Infoquake (8 page)

"The Council will not forget. The Council will not forgive. The
Council will bring you to justice."

Jara looked at the man with his index finger pointing towards the
audience, the implacable representative of Len Borda's will. She
remembered Natch's statement barely twenty-four hours ago: We're
going to be number one on Primo's, and we're going to do it tomorrow. It had
been so easy. Natch's had not been a statement of intent so much as a
prophecy, a foretelling of an event already preordained. When she
looked into the Council spokesman's eyes, she could see the same force
of will.

Insanity, Jara thought. There's no other word for it.

Jara awoke groggy the next morning, hoping the past two days had
been some sort of paranoid hallucination. After yesterday's grim pronouncements from the Defense and Wellness Council, she had prived
herself to the world and slunk straight off to bed like a wounded
animal. Now she discovered she had slept for fourteen hours straight,
a Horvilesque achievement.

Anxious for something familiar, Jara fell back into the morning
routine she had been forced to abandon by Natch's crazy plan. The routine went like this: Sit up and project the news feeds on top of the plaid
blanket. Tune one viewscreen to the morning commentary by Sen Sivv
Sor. Tune the other to the editorial by his rival, John Ridglee. Order a
steaming cup of nitro from the building. Fetch nitro from the access
panel at the left side of the bed. Activate Doze-B-Gone 91.

A few minutes of peaceful routine were enough to convince Jara
she was okay. Enough to convince her that a small niche had been
carved out for her somewhere in this hardscrabble mountain called the
bio/logics industry. Almost enough to convince her she would survive
another eleven months.

Insanity, insanity.

The chatter about yesterday's "black code attack" had already
slowed to a trickle. Everyone who had claimed financial losses in the
panic had quietly recanted during the early morning hours. Representatives of the assorted Pharisee tribes were tripping all over themselves
to declare they had nothing to do with the hoax. Talk on the Data Sea
had shifted focus from the attack itself to the Council's behavior
during the crisis. Why did Len Borda send an underling to face the
crowd at Melbourne instead of appearing himself? How did the
Council plan on pursuing the offending parties? Other drudges were bemoaning the fact that vast swaths of the public had been deceived
by such a simple stunt. Technology had kept the world so secure for so
long. Had society become slothful and complacent?

The speculation merely elicited a yawn from Jara. She moved past
the mundane news about TubeCo's financial woes and deaths in the
orbital colonies, waved away the parochial gossip from her L-PRACG
and the solicitations from programming supply companies. The news
feed on her blanket shifted in the blink of an eye to the bio/logic
industry reports.

The lead headline:

Natch Personal Programming Takes #1 on Primo's

Jara let loose a tidal wave of messages on her boss. She stood on the red
square in her hallway sending multi requests and ConfidentialWhis-
pers by the dozens, enough to cause a major headache. Anyone but a
trusted associate would have automatically been cut off by the Data Sea
by now. Still, Natch could have prived himself to her communiques
with the barest thought. What are you waiting for, Natch? Jara asked.
What are you afraid of?

Finally, one of her multi requests got through. Jara took a deep
breath and activated the connection. Multivoid whispered its sweet
promises of oblivion for a scant few seconds and then abandoned her in
Natch's foyer. A viewscreen right in front of her face broadcast one of
the early nudes of Baghalerix.

Voices drifted into her ears before the connection was stable
enough for her to process them.

"Ratings? Who really cares about ratings?" came the first voice,
cool and butter-smooth and almost certainly enhanced with bio/logics. Natch.

"Well, you do, from what I've heard," replied the second. Jara stood
for a moment, trying to remember where she had heard that scratchy
growl. A male voice, at least twice Natch's age. And then suddenly she
placed it: the drudge Sen Sivv Sor.

So the feeding frenzy has begun, thought Jara bitterly. Everybody wants
to talk to the new number one on Primo's.

She wondered when her fiefcorp master was planning to bring her
in to the conversation. Or did he just plan to keep her dangling at
arm's length? She studied the ballooning belly of the woman on the
viewscreen and tried to decide if her boss had chosen this particular
painting to send a message.

"Of course it doesn't hurt to have high ratings," Natch was saying
from around the corner. "It's good for morale, it's good for business.
But I don't care if we're number one on Primo's or number one thousand, as long as we deliver the highest quality programming. If I can
look back at the end of the day and say we've done the best job we can
do, then I can sleep at night." Yes, Natch had definitely modified his
voice; Jara recognized the laid-back cadences of SmoothTalker 139.

"But the Patel Brothers managed to pull back ahead of you in only
forty-seven minutes," said Sor. "Number one for less than an hour!
Come on, Natch, tell me that doesn't rankle you."

Natch laughed the free and easy laugh that only the rich or the
deranged possessed. "I give Frederic and Petrucio Patel a lot of credit.
They didn't waste any time launching a counter-offensive. It's no
wonder they've been number one so long. But I think we've proven our
point: the Patel Brothers' days of dominating the Primo's ratings are
over. From now on, they'll have to watch their backs."

Jara had heard enough. Obviously, Natch had no plans to include
her in the conversation. She stalked towards the living room, her face
a study in carefully controlled rage-and then stopped.

