Infoquake (21 page)

But food would have to wait. Natch created a new instance of the
MindSpace bubble and placed his model inside it for future reference.
Then he grabbed two of the bio/logic programming bars out of his
satchel. The new bars were light enough to wave in MindSpace for hours, yet solid enough to withstand thousands of accidental bashes
against a workbench. Natch took a deep breath and attacked the empty
MindSpace bubble with zest.

Morning became afternoon; afternoon became evening.

The young entrepreneur sculpted his code quickly, using virtual
blocks of logic as his marble, and programming bars as his hammer
and chisel. Gradually the mass came to resemble the mutated
grasshopper of Natch's diagram. He had been working for thirty-six
hours straight when he finally laid down the programming bars. The
bowl of oatmeal had disappeared, and Natch couldn't remember if he
had eaten it or if the building had simply whisked it away untouched.

Natch stepped into the hallway, which was lined on both sides
with tulips. He fired up EyeMorph 1.0 and was pleased to discover that
everything worked as designed. His eyes quickly slid from their natural blue to a mottled shade of purple. Natch retreated to his living
room and tested his handiwork against a number of floral images on
the viewscreen. So far, so good.

Rest is coming soon, he promised himself. I just need Plugenpatch
approval, so I can launch the program on the Data Sea, and then I'll sleep.

Natch approached the Plugenpatch process with more than a little
trepidation. As he had discovered while apprenticing for Vigal, a successful test was no guarantee of approval. Fiefcorp programmers could
not hope to cover all the combinatorial possibilities of a fully functioning OCHRE system. No, only large entities like Dr. Plugenpatch
and Primo's had the facilities to do that. Natch swallowed his fear,
packaged up his work, and routed the program to Dr. Plugenpatch's
automated verification system.

Eight minutes later, as Natch sat on his sofa sucking down a fizzy
bottle of ChaiQuoke, EyeMorph returned from the verification system
peppered with rejection notices.

Mindful of the time, Natch tore through the Plugenpatch recommendations. He realized to his chagrin that he had left a loophole that might allow excess protein buildup in the choroid. Any decent
OCHRE system would be able to deal with such an anomaly as a
matter of course, but Dr. Plugenpatch's standards were rigid and
uncompromising. The catchphrase from a thousand Creed Conscientious advertisements rose unbidden in his head: Always preserve your
bodily computing resources! Natch sourly picked up the programming
bars again and began reweaving connection strands.

The next rejection took eleven minutes for the system to process.

The rejection after that took sixteen minutes of analysis.

Natch decided to abandon subtlety and just finish the wretched
program. He suspected that someone had already beaten him to the
Data Sea while he was here fumbling with Dr. Plugenpatch rejections,
but he couldn't just abandon the project now. Natch furiously patched
up the remaining holes, disabled a few features that seemed problematic, and fed it into the Plugenpatch system.

Twenty minutes later, the verdict was clear: success!

Natch hastily bundled the program together, slapped on the standard fore and aft tables that the Data Sea required for its cataloging
agents, and launched. He called up the ROD optics listings on his
viewscreen so he could see the results with his own eyes. The evidence
on the new releases board glared at him in small black letters:

Version: 1.0

Programmer: Natch

Yet he felt no sense of triumph. EyeMorph 1.0 may have slipped
past the gates of Dr. Plugenpatch, but Natch knew the program was
still riddled with inconsistencies-the kind of inconsistencies that
Primo's would certainly notice when they dredged the Data Sea for
their bimonthly summation of the ROD coding world. Not only that,
but because Natch had used Weagel's Eye Wizard to perform some of the heavy lifting, part of his profits would be swallowed up by
licensing fees. He would be lucky to break even on the project.

Natch was shambling towards the bed for a long-overdue slumber
when a message arrived.

You gave it your all
I hope you had fun
'Cause you got your ass kicked

By CAPTAIN BOLBUND.

