David Edelman - Infoquake

And then Natch felt the pinprick of a needle in his back, near the base of his spine, and the black code slammed into him.

He flopped around and saw one of his mysterious pursuers standing at the end of the alleyway, dartgun mounted on his shoulder. Before Natch could react, he was hit twice more in the side and the right forearm.

As the malevolent dart tip OCHREs flowed into his bloodstream, he felt surprisingly little pain. All the same, he knew it wouldn't be long before the insidious machines had nullified his defenses and reprogrammed his internal systems. The rules of the Meme Cooperative, the strictures of Dr. Plugenpatch, the protective matrix of OCHREs, and the red blood cells in his body-all could be circumvented, given time and expertise and direct access to the major arteries carrying cellular traffic.

Natch tried one last desperate ConfidentialWhisper request to Horvil, but it was too late. He collapsed face first into a puddle of rainwater and continued down below street level into darkness.

The apprentices, conscious of the press of time, cut their multi connections and made arrangements to cart their bodies to Andra Pradesh. Only Jara stayed behind at the Enterprise Facility to await Quell's arrival.

Horvil's tube ride to Andra Pradesh was uneventful. No Council officers in white robes lurking around, no strange looks from fellow tube passengers other than the ones Horvil was used to getting. The engineer had ascended halfway up the steep hill inside the Surina compound gates before it occurred to him that a three-day stay at Andra Pradesh might require more than his bio/logic programming bars and a thermos of nitro.

He was the first one back at the safari SeeNaRee. Quell had still not arrived. While Jara tried to wrap up the first draft of a speech outline before she fetched her body from London, Horvil made camp at the antiseptic conference table. He conjured up a diagram of Probabilities 4.9 and began poring over the details, trying to familiarize himself with a program he had unceremoniously discarded five years ago. It was like reading old hive poetry; the coding was sloppy, the connections strained and amateurish. Probabilities 4.9 would not even have passed muster at Dr. Plugenpatch five years ago, and the bio/logic standards had evolved so much since then. He couldn't wait to find a workbench and tear into this program in MindSpace.

Suddenly, a shadow fell across the table, obscuring the holograph. Horvil looked up in irritation. Not another one of those SeeNaRee elephants

It was no elephant. An immense man stood before him, possibly fifty years old but with the physique of someone half that age. A pale blonde ponytail slunk down one shoulder and splayed out over his great barrel chest. The man could have cracked Horvil's head like a walnut between his biceps and forearm, but his demeanor was calm, almost sardonic. "I presume you're Horvil," he said.

Horvil balked, his mind a blank. "And you are?"

"I'm your new apprentice," replied the man. "Quell." He extended a hand in Horvil's direction at precisely the same time Horvil arose and started to bow. The plump engineer stared at the calloused and manyringed hand in confusion.

"You're supposed to shake it, you idiot." Jara walked up and placed her tiny palm in Quell's. To do so, she nearly had to get up on her tiptoes. "Towards Perfection. I'm Jara, Natch's bio/logic analyst. Don't mind Horvil-not everybody here is that clueless about your customs." The big man enclosed her virtual hand in his flesh fist, and they went through the awkward mechanics of a handshake. Finally, she pulled her hand away in frustration. "Maybe you can see why we bow instead."

Quell did not miss a beat. "And maybe you can see why I insist on shaking anyway."

All at once, comprehension came flooding into Horvil's head. He caught sight of the plain tan breeches and the thin copper collar suspended from the man's neck. The breeches were cinched tightly around his waist with a snakeskin belt that looked like it was actually made out of snakeskin. "Y-you're an unconnectible!" the engineer exclaimed in surprise.

"Yeah," replied Quell, "although I think the term you're looking for is Islander."

Horvil was so fascinated with the man's collar that he completely missed the faux pas. He had seen plenty of Islanders at a distance, of course-they did sometimes venture beyond the borders of their little demesne in the South Pacific-but actually meeting one in person was a different matter altogether. Horvil tried to picture what this room would look like to Quell if he removed that collar. No SeeNaRee, no Jara, no multi projections of any kind.

"I thought you were a bio/logic engineer," he said, thoroughly baffled. "Weren't you supposed to bring us the MultiReal code?" Horvil peeked around the Islander as if he expected to see a string of MindSpace blueprints bobbing behind him on a string.

"I am an engineer," said Quell with scarcely masked impatience. "And don't worry, I have the access to the code."

Horvil peered up and down the big man doubtfully. "If you're an engineer, where's your bio/logic programming bars?" He patted his own neatly folded knapsack and felt the reassuring heft of the metal inside.

The Islander let out a breath. He had obviously dealt with such skepticism many times before. "Let's just get this over with," he groused in a dangerous tone of voice. "We don't have time to fuck around. Follow me." He pivoted on one heel and stomped towards the metal doorframe standing incongruously in the middle of the veldt. Horvil and Jara looked at one another, shrugged, and set off in pursuit. All at once, the African SeeNaRee was replaced by the blue stretchedstone walls of the Surina Enterprise Facility.

Quell strode through the halls as if the Facility had been constructed solely for his benefit. None of the Surina security guards seemed eager to contradict this impression. They parted dutifully for the Islander with deep, respectful bows, while casting suspicious glances at Jara and Horvil. Throngs of businesspeople hustling to and from meetings stepped aside because of the Islander's intimidating presence. Finally, Quell led them to a door surrounded by Surina security people and walked into the most gorgeous workspace Horvil had ever seen.

The room's four walls bore no SeeNaRee or decorations of any kind, not even one of those extendable programming bar holsters that Horvil had seen in so many offices lately. Quell's workbench, however, was anything but shabby: a four-sided metal monstrosity with a sliding panel that allowed access to its center. The Islander snapped his fingers and conjured up a gigantic MindSpace bubble, large enough to hold three or four of Horvil's programs simultaneously. A serpentine block of bio/logic code wended partway around the bubble in hues of gray, brown and violet.

"Watch this," commanded Quell. And then he plunged his bare hands straight into the middle of the holograph.

Horvil gasped as connection strands rose like snakes charmed from a basket and wiggled their way to the Islander's fingers. Soon, Quell had amassed a bundle of data fibers in each hand, which he proceeded to weave in and out of the code blocks with astonishing alacrity. The connections looked just as well seated as if they had been stuck there with a pricey set of programming bars.

"I didn't even know you could do it that way," said Horvil. He thought of the clunky silver slabs roosted against his side and felt a rush of inferiority.

"How do you think people made code before bio/logic programming bars?" replied Quell. His noodling did not seem to have any purpose other than demonstration; he was tying and untying the same collection of strands over and over again. "With their bare hands, that's how. On the Islands, we remember such things."