Jara and Horvil followed Natch into his office. The room was short and sparsely decorated and functional, but still quite a bit nicer than Jara's workspace. Artificial daylight, streaming into the room from two square windows, showed a hectic market square somewhere in Beijing. That's one way to keep working through all hours of the night, Jara thought sourly. Pretend it's day.
Natch walked up to the squat workbench that sat in the center of the room and waved his hand to summon the virtual programming bubble known as MindSpace. He was instantly surrounded by a clear holographic sphere about two meters in diameter, along with an assortment of interlocking geometric shapes and connecting fibers.
The program loaded in MindSpace looked like a dense pyramid carpeted with spikes. It wasn't any code that Jara recognized. "What's that?" she said.
"Nothing," grumbled the fiefcorp master, banishing the display with a flick of his wrist. A more cohesive structure appeared in the layer beneath, shaped like a lopsided donut and colored in soft grays and blues. Strands of purple and white formed an intricate net through the center. Jara could have traced those supple curves with her eyes closed. NiteFocus 48.
Natch took one look at the mass of bio/logic code floating in front of him and gave a snort of disgust. His dissatisfaction grew as he rotated the donut slowly along its z-axis. Imperfect! Jara could hear him thinking, a fourth-act soliloquy to his invisible audience. Unsatisfactory! A mockery of all the projects I've left unfinished, all the goals I've left unattained.
"Well, what are we waiting for?" said Horvil. "Let's fire this baby up ,,
Jara gave her internal system a silent command to activate NiteFocus, and then waited a few seconds as the program disseminated its instructions to the microscopic machines floating in her bloodstream. She tried to detect the millions of calculations going on right now inside her brain, the logical handshakes extending thousands of kilometers from her virtual body here to cellular structures standing slack on a red tile in London. But she knew that even if she were here in the flesh, the chemical reactions in the retina and the electric pulses along the ciliary muscle would be completely undetectable. Bio/logic programs had not been that crude since Sheldon Surina invented the science some three hundred sixty years ago.
"I think it's working," said Jara. A hopeful statement.
Horvil puffed up his chest and clapped a virtual arm around Natch's shoulder. "Of course it's working. What'd I tell you?"
The fiefcorp master said nothing. He turned off the Beijing scene on the left window, leaving a view of the real darkness outside. Natch squinted, shook his head, and marched through the other room to the balcony door. Horvil and Jara followed him as he stepped outside into the coal-dark Shenandoah night, about half past three now. A platform promptly slid under their feet from the side of the building.
The three fiefcorpers stood at the railing and gazed into the distance, looking for a suitable object on which to test their enhanced vision. Flashing lights were still evident in the rowdier quarters of the city, but out here in the residential district, things were relatively quiet. "There," said Horvil, pointing towards a viewscreen that stood several blocks down the road, its lights dim now that there was no foot traffic. Jara found she could read the advertisement clearly.
DRINK CHAIQUOKE
Because the Defense and Wellness Council Still Lets You.
Beneath the print, the smart-alecky ChaiQuoke pitchman suckled on a neon purple bottle while a Council officer looked on with overt disapproval.
Horvil danced a clumsy jig of triumph. "Looks like the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp will still be in business tomorrow," he crowed. "Oh yeah!"
Jara breathed a sigh of relief. Why had she been nervous? NiteFocus 48 had worked fine yesterday too, and the day before, and the day before. She hadn't seen a major glitch in the program since version 43 or 44. "So what do you think?" she asked Natch. "Ready for launch?"
"Does it look like it's ready for launch?" the fiefcorp master replied brusquely. "The color resolution needs a lot of work. And from the look of those blueprints, this program uses way too many cycles. You think we can just release a product that sucks up all the computing resources on the Data Sea and crashes people's systems? No, it's not fucking ready at all."
Jara reacted as if he had slapped her. There was a sudden fermata in Horvil's dance, which he tried to pass off as intentional. Why had they slaved through so many nights if they were going to get this kind of treatment?
