Infoquake

by David Louis Edelman

  He reached out with enormous hands, each finger a bio/logic programming bar. The city of Angelos responded to his commands. It spun like a globe on an axis. It shifted and shuddered and jittered where he pointed. The world was his ...

  With the exception of an immense and incomprehensible mass hovering just beyond the horizon ... a terrible celestial mass that could reshape humanity, if only he could reach it....

  Natch rushed back to his apartment with his mind ablaze. He curled up into a fetal position on his chair-and-a-half and sketched an inventory of new tools with fiery holographic letters in the air.

  Sex Stability Friendship

  Power Greed Hunger

  Money Guilt Lust

  Love Desire Laziness

  Vanity Novelty Suffering

  On through the morning he wrote, brushing aside the urgent wake-up calls he had set for his assembly-line programming job. The work would not be necessary now.

  He awoke on the couch in mid-afternoon, unable to remember how he had gotten there, but confident he was back on track at last.

  Horvil sat upside-down on Natch's chair-and-a-half with his feet propped on the chair back and his head hanging near the ground. His face was a jumbled stew of concern and fear topped with a thin crust of nonchalance.

  "So you're willing to help me out," said Natch, eyes ablaze. He was practically sprinting from one end of the apartment to the other, teeth chattering and fingertips aquiver.

  "It's a little unorthodox, I guess," said Horvil, "but heck, I've known you were unorthodox since you were six."

  "I just don't want you to back out at the last minute."

  "I won't. But ..."

  "But what?"

  The engineer threw his arms to the ground in exasperation, a move that probably would have sent him tumbling onto his head if he were present in the flesh. "Do you always need to have an evil nemesis, Natch?" he cried. "First Brone, now Captain Bolbund. Can't you succeed on your own without having to beat somebody?"

  Natch gave a hollow and humorless grin. "You can't win unless somebody else loses."

  Horvil flexed his jaw for a moment and watched his friend strut energetically around the room. Natch could see a thousand witty rejoinders crowding into his mind, eager to sharpen their claws on his self-importance. "Okay," the engineer sighed after a minute. "What can I do to help?"

  Two days later, Horvil caught up with the flower vendor named Vellux at the annual Creed Elan convocation. The engineer looked quite out of place at this year's event, not because of his size but because he was the only one in the conference hall not draped from head to toe in some shade of purple. Instead, Horvil wore a crisp dun uniform he had borrowed from a friend working in L-PRACG security.

  "You are Vellux?" Horvil announced in the authoritative tone of voice Natch had instructed him to use.

  The old woman, standing behind a table of lush passionflowers, greeted Horvil with a bland smile. Her eyes shone a soft violet. "And you are?"

  "I'm here as part of an investigation into unethical ROD coding practices." No names, no credentials, Natch had said. She won't ask. She'll think you're with the Meme Cooperative, or Primo's, or some special task force from the Defense and Wellness Council. But Horvil was paranoid about being recognized, despite all of Natch's reassurances, and had insisted on scrubbing his public directory profile for good measure. "Have you recently purchased any bio/logic programming from this man?" Horvil gestured at a viewscreen on the wall, where a gaggle of Creed Elanners were bestowing a garland of flowers upon an addled woman of the diss who was clearly not interested. The engineer erased the display and summoned a particularly unflattering still of Bolbund, caught in midsmirk.

  The flower vendor nodded, puzzled. "Yes, as a matter of fact I did."

  "I see. Have you purchased any of the following products: NozeGay 59, Aura of the Beach 12c, Flaming Lipps 44d, Floral Eyes 14-"

  "Floral Eyes!" cried Vellux excitedly. A wrinkled man in the next stall arched an eyebrow at her in disapproval, and the woman quickly lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Yes, Floral Eyes 14. That's the one."

