Infoquake (47 page)

Natch stood alone on the beach.

Civilization had not reached this place yet, or maybe it had left
long ago and taken all of culture's detritus with it. The billboard
advertisements, the black code darts, the tube tracks, the hoverbird
clouds, the political manifestos, the buildings both large and small,
the silly trappings of fashion-all of them gone.

The world reduced to sand, sky and sun.

The world a million years after humanity had breathed its last
gasp.

The sun had risen to its midday perch and looked as if it might
stay there for a while. Beneath his feet, the sand had begun to absorb
the heat. As the temperature rose and the sand began to sizzle, tiny
creatures burrowed their way to the surface of the beach. Sand mites by
the millions scrambled around, wildly looking for some relief from the
burning, but there was none to be found.

Natch closed his eyes and cast his mind out to the Data Sea to find
a bio/logic program that would protect his tender soles, but he could
find none. No bio/logic programs, no chatter from the drudges, no
Data Sea. Was the vast corpus of human knowledge extinct too? Had
it ever existed at all in this place? He opened his eyes again and
scanned the horizon, looking for something, anything. A tree to shelter
under, a rock with a cool face to it. But the world was completely flat
and featureless.

He had begun to hop up and down to ease the burning, when he
felt an icy drop of water tickle his feet.

The tide was rising. The water carved rivulets in the sand dunes as
it spilled onto the beach. Natch leapt down towards the sea and
dunked his feet in the spray. He heaved a tremendous sigh of relief and allowed the anxiety to slip from his mind.

Minutes passed before Natch noticed the vast panicked retreat
going on in the sand. Millions of tiny creatures-sand mites, miniature crabs, black segmented insects-all dashing pell-mell for higher
ground. The saltwater was licking his ankles before he came to a
sudden realization: the insects weren't fleeing the heat, they were
fleeing the tide.

He turned and headed back up the beach. But the tide was rising
faster than he could run. By the time he overtook his own footprints
running in the opposite direction, they were submerged beneath half a
meter of water. Natch began running as fast as he could, lifting his legs
in the air, stork-like, to stay above the tide.

The ocean had risen up above his knees when he realized he was not
going to make it. The angle of the beach was too shallow, the progress
of the tide too rapid. The strip of land he had been aiming for receded
farther and farther away with each second. Natch stopped for a minute
and turned around to see if there was another place he could head for,
someplace safe from the rising tide. But there was nothing in any
direction now but endless sea.

He began scrambling madly for higher ground. His splashes were
the only noise that could be heard anywhere; the ocean itself did not
crash or break or even ripple. Its surface was unbroken and lifeless.
Eternal.

The water rose up to his chest, and Natch abandoned all hope of
wading. He tried to leap up into a swimming position, but a remarkably strong force pulled on his legs, keeping him down. A deep underwater vortex into which the entire world would eventually sink.

Natch struggled wildly, clinging to his ambitions and desires.
MultiReal was out there somewhere. So were number one on Primo's,
a lunar estate, riches, glory. But one by one, he could feel all his cares
draining out of him and sliding deep into the watery void. There were
no fiefcorps down in that demesne of the drowned, no fiefcorps or memecorps or bio/logic programs or Primo's ratings.

He desperately tried to keep his head above water, but the current
was too strong. The tide of nothingness, the Null Current, pulled him
under.

Natch could see the light of the sun receding. He could feel the
tug of the nothingness below, which was his final destination. His
struggles and his worries seemed so petty once the Null Current had
pulled him in. Down here, desire was irrelevant, because the undifferentiated mass of nothingness that was his destination allowed no
changes, accepted no arguments, admitted no standards by which to
measure and compare. In the deeps, there was nothing to want because
there was nothing to gain, nothing to fix because there was nothing to
break.

He stopped struggling as the darkness closed in, as the surface
became a distant memory, as he was sucked down by the vortex that
had no end, the vortex that spiraled down infinitely until it was no
longer a vortex, until he and it and everything else melted together
and merged into one endless eternal line, a vector pointing nowhere, a
vector whose beginnings were irrelevant and improbable, and whose
end was forever unreachable.

The apartment building was not much to look at by West London
standards, but for Shenandoah, it had style in abundance. One might
have said the building jutted out from the side of a hill, if not for its
sine-wave shape that architects often used to camouflage the constant
structural flux. A more appropriate description would have been that
the building rippled or undulated from the hillside. Not the kind of
thing you found crammed amidst the pointed abbeys at Bishopsgate.

Horvil had been inside the building a thousand times, of course, at
all hours of the day and night. But he usually skipped the exterior view
and multied straight to the network gateway in Natch's foyer. Funny
how you could spend so much time embedded in a place that you
didn't really know what it looked like from the outside.

From the ground, the engineer looked up the side of the tenement
and saw several balconies like the one where he, Natch and Jara had
stood and tested NiteFocus 48. It seemed like a million years ago,
during a vanished era of innocence. Now all the building's balconies
were occupied by strangers.

