Infoquake (25 page)

The Patel Brothers were not known for playing nice.

Prosteev Serly's loss, however, became Natch's gain. Serly had
channeling deals in place and packaging agreements to fulfill. Data
agents scurried around the Data Sea to find a suitable replacement for
the optical program, and located Natch's DeMirage 24.5. Within minutes, Natch's program had become the de facto standard for ocular hallucination management on the Data Sea.

The pings began sounding at 8:32 a.m. Shenandoah time and continued throughout the day. Eventually, the noise became so deafening,
Natch had to adjust the program to ping once every hundred sales. As
the night wore on, the BizWorks administrative program slowed to
pings every thousand sales, then every ten thousand. And still the pings kept coming.

Horvil was ecstatic. "Can I juggle a mean bio/logic programming
bar or what?" he crowed.

"Beginner's luck," Jara corrected him with a smirk.

Natch shook his head. "Luck," he said, staring intensely at the
Shenandoah cityscape, "had nothing to do with it."

Merri sat on Natch's chair-and-a-half and watched the fiefcorp master
make frantic circles through the garden. When he started, he was
treading on turf, but as their conversation absorbed more of his attention, he gradually strayed into the patch of daisies. Soon he was carelessly stepping on flower petals and tracking dirt onto the carpet.

"So in another eighteen months, it'll be ..." Natch stopped and
squinted, as if the future were a distant object hovering outside the
window.

"May," replied Merri.

"It'll be May," continued Natch. "That's right. So if we extend your
contract until then and your shares stay on target, then I expect they'll
be worth-this...." He waved his hand at the viewscreen, mutating
the psychedelic Tope painting into a more prosaic spreadsheet. A sizable boldfaced number sat in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
"And that's a conservative estimate. Now that we've hit number one
on Primo's, it's only going to go up. So how's this figure suit you?"

Merri gave a slight nod, but Natch could see she had some reservations. Not over money, he was fairly certain; even in this economy,
she was not likely to get a better compensation package anywhere else.
No, it probably had something to do with the swirled black-and-white
logo prominently displayed on her breast pocket, the insignia of a
Creed Objectivv truthteller.

Natch gave the woman a long appraising stare while she read over
the apprenticeship contract one more time. Merri might have been
Jara's diametric opposite. Her large frame dwarfed Jara's, though it did
not quite reach Horvil-sized proportions. She had blonde features that
spoke of Nordic ancestry and a demeanor both easy and reserved. Over
the past six months, there had been times when Natch felt like slap ping that pious look right off Merri's face-but for process' preservation, one could get only so angry at a woman who possessed such an
encyclopedic knowledge of the bio/logics world.

"You're concerned about the workload," said a voice on the opposite side of the room. Merri turned to face Serr Vigal, who had been
hovering quietly in the shadows like a spook. Natch hadn't been quite
sure whether the neural programmer was even paying attention.

"Well, partly," conceded Merri with a sidelong glance at Natch.
"But I'm also not sure how comfortable I feel being a channel manager.
I was trained for bio/logic analysis, you know."

Natch faced the window and scowled. He was not about to give up
such a precious asset as a channel manager who had taken the Objective truthtelling oath. Whatever the reality was, people believed that
honest salespeople sold better products. "This is a small fiefcorp, Merri.
Everyone gets to do a little bit of everything around here. Shit, you can
even grab a pair of programming bars and take on some of Horvil's
workload, for all I care."

Merri brightened and gave one of her typical placating smiles. For
a devotee of Creed Objectivv, she fakes her emotions pretty well, Natch
thought. "Would it be all right if I ... thought about it for a few
days?" asked the blonde channel manager.

The entrepreneur shrugged. "Fine."

"Okay, then ..." And with that, Merri cut the multi connection
and returned her mind to a red square tile several hundred thousand
kilometers away on Luna.

Natch gazed out into the gloom of the Shenandoah dusk. Dark
clouds were assembling on the westward horizon and rattling their
sabers, threatening a violent thundershower. In all probability, the
Shenandoah L-PRACGs had already petitioned the Environmental
Control Board to steer the worst of the storm clear of downtown using
its geosynchron bots. But still, the clouds felt like a heavy-handed
omen to Natch. Something was hiding in those clouds, some cruel and brutal creature with Natch's name roiling in its murky consciousness.

He shifted his attention to Serr Vigal. "We've had this discussion
before," he said.

The neural programmer had sunk back into the shadows, invisible
but for the occasional beard hairs glinting like flecks of silver. "It's
common sense, Natch," he replied. "Now that you're constantly neckand-neck with the Patels, there's a real danger of overworking your
apprentices. I think you need to bring more people onboard."

"I hired Merri."

"But she's not taking any of the workload off Horvil and Jara."

Natch knew his old mentor was correct, that eventually the two
apprentices would snap under the strain of eighteen-hour days in the
trenches fighting the Patel Brothers. They would get tired of the sorties in the middle of the night, the maneuvering for field position. The
endless exchange of small-arms fire.

