Rainbows End

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the advice and help of:

Jeff Allen, David Baxter, Ethan Bier, John Carroll, Randy Carver, Steven Cherry, Co

I am very grateful to James Frenkel for the wonderful job of editing he has done with this book. Jim and Tor Books have been very patient with me in the long process of creating Rainbows End .

Prologue. Dumb Luck and Smart Thinking

The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense Against Disease. On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was spreading across the Mediterranean. The claim was based on clever analysis of antibody data from the mass-transit systems of Algiers and Naples.

CDD had no immediate comment, but in less than three hours, public-health hobbyists reported similar results in other cities, complete with contagion maps. The epidemic was at least one week old, probably originating in Central Africa, beyond the scope of hobbyist surveillance.

By the time CDD got its public-relations act together, the disease had been detected in India and North America. Worse yet, a journalist in Seattle had isolated and identified the infectious agent, which turned out to be a Pseudomimivirus. That was about as embarrassing a twist as the public-relations people could imagine: Back in the late teens, CDD had justified its enormous budget with a brilliant defense against the New Sunrise cult. The Sunrise Plague had been the second-worst Euro-terror of the decade. Only CDD's leadership had kept the disaster from spreading worldwide.

The Sunrise Plague had been based on a Pseudomimivirus.

There were still good people at CDD. They were the same specialists who had saved the world in 2017. They quickly resolved the July 23 issue. Public Relations could now spin a more or less accurate statement: Yes, this Pseudomimi had evaded the standard a

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 a

In the i

Understandably, these people were both paranoid and obsessive. The EU Intelligence Board assigned one of its brightest agents, a young German named Günberk Braun, to oversee a quiet reorganization at CDD. In those parts of intelligence where Braun was known, he was somewhat famous — 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 — 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 i

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, begi

Certain observers did not lose interest. Günberk Braun, like most in the i

And that brings us to the second bit of dumb luck. On a whim, Braun called for a fire drill: the analytical resources of the CDD would be pointed at the public-health significance of the Honeyed Nougat Miracle. Whatever the practical content of the mystery, this would exercise the Center in the conduct of a secret, real-time, emergency investigation. At that, it wasn't much crazier than his previous drills. By now, the brighter of the CDD's specialists were very much in the swing of such festivities. They quickly generated a thousand conjectures and imagined half a million tests. These would be seeds for the search trees of the investigation.