Infoquake (18 page)

"The whole incident is still in the news, Natch. Maybe you need
to give the fiefcorps some time."

"It won't matter."

"You know, you can do so many things other than bio/logics.
Maybe-"

"No." Natch pressed his forehead against the window, covering a
histogram of fiefcorp share prices. "It has to be bio/logics. There's
nothing else out there for me."

The neural programmer cleared his throat and began to say something, then stopped. A statement was slowly coalescing in his mind.
At one time, Natch would have lacked the patience to listen to what
his guardian had to say, but after nine months in the wilderness surrounded by the impetuosity of teenage boys, Serr Vigal's deliberate
manner no longer seemed so irritating. "Do you remember," Vigal
stammered, "what I told you before initiation about taking an apprenticeship somewhere close by?"

The boy nodded yes.

"Well, it seems I have some space-I mean, there is an openingat my memecorp. Brainstem programming. The pay isn't much. But,
well, I just thought ..." He let the sentence waft away.

What a difference nine months can make, Natch thought. Before initiation, his main concern had been finding an appropriate excuse to take
an apprenticeship over Vigal's objections. Even after the debacle with
Figaro Fi, Natch had never seriously considered taking an apprenticeship with the neural programmer. But after all that had happened with Brone and the Shortest Initiation, did he have any choice?

Vigal smiled. "I can see the struggle in your face, Natch. You don't
want to apprentice with me because you think the work will be dull
and unchallenging. Even worse, you're afraid I'm going to lecture you
about what happened at initiation. You think I'll try to guilt you into
signing up with my memecorp."

Natch's silence indicated his agreement.

"You also know that one day you will be beyond my tutelage," continued Vigal. "Yet you worry that I might try to keep you around by
reminding you how I lent a helping hand when nobody else would.
Plus-and this may be the most crucial thing-you doubt that you'll
be able to find a decent woman in a company like mine to save your
life."

The young outcast tried hard not to crack a smile, but he failed.

Vigal chuckled and rose from his chair. He took a seat on the bed
next to the boy and put his hand on Natch's shoulder. A rare and yet
not unwelcome moment of physical contact between them. "You know
that life in the memecorps is much different than life in the fiefcorps,
don't you?"

Natch nodded. " Fiefcorps make money," he quoted slyly. "Memecorps
cost money."

The neural programmer snorted. "Well, that's what those fools at
Creed Thassel say. Maybe that was true back when Kordez Thassel and
Lucco Primo were alive. But today.... Today, I think even a hard-core
libertarian would be surprised at how much of our funding comes from
the marketplace. If you ask me, every bio/logic programmer could use
a grounding in the fundamentals of the memecorp world."

The two silently watched the undulations in the Primo's histogram
for a few minutes. Vigal's hand communicated an unspoken message of
comfort and understanding. Natch could briefly see a widening of
vistas, a broadening of horizons.

He tried to picture what life in Vigal's memecorp would be like. Heated debates over brainstem engineering techniques, collaborations
with faceless co-workers, long hours fine-tuning bio/logic programs.
There were worse ways to spend two years of his life. The money would
be a pittance compared to the sums he had been discussing with the
capitalmen nine months ago. But all the same, he would be working
in bio/logics. And once he had proven his ability in the memecorp
world, wouldn't the fiefcorps become that much more attainable?

"So what are your terms?" Natch asked.

Vigal couldn't hold back his delight. He named the terms: Room
and board in Omaha. A modest stipend, with the promise of a bonus
after two years. Access to the run-of-the-mill bio/logic programming
equipment.

"And what about ... all the bad publicity?" said Natch.

His guardian shrugged his shoulders dismissively. "The publicity
will pass. You will discover that one of the benefits of working in the
memecorp sector is that we are well-protected from that sort of nonsense."

Natch stood back and let the phantom letters of Vigal's contract
replace the histogram on the window. He called up Shyster 95.3c to
help him negotiate the details. Within minutes, the two were sitting
across the small round table in the corner of the room dickering over
minor contractual differences. By the end of the hour, they had worked
out an agreement. Natch affirmed it without hesitation.

He was now officially Serr Vigal's apprentice.

After a few moments of relaxed celebration, Vigal once again
struck a serious note.

"I know you worry about your future, Natch," said the neural programmer in a low voice. "And I am sorry I have always been so preoccupied with all these ... distractions." He wiggled his fingers up
towards the ceiling and let them linger there a moment, as if he could
only keep them from drifting into the stratosphere by a colossal act of
willpower. "But-but when you came to me, I promised myself I would always be there for you. And I intend to keep that promise no
matter what the future brings."

Natch ducked his head under the protective helmet of his clasped
fingers. Ordinarily, he would have scoffed at Vigal's sentimentality, but
he was not in an ordinary frame of mind. "And what if I have no
future?"

His guardian leaned forward and put his hand on his apprentice's
arm. "Of course you have a future. And do you know what it is?"

"What?"

"Your future is what you choose to do tomorrow. And the direction
you're searching for?"

Natch shook his head.

"Your direction is where you choose to go."

Natch took a week to get oriented in his new surroundings. There was
a lot to do. He needed to find an apartment whose rent fit the narrow
boundaries of a memecorp salary; he needed to arrange for a shuttle to
carry his belongings out from Cape Town; and most daunting of all, he
needed to enroll himself in an L-PRACG.

The apartment was no hassle. Omaha had an abundance of
memecorp-friendly housing. Natch picked a modest building about as
far away from the Missouri River as you could get and still be inside
the city limits. Even in this drab setting, he could not afford exterior
walls with real windows and had to settle for a handful of viewscreens
instead. There were, of course, no private outgoing multi streams.

