David Edelman - Infoquake

The next rejection took eleven minutes for the system to process.

The rejection after that took sixteen minutes of analysis.

Natch decided to abandon subtlety and just finish the wretched program. He suspected that someone had already beaten him to the Data Sea while he was here fumbling with Dr. Plugenpatch rejections, but he couldn't just abandon the project now. Natch furiously patched up the remaining holes, disabled a few features that seemed problematic, and fed it into the Plugenpatch system.

Twenty minutes later, the verdict was clear: success!

Natch hastily bundled the program together, slapped on the standard fore and aft tables that the Data Sea required for its cataloging agents, and launched. He called up the ROD optics listings on his viewscreen so he could see the results with his own eyes. The evidence on the new releases board glared at him in small black letters:

Version: 1.0

Programmer: Natch

Yet he felt no sense of triumph. EyeMorph 1.0 may have slipped past the gates of Dr. Plugenpatch, but Natch knew the program was still riddled with inconsistencies-the kind of inconsistencies that Primo's would certainly notice when they dredged the Data Sea for their bimonthly summation of the ROD coding world. Not only that, but because Natch had used Weagel's Eye Wizard to perform some of the heavy lifting, part of his profits would be swallowed up by licensing fees. He would be lucky to break even on the project.

Natch was shambling towards the bed for a long-overdue slumber when a message arrived.

You gave it your all I hope you had fun 'Cause you got your ass kicked

By CAPTAIN BOLBUND.

Horvil was at a loss to explain Natch's failure. He wriggled his head free of the blankets and stared drowsily at the ROD listings scrolling up and down his bedroom viewscreen.

"How does he program so fast?" griped Natch from across the room, where he was wearing tracks into the carpet. "Who is this guy? `Captain Bolbund'? He beat me by an entire day on EyeMorph, Horv! What's he doing that I'm not?"

The engineer flopped around to face the wall. "Maybe it was a fluke," he said. "Maybe he just got lucky. It happens."

"It's not a fluke. This Bolbund has beaten me four times in a row now. "

"Four times? How the fuck d'you run into the same guy four times in a row in this business? That's no accident."

Natch shook his head. "Of course it isn't an accident. I keep taking him on, and he keeps massacring me. Even worse, he always sends me this awful poetry when he wins." The young entrepreneur forwarded some of Captain Bolbund's doggerel to Horvil.

Horvil read silently for a minute. "This is terrible," he mumbled. "Ten thousand spell checking programs out there, and this asshole still spells slaughter with a `w'." He sat up in bed, stretched, and shot Natch a worried look. "Listen, Natch, I don't think you get it. When you're a ROD coder, you gotta keep moving or you'll get in a rut. Didn't your mother ever tell you that you win some and you lose some, but life goes on?"

"No," said Natch with a menacing growl.

Horvil winced, causing his pudgy face to shrivel up like a prune. "Oh, fuck, Natch ... I forgot ... I didn't mean-"

"Never mind." Natch gazed at the photos lining Horvil's wall, where dozens of fat, happy Horvil look-alikes with inky black hair frolicked in an assortment of lavish London manors. If Horvil were ever to fail, his family would absorb him back into its bosom at a moment's notice. But where would Natch go if his money ran out, especially now that he had spurned Vigal?

"Why don't you hire an analyst, Natch?" offered Horvil. "Business strategy is what these people do. They can figure out how to get you through this."

"I don't trust them," Natch muttered under his breath. He didn't want to mention the real reason he wouldn't seek professional advice: his Vault account was running low. In the past two weeks, he had made only one sale, to a doddering old L-PRACG politician whose mistress had been complaining about too much sweat on his upper lip.

But after another few weeks of getting thrashed on the ROD circuit, Natch decided that Horvil was right. He needed professional advice, and he needed it quickly. It pained him to admit he was incapable of defeating Bolbund on his own, but he took solace in a saying by the great Lucco Primo: There are a thousand roads to success, and nine hundred of them begin with failure. So Natch swallowed his pride and began hunting around the Data Sea for an analyst he could afford.

One analyst in Natch's price range instantly stood out from the rest. She was a woman named Jara, who lived on the other side of London from Horvil. Natch set the InfoGather 77 program loose on the Data Sea and instructed it to follow her scent. What InfoGather discovered surprised him: stellar notices from Primo's, five years' expe rience with the rising star Lucas Sentinel, a smattering of praise from the drudges. But then the trail abruptly vanished from the Data Sea, only to reemerge six months later with Jara a free agent and her prices far below market level. Natch fired off a message to the woman:

Why is Lucas Sentinel spreading rumors about you? What did you do to piss him off? And why should I give you any work?

The reply was almost instantaneous:

I told Lucas he needed to grow a set of testicles. He decided to blacklist me instead. Don't bother hiring me unless you have a pair.

Natch laughed out loud. If there was one thing he valued after his Shortest Initiation experience, it was nonconformity.

Jara arrived at Natch's apartment in multi, a scant five seconds shy of their appointed meeting time. Natch found himself facing a tiny woman with Sephardic features and a massive thicket of curly hair. She was almost twenty years his senior. "You asked for a ninety-minute consultation," said Jara by way of greeting. "You realize that my standard consultation is forty-five minutes."

"Anything worth doing is worth perfecting," said Natch, quoting Sheldon Surina.

He could sense this woman Jara sizing him up with one eagle eye. Her piercing look said that she already knew about the Shortest Initiation, that she had already reconstructed his story and needed only the one look to confirm it. Natch stood tall and did not flinch. He had nothing to hide.

"All right," said Jara. "Let's get to it."

Natch brought her over to his workbench and summoned the EyeMorph program and several others in MindSpace, along with a passel of Captain Bolbund's competing brands. "Tell me why this asshole keeps beating me," he said simply.

As she stepped inside the MindSpace bubble, Jara didn't pause for any social niceties. She eyed the herd of programs like an angry bull. "Give me twenty minutes," she said gruffly, and then reached up and began spinning the logical structures around with her virtual hands. Natch took a seat in a chair, activated a QuasiSuspension program, and let her work. As he drifted off into a light nap, he could sense her making thousands of queries on his files and wondered what kind of analysis routines she had developed to churn through all that data.

Precisely twenty minutes later, Natch awoke from QuasiSuspension and joined Jara at the workbench. "So what is this clown doing that I'm not?" he asked.

"The problem," replied Jara tersely, "is that Bolbund isn't doing anything you're not doing."

Natch sat back down in his chair, puzzled. "Huh?"

"His programs don't hold a candle to yours. They're sloppy, they're inadequate, and they'll probably fall apart in a pinch. But he's done a real mind job on you. He's got you convinced that you need to work harder and harder until you drop from exhaustion."

"But for process' preservation, Jara, he launched his eye color program a whole day earlier than me. A day! That's life or death in this business."