Marcus’s watch had hummed on his wrist a minute ago, and he’d been looking at some new information in his wearable—this was obvious from the fact that he’d been staring at a blank spot on the wall for no discernible reason. He wiped his hand on a napkin and pushed the device up onto his forehead. “He’s about to get a whole lot crankier,” Marcus announced.

“What happened?” Zula asked. “What did you just learn?” She’d been getting notifications too but ignored them.

Marcus shook his head. His expression was saying, Who the hell knows? He announced, “The Wad just fell over.”

“Fell over?” Maeve asked sharply.

“Crashed. The amount of computational activity going on in the Wad suddenly dropped by three orders of magnitude. And that green thing above the Town Square? It’s gone. Town Square’s back to normal: a little tower in a park.”

Wearables came out of pockets all around the table, or people flipped them down from where they’d been parked atop their heads. Everyone went to the Landform display first and verified that Marcus was correct: the towering flare that during the last several weeks had risen above the Town Square like an oil well fire was now completely gone. But the building atop the nearby hill stood just as it had before, the only difference being that the hill kept growing taller and steeper.

“We’re sure this isn’t just a fail in the LVU?” Maeve asked.

Marcus shook his head. “It’s screamingly obvious in the burn rate. The financials. And if you switch over to the other viz you can see what’s up with the Wad.”

They all checked out the more abstract visualization scheme—the one that for the last few weeks had been dominated by the amorphous cloud of dense white lines. The Dodge process and the Pantheon still hovered above everything else, as bright and as dominant as ever. But the Wad was no more. In its place was a thin white layer that looked like the aftermath of a hailstorm: thousands of hard-looking white pellets. Each of them represented a separate process. They had always been embedded in the Wad. Until a few minutes ago, though, they’d been concealed by the dense matting of white lines representing the messages being passed between them. Now, if you bent close and stared at one of those pellets, you could see white fibers zapping in and out of it as messages were passed. But Marcus was right: the level of activity had dropped to something approaching zero.

They all received the same notification at once. It was a terse message from Sinjin Kerr, letting them know that he needed to cancel this afternoon’s meeting and apologizing for the short notice. Moments later he sent another one very much regretting that he would not be seeing them at ACTANSS 5 next week.

Chapter 40

Chapter 40