Part 9 (1/2)

”That's why we have Dr. Plugenpatch standards-”

”The standards are only one small part of the procedure,” said Vigal with a tinge of sadness in his voice. ”For process' preservation, Natch, why do you think I'm always going off to speak at all these conferences? It's so those of us in neural programming can keep on top of what the others are doing. Certainly, it's costly and time-consuming, but it's also effective. We have a higher standard to live up to here in the memecorp sector.”

Natch crossed his arms in front of his chest and sulked. He tried to look at anything in the room but Serr Vigal. ”I don't see how you can make a profit doing all that,” he said. ”I mean, who's going to wait three years for all of you to coordinate an upgrade to some obscure piece of cranial nerve software?”

Vigal shut off the diagram with a snap of his fingers, revealing the cheap carpeting and second-hand furniture of Natch's apartment once more. ”You're beginning to understand life in a memecorp,” said the neural programmer quietly. ”We can't make a profit. We can't just rely on Primo's ratings or the whims of the marketplace to test our products for us. Because, as you say, people do not have the time or the inclination to pay attention to most neural software. If we didn't get outside funding, I would have to close up shop and send everybody home.”

”Then why do it at all?”

”Because I enjoy it,” said Vigal, ”and because someone has to.”

There was a long pause. Natch could feel 9971.7 mocking him from its berth in Minds.p.a.ce. ”So what do you want me to do? Abandon the whole thing?”

”I want you to do exactly what you're doing,” replied Vigal, ”but slow down. Natch, you've created an excellent long-term plan for the future of 9971.7. Tomorrow, you can begin by rolling back the changes you've put in place, and then we can start to enact that plan one piece at a time.”

Natch had no response. He had expected Vigal to point him to some hidden flaw in the program architecture that only a wise and seasoned programmer could see. Instead, his guardian had only confirmed that the problem did not lay with Natch; the problem was the memecorp system itself.

Silently, Natch cursed the day he had ever signed on to an apprentices.h.i.+p with Serr Vigal, and wondered if he would make it through the rest of his apprentices.h.i.+p without going completely insane.

A few weeks later, Natch abandoned his grandiose plan for the neural software. He hadn't lost confidence in his abilities; on the contrary, he was more certain than ever that he could bring the program to a higher plain of functionality. But Natch had decided to leave Vigal's employ in eight months, when his contract ended. Until then, he would get much more experience trying his hand at a variety of projects than tinkering with just one.

Serr Vigal took the news coolly but with a tinge of disappointment. ”Where will you go?” he asked his protege. ”The fiefcorps?”

”That's not the place for me right now,” said Natch, leaving the obvious unspoken: he still suffered from the taint of the Shortest Initiation. Hiring someone with Natch's notoriety could provoke a boycott from the creeds and the L-PRACGs, or a backlash from the drudges. ”I've decided to set myself up on the Data Sea as a ROD coder,” the youth continued. ”Like Horvil.”

”Are you sure, Natch? ROD coding can be extremely-”

Natch cut the discussion short. ”Yes, I'm sure,” he said.

Vigal did not begrudge his young apprentice's decision. In fact, he seemed to forget all about it over the next few months. Natch quietly upgraded a number of optic nerve programs to the new Plugenpatch specs, working at the glacial pace his master had requested. When Natch multied to Vigal's office to collect his end-of-contract bonus and say goodbye, the neural programmer responded with a surprised ”Oh!” and gave him a feeble hug. Natch could see a host of worries fluttering through his guardian's head, but Vigal had evidently decided to keep them to himself.

Thus ended Natch's brief career in the memecorp sector.

RODs were Routines On Demand, bio/logic programs that catered to the indulgently rich. There were no contracts, no guarantees, no fringe benefits. ROD coders simply scouted the Data Sea for a spec they could engineer quickly, rushed to build it before someone else did, and then launched it in hopes that their patron would like it enough to pay. The applications for RODs ranged from the frivolous (Fab-a-lous Nails 15, now with programmable cuticles”) to the lascivious (t.i.t-o-rama 8, the total breast bounce controller”) to the purely ridiculous (DiscSpeak 3c, ”for the true connoisseur of ancient recorded-sound emulation-now with pop, hiss and warble!”).

An expedient programmer could typically launch two or three RODs per week. Horvil had maintained that pace for over a year before moving on to the more specialized field of bio/logic engineering.

