David Edelman - Infoquake

The shop was located in a cavernous warehouse just south of the Sierra Madres. The area had once been the flowering center of New Alamo and the splinter Texan governments, overgrown with gaudy nouveau palaces and indulgent monuments to civic duty. But the Texans' decay had proved a potent fertilizer for programming factories that could make good use of their large open spaces. Natch hopped on a tube every morning to a nondescript building in the warehouse district, where he reported to one of several hundred identical workbenches on the floor. A program materialized before him in MindSpace, along with color-coded templates put together by some fiefcorp apprentice that instructed him where and how to make connections. There was no room for originality. The system automatically reported any deviations from the template to his supervisor.

Most of Natch's fellow programmers didn't mind the tedium, the endless repetition and constant clanking from a hundred programming bars striking workbenches at once. Their minds were far away. What happened to them in real time mattered little, as long as they could strum and drum and hum along to the orgiastic frenzy of music on the Jamm network. Natch logged on once to see what all the fuss was about. He found a hundred thousand channels of music in every conceivable style, tempo and mood. Channels would spawn like newts, flourish for days or weeks as musicians jumped on and added their personal touch to the mix, then gradually shrivel up and die. Until then, Natch had thought his co-workers were thumping their workbenches with their programming bars to stave off boredom; now he realized he was listening to the rhythm sections of a thousand different Data Sea symphonies. Natch logged off in disgust and found a good white-noise program to block out the din. He detested music.

Natch earned his assembly-line pittance by day, but he was hardly idle at night. He spent countless hours staring at intricate blocks of programming code in MindSpace, not actually making connections, but simply absorbing the patterns and progressions, waiting for the inevitable blast of inspiration.

His next vision came to him in the dead hours before dawn.

Natch went to bed early that night and activated QuasiSuspension 109.3, sick of the eternal struggle to find sleep. The program quickly led him there. He used the highest setting, which should have insulated him from the everyday noises of shifting walls and floors.

Yet somehow Natch found himself bolting upright at three in the morning, his face glistening with sweat.

He felt like a lens had snapped into place and brought something wide and terrible into focus. Natch looked for the familiar objects around his bedroom, the cheap bedside shelf protruding from the wall, the pus-green carpet, the viewscreen that had been showing a light snow on Kilimanjaro when he lay down. Now all he could see were bones. The bones of impossible animals with four, five and six appendages, bones scorched free of flesh and arrayed as furniture.

Natch tore himself out of bed and grabbed a robe from the disembodied index finger on which it hung. He burst out of his apartment, heading for the balcony that stood at the end of the hallway. As Natch rushed out the balcony door, a platform slid from the side of the building with a soft click. He feverishly gripped the alabaster railing and watched Angelos go through its typical early-morning routine. Skeletal tube trains stuffed with cargo rushed silently to and fro, anxious to make deliveries before the morning rush. Viewscreens here and there glared seductively at passersby with visions of dead products and ghoulish fashions. A fleet of bleached-white hoverbirds bearing the yellow star of the Council took wing over the Hollywood hills. Haunted tenements performed a graveyard jig with one another, here sidestepping to make room for the neighboring building on the left, there elbowing aside the building on the right to accommodate freshly awoken tenants. Natch could hear no sound but the soft crunch of pencil-thin bones beneath his feet.

As Natch gazed at all this, the bare skeletal structures he saw began to fill out-not with flesh, but with the washed-out hues of MindSpace code. The city was becoming one vast bio/logic program. A compendium of data, numbers, named entities, subroutines, variables. Pieces, no matter how independent, no matter how abstruse, inevitably connected to a larger and more complex whole. Tendrils snaking invisibly between each node, binding everyone together with mathematical formulae.

And the people ... the people.... The L-PRACG politicians stumbling from meeting halls after late-night sessions, the businesspeople shuffling mechanically to the tube stations and public multi facilities, the private security guards exchanging curt words with their Defense and Wellness Council counterparts, and yes, there were even a few tourists up and about at this hour.... Weren't the people just one more set of objects to be manipulated? Weren't their actions governed by deeply ingrained sets of instructions, and their ideas ultimately predictable? They could be made to obey commands. They, like programming code, could be manipulated.

Natch saw Angelos floating within the giant MindSpace bubble that was the world: his MindSpace, his world. He could practically hear his bio/logics proctor at the Proud Eagle on his first day at the workbench. Reach into your satchels, pull out a programming bay: Any one, it doesn't matter! You have twenty-six bars, marked A to Z, each with three to six separate functions. Twelve commonly recognized hand gestures. The grip. The point. The hitch. Unlimited possibilities before you! Unlimited combinations. This was not strictly true; Natch was wise enough to know that the number of options at his disposal were not infinite. Mathematics dictated that there were limits. But even if his options were not unlimited, they were enough-enough to accomplish anything he was likely to dream. And if he could find some combination of tools capable of manipulating any structure of data, why not people too? Who was to say that the human nodes within his bubble were immune to the natural laws of cause and effect?

He reached out with enormous hands, each finger a bio/logic programming bar. The city of Angelos responded to his commands. It spun like a globe on an axis. It shifted and shuddered and jittered where he pointed. The world was his ...

With the exception of an immense and incomprehensible mass hovering just beyond the horizon ... a terrible celestial mass that could reshape humanity, if only he could reach it....

Natch rushed back to his apartment with his mind ablaze. He curled up into a fetal position on his chair-and-a-half and sketched an inventory of new tools with fiery holographic letters in the air.

Sex Stability Friendship

Power Greed Hunger

Money Guilt Lust

Love Desire Laziness

Vanity Novelty Suffering

On through the morning he wrote, brushing aside the urgent wake-up calls he had set for his assembly-line programming job. The work would not be necessary now.

He awoke on the couch in mid-afternoon, unable to remember how he had gotten there, but confident he was back on track at last.

Horvil sat upside-down on Natch's chair-and-a-half with his feet propped on the chair back and his head hanging near the ground. His face was a jumbled stew of concern and fear topped with a thin crust of nonchalance.

"So you're willing to help me out," said Natch, eyes ablaze. He was practically sprinting from one end of the apartment to the other, teeth chattering and fingertips aquiver.

"It's a little unorthodox, I guess," said Horvil, "but heck, I've known you were unorthodox since you were six."

"I just don't want you to back out at the last minute."