Infoquake

by David Louis Edelman

  Merri had been standing at the foot of the stage since the first thirty-five thousand spectators arrived and the auditorium began overlapping multi projections. She felt a strange sense of privilege to be here as a real body; it was quite literally a one-in-a-million opportunity. Fiefcorp apprentices living on the moon usually did not receive this kind of privilege.

  Her reverie was interrupted by a reedy voice Merri had heard all too often over the past few days. "Say you run an assembly-line programming floor, and you're on a tight deadline. You don't have time to make mistakes." Merri zeroed in on the source of the voice, and saw Frizitz Quo not three meters away, holding court before an audience of Meme Cooperative officials. "Every time one of your workers fumbles a connection, that's a few precious minutes you've wasted. A few credits MultiReal could have saved you. Now multiply that by a few hundred workers, and that's real money...."

  Merri tuned out the sprightly Asian and called up the grid that would show her the location of Robby Robby's entire team of cubeheaded channelers. A diagram of the arena appeared in the air before her, speckled with purple dots to indicate the coordinates of each team member. A legend in the corner of the diagram silently tallied up audience demographics.

  Robby Robby himself had roped together an ad hoc group of nearly six thousand orbital colony residents, and was busy preaching the gospel of-something. Merri tuned in a video feed. "We know what you're going through out there," exclaimed Robby, his idiotic grin wobbling sympathetically. "The last to know. The last to hear. The last to be noticed. Right?"

  A lukewarm cheer from the crowd.

  "Who suffered during the infoquake last week? Was it the terrans? Was it the lunars? No, of course not-it was you. Am I right? You citizens of Allowell, of Patronell, of Furtoid, of 49th Heaven, of Nova Ceti, and all the rest-it was you who bore the brunt of that terrible catastrophe, wasn't it?"

  A righteous buzz of discontent. A few raised fists.

  "Well, keep those multi connections right here in Andra Pradesh, ladies and gentlemen, because tonight the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp is gonna show you a whole new dawn for orbital colonists ..."

  Merri cut off the feed and shook her head. Robby and his channelers had been wandering all over the map during the past few hours, voicing new sales motifs at every exchange. Her instincts told her she should rein Robby in, insist he stay on message. But did it really matter what the channelers said at this point? They were pitching a technology nobody understood to crowds that had no idea whether they should or should not care. Merri couldn't really ask any more of Robby's staff than to keep the audience interested and upbeat.

  She was about to head backstage for a much-needed break when she felt a tug at her elbow. "There you are!" cried a worried Benyamin. "I've got to show you this. You won't believe-"

  Merri put a calming hand over Ben's. "Slow down," she said. "Take a deep breath. How's the assembly-line going?"

  "Almost done. They're putting the final touches on right now. But this is more important."

  The channel manager let him drag her across the stage and up into the mezzanine. She was feeling the first twinges of impatience when the word Petrucio caught her ear.

  "Yes, yes, yes, of course it's true that the Patels are licensing MultiReal from Surina/Natch," stated a rail-thin woman of Polynesian descent, who stood on a makeshift podium fielding questions from several thousand fiefcorp masters. "Why bother to deny it? The MultiReal you're going to see here today is the same MultiReal Frederic and Petrucio will be demonstrating later tonight. Same product, different brand."

  Merri fed the woman's face into the public directory and soon verified her suspicions. She had never actually seen Xi Xong outside a viewscreen, where her emaciated frame often sat alongside Robby Robby, Phrancoliape and The Felwidge Group in drudge roundups of the top channeling firms. But given the amount of work Xong did for the Patel Brothers, Merri should have expected her appearance here tonight.

  "There have to be some kind of Meme Cooperative regulations against this," 'Whispered Benyamin. "That woman can't just come here into our audience and start stealing customers, can she?"

  "I'm afraid she can," replied Merri with a sigh. "There's not really much we can do about it. If we kick her out, she'll only draw more attention."

