"Stross, Charles - Seaq And Destroy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

SEAQ and Destroy
Charles Stross

Historical note: this story was originally written in 1987. It was sold to There won't be War in early 1988. However, it took rather a long time for that anthology to be published ... it finally came out the week after the Moscow Putsch that toppled Mikhail Gorbachev and led to the breakup of the USSR.
If that kind of thing annoys you, just pretend it's an "alternate history" story ...

Day 1
NewsBurst:11:43 G.M.T.
The Third World War began this morning with a Russian dawn raid on the City of London. Bombs exploded all over the Docklands Enterprise Zone, disrupting the white-hot core of European industrial asset-stripping; the follow-up raids involved extensive use of lethal virus weapons and tactical assault units. Casualties included Larry Steinberg, a systems analyst for BSF:
Video intercut:
Steinberg: "It was terrible. They must have infiltrated those time bombs weeks ago, but there was no sign of them. They began going off at nine-thirteen this morning, bringing down whole systems. One entire block just crumbled ... it was terrible, I tell you. We lost SEAQ for starters and then it all went to hell. There were casualties everywhere ... I saw this young dealer, she was crying and pulling her hair out over her colleague, he'd copped it but bad, flat on the floor ... "
Voice-over:"Barclays de Stoat Fader is just one of the large financial houses to suffer at the hands of the spetznaz assault this morning. Other large institutions affected include Country NatWest and the European desks of Drexel Burnham.
"Casualty figures are high, possibly running into tens of thousands of city workers and billions of ECU's of damage. Further video updates will follow."
Viral attack was largely confined to peripheral dealer desks where data throughput was limited to those personnel who had time to play a pirated game of Strip Poker which was being passed around. The virus was triggered by a date check, which suggests that the assault has been prepared far in advance. The main network through which it was disseminated appears to have been via SEAQ, the Stock Exchange Automated Quotations system.
BSF have refused to comment on a rumour to the effect that the attack was planned with the assistance of disgruntled employees sacked last year after a securities scandal which led to the company being investigated by the MMC.
The Soviet Embassy in London was unavailable for comment. The US Treasury Department is expected to make a statement later in the day.

NewsBurst:12:51 G.M.T.
Initial damage caused by the Soviet attack appears to have been limited, and the main clearing banks are switching in their reserve and back-up capacity. About 30% of the damaged dealer desks are up and running from back-ups, but the virus-infected optical discs are still in quarantine with DTI investigators and S&Q Enterprises called in. The attack failed to induce a massive slide, but Snake currencies are shaky and an unscheduled internal adjustment has been announced for this afternoon. Interest rates have not yet been affected, but announcements are expected hourly.
At 12:49 the European Currency Unit stood at 0.92 Roubles, down 23 Kopeks in just three and a half hours. The U.S. dollar remained stable at 0.89 ECUs, three cents up on yesterday.
A press conference has been scheduled by the Soviet Embassy in nine minutes time and will be covered by this service.
Just in:
At the press conferance in Washington that has just ended, the U.S. Treasury Department spokesman, Mr John Flatbush, read the following statement but left the platform before he could be asked any questions:
"At nine hundred hours today the Treasury Department monitoring service became aware of the serious nature of the current Russian attack on London. We are of course monitoring the present scenario in real-time, but we do not believe that there are any grounds for alarm in this country. The days of the great corporate raiders Ц Ikahn and Boesky and the like Ц are over, thanks to the decisive lead provided by the Jackson administration in re-structuring the U.S. economy. There are no grounds to fear a joint Japanese-Soviet attack on our corporate heartland, but in order to prevent any localized slides we are taking action to freeze European assets held in U.S. stocks and bonds. These shares will be underwritten by the Federal Reserve Bank for the duration of the Ц er, instability.
"It falls to me to say Ц off the record Ц that any of our boys who go in there deserve the best of luck and our encouragment in fighting the good fight and getting while the getting's good on foreign soil! This could be the offshore investment opportunity of the century, and I for one am gonna be phoning my broker as soon as this conference is over. Goodbye."

Newsburst:13:27 G.M.T.
At 13:03 today, the Soviet trade attache, Ms. V. I. Retshuchenko, released the following statement, reproduced in its entirety:
"My friends, this morning forces based within the RFSFR launched an economic attack upon the United States of Europe, with the goal of dominating those states. On behalf of the government of the RFSFR, may I express our sincere sympathy for the victims of this unprecedented offensive; unfortunately we are unable to prevent further incursions. The hostile forces appear to be a secret consortium of Soviet industry, including Mikoyan-Gurevitch design bureau, Glavkosmos, and the First Consolidated Peoples' Bank of Azerbaijan; these corporations appear to be co-operating with extra-national powers of unknown identity.
"As you know, such an attack would have been both impossible and implausible if the RFSFR still retained the old, monolithic industrial centralism of the decadent Lenin-Brezhnev era. Following the marked improvements in international progress and trade of the past decade, however, certain organisations listed on the Moscow stock exchange have decided that the Soviet economy cannot support their investment programs. They appear to have decided that a leveraged buy-out of the entire Western economy would be a suitable way of resolving their balance of payments surplus, and unfortunately the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is unable to restrain them.
"Bluntly, such a sequence of events was not considered possible, and no restraining legislation has been drafted. The Politburo is not sanguine about the consequences, however. We have no desire to return to the isolationist, Cold War mentality of the seventies and eighties, and in any event such a policy will inevitably induce considerable public discontent.
"President Boris Yeltsin has expressed his condolences for the victims of the conflict, and has promised maximum cooperation with the European authorities in an attempt to negotiate an end to the shares war before the G-9 talks are jeopardised.
"Thank you very much indeed for coming here. Goodbye."

