Technobabel

14

As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from afar country -Proverbs 25:25 Alone in the dimness of a private office in the Mandala Technologies office building in the Boston sprawl, Miles Lanier, member of the Renraku Computer Systems Board of Directors and former Director of Internal Security for Fuchi Industrial Technologies, sat behind a desk rolling the slim datacord of the gleaming neural jack in his hand. It was quite late, and all of the regular employees had long gone home, leaving the hall outside silent and dark. As he turned the datacord over and over, Lanier thought about the strange turn of events that had brought him to where he was now. He had been a military man once, a master sharpshooter. That was in a time when the major factions of the world needed a lot of military people to settle their differences. Miles Lanier was the kind of man who specialized in troubleshooting, at first literally and later with more subtlety, but with no less precision than in his sniper days. He rose in the ranks to become an officer in the military and put his tactical skills to good use. Then the world changed and the military wasn't solving the problems of people of power and influence. A quieter approach was called for, so Lanier went into the business of "security," which was a softer name they used for military forces working for the megacorporations, the great powers of the world. He became Director of Internal Security for

Fuchi Industrial Electronics and prided himself on the efficiency with which his department was run. Fuchi's security was respected. Everyone knew the corporation wasn't to be trifled with. Lanier continued to do what he did before: find problems that were developing for his employer and eliminate them before they could become a serious threat. It was what he did best. Then the dragon changed everything. Lanier was never much of a believer in the idea that the return of magic to the world had re-written history. Certainly, the Awakening had put incredible power into the hands of people who previously had none, like the Native Americans and some of the other tribal peoples in the world. And they had used it against the governments that had formerly oppressed them. Used it to reclaim some of their lost land and lost heritage. There were magicians walking the streets, spirits appearing out of nothingness, and dragons flying in the skies, but Lanier believed the Awakening had changed very little in the end. Some land got shuffled and some borders redrawn. Some new professions were created and a few new security concerns were raised, but when the dust from the Awakening began to settle, the world was still run the same way it had always been. People, corporations, and governments with power did as they pleased to those without it, and people like Miles Lanier still found work taking care of the problems of those powerful entities. Things hadn't changed much, but only because there were people-beings-who played the game of power and control better than any mega-corporation or government ever imagined. Beings whose existence was a kind of chess game on a grand scale. Creatures like dragons. A dragon had used his vast wealth to buy his way onto the airwaves more than forty years ago, coming live into the living rooms of people all over the world. Somehow, nobody really questioned that a creature out of myth wanted more than anything to have his own trideo show broadcast into millions of homes. In fact, most people thought it was rather cute. It made a creature weighing tons, with a maw capable

of crushing and swallowing a man in one bite, into a cuddly media icon almost overnight. People began to lose their primal fear of a monster out of legend and consider him almost a member of the family. He must have been pla