  As it was, Xong did not seem to have any trouble attracting attention. With her opal-bedecked kimono and her glittering nail polish, she presented quite an elegant contrast to Robby's slick hucksterism. "The Patels look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with Margaret and Natch," continued Xi Xong, responding to a muffled question from the crowd. "Competitors? Why, certainly the Patels have had a little friendly competition with Natch over the years. What of it?"

  "Friendly?" protested one of the onlookers. "They've done everything but try to kill each other."

  A frothy laugh bubbled from Xong's china doll lips. "Don't believe everything you hear from the drudges!" she said with a dark twinkle in her eye. "So there's no love lost between Natch and my clients. What does that matter? MultiReal is a wide-open market, and there will be more than enough room for two fiefcorps here. Besides, don't they say that a rising tide lifts all boats? As long as that tide pushes a few boats towards our safe shores, then everyone wins."

  Merri couldn't help but admire the woman's poise, even if her wardrobe was too gaudy for the channel manager's taste. She caught sight of one of Robby's boyish cube-heads bounding up the aisles, and for a split-second wished she could exchange sales teams.

  "Do you want to know what the worst part is?" said Benyamin. "She's not the only one here trying to poison Natch's reputation."

  Merri frowned. "Who else?"

  "You might as well ask who isn't here. Lucas Sentinel has a whole group here spreading lies. PulCorp, Billy Sterno, Bolliwar Tuban, the Serlys, the Deuterons, Studio Fitzgerald-they've all got their own people mouthing off in the wings."

  "Jara was right."

  "About what?"

  "It's too late to cancel. With all these fiefcorps looking for blood, we've got to pull this demonstration off, or we're finished in this business."

  Jara tried on several courses of action in her head, but none of them fit. She could run, but there really wasn't anywhere to run to. She could hide, but that would be utterly futile given the surveillance technology at the Council's disposal. Jara thought about what the protagonists of the dramas did in these kinds of situations. They relied on glib words and cool detachment, of course, two things that Jara did not possess. What would Natch do?

  A low crescendo of thunder swept across the courtyard and set the window panes vibrating. Rhythmic thumps. Boom boom, boom boom. It took her a few minutes to decipher the sound as that of a thousand boots marching on travertine in perfect synchronization. She listened intently for signs of battle-the high-pitched whine of continuous dartgun fire, the muffled boom of disruptors, all the war noises the dramas had trained her to recognize over the years. But if there was indeed a skirmish going on outside, none of it was reaching Jara's ears.

  The tourists who had been kicked out of the atrium half an hour earlier came scurrying by. Over her mother's shoulder, a toddler gave Jara a curious look as they fled past Albert Einstein into Relativity Hall. They were followed shortly by a phalanx of panicked green-andblue Surina guards, fumbling with their dartguns as they scrambled to reach some defensive checkpoint. Jara dissolved as much as possible into Sheldon Surina's open-toed sandals, but nobody paid her any attention. Obviously, Len Borda had not even bothered repeating his fiction about protecting the scientist statues this time.

  Outside, the first row of Defense and Wellness Council officers strode past the window. Their white robes looked positively spectral in the cloudy afternoon light, an affront to the notion of camouflage. Their faces bore the kind of stone-like neutrality that only bio/logics could produce. They were aiming squarely for the Revelation Spire, where Margaret was presumably holed up in a high story awaiting some kind of apocalyptic showdow
n. Jara peered out another window that gave her a view closer to the Spire. She had seen a squadron of Surina security forces there earlier, but now they had vanished.

  What would Natch do under these circumstances? Jara knew exactly what he would do: he would go ahead and give the presenta tion anyway, until someone physically dragged him off the stage or blew him into a million pieces.

  An idea popped into Jara's head, an idea that had been percolating for hours even though she had refused to acknowledge it.

  Why couldn't she deliver the presentation?

  Casting her mind out to the Surina facilities, Jara discovered that the spectators were indeed staying put in spite of Len Borda's little incursion. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was scheduled to hit the stage in little more than an hour, and the auditorium already held almost 400 million multi projections. If these numbers kept up, this would be an even larger crowd than the one Margaret had garnered last week-maybe even large enough to rival the 1.3 billion who had attended Marcus Surina's funeral forty-six years ago.

