Jara studied the fiefcorp master's face carefully. Could he possibly be telling the truth? Could he be operating on a plane that far removed from everyday life? Or was this just another one of his acting jobs? She gazed into that unblemished, boyish face and wondered if there were any truths at all buried beneath its surface, or if truth for him was as mutable as programming code, subject to updates by the hour.
A minute rolled by, then two. Jara cursed her body as a turncoat, fired up Delibidinize 14a for the third time that hour. Can't he at least give me the satisfaction of turning MindSpace off? she fumed. Finally, she straightened her spine and looked him squarely in the eye. "I quit."
Natch gave her a sly look. "Fine," said the fiefcorp master blithely. "Quit."
A stunned silence filled the room. Jara didn't move.
"Stop being so fucking melodramatic, Jara!" Natch burst out. He grabbed NiteFocus 49 with one hand and violently spun the virtual code around like a wheel, himself stuck in the spokes. "You've got less than a year left on your contract, and after that you'll have the option to cash out. You're telling me you're going to give up all those shares and start from scratch someplace else? Room and board for another four years? I know you better than that, Jara. You're going to stay right where you are and get filthy rich with the rest of us."
"I could turn you in to the Council."
Natch didn't lose a beat. "Without hard evidence-which I know you don't have-where would that get you? Nobody wants to hire a whiner or a whistle blower. You'd be right back where you were when I found you: blacklisted by the major bio/logic fiefcorps, taking shit from second-rate imbeciles like Lucas Sentinel. And don't tell me the Council will get to the bottom of this, because they won't. Dozens of cases like this cross Len Borda's desk every week, and he's lucky if he can close a tenth of them."
"Then I'll tell the Meme Cooperative."
"Don't make me laugh."
"The drudges. I could send a message to Sen Sivv Sor and John Ridglee right now."
Natch shrugged, as if the effort of responding to such an inane proposition was beneath him. He caught the spinning donut of code with one hand and began studying its surface once more.
Jara let her hands drop inertly to her sides. Is he right about me? she thought. Is that all I am-a whiner and a whistle blower? She thought back to her days peddling bio/logic analysis to Lucas Sentinel, to all the times she had cursed her fate and threatened to quit. Wouldn't Lucas pull the same stunts that Natch did, if he had the guts or the foresight?
She hadn't really intended to quit, she realized now. Despite all the indignities, Jara couldn't bring herself to hate this cantankerous child. What she had wanted was the opportunity to deliver some kind of high-handed sermon about Pyrrhic victories and the value of interpersonal relationships. She wanted him to take her seriously. "People could have gotten hurt, Natch," Jara said quietly.
"They didn't."
"But they could have."
Natch finally capitulated and flipped off the MindSpace bubble around his workbench. The holographic donut melted back into the void. "Jara, everyone who invests in bio/logics knows what's going on. Things like this happen all the time. Do you think the Patel Brothers got to the top without getting their hands dirty? Or Len Borda?"
Jara snorted angrily. "Oh, I see, the end justifies the means."
The entrepreneur narrowed his eyes, as if trying to adjust his focus to a shallower depth of field. "Do you really think number one on Primo's is the end? Then you don't understand anything, Jara. Getting to number one on Primo's isn't an end at all-it's a means. It's part of the process ... just a step on the ladder."
"So what is the end? Where do all these means lead to?"
Natch stared out into the nothingness for a moment without speaking. She saw him for a brief instant unadorned, between masks. His jaw rocked back and forth, and in his eyes burned a hunger the likes of which Jara had never seen. That fire could consume her schoolgirl lust, swallow it without a trace. She shivered involuntarily.
"I don't have a clue," said Natch. "But when I find out, I'll let you know." And with a peremptory wave of his hand, he cut her multi connection.
Jara found herself standing once more on the red square in her London apartment. It was Wednesday afternoon already. In a few blessed hours, this entire debacle would be a distant memory. On the viewscreen, she could hear the crowds milling about in the public square, restless, impatient, disconsolate.
