Infoquake (11 page)

Unfortunately, Vigal's first controversial decision sparked his first
major conflict. Lora was a quick learner, but the work was difficult and
the rest of the team unforgiving. Mistake piled on top of mistake while
the apprentices were crunching to hit major deadlines. Once the
project was completed, a group of Lora's fellow apprentices approached
Vigal and demanded her dismissal. It's impossible to work under these con ditions, they said. We have friends with much better credentials who are still
out there in the ranks of the disc.

Vigal refused to terminate her contract, but he had selfish reasons.

He had fallen in love with her.

Over the next year, Lora found a place in the company as Vigal's
muse. The very sight of her fierce blue eyes inspired flights of fancy,
flights that glided Vigal over distant mathematical lands few had seen.
And yet, one touch of her hand on his shoulder was enough to ground
him and bring a sense of direction to his wandering intellect.

The memecorp began to experience great success. Soon, Serr Vigal
had become one of the world's pre-eminent neural programmers, a fixture on the scientific lecture circuit, and a much-sought-after expert on
brainstem issues. The other apprentices in the company suspected that
Vigal and Lora were lovers, but they looked at the company's accomplishments and decided to give their master some leeway.

Lora frequently accompanied Vigal to scientific conferences and
fundraising pitches. One month, Vigal sent her to the remote colony
of Furtoid to prepare for such a conference. Two days later, the entire
colony was quarantined with a sudden epidemic. Whether the virus
was deliberately engineered or simply an evolutionary fluke was never
determined.

Portions of Furtoid remained quarantined for months. Four hundred forty-seven people died in those sections of the colony.

Including Lora.

Vigal went into a deep depression when he heard the news. The future
had seemed so bright and his own ambitions so limitless. He was just
starting to notice the void in his heart that men often discover in their
thirties, a void that neither career nor accomplishment can fill. Lora
had filled that void for Vigal. Now that she was gone, life seemed bleak and purposeless.

But when Vigal arrived at distant Furtoid to claim her body, he
had a surprise waiting for him. Lora had left behind a child, ex utero,
at the colony's hiving and birthing facility. The child had been there
in the gestation chambers since soon after conception. Rumors
abounded that Lora had taken a lover, but the hive had been unable to
locate a father.

Suddenly, Vigal found himself standing on Lora's track, looking
straight ahead at that long stretch of open country after the scheduled
stop at career and before the end of the line. The distance seemed
unimaginably vast. To Vigal, it did not seem to be part of the natural
order of things for a man to travel such a long distance alone.

When the boy emerged from gestation, the neural programmer
had himself appointed legal guardian. Then he transferred the child to
a hive facility back on Earth, in Omaha.

He named the child Natch.

Many years later, Natch would say that his greatest skill was his knack
for acquiring enemies. He was only half joking.

Natch made his first enemies before the age of five. He had not
learned to speak until he was almost three-an eternity in an age of
bio/logics-and this set him apart from the other children. The hive's
larger boys took notice of his solitude and quiet demeanor, his propensity for sitting alone in corners. They decided to examine this odd
child the only way they knew how: with their fists.

One morning, Natch emerged from his room and found five of his
hivemates waiting. They were older boys, uglier than he, and sullen
since birth. Natch instinctively knew what was about to happen and
felt a split-second of astonishment. What did I do wrong? he thought.
Then the boys jumped him. The next few minutes were a tumult of
kicks, punches and scratches that left Natch reeling on the floor in
pain.

He limped back into his room, having learned a valuable lesson:
Always be on your guard, because the universe needs no reasons to
inflict punishment.

Perhaps the boys were merely looking for a cringe or a whimper of
fear, something that would validate their nascent theories of power and
weakness. But Natch refused to give them this satisfaction. The next
morning, he emerged from his room as always and marched without
hesitation towards the waiting band of thugs. They gave him plenty of
opportunity to flee, but the stubborn child refused to veer off his determined path. Instead, he waited silently while the bullies had their way
with him. The beatings continued the next day, and the next, and the
next.

The proctors were not blind. Natch's floor in the hive could barely contain four dozen children; no space remained for privacy. But
bio/logic technology did not work in Natch's favor. The OCHREs
floating in his bloodstream had been battle-tested for generations in
much more rigorous environments than a suburban hive; they could
heal minor cuts and bruises within minutes. The bullies could inflict
little real damage on him until they were old enough to pull black
code off the Data Sea.

The proctors decided to let the conflict play itself out.

But how can we just sit there and watch the boy suffer like that? argued
one of the proctors in a staff meeting. We can't just let this go on forever.

