Part 5 (1/2)

Suddenly, Vigal found himself standing on Lora's track, looking straight ahead at that long stretch of open country after the scheduled stop at career and before the end of the line. The distance seemed unimaginably vast. To Vigal, it did not seem to be part of the natural order of things for a man to travel such a long distance alone.

When the boy emerged from gestation, the neural programmer had himself appointed legal guardian. Then he transferred the child to a hive facility back on Earth, in Omaha.

He named the child Natch.

Many years later, Natch would say that his greatest skill was his knack for acquiring enemies. He was only half joking.

Natch made his first enemies before the age of five. He had not learned to speak until he was almost three-an eternity in an age of bio/logics-and this set him apart from the other children. The hive's larger boys took notice of his solitude and quiet demeanor, his propensity for sitting alone in corners. They decided to examine this odd child the only way they knew how: with their fists.

One morning, Natch emerged from his room and found five of his hivemates waiting. They were older boys, uglier than he, and sullen since birth. Natch instinctively knew what was about to happen and felt a split-second of astonishment. What did I do wrong? he thought. Then the boys jumped him. The next few minutes were a tumult of kicks, punches and scratches that left Natch reeling on the floor in pain.

He limped back into his room, having learned a valuable lesson: Always be on your guard, because the universe needs no reasons to inflict punishment.

Perhaps the boys were merely looking for a cringe or a whimper of fear, something that would validate their nascent theories of power and weakness. But Natch refused to give them this satisfaction. The next morning, he emerged from his room as always and marched without hesitation towards the waiting band of thugs. They gave him plenty of opportunity to flee, but the stubborn child refused to veer off his determined path. Instead, he waited silently while the bullies had their way with him. The beatings continued the next day, and the next, and the next.

The proctors were not blind. Natch's floor in the hive could barely contain four dozen children; no s.p.a.ce remained for privacy. But bio/logic technology did not work in Natch's favor. The OCHREs floating in his bloodstream had been battle-tested for generations in much more rigorous environments than a suburban hive; they could heal minor cuts and bruises within minutes. The bullies could inflict little real damage on him until they were old enough to pull black code off the Data Sea.

The proctors decided to let the conflict play itself out.

But how can we just sit there and watch the boy suffer like that? argued one of the proctors in a staff meeting. We can't just let this go on forever.

Her superior was unsympathetic. We're not here to coddle these children. There are sixty billion people out there waiting to chew them up and spit them out. The headmaster nodded towards the flexible gla.s.s window, as if this thin membrane could ward off the world's suffering. Outside, tree branches sc.r.a.ped greedily against the window like claws. These children need to be tough in order to thrive.

So we're trying to create a generation of martyrs. Is that it?

Long pause. Have faith in the boy, Petaar. He's not getting hurt, is he? We won't let this go on forever, but let's give him a few more days to figure things out for himself before we intervene.

n.o.body ever explained this decision to Natch, however, and to him the proctors' inaction felt like indifference. This was a greater blow than any the young bullies could deliver. Didn't the proctors drill into the children's heads every day that the world was run by logical, impartial laws? Everything happened for a reason, they said. Every effect was traceable to a root cause. But this daily punishment had no rational basis that Natch could see, and though the proctors could see him suffering, they remained mum. The boy pondered his dilemma for days on end, and spent his nights wrestling with cognitive dissonance.

One night, Natch awoke before dawn with his mind on fire.

The world around him dimmed and blanked out until all he could see were his hands in front of his face. And then the room exploded with colors. A frenzy of lights burned far away up over his head, while strange hollow voices began speaking to him of things he didn't understand. Random phrases in imaginary languages. The names of dead kings. Algorithms and encrypted messages. Natch lay quietly in the dark, consumed by fear, and let the vision wash over him.

When dawn arrived, he knew what he had to do.

Natch missed roll call that morning. The proctor Petaar scrambled to his room, fearing the worst. She found the boy on the floor, trapped beneath a heavy bureau and struggling to breathe.

The hive descended into pandemonium. After tending to Natch, the proctors quickly rounded up the thugs who had been tormenting him. They grilled the boys behind locked doors for two hours and extracted a number of tearful confessions. But the bullies were unanimous in insisting they had nothing to do with burying Natch under the bureau. And the toys missing from Natch's room? thundered Petaar. Did they run off by themselves? The boys had no explanation. The proctors weighed the evidence against the five bullies for much of the afternoon, and then summarily expelled them.

When he heard the news, Natch felt a cold thrill run up his spine. It was his first taste of victory, and he found it an intoxicating brew.

The boys had actually been innocent of their crime; the entire incident was a setup. Natch had contrived to trap himself beneath the bureau by propping it up with blocks and then slowly removing the supports. He had sketched out the details of his plan in the early morning hours with the zeal of a master draftsman, until no flaws were visible to the naked eye. He had long since forgotten the source of his inspiration.

But Natch's ploy succeeded in totally unexpected dimensions as well. The proctors who had ignored his plight now walked around with looks of guilt etched on their faces. Petaar went out of her way to accommodate Natch's every whim. Word of the episode even leaked out to his hivemates' parents and caused the inst.i.tution no end of grief. Natch was astounded. He had vanquished his enemies and exposed his proctors' fallibility with a single blow.

The incident drove home another valuable lesson: With patience, cunning and foresight, anything is possible.

