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is advertising -- not of the products or the companies (most of them long gone), but of the skills, not at all redundant, of hacking their legacy code.
    I try to look respectful, like some fanboy at a con, but I don't respect this lot at all. The ruling Party considers them unreliable, but as far as I'm concerned this is just the CPEU being its usual stuffed-shirt self. Vaguely left-wing, precisely cynical, they affect a laid-back, ca'canny approval of the so-called "imported revolution" that followed our defeat in the war. It was their kind of crap attitude to quality control that let the Russkis past NATO's automated defenses in the first place.
    On the other hand, if you want to hack Unix-based filing systems in dusty metal boxes in schools and hospitals and personnel departments all over the continental U.S., they'll get on your case without asking questions, especially if you pay in dollars. I zero in on Alasdair Curran, a tall nonagenarian with long white hair and boastfully black sideburns.
    "The guy who trained me worked on LEO," he brags loudly, "and he was trained by a some spook who'd been at Bletchley Park, so I reckon -- "
    "Yeah, Alec, and you're still shite!" someone else shouts.
    As he rocks back in the general laughter Jadey catches his eye, and I take the opportunity to catch his ear. "Got a minute?"
    "Oh, sure, Matt. What you after?"
    "Well, I need an MS-DOS subbie -- "
    Curran scowls, then jerks his thumb at one of his mates. "Tony's your man."
    " -- and Jason needs somebody with a bit of early-dialect Oracle."
    "Ah!" Curran brightens. "That, I can manage."
    "We need it, like, now," Jadey tells him.
    "Now?" He looks regretfully at his pint, then back at Jadey. She hits him with her best smile, and he has no defense. Hey, it makes my face warm, and I'm not even in the main beam.
    Back to the quantum pool-room, but this time we don't even pretend to be playing. Curran boots up some clunky VR database manipulator, Jason sets up his card-table again, and I call up some of my software agents to handle the interface protocols and break the American firewalls.
    I get the uncanniest sensation of pushing at an open door. Within moments Curran's up to his elbows in U.S. admin databases, Jason's slipping unlogged updates on Jadey's life story, and I'm keeping the one and only record of the changes and my AIs are booking the new ID an airline ticket.
    We back out.
    Jason passes Jadey a plastic card.
    "That's the lot," he says. "Take it to any copyshop, they'll print and bind it for you. It'll even have the right bloodgroup stains."
    I'm shaking my head. "Too bloody easy. It's like all the U.S. codes had been cracked ... "
    "Shee-it," says Jadey.
    Then I remember too. The English resistance network, unraveling.
    "Uh-oh."
    Curran's looking at us sharply as we move back to his lot's side of the room. "What's up?"
    "Oh, nothing," I say hastily.
    Then I notice that the whole place has gone quiet and everybody's watching the telly wall. There's that little jazzed-up flourish from "Ode to Joy" that precedes official announcements, and Big Uncle's face appears. CPEU General Secretary Gennady Yefrimovich normally looks appropriately avuncular, jovial, with an underlying solemnity. Right now he just looks insufferably smug.
    "Comrades and friends," he begins, the translation and lip-synch software maxing his street-cred as usual in all the languages of the Community. For this particular nation and region, he comes across speaking English with a gravely Central Belt Scottish accent, which I know for a fact has been swiped from old tapes of the Communist trade-union leader and authentic working-class hero Mick Mac-Gahey. "I have an historic announcement to make. The exploration station of the European Space Agency, Marshall Titov, has made contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life within the asteroid 10049 Lora."
    He pauses for a moment to let that sink in. As if from a great distance, I hear a dozen dropped glasses break, in