Infoquake (37 page)

"Let me guess," said a voice. "Tokyo circa the Second American
Revolution."

Jara whipped her head around to find Horvil surveying the room.
The elaborate SeeNaRee only seemed to heighten the engineer's
already high spirits. As soon as he spotted the wet bar, Horvil bounded across the room on some undefined errand of mischief. His movement
revealed a nervous-looking youth who had been standing in the engineer's shadow.

"It's not Tokyo," said Jara. "It's New York City, before the orbital
colony hit. See, that's the Hudson River over there." She regarded the
young man with a cynical eye, noticed his inky black hair and five
o'clock shadow, and decided he must be a relative of Horvil. His face
had the same air of bonhomie, but Jara could also see an undercurrent
of piety that could only have been a genetic gift from the infamous
Aunt Berilla. "You must be Benyamin."

The youth nodded and gave a polite bow in Jara's direction.
"Towards Perfection," he said. "I guess you're Jara. Horvil's told me a
lot about you."

Jara shot a suspicious glance at the engineer, who had begun to
juggle the Waterford crystal. Over his head, patterns of reflected sunlight danced crazily on the ceiling. "Oh, has he?"

"Don't worry," said Horvil. "I really only told him a tiny bit. Just
the good things."

Benyamin sensed the tension and immediately assumed the role of
diplomat. "Ah, the drudges," he said, nodding at the chaotic display
of fully justified type on the window. "You know, Khann Frejohr
thinks High Executive Borda caused it."

"Caused what?"

"Well, the infoquake."

Horvil had moved from three pieces of stemware to four, and their
arcs of flight were growing longer by the second. "Yeah, I saw that
speech he gave last night," he said. "The evil work of the Defense and Wellness Council. Len Borda's last-ditch effort to muzzle the Sarinas once and for
all. You gotta love that Khann Frejohr."

"What a load of shit," said Jara with a grimace. "Come on, Horvil.
Borda pulled his troops out of Andra Pradesh almost as soon as the
infoquake was over. If he wanted Margaret dead, she'd be dead by now." She waved her hand, banishing the news coverage from the
window screen. "So how did Borda react to Khann's speech? He must
have gone completely offline."

Benyamin nodded. "That's putting it mildly. He shut down the
Sigh and the Jamm and all other `resource-intensive pleasure networks'
until further notice."

"He shut down-?"

"Len Borda isn't our problem right now." The three fiefcorp
apprentices swiveled around to find Natch standing in the doorway.
Jara saw that he had come with wolf's grin and invisible audience in
tow, not to mention an impeccable pin-striped suit that would have
been at home in ancient New York. "So let's get down to business
already."

Horvil caught three pieces of stemware but accidentally let the
fourth slip through his fingers. The virtual Waterford landed on the
marble floor with a clang but did not break. "What about Vigal? And
Merri?" asked Horvil.

"Vigal's off to another one of his seminars in Beijing," said Natch.
"Effects of Orbital Colony Gravitational Fields on Neural Pathways, or
something like that."

"Nothing stops a scientific conference," muttered Jara.

"And I'm right here," said Merri. The blonde channel manager had
apparently snuck in while nobody was paying attention. Merri had
taken a seat near Natch's side of the table and projected a set of notes
visible on the dark wood in front of her. Her penmanship was crisp and
perfect, something that gave Jara an inexplicable pang of jealousy.

"So what's everyone waiting for?" cried Natch in a sudden fit of
pique. "Sit the fuck down."

Natch planted himself in the cushioned leather chair at the head of the table and surveyed his four apprentices with a barely suppressed smirk.
A snapshot of the Council troops tromping through the Surina courtyard loomed large on the window behind him; Jara realized she must
have accidentally left open one of her morning news stories. The four
apprentices gazed expectantly back and forth between the photo and
their fiefcorp master. Margaret Surina, the Defense and Wellness
Council, investor meetings, infoquakes, MultiReal-hadn't the time
finally come for Natch to let them know what was going on?