  Horvil frowned and tapped his foot for a moment. Don't tell her what you're doing, Natch had said. Make her think you're talking to someone over Confidential Whisper. Let her wonder for a minute or two. Then the engineer abruptly motioned for Vellux to turn around and face the viewscreen. The old woman complied, with a nervous glance towards her table of passionflowers. "This will just take a moment," said Horvil. He bisected the viewscreen with a gesture, summoning a mirror on the left half and a series of flowers on the right. Daisies, buttercups, baby's breath, sunflowers. He gave an exaggerated stare at the image of Vellux in the mirror, took note of her obviously mismatched eye color, and shook his head sadly. "Bolbund, Bolbund, Bolbund," he muttered with a world-weary sigh for effect.

  The confused flower vendor huddled inside her purple robe and frowned. "It's been working perfectly since I bought it," she said. "I don't know what happened.... Should I return the program? Should I get a refund, or, or ... report this to someone?"

  Act surprised. Look around quickly. Make her believe that you've said too much and now you're trying to cover up. "Madam," said Horvil, blooming into a nervous smile, "I'm not allowed to make recommendations on bio/logic programs. Please don't make any changes on my account. It's nothing. Pretend I was never here. If we get enough evidence to move the investigation forward, we'll be in touch with you."

  Vellux smiled wanly and nodded, looking completely unconvinced.

  "Towards Perfection," said Horvil, and gave her a formal bow. Then he was gone. The entire encounter took about five minutes.

  That afternoon, Natch logged his first sale of the EyeMorph program.

  Natch spent the week tracking down Captain Bolbund's best customers. He did so by personally following the man, who turned out to be as offensive to the eyes as his poetry was to the ear. Bolbund had a body like a misshapen bowling pin, with an uneven beard and a nose like a wedge of putty.

  But Natch did not fear his rival now that he had put his finger on Bolbund's mortal flaw: vanity. It was this vanity that led him to conduct his business out in the open, where others could see and post reports on the Data Sea. Where people could observe him personally delivering programs to his customers and reciting lines of his gutwrenching poetry. Natch had to admit that it was a clever gimmick; customers appreciated the attention, and onlookers remembered his name. During the next few days, Natch and Horvil watched him sell two phallic enhancement programs to old Creed Objectivv devotees and repackage the same eyelash curling program for a handful of debutantes. By the end of the week, they had compiled a sizeable list of clients and the RODs Bolbund had sold them.

  The two quickly developed a solid routine. Natch would buy copies of Captain Bolbund's routines (using Horvil's money, of course) and study them in MindSpace for hours on end. Cracking into the programming code was no simple matter, even for such retrograde technology as a ROD. But even without root-level access, Natch could glean a lot of information just by eyeballing a program's surface and running it through a battery of tests. Within a few weeks, he could reverse-engineer Bolbund's code blindfolded and put together improved versions in mere hours. Once a ROD was completed, Natch would pass the customer's name and the script on to Horvil for his unique brand of social engineering.

  Horvil was having the time of his life. He pinned bits of ceremonial bric-a-brac to his costume like medals, and constantly pestered his old hivemate with new character improvisations. Horvil had lived his whole life in decadent boredom, every move choreographed by an autocratic family. All Natch had to do was show the engineer a glimpse of spontaneity, and Horvil was dancing to his music.

  Natch was astonished at how quickly Captain Bolbund's operation folded under pressure. He expected to run into a few snags along the way: programs he could not duplicate, customers he could not sway. But these problems never materialized. Bolbund's customers continued to roll over an
d switch to Natch's brands. Credits continued to accumulate in Natch's Vault account.

  Of course, Bolbund did not accept the ravaging of his client list without a fight. But once again, Natch was shocked by his rival's stupidity.

  The whole affair came to a head one morning as Natch was swigging down a cup of nitro and scanning the drudge headlines. The previous night he had relished his first mention in the Primo's investment guide.

  Then he received a multi request from a Meme Cooperative official.

  Natch activated a serenity program and granted the multi request. Within seconds, he was greeted by a smartly dressed woman flashing the official crest of the Meme Cooperative, the ancient Hebrew character of the aleph on a field of azure.