"Can't either of you see what I'm trying to do?" asked Natch, his tone suddenly quiet and contemplative. "I'm just pointing out the same inadequacies that Primo's is going to find tomorrow. Primo's doesn't care if you spent all night coding. They only care about two things: success and failure. Success means more sales. It means more respect. It means moving up to the next level of the game. Everything else ... is failure." Natch rubbed his forehead and gave a yearning look out towards the horizon.
Jara couldn't help but roll her eyes at his histrionics. Doesn't Natch ever stop to wonder if he's taking himself too seriously? She wanted to screech obscenities at the invisible audience, to throttle his knowing smirk. She wanted to get him out of those breeches somewhere quiet and instruct him in low, sibilant tones about the things that really mattered.
The fiefcorp master turned. He gave Jara a long, penetrating stare of amusement and contempt while Horvil shifted awkwardly from foot to foot behind them. "Now come inside," Natch said, "and I'll tell you my plan."
Jara lowered her eyes. "I thought you said no more dirty tricks," she whimpered.
"I never said that. I said I'd take a look at NiteFocus 48, which I just did. And it's awful. Besides, why do you keep using those words, dirty tricks? I don't do dirty tricks. It's called business."
The sun crept up the early-morning sky, panther-like, reminding Jara she had managed to last another twenty-four hours without going crazy or quitting or killing someone. She flushed with accomplishment. All she needed to do for the next eleven months was pace through the days with her head bowed low, like Natch in one of his moods, and she would survive. That was how you killed a stretch of time: stick around long enough to outlast it.
She told the others she needed a few minutes alone in the cool night air. Natch and Horvil disappeared inside.
Jara stayed outside and watched the city of Shenandoah shake itself awake. Buildings that had automatically compressed themselves overnight to conserve space began puffing up like blowfish as their tenants awoke. The balcony outside Natch's apartment floated upwards, almost imperceptibly, as residents on the lower levels claimed their living space for the morning. A river of pedestrian traffic wended from the poorer districts to the public multi facilities, ferrying half a million workers to offices around the globe, or to Luna, Mars or one of the orbital colonies. Others flooded into the tube stations where sleek trains would whisk them across the continent at exorbitant speeds. A privileged few used the teleportation stations, still shiny and unspoiled and mostly empty.
Jara had witnessed the same morning transformation many times in London, but until now, she had never seen it in Shenandoah. She felt a momentary pang of envy for the people who lived and worked in the smooth, low curves of a modern city. They had never scrabbled to work over ancient brick or weedy cobblestone, nor taken a circuitous tube route around yet another corroded abbey that had been given perpetual right-of-way For The Sake Of History. Stop feeling sorry for yourself Jara thought. You could live in Shenandoah if you really wanted-even though all you could afford here is a room in one of the old skyscrapers. She gazed off to the east, where the faint broken towers of Old Washington thrust above the mist. The towers were all that remained now of the variegated American empires that had flourished in the years before the Autonomous Revolt. One lone tube track snaked out in that direction from Shenandoah and disappeared into the fog like the fossilized tendril of some long-dead beast.
Stop delaying, Jara thought. Go inside and get this over with. Then you can
go home and sleep. Whatever idiocy Natch is planning can't be much worse than what you're already doing.
She was wrong.
"You want me to what?" Jara shrieked, sounding even to herself like some farcical harpy from the dramas. The Unbeliever, the sourfaced One Who Doubts Our Hero's Prowess.
Natch gloated at his apprentice's reaction. "I want you to spread rumors," he said calmly, mid-pace, "that the Data Sea is about to be bombarded with a crippling black code attack."
"A crippling black code attack."
"By the Pharisees."
"The Pharisees. And what good is this going to do?"
"It's going to cause the Patel Brothers to delay their product launch."
Natch's orders were such an affront to common sense that Jara couldn't help but laugh. An emboldened Horvil let out a guffaw of his own. "Great plan," cheered the engineer mockingly. "While we're at it, let's cause the Patel Brothers to put a million credits in our Vault accounts and give us all neck massages."
