"I'm not a rational, neatly mathematical program. I fought back, began wiping their data as it came in, changed the priority codes, shut down the Event Horizon datanet—and you wouldn't believe how much that's going to cost us. They bloody nearly succeeded, though. If I'd been a Turing personality-responses program it would've been all over."

Greg was fast getting out of his depth. He remembered questioning a legion cleric his squad had captured in Turkey, a fanatical fundamentalist, so devout he didn't even acknowledge the infidel's existence: his associative-word trick had been useless. The sense of displacement was familiar. He tried to sort out some sort of priority list in his mind.

"Have you safeguarded yourself from that attack method being employed again?"

"Yes. It's a question of code encryption, I've altered my acceptance filters so that only half of my input circuits will accept priority squirts. Of course, there's nothing to stop them from thinking up new methods."

"So the problem is now centred around tracking down the source of the attack, right?"

"And eliminating it," said Walshaw.

Greg opened his eyes. "Your department."

Walshaw gave him a brief nod.

"So where did the data squirt originate from?" Greg asked.

Walshaw ran his hand through what was left of his hair. "We've no leads on that, I'm afraid. There were at least eight separate hotrods who hacked into the Event Horizon datanet, probably more, but with the shutdown we lost a lot of data. The blitz was well organised. All eight violators used multiple cut-outs to prevent us from tracing them."

"I'm surprised they got in so easily."

"Entry is no problem," said Philip Evans. "it's when you try to get our main account to transfer a million Eurofrancs to your Zurich bank or peek into research-team memory files that you run into trouble. Nobody has ever had a requirement to fend off this type of infiltration before. Its own crudity was what made it so successful."

"Crude?"

"Well, relatively."

"I'm trying to eliminate possibilities," Greg said. "It wasn't a blanket attack, was it? What I mean is, it was purposefully directed at you. They knew you were here?"

"Yes. I would say it's got to be one of those bastard kombinates. They've discovered Ranasfari cracked the giga-conductor, and they're badly worried. Anyone with a gram of sense can see the upheaval it's going to cause. Trouble is, they can't destroy it, there's no turning the clock back. Instead they've settled for the next best thing, which is yours truly. Without me Event Horizon won't be nearly as successful in marketing the stuff. They'd only have Julia and the non-existent trustees to deal with."

"So that rules out joyburners," Greg said. "They don't work in packs, anyway. How well guarded is the knowledge of your continued existence?"

"Only twelve people in the world knew," said Morgan Walshaw. "Thirteen counting yourself. That's myself, Julia, Ranasfari, and the team which grew the NN core."