"Maybe she will, maybe she won't. Do you know how hard it is to get your money back from a programmer? She'd have to go to the Cooperative, and that could take weeks. Not worth her time, not for such a trifling amount. Maybe by the time she notices, Bolbund will have fixed all those problems. He offers her a free upgrade, and she goes straight to him the next time she needs something."

The frustration coalesced in his mind like steam, and he was unable to summon any intelligible words through the fog. Natch vented his anger through a brutal kick at the wall.

"I feel like I'm going around in circles," he cried. "I'm just not getting anywhere. You ever hear that saying of Lucco Primo's about the three elements of success?"

Jara took a seat in the chair that Natch had recently used for his nap and looked him over with a tough but sympathetic eye. "Ability, energy and direction," she said. "Yeah, I've heard it."

"So what am I missing?"

"That's easy," replied Jara. "The wisdom to know when to use them."

Sheldon Surina once said, Progress is persistence.

Natch was nothing if not persistent. He had chosen the track he would take-from ROD coding, to mastering a fiefcorp, to winning the number one rank on Primo's-and nothing would throw him off course. Soon, Natch was convinced that nothing existed outside of this track. It was only within this context that he could make sense of his humiliating failures to Captain Bolbund. The track may twist and turn, he told himself, but eventually it will lead me to my destination.

In the meantime, Natch's most pressing problem was cash flow. His Vault account had been drained by weeks of fruitless compet.i.tion, not to mention the new bio/logic programming bars and Jara's consultation. Even the normally oblivious Horvil took note of Natch's financial plight. The engineer began to discover subtle ways to help. He would pick up the tab for dinner, accidentally leave groceries behind at Natch's place, drastically overpay Natch back for drinks from the night before.

Finally, Natch had to face the fact that ROD coding would not keep him afloat if he insisted on confronting Captain Bolbund again and again. Yet stanzas of Bolbund's wretched poetry kept creeping into his mind late at night, tramplike, refusing all attempts at eviction. Natch refused to give up, but he decided to put ROD coding on the back burner and scour the Data Sea for additional work. Something staid and square and predictable that would pay the bills.

Natch quickly found an open position at a large a.s.sembly-line programming shop in southern Texas territory.

"You don't want to go there," Jara advised him. "That's just connecting dots. Customization jobs for L-PRACGs handing out programs to twenty thousand people at once."

"Can't they automate that c.r.a.p?" Natch asked.

"Too expensive. Al's could have done the grunt work, back before the Autonomous Revolt. But the time and expense to deal with all the contingencies for projects that big ... it's cheaper to just go a.s.semblyline."

Natch drifted around his apartment that night kicking walls and yelling at ceiling tiles. There had to be some other course, some place else in bio/logics where the opinions of the drudges didn't matter. But Natch could not find any, and his Vault account was nearly empty. He accepted the job. Now his descent to the bottom of the programmer's food chain was complete.

The shop was located in a cavernous warehouse just south of the Sierra Madres. The area had once been the flowering center of New Alamo and the splinter Texan governments, overgrown with gaudy nouveau palaces and indulgent monuments to civic duty. But the Texans' decay had proved a potent fertilizer for programming factories that could make good use of their large open s.p.a.ces. Natch hopped on a tube every morning to a nondescript building in the warehouse district, where he reported to one of several hundred identical workbenches on the floor. A program materialized before him in Minds.p.a.ce, along with color-coded templates put together by some fiefcorp apprentice that instructed him where and how to make connections. There was no room for originality. The system automatically reported any deviations from the template to his supervisor.

Most of Natch's fellow programmers didn't mind the tedium, the endless repet.i.tion and constant clanking from a hundred programming bars striking workbenches at once. Their minds were far away. What happened to them in real time mattered little, as long as they could strum and drum and hum along to the orgiastic frenzy of music on the Jamm network. Natch logged on once to see what all the fuss was about. He found a hundred thousand channels of music in every conceivable style, tempo and mood. Channels would sp.a.w.n like newts, flourish for days or weeks as musicians jumped on and added their personal touch to the mix, then gradually shrivel up and die. Until then, Natch had thought his co-workers were thumping their workbenches with their programming bars to stave off boredom; now he realized he was listening to the rhythm sections of a thousand different Data Sea symphonies. Natch logged off in disgust and found a good white-noise program to block out the din. He detested music.

Natch earned his a.s.sembly-line pittance by day, but he was hardly idle at night. He spent countless hours staring at intricate blocks of programming code in Minds.p.a.ce, not actually making connections, but simply absorbing the patterns and progressions, waiting for the inevitable blast of inspiration.

