"Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

announce this routine event."

A week passed. Two weeks. There were no further captures of the organism. Antibody surveys showed
that the epidemic never got much farther than the rim of the Mediterranean. CDD's claims for the
outbreak were absolutely correct. This kind of "subclinical respiratory epidemic" was almost a
contradiction in terms. If not one victim in a thousand even gets the sniffles, the virus is almost dependent
on charity to make its way in the world.

The CDD explanations were accepted. The public-health hobbyists had been scaremongering a
commonplace event.

In fact, there was only one misrepresentation in the CDD story, and that successfully eluded public
notice: The failure to announce the virus had not been a mess-up at the public website. Instead, it had
been a glitch in the Center's just-revised internal alert system. So the responsible specialists had been as
ignorant of the event as the general public; it was the hobbyists who had alerted both.

In the inner circles of EU intelligence, there were people who were not forgiving of such lapses. These
were people who countered terror on a daily basis. These were people whose greatest successes were
things you never heard about тАФ and whose failures could be bigger than the Sunrise Plague.

Understandably, these people were both paranoid and obsessive. The EU Intelligence Board assigned
one of its brightest agents, a young German named G├╝nberk Braun, to oversee a quiet reorganization at
CDD. In those parts of intelligence where Braun was known, he was somewhat famous тАФ as the most
obsessing of the obsessive. In any case, he and his teams quickly revamped the internal reporting
structure of the CDD, then undertook a Center-wide review that was to last six months and consist of
random "fire drills" that would probe threats and conjectures more bizarre than the epidemiologists had
ever imagined.

For CDD, those six months promised to be a torment for the incompetent and a revelation for the
brilliant. But Braun's fire-drill regime lasted less than two months, and was ended by an advertisement at
a soccer match.

The first meeting of the Greece-Pakistan Football Series was held in Lahore on September 20. The
Greece-Pakistan Series had some tradition behind it тАФ or perhaps the supporters were just
old-fashioned. In any case, the advertising was very much a blundering, twentieth-century affair. There
were commercials where each advert was seen by everyone. Display space was sold on the inner
barricades of the stadium, but even that was not targeted per viewer.

A remarkable thing happened at the match (two remarkable things, if you count the fact that Greece
won). At halftime a thirty-second advert for honeyed nougats was shown. Within the hour, several
freelance marketing analysts reported a spike-surge of nougat sales, beginning three minutes after the
advert. That single advertisement had repaid its sponsor one hundred times over. Such was the stuff of
dreams тАФ at least for those unwhole-somely fixated on the marketing arts. Throughout the afternoon,
these millions debated the remarkable event. The advertisement was analyzed in every detail. It was an
uninspired thing, quite in keeping with the third-rate company that produced it. Importantly, it contained
no subliminal messing about (though finding such was the main hope of those who studied it). The delay
and abruptness of the surge were quite unlike a normal advertisement response. Within hours, all
reasonable participants agreed that the Honeyed Nougat Miracle was just the kind of mirage that came
from modern data-dredging capabilities: if you watch trillions of things, you will often see one-in-a-million
coincidences. At the end of the day, the whole affair had canceled itself out, just another tiny ripple in the