Infoquake (24 page)

Please don't think I'm rude
If I tell you YOU GOT SCREWED.
Guess you finally met your match
From now on, look out for NATCH.

Natch's challenges did not end there. When Bolbund spread the word
about what had happened to him, the ROD coding community took
it as a personal affront. ROD coders followed a loose, bohemian ethos
where nothing was taken too seriously and thievery was allowed for
sport but not for money. Natch's ruse-or at least Bolbund's version of
it-violated those principles.

And so Natch had to endure several blatant attempts by third-rate
programmers to sabotage his products, steal his customers, and savage
his reputation. But this did not faze him. Natch quickly developed a
reputation on the Data Sea for his humorless determination and his
inability to accept defeat. Beat him once, and he would not stop until
he had humiliated you three or four times in return-and fired a few
warning shots at your friends and associates to boot.

Captain Bolbund returned to the business after his ninety-day suspension. But by this point, the ROD coding community had come to
the consensus that the best way to deal with Natch was to leave him
alone and grease his path up and out of the business altogether. An
enterprising young woman in Sudafrica even made a profit out of it by
selling a program called NatchWatch that kept other coders abreast of
Natch's activities.

Bolbund decided to steer clear of the angry young programmer.

Natch spent another two years honing his skills in the ROD game.
By the time Primo's took notice and tagged him as a rising star,
Natch's services were in high demand among the elites. He had also
acquired a long list of enemies, which was an even greater indicator of
success as far as Natch was concerned. Nobody likes success but the successful, the ruthless financier Kordez Thassel had once said.

Eventually, Natch decided to move out of his cramped Angelos apartment and settle somewhere else. He chose the city of Shenandoah,
whose coffers were overflowing with fiefcorp revenues and whose local
L-PRACGs were among the most libertarian in the world. With
another financial boost from Horvil, he could even afford a place that
included its own private multi stream and a small garden of daisies off
the living room.

But the money was still abysmal compared to the sums the capitalmen were tossing into the bio/logic fiefcorp sector every day. The
ranks of the diss were thinning, and those of the fiefcorps were
inflating. There was talk on the Data Sea of another Great Boom like
the one that had preceded Marcus Surina's death.

Natch spent another year freelancing, taking on the occasional
ROD but concentrating more on neurological software. As his profile
rose, so did his prospects. Natch received multi requests and lunch
invitations every week from capitalmen and channelers trying to get a
sense of his future plans. They seemed to be competing with one
another to see who could slip in the most dismissive reference to the
Shortest Initiation. Many of the same fiefcorp masters who had tried to
shanghai Natch into worthless apprenticeships a few years ago were
now sugaring him with promises of large signing bonuses.

He even heard from a few groups in the bio/logics underground
who promised him a fortune writing black code off the grid. The
future lay not with fiefcorps and memecorps, they said, but with clandestine teams of programmers sponsored by rich creed organizations
and lunar tycoons, programmers who were being paid to circumvent
the restrictive laws of central government and stretch the boundaries
of bio/logics.

Natch got into the habit of taking the tube out to the great sequoia
forests and zigzagging from station to station for hours while he stared
up at the trees and tried on alternative career paths like gloves.

"You've done really well with RODs," said Jara during one of her
frequent consultations. "But isn't it time you set your sights a little higher?"

Horvil agreed. "I never thought I would be the one telling you to
get some ambition," he said mockingly. "There's bigger targets out
there, and a fuck of a lot more money!"

Contrary to what Jara and Horvil thought, however, Natch had not
settled into a rut. He was biding his time, saving up his resources,
marshaling his abilities. He wanted to plan his next move carefully so
he would not fail again.

One cold winter night at three a.m., he sent a Confidential Whisper
to Serr Vigal.

The neural programmer didn't mind at all being woken up; in fact,
he was overjoyed to hear from his former protege. Ten minutes later,
Natch hopped on an Omaha-bound tube. Within an hour, he was
standing in Vigal's foyer. Natch was surprised to find their friendly
hug metamorphosing into a real flesh-and-blood embrace.

True to form, Serr Vigal had changed little in the past few years.
Memecorp business had risen with the tide of the economy, but this
had also caused his fundraising duties to swell to epic proportions.
Vigal had just returned from a meeting with some of the minor bodhisattvas at Creed Surina and was due at the sybaritic resort of 49th
Heaven in two days to speak about newly proposed OCHRE standards.

"So what causes the prodigal son to visit his old guardian in the
middle of the night?" asked Vigal between sips of green tea.

"I need your advice," said Natch.

"Oh?"

"I'm ready to start my own fiefcorp."

Later that morning, Horvil and Jara agreed to come over to assist
in the planning. Following standard etiquette, which said that crucial
business decisions should be made in person, the two caught a hoverbird across the Atlantic from London. They met in the flesh for the first
time on the runway and gave each other formal bows. By the time they
arrived in Omaha, Horvil and Jara were already grumbling at each other like longtime companions.

Natch brought the first meeting of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp to order around Vigal's kitchen table at noon.

From the outset, cash flow was the primary issue. Natch couldn't
realistically expect any revenue flowing into the company for at least
sixty days, yet there were a number of capital investments that needed
to be made in the beginning. Licensing fees to the Meme Cooperative,
listing fees to Primo's and the L-PRACGs, bio/logic equipment,
administrative programs. Natch's savings would go a long way towards
covering these costs, and eventually he would recoup the rest through
new-fiefcorp tax breaks. But in the meantime, he was short the credits
for apprentices' room and board those first few months.

