"Paul Preuss - Venus Prime 1 - Breaking Strain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

grasp of the peculiar neurology of the numerically gifted. So far the task had been accomplished just
once.

Sparta didnтАЩt even know it. Sparta, like natural calculators, had a particular fascination and facility with
prime numbers; unlike natural calculators, her right brain housed artificial neural structures that vastly
expanded the range and size of the primes she could manipulate, structures of which she was yet
unaware, even as she used them. It was not wholly by coincidence that data encryption systems often
depend on keys that are large primes.

Sitting quietly in the Denver information booth, watching the flatscreen, Sparta appeared to be studying
the dance of the alphanumerics; the blurring symbols on the screen had no significance, however, for she
was questing far beyond the interface, following the sharp tang of a familiar key through the
communication networks like a salmon following the trace of its home brook through the labyrinth of
oceanтАУexcept that Sparta was immobile, and the informational ocean surged through her mind. Sitting
still, she swam ever closer to home.

The budgets of the most secret agencies of government are not labeled in public print but are broken up
and scattered through the budgets of many other agencies, disguised as insignificant line items, with the
funds frequently channeled through transactions with cooperative contractors and commercial bankers.
Occasionally the ploy backfiresтАУas when a legate whose colleagues have kept him in the dark inquires
loudly and publicly why the defense forces, for example, have paid millions for тАЬhelicopter replacement
partsтАЭ and have only a handful of cheap nuts and bolts to show for itтАУbut generally only a few people
know or care what the money is really for, or where it really goes.

The money is electronic, of course, spreadsheet numbers of constantly changing magnitude, transactions
tagged in electronic code. Sparta was tracking the routes of one code in particular. Sliding into the
memory of the First TradesmenтАЩs Bank of Manhattan through a coded trap door, SpartaтАЩs awareness
uncovered the golden thread she had been seeking.

The people who had created her had not imagined the playful uses to which she would put her talents.

Here in the information booth it was a simple matter to transfer a modest and reasonable amount, a few
hundreds of thousands, from an insignificant line item in her targetтАЩs budget (тАЬoffice maintenance and
custodialтАЭ) to a real contractor, to that contractorтАЩs real subcontractor, to a well-known phony consultant
firm, and now into a cutout loop through the black side of another agencyтАУwho would not miss what
they had held for only a microsecond flip-flop, but would stop any inquiries coldтАУand finally through a
random cascade of addresses to another, much smaller New York institution, the Great Hook Savings
and Loan, which appealed to her for the naivet├й of its pseudo-prime key and whose Manhattan branch
thus acquired a new customer without even knowing itтАУa young woman whose name was . . .

She needed a name, fast, not her real name, not Linda, not L. N., but Ellen, and now a last name, Ellen,
Ellen . . . before the flatscreen dumped her she keyed in the first word that popped into her mind. Her


file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Bureaub...0-%20Venus%20Prime%201%20-%20Breaking%20Strain.html (28 of 182)23-12-2006 18:54:42
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME I

name was Ellen Troy.