Infoquake (42 page)

"Not as expensive as replacing a dead channel manager at the last
minute," said Natch.

Nobody could argue with that.

Ten minutes later, Natch cut his multi connection. He stood on the red
square tile in his hallway and took stock of preparations for Tuesday's
performance. All the pieces were set on the board: the auditorium
space had been reserved, the proper documentation had been filed with
the Meme Cooperative, the press release had been blasted to every
corner of the Data Sea. He gave the drudges another fifteen minutes before they started a blitzkrieg of their own.

He consulted the time and shook his head. Precious seconds were
ticking away, time disappearing forever into the void. He would need
to drive his staff hard in order to complete this massive undertaking.
He would need to thrash a little sloppiness out of Horvil; to wink and
cajole a little extra effort out of Jara; to give Merri that zone of comfort that allowed her to produce consistently excellent work.
Benyamin's motivations were still a mystery to him, as were those of
the Islander Quell. But Natch felt confident he would find their hooks
before this crunch was through.

The fiefcorp master made a quick list of things he would need at
the Surina complex. His satchel of bio/logic programming bars. A few
shirts. An extra pair of pants. The gabardine suit he had purchased for
important events. Natch tucked the hermetically sealed packets of
clothing into his satchel, wolfed down a sandwich, and was on his way.
As he left the building, he imagined he could hear his apartment
breaking down and compressing into its component pieces.

November afternoons in Shenandoah were dreary affairs. It would
not be unusual to expect a dusting of early snow, but Natch's LPRACG weather service was predicting rain. Indeed, a group of ominous dark clouds had assembled on the city's western edge, trying to
decide whether to advance downtown or move on to riper targets. The
threat of rain was enough to empty the streets. Why slog through the
rain when you could multi to some sunny locale halfway around the
globe?

The large viewscreen down the road from Natch's building had
long since moved on from its ChaiQuoke advertisement. Now it showcased a bosomy woman with a lustful gaze that followed everyone who
passed by. Above her shoulder were the words:

Vacation packages for all ages and income brackets.

But Natch paid as little heed to the sign as he did to the mounting
rain. His head was already inside MindSpace at the Surina Enterprise
Facility, toying with the intricate code stored in the MultiReal databases. By the time he made it halfway to the TubeCo station, his hair
had drooped mopstyle onto his forehead, bogged down by the afternoon drizzle.

He leaned forward to shake off the watery accumulation, causing
the first dart to whizz past his right ear.

Natch snapped his head up and saw a small needle embedded in the
side of the building he had been walking past. Undoubtedly, the dart's
payload of OCHREs was discharging harmlessly into the concrete.

Darts ... OCHREs laden with ... black code!

Natch's animal instincts took over as he sprinted for cover. He
caught a glimpse of a figure in a black robe flecked with crimson,
shouldering a dart-rifle. Firing.

Thwip! Thwip! Two more projectiles slammed into the wall mere
centimeters away, sending miniature starbursts of rainwater into the
air.

Natch dove around the corner into an alleyway of sorts, a temporary opening between buildings that did not need the space. An avenue
of shadows that would be gone long before anyone got around to
naming it. Natch dimly realized that ending up here was no accident;
this assault had been well planned.

He risked a glance back across the street, where he had seen the
figure in the black robe. If the man was a Council officer, he was not
wearing any of the standard issue uniforms. The robe draped him from
head to toe, and the red formed some kind of pattern-Chinese characters, perhaps. Illegible at this distance, in any event.

The man was making brusque hand signals in several directions.
He was not alone.

Two figures went tearing past the alleyway in an attempt to establish a flanking position on the other side. In one fluid motion, Natch drew a bio/logic programming bar from his satchel and hurled it like
a discus.

The bar hit home, and one of the black-robed figures went down
with a grunt. Definitely human, definitely male, and definitely not a
multi projection. He doubted he had used enough force to cause major
damage, but a solid metal bar in the gut was enough to bring anyone
to the floor for at least a few minutes.

Natch could see more scrambling motions in the shadows, and
more figures in identical black robes. He swung his head around
wildly, looking for someone on the street to yell to, some method of
escape. But the street was empty and the only way out of the alley lay
some fifty meters ahead of him. Natch bolted down the corridor, frantically trying to think of a bio/logic program he could use for selfdefense. Forty meters to the end of the alley ... thirty meters ...
almost halfway there ...

And then Natch felt the pinprick of a needle in his back, near the
base of his spine, and the black code slammed into him.

He flopped around and saw one of his mysterious pursuers
standing at the end of the alleyway, dartgun mounted on his shoulder.
Before Natch could react, he was hit twice more in the side and the
right forearm.

As the malevolent dart tip OCHREs flowed into his bloodstream,
he felt surprisingly little pain. All the same, he knew it wouldn't be
long before the insidious machines had nullified his defenses and
reprogrammed his internal systems. The rules of the Meme Cooperative, the strictures of Dr. Plugenpatch, the protective matrix of
OCHREs, and the red blood cells in his body-all could be circumvented, given time and expertise and direct access to the major arteries
carrying cellular traffic.

Natch tried one last desperate ConfidentialWhisper request to
Horvil, but it was too late. He collapsed face first into a puddle of rainwater and continued down below street level into darkness.