Horvil was at a loss to explain Natch's failure. He wriggled his head
free of the blankets and stared drowsily at the ROD listings scrolling
up and down his bedroom viewscreen.

"How does he program so fast?" griped Natch from across the
room, where he was wearing tracks into the carpet. "Who is this guy?
`Captain Bolbund'? He beat me by an entire day on EyeMorph, Horv!
What's he doing that I'm not?"

The engineer flopped around to face the wall. "Maybe it was a
fluke," he said. "Maybe he just got lucky. It happens."

"It's not a fluke. This Bolbund has beaten me four times in a row
now. "

"Four times? How the fuck d'you run into the same guy four times
in a row in this business? That's no accident."

Natch shook his head. "Of course it isn't an accident. I keep taking
him on, and he keeps massacring me. Even worse, he always sends me
this awful poetry when he wins." The young entrepreneur forwarded
some of Captain Bolbund's doggerel to Horvil.

Horvil read silently for a minute. "This is terrible," he mumbled.
"Ten thousand spell checking programs out there, and this asshole still
spells slaughter with a `w'." He sat up in bed, stretched, and shot Natch a worried look. "Listen, Natch, I don't think you get it. When you're
a ROD coder, you gotta keep moving or you'll get in a rut. Didn't your
mother ever tell you that you win some and you lose some, but life goes on?"

"No," said Natch with a menacing growl.

Horvil winced, causing his pudgy face to shrivel up like a prune.
"Oh, fuck, Natch ... I forgot ... I didn't mean-"

"Never mind." Natch gazed at the photos lining Horvil's wall,
where dozens of fat, happy Horvil look-alikes with inky black hair frolicked in an assortment of lavish London manors. If Horvil were ever to
fail, his family would absorb him back into its bosom at a moment's
notice. But where would Natch go if his money ran out, especially now
that he had spurned Vigal?

"Why don't you hire an analyst, Natch?" offered Horvil. "Business
strategy is what these people do. They can figure out how to get you
through this."

"I don't trust them," Natch muttered under his breath. He didn't
want to mention the real reason he wouldn't seek professional advice:
his Vault account was running low. In the past two weeks, he had made
only one sale, to a doddering old L-PRACG politician whose mistress
had been complaining about too much sweat on his upper lip.

But after another few weeks of getting thrashed on the ROD circuit, Natch decided that Horvil was right. He needed professional
advice, and he needed it quickly. It pained him to admit he was incapable of defeating Bolbund on his own, but he took solace in a saying
by the great Lucco Primo: There are a thousand roads to success, and nine
hundred of them begin with failure. So Natch swallowed his pride and
began hunting around the Data Sea for an analyst he could afford.

One analyst in Natch's price range instantly stood out from the
rest. She was a woman named Jara, who lived on the other side of
London from Horvil. Natch set the InfoGather 77 program loose on
the Data Sea and instructed it to follow her scent. What InfoGather
discovered surprised him: stellar notices from Primo's, five years' expe rience with the rising star Lucas Sentinel, a smattering of praise from
the drudges. But then the trail abruptly vanished from the Data Sea,
only to reemerge six months later with Jara a free agent and her prices
far below market level. Natch fired off a message to the woman:

Why is Lucas Sentinel spreading rumors about you? What did you do to
piss him off? And why should I give you any work?

The reply was almost instantaneous:

I told Lucas he needed to grow a set of testicles. He decided to blacklist me
instead. Don't bother hiring me unless you have a pair.

Natch laughed out loud. If there was one thing he valued after his
Shortest Initiation experience, it was nonconformity.

Jara arrived at Natch's apartment in multi, a scant five seconds shy
of their appointed meeting time. Natch found himself facing a tiny
woman with Sephardic features and a massive thicket of curly hair. She
was almost twenty years his senior. "You asked for a ninety-minute
consultation," said Jara by way of greeting. "You realize that my standard consultation is forty-five minutes."

"Anything worth doing is worth perfecting," said Natch, quoting
Sheldon Surina.