  When the tromp of the troops became deafening, Jara put her hands over her ears and slithered even farther into the shadows. Still feeling exposed and vulnerable, she reached into her bio/logic bag of tricks and turned on Cocoon 32, a Lucas Sentinel program that had helped calm her down many times in the past.

  Jara could instantly feel the tumult from the outside world fading away as her OCHREs filtered out the sounds around her and dimmed her sight until everything had faded to a dull gray. No ConfidentialWhispers, no incoming messages. No background chatter from the Data Sea.

  Could she really stand up in front of a billion people and demonstrate a technology she barely understood herself? And not just any technology-perhaps the most radical invention in the history of humanity, and one that was almost completely untested.

  There were a million reasons why she couldn't deliver the presentation. Jara had no experience speaking in front of large crowds. She had a bad reputation in the bio/logics industry. She hadn't swung a baseball bat in nearly twenty years.

  But what other options did she have at this point? Slink off to a tube station and go home? Wait for the hubbub to die down and then drop a groveling Confidential Whisper to Lucas Sentinel asking for her old job back?

  Face it, Jara, she told herself. You want to fail.

  The thought surprised and angered her. She wanted to fail. She wanted Natch's latest business venture to go down in flames. The analyst conjured a mental picture of herself: a small, fluttering, frightened thing, cowering at the feet of marble goliaths, men and women with minds and hearts and wills of stone.

  And suddenly something inside of her rebelled. That's not me, she thought. I can't be like that. To settle for failure-that's like accepting death. If I just sit back and let things happen, I might as well have never lived in the first place.

  Jara took a deep breath, counted to twenty, and flipped off the Cocoon. She had made her decision.

  At just that moment, a familiar figure came barreling around the corner. He screeched to a halt in the middle of the room as soon as he saw the analyst, but the tub of jelly around his gut obeyed the laws of inertia and kept going. The statue of Isaac Newton looked on with amusement as Horvil toppled to the ground in accordance with the good scientist's theories.

  "Oh, thank goodness!" bellowed the engineer, crawling his way across the floor to Jara's side. "I've been looking all over for you."

  Jara gave her fellow apprentice a look of steely determination. "Horv, I'm going to deliver the presentation."

  Horvil's mouth gaped open. "No luck with Margaret?"

  She shook her head. "Quell was right. Margaret's gone totally offline. She ran to the Revelation Spire with a dartgun. I think she's going to make some kind of last stand up there. So with Natch gone and Margaret out of the picture, I guess it's up to me."

  The engineer's face turned white. "Jara, there are Council officers out there. Thousands of 'em."

  "I don't care. I'm not just going to sit here and do nothing."

  "Before they let you set foot on that stage, they'll stick you with black code darts like a pincushion."

  "Then they'll have to do it in front of a billion people."

  Horvil's face took on a look of panic. His eyes tilted upwards as if beseeching the Father of Bio/Logics for an infusion of sanity. "Listen to me," he said, grabbing Jara's tiny hands and clutching them tightly within his own. "We can delay the presentation. Nothing says we have to do ours before the Patel Brothers do theirs. We can just lay low and do the whole show some other time."

  "Are you completely deranged? If we put this off, the Patel Brothers will eat us for lunch. They'll pounce on us, and we'll have to spend the next month digging ourselves out."

  "So what? Is it really worth it, Jara? Maybe Margaret's right. Just let it go."

  "Horvil, these are our lives we're talking about here. This is our business. Don't you care about the fiefcorp and MultiReal and-and everything we've worked for in the past five years?"

  "No."

  Jara blanched, momentarily struck dumb. "No?"

  The engineer's face blossomed into a shy smile completely devoid of irony. "All I care about is not losing you."

  Jara sat stunned, unsure what to say. Was he trying to put her off her guard? Or maybe this had something to do with their unspoken rivalry for Natch's favor? Certainly the big lummox couldn't be sincere. In the three years she had known him, Horvil had barely uttered a single word that wasn't laced with sarcasm. Jara sighed. Why was it that as soon as she found her own moment of mental clarity, everything else had to slide out of focus?