His next vision came to him in the dead hours before dawn.

Natch went to bed early that night and activated QuasiSuspension 109.3, sick of the eternal struggle to find sleep. The program quickly led him there. He used the highest setting, which should have insulated him from the everyday noises of shifting walls and floors.

Yet somehow Natch found himself bolting upright at three in the morning, his face glistening with sweat.

He felt like a lens had snapped into place and brought something wide and terrible into focus. Natch looked for the familiar objects around his bedroom, the cheap bedside shelf protruding from the wall, the pus-green carpet, the viewscreen that had been showing a light snow on Kilimanjaro when he lay down. Now all he could see were bones. The bones of impossible animals with four, five and six appendages, bones scorched free of flesh and arrayed as furniture.

Natch tore himself out of bed and grabbed a robe from the disembodied index finger on which it hung. He burst out of his apartment, heading for the balcony that stood at the end of the hallway. As Natch rushed out the balcony door, a platform slid from the side of the building with a soft click. He feverishly gripped the alabaster railing and watched Angelos go through its typical early-morning routine. Skeletal tube trains stuffed with cargo rushed silently to and fro, anxious to make deliveries before the morning rush. Viewscreens here and there glared seductively at pa.s.sersby with visions of dead products and ghoulish fashions. A fleet of bleached-white hoverbirds bearing the yellow star of the Council took wing over the Hollywood hills. Haunted tenements performed a graveyard jig with one another, here sidestepping to make room for the neighboring building on the left, there elbowing aside the building on the right to accommodate freshly awoken tenants. Natch could hear no sound but the soft crunch of pencil-thin bones beneath his feet.

As Natch gazed at all this, the bare skeletal structures he saw began to fill out-not with flesh, but with the washed-out hues of Minds.p.a.ce code. The city was becoming one vast bio/logic program. A compendium of data, numbers, named ent.i.ties, subroutines, variables. Pieces, no matter how independent, no matter how abstruse, inevitably connected to a larger and more complex whole. Tendrils snaking invisibly between each node, binding everyone together with mathematical formulae.

And the people ... the people.... The L-PRACG politicians stumbling from meeting halls after late-night sessions, the businesspeople shuffling mechanically to the tube stations and public multi facilities, the private security guards exchanging curt words with their Defense and Wellness Council counterparts, and yes, there were even a few tourists up and about at this hour.... Weren't the people just one more set of objects to be manipulated? Weren't their actions governed by deeply ingrained sets of instructions, and their ideas ultimately predictable? They could be made to obey commands. They, like programming code, could be manipulated.

Natch saw Angelos floating within the giant Minds.p.a.ce bubble that was the world: his Minds.p.a.ce, his world. He could practically hear his bio/logics proctor at the Proud Eagle on his first day at the workbench. Reach into your satchels, pull out a programming bay: Any one, it doesn't matter! You have twenty-six bars, marked A to Z, each with three to six separate functions. Twelve commonly recognized hand gestures. The grip. The point. The hitch. Unlimited possibilities before you! Unlimited combinations. This was not strictly true; Natch was wise enough to know that the number of options at his disposal were not infinite. Mathematics dictated that there were limits. But even if his options were not unlimited, they were enough-enough to accomplish anything he was likely to dream. And if he could find some combination of tools capable of manipulating any structure of data, why not people too? Who was to say that the human nodes within his bubble were immune to the natural laws of cause and effect?

He reached out with enormous hands, each finger a bio/logic programming bar. The city of Angelos responded to his commands. It spun like a globe on an axis. It shifted and shuddered and jittered where he pointed. The world was his ...

With the exception of an immense and incomprehensible ma.s.s hovering just beyond the horizon ... a terrible celestial ma.s.s that could reshape humanity, if only he could reach it....

Natch rushed back to his apartment with his mind ablaze. He curled up into a fetal position on his chair-and-a-half and sketched an inventory of new tools with fiery holographic letters in the air.

s.e.x Stability Friendship Power Greed Hunger Money Guilt l.u.s.t Love Desire Laziness Vanity Novelty Suffering On through the morning he wrote, brushing aside the urgent wake-up calls he had set for his a.s.sembly-line programming job. The work would not be necessary now.

He awoke on the couch in mid-afternoon, unable to remember how he had gotten there, but confident he was back on track at last.

Horvil sat upside-down on Natch's chair-and-a-half with his feet propped on the chair back and his head hanging near the ground. His face was a jumbled stew of concern and fear topped with a thin crust of nonchalance.