He could sense this woman Jara sizing him up with one eagle eye.
Her piercing look said that she already knew about the Shortest Initiation, that she had already reconstructed his story and needed only the
one look to confirm it. Natch stood tall and did not flinch. He had
nothing to hide.

"All right," said Jara. "Let's get to it."

Natch brought her over to his workbench and summoned the EyeMorph program and several others in MindSpace, along with a passel
of Captain Bolbund's competing brands. "Tell me why this asshole
keeps beating me," he said simply.

As she stepped inside the MindSpace bubble, Jara didn't pause for
any social niceties. She eyed the herd of programs like an angry bull.
"Give me twenty minutes," she said gruffly, and then reached up and
began spinning the logical structures around with her virtual hands.
Natch took a seat in a chair, activated a QuasiSuspension program, and
let her work. As he drifted off into a light nap, he could sense her
making thousands of queries on his files and wondered what kind of
analysis routines she had developed to churn through all that data.

Precisely twenty minutes later, Natch awoke from QuasiSuspension and joined Jara at the workbench. "So what is this clown doing
that I'm not?" he asked.

"The problem," replied Jara tersely, "is that Bolbund isn't doing
anything you're not doing."

Natch sat back down in his chair, puzzled. "Huh?"

"His programs don't hold a candle to yours. They're sloppy, they're
inadequate, and they'll probably fall apart in a pinch. But he's done a
real mind job on you. He's got you convinced that you need to work
harder and harder until you drop from exhaustion."

"But for process' preservation, Jara, he launched his eye color program a whole day earlier than me. A day! That's life or death in this
business."

"You're still not getting it, Natch. What was the spec?"

"She wanted an eye-morphing program to complement the-"

Jara put up her hand. It was as tiny and delicate as a doll's. "That's
your first mistake. You thought the customer knew what she wanted.
She wanted an eye-morphing program to complement the colors of the flowers,
right? No, what she wanted was a program to make her eyes match her
flowers."

The agitation flowed down to Natch's feet and made him rise from
the chair in a futile attempt to pace it off. "What's the difference?"

"Did you spend any time researching your client before you took
on the project? Well, I did-just now, while you were dozing-and look what I found." She strode up to the room's lone viewscreen and
gave an imperious nod.

A woman materialized on the screen, probably in her mid-eighties
but possibly approaching a hundred, decked out in a lavish purple robe
that was the hallmark of membership in Creed Elan. vellux, read the
caption beneath her. The two watched silently for a moment as Vellux
puttered around her greenhouse pointing out different specimens of
flowers. Five minutes into her nauseating pitch, Natch froze the display. "Okay, she sells flowers. I've already seen this promo. I don't
think I'd live through a second viewing."

Jara snorted, but the glimmer in her eyes was not unfriendly. "You
may have seen it, but how closely were you watching? Did you notice
this?" She stretched out her index finger to zoom in on a block of text
in the corner of the screen: visit us at the creed elan annual convocation July 15-27. "Vellux probably didn't mention she was buying this
ROD to use at a Creed Elan function, did she? If you were going to
traffic flowers to the Elanners, Natch, what flowers would you sell? I'd
pick bougainvilleas, lilacs, irises. Red, purple, and lavender, the official
colors of the creed." Jara jerked her thumb to the left and focused on
the flower vendor's face. "And here's another clue. Did you notice that
her eyes are hazel?"

Natch stewed quietly in the opposite corner of the room. He could
see the gestalt of the situation coming into focus.

"After five minutes, we've narrowed down the task considerably.
Instead of creating a program to change anyone's eyes to match any color
flower, we just need to create one that will change this woman's eyes to
several shades of purple. Not only that, but we know which flowers to
scan for in the retinal image. It's much easier to analyze an image for a
specific genus of flower than to do the same for any flower; I'm willing
to bet you can find dozens of sub-routines on the Data Sea that will do
the trick.