Infoquake (36 page)

Black code, she thought.

Jara instantly shot off a request to check the security of her possessions. Her Vault accounts, her dismal apartment, the databanks
holding all her programming and personal information. Everything
seemed fine, but with the deluge of incoming messages and Confiden-
tialWhispers washing in from every side, it was hard to tell. The Vault
was spouting off warnings and informational bulletins by the dozens,
followed in close succession by scores of redundant updates from the
Meme Cooperative, the Prime Committee, her L-PRACG. Horvil,
Merri, Vigal and her sister sent her two messages apiece asking if she
was okay.

Jara closed her eyes and tried to screen out the chaos. She could
only imagine the computational mayhem caused by half a billion
multi projections spraying billions of simultaneous requests at the Data Sea.

Things were no better when she opened her eyes.

The Council officers were on the move. Men and women in white
robes advanced on the stage with grim looks on their faces, dart rifles
drawn. A handful of disruptor blasts sent multi projections flickering
out into nothingness, clearing a path to the front of the arena. The rest
of the crowd began scattering this way and that in confusion. Meanwhile, the Surina security forces had drawn their rifles as well and had
formed a rapidly tightening circle around the stage. Several dozen
guards on both sides lay twitching on the ground with black code darts
jutting from their torsos.

Unbelievably, Margaret was still speaking. Either none of the darts
was flying in her direction, or none of them had managed to hit her
yet. Her face was ghosted over with panic, yet she stood firm and tried
to make herself heard over the tumult.

"The creation of multiple realities," she said. "It sounds like a tale
we tell children in the hive. But soon we will consider multiple realities as common as OCHREs, as practical as bio/logic programs, and as
necessary as oxygen.

"What would our lives be like if we had made different choices? In
the Age of MultiReal, we will wonder no more-because we will be
able to make many choices. We will be able to look back at checkpoints
in our lives and take alternate paths. We will wander between alternate
realities as our desires lead us.

"The ever-changing flux of MultiReal will become reality.

"Just as bio/logics freed us from the tyranny of the body ... just as
the Universal Law of Physics freed us from the tyranny of nature ...
just as teleportation freed us from the tyranny of distance ... so MultiReal will free us from the tyranny of cause and effect itself.

"Throughout human history, we have been striving towards
greater freedom. Freedom is our destiny and our birthright. And in the
age to come-in the Age of MultiReal-we will all be empowered to pursue our individual freedoms however we choose.

"And I say this:

"Only when we can truly choose our own destinies will we be completely free."

Jara could not say for certain whether or not Margaret had finished
her speech. Because at that moment the Surina security guards
elbowed their way onstage, a mere two steps ahead of the Defense and
Wellness Council troops. Jara watched with mouth agape as a whiterobed officer raised her dartgun at Margaret Surina and prepared to
fire.

But then an enormous man with a blonde ponytail swooped out of
nowhere and wrapped his arms around the bodhisattva, shielding her
from harm. My goodness, thought Jara, is that an Islander? The Council
officer aimed her weapon high and let off a warning shot. Within seconds, the man had whisked Margaret through the stage door. A
number of Surina functionaries quickly scrambled after her.

Among those hustling backstage, Jara noted with slack-jawed
amazement, was a certain lean fiefcorp master whose wolfish grin she
would have recognized anywhere.

Dozens of kilometers above the earth's surface, a cluster of hydrogen
atoms danced in a copper tube. After several billion oscillations, the
hydrogen maser clock declared that a second had passed.

It was midnight.

The news passed via subaether to a processing station run by the
Meme Cooperative. The station-itself a small metallic box also
floating in geostationary orbit-consulted its internal tables and determined that the time had come to spawn a data newt for the Pierre
Loget Fiefcorp. The newt was born mere picoseconds after midnight.

A data newt did not need sixteen years of hive education to fathom
its purpose. The mother station had stamped a destination into the
newt's very atomic structure, a destiny to fulfill. But it was impossible
to know what paths the data structure would need to take or what
obstacles it would face along the way. And so the newt was endowed
with a level of autonomy and given all the logical tools it would need
to carry out its duties. Internal schedules, communication routines,
self-replication instructions, maps of the quantum universe. Then the
mother station ushered the newt out into the world.

The newt accessed its internal schedule and noted that its first stop
was a set of spatial coordinates in a nearby processing station. Upon its
arrival, the station challenged the newt to state its credentials and destination. The newt consulted its fore table and found the answers to
these perplexing questions: Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, BizWorks
139.5f, Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. Satisfied with the newt's
response, the station directed its microscopic visitor towards a collection of static information belonging to the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp.

A rote conversation ensued. Was BizWorks 139.5f listed as an acceptable expense in the Natch Fiefcorp data stores? Yes, it was. Did
the unique identifying code stored in the newt's memory correspond to
the one expected by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp? Yes,
it did. Was the price quoted by PulCorp agreeable to its customer?
Yes, it was.