Jara sank to the floor and cried for a moment, then dragged herself back to her office. There was work to be done.
Sleep tore at him, shrieked at him, pummeled him without mercy. His traitorous body was only too happy to succumb, and it took a monumental effort of will for Natch to keep himself awake.
Sheldon Surina, the father of bio/logics, had once defined progress as "the expansion of choices." Natch wanted the choice to stay awake. So he switched on PulCorp's U-No-Snooze 93 and let the OCHRE machines in his body release more adrenaline. Within seconds, he was awake and alert.
He was on the tube headed north out of Cisco station, through the great redwood forests that carpeted much of the northwest, and up to Seattle. Natch had been on this route hundreds of times. The tube would shuttle back and forth between the two port cities all afternoon, hauling industrial supplies and a dwindling number of commuters. At this time of the morning, the passenger car was nearly empty. Besides Natch, there was an elderly gentleman who appeared to be killing time; two businesswomen who were probably accompanying their cargo in the trailing cars; and an Islander tugging uncomfortably at the steel collar around his neck. Fickle economics, which had once courted TubeCo with ardor, had moved on to younger and more acrobatic mistresses.
Natch had no business to transact in either Cisco or Seattle. He came to see the trees. To see the trees and to plot his next move.
Everyone in the fiefcorp knew about his ritual of tubing out to the redwood forests whenever he had something to mull over. Nobody understood it, least of all Jara. "You refuse to eat a meal sitting down because it's a waste of time, but you'll spend three and a half hours riding a hunk of tin across the continent?" she had once scolded him. "Why tube all the way out there when you can multi instead?"
"It's not the same as being there in person."
Jara rolled her eyes. He saw the incomprehension written all over her face: This is the same kind of backwards logic that the Islanders and the Pharisees use. I thought you were smarter than that.
"What about a hoverbird?"
"I don't like hoverbirds. Bad memories."
"Okay, then why don't you teleport? I know, it's expensive. But time is money, isn't it?"
Natch had had no reply. He was not very good at elaborate explanations. He simply knew he did his best thinking while in a tube car staring at giant sequoias. Teleporting or multi projecting out to the redwoods just wasn't the right way to do it. It was wrong, like an imperfect bio/logic program was wrong.
Maybe what he appreciated about the tube was that it was done right. TubeCo had an eye for perfection in everything they did. Their vehicles were not "hunks of tin," as Jara had accused. They were sleek and beautiful, the product of a business that had reached its awesome maturity. Transparent from the inside but breathtakingly translucent from the outside, the tube cars floated on a cushion of air just molecules thick and whooshed over slim tracks with quiet grace. Even the armrests on the chairs were sculpted from synthetic ivory and contoured for maximum comfort. Unlike so many technological marvels these days that blended into the background-microscopic OCHREs that regulated the human body, multi projections that were nearly indistinguishable from real bodies, data agents that existed only within the mind-the tube was a visible, palpable manifestation of human achievement. It was progress writ large.
The redwoods, in contrast, were nature writ large. Natch gazed through the transparent wall at the sequoias towering over the tube tracks. These trees had watched over this route long before the tube even existed. M
ost of them had undoubtedly seen the days of Sheldon Surina and Henry Osterman, the days of bio/logics' founders. Some of the trees had stood here since long before the Autonomous Revolt or even the First American Revolution. All of human history, in fact, was but a footnote to their tranquil and reflective existence.
The tube car completed its circuit through the redwood forest and slid to a graceful stop at the Seattle station, but Natch stayed on for another pass. Then another, and another. He watched the trees, he pondered the future, he formulated plans. Gradually, the effects of the UNo-Snooze program wore off. Natch let his guard down and drifted off to sleep.
In his sleep, he dreamed.
