David Edelman - Infoquake

A few billion oscillations of hydrogen later, another second passed.

More than twenty-four hours had gone by since Margaret's speech, and Jara had slept for none of them. Had she not been propping herself awake with Doze-B-Gone 91 and AntiSleepStim 124.7 and two cups of nitro, the analyst might have taken more notice of her surroundings. Instead, Jara sleepwalked past the guards at Andra Pradesh and up three stories of the blue Surina Enterprise Facility with hardly a glance in any direction.

She opened the conference room door and found herself standing in a corporate boardroom from antiquity.

Jara blinked hard, twice, wondering if the opulent surroundings were the hallucinations of a sleep-deprived mind. The oval-shaped room sported a faux mahogany table that could have seated twenty, glass windows that overlooked a panoply of phallic skyscrapers, and a wet bar complete with Waterford crystal and Kentucky bourbon. But Jara was in no mood to start tapping things to figure out whether they were real or SeeNaRee. She approached the table and slumped onto a chair, which automatically scooted in and adjusted to the contours of her body. This one, at least, was virtual.

The analyst, consulting the time, realized she had arrived fifteen minutes early for their fiefcorp meeting. Jara scowled an order to the building for another cup of nitro, and then called up the morning drudge reports on a nearby window.

Nobody could quite recall who had coined the term infoquake, but within hours it had become common currency throughout the civilized world. Infoquake: a mysterious computational disturbance of unknown origin and awesome destructive power. Even the handful of residents living at remote experimental colonies beyond Jupiter were now bandying the word around like they had been speaking it for years.

Unfortunately, the terminology was just about the only thing the pundits could agree upon.

"Once again, the Data Sea has exhibited its juvenile tendency to turn everything into a conspiracy," wrote the drudge Mah Lo Vertiginous.

According to the preliminary analysis from Creed Conscientious, the infoquake was a simple bottleneck of information; nothing more, nothing less. An unheard-of concentration of multi projections in a single space, vying for access to the same facts and figures on the Data Sea. Is it so hard to imagine that a series of overloaded data agents could cause OCHREs to fail?

But Vertiginous' opinion was by no means the majority along the drudge circuit. Sen Sivv Sor had a considerably darker view of the previous night's events:

Some governmentalist cretins would have you believe we suffered from a simple bottleneck of information last night. Unfortunately, dear readers, nothing could be further from the truth.

Since when does a simple bottleneck of information stop several hundred weak hearts from beating? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information cause a generator malfunction on Furtoid and send two hundred people to an icy death? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information wreak havoc with the gravity control on 49th Heaven and fling three dozen people into freefall?

Mark my words: Disasters like the infoquake are not natural occurrences. Wherever you find such poisonous medicine, there's a human hand nearby administering the dose.

"Let me guess," said a voice. "Tokyo circa the Second American Revolution."

Jara whipped her head around to find Horvil surveying the room. The elaborate SeeNaRee only seemed to heighten the engineer's already high spirits. As soon as he spotted the wet bar, Horvil bounded across the room on some undefined errand of mischief. His movement revealed a nervous-looking youth who had been standing in the engineer's shadow.

"It's not Tokyo," said Jara. "It's New York City, before the orbital colony hit. See, that's the Hudson River over there." She regarded the young man with a cynical eye, noticed his inky black hair and five o'clock shadow, and decided he must be a relative of Horvil. His face had the same air of bonhomie, but Jara could also see an undercurrent of piety that could only have been a genetic gift from the infamous Aunt Berilla. "You must be Benyamin."

The youth nodded and gave a polite bow in Jara's direction. "Towards Perfection," he said. "I guess you're Jara. Horvil's told me a lot about you."

Jara shot a suspicious glance at the engineer, who had begun to juggle the Waterford crystal. Over his head, patterns of reflected sunlight danced crazily on the ceiling. "Oh, has he?"

"Don't worry," said Horvil. "I really only told him a tiny bit. Just the good things."

Benyamin sensed the tension and immediately assumed the role of diplomat. "Ah, the drudges," he said, nodding at the chaotic display of fully justified type on the window. "You know, Khann Frejohr thinks High Executive Borda caused it."

"Caused what?"

"Well, the infoquake."

Horvil had moved from three pieces of stemware to four, and their arcs of flight were growing longer by the second. "Yeah, I saw that speech he gave last night," he said. "The evil work of the Defense and Wellness Council. Len Borda's last-ditch effort to muzzle the Sarinas once and for all. You gotta love that Khann Frejohr."

"What a load of shit," said Jara with a grimace. "Come on, Horvil. Borda pulled his troops out of Andra Pradesh almost as soon as the infoquake was over. If he wanted Margaret dead, she'd be dead by now." She waved her hand, banishing the news coverage from the window screen. "So how did Borda react to Khann's speech? He must have gone completely offline."

Benyamin nodded. "That's putting it mildly. He shut down the Sigh and the Jamm and all other `resource-intensive pleasure networks' until further notice."

"He shut down-?"

"Len Borda isn't our problem right now." The three fiefcorp apprentices swiveled around to find Natch standing in the doorway. Jara saw that he had come with wolf's grin and invisible audience in tow, not to mention an impeccable pin-striped suit that would have been at home in ancient New York. "So let's get down to business already."

Horvil caught three pieces of stemware but accidentally let the fourth slip through his fingers. The virtual Waterford landed on the marble floor with a clang but did not break. "What about Vigal? And Merri?" asked Horvil.

"Vigal's off to another one of his seminars in Beijing," said Natch. "Effects of Orbital Colony Gravitational Fields on Neural Pathways, or something like that."

"Nothing stops a scientific conference," muttered Jara.

"And I'm right here," said Merri. The blonde channel manager had apparently snuck in while nobody was paying attention. Merri had taken a seat near Natch's side of the table and projected a set of notes visible on the dark wood in front of her. Her penmanship was crisp and perfect, something that gave Jara an inexplicable pang of jealousy.

"So what's everyone waiting for?" cried Natch in a sudden fit of pique. "Sit the fuck down."

Natch planted himself in the cushioned leather chair at the head of the table and surveyed his four apprentices with a barely suppressed smirk. A snapshot of the Council troops tromping through the Surina courtyard loomed large on the window behind him; Jara realized she must have accidentally left open one of her morning news stories. The four apprentices gazed expectantly back and forth between the photo and their fiefcorp master. Margaret Surina, the Defense and Wellness Council, investor meetings, infoquakes, MultiReal-hadn't the time finally come for Natch to let them know what was going on?

The entrepreneur turned to Jara with pronounced matter-of-factness, his face a riddle. "Why don't you start us off with an analysis of the latest sales figures," he said.

Jara shrugged. Sales figures? Who can think of sales at a time like this? But she knew Natch, and had prepared a brief analysis this morning anyway. She snapped her fingers briskly, causing a three-dimensional chart to hover over the surface of the conference table. Lines in primary colors raced one another to see which could climb to the top right corner the quickest.