The answer triggered an innate response in the data newt. The
newt replicated itself, stamped its clone with a subset of the required
tools, and waited patiently as the newcomer sped off to the Vault. Billions of newts had already queued up at the nearby Vault processing
center to retrieve and deposit payments large and small, but there was
no disagreement or jockeying for position in a world of indelible, unalterable rules. The data representative of the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp slid
into line in its prescribed position. After a few nanoseconds, the newt
reached the front of the queue and presented the Vault agent with its
transaction: Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, Pierre Ulyanich Loget
Fiefcorp, 0.03 credits. The Vault agent made all the appropriate
inquiries and finally responded with a credit authorization. What happened to the credit authorization after that was of no concern to the
cloned newt; it reported a transaction summary back to its master and
returned to the mother station.

With a credit authorization in its databanks, the data newt at the
Natch Fiefcorp data stores determined it was ready to proceed. It consulted the fore table to look for its Defense and Wellness Council-sanctioned processing precedence, and lined up behind OCHRE transmissions, geosynchrons, Prime Committee statistical algorithms, and
agents of L-PRACG taxation. Finally, the newt arrived at the front of
the line and completed the task for which it had been born: the
recording of an order by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp for
a replacement part on one of Horvil's bio/logic programming bars.

All that remained was housecleaning. The newt spawned another
clone to relay the order back to the mother station. Meanwhile, the
newt consulted its own aft table for special instructions on completing a business transaction. The L-PRACG with jurisdiction over the Natch
Personal Programming Fiefcorp dictated that all programs must log a
record of their activities in the fiefcorp's data stores. This task done, the
newt performed a quick self-examination to see if it had lost data
integrity or left any stray bits of information in the fiefcorp's holdings
or needed to do any unusual acts of maintenance. All indications were
that the newt had conducted a clean transaction.

And so the data structure left the Natch Personal Programming
Fiefcorp holdings to perform a sweep of the remaining 4,293 fiefcorps
on Pierre Loget's subscription list.

Several thousand nanoseconds later, the newt returned to the
mother processing station-the prodigal son back home at last. The
data structure reported a summary of its activities for the statistical
programs to compile and then reported back to the Meme Cooperative
energy stores. There the newt uncomplainingly self-destructed, having
successfully fulfilled its mission of existence.

A few billion oscillations of hydrogen later, another second passed.

More than twenty-four hours had gone by since Margaret's speech, and
Jara had slept for none of them. Had she not been propping herself
awake with Doze-B-Gone 91 and AntiSleepStim 124.7 and two cups
of nitro, the analyst might have taken more notice of her surroundings.
Instead, Jara sleepwalked past the guards at Andra Pradesh and up
three stories of the blue Surina Enterprise Facility with hardly a glance
in any direction.

She opened the conference room door and found herself standing in
a corporate boardroom from antiquity.

Jara blinked hard, twice, wondering if the opulent surroundings
were the hallucinations of a sleep-deprived mind. The oval-shaped
room sported a faux mahogany table that could have seated twenty,
glass windows that overlooked a panoply of phallic skyscrapers, and a
wet bar complete with Waterford crystal and Kentucky bourbon. But
Jara was in no mood to start tapping things to figure out whether they
were real or SeeNaRee. She approached the table and slumped onto a
chair, which automatically scooted in and adjusted to the contours of
her body. This one, at least, was virtual.

The analyst, consulting the time, realized she had arrived fifteen
minutes early for their fiefcorp meeting. Jara scowled an order to the
building for another cup of nitro, and then called up the morning
drudge reports on a nearby window.

Nobody could quite recall who had coined the term infoquake, but
within hours it had become common currency throughout the civilized
world. Infoquake: a mysterious computational disturbance of unknown
origin and awesome destructive power. Even the handful of residents
living at remote experimental colonies beyond Jupiter were now
bandying the word around like they had been speaking it for years.

Unfortunately, the terminology was just about the only thing the
pundits could agree upon.

"Once again, the Data Sea has exhibited its juvenile tendency to
turn everything into a conspiracy," wrote the drudge Mah Lo Vertiginous.

According to the preliminary analysis from Creed Conscientious, the infoquake was a simple bottleneck of information; nothing more, nothing less.
An unheard-of concentration of multi projections in a single space, vying
for access to the same facts and figures on the Data Sea. Is it so hard to
imagine that a series of overloaded data agents could cause OCHREs to fail?

But Vertiginous' opinion was by no means the majority along the
drudge circuit. Sen Sivv Sor had a considerably darker view of the previous night's events:

Some governmentalist cretins would have you believe we suffered from a
simple bottleneck of information last night. Unfortunately, dear readers,
nothing could be further from the truth.

Since when does a simple bottleneck of information stop several hundred weak
hearts from beating? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information cause
a generator malfunction on Furtoid and send two hundred people to an icy
death? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information wreak havoc with the
gravity control on 49th Heaven and fling three dozen people into freefall?

Mark my words: Disasters like the infoquake are not natural occurrences.
Wherever you find such poisonous medicine, there's a human hand nearby
administering the dose.