"If it actually is on somebody's birthday, they're being framed.  Not a double fakeout either, serious criminals just wouldn't do it even taking into account that we'd conclude they just wouldn't do it..."

"There's an obvious equilibrium for that.  Back to main topic.  What was the plan to profit?"

"I legit don't expect that we had enough information on the plane to guess that, or somebody would have guessed."

"Narrow it down, if you can."

"To unravel the purpose behind a mysterious plot, look what would have happened without all details of that plot in place, and ask why those trajectories needed to be forbidden.  This case will contain some extras, in the shape of a fake silence from Civilization, but then we ask what happens without the extras."

"We didn't get an escort, because Civilization didn't realize our plane had a total comms loss.  Civilization thought we were in contact.  So it's not about concern over our plane, directly, having a big impact on Civilization, like, there wasn't massive movement around the concern for over a hundred true lives being at stake.  Other things Civilization could have misbelieved about our plane, that would've been big deals, are also unlikely.  Anything that gets this amount of SEC attention is worth dispatching a supersonic escort for us.  Civilization did not, at the time, realize that our plane was important."

"It's not about how it felt from our side of the plane, because we weren't in contact with Civilization so the exact details of how we thought on the plane are not powerful.  It may have mattered that we didn't make a desperate effort to contact Civilization."

"So their key desideratum is something that would have originated on our plane, and impacted Civilization, if our plane had stayed in contact.  That needed to go silent, and Civilization needed to not notice it going silent.  Civilization needed to believe that we were in sporadic contact, so they wouldn't go to great lengths to restore contact, and we needed to not actually be in contact at all."

"There was some sort of causal interaction between our plane, and Civilization, that the criminal wanted to have not happen, and they didn't want Civilization to notice it not happening.  On our own side, they allowed us to notice an anomaly, but maybe not figure things out to the point where we would have risked breaching the plane interior to use the plane exterior as an improvised antenna..."

(In another room, at a similar moment in causal trajectories if not linear time per se.)

"How did they make a profit?"

"I expect we didn't have enough information on the plane to guess that, or we would've guessed."

"...my brain's literary processor is suggesting that the only way the readers of my story could have guessed is if the uniquely applicable information was something only I heard, or singled out by how I heard it without it being buried under all the rest of the information generated all over the airplane.  Which would require that... what have I heard like that which was remotely interesting.  It would need to have something to do with the two physicists seated in the row behind me, who were coming back from a conference on superconductivity."

"I have some bad news about how much anthropic paranoia you're likely to have in the future."

(In another room.)

"Roughly just as your plane's comms went out, news broke, and not in a very orderly fashion, that a team of physicists had allegedly discovered a room-temperature, atmospheric-pressure superconductor."

"Try to reconstruct as much of their plan as you can, from there."

"That was cruel."

"It would have changed the face of dath ilan.  Space travel, power generation, every industry."

"The markets--?"

"Suspended, once we realized."

"Not realistically possible to fully roll back.  The market event was just--too large."

"And they timed it for--when the physicists who could have debunked it were all on a plane back from a superconductivity conference?  No, silly idea, not all of the planetary experts would be on the same plane and the markets would have noticed an anomaly like that..."

"The physicists who'd supposedly verified and attested the breakthrough as third parties were all on our plane."

"But the markets would have noticed, if nobody could reach--"

"In reality they were on our plane.  But their Network accounts and cellular texters had been corrupted, as in, video cameras to intercept their passwords, attackers with screwdrivers and microscopes going over their hardware, the cellular texters they have with them on board the plane are custom-built proxies to their real texters being hidden elsewhere.  The kind of attack that's basically not possible to defend against in real life.  Their accounts were sending emails, attesting to the superconductivity, and they were verifiably on a plane back from a conference when the news supposedly broke, so nobody thought it was odd that they couldn't give in-person interviews right away.  That's what journalists and chroniclers and other scientists saw; their personal friends saw, 'Sorry I'm on a plane very busy right now' and didn't think to ask deep personal questions for identity verification."

"And nobody thought to check that against the weird little item, probably not even in the news feeds, about how some random flight had partially lost comms and was diverting along an emergency route.  It looked like the physicists were in contact."

"How do you infer the superconductivity conference, versus all the other ways for multiple scientists to be on one plane in a way an adversary could have predicted in advance?"

"Sorry, not inference, that was overhearing a conversation from physicists seated in the row behind me."

"Sigh."

"I genuinely would not do that, you know."  He's not even sure why he says it, wouldn't have said it if not for earlier instructions and momentum about thinking out loud.  It just feels a little wounding, somehow, to have that thought of him.

"I know, or think I know, but it pushes the rest of this conversation off the statistical pathway where we can use it to the fullest as a comparison baseline."

"The scientists who announced the breakthrough--they're not--the criminals.  I can--sort of guess, here, what must have happened, but it feels painful even to say it.  If we're off the statistical baseline anyways, can you--"

"Asking after that information is just another path this conversation can go down."

"They were young.  Smart.  They thought they'd engaged top verifiers to look at their findings and double-check them."

"Then somebody told them that the news they were keeping carefully secret pending airtight verification had been leaked in advance of their planned publication timeline.  In a way that pointed to what they thought was their official contact in Market Oversight having done the leaking."

"Their advice from the person they thought was their lawyer was that, with others already profiting on the leaked information, and Market Oversight possibly not trustworthy, they should just go straight to the journalists in person, at that point.  Not an optimal course, but a simple one, facing possible smarter adversaries with possible government taps and obvious huge financial incentives.  It would obviously cause a mess, but they trusted to their third-party verified data and that truth would win out in the end."

Keltham becomes aware that his fists have clenched shut, in sheer sympathetic horror for imagining himself in their shoes.

"You can use the information from this conversation however it may be helpful for tracking down the criminals," he says.

"Though I do still expect an entirely standard gratuity on any reward bounties obtained thereby."

"We will be putting a lot of effort into tracking the responsible parties down.  The sort of effort where fifty mid-rank Keepers get flown into this site just in case there are any causal traces we can follow from here."

"It's not the damage they did.  It's not the trust they burned.  It's not the new costly security measures that airlines will put in place.  It's not the hearts they broke."

"There were inferrably too many of them, and they were too competent.  A criminal conspiracy that potent is a threat to human existence beyond what the Keepers will permit to exist."

"I don't--actually understand--how a threat like that--scales.  Why nobody betrayed anybody, so long as they were already betraying Civilization to begin with."

"Supercriminals are also always pondering that question themselves.  There are predictable tricks they tend to develop, for not exposing their real identities to each other, for placing prenegotiated deterrents against betrayal.  We try to make it hard for them to coordinate, but they do not want it to be hard for them to coordinate, and ultimately they are allowed to think about it too."

"From that level of perspective, what you saw here today was a criminal innovation in distributed payment.  Their ability to individually profit from the market disruption is capped by the need to have the visible portion of any wealth gains, or power exercises, not stand out statistically in the light of other disruptions.  This means that dozens of coordinated supercriminals can all take a profit of the maximum unremarkable size, from the predictable market disruption, so long as they do so separately and individually."

"It may, possibly, have represented something of a balance-of-payments reconciliation exercise among their kind."

"And while they were attacking Civilization on that level of abstract intelligence, one of them took a few extra moments to make us all believe that our airplane wasn't in dath ilan anymore?"