Infoquake

by David Louis Edelman

  "No," said Natch with a menacing growl.

  Horvil winced, causing his pudgy face to shrivel up like a prune. "Oh, fuck, Natch ... I forgot ... I didn't mean-"

  "Never mind." Natch gazed at the photos lining Horvil's wall, where dozens of fat, happy Horvil look-alikes with inky black hair frolicked in an assortment of lavish London manors. If Horvil were ever to fail, his family would absorb him back into its bosom at a moment's notice. But where would Natch go if his money ran out, especially now that he had spurned Vigal?

  "Why don't you hire an analyst, Natch?" offered Horvil. "Business strategy is what these people do. They can figure out how to get you through this."

  "I don't trust them," Natch muttered under his breath. He didn't want to mention the real reason he wouldn't seek professional advice: his Vault account was running low. In the past two weeks, he had made only one sale, to a doddering old L-PRACG politician whose mistress had been complaining about too much sweat on his upper lip.

  But after another few weeks of getting thrashed on the ROD circuit, Natch decided that Horvil was right. He needed professional advice, and he needed it quickly. It pained him to admit he was incapable of defeating Bolbund on his own, but he took solace in a saying by the great Lucco Primo: There are a thousand roads to success, and nine hundred of them begin with failure. So Natch swallowed his pride and began hunting around the Data Sea for an analyst he could afford.

  One analyst in Natch's price range instantly stood out from the rest. She was a woman named Jara, who lived on the other side of London from Horvil. Natch set the InfoGather 77 program loose on the Data Sea and instructed it to follow her scent. What InfoGather discovered surprised him: stellar notices from Primo's, five years' expe rience with the rising star Lucas Sentinel, a smattering of praise from the drudges. But then the trail abruptly vanished from the Data Sea, only to reemerge six months later with Jara a free agent and her prices far below market level. Natch fired off a message to the woman:

  Why is Lucas Sentinel spreading rumors about you? What did you do to piss him off? And why should I give you any work?

  The reply was almost instantaneous:

  I told Lucas he needed to grow a set of testicles. He decided to blacklist me instead. Don't bother hiring me unless you have a pair.

  Natch laughed out loud. If there was one thing he valued after his Shortest Initiation experience, it was nonconformity.

  Jara arrived at Natch's apartment in multi, a scant five seconds shy of their appointed meeting time. Natch found himself facing a tiny woman with Sephardic features and a massive thicket of curly hair. She was almost twenty years his senior. "You asked for a ninety-minute consultation," said Jara by way of greeting. "You realize that my standard consultation is forty-five minutes."

  "Anything worth doing is worth perfecting," said Natch, quoting Sheldon Surina.

  He could sense this woman Jara sizing him up with one eagle eye. Her piercing look said that she already knew about the Shortest Initiation, that she had already reconstructed his story and needed only the one look to confirm it. Natch stood tall and did not flinch. He had nothing to hide.

  "All right," said Jara. "Let's get to it."

  Natch brought her over to his workbench and summoned the EyeMorph program and several others in MindSpace, along with a passel of Captain Bolbund's competing brands. "Tell me why this asshole keeps beating me," he said simply.

  As she stepped inside the MindSpace bubble, Jara didn't pause for any social niceties. She eyed the herd of programs like an angry bull. "Give me twenty minutes," she said gruffly, and then reached up and began spinning the logical structures around with her virtual hands. Natch took a seat in a chair, activated a QuasiSuspension program, and let her work. As he drifted off into a light nap, he could sense her making thousands of queries on his files and wondered what kind of analysis routines she had developed to churn through all that data.

  Precisely twenty minutes later, Natch awoke from QuasiSuspension and joined Jara at the workbench. "So what is this clown doing that I'm not?" he asked.

  "The problem," replied Jara tersely, "is that Bolbund isn't doing anything you're not doing."

  Natch sat back down in his chair, puzzled. "Huh?"

