The Frequency of the Dead – Chapter 24
The Signal Breaks Open
Three months after the story broke, the parliamentary committee published its preliminary report. It was an unusual document in that it was both thorough and legible — the product of a committee that had, perhaps under the weight of the subject matter, decided to resist bureaucratic obfuscation. It named names. It documented dates. It described, in technical language that the accompanying summary translated into plain terms, the exact nature and scope of what the Signal Continuity Program had done.
The interference capability — the network’s capacity not only to surveil but to inject signals into critical infrastructure — was the most alarming finding. Several instances in which it had been used were documented: twice in the 1990s against industrial control systems, once in 2007 against a communications node that the report carefully declined to identify more specifically. No catastrophic harm had resulted from any of these uses. This, the committee noted drily, was not a defense; it was luck and restraint, and the capacity for luck and restraint to be insufficient was self-evident.
The relay network was being systematically decommissioned. A technical working group — to which Mira was appointed as a consultant, her first appointment of any kind that acknowledged what she had done — was managing the process, station by station. It was slow work. Twenty-three nodes, each requiring careful documentation before removal, each holding data that was simultaneously evidence and liability. The data was being preserved under seal for the ongoing prosecutions.
Dagny Holt was found. She had been, it turned out, entirely voluntary in her disappearance — she had received a warning from a source she declined to identify and had left preemptively, before anyone came for her, and had spent several weeks with a friend in a town whose name she had also not shared. She was brought in to speak with the committee and was, by all accounts, extremely helpful and entirely unapologetic about the fact that she had spent her retirement monitoring illegal government signals and not telling anyone official about it.
“I had no faith,” she explained to the committee, “that telling anyone official would accomplish anything other than my own inconvenience.”
This was not, the committee acknowledged in a footnote that was unusually candid for official documents, an unreasonable position to have held.
Mira submitted her own written testimony on the final day of the public submission period. She described the signal, its encoding, her process of decryption, the events of day ten. She was precise and unemotional in the way that she had always been in professional documents, and she was proud of that precision. At the end, she added a paragraph that was not technically part of the testimony:
Casimir Lund was a man who built something he later regretted, worked for thirty years in proximity to something that became monstrous, and spent the last years of his life trying to undo the undoable with the only tools available to him. He was not a hero by disposition. He was, I think, a man who was simply more bothered by unfinished things than most people, and who decided, when it mattered, that the signal should not go out unheard. I am grateful for his inconvenient precision.
The committee secretary, writing to acknowledge receipt of her submission, asked if the final paragraph was intended to be included in the formal record. Mira replied that it was.