But as soon as business started pouring in, Horvil and Jara had forgotten all about their bewilderment and indignation surrounding the
black code incident. Natch's interviews with Sen Sivv Sor and John
Ridglee had spawned a drudge feeding frenzy, which in turn produced
a tidal wave of sales. Suddenly, important engineers were contacting
Horvil for advice and dissecting his recursive functions as if they were
ancient Sanskrit texts. And Jara, who was used to shuffling money
between fiefcorp accounts to placate some creditors and put off others,
was now trying to find places to invest the overflow.

"Horvil and Jara will be fine," mumbled Natch. "Oh, I know
you're right, Vigal. I'll need to bring more people aboard at some
point. It's just that I don't trust anyone else."

"Maybe you need to give those two a holiday," said Serr Vigal.
"The fiefcorp is running pretty smoothly. There's no reason you can't
slow down for a week or two."

Natch, his arms folded over his chest, turned to glare at the neural
programmer. NiteFocus 50c allowed him to peer through the veil of shadow and see the concerned look on his mentor's face. "No," he said,
"there is a reason."

"Ah, the message."

"Something's coming up, Vigal. I can feel something out there,
coming up fast. A tidal wave. Something."

Natch nodded towards the viewscreen that was still displaying
Merri's apprenticeship contract. He called up a message in its place and
enlarged the type so it was readable from across the room.

Natch,

I would like to personally congratulate you on achieving number one in the
Primo's bio/logic investment guide. Several members of my administrative
staff are devoted users of your programs. Your sleep deprivation utilities,
I'm afraid, are particularly popular around here.

As you may have heard, Creed Surina will be holding a cultural festival next
week to celebrate what would have been Sheldon Surina's 400th birthday.
We are looking for able bio/logic programmers such as yourself to contribute to a presentation on my ancestors' legacy to the world. I would be
honored to have you as my guest for dinner at Andra Pradesh this
Wednesday, November 23, to discuss the details.

Towards Perfection,

Margaret Surina

Master of the Surina Perfection Memecorp
Bodhisattva of Creed Surina

The letters hung on the screen before him, waiting for some gesture or
flicker of the eyeballs to indicate which way Natch wanted to scroll.
Finally, the fiefcorp master blinked hard and sent the missive away.

"I'm afraid I don't understand why you're so worried, Natch," said
his guardian. "It looks like a perfectly normal invitation to me."

"It just doesn't feel right," said Natch. "I can't explain it. It's like

... Like a vast collection of numbers that have some hidden kabbalistic connection to one another. Like a constellation millions of light years across, and
you're sitting in the middle trying to decipher what it looks like from a distance. "Let me ask you this, Vigal. Why invite me to dinner? It means
that Margaret doesn't want to see me in multi-she wants me to trek
halfway around the globe to talk to her in person. That seems awfully
formal for a first meeting. Does she think there's some security risk?
Or maybe she has a business proposition for me. You know the etiquette -

important business deals happen through personal meetings."

The neural programmer frowned. "Maybe you should just take this
at face value."

"Face value," Natch scoffed. "I never take anything at face value."

Vigal rose from his chair with a creaky sigh, then walked over and
clapped a virtual hand on his protege's shoulder. "Perhaps you need to
get some rest, Natch." He gave the shoulder a gentle squeeze and then
stepped back, looking the young programmer up and down wistfully.
"Rest-that's advice I think I'm going to follow myself. Make sure you
Confidential Whisper me if you need anything."

Minutes later, Natch was alone.

The fiefcorp master prived himself to all incoming communication and
darkened the windows. Then he called up the invitation on the
viewscreen once more and crouched on his haunches in front of it.

Could this be some trick by the Patel Brothers? A punishment for
filching the lead on Primo's for those brief forty-seven minutes? He
verified the message's digital signature against the one in the public
directory, and the directory declared it authentic. The message had not
come from the hand of some Surina flunky either, but straight from the bodhisattva herself. Signatures could be forged, of course, but it was a
fiendishly difficult task. Natch knew all the standard tricks for lowlevel signature forgery, and this message used none of them.

He collapsed onto his sofa and instructed InfoGather 96a to find as
much up-to-date information about Margaret Surina as possible. The
program launched a volley of data agents onto the measureless ocean of
information and began bouncing the results off its analysis engines,
deducing connections, drawing conclusions, cooking up bite-sized
summaries.

Seconds later, the viewscreen lit up with the image of a woman
around Serr Vigal's age. The drudges described the heir to the Surina
family mantle as a glamorous figure, but Natch could see little
glamour in this nondescript woman. Margaret was neither tall nor
short, neither heavy nor thin; she could have been one of those composite sketches of women compiled from a hundred different ethnicities. The plain gray pantsuit she wore belied her vaunted sense of
fashion, and even her raven-black hair lay unostentatiously on her
shoulders. If she did not have the prominent Surina family nose and
her father's eyes, preternaturally large and shining with fierce intelligence, Natch would not have believed that this woman was the heiress
to the world's largest programming fortune.

read the caption that floated next to the woman on the screen.

The bodhisattva of Creed Surina and master of the Surina Perfection
Memecorp, Margaret Surina is heiress to the Surina family fortune and the
vast empire left her after the untimely death of her father Marcus. She lives
in Andra Pradesh at the residence constructed in honor of her ancestor,
Sheldon Surina, the Father of Bio/Logics.