Infoquake (41 page)

Jara felt her mental gears grind to a halt. The rest of the apprentices sported dumb looks as well.

"Petrucio didn't say they were going to launch a MultiReal product
on Tuesday," Natch continued. "All they're doing is holding a demo.
As far as we know, the Patel Brothers are months away from launching
anything that'll float on the Data Sea."

"Which means-"

"Maybe Frederic and Petrucio don't understand this technology
any better than we do. Maybe they never got much cooperation from
Margaret, and now they're frantically trying to put together something
that will look halfway decent for their demo. A good channeler can
make lots of deals before there's anything to sell. The Patels could be
trying to shut out the competition before anyone else realizes there's
something to compete over."

Horvil snorted. "What about us?"

"Us?" said Jara, starting to comprehend the vector of Natch's
thoughts. "Horv, Margaret never said anything about products in that
speech of hers. She called MultiReal a scientific breakthrough. As far as
the public knows, we could be planning to hold on to the core technology and collect licensing fees. Or we could be some kind of charitable technology bank."

"So you think the Patels are bluffing," said Merri. "Putting up a
a smokescreen to scare everyone else out of the MultiReal business." As a devotee of Creed Objectivv, she seemed to find the entire possibility distasteful.

"More or less," said Natch.

Silence briefly engulfed the room. Natch's eyes remained closed.
Jara could hear the cawing of vultures overhead, the rustling of amorphous beasts out in the brush. Nobody ever said that SeeNaRee had to be
subtle, she thought.

"Well," said Benyamin faintly, "why can't we do the same thing?"

Natch's eyelids snapped open, and the blue orbs beneath emitted a
ghoulish glow. The virtual sun dipped below the treeline as if on cue
and cast them all in shadow. "That's exactly what we're going to do,"
he hissed through a fierce grin. "The Patel Brothers made the first
strike by releasing this promo and scheduling a demo so quickly. But
on Tuesday, we're going to beat them at their own game-because we're
going to demo our products first."

Jara groaned. "And how do you expect us to do that?" she cried,
her hands balled into miniature fists. "It was bad enough when you
wanted us to create an entire industry in eight days. Now you want us
to do it in three?"

The fiefcorp master did not even pause. "Yes."

"Natch, who knows how long the Patels have been preparing for
this demo? Days, weeks, months! Horvil's right-we barely even know
what this program is. None of us had even heard of MultiReal this time
last week. How are we supposed to get started? We don't have the
code, we don't have the expertise, we don't have anything to work
with."

"Not true," Natch replied tersely. "We have all the bio/logic code
we need."

Merri ran her fingers through her blonde hair quizzically. "Natch,
I thought you started liquidating all our bio/logic programs this
morning."

"All the released programs, yes. But not the old ones we've taken off
the market. Not the Routines On Demand."

"RODs?" yelped Horvil, springing up from his chair. "I don't
believe this. You're pitting us against the Patel Brothers with some of
your shitty old ROD programming?"

Natch smiled cruelly. "Not my old programming, Horvil. Yours."

All the color drained from the engineer's face. He sat down gingerly, not even bothering to put on a PokerFace to mask his dismay.
"Oh no, Natch. You're not talking about Probabilities 4.9, are you?
Man, that program is in sorry shape. It's nowhere near ready for production."

The fiefcorp master nodded. "That's the one."

Horvil whimpered incoherently.

Jara cut in. "Natch, I don't see any record of Probabilities 4.9 on
the Data Sea." She narrowed her eyes, casting her mind out in a wider
net. Primo's ratings, fiefcorp launch schedules, Meme Cooperative filings, drudge reviews, InfoGathers-all came up empty. "As far as I can
tell, this program was never released. It doesn't even look like it's been
run through Dr. Plugenpatch."

"Well, of course," said Natch, irony oozing from his pores. "Do you
think we'd put the code to our top-secret weapon out on the Data Sea,
where anybody could see it?"

"You wouldn't let me release it," whined Horvil. "You said it was
shit."

Merri interposed a hand into the middle of the table, attempting a
peacemaking gesture. "Horvil, if our MultiReal demo is riding on this
program-"

"And all our contracts too," snarled Jara.

