Infoquake (22 page)

"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."

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 structures 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?

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.