Infoquake (3 page)

Jara breathed a sigh of relief. Why had she been nervous? NiteFocus 48 had worked fine yesterday too, and the day before, and the
day before. She hadn't seen a major glitch in the program since version
43 or 44. "So what do you think?" she asked Natch. "Ready for
launch?"

"Does it look like it's ready for launch?" the fiefcorp master replied
brusquely. "The color resolution needs a lot of work. And from the
look of those blueprints, this program uses way too many cycles. You
think we can just release a product that sucks up all the computing
resources on the Data Sea and crashes people's systems? No, it's not
fucking ready at all."

Jara reacted as if he had slapped her. There was a sudden fermata in Horvil's dance, which he tried to pass off as intentional. Why had
they slaved through so many nights if they were going to get this kind
of treatment?

"Can't either of you see what I'm trying to do?" asked Natch, his
tone suddenly quiet and contemplative. "I'm just pointing out the
same inadequacies that Primo's is going to find tomorrow. Primo's
doesn't care if you spent all night coding. They only care about two
things: success and failure. Success means more sales. It means more
respect. It means moving up to the next level of the game. Everything
else ... is failure." Natch rubbed his forehead and gave a yearning look
out towards the horizon.

Jara couldn't help but roll her eyes at his histrionics. Doesn't Natch
ever stop to wonder if he's taking himself too seriously? She wanted to screech
obscenities at the invisible audience, to throttle his knowing smirk.
She wanted to get him out of those breeches somewhere quiet and
instruct him in low, sibilant tones about the things that really mattered.

The fiefcorp master turned. He gave Jara a long, penetrating stare
of amusement and contempt while Horvil shifted awkwardly from foot
to foot behind them. "Now come inside," Natch said, "and I'll tell you
my plan."

Jara lowered her eyes. "I thought you said no more dirty tricks,"
she whimpered.

"I never said that. I said I'd take a look at NiteFocus 48, which I
just did. And it's awful. Besides, why do you keep using those words,
dirty tricks? I don't do dirty tricks. It's called business."

The sun crept up the early-morning sky, panther-like, reminding Jara
she had managed to last another twenty-four hours without going
crazy or quitting or killing someone. She flushed with accomplishment. All she needed to do for the next eleven months was pace
through the days with her head bowed low, like Natch in one of his
moods, and she would survive. That was how you killed a stretch of
time: stick around long enough to outlast it.

She told the others she needed a few minutes alone in the cool
night air. Natch and Horvil disappeared inside.

Jara stayed outside and watched the city of Shenandoah shake itself
awake. Buildings that had automatically compressed themselves
overnight to conserve space began puffing up like blowfish as their tenants awoke. The balcony outside Natch's apartment floated upwards,
almost imperceptibly, as residents on the lower levels claimed their
living space for the morning. A river of pedestrian traffic wended from
the poorer districts to the public multi facilities, ferrying half a million workers to offices around the globe, or to Luna, Mars or one of the
orbital colonies. Others flooded into the tube stations where sleek
trains would whisk them across the continent at exorbitant speeds. A
privileged few used the teleportation stations, still shiny and unspoiled
and mostly empty.

Jara had witnessed the same morning transformation many times
in London, but until now, she had never seen it in Shenandoah. She felt
a momentary pang of envy for the people who lived and worked in the
smooth, low curves of a modern city. They had never scrabbled to work
over ancient brick or weedy cobblestone, nor taken a circuitous tube
route around yet another corroded abbey that had been given perpetual
right-of-way For The Sake Of History. Stop feeling sorry for yourself Jara thought. You could live in Shenandoah if you really wanted-even though all
you could afford here is a room in one of the old skyscrapers. She gazed off to
the east, where the faint broken towers of Old Washington thrust
above the mist. The towers were all that remained now of the variegated American empires that had flourished in the years before the
Autonomous Revolt. One lone tube track snaked out in that direction
from Shenandoah and disappeared into the fog like the fossilized tendril of some long-dead beast.

Stop delaying, Jara thought. Go inside and get this over with. Then you
can go home and sleep. Whatever idiocy Natch is planning can't be much worse
than what you're already doing.

She was wrong.

"You want me to what?" Jara shrieked, sounding even to herself
like some farcical harpy from the dramas. The Unbeliever, the sourfaced One Who Doubts Our Hero's Prowess.

Natch gloated at his apprentice's reaction. "I want you to spread
rumors," he said calmly, mid-pace, "that the Data Sea is about to be
bombarded with a crippling black code attack."

"A crippling black code attack."

"By the Pharisees."

"The Pharisees. And what good is this going to do?"

"It's going to cause the Patel Brothers to delay their product
launch."

Natch's orders were such an affront to common sense that Jara
couldn't help but laugh. An emboldened Horvil let out a guffaw of his
own. "Great plan," cheered the engineer mockingly. "While we're at
it, let's cause the Patel Brothers to put a million credits in our Vault
accounts and give us all neck massages."