"So you're willing to help me out," said Natch, eyes ablaze. He was practically sprinting from one end of the apartment to the other, teeth chattering and fingertips aquiver.

"It's a little unorthodox, I guess," said Horvil, "but heck, I've known you were unorthodox since you were six."

"I just don't want you to back out at the last minute."

"I won't. But ..."

"But what?"

The engineer threw his arms to the ground in exasperation, a move that probably would have sent him tumbling onto his head if he were present in the flesh. "Do you always need to have an evil nemesis, Natch?" he cried. "First Brone, now Captain Bolbund. Can't you succeed on your own without having to beat somebody?"

Natch gave a hollow and humorless grin. "You can't win unless somebody else loses."

Horvil flexed his jaw for a moment and watched his friend strut energetically around the room. Natch could see a thousand witty rejoinders crowding into his mind, eager to sharpen their claws on his self-importance. "Okay," the engineer sighed after a minute. "What can I do to help?"

Two days later, Horvil caught up with the flower vendor named Vellux at the annual Creed Elan convocation. The engineer looked quite out of place at this year's event, not because of his size but because he was the only one in the conference hall not draped from head to toe in some shade of purple. Instead, Horvil wore a crisp dun uniform he had borrowed from a friend working in L-PRACG security.

"You are Vellux?" Horvil announced in the authoritative tone of voice Natch had instructed him to use.

The old woman, standing behind a table of lush pa.s.sionflowers, greeted Horvil with a bland smile. Her eyes shone a soft violet. "And you are?"

"I'm here as part of an investigation into unethical ROD coding practices." No names, no credentials, Natch had said. She won't ask. She'll think you're with the Meme Cooperative, or Primo's, or some special task force from the Defense and Wellness Council. But Horvil was paranoid about being recognized, despite all of Natch's rea.s.surances, and had insisted on scrubbing his public directory profile for good measure. "Have you recently purchased any bio/logic programming from this man?" Horvil gestured at a viewscreen on the wall, where a gaggle of Creed Elanners were bestowing a garland of flowers upon an addled woman of the diss who was clearly not interested. The engineer erased the display and summoned a particularly unflattering still of Bolbund, caught in midsmirk.

The flower vendor nodded, puzzled. "Yes, as a matter of fact I did."

"I see. Have you purchased any of the following products: NozeGay 59, Aura of the Beach 12c, Flaming Lipps 44d, Floral Eyes 14-"

"Floral Eyes!" cried Vellux excitedly. A wrinkled man in the next stall arched an eyebrow at her in disapproval, and the woman quickly lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Yes, Floral Eyes 14. That's the one."

Horvil frowned and tapped his foot for a moment. Don't tell her what you're doing, Natch had said. Make her think you're talking to someone over Confidential Whisper. Let her wonder for a minute or two. Then the engineer abruptly motioned for Vellux to turn around and face the viewscreen. The old woman complied, with a nervous glance towards her table of pa.s.sionflowers. "This will just take a moment," said Horvil. He bisected the viewscreen with a gesture, summoning a mirror on the left half and a series of flowers on the right. Daisies, b.u.t.tercups, baby's breath, sunflowers. He gave an exaggerated stare at the image of Vellux in the mirror, took note of her obviously mismatched eye color, and shook his head sadly. "Bolbund, Bolbund, Bolbund," he muttered with a world-weary sigh for effect.

The confused flower vendor huddled inside her purple robe and frowned. "It's been working perfectly since I bought it," she said. "I don't know what happened.... Should I return the program? Should I get a refund, or, or ... report this to someone?"

Act surprised. Look around quickly. Make her believe that you've said too much and now you're trying to cover up. "Madam," said Horvil, blooming into a nervous smile, "I'm not allowed to make recommendations on bio/logic programs. Please don't make any changes on my account. It's nothing. Pretend I was never here. If we get enough evidence to move the investigation forward, we'll be in touch with you."

Vellux smiled wanly and nodded, looking completely unconvinced.

"Towards Perfection," said Horvil, and gave her a formal bow. Then he was gone. The entire encounter took about five minutes.

That afternoon, Natch logged his first sale of the EyeMorph program.

Natch spent the week tracking down Captain Bolbund's best customers. He did so by personally following the man, who turned out to be as offensive to the eyes as his poetry was to the ear. Bolbund had a body like a misshapen bowling pin, with an uneven beard and a nose like a wedge of putty.

