assembled from scrap lumber on ground infested with termites and carpenter ants. So rotten that rot was the only thing that was holding it together. So I can totally see why El or anyone with a shred of crypto knowledge would want to just burn it down. To make it so that no one would ever trust it again. Moab was a pretty effective way of doing that, and ENSU came along right on its heels and dumped a 747-load of gasoline on that fire. But the other shoe never dropped.”

“What do you suppose the other shoe ought to have been in this case?” Sinjin asked.

Corvallis was about to answer, then stopped himself, sensing the absurdity of it.

Sinjin let him work it out on his own for a bit, then, in a gentle tone that barely rose above the lapping of the waves on the boat’s hull, said, “Elmo Shepherd releases a statement a week after Moab in which he fesses up. Pulls back the veil. Maybe plays some behind-the-scenes video showing how the hoax was staged—a blooper reel of the actors, some ‘making of’ footage about burn makeup and CGI mushroom clouds. ‘All this was done on a one-million-dollar budget,’ he says, and gives a sermon about how if he can get you to believe Moab was nuked by spending a million bucks, just imagine what the Russians and the big Internet companies are doing to your mind every day with much larger budgets. Followed by a pitch for a cryptographically secure successor to the Internet.”

“Yeah,” Corvallis said. “That’s pretty much what I had in mind in the way of an other shoe.”

“That video was actually made,” Sinjin said.

“No shit!?”

“I kid you not. I was there, Corvallis. I vetted the script and sat off camera while he read it off the teleprompter. That whole video was in the can, ready to go, before the exploit was launched.”

“But he changed his mind.”

“By degrees.”

“What?”

“El changed his mind by degrees, over a period of weeks. He was holed up in Z-A to avoid any possible issues around extradition.”

As Corvallis knew, Z-A was Zelrijk-Aalberg, a Flemish nano-state and tax haven where El had been spending most of his time the last few years.

“So there was a degree of insulation from legal consequences—but even so he was disconcerted by how effective it had been. By the fact that people died.”

“I can see how that would give you pause,” Corvallis said, a bit sarcastically.