The entrepreneur turned to Jara with pronounced matter-of-factness, his face a riddle. "Why don't you start us off with an analysis of
the latest sales figures," he said.

Jara shrugged. Sales figures? Who can think of sales at a time like this?
But she knew Natch, and had prepared a brief analysis this morning
anyway. She snapped her fingers briskly, causing a three-dimensional
chart to hover over the surface of the conference table. Lines in primary
colors raced one another to see which could climb to the top right
corner the quickest.

The analyst indicated an uncharacteristic dip at the end of a green
line labeled MENTAL INDEXX 39. "Looks like one of our programs
took a hit yesterday," she said. "An 18 percent drop in the last twentyfour hours. It must have suffered a few glitches during the infoquake."
She gave Horvil the evil eye. "Billy Sterno's DataReorg 55c had a 43
percent jump in sales during the same period."

Horvil sat back confidently, measuring the table as a possible
resting spot for his feet. "Glitches happen. Mental Indexx 40'11 bring
'em back into the fold."

As she crunched the numbers, Merri plucked at the chart lines like
guitar strings. "I see there's a silver lining here as well."

Jara smiled. "Yeah, I see it too.... It looks like the Patel Brothers
had a few glitches of their own, and Primo's took note." The chart
shifted from sales figures to Primo's scores. If anything, the incline of
the race became even steeper. "So even though we lost market share to Billy Sterno, we gained ground against the Patels on Primo's. Looks
like we're back up to number three!"

Horvil broke out in a spirited cheer, which Merri and Benyamin
echoed with a pair of quiet grins. Natch seemed oddly oblivious, a
mystery that Jara did not feel like pursuing. Maybe this info quake was
the end of the whole thing, she thought. Maybe all this hassle will just go
away, and my last ten months will be business as usual.

"Okay, so if we look at the big picture, what've we got?" said
Horvil.

"82.4 percent gross increase in revenues so far this year," stated
Jara, "most of that after we hit number one on Primo's. And only a 17
percent increase in expenditures." She banished the bar chart to datalimbo with a wave of her hand. "I'd say we're doing pretty well."

A look of concern slowly rippled across Merri's face. "Only a 17
percent increase in spending-how is that possible?" The soft-spoken
channel manager began counting on her fingers. "In the last week
alone, we've bought new bio/logic programming bars ... analysis
algorithms ... these conference rooms ... not to mention hiring a
new apprentice ..." She nodded her head towards Benyamin, who
merely sat with a bland smile on his face. Merri took a deep breath. "I
was hoping, Natch, that you might be able to explain some of this."

Natch raised one eyebrow. A private in-joke with his invisible
audience. "What do you want me to explain?"

"Well, for one thing, I don't see any of this showing up on the
books...."

"Jara does the books, not you."

"Yes, I know, but still-"

Jara had had enough. Her longed-for ten months of peace and
quiet suddenly imploded. She lodged her left elbow firmly on the table
and used it as a base to launch an accusing finger at the fiefcorp master.
"Come on, Natch! First you start fundraising for a product we don't
make, and then out of the blue you start spending money we don't have. You totally ignore the Primo's ratings. And now you've gotten
us involved in this whole mess with Margaret and the infoquake.
You've put us off long enough, Natch! What the fuck is going on?"

She had unleashed enough verbal thunder to send any of the other
apprentices scampering for cover, but Natch remained unmoved. He
gave a sidelong glance to Horvil, but the engineer was gazing at Jara
with dumb awe.

"All right then." Natch's eyes glittered. He leaned back in his
chair and clasped his hands behind his head, as if he needed a cradle for
all that excess brainpower. "In a little over twelve hours, I will officially
dissolve the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. We are getting
out of the regular bio/logic programming business. Tomorrow, you
will all be apprentices in a new fiefcorp devoted exclusively to MultiReal."

