David Edelman - Infoquake

The neural programmer didn't mind at all being woken up; in fact, he was overjoyed to hear from his former protege. Ten minutes later, Natch hopped on an Omaha-bound tube. Within an hour, he was standing in Vigal's foyer. Natch was surprised to find their friendly hug metamorphosing into a real flesh-and-blood embrace.

True to form, Serr Vigal had changed little in the past few years. Memecorp business had risen with the tide of the economy, but this had also caused his fundraising duties to swell to epic proportions. Vigal had just returned from a meeting with some of the minor bodhisattvas at Creed Surina and was due at the sybaritic resort of 49th Heaven in two days to speak about newly proposed OCHRE standards.

"So what causes the prodigal son to visit his old guardian in the middle of the night?" asked Vigal between sips of green tea.

"I need your advice," said Natch.

"Oh?"

"I'm ready to start my own fiefcorp."

Later that morning, Horvil and Jara agreed to come over to assist in the planning. Following standard etiquette, which said that crucial business decisions should be made in person, the two caught a hoverbird across the Atlantic from London. They met in the flesh for the first time on the runway and gave each other formal bows. By the time they arrived in Omaha, Horvil and Jara were already grumbling at each other like longtime companions.

Natch brought the first meeting of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp to order around Vigal's kitchen table at noon.

From the outset, cash flow was the primary issue. Natch couldn't realistically expect any revenue flowing into the company for at least sixty days, yet there were a number of capital investments that needed to be made in the beginning. Licensing fees to the Meme Cooperative, listing fees to Primo's and the L-PRACGs, bio/logic equipment, administrative programs. Natch's savings would go a long way towards covering these costs, and eventually he would recoup the rest through new-fiefcorp tax breaks. But in the meantime, he was short the credits for apprentices' room and board those first few months.

He turned expectantly towards Horvil, but the engineer surprised him by shaking his head. "Sorry," he said, "but if I'm gonna be your apprentice, Natch, I don't want to complicate things."

Natch's eyebrows creased in confusion. "You want to be my apprentice?"

"Sure, why not? You're gonna need a first-rate engineer on the team, aren't you? The way I figure it, the only place I'm safe from that competitive streak of yours is on your payroll."

"But-the pay ..."

"This ain't about the money, Natch," said Horvil jauntily, pleased to catch his friend off guard. "I've got enough of that. I just don't want to miss out on all the fun. And besides-someone has to keep you sane."

Serr Vigal beamed at the engineer in approval. "I don't think your credits will be necessary, Horvil," he said. "I can cover the payroll for the first few months."

This outpouring of faith and goodwill began to arouse Natch's suspicions. "And what do you want in return?"

"Do I have to want anything in return?" replied Vigal with a cozy smile.

Natch's face turned a flustered purple. "I'm serious, Vigal," he muttered. "What do you want?"

Vigal sighed and considered the question for a minute. "Okay, then how about a membership on the board, with a stake in the decisionmaking. A minority stake, of course," he added hastily. Natch nodded in mute satisfaction. Young fiefcorps often ended up with a concerned father or generous aunt on the board. "I can't promise I'll be available every day or even every week," continued the neural programmer, "but just remember, I'll always be there when you need help."

Embarrassed, Natch turned towards the last person at the table. He didn't know what to expect from Jara. Unlike his career, hers had not blossomed over the past few years. A gradual detente in her relations with Lucas Sentinel had resulted in the occasional piece of business, but Jara had come increasingly to rely on Natch's consulting fees to make a living.

The fiefcorp master summoned one of his simmering stares, the kind he had learned to use on Jara through trial and error. "I'm going to need a good bio/logic analyst too, Jara," he said.

The small businesswoman shifted uncomfortably in her chair as she tried, and failed, to meet Natch's stare head-on. Eventually, she lost the battle of wills and lowered her eyes to the table. "Count me in," she said finally, gritting her teeth. "But don't think you talked me into this, Natch. Everyone knows that fiefcorps are where the real money is these days. I've been waiting a long time for an opportunity like this to come along."

Natch gave his fellow fiefcorpers a predatory grin. So have I, he thought.

Despite all the careful planning and preparation that went into the formation of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, success did not come easily for the company.

Bio/logic programming was a much different animal than Routine On Demand coding. The work was more labor-intensive, and required the skills of a hard-core nuts-and-bolts engineer like Horvil and the leadership of a generalist like Natch. Because of the difference in scale, the stakes for any one particular piece of code were much higher. Each revision took weeks to complete. You couldn't afford to take the shortcuts commonplace in the ROD coding world. Nor did you have the luxury of wasting time on unnecessary features; you needed an analyst like Jara who had her fingers on the pulse of the market and could pinpoint exactly what revisions would be the most lucrative.

During the first few weeks, Natch worked nearly non-stop. He bounced from Jara's flat to Horvil's flat to Vigal's flat so many times that he was constantly disoriented. But Natch knew he was finally on the right track and moving full steam ahead.

Still, the sales figures in those initial months were abysmal. Natch began each day by examining the upgrades and revisions waiting on the dock for a launch onto the Data Sea. After launch, Jara would sit back in nervous anticipation, senses tuned to the Sea's very molecular hum, waiting for the currents of trade to shift in their direction. And each day she felt the sting of disappointment when traffic failed to come. Besides the occasional sale to a curious browser or the random ping of a cataloging data agent, there was very little activity.

"What are we doing wrong?" Jara moaned to Natch one day.

"We're not doing anything wrong," he replied coolly. "We just need the mojo to accumulate. Give it time."

And then one day it happened.

DeMirage 24.5 was a pedestrian routine designed to reduce the effect of optical illusions. Natch had halfheartedly picked up the project hoping to capitalize on all the ocular research he had put over the years into programs like EyeMorph. Jara didn't have much of an opinion one way or the other about the program. Horvil gave it a cursory look and spent a few hours performing delicate surgery on the pro gram's innards in MindSpace. Natch barely paused to write a descriptive fore and aft for the product before launching it on the Data Sea. He assigned a BizWorks administrative agent to watch the traffic and sound a short ping for every sale, then went to sleep.

Natch's program hit the Data Sea right in the midst of a major turf war.

The Serly Fiefcorp had been involved in a fierce competition with a fast-rising company known as the Patel Brothers. Each company's partisans were launching a daily barrage of complaints to the Meme Cooperative, to Primo's, and to various L-PRACGs throughout the civilized world. Finally, the battle came to a head when Serly's databases were struck with a malicious piece of black code that temporarily put a small portion of the company catalog out of commission. One of the programs hit was Serly's TrueOptix 88. While Serly's people were assessing the damage to the catalog, they decided to pull TrueOptix from the Data Sea until they could determine if it had been infected. Prosteev Serly immediately brought a complaint before the Meme Cooperative blaming the Patels, but the evidence was thin and the case quickly vanished like one of the visual phantasms that TrueOptix was designed to prevent.