Her superior was unsympathetic. We're not here to coddle these children. There are sixty billion people out there waiting to chew them up and spit
them out. The headmaster nodded towards the flexible glass window, as
if this thin membrane could ward off the world's suffering. Outside,
tree branches scraped greedily against the window like claws. These
children need to be tough in order to thrive.

So we're trying to create a generation of martyrs. Is that it?

Long pause. Have faith in the boy, Petaar. He's not getting hurt, is he?
We won't let this go on forever, but let's give him a few more days to figure
things out for himself before we intervene.

Nobody ever explained this decision to Natch, however, and to
him the proctors' inaction felt like indifference. This was a greater
blow than any the young bullies could deliver. Didn't the proctors drill
into the children's heads every day that the world was run by logical,
impartial laws? Everything happened for a reason, they said. Every
effect was traceable to a root cause. But this daily punishment had no
rational basis that Natch could see, and though the proctors could see
him suffering, they remained mum. The boy pondered his dilemma for
days on end, and spent his nights wrestling with cognitive dissonance.

One night, Natch awoke before dawn with his mind on fire.

The world around him dimmed and blanked out until all he could
see were his hands in front of his face. And then the room exploded with colors. A frenzy of lights burned far away up over his head, while
strange hollow voices began speaking to him of things he didn't understand. Random phrases in imaginary languages. The names of dead
kings. Algorithms and encrypted messages. Natch lay quietly in the
dark, consumed by fear, and let the vision wash over him.

When dawn arrived, he knew what he had to do.

Natch missed roll call that morning. The proctor Petaar scrambled
to his room, fearing the worst. She found the boy on the floor, trapped
beneath a heavy bureau and struggling to breathe.

The hive descended into pandemonium. After tending to Natch,
the proctors quickly rounded up the thugs who had been tormenting
him. They grilled the boys behind locked doors for two hours and
extracted a number of tearful confessions. But the bullies were unanimous in insisting they had nothing to do with burying Natch under
the bureau. And the toys missing from Natch's room? thundered Petaar.
Did they run off by themselves? The boys had no explanation. The proctors weighed the evidence against the five bullies for much of the afternoon, and then summarily expelled them.

When he heard the news, Natch felt a cold thrill run up his spine.
It was his first taste of victory, and he found it an intoxicating brew.

The boys had actually been innocent of their crime; the entire incident was a setup. Natch had contrived to trap himself beneath the
bureau by propping it up with blocks and then slowly removing the
supports. He had sketched out the details of his plan in the early
morning hours with the zeal of a master draftsman, until no flaws were
visible to the naked eye. He had long since forgotten the source of his
inspiration.

But Natch's ploy succeeded in totally unexpected dimensions as
well. The proctors who had ignored his plight now walked around
with looks of guilt etched on their faces. Petaar went out of her way to
accommodate Natch's every whim. Word of the episode even leaked
out to his hivemates' parents and caused the institution no end of grief. Natch was astounded. He had vanquished his enemies and exposed his
proctors' fallibility with a single blow.

The incident drove home another valuable lesson: With patience,
cunning and foresight, anything is possible.

This was not the last hurdle Natch had to clear in the hive. Other children rushed to fill the void left by the departure of the bullies, and they
were not so easily fooled. They tried to sabotage his homework, steal
his belongings, and blame him for all their own mischief. Natch
quickly realized he had made a tactical error hiding behind the proctors; by not dealing with his opponents directly, he had only reinforced
the perception that he was weak.

He wondered if this would be a never-ending cycle. Was he
doomed to spend the remainder of his life fighting battle after battle
with a succession of enemies, each more capable than the last, until he
finally met his match?

At the age of six, Natch decided that escape was his only option.
He ran away.

Serr Vigal received a panicked Confidential Whisper from Natch's
proctors that morning. They wondered whether the boy had hopped
the tube and found his way to Vigal's apartment, but the neural programmer had not seen his charge in weeks. He cancelled the morning's
staff meeting and set out for the nearest tube station. The tube
whisked him across metropolitan Omaha to a squat semi-circular
building that did, in fact, look like a beehive.

What do you mean, he's missing? asked Vigal, perplexed, when he
caught up to the anxious proctors. I thought you monitored the children
here twenty-four hours a day.

The headmaster bowed his head. We do.

Vigal was not an excitable man by nature. Are you sure he didn't just wander onto another floor? he said, scratching the few lonely hairs on his
head. You have security programs, don't you? Certainly he couldn't have gotten
out of the building without you knowing it.

Theoretically, no, said the headmaster. But it appears he did.

Omaha was no place for an unattended boy. A curious soul like
Natch could easily disappear in a cosmopolitan city of 22 million and
never be heard from again. Broken families had been commonplace in
the depths of the Economic Plunge, but even a recovering economy
could not totally stem the trickle of missing children.