He dreamed he was standing in a grove of redwoods, dwarfed by their majesty. He felt small: a forgotten attribute in the great schema of the universe. He was trapped down here. The forest was endless. Tube trains whizzed by just over the next hill, powerless to do anything but circle around in vain looking for an outlet.
But Natch had found a method of escape. He had prepared for this moment. He was a bio/logic programmer, a master architect of human capability. He had studied in the Proud Eagle hive, apprenticed with the great Serr Vigal, gone up against formidable enemies like the Patel Brothers. And he had brought all his skill and learning to bear when he had crafted the ultimate program: Jump 225.
He stared at the canopy of leaves many kilometers up in the sky. It looked impossibly distant. But then he thought about the jump program, the way it swirled and swooped in MindSpace with impossible grace. The sheer number of its tendrils, its connections. The geometric shapes that formed mathematical constellations beyond human perception.
Natch was confident. He started the jump program, felt programming instructions flowing off the Data Sea and into the data recepta- Iles built into his very bones. Felt the tingling of OCHRE systems interpreting the code and routing commands to the proper leg muscles.
He Jumped.
Natch propelled himself right-foot-forward in an elegant arc towards the sky. The code was grounded in one of the classic moves of natural law: the jump, a movement humanity had worked out through a hundred thousand years of constant iteration. Yet the program bore the indelible signatures of an artificial product: the curl of the toes at mid-leap, the triumphant arching of the back, the pleasing whistle where no whistle would otherwise exist. The sky drew nearer and nearer, the ground now but a distant memory. Breaking free of the redwoods was already a foregone conclusion, and Natch had set his sights on still loftier goals. Jump 225 would take him not only above the redwoods, but up into the clouds and out of natural law altogether. He would achieve freedom from the tedious rules that had governed human existence since the beginning of time. Down would no longer follow up. Autumn would no longer follow summer. Death would no longer follow life. The jump 225 program would accomplish all this, and more.
Then, just when his straining fingertips struggled for purchase on the twigs hanging off the highest branches-when he could feel the feathery touch of the leaves-when he had just gotten his first whiff of pure, clean, unspoiled sky-the inevitable descent began.
Natch could see himself falling in slow motion, as if he were looking down from the pinnacle of the tallest redwood. He could see his arms flailing and feel his lungs bursting every second of the way down. The whistle of the jump had become the screech of gravity's avenging angel. What mere seconds ago had been a triumphant jump now turned into a horrible, agonizing Fall. How could he have been so blind? How could he not have seen this?
This was worse than not having jumped in the first place: the force of the impact would surely crush him, flatten him, destroy him. And still he accelerated. Falling so fast now that he would actually crash through the ground, down through the pulverizing rock, down to the center of the earth, where nothing could ever rise again. He yelled his defiance. He shook his fists. He railed at the trees, reaching out in a vain effort to pull them down with him.
A split-second before impact, Natch awoke.
2
THE SHORTEST
INITIATION
Natch's forefather Hundible was an acquaintance of Sheldon Surina and one of the earliest investors in bio/logics. He was a gambler, a teller of tall tales, a drifter of unknown origin and unsavory character.
But above all else, Hundible was a poor financial planner. His getrich-quick schemes sank like leaky boats, leaving him constantly floundering in a sea of fathomless debt. Where he found the money to invest in bio/logics, no one knew. Human biological programming seemed an unlikely venture for Hundible; Surina himself, with his prudish ways and supercilious attitude, seemed an unlikely partner. Naturally, everyone assumed this new discipline was destined to fail.
Yet it was Hundible who had the last laugh. His partner, the skinny Indian tinkerer with the big nose, went on to revitalize science and revolutionize history. The gambler's modest investment ballooned a thousandfold and generated a large fortune. Hundible retired at the seasoned age of thirty-three, took a high-society companion, and slid contentedly out of history. If he had any interest in the great flowering of science that his investment helped bring to fruition, there was no record of it.
Hundible eventually passed on. His wealth endured, for a while.