The apprentices, conscious of the press of time, cut their multi connections and made arrangements to cart their bodies to Andra Pradesh.
Only Jara stayed behind at the Enterprise Facility to await Quell's
arrival.

Horvil's tube ride to Andra Pradesh was uneventful. No Council
officers in white robes lurking around, no strange looks from fellow
tube passengers other than the ones Horvil was used to getting. The
engineer had ascended halfway up the steep hill inside the Surina compound gates before it occurred to him that a three-day stay at Andra
Pradesh might require more than his bio/logic programming bars and
a thermos of nitro.

He was the first one back at the safari SeeNaRee. Quell had still
not arrived. While Jara tried to wrap up the first draft of a speech outline before she fetched her body from London, Horvil made camp at
the antiseptic conference table. He conjured up a diagram of Probabilities 4.9 and began poring over the details, trying to familiarize himself with a program he had unceremoniously discarded five years ago.
It was like reading old hive poetry; the coding was sloppy, the connections strained and amateurish. Probabilities 4.9 would not even have
passed muster at Dr. Plugenpatch five years ago, and the bio/logic
standards had evolved so much since then. He couldn't wait to find a
workbench and tear into this program in MindSpace.

Suddenly, a shadow fell across the table, obscuring the holograph.
Horvil looked up in irritation. Not another one of those SeeNaRee elephants

It was no elephant. An immense man stood before him, possibly
fifty years old but with the physique of someone half that age. A pale
blonde ponytail slunk down one shoulder and splayed out over his great barrel chest. The man could have cracked Horvil's head like a
walnut between his biceps and forearm, but his demeanor was calm,
almost sardonic. "I presume you're Horvil," he said.

Horvil balked, his mind a blank. "And you are?"

"I'm your new apprentice," replied the man. "Quell." He extended
a hand in Horvil's direction at precisely the same time Horvil arose and
started to bow. The plump engineer stared at the calloused and manyringed hand in confusion.

"You're supposed to shake it, you idiot." Jara walked up and placed
her tiny palm in Quell's. To do so, she nearly had to get up on her tiptoes. "Towards Perfection. I'm Jara, Natch's bio/logic analyst. Don't
mind Horvil-not everybody here is that clueless about your customs."
The big man enclosed her virtual hand in his flesh fist, and they went
through the awkward mechanics of a handshake. Finally, she pulled her
hand away in frustration. "Maybe you can see why we bow instead."

Quell did not miss a beat. "And maybe you can see why I insist on
shaking anyway."

All at once, comprehension came flooding into Horvil's head. He
caught sight of the plain tan breeches and the thin copper collar suspended from the man's neck. The breeches were cinched tightly around
his waist with a snakeskin belt that looked like it was actually made
out of snakeskin. "Y-you're an unconnectible!" the engineer exclaimed
in surprise.

"Yeah," replied Quell, "although I think the term you're looking
for is Islander."

Horvil was so fascinated with the man's collar that he completely
missed the faux pas. He had seen plenty of Islanders at a distance, of
course-they did sometimes venture beyond the borders of their little
demesne in the South Pacific-but actually meeting one in person was
a different matter altogether. Horvil tried to picture what this room
would look like to Quell if he removed that collar. No SeeNaRee, no
Jara, no multi projections of any kind.

"I thought you were a bio/logic engineer," he said, thoroughly baffled. "Weren't you supposed to bring us the MultiReal code?" Horvil
peeked around the Islander as if he expected to see a string of MindSpace blueprints bobbing behind him on a string.

"I am an engineer," said Quell with scarcely masked impatience.
"And don't worry, I have the access to the code."

Horvil peered up and down the big man doubtfully. "If you're an
engineer, where's your bio/logic programming bars?" He patted his
own neatly folded knapsack and felt the reassuring heft of the metal
inside.

The Islander let out a breath. He had obviously dealt with such
skepticism many times before. "Let's just get this over with," he
groused in a dangerous tone of voice. "We don't have time to fuck
around. Follow me." He pivoted on one heel and stomped towards the
metal doorframe standing incongruously in the middle of the veldt.
Horvil and Jara looked at one another, shrugged, and set off in pursuit.
All at once, the African SeeNaRee was replaced by the blue stretchedstone walls of the Surina Enterprise Facility.

Quell strode through the halls as if the Facility had been constructed solely for his benefit. None of the Surina security guards
seemed eager to contradict this impression. They parted dutifully for
the Islander with deep, respectful bows, while casting suspicious
glances at Jara and Horvil. Throngs of businesspeople hustling to and
from meetings stepped aside because of the Islander's intimidating
presence. Finally, Quell led them to a door surrounded by Surina security people and walked into the most gorgeous workspace Horvil had
ever seen.

The room's four walls bore no SeeNaRee or decorations of any
kind, not even one of those extendable programming bar holsters that
Horvil had seen in so many offices lately. Quell's workbench, however,
was anything but shabby: a four-sided metal monstrosity with a
sliding panel that allowed access to its center. The Islander snapped his fingers and conjured up a gigantic MindSpace bubble, large enough to
hold three or four of Horvil's programs simultaneously. A serpentine
block of bio/logic code wended partway around the bubble in hues of
gray, brown and violet.