  "His programs don't hold a candle to yours. They're sloppy, they're inadequate, and they'll probably fall apart in a pinch. But he's done a real mind job on you. He's got you convinced that you need to work harder and harder until you drop from exhaustion."

  "But for process' preservation, Jara, he launched his eye color program a whole day earlier than me. A day! That's life or death in this business."

  "You're still not getting it, Natch. What was the spec?"

  "She wanted an eye-morphing program to complement the-"

  Jara put up her hand. It was as tiny and delicate as a doll's. "That's your first mistake. You thought the customer knew what she wanted. She wanted an eye-morphing program to complement the colors of the flowers, right? No, what she wanted was a program to make her eyes match her flowers."

  The agitation flowed down to Natch's feet and made him rise from the chair in a futile attempt to pace it off. "What's the difference?"

  "Did you spend any time researching your client before you took on the project? Well, I did-just now, while you were dozing-and look what I found." She strode up to the room's lone viewscreen and gave an imperious nod.

  A woman materialized on the screen, probably in her mid-eighties but possibly approaching a hundred, decked out in a lavish purple robe that was the hallmark of membership in Creed Elan. vellux, read the caption beneath her. The two watched silently for a moment as Vellux puttered around her greenhouse pointing out different specimens of flowers. Five minutes into her nauseating pitch, Natch froze the display. "Okay, she sells flowers. I've already seen this promo. I don't think I'd live through a second viewing."

  Jara snorted, but the glimmer in her eyes was not unfriendly. "You may have seen it, but how closely were you watching? Did you notice this?" She stretched out her index finger to zoom in on a block of text in the corner of the screen: visit us at the creed elan annual convocation July 15-27. "Vellux probably didn't mention she was buying this ROD to use at a Creed Elan function, did she? If you were going to traffic flowers to the Elanners, Natch, what flowers would you sell? I'd pick bougainvilleas, lilacs, irises. Red, purple, and lavender, the official colors of the creed." Jara jerked her thumb to the left and focused on the flower vendor's face. "And here's another clue. Did you notice that her eyes are hazel?"

  Natch stewed quietly in the opposite corner of the room. He could see the gestalt of the situation coming into focus.

  "After five minutes, we've narrowed down the task considerably. Instead of creating a program to change anyone's eyes to match any color flower, we just need to create one that will change this woman's eyes to several shades of purple. Not only that, but we know which flowers to scan for in the retinal image. It's much easier to analyze an image for a specific genus of flower than to do the same for any flower; I'm willing to bet you can find dozens of sub-routines on the Data Sea that will do the trick.

  "That's what they call a tell. The customer says they want one thing, but their actions tell you they want something else. Something simple and easy to deliver. I'm willing to bet this Captain Bolbund character saw that right away, and that's why he jumped on this spec.

  "So not only did you take on the wrong task, but you went about it the wrong way. Why actually bother changing the color of her eyes? Why not just change other people's perceptions of them? That's a million times easier than all this shit you did with pigments and proteins. Good work, by the way, but who cares? Bolbund's ROD secretes a light pigment onto the lens of the eye through the tear ducts. Outside the eye, Natch, not inside of it. Clever. It's not a perfect solution, but nobody's going to notice in the middle of a creed convention. Best of all, Bolbund can skip the most intensive OCHRE programming and breeze right past hours of Plugenpatch validation."

&
nbsp; Natch looked at his hands, absorbing her analysis and storing it for later use. He could see why Jara's curt manner might have irritated Lucas Sentinel and gotten the other big fiefcorps to boycott her services, why she had suddenly found herself unemployable in the fiefcorp world and desperate enough to advertise cheap consulting services to lowly ROD coders like him. But Natch had no use for flattery. Not in his personal life and certainly not in his business.

  "So what if your analysis is wrong?" he said. "What if this Vellux woman isn't using the program at a Creed Elan function at all?"

  "Then someone else wins the business and you move on," replied Jara coolly. "All you've lost is a day or two."

  "EyeMorph is much better than that shit Bolbund threw together," he snapped.

  "No doubt. But what does that matter if nobody buys it?"

