Infoquake (20 page)

Natch crossed his arms in front of his chest and sulked. He tried
to look at anything in the room but Serr Vigal. "I don't see how you
can make a profit doing all that," he said. "I mean, who's going to wait
three years for all of you to coordinate an upgrade to some obscure
piece of cranial nerve software?"

Vigal shut off the diagram with a snap of his fingers, revealing the
cheap carpeting and second-hand furniture of Natch's apartment once
more. "You're beginning to understand life in a memecorp," said the
neural programmer quietly. "We can't make a profit. We can't just rely
on Primo's ratings or the whims of the marketplace to test our products for us. Because, as you say, people do not have the time or the
inclination to pay attention to most neural software. If we didn't get
outside funding, I would have to close up shop and send everybody
home."

"Then why do it at all?"

"Because I enjoy it," said Vigal, "and because someone has to."

There was a long pause. Natch could feel 9971.7 mocking him
from its berth in MindSpace. "So what do you want me to do? Abandon
the whole thing?"

"I want you to do exactly what you're doing," replied Vigal, "but
slow down. Natch, you've created an excellent long-term plan for the future of 9971.7. Tomorrow, you can begin by rolling back the changes
you've put in place, and then we can start to enact that plan one piece
at a time."

Natch had no response. He had expected Vigal to point him to
some hidden flaw in the program architecture that only a wise and seasoned programmer could see. Instead, his guardian had only confirmed
that the problem did not lay with Natch; the problem was the
memecorp system itself.

Silently, Natch cursed the day he had ever signed on to an apprenticeship with Serr Vigal, and wondered if he would make it through
the rest of his apprenticeship without going completely insane.

A few weeks later, Natch abandoned his grandiose plan for the neural
software. He hadn't lost confidence in his abilities; on the contrary, he
was more certain than ever that he could bring the program to a higher
plain of functionality. But Natch had decided to leave Vigal's employ
in eight months, when his contract ended. Until then, he would get
much more experience trying his hand at a variety of projects than tinkering with just one.

Serr Vigal took the news coolly but with a tinge of disappointment. "Where will you go?" he asked his protege. "The fiefcorps?"

"That's not the place for me right now," said Natch, leaving the
obvious unspoken: he still suffered from the taint of the Shortest Initiation. Hiring someone with Natch's notoriety could provoke a boycott from the creeds and the L-PRACGs, or a backlash from the
drudges. "I've decided to set myself up on the Data Sea as a ROD
coder," the youth continued. "Like Horvil."

"Are you sure, Natch? ROD coding can be extremely-"

Natch cut the discussion short. "Yes, I'm sure," he said.

Vigal did not begrudge his young apprentice's decision. In fact, he
seemed to forget all about it over the next few months. Natch quietly
upgraded a number of optic nerve programs to the new Plugenpatch
specs, working at the glacial pace his master had requested. When
Natch multied to Vigal's office to collect his end-of-contract bonus and
say goodbye, the neural programmer responded with a surprised "Oh!"
and gave him a feeble hug. Natch could see a host of worries fluttering
through his guardian's head, but Vigal had evidently decided to keep
them to himself.

Thus ended Natch's brief career in the memecorp sector.

RODs were Routines On Demand, bio/logic programs that catered to
the indulgently rich. There were no contracts, no guarantees, no fringe
benefits. ROD coders simply scouted the Data Sea for a spec they could
engineer quickly, rushed to build it before someone else did, and then
launched it in hopes that their patron would like it enough to pay. The
applications for RODs ranged from the frivolous (Fab-a-lous Nails 15,
now with programmable cuticles") to the lascivious (Tit-o-rama 8,
the total breast bounce controller") to the purely ridiculous (DiscSpeak 3c, "for the true connoisseur of ancient recorded-sound emulation-now with pop, hiss and warble!").

An expedient programmer could typically launch two or three
RODs per week. Horvil had maintained that pace for over a year before
moving on to the more specialized field of bio/logic engineering.

"Let's estimate three sales a week," said Natch to his old friend one
night as they strode around London discussing career options. He summoned a virtual calculator in the brisk spring air and began plugging
in numbers. "So we'll multiply three by the average asking price for an
ROD, subtract out equipment and overhead ..."

Horvil sliced his hand through Natch's holographic calculator.
"Wait a minute, Natch," he said, shaking his head. "It's not that easy."

"What do you mean?"

"I said I launched two or three RODs a week. I didn't say anybody
bought 'em. You never sell all the RODs you launch. Sometimes you get
beaten to the punch by another programmer. Or your patron changes
his mind and pulls the spec from the Data Sea just for the fuck of it.
Or you're sabotaged by the competition. There are assholes out there
that post fake ROD requests, you know."

