Part 11 (2/2)

”Natch, I picked you for a reason-because you'l resist Len Borda to your dying breath.

You wil resist the winter and the void. Understand thissomething my father was trying to tel me.

The world is new each day, every sunrise a spring and every sunset a winter. I know you'l understand this. You wil stand alone in the end, and you wil make the decisions that the world demands. The decisions I can't make. I know this. I know it.”

There would be no more elucidation coming from Margaret Surina that afternoon, for as she finished the last word she slipped into a sudden fitful sleep. Quel cradled her in his arms, saying nothing. The fiefcorp master could see that the Islander comprehended no more than he did.

Natch stood once more and walked to the closest window. Far down below through the mist, he could see Andra Pradesh laid out before him like a chaotic playground of the G.o.ds, but from that quarter there were no answers forthcoming either.

15.

The trouble began with a message in the early hours of the morningearly hours for Horvil, at least, who was stil exhausted from yesterday's drudge onslaught and who even in the most lax of times would cross multiple time zones and hotel it to justify a few extra hours of sleep.

The engineer pul ed his face from a cool crevice of the sofa and fluttered his eyelids to dispel the pixie dust. Bulky letters were hopping up and down impatiently on their serifs before Horvil's face.

HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP.

Horvil rol ed onto his back, dropped his head into a net of interwoven fingers, and checked the signature. The message had come from ... Prosteev Serly?

As an engineer in a highly visible fiefcorp, Horvil had met just about everyone in the Primo's top fifty. The entrepreneur Serly had bought him a few drinks last week on the pretext of fostering good relations among the compet.i.tion. Never mind that Horvil no longer was the compet.i.tion since MultiReal had come along. It soon became apparent that Serly was real y after technical a.s.sistance with NiteFocus 51, which he had bought at auction when Natch liquidated the company's old programs. Horvil suspected that Natch wouldn't approve of such generosity to a former compet.i.tor, especial y with the exposition looming so close. But free booze was free booze. Horvil and Serly spent a few hours in a Turkish bar discussing iterative functions and quantum dynamics and the conductive properties of the optic nerve. Prosteev took lots of notes and, more importantly, poured lots of drinks. The two had

parted

friends.

Horvil zapped off a ConfidentialWhisper. ”How ya doing, Prosteev?”

Prosteev, panicked, teetering on the edge of violence: ”What kind of s.h.i.+t did you put in that NiteFocus code, Horv? What's Natch trying to pul ? I thought he was getting out of bio/logics, and now he does this to me-”

”Hold it, hold it, hold it,” interrupted the engineer. ”Start from the beginning. I have no idea what you're talking about.”

”I'm talking about ma.s.sive failures with NiteFocus. I'm talking about twelve thousand complaints in the past three hours, and more every minute. Now I've got the Meme Cooperative breathing down my neck, people demanding refunds, my a.n.a.lyst threatening to quit-”

Horvil calmed the man down the best he could and asked for temporary access to the Minds.p.a.ce blueprints. He threw on a robe and shuffled to his workbench. Crumbs from yesterday's sandwich made lazy backflips off his sleeve. (Read the contract, he could hear his inner Natch griping. You don't have to help Prosteev Serly. That sale was final the instant those credits changed hands.) Sifting through the soft blues and purples of the NiteFocus code was like catching up with an old friend. Horvil remembered the nimble swing of the Sifting through the soft blues and purples of the NiteFocus code was like catching up with an old friend. Horvil remembered the nimble swing of the programming bar that had created that parabola, the deft touch that had closed those loopholes. He briefly relived the evening when Natch had tested the program on his balcony and declared it unfit for public consumption. Soon Horvil was back in hyperfocus as he sifted through error reports and Plugenpatch specifications.

An hour and a half later, Horvil found the mistake: an improperly defined variable in one of the program's isolated ghettos. He swept through the logs and verified that the error was, in fact, his responsibility and not something tacked on later by Serly's engineers. It was a trivial mistake from those frantic nights before the NiteFocus 48 launch. Under normal conditions, such a flaw might go unnoticed for years without causing any trouble. Half the bio/logic programs on the Data Sea had failings like this that would only crop up in the most bizarre situations. Not even Primo's and Dr. Plugenpatch could find them al .

The engineer tossed his programming bar over one shoulder with a wel -practiced motion, where it landed on a pil ow and rol ed to join several others on the floor. He cal ed up bug reports and began crossreferencing the source of the errors.

Bil board holographs, mostly, along with the occasional Data Sea news feed.