But Natch did not fear his rival now that he had put his finger on Bolbund's mortal flaw: vanity. It was this vanity that led him to conduct his business out in the open, where others could see and post reports on the Data Sea. Where people could observe him personally delivering programs to his customers and reciting lines of his gutwrenching poetry. Natch had to admit that it was a clever gimmick; customers appreciated the attention, and onlookers remembered his name. During the next few days, Natch and Horvil watched him sell two phallic enhancement programs to old Creed Objectivv devotees and repackage the same eyelash curling program for a handful of debutantes. By the end of the week, they had compiled a sizeable list of clients and the RODs Bolbund had sold them.

The two quickly developed a solid routine. Natch would buy copies of Captain Bolbund's routines (using Horvil's money, of course) and study them in Minds.p.a.ce for hours on end. Cracking into the programming code was no simple matter, even for such retrograde technology as a ROD. But even without root-level access, Natch could glean a lot of information just by eyeballing a program's surface and running it through a battery of tests. Within a few weeks, he could reverse-engineer Bolbund's code blindfolded and put together improved versions in mere hours. Once a ROD was completed, Natch would pa.s.s the customer's name and the script on to Horvil for his unique brand of social engineering.

Horvil was having the time of his life. He pinned bits of ceremonial bric-a-brac to his costume like medals, and constantly pestered his old hivemate with new character improvisations. Horvil had lived his whole life in decadent boredom, every move ch.o.r.eographed by an autocratic family. All Natch had to do was show the engineer a glimpse of spontaneity, and Horvil was dancing to his music.

Natch was astonished at how quickly Captain Bolbund's operation folded under pressure. He expected to run into a few snags along the way: programs he could not duplicate, customers he could not sway. But these problems never materialized. Bolbund's customers continued to roll over and switch to Natch's brands. Credits continued to acc.u.mulate in Natch's Vault account.

Of course, Bolbund did not accept the ravaging of his client list without a fight. But once again, Natch was shocked by his rival's stupidity.

The whole affair came to a head one morning as Natch was swigging down a cup of nitro and scanning the drudge headlines. The previous night he had relished his first mention in the Primo's investment guide.

Then he received a multi request from a Meme Cooperative official.

Natch activated a serenity program and granted the multi request. Within seconds, he was greeted by a smartly dressed woman flashing the official crest of the Meme Cooperative, the ancient Hebrew character of the aleph on a field of azure.

"Towards Perfection," said the woman. She then proceeded to reel off her name, position, division and supervisor, along with a string of unnecessary provisos and notifications.

"Perfection," replied Natch, his anxiety now well under control. "What can I do for you?"

"You can tell me what your relationship is with this man." The Cooperative official held out her hand and flashed the same obnoxious picture of Bolbund that Horvil had been using in his charades.

Natch rolled his eyes. "Captain Bolbund," he moaned with distaste. "We've been sc.r.a.pping over ROD customers for months now. He just can't accept that I'm beating him."

"Well, apparently he has gone over the line." The woman nodded towards the nearest viewscreen and began playing back a heated discussion between one of Natch's new customers and an ugly man with large ears. The video was obviously captured on the sly. Natch couldn't make out the words pa.s.sing between the two, but they nearly came to blows before the encounter was over. "Do you know this man?" said the Cooperative woman, freezing the display and tapping one of the interrogator's floppy ears.

"No," Natch replied truthfully.

"This man has been pa.s.sing himself off as a Meme Cooperative official," she said. Natch looked closer at the display and noticed that the imposter's uniform was nearly identical to that of the woman standing in his apartment. "He's been telling people that he's conducting an official investigation into 'unethical ROD coding practices.' When we caught up with him, he told us that this Captain Bolbund has been paying him to put on this charade."

Natch was by now the very model of unconcern. "So what does this have to do with me?"

"Apparently, Bolbund specifically requested that his accomplice tell people that you were the one under investigation."

Natch masked his laughter by burying his face in his mug of nitro. You fumbling idiot! he chided Bolbund in his head. The key to the whole scam was to not mention any specific names or organizations whatsoever. After all, who could accuse Horvil of misrepresenting himself if he never made any representations in the first place?

"I don't know anything about it," Natch said at length to the Cooperative official.

The woman nodded perfunctorily. She had already made the mental leap to the next case. "The Cooperative will be in touch with you if we need any further information." She added another litany of bureaucratic language and was about to cut the multi connection when she had a sudden thought. "This Bolbund-what is he a 'captain' of anyway?"

Natch shrugged. "I have no idea."

And that was that.

