Infoquake (10 page)

Yet it was Hundible who had the last laugh. His partner, the
skinny Indian tinkerer with the big nose, went on to revitalize science
and revolutionize history. The gambler's modest investment ballooned
a thousandfold and generated a large fortune. Hundible retired at the
seasoned age of thirty-three, took a high-society companion, and slid
contentedly out of history. If he had any interest in the great flowering
of science that his investment helped bring to fruition, there was no
record of it.

Hundible eventually passed on. His wealth endured, for a while.

Natch's ancestor was not the only one to stumble serendipitously
onto Surina riches. A host of rogues, early adopters, and cutting-edge
investors were handsomely rewarded for their early backing of
bio/logics. Lavish mansions and villas sprouted up around the globe to
serve their owners' whims-places where they could escape the harsh
moral strictures that had kept order since the Autonomous Revolt. The
bio/logic entrepreneurs deliberately sought cities that had largely
escaped the havoc of the Revolt: Omaha, Melbourne, Shenandoah,
Madrid, Cape Town. Cities that yearned for the greatness of antiquity, cities whose local governments could be easily bought.

This change in the political landscape did not escape the attention
of the old nation-states. The old governments might have been dilapidated and their halls of power decaying, but they still had plenty of
resources at their disposal to fight this territorial encroachment. They
vested much of their power in a centralized Prime Committee. The
Committee turned around and bestowed ultimate martial authority on
a single Defense and Wellness Council. Crusading high executives of
the Council like Tul Jabbor and Par Padron made reining in the
excesses of the bio/logic entrepreneurs their top priority.

Thus the battle was joined. Society split along ideological fault
lines: governmentalists who favored central authority versus libertarians who sought power for local civic groups. By the time Natch's fiefcorp ascended to number one on Primo's, this dichotomy had come to
seem like the natural order of things.

Hundible's descendants grew fiercely protective of their fortunes.
Not only were they fending off the Committee and the Council, but
they were also under siege by the greatest enemy of all: time. The
bio/logic entrepreneurs knew that theirs was not the immutable
wealth of the lunar land tycoons. Their money was not a tangible thing
like terraformed soil that they could stick their hands into. No, for
better or worse, the fates of the bio/logic entrepreneurs were tied to the
bio/logic markets.

And markets, like all living things, are mortal.

Natch's mother Lora was fourteen when the Economic Plunge of the
310s hit.

Lora was schooled in the best hives, with the children of important
diplomats and capitalmen. Her proctors were crisp, disciplined citizens who saw the hive as a Petri dish in which to experiment with the latest academic fashions. Lora and her hivemates yo-yoed between pedagogical theories, learning much about politics but very little about
government, finance, engineering or programming.

But what did it matter? When Lora looked into the future, she saw
nothing but the comfortable track her parents had laid out for her,
with scheduled stops at initiation, loss of virginity, career, companionship and motherhood. There would be plenty of time along the way to
pick up any other skills she needed.

In the meantime, Lora worked diligently to become a Person of
Quality. She developed a keen fashion sense and an eye for good
beauty-enhancement programming. She sharpened her social skills at
the regular charity balls held in the Creed Elan manors. She dipped her
toes in the Sigh, that virtual network of sensuality, and learned a thing
or two about the pleasures of the flesh. And when holidays rolled
around, she retreated to her cavernous family mansion to dally with
servants whose parents had not been blessed with the money for a hive
education.

Then, one gloomy spring day, Lora and her hivemates awoke to
find all the proctors riveted to news feeds off the Data Sea. Marcus
Surina has died, they said. An accident in the orbital colonies. A few of the
proctors wept openly.

For a while, Surina's death seemed like a distant event that had
little connection to the girl's carefully structured hive existence: a
supernova in a remote galaxy, visible only through powerful refractive
lenses. Surina had been the master of TeleCo, a big and powerful company. He was a direct descendant of Sheldon Surina, the inventor of
bio/logics. His death had been a terrible tragedy. What else was there
to say?

But from that day forward, everything changed.

Lora's friends began checking out of the hive and disappearing,
nobody knew where. One by one, Lora's parents cut back on subscriptions to the programs that gave her eyes that china-doll sparkle and her hair that reflective luster. The servants were let go. Nameless fears
escaped from the demesne of adulthood and roamed the hive at night
with impunity, whispering words the children did not understand.

Six months after Marcus Surina's death, Lora's parents unexpectedly showed up at the hive and told her to pack her things. They gave
her a single valise and told her to take as many of the precious knickknacks and gewgaws lining her shelves as she could carry.

Where are we going? she asked.

To Creed Elan, they replied.

The last time Lora had seen the great ballroom at the Elan manor,
its railings had been festooned with purple flowers, and its marble
floors lined with elegant revelers in formal robes. Now the ballroom
was a shantytown of clustered cots and frightened children. Lora's parents deposited her on an empty bunk and kissed her goodbye.

There's an opportunity in the orbital colonies that we can't pass up, but it's
much too dangerous for children, they said. Don't worry, Creed Elan will take
good care of you, and the family will be back on its feet in no time. Just wait
here and we'll send for you.

They never did.