  "Towards Perfection," said the woman. She then proceeded to reel off her name, position, division and supervisor, along with a string of unnecessary provisos and notifications.

  "Perfection," replied Natch, his anxiety now well under control. "What can I do for you?"

  "You can tell me what your relationship is with this man." The Cooperative official held out her hand and flashed the same obnoxious picture of Bolbund that Horvil had been using in his charades.

  Natch rolled his eyes. "Captain Bolbund," he moaned with distaste. "We've been scrapping over ROD customers for months now. He just can't accept that I'm beating him."

  "Well, apparently he has gone over the line." The woman nodded towards the nearest viewscreen and began playing back a heated discussion between one of Natch's new customers and an ugly man with large ears. The video was obviously captured on the sly. Natch couldn't make out the words passing between the two, but they nearly came to blows before the encounter was over. "Do you know this man?" said the Cooperative woman, freezing the display and tapping one of the interrogator's floppy ears.

  "No," Natch replied truthfully.

  "This man has been passing himself off as a Meme Cooperative official," she said. Natch looked closer at the display and noticed that the imposter's uniform was nearly identical to that of the woman standing in his apartment. "He's been telling people that he's conducting an official investigation into `unethical ROD coding practices.' When we caught up with him, he told us that this Captain Bolbund has been paying him to put on this charade."

  Natch was by now the very model of unconcern. "So what does this have to do with me?"

  "Apparently, Bolbund specifically requested that his accomplice tell people that you were the one under investigation."

  Natch masked his laughter by burying his face in his mug of nitro. You fumbling idiot! he chided Bolbund in his head. The key to the whole scam was to not mention any specific names or organizations whatsoever. After all, who could accuse Horvil of misrepresenting himself if he never made any representations in the first place?

  "I don't know anything about it," Natch said at length to the Cooperative official.

  The woman nodded perfunctorily. She had already made the mental leap to the next case. "The Cooperative will be in touch with you if we need any further information." She added another litany of bureaucratic language and was about to cut the multi connection when she had a sudden thought. "This Bolbund-what is he a `captain' of anyway?"

  Natch shrugged. "I have no idea."

  And that was that.

  Natch never heard another word back from the Meme Cooperative about the investigation, but was pleased to discover via the drudges that Captain Bolbund had received a stiff fine and a ninety-day suspension of his license to sell programming code on the Data Sea. Ninety days was an aeon in this business. Natch breathed a sigh of relief, and not only because he had vanquished his competitor; now Horvil could drop his silly role-playing and Natch could do business in earnest. For months afterward, Natch kept waiting for a reprisal to come his way from the Cooperative or some other legislative body, but none ever appeared.

  The final chapter of the Bolbund saga occurred the night of the Meme Cooperative visit, when Horvil took Natch on a whirlwind tour of the London bars to celebrate. Natch was still earning less in a month than the top fiefcorps paid their apprentices as a daily wage. But he had halted his downward slide. He had proven that, by sheer force of will, he could bring the world in line with the visions in his mind's eye. Natch never drank or used alcohol simulation programs, but was content to watch Horvil get pleasantly sauced. At the end of the night, Natch fired off a parting message to Captain Bolbund with Horvil's enthusiastic backing:

  Please don't think I'm rude If I tell you YOU GOT SCREWED. Guess you finally met your match From now on, look out for NATCH.

  Natch's challenges did not end there. When Bolbund spread the word about what had happened to him, the ROD coding community took it as a personal affront. ROD coders followed a loose, bohemian ethos where nothing was taken too seriously and thievery was allowed for sport but not for money. Natch's ruse-or at least Bolbund's version of it-violated those principles.

  And so Natch had to endure several blatant attempts by third-rate programmers to sabotage his products, steal his customers, and savage his reputation. But this did not faze him. Natch quickly developed a reputation on the Data Sea for his humorless determination and his inability to accept defeat. Beat him once, and he would not stop until he had humiliated you three or four times in return-and fired a few warning shots at your friends and associates to boot.