He turned expectantly towards Horvil, but the engineer surprised
him by shaking his head. "Sorry," he said, "but if I'm gonna be your
apprentice, Natch, I don't want to complicate things."

Natch's eyebrows creased in confusion. "You want to be my apprentice?"

"Sure, why not? You're gonna need a first-rate engineer on the
team, aren't you? The way I figure it, the only place I'm safe from that
competitive streak of yours is on your payroll."

"But-the pay ..."

"This ain't about the money, Natch," said Horvil jauntily, pleased
to catch his friend off guard. "I've got enough of that. I just don't want
to miss out on all the fun. And besides-someone has to keep you sane."

Serr Vigal beamed at the engineer in approval. "I don't think your
credits will be necessary, Horvil," he said. "I can cover the payroll for
the first few months."

This outpouring of faith and goodwill began to arouse Natch's suspicions. "And what do you want in return?"

"Do I have to want anything in return?" replied Vigal with a cozy
smile.

Natch's face turned a flustered purple. "I'm serious, Vigal," he muttered. "What do you want?"

Vigal sighed and considered the question for a minute. "Okay, then
how about a membership on the board, with a stake in the decisionmaking. A minority stake, of course," he added hastily. Natch nodded
in mute satisfaction. Young fiefcorps often ended up with a concerned
father or generous aunt on the board. "I can't promise I'll be available
every day or even every week," continued the neural programmer, "but
just remember, I'll always be there when you need help."

Embarrassed, Natch turned towards the last person at the table.
He didn't know what to expect from Jara. Unlike his career, hers had
not blossomed over the past few years. A gradual detente in her relations with Lucas Sentinel had resulted in the occasional piece of business, but Jara had come increasingly to rely on Natch's consulting fees
to make a living.

The fiefcorp master summoned one of his simmering stares, the
kind he had learned to use on Jara through trial and error. "I'm going
to need a good bio/logic analyst too, Jara," he said.

The small businesswoman shifted uncomfortably in her chair as
she tried, and failed, to meet Natch's stare head-on. Eventually, she lost
the battle of wills and lowered her eyes to the table. "Count me in,"
she said finally, gritting her teeth. "But don't think you talked me into
this, Natch. Everyone knows that fiefcorps are where the real money is
these days. I've been waiting a long time for an opportunity like this
to come along."

Natch gave his fellow fiefcorpers a predatory grin. So have I, he
thought.

Despite all the careful planning and preparation that went into the formation of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, success did not
come easily for the company.

Bio/logic programming was a much different animal than Routine
On Demand coding. The work was more labor-intensive, and required
the skills of a hard-core nuts-and-bolts engineer like Horvil and the
leadership of a generalist like Natch. Because of the difference in scale,
the stakes for any one particular piece of code were much higher. Each
revision took weeks to complete. You couldn't afford to take the shortcuts commonplace in the ROD coding world. Nor did you have the
luxury of wasting time on unnecessary features; you needed an analyst
like Jara who had her fingers on the pulse of the market and could pinpoint exactly what revisions would be the most lucrative.

During the first few weeks, Natch worked nearly non-stop. He
bounced from Jara's flat to Horvil's flat to Vigal's flat so many times
that he was constantly disoriented. But Natch knew he was finally on
the right track and moving full steam ahead.

Still, the sales figures in those initial months were abysmal. Natch
began each day by examining the upgrades and revisions waiting on
the dock for a launch onto the Data Sea. After launch, Jara would sit
back in nervous anticipation, senses tuned to the Sea's very molecular
hum, waiting for the currents of trade to shift in their direction. And
each day she felt the sting of disappointment when traffic failed to
come. Besides the occasional sale to a curious browser or the random
ping of a cataloging data agent, there was very little activity.

"What are we doing wrong?" Jara moaned to Natch one day.

"We're not doing anything wrong," he replied coolly. "We just
need the mojo to accumulate. Give it time."

And then one day it happened.

DeMirage 24.5 was a pedestrian routine designed to reduce the
effect of optical illusions. Natch had halfheartedly picked up the
project hoping to capitalize on all the ocular research he had put over
the years into programs like EyeMorph. Jara didn't have much of an
opinion one way or the other about the program. Horvil gave it a cursory look and spent a few hours performing delicate surgery on the pro gram's innards in MindSpace. Natch barely paused to write a descriptive fore and aft for the product before launching it on the Data Sea.
He assigned a BizWorks administrative agent to watch the traffic and
sound a short ping for every sale, then went to sleep.

Natch's program hit the Data Sea right in the midst of a major turf
war.

The Serly Fiefcorp had been involved in a fierce competition with
a fast-rising company known as the Patel Brothers. Each company's
partisans were launching a daily barrage of complaints to the Meme
Cooperative, to Primo's, and to various L-PRACGs throughout the
civilized world. Finally, the battle came to a head when Serly's databases were struck with a malicious piece of black code that temporarily
put a small portion of the company catalog out of commission. One of
the programs hit was Serly's TrueOptix 88. While Serly's people were
assessing the damage to the catalog, they decided to pull TrueOptix
from the Data Sea until they could determine if it had been infected.
Prosteev Serly immediately brought a complaint before the Meme
Cooperative blaming the Patels, but the evidence was thin and the case
quickly vanished like one of the visual phantasms that TrueOptix was
designed to prevent.