  "Vellux will figure it out. She'll see she bought a lousy product."

  "Maybe she will, maybe she won't. Do you know how hard it is to get your money back from a programmer? She'd have to go to the Cooperative, and that could take weeks. Not worth her time, not for such a trifling amount. Maybe by the time she notices, Bolbund will have fixed all those problems. He offers her a free upgrade, and she goes straight to him the next time she needs something."

  The frustration coalesced in his mind like steam, and he was unable to summon any intelligible words through the fog. Natch vented his anger through a brutal kick at the wall.

  "I feel like I'm going around in circles," he cried. "I'm just not getting anywhere. You ever hear that saying of Lucco Primo's about the three elements of success?"

  Jara took a seat in the chair that Natch had recently used for his nap and looked him over with a tough but sympathetic eye. "Ability, energy and direction," she said. "Yeah, I've heard it."

  "So what am I missing?"

  "That's easy," replied Jara. "The wisdom to know when to use them."

  Sheldon Surina once said, Progress is persistence.

  Natch was nothing if not persistent. He had chosen the track he would take-from ROD coding, to mastering a fiefcorp, to winning the number one rank on Primo's-and nothing would throw him off course. Soon, Natch was convinced that nothing existed outside of this track. It was only within this context that he could make sense of his humiliating failures to Captain Bolbund. The track may twist and turn, he told himself, but eventually it will lead me to my destination.

  In the meantime, Natch's most pressing problem was cash flow. His Vault account had been drained by weeks of fruitless competition, not to mention the new bio/logic programming bars and Jara's consultation. Even the normally oblivious Horvil took note of Natch's financial plight. The engineer began to discover subtle ways to help. He would pick up the tab for dinner, accidentally leave groceries behind at Natch's place, drastically overpay Natch back for drinks from the night before.

  Finally, Natch had to face the fact that ROD coding would not keep him afloat if he insisted on confronting Captain Bolbund again and again. Yet stanzas of Bolbund's wretched poetry kept creeping into his mind late at night, tramplike, refusing all attempts at eviction. Natch refused to give up, but he decided to put ROD coding on the back burner and scour the Data Sea for additional work. Something staid and square and predictable that would pay the bills.

  Natch quickly found an open position at a large assembly-line programming shop in southern Texas territory.

  "You don't want to go there," Jara advised him. "That's just connecting dots. Customization jobs for L-PRACGs handing out programs to twenty thousand people at once."

  "Can't they automate that crap?" Natch asked.

  "Too expensive. Al's could have done the grunt work, back before the Autonomous Revolt. But the time and expense to deal with all the contingencies for projects that big ... it's cheaper to just go assemblyline."

  Natch drifted around his apartment that night kicking walls and yelling at ceiling tiles. There had to be some other course, some place else in bio/logics where the opinions of the drudges didn't matter. But Natch could not find any, and his Vault account was nearly empty. He accepted the job. Now his descent to the bottom of the programmer's food chain was complete.

  The shop was located in a cavernous warehouse just south of the Sierra Madres. The area had once been the flowering center of New Alamo and the splinter Texan governments, overgrown with gaudy nouveau palaces and indulgent monuments to civic duty. But the Texans' decay had proved a potent fertilizer for programming factories that could make good use of their large open spaces. Natch hopped on a tube every morning to a nondescript building in the warehouse district, where he reported to one of several hundred identical workbenches on the floor. A program materialized before him in MindSpace, along with color-coded templates put together by some fiefcorp apprentice that instructed him where and how to make connections. There was no room for originality. The system automatically reported any deviations from the template to his supervisor.

