David Edelman - Infoquake

The Patel Brothers were not known for playing nice.

Prosteev Serly's loss, however, became Natch's gain. Serly had channeling deals in place and packaging agreements to fulfill. Data agents scurried around the Data Sea to find a suitable replacement for the optical program, and located Natch's DeMirage 24.5. Within minutes, Natch's program had become the de facto standard for ocular hallucination management on the Data Sea.

The pings began sounding at 8:32 a.m. Shenandoah time and continued throughout the day. Eventually, the noise became so deafening, Natch had to adjust the program to ping once every hundred sales. As the night wore on, the BizWorks administrative program slowed to pings every thousand sales, then every ten thousand. And still the pings kept coming.

Horvil was ecstatic. "Can I juggle a mean bio/logic programming bar or what?" he crowed.

"Beginner's luck," Jara corrected him with a smirk.

Natch shook his head. "Luck," he said, staring intensely at the Shenandoah cityscape, "had nothing to do with it."

Merri sat on Natch's chair-and-a-half and watched the fiefcorp master make frantic circles through the garden. When he started, he was treading on turf, but as their conversation absorbed more of his attention, he gradually strayed into the patch of daisies. Soon he was carelessly stepping on flower petals and tracking dirt onto the carpet.

"So in another eighteen months, it'll be ..." Natch stopped and squinted, as if the future were a distant object hovering outside the window.

"May," replied Merri.

"It'll be May," continued Natch. "That's right. So if we extend your contract until then and your shares stay on target, then I expect they'll be worth-this...." He waved his hand at the viewscreen, mutating the psychedelic Tope painting into a more prosaic spreadsheet. A sizable boldfaced number sat in the bottom-right corner of the screen. "And that's a conservative estimate. Now that we've hit number one on Primo's, it's only going to go up. So how's this figure suit you?"

Merri gave a slight nod, but Natch could see she had some reservations. Not over money, he was fairly certain; even in this economy, she was not likely to get a better compensation package anywhere else. No, it probably had something to do with the swirled black-and-white logo prominently displayed on her breast pocket, the insignia of a Creed Objectivv truthteller.

Natch gave the woman a long appraising stare while she read over the apprenticeship contract one more time. Merri might have been Jara's diametric opposite. Her large frame dwarfed Jara's, though it did not quite reach Horvil-sized proportions. She had blonde features that spoke of Nordic ancestry and a demeanor both easy and reserved. Over the past six months, there had been times when Natch felt like slap ping that pious look right off Merri's face-but for process' preservation, one could get only so angry at a woman who possessed such an encyclopedic knowledge of the bio/logics world.

"You're concerned about the workload," said a voice on the opposite side of the room. Merri turned to face Serr Vigal, who had been hovering quietly in the shadows like a spook. Natch hadn't been quite sure whether the neural programmer was even paying attention.

"Well, partly," conceded Merri with a sidelong glance at Natch. "But I'm also not sure how comfortable I feel being a channel manager. I was trained for bio/logic analysis, you know."

Natch faced the window and scowled. He was not about to give up such a precious asset as a channel manager who had taken the Objective truthtelling oath. Whatever the reality was, people believed that honest salespeople sold better products. "This is a small fiefcorp, Merri. Everyone gets to do a little bit of everything around here. Shit, you can even grab a pair of programming bars and take on some of Horvil's workload, for all I care."

Merri brightened and gave one of her typical placating smiles. For a devotee of Creed Objectivv, she fakes her emotions pretty well, Natch thought. "Would it be all right if I ... thought about it for a few days?" asked the blonde channel manager.

The entrepreneur shrugged. "Fine."

"Okay, then ..." And with that, Merri cut the multi connection and returned her mind to a red square tile several hundred thousand kilometers away on Luna.

Natch gazed out into the gloom of the Shenandoah dusk. Dark clouds were assembling on the westward horizon and rattling their sabers, threatening a violent thundershower. In all probability, the Shenandoah L-PRACGs had already petitioned the Environmental Control Board to steer the worst of the storm clear of downtown using its geosynchron bots. But still, the clouds felt like a heavy-handed omen to Natch. Something was hiding in those clouds, some cruel and brutal creature with Natch's name roiling in its murky consciousness.

He shifted his attention to Serr Vigal. "We've had this discussion before," he said.

The neural programmer had sunk back into the shadows, invisible but for the occasional beard hairs glinting like flecks of silver. "It's common sense, Natch," he replied. "Now that you're constantly neckand-neck with the Patels, there's a real danger of overworking your apprentices. I think you need to bring more people onboard."

"I hired Merri."

"But she's not taking any of the workload off Horvil and Jara."

Natch knew his old mentor was correct, that eventually the two apprentices would snap under the strain of eighteen-hour days in the trenches fighting the Patel Brothers. They would get tired of the sorties in the middle of the night, the maneuvering for field position. The endless exchange of small-arms fire.

But as soon as business started pouring in, Horvil and Jara had forgotten all about their bewilderment and indignation surrounding the black code incident. Natch's interviews with Sen Sivv Sor and John Ridglee had spawned a drudge feeding frenzy, which in turn produced a tidal wave of sales. Suddenly, important engineers were contacting Horvil for advice and dissecting his recursive functions as if they were ancient Sanskrit texts. And Jara, who was used to shuffling money between fiefcorp accounts to placate some creditors and put off others, was now trying to find places to invest the overflow.

"Horvil and Jara will be fine," mumbled Natch. "Oh, I know you're right, Vigal. I'll need to bring more people aboard at some point. It's just that I don't trust anyone else."

"Maybe you need to give those two a holiday," said Serr Vigal. "The fiefcorp is running pretty smoothly. There's no reason you can't slow down for a week or two."

Natch, his arms folded over his chest, turned to glare at the neural programmer. NiteFocus 50c allowed him to peer through the veil of shadow and see the concerned look on his mentor's face. "No," he said, "there is a reason."

"Ah, the message."

"Something's coming up, Vigal. I can feel something out there, coming up fast. A tidal wave. Something."

Natch nodded towards the viewscreen that was still displaying Merri's apprenticeship contract. He called up a message in its place and enlarged the type so it was readable from across the room.

Natch,

I would like to personally congratulate you on achieving number one in the Primo's bio/logic investment guide. Several members of my administrative staff are devoted users of your programs. Your sleep deprivation utilities, I'm afraid, are particularly popular around here.

As you may have heard, Creed Surina will be holding a cultural festival next week to celebrate what would have been Sheldon Surina's 400th birthday. We are looking for able bio/logic programmers such as yourself to contribute to a presentation on my ancestors' legacy to the world. I would be honored to have you as my guest for dinner at Andra Pradesh this Wednesday, November 23, to discuss the details.