And now for some light reading on Light Reading: Something a liltle different for our readers -- a science fiction story, written especially for communications service providers by veteran science fiction writer and technology journalist John Barnes.

Join us in the day after tomorrow, as a mild-mannered network security consultant is ripped from her quiet life when she investigates unusual activity affecting the biggest cloud applications provider in the world.

"Silence Like Diamonds" is brought to you in ten parts on Fridays and Tuesdays for the next few weeks. Sit back, pour yourself a cup of chamomile-peppermint tea, pet the cats and enjoy Episode 1. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. -- The Editors

The override siren made me spill a lovely, just-drinking-temperature cup of chamomile-peppermint. Amaryllis, Daisy and Mrs. Greypaws all bolted from the balcony and under the bed, wailing.

My sister Yazzy paid me extra to have that super-powered, never-off phone bell always hanging over my silence. It was worth it except when it went off. I rubbed the tea splashes on my old yoga pants, kicked my slippers off at the French doors and padded inside barefoot. "House, main parlor."

The siren doused into muffled plaintive mewing. Paintings, bulletin boards and windows vanished from the interior wall. I dragged my chair over to face it, about a meter away.

The wall became apparently transparent, seeming to join my morning parlor to my sister's late afternoon office. She had that smirk, having caught me before I dressed for the day. "Hi, Yip. How's Arcata?"

"Same as always. How's Prague?"

"Different from Arcata. I talked to the folks on Thursday. They're still okay?"

"You know, the usual. Mama robbed a bank; Táta drove the getaway car."

She stuck her tongue out at me, just like when we were kids. "All right, and how're things on the Markus front?"

"I'm sorry I ever told you about that. I don't know if I should even try to get his interest. What if he finds out there's hereditary yenta-ism in my family?"

Yazzy sighed. "I guess you just want to get right to business, huh?"

"Well, I do have my itsy-bitsy pottering pleasures to bury myself in."

"I'm sorry I ever said that. Does that make us even?"

"What's the gig, sis? Who's the client and what's the matter?"

"It's NameItCorp. I guess you know who they are."

I held a thumb high. "Hey, good going." I was so impressed I didn't care if she saw. NameItCorp was as ubiquitous nowadays as Google had once been. Type or speak "NItCO" or "NameItCorp" while connected to the Net, add the name of any problem and AI and human operators would rush you a price and a time estimate, or Sorry, not possible with present tech, or Sorry, illegal. "What do they need us for?"

Yazzy shrugged. "They need you. And they're smart enough to know it. There are maybe 200 scheme architecture analysts worldwide, and last time Dusan ran 1,000 iterations of an open-ended self-defining search, 1,000 out of 1,000 times, you turned up in the top three."

"He's biased. He's your husband"

Want to know more about the cloud? Visit Light Reading's Cloud Services content channel

"He's the Zalodny in Zalodny Integrated Security, Yip. When he's analyzing on the marketing and business side, his feelings get into it about as much as yours do when you're tracing the money or mine do reading code. You're our single most salable asset, which is why we do pretty much any ridiculous thing you ask so that we can be the only 4D security firm that has 'Yi Ingrid Palacek, Yip to her friends, a legend in scheme architecture analysis...' "

"Ugh. I hate that stupid bio." It was good that we were talking through the screen-wall; it kept me from throwing vases at her.

Next Page: Deadly Interruption