His announcement was greeted by a stunned silence. Jara had a
protest half-formed in her mouth but strangled it when she remembered the portability clause in their contracts, a clause which essentially gave Natch the right to pass off their apprenticeships to
whomever he chose. She looked at Merri and Horvil and saw their faces
meld into bland expressions of unconcern, a telltale sign that they had
both flipped on PokerFace 83.4b. Benyamin closed his eyes and
ducked his head as if he had just been punched in the gut.

"When did you decide all this?" said Jara weakly.

"Yesterday."

The silence remained. A pigeon fluttered by the window with a
loud broo.

"Now, I know you're all getting impatient with just room and
board," Natch continued, touching his fingertips in front of his face.
"Your shares all mature this year, and some of you are thinking of
cashing out. So I'm prepared to sweeten the deal. Yes, that includes
you, Ben. Cash out your shares today and I'll release you from your
apprenticeship with no penalty ... or sign on to a two-year contract with the new fiefcorp for ten times the compensation, plus bonuses. The
offer stands until midnight tonight, Shenandoah time."

Jara felt a wave of emotion crash over her. A week ago, she had
wanted nothing more than to be set free from Natch's shackles, to run
as far as possible and not look back. She remembered that carefree
Meme Cooperative official in Melbourne, sitting at his desk all day, his
mind adrift in some SeeNaRee fantasyland. For process' preservation, I
could use a job like that, she thought. A nice, dull desk job of looking at
datamaps and bar charts sounds perfect right about now.

But then suddenly Jara thought of her old proctor from the hive,
the one who had stimulated the governmentalist ideals of her youth
and negotiated the surrender of her virginity while he was at it. Had
he been somewhere in that crowd last night, as spellbound by Margaret's lilting voice as the rest of them? Would the bodhisattva's words
have filled him with hope, or would he have some cynical counterpoint
to make?

And what would he think of Jara now, almost twenty years down
the road, ready to throw aside the remainder of her ambitions and slip
into a SeeNaRee stupor?

Horvil interrupted her reverie with a loud clearing of the throat.
"So what's gonna happen to all those programs we've been slaving
over?" he said. "NiteFocus and EyeMorph and Mental Indexx and the
rest of them?"

The engineer might as well have asked about the fate of an obsolete set of bio/logic programming bars. "They'll be sold off," Natch
replied with a shrug. "You didn't think we were going to upgrade
them forever, did you? We won't have time to maintain those old programs, and the money they generate is nothing compared to what
MultiReal is going to pull in."

Across the table, Jara could see a little piece of Horvil die at
Natch's pronouncement. The programs he had weaned and nurtured
from RODs and hive projects into Primo's powerhouses would soon belong to the graveyard of history. Qubits of information stranded on
some forgotten atoll on the backwaters of the Data Sea.

"Natch, let me be honest here," said Horvil, a tinge of anger
clouding the engineer's voice. "I really had no idea what Margaret was
talking about yesterday."

"It was a vague speech," agreed Benyamin with a sigh.

"I mean, what is this MultiReal? What does it look like? What
does it do? Did Margaret ever sit down and do a-a needs analysis or
a survey or something to figure out if an

ybody wants multiple realities? I've tackled a lot of tough problems
in my life, but I can't remember a single time I said to myself, You could
fix this if you just had a few alternate realities."

Jara found herself nodding her head vigorously in agreement.
"Listen, Natch, even if Margaret is on the right track, what makes you
think this, this, daydream of hers will work? We have no idea how good
an engineer this woman is. That licensing agreement you made with
her might be totally worthless."

"The licensing agreement is dead," said Natch. "I'm a co-owner
now. "

"What?"

"Hold on, everybody. Act confident. Pretend you know what's
going on.... Towards Perfection, Margaret. How are you?"

Jara whipped her head around, only to see Margaret Surina herself
watching from the doorway. Part of the SeeNaRee? No, this woman
was real. Of course she's real, you idiot, Jara chided herself. She lives right
across the courtyard. The analyst slammed on PokerFace 83.4b as quickly
as she could, and the rest of the staff followed suit.