This was not the last hurdle Natch had to clear in the hive. Other children rushed to fill the void left by the departure of the bullies, and they were not so easily fooled. They tried to sabotage his homework, steal his belongings, and blame him for all their own mischief. Natch quickly realized he had made a tactical error hiding behind the proctors; by not dealing with his opponents directly, he had only reinforced the perception that he was weak.

He wondered if this would be a never-ending cycle. Was he doomed to spend the remainder of his life fighting battle after battle with a succession of enemies, each more capable than the last, until he finally met his match?

At the age of six, Natch decided that escape was his only option. He ran away.

Serr Vigal received a panicked Confidential Whisper from Natch's proctors that morning. They wondered whether the boy had hopped the tube and found his way to Vigal's apartment, but the neural programmer had not seen his charge in weeks. He cancelled the morning's staff meeting and set out for the nearest tube station. The tube whisked him across metropolitan Omaha to a squat semi-circular building that did, in fact, look like a beehive.

What do you mean, he's missing? asked Vigal, perplexed, when he caught up to the anxious proctors. I thought you monitored the children here twenty-four hours a day.

The headmaster bowed his head. We do.

Vigal was not an excitable man by nature. Are you sure he didn't just wander onto another floor? he said, scratching the few lonely hairs on his head. You have security programs, don't you? Certainly he couldn't have gotten out of the building without you knowing it.

Theoretically, no, said the headmaster. But it appears he did.

Omaha was no place for an unattended boy. A curious soul like Natch could easily disappear in a cosmopolitan city of 22 million and never be heard from again. Broken families had been commonplace in the depths of the Economic Plunge, but even a recovering economy could not totally stem the trickle of missing children.

Natch was not oblivious to the dangers of the city, but he had already learned to discount fear as an unreliable emotion. Omaha seemed like a zoo to him; everywhere he turned, there were tantalizing new sights arrayed for his amus.e.m.e.nt. Buildings expanded and collapsed like breathing animals, often causing entire city blocks to s.h.i.+ft a few meters this way and that. Tube trains criss-crossed the city like veins. And the streets were filled with millions of people holding silent conversations with acquaintances thousands of kilometers away.

Natch spent hours trying to figure out which of the pedestrians were real and which were multi projections. The proctors had taught the children about multi, of course; some of the proctors multied to the hive themselves from as far away as Luna. But children under eight were not allowed to project on the network, and thus they had very little first-hand knowledge of the subject. So Natch spent hours pivoting 360 degrees in the crowd, looking for people on the periphery of his vision who seemed fuzzy and indistinct until he focused on them. Then he would run up and toss a pebble. Those that the pebble bounced off were real (and sometimes irritated); those that the pebble pa.s.sed through were multi projections. Natch discovered to his astonishment that he could not tell the difference at all.

Once the initial fascination of the city wore off, Natch's experiences in the hive began to infect everything he saw. The belligerent street vendor shouting down his customer's haggling ... the timid woman walking two steps behind her companion like a housepet ... the down-and-out businessman being pressed out of his apartment by white-robed Council officers ... every interaction he saw was a substantiation of the eternal struggle between the Pushers and the Pushed.

Natch found a quiet corner in a public square and sat facing the wall. A viewscreen above him repeatedly screeched a popular footwear slogan every ten seconds. No matter where you go, there will be bullies and victims, Natch told himself. Which do you want to be?

Back at the hive, the proctors made a poor show of mobilizing to find Natch. The boy had been gone for most of the afternoon, and yet the headmaster had only just managed to circulate his name and description to the local L-PRACG security forces. Serr Vigal, for his part, was absorbed in solving the riddle of how Natch had made it through hive security. All simply gaped with astonishment when the boy appeared back in the hive that evening, seemingly out of nowhere. On his return, he had managed to elude their security apparatus as effortlessly as he had on his departure.

That was a nice trick you pulled, said the neural programmer with a hint of pride. And then, mindful of the proctors' angry stares: Is there anything you'd like to talk to us about?

Natch frowned, shook his head, and vanished into his room without a word.

The next day, a tangible change had come over the boy. He met the taunts and jeers of his hivemates with a cruel smile that made them uneasy. And then his enemies began to suffer from a series of unfortunate accidents.

One boy who had constantly maligned Natch for his good looks found himself tripping down a long flight of stairs. A girl who liked to capsize Natch's lunch tray found herself locked in a spare pantry for an entire evening. And so on.

Each humiliation was carefully crafted to reach maximum exposure among the hive children. Natch instinctively knew that the punish ments he imposed should be both brutal and disproportionate to their crimes. This new brand of psychological warfare terrified the other children, who had not yet learned the art of subtlety, who still expressed their emotions with curled fists and running feet. Eventually, even the dullest child in the hive saw a pattern: if you bother Natch, you will pay for it.

Natch got his wish. The other children left him alone. He had learned another valuable lesson: Perception is everything.

Natch quickly outgrew his hive. Even the absent-minded Serr Vigal could see that, although it took an eye-opening conversation with the proctor Petaar for him to recognize it.

Children like Natch need something to focus on, she said. You'd better make sure he's pointed in the right direction, or he'll focus on the wrong things.

Vigal furrowed his brow. A man who spent his day working with the quadratics of neural science had little time for binary terms like ”right” and ”wrong”. This new hive you suggest-they'll give him something to focus on?

Petaar nodded knowingly. And then some. Natch will get ten years of study-hard study and then a one-year initiation.