Natch's ancestor was not the only one to stumble serendipitously onto Surina riches. A host of rogues, early adopters, and cutting-edge investors were handsomely rewarded for their early backing of bio/logics. Lavish mansions and villas sprouted up around the globe to serve their owners' whims-places where they could escape the harsh moral strictures that had kept order since the Autonomous Revolt. The bio/logic entrepreneurs deliberately sought cities that had largely escaped the havoc of the Revolt: Omaha, Melbourne, Shenandoah, Madrid, Cape Town. Cities that yearned for the greatness of antiquity, cities whose local governments could be easily bought.
This change in the political landscape did not escape the attention of the old nation-states. The old governments might have been dilapidated and their halls of power decaying, but they still had plenty of resources at their disposal to fight this territorial encroachment. They vested much of their power in a centralized Prime Committee. The Committee turned around and bestowed ultimate martial authority on a single Defense and Wellness Council. Crusading high executives of the Council like Tul Jabbor and Par Padron made reining in the excesses of the bio/logic entrepreneurs their top priority.
Thus the battle was joined. Society split along ideological fault lines: governmentalists who favored central authority versus libertarians who sought power for local civic groups. By the time Natch's fiefcorp ascended to number one on Primo's, this dichotomy had come to seem like the natural order of things.
Hundible's descendants grew fiercely protective of their fortunes. Not only were they fending off the Committee and the Council, but they were also under siege by the greatest enemy of all: time. The bio/logic entrepreneurs knew that theirs was not the immutable wealth of the lunar land tycoons. Their money was not a tangible thing like terraformed soil that they could stick their hands into. No, for better or worse, the fates of the bio/logic entrepreneurs were tied to the bio/logic markets.
And markets, like all living things, are mortal.
Natch's mother Lora was fourteen when the Economic Plunge of the 310s hit.
Lora was schooled in the best hives, with the children of important diplomats and capitalmen. Her proctors were crisp, disciplined citizens who saw the hive as a Petri dish in which to experiment with the latest academic fashions. Lora and her hivemates yo-yoed between pedagogical theories, learning much about politics but very little about government, finance, engineering or programming.
But what did it matter? When Lora looked into the future, she saw nothing but the comfortable track her parents had laid out for her, with scheduled stops at initiation, loss of virginity, career, companionship and motherhood. There would be plenty of time along the way to pick up any other skills she needed.
In the meantime, Lora worked diligently
to become a Person of Quality. She developed a keen fashion sense and an eye for good beauty-enhancement programming. She sharpened her social skills at the regular charity balls held in the Creed Elan manors. She dipped her toes in the Sigh, that virtual network of sensuality, and learned a thing or two about the pleasures of the flesh. And when holidays rolled around, she retreated to her cavernous family mansion to dally with servants whose parents had not been blessed with the money for a hive education.
Then, one gloomy spring day, Lora and her hivemates awoke to find all the proctors riveted to news feeds off the Data Sea. Marcus Surina has died, they said. An accident in the orbital colonies. A few of the proctors wept openly.
For a while, Surina's death seemed like a distant event that had little connection to the girl's carefully structured hive existence: a supernova in a remote galaxy, visible only through powerful refractive lenses. Surina had been the master of TeleCo, a big and powerful company. He was a direct descendant of Sheldon Surina, the inventor of bio/logics. His death had been a terrible tragedy. What else was there to say?
But from that day forward, everything changed.
Lora's friends began checking out of the hive and disappearing, nobody knew where. One by one, Lora's parents cut back on subscriptions to the programs that gave her eyes that china-doll sparkle and her hair that reflective luster. The servants were let go. Nameless fears escaped from the demesne of adulthood and roamed the hive at night with impunity, whispering words the children did not understand.
Six months after Marcus Surina's death, Lora's parents unexpectedly showed up at the hive and told her to pack her things. They gave her a single valise and told her to take as many of the precious knickknacks and gewgaws lining her shelves as she could carry.
Infoquake Page 6