Horvil turned back to that insignificant thread drooping in Minds.p.a.ce like a flaccid phal us. What were the odds of twelve thousand specific cal s to that strand in one morning? Astronomical. This was no coincidence. Someone had bought advertising s.p.a.ce on those bil boards and posted just the right image with just the right resolution at just the right time: a perfect storm of sabotage. But how had the saboteurs found the flaw? Unless they had stumbled on it by accident, which seemed unlikely, they would have had to reverse-engineer the whole thing from scratch. Not an easy task.

Horvil's mind triangulated with furious speed. Who could spare those kinds of resources?

Who could afford to rent al that bil board s.p.a.ce for those incriminating holographs? And who had the motive to muck with Horvil's code anyway?

Horvil silently tal ied up al the bio/logic programs out there that bore his signature.

Optical programs, mental process refiners, memory aids. Four dozen? Five? Certainly if one program was vulnerable to such attack, they al were.

The yel ow jacket floated on the surface of the hoverbird window, lifeless, inert. If Natch stared long enough, he could see it drift from side to side like a buoy bobbing on the ocean. There was a faint hum coming from some subterranean register as wel . Natch knew it was just a trick of the hoverbird's audiovisual system, a way to hint at information that only a properly configured Minds.p.a.ce workbench could provide. But until he arrived back in Shenandoah, this poor man's display would have to do.

He was stil a few hours out from Shenandoah, closer than he would have been if he had taken the tube with Quel . But the Islander was so upset at the state of affairs in Andra Pradesh, he had decided to stay behind for another day to see what he could accomplish. Natch bristled, thinking of the MultiReal exposition in less than a week and the mountain of programming changes that needed to go to the a.s.sembly-line shop in the next forty-eight hours. But in the end he decided to give the Islander some leeway and just get himself home as fast as possible. Thus, a chartered flight, in a four-seater Falcon hoverbird. The pilot had never made any attempt to talk to him; she simply tuned the c.o.c.kpit windows to a geosynchron weather report and lifted off.

As Andra Pradesh became a memory and Europe fled in the hoverbird's wake, Natch stared at the yel ow jacket on the window, evidence of the MultiReal code in his head. Who planted you there? he asked the insect. What are you doing? What relation do you have to the black code?

What are you waiting for?

Natch was startled out of his reverie by a ConfidentialWhisper request. Horvil. The fiefcorp master waved the blob on the window away until it was nothing but a ghostly presence, a malicious idea. Many meters below, he could see the choppy waves of the English Channel. ”What?” he snapped brusquely, shaking his head to jumpstart his synapses.

The engineer's tone was tired and fatalistic. ”We've got a problem, boss.”

”Wel ? What is it?”

”The Council.”

Natch felt a sudden nausea wash over him. It was the same primitive queasiness he had felt the night before initiation, when he had been outflanked and humiliated by Brone, and somehow he knew this was not just another petty hara.s.sment. ”So what did they do this time?” said Natch, molars grinding.

Horvil let out a 'Whisper-audible sigh. ”They sabotaged my programs,” he said. ”Twelve of 'em so far and counting. No, don't say I'm being paranoidthis has their fingerprints al over it.

They figured out a way to generate al these complaints to the Meme Cooperative, and the Meme Cooperative's been funneling them to the Bio/Logic Engineering Guild. They're accusing me of-get this-deceptive programming.”

”So you've gotten some complaints. When has that ever-”

”Not just some complaints. More complaints than the Guild's ever received for one programmer.” Horvil might have sounded amused if he didn't sound so exhausted. ”Four mil ion and counting. They're starting up a whole task force.”

Natch blinked, hard. Four mil ion complaints?

But before he had a chance to process this new datum, he was a.s.saulted by a fresh Confidential Whisper request, also labeled urgent. Merri. ”Natch,”

she moaned in a tone redolent of fresh sobbing. ”They've-I've-”

Natch slumped down in his seat. ”Let me guess. The Council.”

Merri's nod was evident even through ConfidentialWhisper. ”I don't know for certain-but it has to be them. Someone convinced Creed Objectivv to suspend my members.h.i.+p. Here, look.” The fiefcorp master felt the neural twitch of an incoming message. He pointed at the hoverbird window and summoned a doc.u.ment whose quasi-mystical font could only have germinated in an Objectivv art department.

Horvil, stil prattling on in the background: ”I haven't heard anything from the Meme Cooperative yet, but the Engineering Guild is p.i.s.sed. They've taken away my Guild card until this is al cleared up.”

”I don't understand,” said Natch. ”Why would Magan Kai Lee care about some stupid trade guild?”

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