-then maybe you'd better tell us what it is."

Horvil gathered his breath and sucked in his voluminous gut. He
started reciting a sales pitch that had long since calcified in memory. 11
'Probabilities 4.9 is designed to take chaotic real-world events and
quantify their random elements into a meaningful array suitable for
prediction. Its intended audience is any person looking for an array of random elements on which to place a wager. For instance, Probabilities 4.9 might track the number of dust motes in a particular square
meter and determine the odds of any one dust mote hitting the ground
first ..."'

"It's a gambling calculator," said Jara, shaking her head. "We've
quit the bio/logics business to sell a gambling calculator?"

"Actually, it's more like a statistical distribution engine that-"

"Probabilities 4.9 is absolutely not a gambling calculator!" said
Natch, rising from his chair and waving his fist like a tin-pot dictator.
"It's the turbine that powers Possibilities 1.0, the first in a revolutionary line of MultiReal products based on the principles of Margaret
Surina! It will quantify and order multiple realities! It will find the
patterns within the chaos!"

Jara's temples were beginning to throb. She could feel panic lapping up against the seawalls of her mind, threatening to spill over and
flood her synapses. All our contracts and our shares are riding on some tossedoff contraption of Horvil's...... So what's the plan then, Natch? Are we
just going to go out there and pretend this Probabilities thing is MultiReal?"

"No, I'm afraid Horvil's right. It's a piece of shit."

"Hey!"

"Probabilities 4.9 is really just going to be the front end for Margaret's MultiReal code. When Quell gets here, we'll hook the two programs together in MindSpace. They operate in the same general field.
There ought to be some similarities we can work with. Enough to get
us through the demonstration, at least."

Merri had been watching the back-and-forth between Natch and
Jara like a spectator at a duel. "I think I'm beginning to understand,"
she said. "Horvil knows the Probabilities code inside and out ... Presumably, this apprentice of Margaret's knows the MultiReal code
inside and out ... So, if we can just build a bridge between the two,
we can make this demo work."

"Precisely."

Horvil had already pushed aside the injury to his pride for the
more pressing issue of an intellectual challenge. Using the tip of his
finger, he was busy sketching lengthy equations on a virtual slate. The
engineer ended up with a very large and unwieldy number at the
bottom. "Totally impossible," he said.

"What?" asked Natch.

"This is going to take a lot of grunt work, Natch. A lot. If this
MultiReal program is as complex as Margaret says it is, it's bound to
have thousands of nodes we'll need to hook up. Tens of thousands,
maybe. Even if you and me and Quell and Ben work on this nonstop,
we couldn't get it done until"-Horvil scribbled his way through a
maze of algebra-"December 19th."

"You see?" cried Jara. "There's no way we can do all this by
Tuesday. No way."

The fiefcorp master flashed her the barest hint of a suggestive look,
which Jara could feel right between the shoulder blades. Natch
extended his finger towards Benyamin. "You've managed assemblyline coders," he said. "Do you know a shop that can pull this off at the
last minute?" The young man looked wide-eyed at his cousin, inhaled
deeply, then nodded. "Good, then it's settled."

Jara felt the tingling between her shoulder blades diffuse down her
back and into her spine. She remembered getting this feeling while
playing chess against her grandfather, a professional who had jousted
with the masters in the 49th Heaven tournaments. Inevitably, halfway
through every game, she would discover that her grandfather had
accounted for all of her two-dimensional feints, that the moves she had
taken at face value were but the smallest strokes of an overarching
blueprint that had been in place since the first tentative pawnstep forward. Natch possessed this same talent. Had he known where
Benyamin would fit in the grand scheme when he hired him? Had he
known all those years ago that Horvil's Probabilities code would one day prove useful? Did he have some hidden purpose reserved for her?

"So that still leaves Jara and me," said Merri quietly. "What should
we be doing?"

"Yeah, I suppose we get to stay behind and keep the home fires
burning," Jara snapped with a swagger she didn't feel.

Natch focused the full force of his sapphire orbs on Jara. "You have
the most difficult job of all. You write the script."

