I huddled over, scribbling furiously. The power fan kicked on with a noisy buzz. Even so, I heard the talk going on behind my back. Some was about the Vine Keeper, but most was about me, punctuated with an ugly word—a word I hated.

I lifted my chin and ground away at my notes, reminding myself that fielding jealousy was part of being valedictorian. I felt a jab in my shoulder—East Keep. I kept writing, determined to keep busy. Jab jab—that one hurt. I ducked my head, writing nonsense words now—bits and pieces of memorized text, squiggles and punctuations. The sharp tip of the quill ripped through the page. I dipped ink and kept writing.

Finally, East Keep forced the issue. She wrote the word down and passed it to the twins. They folded it and tossed it over my shoulder. It opened, ugly on my desk—TRAITOR!

The Last War

THE LAST WAR

In the fall before I met Hosea Khan, I accepted the Silver Medal Award in old-world history. In my winning essay, I outlined the events leading up to the Last War, the war that destroyed the old world, save a sliver of the east coast of old North America.

Every Record Keeper knows the paramount forces behind that catastrophe, as they validate our aversion to electro-technology. The conclusion I drew in my essay, however, was extraordinary. I argued that the fate of the old world could be traced to a single instant.

I had many unfortunate moments to choose from. For example, in a last-minute decision, the Director of the Omega Project, the final brainchild of the bankrupt SETI group, decided to cut costs by using the Allen Telescope Array in place of more sophisticated models proposed for the Project. It was an important decision since the Allen elements linked directly to the Internet and left the whole world vulnerable to attack.

If not that moment, I might have pinpointed the minute Steve Kalowitz, a manager on the Project, relinquished control of the monitor room to Henry Burns, an overworked intern. Leaving an intern unsupervised was against protocol, but that night was the last of the year, and Kalowitz was eager to celebrate with his wife and triplet toddlers—all of whom died eight days later when the first heavy bomb, dubbed “the Volcano Maker,” landed. I could have chosen the moment one of the radio telescopes transmitted a signal to the undermanned control room, a process that took less than a second. Or the moment Burns, in receipt of the signal, comprehended its significance.

The Allen telescopes were designed to scan the sky for artificial radio waves. A synthetic signal, such as the one transmitted that night, could have come from an extraterrestrial society, with superhuman transmitters. Or, more likely, the signal was a hoax—a human hacker fishing for dramatic entry into the worldwide network he intended to destroy.