Perfection taint you! she screamed silently at her boss. The fiefcorp master had cordoned off the living room, blocking access as only the
apartment owner could. It was an inhuman feeling, this sensation of
just stopping, the inability to even make an effort to transgress. The
designers of the multi network strove so hard to provide complete
verisimilitude, and yet their method of access control utterly short-circuited human instincts.

"So what's next for the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp?"
Sen Sivv Sor was asking.

Natch's grin was practically audible. "Kick the Patel Brothers out
on their asses, of course." His imaginary audience let out a spirited
cheer.

Jara gritted her teeth and fired off a terse ConfidentialWhisper.
"This interview is over," she announced, "unless you want me to start
bombarding him with all the evidence I've found about your little
scheme."

There was a pause in the conversation. Jara could hear the rustling
of clothing, a man arising from his chair. "I'm afraid I'm going to have
to call it a day, Mr. Sor," said Natch. "Duty beckons. I've got a fiefcorp
to run."

"Sure, sure!"

The analyst suddenly found the impenetrable barrier lifted, and
swooped around the corner just in time to see Sor give Natch a final
clap on the back. The drudge looked exactly like his pictures on the
Data Sea; his craggy face, white mop of hair and distinctive birthmark
would be recognizable anywhere. A second later, he disappeared. Off
to rebroadcast the interview and play the bit part Natch had assigned
him in the drama of his life.

Natch displayed no sign of the fatigue a normal human being
would feel after four days without sleep. He looked alive, focused,
handsome. Jara felt the familiar twinge of lust stabbing through her
abdomen and sneered it down.

And then, in the space between one breath and the next, Natch's demeanor completely shifted. A mask was silently discarded. Now his
eyes held nothing but sullenness, and the once-over he gave her spoke
more of dismissal than command. Natch didn't even offer his apprentice a chair to sit in, but instead marched straight into his office. Jara
stormed after him, trembling, only to find him standing at his workbench in the midst of a MindSpace bubble. The donut-shaped code of
NiteFocus 48-or NiteFocus 49, she supposed-surrounded him like
a life preserver.

"What evidence?" grunted Natch.

Jara put her hands on her hips and mustered her best accusatory
stance. "Evidence of what you did."

"And what exactly did I do?"

"You know exactly what you did, you son-of-a-bitch! You launched
that fake black code attack yourself."

If the analyst expected an angry outburst from her master, she was
disappointed. She would have even been reassured by one of his contemptuous laughs. Instead, Natch nudged a periwinkle-colored chunk
of code with his left hand while he probed its cratered surface with the
fingertips of his right. "What makes you think I did that?" he said.

"Come on, Natch! There aren't many people clever enough to pull
off that little fandango yesterday. There's even fewer who would have
anything to gain by it. I've seen you tinkering around with strange
programs over the past few weeks, stuff that doesn't look like anything
in our catalog. And then, of course, there's the fact that the so-called
attack happened exactly when our rumors said it would."

"A happy coincidence."

"And was it a happy coincidence you put our necks on the line instead
of yours? Did it occur to you that when the Council starts asking questions, the rumors'll lead back to Horvil and me? Not you, of course.
You didn't have anything to do with those rumors. You were busy getting our bio/logic programs ready for launch, as the MindSpace logs
will clearly show."

Something she said finally penetrated Natch's thick skin. He
worked quietly for a few minutes without speaking a word, the gears
in his head clearly grinding away. The pause of a politician carefully
phrasing a key platform. "If you really think I would do that to you
and Horvil," he said at length, "then you don't understand me at all."

Jara studied the fiefcorp master's face carefully. Could he possibly
be telling the truth? Could he be operating on a plane that far removed
from everyday life? Or was this just another one of his acting jobs? She
gazed into that unblemished, boyish face and wondered if there were
any truths at all buried beneath its surface, or if truth for him was as
mutable as programming code, subject to updates by the hour.

A minute rolled by, then two. Jara cursed her body as a turncoat,
fired up Delibidinize 14a for the third time that hour. Can't he at least
give me the satisfaction of turning MindSpace off? she fumed. Finally, she
straightened her spine and looked him squarely in the eye. "I quit."

Natch gave her a sly look. "Fine," said the fiefcorp master blithely.
"Quit."

A stunned silence filled the room. Jara didn't move.

"Stop being so fucking melodramatic, Jara!" Natch burst out. He
grabbed NiteFocus 49 with one hand and violently spun the virtual
code around like a wheel, himself stuck in the spokes. "You've got less
than a year left on your contract, and after that you'll have the option
to cash out. You're telling me you're going to give up all those shares
and start from scratch someplace else? Room and board for another
four years? I know you better than that, Jara. You're going to stay right
where you are and get filthy rich with the rest of us."

"I could turn you in to the Council."

Natch didn't lose a beat. "Without hard evidence-which I know
you don't have-where would that get you? Nobody wants to hire a
whiner or a whistle blower. You'd be right back where you were when
I found you: blacklisted by the major bio/logic fiefcorps, taking shit
from second-rate imbeciles like Lucas Sentinel. And don't tell me the Council will get to the bottom of this, because they won't. Dozens of
cases like this cross Len Borda's desk every week, and he's lucky if he
can close a tenth of them."