”Let's estimate three sales a week,” said Natch to his old friend one night as they strode around London discussing career options. He summoned a virtual calculator in the brisk spring air and began plugging in numbers. ”So we'll multiply three by the average asking price for an ROD, subtract out equipment and overhead ...”

Horvil sliced his hand through Natch's holographic calculator. ”Wait a minute, Natch,” he said, shaking his head. ”It's not that easy.”

”What do you mean?”

”I said I launched two or three RODs a week. I didn't say anybody bought 'em. You never sell all the RODs you launch. Sometimes you get beaten to the punch by another programmer. Or your patron changes his mind and pulls the spec from the Data Sea just for the f.u.c.k of it. Or you're sabotaged by the compet.i.tion. There are a.s.sholes out there that post fake ROD requests, you know.”

Natch frowned and adjusted his numbers downwards. ”Well, it's still not that bad-you've just got to factor in recurring revenue. You know, maintenance fees, subscription fees, upgrade fees. That's how the fiefcorps make a profit, right?”

The stocky engineer chuckled, pleased to be in the know for once. ”Nope, can't count on any of that either. These are RODs, Natch-you have to build 'em so quickly that they won't withstand any kind of heavy use. The shelf life for a ROD is about twelve to fifteen weeks, and that's only if you've done your homework. After that, the buyers just get bored and move on to the next new thing.”

Natch began to wonder if he had made a rash choice in leaving Vigal's employ. Memecorp work might be torpid and dull, but at least it provided a sense of stability. But once Natch stepped out on his own, nothing was guaranteed. A year from now, he could be trolling the old cities and living in trashed-up skysc.r.a.pers like the diss, like his mother had done.

But certainly Natch could make a decent living in the ROD coding game if Horvil could. He had a tremendous respect for his hivemate's intellect, but Horvil's business sense was a little skewed. People tended to fall into the ROD world because they couldn't hack it in the real bio/logics market. But Natch never doubted that he had the skills and the pedigree to make it to the top ranks of the fiefcorps. He was not on his way down; he was on his way up.

All Natch needed to do was persevere, produce quality work, and establish a reputation. Eventually, the ill wind that drifted around him would dissipate and the brand on his forehead would fade; the Shortest Initiation would be permanently tossed into the dustbin of Yesterday's News. Then the channelers and capitalmen and fiefcorp masters who patrolled the Data Sea for fresh talent would find him, and he would resume his rightful place in the bio/logics world.

Natch's end-of-contract bonus was enough to keep him afloat for a month or two. Vigal offered to buy his young protege a set of bio/logic programming bars as a parting gift, but Natch declined and bought the bars himself. He did not want to feel beholden to his guardian for anything. It was not an idle investment; the extended function sets on the new bars would enable him to take coding shortcuts and thus program faster.

Now that Natch had emerged from Vigal's shadow, the city of Omaha held no appeal to him. He hopped around the globe looking for a place to settle, and finally found an apartment in Angelos that suited his tastes. The place made Horvil's spare room look like a palace by comparison. Still, it had everything he would need to start a ROD business. There was a bed to sleep in, s.p.a.ce to hold a decent-sized workbench, and proximity to downtown Angelos, where the public multi facilities were abundant and cheap.

The next morning, he got to work.

Natch decided to begin with a field he was familiar with, so he chose optics. He skimmed the Data Sea and found a request for an eye transformation program that looked like it might be a good place to start. Bio/logics had made setting one's eye color as easy as editing a database entry, but the woman who had posted this request wanted something more. Vellux of Beijing wanted her eye color to sync with the colors of nearby flowers. In a room of violets, she wanted violet eyes; in a field of ivy, she wanted green.

It seemed like a simple enough programming task. A morning spent nosing through the Dr. Plugenpatch archives helped him better his understanding of the optical programming interface. Natch fetched the OCHRE specs from Dr. Plugenpatch, projected them onto his workbench in Minds.p.a.ce, and started planning his strategy.

Natch found plenty of machines floating around the eyeball that he could harness to accomplish his task. Thanks to the OCHREs, he could query the iris and determine the color of its pigment; he could also query the retina and pa.r.s.e the colors in the user's line of sight. But a number of vexing questions remained. How would the program identify flowers in the retinal image? How would it distinguish between petals, stems and leaves? How would the program funnel the millions of shades of yellows and reds and purples into a narrow palette of 16 colors? What if Vellux was looking at seven different flowershow would the program rank the order of importance of these flowers and a.s.sign an appropriate eye color?