Horvil walked inside the front doors, nosed around the atrium for
a few minutes, then ascended the lift to Natch's flat. He hesitated at
the fiefcorp master's door for a few seconds. If Natch wasn't here, the
apartment security program would probably let a trusted presence like
Horvil invoke emergency protocols and enter. But that would trigger
warning messages to Natch and possibly the building management as
well. He didn't mind Natch receiving such a message-the entrepreneur might actually respond and put an end to this madness-but how
much could you really trust a landlord these days? A series of gloating
drudge headlines flashed in Horvil's brain: BREAK-IN LEADS TO
MASSIVE MANHUNT FOR MISSING FIEFCORP MASTER.... NATCH LEAVES APPRENTICES HIGH AND DRY.... MISSING
ENTREPRENEUR `A WORTHLESS HUMAN BEING,' SAYS
LANDLORD.

Horvil entered, stood in the foyer and counted to twenty. Nothing
happened.

It took Horvil only a few minutes to determine there was no
bloody corpse stinking up the premises. No scattered debris on the
counters, no slack body standing on the red tile, no sign of a struggle.
But he could see no evidence the place had been inhabited the past few
days either. Not that Natch's messes could compare to the colossal disasters Horvil usually left for his cleaning bots, but a few half-drunk
cups of chaff or nitro could usually be found on his table at any given
time. Today, however, nothing.

Horvil knew the real test was not in the common areas, but in the
office. That was where Natch spent most of his time anyway. The engineer poked his nose into the room and made a major discovery: Natch's
bio/logic programming bars were gone. Of course, they could be lying
in one of the drawers under the workbench, drawers that a multi projection could not physically open. But in all the years Horvil had
known him, Natch had never set his programming bars anywhere but
the top of the bench or on a side table within easy reach.

Wherever Natch went, he took his biollogic programming tools with him,
thought Horvil. So what does that mean?

The fiefcorp apprentice wandered to the window and tuned it
transparent. Natch would have headed northeast past the billboard
(BANDWIDTH CONSERVATION IS PEOPLE PRESERVATION:
A message from Creed Conscientious), towards the main city, towards the
TubeCo station.

Towards the small cluster of officers in white robes now pointing
in Horvil's direction.

Horvil instantly flipped on the window's sunblock and ducked out
of the officers' line of sight. Don't be so paranoid, Horv, the engineer scolded himself. Just Council officers doing a routine patrol. They weren't
pointing at you.

But was it really so implausible to think Len Borda's goons might
be scoping out Natch's apartment? Especially now, when he was mere
hours away from demonstrating MultiReal to an audience of billions?

Horvil scurried out of the apartment and down the lift, whether to
hide from the officers or to follow them, he could not say. He stood in
the atrium and looked out the window, still vacillating between
courses of action, when his eye caught a glint of metal on the ground
reflected from the just-risen moon, past the billboard in the gutter on
the side of the road. Horvil launched NiteFocus 50c and fine-tuned his
vision with Bolliwar Tuban's TeleScopics 88 to make sure. Yep, definitely a bio/logic programming bar.

Eventually, the coven of Council troops moved westwards toward
the hoverbird facilities. The engineer thrust his head outside the front
door and scanned the horizon, left to right and back again. None of the
officers carried bulky, shoulder-mounted disruptors, but who knew
which of the surrounding buildings contained one the Council could
summon at a moment's notice? When the coast was clear, he darted
northwest as fast as his feet could carry him.

Horvil kneeled to the ground and examined the object closely,
wishing his multi projection could solidify long enough for him to
pick it up. A thin rod of burnished metal, nondescript but for the
Roman letter S embossed near one end and a small dent in one corner.
The kind of dent a tightly wound programmer might make by repeatedly whacking the bar against a hard workbench.

If this was indeed Natch's bio/logic programming bar, then what
were the odds of Horvil finding it here? The fact that the municipal LPRACG had not swept it up by now was a pretty astronomical coincidence in itself.

And if it was Natch's-how did it get here? And what did its presence mean?

Jara had the same questions.

"I'm not saying it means nothing," said the analyst, looking drawn
and haggard from lack of sleep. "I'm not saying the bar doesn't belong
to Natch. But there have to be hundreds of people who walk by that
spot every day carrying programming tools. Anybody could have
dropped that bar."

"But the dent," protested Horvil. "The fact that the bars weren't in
his apartment ..."

"Circumstantial evidence. And besides, what if you're right? What
if that was Natch's stuff lying on the street? It's useless information.
Unless Natch left a trail of metal bars leading across town like breadcrumbs, it won't help us."

Benyamin rocked back and forth in his seat impatiently. "The least
we can do is send someone to go get it."

"No," said Jara. "Multi projecting to Shenandoah is one thing, but
sending someone there in the flesh is another. What if someone's trying
to use that bar to lure us away from the Surina compound? We came
here to Andra Pradesh to keep safe. We need to stay here."

The young apprentice muttered something under his breath and
arose from his chair with a look of defiance. "I'll go," he said.

"No, you won't," snapped Jara. "You need to ride herd on those
assembly-line programmers and make sure we've got a product ready
to show this afternoon. Now sit down." Blood rushed to Benyamin's
face. He looked to Horvil, Merri and Quell for support, but found only
awkward silence. Horvil gave an almost imperceptible gesture downwards towards the chair, and his cousin crumbled to his seat.