  "Horvil," she said gently, bundling her hands inside the warm nest of the engineer's palms. "I hope you can understand this. But I have to make that presentation. I just have to. This isn't about the fief corp or Natch, or-or product release schedules. It's about me. It's about ... not backing down. Not failing."

  The engineer considered this for a moment. Jara couldn't imagine what thoughts were running through his head. Could a rich boy from the other side of London who had never had a moment of financial instability in his entire life still understand a crisis of conscience? "You have to promise me you'll be all right," he said.

  Jara smiled sadly. "I'm afraid that's not up to me."

  There was no burst of comprehension, no sudden epiphany behind Horvil's eyes. But finally he nodded and clenched the analyst's hands tightly. "Okay," he said. "So how can I help?"

  "You can help me navigate. Do you know if there's a back entrance to the arena?" She gestured through the window at the now-familiar sight of Council officers roaming freely around the Surina courtyard. Their ranks ringed the Revelation Spire like a white crown, and lined the boulevard to the arena's front doors as well. The Surina security guards were nowhere to be found. "Obviously, we can't go that way."

  Horvil jutted his chin out with determination, and the two of them rose to their feet. "As a matter of fact," he said, "there's a side entrance, through the museum here. Quell took me past it yesterday."

  Jara brushed off her trousers and gave the Surina statue a respectful nod. "Let's go then."

  The fiefcorp apprentices zipped past the statue of Tobi Jae Witt and down the hall. They dodged their way through a warren of curio tables and around a variety of large metal contraptions that had once housed Witt's experiments in artificial intelligence. The halls were now mostly empty of people. The few stragglers they did see were either terrified tourists looking for an escape route or Surina security forces hustling back towards the square.

  Something about the conversation in the atrium had completely changed Horvil's demeanor. Minutes ago, he had been fearful for Jara's safety. But now he was taking the lead, lumbering into corridor inter sections as if preparing to use his belly to shield her from a barrage of darts. Jara looked at the engineer with a broad smile on her face. She wondered whether Horvil planned on taking the stage with her, and whether she would try to stop him if he did.
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  Horvil and Jara crossed over a walkway that bridged the Center for Historic Appreciation with the auditorium. They tried to keep low to avoid attention, but most of the soldiers below were fixated on the Revelation Spire anyway. Hundreds of dart-rifle barrels poked from the notches in the Spire walls, daring the Council troops to come any closer.

  "The arena's just past that door," said Horvil. "The stage entrance is down the stairs."

  Jara opened the door to the arena and found herself confronted with a sea of white robes.

  The gathering crowd still stood at half a billion strong, but their ranks now included a large number of Defense and Wellness Council troops. The officers surrounded the stage and lined every aisle in the place. Just like last time, they silently shouldered their dartguns, their faces sculpted of stone.

  Horvil gulped. "You ready?"

  "As I'll ever be."

  They galloped down the stairs, opting now for speed rather than stealth. The two reached the bottom and rounded the last corner. Sure enough, the corridor angled upwards and ended in a single metal door that would lead them directly onto the arena stage. Jara had not expected this last approach to the stage to be unguarded. But when she saw the three people standing in front of the door, she gasped and snapped on a PokerFace 83.4b.

  Serr Vigal, the preeminent neural programmer.

  Len Borda, High Executive of the Defense and Wellness Council.

  And Natch, master of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp.

  Jara took an awkward step backwards, tripped, and fell neatly into Horvil's arms.

  She didn't realize that Len Borda was so tall. He towered over the rest of them like a thin rock pillar, his bald head its capstone. Anywhere in the world, she would have recognized his dour face instantly, whether or not he wore the Council's white robe and yellow star.

  Jara tried but could not shake her head clear of historical vertigo. Standing before her was the High Executive of the Defense and Wellness Council himself. The man who had led the world's most feared military and intelligence organization for fifty-seven years and counting. The man who had personally sparred with giants like Lucco Primo, Kordez Thassel and Marcus Surina. The man who had singlehandedly defeated the Economic Slump of the 310s. The man who had mastered the intricacies of his post long before Jara was born.