  Most of Natch's fellow programmers didn't mind the tedium, the endless repetition and constant clanking from a hundred programming bars striking workbenches at once. Their minds were far away. What happened to them in real time mattered little, as long as they could strum and drum and hum along to the orgiastic frenzy of music on the Jamm network. Natch logged on once to see what all the fuss was about. He found a hundred thousand channels of music in every conceivable style, tempo and mood. Channels would spawn like newts, flourish for days or weeks as musicians jumped on and added their personal touch to the mix, then gradually shrivel up and die. Until then, Natch had thought his co-workers were thumping their workbenches with their programming bars to stave off boredom; now he realized he was listening to the rhythm sections of a thousand different Data Sea symphonies. Natch logged off in disgust and found a good white-noise program to block out the din. He detested music.

  Natch earned his assembly-line pittance by day, but he was hardly idle at night. He spent countless hours staring at intricate blocks of programming code in MindSpace, not actually making connections, but simply absorbing the patterns and progressions, waiting for the inevitable blast of inspiration.

  His next vision came to him in the dead hours before dawn.

  Natch went to bed early that night and activated QuasiSuspension 109.3, sick of the eternal struggle to find sleep. The program quickly led him there. He used the highest setting, which should have insulated him from the everyday noises of shifting walls and floors.

  Yet somehow Natch found himself bolting upright at three in the morning, his face glistening with sweat.

  He felt like a lens had snapped into place and brought something wide and terrible into focus. Natch looked for the familiar objects around his bedroom, the cheap bedside shelf protruding from the wall, the pus-green carpet, the viewscreen that had been showing a light snow on Kilimanjaro when he lay down. Now all he could see were bones. The bones of impossible animals with four, five and six appendages, bones scorched free of flesh and arrayed as furniture.

  Natch tore himself out of bed and grabbed a robe from the disembodied index finger on which it hung. He burst out of his apartment, heading for the balcony that stood at the end of the hallway. As Natch rushed out the balcony door, a platform slid from the side of the building with a soft click. He feverishly gripped the alabaster railing and watched Angelos go through its typical early-morning routine. Skeletal tube trains stuffed with cargo rushed silently to and fro, anxious to make deliveries before the morning rush. Viewscreens here and there glared seductively at passersby with visions of dead products and ghoulish fashions. A fleet of bleached-white hoverbirds bearing the yellow star of the Council took wing over the Hollywood hills. Haunted tenements performed a graveyard jig with one another, here sidestepping to make room for the neighboring building on the left, there elbowing aside the building on the right to accommodate freshly awoken tenants. Natch could hear no sound but the soft crunch of pencil-thin bones beneath his feet.

  As Natch gazed at all this, the bare skeletal s
tructures he saw began to fill out-not with flesh, but with the washed-out hues of MindSpace code. The city was becoming one vast bio/logic program. A compendium of data, numbers, named entities, subroutines, variables. Pieces, no matter how independent, no matter how abstruse, inevitably connected to a larger and more complex whole. Tendrils snaking invisibly between each node, binding everyone together with mathematical formulae.

  And the people ... the people.... The L-PRACG politicians stumbling from meeting halls after late-night sessions, the businesspeople shuffling mechanically to the tube stations and public multi facilities, the private security guards exchanging curt words with their Defense and Wellness Council counterparts, and yes, there were even a few tourists up and about at this hour.... Weren't the people just one more set of objects to be manipulated? Weren't their actions governed by deeply ingrained sets of instructions, and their ideas ultimately predictable? They could be made to obey commands. They, like programming code, could be manipulated.

  Natch saw Angelos floating within the giant MindSpace bubble that was the world: his MindSpace, his world. He could practically hear his bio/logics proctor at the Proud Eagle on his first day at the workbench. Reach into your satchels, pull out a programming bay: Any one, it doesn't matter! You have twenty-six bars, marked A to Z, each with three to six separate functions. Twelve commonly recognized hand gestures. The grip. The point. The hitch. Unlimited possibilities before you! Unlimited combinations. This was not strictly true; Natch was wise enough to know that the number of options at his disposal were not infinite. Mathematics dictated that there were limits. But even if his options were not unlimited, they were enough-enough to accomplish anything he was likely to dream. And if he could find some combination of tools capable of manipulating any structure of data, why not people too? Who was to say that the human nodes within his bubble were immune to the natural laws of cause and effect?