  Captain Bolbund returned to the business after his ninety-day suspension. But by this point, the ROD coding community had come to the consensus that the best way to deal with Natch was to leave him alone and grease his path up and out of the business altogether. An enterprising young woman in Sudafrica even made a profit out of it by selling a program called NatchWatch that kept other coders abreast of Natch's activities.

  Bolbund decided to steer clear of the angry young programmer.

  Natch spent another two years honing his skills in the ROD game. By the time Primo's took notice and tagged him as a rising star, Natch's services were in high demand among the elites. He had also acquired a long list of enemies, which was an even greater indicator of success as far as Natch was concerned. Nobody likes success but the successful, the ruthless financier Kordez Thassel had once said.

  Eventually, Natch decided to move out of his cramped Angelos apartment and settle somewhere else. He chose the city of Shenandoah, whose coffers were overflowing with fiefcorp revenues and whose local L-PRACGs were among the most libertarian in the world. With another financial boost from Horvil, he could even afford a place that included its own private multi stream and a small garden of daisies off the living room.

  But the money was still abysmal compared to the sums the capitalmen were tossing into the bio/logic fiefcorp sector every day. The ranks of the diss were thinning, and those of the fiefcorps were inflating. There was talk on the Data Sea of another Great Boom like the one that had preceded Marcus Surina's death.

  Natch spent another year freelancing, taking on the occasional ROD but concentrating more on neurological software. As his profile rose, so did his prospects. Natch received multi requests and lunch invitations every week from capitalmen and channelers trying to get a sense of his future plans. They seemed to be competing with one another to see who could slip in the most dismissive reference to the Shortest Initiation. Many of the same fiefcorp masters who had tried to shanghai Natch into worthless apprenticeships a few years ago were now sugaring him with promises of large signing bonuses.

  He even heard from a few groups in the bio/logics underground who promised him a fortune writing black code off the grid. The future lay not with fiefcorps and memecorps, they said, but with clandestine teams of programmers sponsored by rich creed organizations and lunar tycoons, programmers who were being paid to circumvent the restrictive laws of central government and stretch the boundaries of bio/logics.

  Natch got into the habit of taking the tube out to the great sequoia forests and zigzagging from station to station for hours while he stared up at the trees and tried on alternative care
er paths like gloves.

  "You've done really well with RODs," said Jara during one of her frequent consultations. "But isn't it time you set your sights a little higher?"

  Horvil agreed. "I never thought I would be the one telling you to get some ambition," he said mockingly. "There's bigger targets out there, and a fuck of a lot more money!"

  Contrary to what Jara and Horvil thought, however, Natch had not settled into a rut. He was biding his time, saving up his resources, marshaling his abilities. He wanted to plan his next move carefully so he would not fail again.

  One cold winter night at three a.m., he sent a Confidential Whisper to Serr Vigal.

  The neural programmer didn't mind at all being woken up; in fact, he was overjoyed to hear from his former protege. Ten minutes later, Natch hopped on an Omaha-bound tube. Within an hour, he was standing in Vigal's foyer. Natch was surprised to find their friendly hug metamorphosing into a real flesh-and-blood embrace.

  True to form, Serr Vigal had changed little in the past few years. Memecorp business had risen with the tide of the economy, but this had also caused his fundraising duties to swell to epic proportions. Vigal had just returned from a meeting with some of the minor bodhisattvas at Creed Surina and was due at the sybaritic resort of 49th Heaven in two days to speak about newly proposed OCHRE standards.

  "So what causes the prodigal son to visit his old guardian in the middle of the night?" asked Vigal between sips of green tea.

  "I need your advice," said Natch.

  "Oh?"

  "I'm ready to start my own fiefcorp."

  Later that morning, Horvil and Jara agreed to come over to assist in the planning. Following standard etiquette, which said that crucial business decisions should be made in person, the two caught a hoverbird across the Atlantic from London. They met in the flesh for the first time on the runway and gave each other formal bows. By the time they arrived in Omaha, Horvil and Jara were already grumbling at each other like longtime companions.