Infoquake (9 page)

"Then I'll tell the Meme Cooperative."

"Don't make me laugh."

"The drudges. I could send a message to Sen Sivv Sor and John
Ridglee right now."

Natch shrugged, as if the effort of responding to such an inane
proposition was beneath him. He caught the spinning donut of code
with one hand and began studying its surface once more.

Jara let her hands drop inertly to her sides. Is he right about me? she
thought. Is that all I am-a whiner and a whistle blower? She thought
back to her days peddling bio/logic analysis to Lucas Sentinel, to all
the times she had cursed her fate and threatened to quit. Wouldn't
Lucas pull the same stunts that Natch did, if he had the guts or the
foresight?

She hadn't really intended to quit, she realized now. Despite all the
indignities, Jara couldn't bring herself to hate this cantankerous child.
What she had wanted was the opportunity to deliver some kind of
high-handed sermon about Pyrrhic victories and the value of interpersonal relationships. She wanted him to take her seriously. "People
could have gotten hurt, Natch," Jara said quietly.

"They didn't."

"But they could have."

Natch finally capitulated and flipped off the MindSpace bubble
around his workbench. The holographic donut melted back into the
void. "Jara, everyone who invests in bio/logics knows what's going on.
Things like this happen all the time. Do you think the Patel Brothers
got to the top without getting their hands dirty? Or Len Borda?"

Jara snorted angrily. "Oh, I see, the end justifies the means."

The entrepreneur narrowed his eyes, as if trying to adjust his focus
to a shallower depth of field. "Do you really think number one on Primo's is the end? Then you don't understand anything, Jara. Getting
to number one on Primo's isn't an end at all-it's a means. It's part of
the process ... just a step on the ladder."

"So what is the end? Where do all these means lead to?"

Natch stared out into the nothingness for a moment without
speaking. She saw him for a brief instant unadorned, between masks.
His jaw rocked back and forth, and in his eyes burned a hunger the
likes of which Jara had never seen. That fire could consume her schoolgirl lust, swallow it without a trace. She shivered involuntarily.

"I don't have a clue," said Natch. "But when I find out, I'll let you
know." And with a peremptory wave of his hand, he cut her multi connection.

Jara found herself standing once more on the red square in her
London apartment. It was Wednesday afternoon already. In a few
blessed hours, this entire debacle would be a distant memory. On the
viewscreen, she could hear the crowds milling about in the public
square, restless, impatient, disconsolate.

Jara sank to the floor and cried for a moment, then dragged herself
back to her office. There was work to be done.

Sleep tore at him, shrieked at him, pummeled him without mercy. His
traitorous body was only too happy to succumb, and it took a monumental effort of will for Natch to keep himself awake.

Sheldon Surina, the father of bio/logics, had once defined progress
as "the expansion of choices." Natch wanted the choice to stay awake.
So he switched on PulCorp's U-No-Snooze 93 and let the OCHRE
machines in his body release more adrenaline. Within seconds, he was
awake and alert.

He was on the tube headed north out of Cisco station, through the
great redwood forests that carpeted much of the northwest, and up to
Seattle. Natch had been on this route hundreds of times. The tube
would shuttle back and forth between the two port cities all afternoon,
hauling industrial supplies and a dwindling number of commuters. At
this time of the morning, the passenger car was nearly empty. Besides
Natch, there was an elderly gentleman who appeared to be killing
time; two businesswomen who were probably accompanying their
cargo in the trailing cars; and an Islander tugging uncomfortably at
the steel collar around his neck. Fickle economics, which had once
courted TubeCo with ardor, had moved on to younger and more acrobatic mistresses.

Natch had no business to transact in either Cisco or Seattle. He
came to see the trees. To see the trees and to plot his next move.

Everyone in the fiefcorp knew about his ritual of tubing out to the
redwood forests whenever he had something to mull over. Nobody
understood it, least of all Jara. "You refuse to eat a meal sitting down
because it's a waste of time, but you'll spend three and a half hours
riding a hunk of tin across the continent?" she had once scolded him.
"Why tube all the way out there when you can multi instead?"

"It's not the same as being there in person."

Jara rolled her eyes. He saw the incomprehension written all over
her face: This is the same kind of backwards logic that the Islanders and the
Pharisees use. I thought you were smarter than that.

"What about a hoverbird?"

"I don't like hoverbirds. Bad memories."

"Okay, then why don't you teleport? I know, it's expensive. But time
is money, isn't it?"

Natch had had no reply. He was not very good at elaborate explanations. He simply knew he did his best thinking while in a tube car
staring at giant sequoias. Teleporting or multi projecting out to the
redwoods just wasn't the right way to do it. It was wrong, like an imperfect bio/logic program was wrong.

