THE PYRAMID OF INFLUENCE

This is the history.

Somebody has leaked everything: nine hundred and eighteen thousand files, four point seven terabytes, mirrored on four thousand machines inside a day. Soren Kligge built the distribution, pressed the key, and walked out of a Berlin basement through a utility tunnel with an orange two-terabyte drive inside their jacket — ninety gigabytes of raw, uncurated source, with the names still in it.

On a train going east they open the first file and read it against the copy the world is now downloading.

The two are identical for nine minutes. Then, at the foot of the last table, the raw file carries a line that the public copy does not. It is not redacted — redaction leaves a shape. The line is simply not there, the way a name is not in a phone book: an office, a year, and a reference in four parts, the last part a single letter.

Soren did not edit it. The distribution does not edit. Something between the drive in their pocket and four thousand machines took out one line, and that line was the only thing in the file that said who.

They open the next file. And the next.

THE PYRAMID OF INFLUENCE runs two thousand years of the same instrument in different hands — Roman grain, a monastic ledger in the year of the pestilence, the Venetian contract, Westphalia, Napoleon’s courier, the Atlantic cable, a Victorian garrison audit, 1914, Bretton Woods, ARPANET, Tehran, the genome — each of them read by somebody on the run who is checking it against what was taken out.

This is the history behind the other four books, and it was never a step between them. Take it at any point in the sequence, or last, or first.

The companion volume to THE NINE — a completed sequence of four contemporary novels and one history. It carries no volume number, because it is not a step in the sequence.