Choosing an L-PRACG proved to be a more difficult chore. Legislatures large and small had been bombarding Natch with ads for days
now, since the very instant he reconnected to the Data Sea. He found
himself in the midst of an ideological battle fought with one-line
enticements:

Full Compliance With All Prime Committee Details

The ULTIMATE in PRIVACY PROTECTION

GOVERNMENTALISM at its Finest

Natch spent a day trying to sort through all the solicitations and
pick a government that suited him. But his confusion increased the
longer he worked at it; questions nibbled away at the back of his mind
like rodents, and only seemed to multiply when he wasn't looking.
What basic services did the L-PRACG provide? What kinds of taxes
and fees were involved? Did the L-PRACG contract out security or
provide its own? How long was the subscription term? How exclusive
was the membership?

Finally, Natch threw up his hands and settled on a libertarianleaning L-PRACG that offered a nice package of bio/logic programs as
a membership incentive. If he decided he didn't like his government's
policies, he could always let the subscription lapse or supplement it
with other complementary L-PRACGs. Natch immediately received a
vast dossier of regulations and bylaws, which he promptly filed away
and never looked at again.

He awoke the following Monday with a sense of determination he
had not felt since before initiation. By 6:40 that morning, Natch was
wading through the Omaha traffic towards the tube stations. He was
no longer a curious bystander tossing pebbles at multi projections;
now he had become part of the flow, a fish swimming upstream with
the rest of the workforce. Natch caught a cross-town tube and found
himself standing in Serr Vigal's foyer with three minutes to spare.

Vigal emerged from his bedroom fifteen minutes late, ushered
Natch inside, and then spent another twenty-two minutes clucking around the kitchen making tea. The young programmer scanned the
living room in vain for an extra workbench or a set of bio/logic programming bars. Where does he expect me to work? Natch thought.

Finally, he and his guardian sat on opposing couches and got down
to business.

"The human brain," said Serr Vigal solemnly. A holograph of the
bulbous organ appeared in the air between them. With an unassuming
wave of his hand, Vigal enlarged the projection until it nearly filled the
room, then set it rotating slowly in place. "And here"-his finger indicated the long trunk that extended out the bottom-"here is the area
we specialize in: the brainstem.

"What is the brainstem? The brainstem is the key to understanding humanity. Learn how the brainstem works, and you learn how
people work."

Vigal stood and began walking slowly around the hologram. His
words had the flavor of a carefully scripted lecture.

"The body is a sensory machine," continued Vigal. "A machine
that takes careful measurements of what is going on all around us.
Sights, smells, sounds, tastes, touches: these are nothing more than
dispatches from the outside world. The body transfers this information
to the brain through a series of neural networks. And what does the
brain receive? Meaningless pulses of electrical activity. Echoes of the
world around us. How is the mind to make any sense of it at all? That
is where the brainstem comes in.

"The brainstem is the connection between mind and body.

"The brainstem is the mechanism that translates impulse to
thought, and then thought to action. It is the body's jumping-off point
to higher intelligence. The brainstem passes information to the central
processing units of our minds, the cerebrum and cerebellum. It translates this data into a format the higher brain can understand. And
when the central processor has determined a course of action, it then
routes electrical impulses back into the body through the brainstem.

"What would we be without the brainstem? Without the brainstem, the body would be a useless mass of tissue and bone. Our senses
would be reduced to electrical impulses without context-mere
random noise. And our minds? Our minds would be isolated from the
real world. We would be free to postulate and theorize and deduce, but
be forever unable to translate these lofty thoughts into action. We
would each be remote stars in the center of a meaningless void.

"All the questions humanity has been asking itself since the dawn
of time have their root in the brainstem. Are we creatures of passion,
or are we creatures of forethought? How do we balance the needs of the
mind with the needs of the body? Should Hamlet follow his heart and
avenge the death of his father, or should he follow his head and,
through careful reason, devise another course of action?

"These are brainstem questions, Natch. This is what you will be
studying here in my memecorp over the next two years."

Natch's eyes began to glaze over halfway through Vigal's speech,
and he wondered if this was part of the memecorp's standard
fundraising pitch. Natch didn't want to be a philosopher; he wanted to
be a programmer. He wanted to feel the grooved handle of a bio/logic
programming bar in his hand as he stood in MindSpace making logical connections. He wanted to make things work.

But, over the next few months, Natch obediently buried himself in
the lore of the brainstem. He read about the cell composition in the
thalamus and hypothalamus, about the mysteries of the medulla
oblongata, about the fiber pathways that ran through the limbic
system like cranial tube tracks. He studied humanity's slow progress
in mastering the brainstem through bio/logics. The early neural programmers began with simple programs to monitor the electrical pulses
passing through the nervous system, and then later crafted programs
to control them. Soon their successors were using bio/logics to broaden
the bandwidth of the spinal cord, to shorten the refractory period a
neural cell must wait between transmissions, to intercept and edit and mimic the electric messages passing through the nervous system. They
learned how to plug straight into the message stream and project sensations of their own that were indistinguishable from their "real" counterparts.

During these first few months of his apprenticeship, Natch also
learned the ins and outs of the memecorp business. He accompanied
his guardian on a round of fundraising and speeches that took them
from Omaha to Beijing to Melbourne and even out to the orbital
colonies of Allowell and Nova Ceti. Vigal would begin with the same
speech he had given Natch on his first day of apprenticeship, and then
segue into lofty promises of future achievements. Accurate recording
and playback of mental processes. Clustered brainpower. Group consciousness.