Maybe what he appreciated about the tube was that it was done
right. TubeCo had an eye for perfection in everything they did. Their
vehicles were not "hunks of tin," as Jara had accused. They were sleek
and beautiful, the product of a business that had reached its awesome
maturity. Transparent from the inside but breathtakingly translucent
from the outside, the tube cars floated on a cushion of air just molecules thick and whooshed over slim tracks with quiet grace. Even the
armrests on the chairs were sculpted from synthetic ivory and contoured for maximum comfort. Unlike so many technological marvels
these days that blended into the background-microscopic OCHREs
that regulated the human body, multi projections that were nearly
indistinguishable from real bodies, data agents that existed only
within the mind-the tube was a visible, palpable manifestation of
human achievement. It was progress writ large.

The redwoods, in contrast, were nature writ large. Natch gazed
through the transparent wall at the sequoias towering over the tube
tracks. These trees had watched over this route long before the tube
even existed. Most of them had undoubtedly seen the days of Sheldon
Surina and Henry Osterman, the days of bio/logics' founders. Some of the trees had stood here since long before the Autonomous Revolt or
even the First American Revolution. All of human history, in fact, was
but a footnote to their tranquil and reflective existence.

The tube car completed its circuit through the redwood forest and
slid to a graceful stop at the Seattle station, but Natch stayed on for
another pass. Then another, and another. He watched the trees, he pondered the future, he formulated plans. Gradually, the effects of the UNo-Snooze program wore off. Natch let his guard down and drifted off
to sleep.

In his sleep, he dreamed.

He dreamed he was standing in a grove of redwoods, dwarfed by
their majesty. He felt small: a forgotten attribute in the great schema
of the universe. He was trapped down here. The forest was endless.
Tube trains whizzed by just over the next hill, powerless to do anything but circle around in vain looking for an outlet.

But Natch had found a method of escape. He had prepared for this
moment. He was a bio/logic programmer, a master architect of human
capability. He had studied in the Proud Eagle hive, apprenticed with
the great Serr Vigal, gone up against formidable enemies like the Patel
Brothers. And he had brought all his skill and learning to bear when
he had crafted the ultimate program: Jump 225.

He stared at the canopy of leaves many kilometers up in the sky. It
looked impossibly distant. But then he thought about the jump program, the way it swirled and swooped in MindSpace with impossible
grace. The sheer number of its tendrils, its connections. The geometric
shapes that formed mathematical constellations beyond human perception.

Natch was confident. He started the jump program, felt programming instructions flowing off the Data Sea and into the data recepta- Iles built into his very bones. Felt the tingling of OCHRE systems
interpreting the code and routing commands to the proper leg muscles.

He Jumped.

Natch propelled himself right-foot-forward in an elegant arc
towards the sky. The code was grounded in one of the classic moves of
natural law: the jump, a movement humanity had worked out through
a hundred thousand years of constant iteration. Yet the program bore
the indelible signatures of an artificial product: the curl of the toes at
mid-leap, the triumphant arching of the back, the pleasing whistle
where no whistle would otherwise exist. The sky drew nearer and
nearer, the ground now but a distant memory. Breaking free of the redwoods was already a foregone conclusion, and Natch had set his sights
on still loftier goals. Jump 225 would take him not only above the redwoods, but up into the clouds and out of natural law altogether. He
would achieve freedom from the tedious rules that had governed
human existence since the beginning of time. Down would no longer
follow up. Autumn would no longer follow summer. Death would no
longer follow life. The jump 225 program would accomplish all this,
and more.

Then, just when his straining fingertips struggled for purchase on
the twigs hanging off the highest branches-when he could feel the
feathery touch of the leaves-when he had just gotten his first whiff of
pure, clean, unspoiled sky-the inevitable descent began.

Natch could see himself falling in slow motion, as if he were
looking down from the pinnacle of the tallest redwood. He could see
his arms flailing and feel his lungs bursting every second of the way
down. The whistle of the jump had become the screech of gravity's
avenging angel. What mere seconds ago had been a triumphant jump
now turned into a horrible, agonizing Fall. How could he have been so
blind? How could he not have seen this?

This was worse than not having jumped in the first place: the force of the impact would surely crush him, flatten him, destroy him. And
still he accelerated. Falling so fast now that he would actually crash
through the ground, down through the pulverizing rock, down to the
center of the earth, where nothing could ever rise again. He yelled his
defiance. He shook his fists. He railed at the trees, reaching out in a
vain effort to pull them down with him.

A split-second before impact, Natch awoke.

Natch's forefather Hundible was an acquaintance of Sheldon Surina
and one of the earliest investors in bio/logics. He was a gambler, a
teller of tall tales, a drifter of unknown origin and unsavory character.

But above all else, Hundible was a poor financial planner. His getrich-quick schemes sank like leaky boats, leaving him constantly
floundering in a sea of fathomless debt. Where he found the money to
invest in bio/logics, no one knew. Human biological programming
seemed an unlikely venture for Hundible; Surina himself, with his
prudish ways and supercilious attitude, seemed an unlikely partner.
Naturally, everyone assumed this new discipline was destined to fail.