Natch frowned and adjusted his numbers downwards. "Well, it's
still not that bad-you've just got to factor in recurring revenue. You know, maintenance fees, subscription fees, upgrade fees. That's how
the fiefcorps make a profit, right?"

The stocky engineer chuckled, pleased to be in the know for once.
"Nope, can't count on any of that either. These are RODs, Natch-you
have to build 'em so quickly that they won't withstand any kind of
heavy use. The shelf life for a ROD is about twelve to fifteen weeks,
and that's only if you've done your homework. After that, the buyers
just get bored and move on to the next new thing."

Natch began to wonder if he had made a rash choice in leaving
Vigal's employ. Memecorp work might be torpid and dull, but at least
it provided a sense of stability. But once Natch stepped out on his own,
nothing was guaranteed. A year from now, he could be trolling the old
cities and living in trashed-up skyscrapers like the diss, like his mother
had done.

But certainly Natch could make a decent living in the ROD
coding game if Horvil could. He had a tremendous respect for his hivemate's intellect, but Horvil's business sense was a little skewed. People
tended to fall into the ROD world because they couldn't hack it in the
real bio/logics market. But Natch never doubted that he had the skills
and the pedigree to make it to the top ranks of the fiefcorps. He was
not on his way down; he was on his way up.

All Natch needed to do was persevere, produce quality work, and
establish a reputation. Eventually, the ill wind that drifted around him
would dissipate and the brand on his forehead would fade; the Shortest
Initiation would be permanently tossed into the dustbin of Yesterday's
News. Then the channelers and capitalmen and fiefcorp masters who
patrolled the Data Sea for fresh talent would find him, and he would
resume his rightful place in the bio/logics world.

Natch's end-of-contract bonus was enough to keep him afloat for a month or two. Vigal offered to buy his young protege a set of bio/logic
programming bars as a parting gift, but Natch declined and bought
the bars himself. He did not want to feel beholden to his guardian for
anything. It was not an idle investment; the extended function sets on
the new bars would enable him to take coding shortcuts and thus program faster.

Now that Natch had emerged from Vigal's shadow, the city of
Omaha held no appeal to him. He hopped around the globe looking
for a place to settle, and finally found an apartment in Angelos that
suited his tastes. The place made Horvil's spare room look like a palace
by comparison. Still, it had everything he would need to start a ROD
business. There was a bed to sleep in, space to hold a decent-sized
workbench, and proximity to downtown Angelos, where the public
multi facilities were abundant and cheap.

The next morning, he got to work.

Natch decided to begin with a field he was familiar with, so he
chose optics. He skimmed the Data Sea and found a request for an eye
transformation program that looked like it might be a good place to
start. Bio/logics had made setting one's eye color as easy as editing a
database entry, but the woman who had posted this request wanted
something more. Vellux of Beijing wanted her eye color to sync with
the colors of nearby flowers. In a room of violets, she wanted violet
eyes; in a field of ivy, she wanted green.

It seemed like a simple enough programming task. A morning
spent nosing through the Dr. Plugenpatch archives helped him better
his understanding of the optical programming interface. Natch
fetched the OCHRE specs from Dr. Plugenpatch, projected them onto
his workbench in MindSpace, and started planning his strategy.

Natch found plenty of machines floating around the eyeball that he
could harness to accomplish his task. Thanks to the OCHREs, he
could query the iris and determine the color of its pigment; he could
also query the retina and parse the colors in the user's line of sight. But a number of vexing questions remained. How would the program
identify flowers in the retinal image? How would it distinguish
between petals, stems and leaves? How would the program funnel the
millions of shades of yellows and reds and purples into a narrow palette
of 16 colors? What if Vellux was looking at seven different flowershow would the program rank the order of importance of these flowers
and assign an appropriate eye color?

The longer Natch struggled to unravel these tangled questions, the
more questions arose to ensnare him. Normally, it took hours for the
body to process color changes through the personal preferences database. Unless this woman Vellux planned to stand still for long periods
of time, he would need to find an alternate solution. Luckily, he found
a number of sub-routines on the Data Sea that would do the job
quicker. Natch chose one called Weagel's Eye Wizard, which had
received excellent ratings from Primo's a few months back. But the
program required access to a batch of proteins for building the pigmentation ... which could only be done by requesting resources from
another OCHRE nearby in the choroid ... but the OCHRE in the
choroid needed to register its supply requirements with the brainstem.

It took Natch most of the day and into the night to come up with
a satisfactory blueprint for the project. At six in the morning, he sat
back and took stock of his progress. The holographic model floating
above his workbench looked like a mutated grasshopper, but Natch
knew he could not afford to trifle with aesthetics this time around. As
he was examining his handiwork, the building interrupted him to
slide a bowl of hot oatmeal onto the kitchen counter. When was the last
time I ate? Natch asked himself. He could not remember.