The longer Natch struggled to unravel these tangled questions, the more questions arose to ensnare him. Normally, it took hours for the body to process color changes through the personal preferences database. Unless this woman Vellux planned to stand still for long periods of time, he would need to find an alternate solution. Luckily, he found a number of sub-routines on the Data Sea that would do the job quicker. Natch chose one called Weagel's Eye Wizard, which had received excellent ratings from Primo's a few months back. But the program required access to a batch of proteins for building the pigmentation ... which could only be done by requesting resources from another OCHRE nearby in the choroid ... but the OCHRE in the choroid needed to register its supply requirements with the brainstem.

It took Natch most of the day and into the night to come up with a satisfactory blueprint for the project. At six in the morning, he sat back and took stock of his progress. The holographic model floating above his workbench looked like a mutated gra.s.shopper, but Natch knew he could not afford to trifle with aesthetics this time around. As he was examining his handiwork, the building interrupted him to slide a bowl of hot oatmeal onto the kitchen counter. When was the last time I ate? Natch asked himself. He could not remember.

But food would have to wait. Natch created a new instance of the Minds.p.a.ce bubble and placed his model inside it for future reference. Then he grabbed two of the bio/logic programming bars out of his satchel. The new bars were light enough to wave in Minds.p.a.ce for hours, yet solid enough to withstand thousands of accidental bashes against a workbench. Natch took a deep breath and attacked the empty Minds.p.a.ce bubble with zest.

Morning became afternoon; afternoon became evening.

The young entrepreneur sculpted his code quickly, using virtual blocks of logic as his marble, and programming bars as his hammer and chisel. Gradually the ma.s.s came to resemble the mutated gra.s.shopper of Natch's diagram. He had been working for thirty-six hours straight when he finally laid down the programming bars. The bowl of oatmeal had disappeared, and Natch couldn't remember if he had eaten it or if the building had simply whisked it away untouched.

Natch stepped into the hallway, which was lined on both sides with tulips. He fired up EyeMorph 1.0 and was pleased to discover that everything worked as designed. His eyes quickly slid from their natural blue to a mottled shade of purple. Natch retreated to his living room and tested his handiwork against a number of floral images on the viewscreen. So far, so good.

Rest is coming soon, he promised himself. I just need Plugenpatch approval, so I can launch the program on the Data Sea, and then I'll sleep.

Natch approached the Plugenpatch process with more than a little trepidation. As he had discovered while apprenticing for Vigal, a successful test was no guarantee of approval. Fiefcorp programmers could not hope to cover all the combinatorial possibilities of a fully functioning OCHRE system. No, only large ent.i.ties like Dr. Plugenpatch and Primo's had the facilities to do that. Natch swallowed his fear, packaged up his work, and routed the program to Dr. Plugenpatch's automated verification system.

Eight minutes later, as Natch sat on his sofa sucking down a fizzy bottle of ChaiQuoke, EyeMorph returned from the verification system peppered with rejection notices.

Mindful of the time, Natch tore through the Plugenpatch recommendations. He realized to his chagrin that he had left a loophole that might allow excess protein buildup in the choroid. Any decent OCHRE system would be able to deal with such an anomaly as a matter of course, but Dr. Plugenpatch's standards were rigid and uncompromising. The catchphrase from a thousand Creed Conscientious advertis.e.m.e.nts rose unbidden in his head: Always preserve your bodily computing resources! Natch sourly picked up the programming bars again and began reweaving connection strands.

The next rejection took eleven minutes for the system to process.

The rejection after that took sixteen minutes of a.n.a.lysis.

Natch decided to abandon subtlety and just finish the wretched program. He suspected that someone had already beaten him to the Data Sea while he was here fumbling with Dr. Plugenpatch rejections, but he couldn't just abandon the project now. Natch furiously patched up the remaining holes, disabled a few features that seemed problematic, and fed it into the Plugenpatch system.

Twenty minutes later, the verdict was clear: success!

Natch hastily bundled the program together, slapped on the standard fore and aft tables that the Data Sea required for its cataloging agents, and launched. He called up the ROD optics listings on his viewscreen so he could see the results with his own eyes. The evidence on the new releases board glared at him in small black letters: EYEMORPH.