Jara wondered fleetingly if Natch really had lost his mind. What connection was there between a respectable bio/logics company selling
programs to improve the human body, and a group of superstitious
fanatics who had walled themselves off in a far corner of the globe?
Then she looked at Natch's condescending smirk and realized he was
utterly serious.

Insanity.

The analyst took a seat on the sofa next to her fellow apprentice.
"All right, start explaining," she said.

Natch nodded and gave another one of those self-absorbed looks
into the distance. "What's tomorrow?" he said at length.

Horvil tilted his eyes upwards in thought. "November 1st."

"November 1st. A day like any other, right? For us, yes. Products
launched, products sold, business as usual. But for the Pharisees,
tomorrow is the Day of the Dead." He waved his hand at the closest
viewscreen, which happened to be showing an early landscape by Tope.
The painting's sharp blues and greens morphed into an old Prime
Committee video about the Day of the Dead. Technology has marched
onwards, announced the narrator, but in the mythology of the Pharisees,
ghouls and goblins still come out at night. The three of them watched as a
band of brown-skinned Pharisees bowed low in dusty robes and began
chanting in an archaic guttural tongue.

The Pharisees hate the civilized world, continued the nameless documentary narrator. Using biollogic programs to manipulate the human body is
`ungodly,' they say. And to implant tiny machines in the blood, to let some programmer's code actually broadcast images into the brain ... Unnatural! A
sin!

Natch paused the display and snapped for emphasis. Onscreen, a
youth was frozen in mid-scowl, his sunburned fist raised in defiance at
some unseen foe. "Remember the program that started raising blood
pressures in all the orbital colonies?" said Natch. "That was just two
years ago. Twenty-three hundred dead, and a harsh military response
from the Defense and Wellness Council. But do you think they've had their fill of bloodshed? Of course not! The Pharisees haven't been idle
since then. They've been plotting and scheming and studying programming techniques, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to
strike.

"When do the Pharisees tend to attack? On days of religious significance, of course. Like the Feast of All Saints. Like Jesus Joshua
Smith's Birthday.

"Like the Day of the Dead.

"Think about it! Couldn't the Pharisees have figured out a way to
disrupt the financial markets or Dr. Plugenpatch or the multi network
by now? Couldn't they have chosen tomorrow to launch their opening
salvo in the next holy war against us `connectibles'? Isn't it possible the
Defense and Wellness Council is shoring up its defenses right now to
prepare for a major onslaught by some frightening new breed of black
code?"

Horvil was totally captivated by Natch's little narrative. He leaned
forward on the edge of the sofa, shifting his attention nervously
between the wildly gesticulating Natch and the ominous figure on the
viewscreen with the unkempt hair and dirty robe. "It is possible, isn't
it!" he gasped.

"And if all this is true ... wouldn't November lst be a very
unlucky day for the Patel Brothers to launch a product upgrade?"

Jara felt Natch's plot snap into focus, and for one sickening instant
she saw the world through the fiefcorp master's warped lenses. Colors
faded away, blacks and whites dissolved into a miasma of indistinct
gray. "So you want us to tell people our friends at the Defense and Wellness Council say something big is about to happen, and wait for the rumors
to clog up the gossip networks?"

"I don't want anything clogged up. I want fucking bedlam."

"And you think the Patel Brothers will catch wind of all this and
postpone their product launch to a day with a slower news cycle."

Horvil shook off the jitters and sat back in thought. "So that's why you've been pushing us so hard on NiteFocus 48," he said. "A near-perfect program ... launched on a day where there's no competition ...
That just might cause Primo's to edge us up a notch or two in the ratings."

Jara frowned. She now gleaned why Merri and Serr Vigal had been
excluded from this early-morning rendezvous; they would never participate in such a scheme. In fact, now that Jara thought about it,
Natch had been excluding them from a lot of ethically shady errands
like this lately. A thought slithered through the back of Jara's mind.
What did that say about Natch's opinion of her? She purposefully let
it go.

Natch restarted the video. They watched a squad of Defense and
Wellness Council officers execute a coordinated strike on a crowd of
restless Pharisees standing on a hilltop. The Pharisees fired laser rifles
wildly at the white-robed figures materializing all around them. But
the figures they hit were nothing but ghostly multi projections, spotters for the real strike force lining up behind them. A volley of needlesized darts flew through the air, lodging themselves in the flesh of their
adversaries and unloading their deadly cargo of toxic chemicals and
molecule-sized machines of war. Within seconds, the fight was over
and the Pharisees lay motionless on the dirty ground.

"It's a nice theory, Natch," Jara said, "but I doubt one new program
could cause us to jump five slots on Primo's overnight."

"No," said Natch with a sudden diabolical grin, "but four programs just might."

The apprentices simply stared at him, unable to summon any
coherent words in response.

"What do you think I've been doing these past few weeks while the
two of you plugged away on NiteFocus 48? I've been working, that's
what. Getting DeMirage 52 and EyeMorph 66 prepared for launch."

Horvil counted ostentatiously on his fingers. "That's only three.
What's the fourth program?"

"Mento Calc-U-Later 93.9. That's been ready for weeks now."

"What? You told me that program was unlaunchable."

"I lied."