During the next few months, Lora managed to string together
what had happened from scraps of overheard conversation and bits of
news footage on the Data Sea. Her parents had invested heavily in
TeleCo, as had all of the absentee parents of the boys and girls moping
the hallways at Creed Elan. It had seemed like a safe bet. No less an
authority than Primo's had heralded teleportation as the Next Big
Thing. And why wouldn't it be? The master of TeleCo was a Surina.
Sheldon Surina's invention of bio/logics had propelled the entire world
from chaos to a new era of prosperity and innovation. The emerging
science of teleportation would surely do the same, with a handsome
and brilliant and urbane pitchman like Marcus Surina at the helm. Yes,
the economics were fuzzy and the technical challenges daunting, but
TeleCo would figure it all out in time.

And that might have happened, if Marcus and his top officers had
not been charred to ash by a ruptured shuttle fuel tank.

Marcus Surina's successors at TeleCo tried to pick up the pieces of
his work, but it was a Herculean task. They soon discovered that the
economics of teleportation weren't merely fuzzy; they were disastrous.
The company quickly scaled back its ambitions from Marcus Surina's
pie-in-the-sky dreams to more sober and subdued goals. TeleCo supplicated the Prime Committee for protection from its creditors, and
soon all the manufacturers and distributors that had anticipated a teleportation boom went belly-up. The ripples spread far and wide,
leaving dead companies floating in their wake. Eventually, the ripples
touched even Creed Elan, that last bastion of noblesse oblige.

Years later, Lora wondered how much of a fight the rank-and-file
put up when the bodhisattvas of Creed Elan decided to let the children
go. The girl found herself shunted off to a small, private institution
that was obviously destined for bankruptcy.

Within the space of two years, Lora had gone from a promising
young debutante to a penniless member of the diss. Her quest to
become a Person of Quality would have to be put on hold.

After exhausting the generosity of her family's remaining acquaintances and selling all her trinkets, Lora found shelter on the thirtyfourth floor of a decaying Chicago office tower. The furniture had long
ago been stripped away, and the windows had no glass. Every few years,
one of these buildings falls down and kills everyone inside, cackled one of the
neighboring women, a wretched old hag who had never experienced
high society and resented Lora for her all-too-brief tenure there. Maybe
this one will be next.

Lora learned to do the Diss Shuffle, that ungainly two-step that
had her feigning malnutrition on the bread lines one day and faking
job experience during interviews the next. Employment was almost
impossible to come by for a woman with no marketable skills, no work
experience, and no references. She tried the sacred totems that had opened doors for her in the past-the name of her hive, the names of
her parents, the name of the fashionista who had designed her ball
gowns. But in this new world, those names had lost their magic.

And so several years slipped by in slow motion. Down in the realm
of the diss, nothing changed. The same expressionless faces meandered
down the street, day after day, neither angry nor frightened nor scared
nor hurt, but just there: zombies of the eternal now chewing synthetic
meats grown in tanks. The beneficent forces of government sent
bio/logic programming code raining down from the skies, containing
chemical nourishment and protection from disease and hygiene. Black
code sprouted up from the lower realms, programs to stir the sludge of
neural chemicals in their skulls and relieve the boredom.

Sometimes she had real flesh sex with strangers in trashed-out
buildings. Other times, she and her roommates embarked on errands
of violence against the crumbling city. Bio/logics had made it very difficult to seriously injure someone with a pipe or a rock. But buildings
... buildings followed the natural laws of entropy, and could eventually be beaten down into dust.

And then one day, the rumors began. Len Borda, the young high
executive of the Defense and Wellness Council, was giving out money
to the bio/logic fiefcorps. It's a massive program of military and intelligence
spending designed to end the Economic Plunge, they said. Jobs will be
returning soon.

Lora had not hunted for work in nearly two years. She had rarely
even made it around the block in that time. But the rumors stirred
memories of her old life, of the comfortable track that prescribed
career, companionship and motherhood. Lora left the Chicago slums
and tubed to the metropolis of Omaha in search of work.

Within a few weeks, Lora's search brought her to the attention of
Serr Vigal.

Vigal had matriculated in one of the great lunar universities and discovered an innate passion for neural programming. He settled in
Omaha the same week that High Executive Borda defied the Prime
Committee and began handing out massive defense subsidies. Vigal
founded a company devoted to the study of the brainstem, and went to
the Defense and Wellness Council for funding. They approved his
request almost without question.

The young neural programmer decided to incorporate as a
memecorp instead of a fiefcorp. Vigal had to spend much of his time
pleading for public funding from a patchwork of government agencies,
but he felt this was time well spent if his employees were insulated
from the pressures of the marketplace.

His choice of company structure also allowed him to make unconventional hiring decisions.

Lora was his first such decision. Vigal could see her qualifications
were slim, yet her scores on the logic quizzes he routinely gave to
applicants were astronomical, far higher than most of his pedigreed
apprentices. Clearly the woman was full of untapped potential, and
Vigal was intrigued. The field of neuroscience had moved far beyond
the basic mechanics of forming neurons and positioning dendrites. If
he was to succeed in this field, Vigal knew he would need creative
thinkers to help decipher the hidden electrical order in the brain. He
hired Lora.