Jara wondered fleetingly if Natch really had lost his mind. What connection was there between a respectable bio/logics company selling programs to improve the human body, and a group of superstitious fanatics who had walled themselves off in a far corner of the globe? Then she looked at Natch's condescending smirk and realized he was utterly serious.
Insanity.
The analyst took a seat on the sofa next to her fellow apprentice. "All right, start explaining," she said.
Natch nodded and gave another one of those self-absorbed looks into the distance. "What's tomorrow?" he said at length.
Horvil tilted his eyes upwards in thought. "November 1st."
"November 1st. A day like any other, right? For us, yes. Products launched, products sold, business as usual. But for the Pharisees, tomorrow is the Day of the Dead." He waved his hand at the closest viewscreen, which happened to be showing an early landscape by Tope. The painting's sharp blues and greens morphed into an old Prime Committee video about the Day of the Dead. Technology has marched onwards, announced the narrator, but in the mythology of the Pharisees, ghouls and goblins still come out at night. The three of them watched as a band of brown-skinned Pharisees bowed low in dusty robes and began chanting in an archaic guttural tongue.
The Pharisees hate the civilized world, continued the nameless documentary narrator. Using biollogic programs to manipulate the human body is `ungodly,' they say. And to implant tiny machines in the blood, to let some programmer's code actually broadcast images into the brain ... Unnatural! A sin!
Natch paused the display and snapped for emphasis. Onscreen, a youth was frozen in mid-scowl, his sunburned fist raised in defiance at some unseen foe. "Remember the program that started raising blood pressures in all the orbital colonies?" said Natch. "That was just two years ago. Twenty-three hundred dead, and a harsh military response from the Defense and Wellness Council. But do you think they've had their fill of bloodshed? Of course not! The Pharisees haven't been idle since then. They've been plotting and scheming and studying programming techniques, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike.
"When do the Pharisees tend to attack? On days of religious significance, of course. Like the Feast of All Saints. Like Jesus Joshua Smith's Birthday.
"Like the Day of the Dead.
"Think about it! Couldn't the Pharisees have figured out a way to disrupt the financial markets or Dr. Plugenpatch or the multi network by now? Couldn't they have chosen tomorrow to launch their opening salvo in the next holy war against us `connectibles'? Isn't it possible the Defense and Wellness Council is shoring up its defenses right now to prepare for a major onslaught by some frightening new breed of black code?"
Horvil was totally captivated by Natch's little narrative. He leaned forward on the edge of the sofa, shifting his attention nervously between the wildly gesticulating Natch and the ominous figure on the viewscreen with the unkempt hair and dirty robe. "It is possible, isn't it!" he gasped.
"And if all this is true ... wouldn't November lst be a very unlucky day for the Patel Brothers to launch a product upgrade?"
Jara felt Natch's plot snap into focus, and for one sickening instant she saw the world through the fiefcorp master's warped lenses. Colors faded away, blacks and whites dissolved into a miasma of indistinct gray. "So you want us to tell people our friends at the Defense and Wellness Council say something big is about to happen, and wait for the rumors to clog up the gossip networks?"
"I don't want anything clogged up. I want fucking bedlam."
"And you think the Patel Brothers will catch wind of all this and postpone their product launch to a day with a slower news cycle."
Horvil shook off the jitters and sat back in thought. "So that's why you've been pushing us so hard on NiteFocus 48," he said. "A near-perfect program ... launched on a day where there's no competition ... That just might cause Primo's to edge us up a notch or two in the ratings."
Jara frowned. She now gleaned why Merri and Serr Vigal had been excluded from this early-morning rendezvous; they would never participate in such a scheme. In fact, now that Jara thought about it, Natch had been excluding them from a lot of ethically shady errands like this lately. A thought slithered through the back of Jara's mind. What did that say about Natch's opinion of her? She purposefully let it go.