"That's not difficult. I bleed marketing copy, Natch."

"But this isn't like any marketing copy you've ever written before,
Jara. Those people out there-they hate me." He made a sweeping arc
with one hand that encompassed nearly the entire veldt. "By the time
I step out on that stage on Tuesday, the drudges will have convinced
everyone I'm a public menace. You need to counter their propaganda-and explain a completely foreign technology-and get the
audience revved up-all in fifteen minutes or less."

"Fifteen minutes?" the analyst yelped.

"Margaret's speech was too long. Much too long. Ours needs to be
different. We need to get the audience keyed up in an emotional way. I
don't want anybody thinking too much about this technology. I just
want one simple demonstration that cuts to the chase. How simple? A
four-year-old should understand MultiReal after I'm done speaking,
that's how simple it's got to be."

Merri cleared her throat politely. "And me?"

"Work with Robby Robby and his channelers. Start warming up
the leads. And then, the instant the presentation's over, bang! I want a
fucking sales blitzkrieg out there. Take no prisoners."

Jara looked around and saw nothing but eager faces spiked with
adrenaline. All the apprentices had feared this new fiefcorp was flailing
around in the dark, aimlessly searching for direction. But Natch has a
plan, Jara thought. We should have known. He always has a plan.

"There's one more topic we need to cover," Natch said with an
abrupt change of tone. Either he was suddenly being sincere, or he had made new strides in his mask of personableness. "The Defense and
Wellness Council is out there, and they don't want this demonstration
to go forward. You all saw what happened at Margaret Surina's speech.
When this meeting is over and I send out the announcement of our
demo, we've got seventy-two hours til showtime-and once Len Borda
knows that, he might resort to something desperate."

"What about the Patels?" said Jara. "Are they going to come after
us too?"

Natch scratched his elbow thoughtfully. "I don't know. I can't see
the angle in them resorting to violence. And Frederic and Petrucio
never do anything without an angle."

Horvil eyed a pack of hyenas in the distance as if they might be
Council informants. "So what do you want us to do? Lock our doors?
Hire bodyguards?"

"Maybe we should just lie low until Tuesday," suggested Ben.
"Find somewhere the Council can't get to us."

Merri gave the young apprentice a dark look. "Like where?"

There was a long pause. Somewhere in the distance, a cluster of
African bats shrieked. The Defense and Wellness Council had a presence in every city on the globe, every chartered settlement on Luna and
Mars, every jerrybuilt outpost orbiting the sun from Earth to the
asteroid belt. Was there anyplace in the whole of human civilization
where Borda couldn't find them?

Natch leaned forward, balancing his chin on the tips of his two
index fingers. "All right, then," he said. "Everyone's going to come out
here to Andra Pradesh. The Surina compound's got plenty of accommodations and the best programming facilities in the world-not to
mention armed security."

"What good is that going to do us?" said Jara with a grimace. "The
Council marched right inside the gates the other day while Surina
security just sat there and watched. What makes you think they'll stop
Borda this time?"

The entrepreneur closed his eyes once more, and Jara realized he
had explored this situation a thousand times already in his head.
"Where else can we go? Any place that's primitive enough to escape
the Council's notice is too backwards for us to put together a demo in.
And I've looked everywhere ... the Islands, the Pharisee Territories,
OrbiCo space freighters. It's the same wherever you look. At least in
Andra Pradesh we'll see them coming."

"What-what about Serr Vigal?" stuttered Horvil.

"Vigal will be all right. He's got his own private security team at
the conference, and everyone knows he doesn't have much to do with
our day-to-day operations. He promised he'd show up for the demo."

"Natch, what about me?" Merri's tone of voice was distraught,
almost tearful. "I don't think there's any shuttle that can get from Luna
to Terra that fast. The presentation will be over while I'm still in
transit."

"I haven't forgotten about you. I've made you a reservation at
TeleCo later this afternoon."

Jara's eyes went wide with disbelief. "Teleport-from the moon?
Are you kidding? Do you know how expensive that is? That's like our
entire third quarter budget right there."