Newsburst:14:56 G.M.T.
News is coming in of a bloody attack on Wall Street. As trading opened in New York at 13:00 G.M.T. the ailing infotech giant IBM (US) launched a hostile take-over bid for Mercury Telecom PLC in London. Fund transfers to Europe so far total over ten billion dollars, believed to be close to IBM's entire liquid assets. Mercury is the main PSTN and ISDN operator for the London Stock Exchange and handles the Stock Exchange Automated Quotation system, SEAQ. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission have been notified, but no immediate action is possible because inspectors are working at saturation levels elsewhere in the City.
It appears that IBM has been controlled in large measure by shell corporations registered in Columbia and Peru for the past three months. CEO Debbie Beagle has refused to comment on allegations that her corporation is cooperating with the Soviet offensive in an attempt to dismember Western Europe's high-technology industries.
Closer to home, EuroBank has launched a counter-offensive before the close of trading in Moscow, with a bid for shares in the state airline Aeroflot and a back-up investment of ECU 500m in BSF. Amstrad and News International's Sky Channel have announced a consortium bid for BSB in an attempt to consolidate the satellite TV market under one umbrella. Glaxo, Ciba-Geigy, and the NHS Pharmatech division are reported to be entering the fray with a bid for several small Russian pharmaceutical manufacturing units; and the smell of money may drag British Power and even NHS(PLC) into the trade war.
The government remains silent on the issue so far, but a spokesman for Number Ten Downing Street has re-affirmed the Prime Ministers' commitment to the free market. "The share issue for British Monarchy PLC will not be jeopardized," he emphasized. "There is no alternative!"
The Queen was unavailable for comment.
In Europe there has generally been a measured response to the carnage. Fiat, Dassault-Renault, and Airbus Industrie are conducting intensive merger negotiations in conjunction with BMW, Porsche-SEAT and Arianespace, apparently in an attempt to inflate their group capital beyond any credible takeover attempt. The fact that this would automatically be viewed as monopolistic is irrelevant because the move is purely intended as a short-term defensive measure Ц safety in numbers, and the more zeros on the balance sheet the better.

NewsBurst:15:45 G.M.T.
In a move that has shocked industry bystanders, IBM (US) has dismissed the entire board of Mercury Telecom and moved a special Emergency Task Group into the boardroom. MT apparently held out for a full twenty-seven minutes under the intensive IBM bidding which raised the price of shares from 198 to 323 in less than half an hour. The price of shares has suddenly slumped into the red, with a post-takeover quotation of 121 delivered five minutes ago by human messenger. The SEAQ service appears to have been overloaded by the rapidity of events, with priority going to financial transactions; many smaller desks are apparently 'flying blind' on expert systems alone and praying that their software has no hidden bugs in it.
Judith Richmond, a broker with Copperhouse-Gerbil, had this to say:
"Things are just going crazy today. It's not a classic melt down because some shares are going through the roof in real time, but it's like a shooting war's broken out. Nothing is stable any more, and all we small brokers can do is keep our heads down when the big countercurrent exchange laundries go into action. We're spilling a million ECU's a second right now, draining into the Soviet economy; it's sheer havoc. I'm not going to predict what's going to happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow I expect to see a lot of dealers throwing themselves under BMW's ... or Lada's."
Rumours of a second wave of software bombs tomorrow morning have prompted many dealer rooms to call in the security analysts overnight. There're going to be many sleepless engineers earning their overtime checksumming the operating system files for signs of retrovirus infection.
In Tokyo, the Ministry of Finance announced a suspension of all trading for the next three days, an unprecedented move that echoes Meltdown Monday, October 19th 1987, when Wall Street lost more than a thousand points by closing time as a result of computerised panic selling. People's Hong Kong and Manila are expected to follow suit.
Barclays Bank, the Midland Bank, and all the leading Merchant Banks announced a rise in interest rates of two percent in one day, to be reviewed as soon as the current crisis is defused. The Chancellor of the Exchequer refused to comment, but an official statement from Downing Street is expected imminently, as is a statement from Brussels.