Natch restarted the video. They watched a squad of Defense and Wellness Council officers execute a coordinated strike on a crowd of restless Pharisees standing on a hilltop. The Pharisees fired laser rifles wildly at the white-robed figures materializing all around them. But the figures they hit were nothing but ghostly multi projections, spotters for the real strike force lining up behind them. A volley of needlesized darts flew through the air, lodging themselves in the flesh of their adversaries and unloading their deadly cargo of toxic chemicals and molecule-sized machines of war. Within seconds, the fight was over and the Pharisees lay motionless on the dirty ground.
"It's a nice theory, Natch," Jara said, "but I doubt one new program could cause us to jump five slots on Primo's overnight."
"No," said Natch with a sudden diabolical grin, "but four programs just might."
The apprentices simply stared at him, unable to summon any coherent words in response.
"What do you think I've been doing these past few weeks while the two of you plugged away on NiteFocus 48? I've been working, that's what. Getting DeMirage 52 and EyeMorph 66 prepared for launch."
Horvil counted ostentatiously on his fingers. "That's only three. What's the fourth program?"
"Mento Calc-U-Later 93.9. That's been ready for weeks now."
"What? You told me that program was unlaunchable."
"I lied."
As the morning wore on, Natch stubbornly resisted all objections to his plan, though Horvil and Jara tried their best.
"This all sounds so nebulous," protested Jara. "Who's going to believe we know anything about terrorist attacks? We're not spieswe're businesspeople."
"We've got good connections. People will believe them. Besides, we don't need to come up with any specific information-a rumor of a rumor, that's all."
"What if it doesn't work?"
Natch shrugged. "If it doesn't work, then what's the harm done?"
"The Council will deny the rumor," interjected Horvil.
"And knowing the Council, they'll deny it so forcefully that people will remain suspicious. Nobody ever accused High Executive Borda of being subtle."
I could say the same thing about you, Natch, Jara thought to herself. I don't understand this at all," she said, throwing up her hands in exasperation. "If we have four programs ready to launch on the Data Sea, why don't we just launch them now? Why do we need Pharisees?"
Natch shook his head. "First off, the programs aren't good enough yet," he replied. "We need at least another day to polish them up. And second, the Patel Brothers have been watching our every move for weeks now. They know we're eyeing their number one spot on Primo's. Unless we catch the Patels unaware for a f
ew hours, they'll immediately fire off a barrage of their own upgrades so they can stay on top. But if we have enough of a cushion, we just might be able to grab number one for a few hours."
"What if someone catches us spreading rumors?"
"Like who?"
He's right, the fiefcorp analyst reflected bitterly. Truth on the Data Sea was like the light from an ancient kaleidoscope: tinted and scattered and refracted on all sides. Especially in the bio/logics trade, where everyone was an interested party. Fiefcorps and memecorps spread rumors about their competitors all the time. So did the capitalmen who funded them and the channelers who pushed their wares. Jara remembered the recent case of a woman who planted rumors of incompetence about her own son to drive him out of business. Or the case of the fiefcorper who cornered the market on gastrointestinal programming by sabotaging his competitors' sales demos. No charges had been filed in either case.
And who stood in Natch's way? The Meme Cooperative-a fumbling bureaucracy.
Jara thought back to those interminable childhood lectures from the hive. So if the Meme Cooperative is so incompetent, she had once complained, who's looking out for the little guy? Who's keeping things fair?
Nobody, her proctor had replied ruefully.
Nobody? Jara had screamed in youthful outrage.
Oh, I could tell you what the headmaster wants me to tell you, the proctor had replied. All that bullshit in the official hive curriculum. "The fluidity of information on the Data Sea ferrets out weak struts in the economy." "The independent writers, pundits and watchdogs known as the drudges are very effective at rooting out corruption. " "We rely on the Local Political Representative Associations of Civic Groups-the L-PRACGs, our governments-to keep the free market in check." But you read the news, Jara. Do any of those statements sound like the truth to you?
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