Natch never heard another word back from the Meme Cooperative about the investigation, but was pleased to discover via the drudges that Captain Bolbund had received a stiff fine and a ninety-day suspension of his license to sell programming code on the Data Sea. Ninety days was an aeon in this business. Natch breathed a sigh of relief, and not only because he had vanquished his compet.i.tor; now Horvil could drop his silly role-playing and Natch could do business in earnest. For months afterward, Natch kept waiting for a reprisal to come his way from the Cooperative or some other legislative body, but none ever appeared.

The final chapter of the Bolbund saga occurred the night of the Meme Cooperative visit, when Horvil took Natch on a whirlwind tour of the London bars to celebrate. Natch was still earning less in a month than the top fiefcorps paid their apprentices as a daily wage. But he had halted his downward slide. He had proven that, by sheer force of will, he could bring the world in line with the visions in his mind's eye. Natch never drank or used alcohol simulation programs, but was content to watch Horvil get pleasantly sauced. At the end of the night, Natch fired off a parting message to Captain Bolbund with Horvil's enthusiastic backing: Please don't think I'm rude If I tell you YOU GOT SCREWED. Guess you finally met your match From now on, look out for NATCH.

Natch's challenges did not end there. When Bolbund spread the word about what had happened to him, the ROD coding community took it as a personal affront. ROD coders followed a loose, bohemian ethos where nothing was taken too seriously and thievery was allowed for sport but not for money. Natch's ruse-or at least Bolbund's version of it-violated those principles.

And so Natch had to endure several blatant attempts by third-rate programmers to sabotage his products, steal his customers, and savage his reputation. But this did not faze him. Natch quickly developed a reputation on the Data Sea for his humorless determination and his inability to accept defeat. Beat him once, and he would not stop until he had humiliated you three or four times in return-and fired a few warning shots at your friends and a.s.sociates to boot.

Captain Bolbund returned to the business after his ninety-day suspension. But by this point, the ROD coding community had come to the consensus that the best way to deal with Natch was to leave him alone and grease his path up and out of the business altogether. An enterprising young woman in Sudafrica even made a profit out of it by selling a program called NatchWatch that kept other coders abreast of Natch's activities.

Bolbund decided to steer clear of the angry young programmer.

Natch spent another two years honing his skills in the ROD game. By the time Primo's took notice and tagged him as a rising star, Natch's services were in high demand among the elites. He had also acquired a long list of enemies, which was an even greater indicator of success as far as Natch was concerned. n.o.body likes success but the successful, the ruthless financier Kordez Tha.s.sel had once said.

Eventually, Natch decided to move out of his cramped Angelos apartment and settle somewhere else. He chose the city of Shenandoah, whose coffers were overflowing with fiefcorp revenues and whose local L-PRACGs were among the most libertarian in the world. With another financial boost from Horvil, he could even afford a place that included its own private multi stream and a small garden of daisies off the living room.

But the money was still abysmal compared to the sums the capitalmen were tossing into the bio/logic fiefcorp sector every day. The ranks of the diss were thinning, and those of the fiefcorps were inflating. There was talk on the Data Sea of another Great Boom like the one that had preceded Marcus Surina's death.

Natch spent another year freelancing, taking on the occasional ROD but concentrating more on neurological software. As his profile rose, so did his prospects. Natch received multi requests and lunch invitations every week from capitalmen and channelers trying to get a sense of his future plans. They seemed to be competing with one another to see who could slip in the most dismissive reference to the Shortest Initiation. Many of the same fiefcorp masters who had tried to shanghai Natch into worthless apprenticeships a few years ago were now sugaring him with promises of large signing bonuses.

He even heard from a few groups in the bio/logics underground who promised him a fortune writing black code off the grid. The future lay not with fiefcorps and memecorps, they said, but with clandestine teams of programmers sponsored by rich creed organizations and lunar tyc.o.o.ns, programmers who were being paid to circ.u.mvent the restrictive laws of central government and stretch the boundaries of bio/logics.

Natch got into the habit of taking the tube out to the great sequoia forests and zigzagging from station to station for hours while he stared up at the trees and tried on alternative career paths like gloves.

"You've done really well with RODs," said Jara during one of her frequent consultations. "But isn't it time you set your sights a little higher?"

Horvil agreed. "I never thought I would be the one telling you to get some ambition," he said mockingly. "There's bigger targets out there, and a f.u.c.k of a lot more money!"

Contrary to what Jara and Horvil thought, however, Natch had not settled into a rut. He was biding his time, saving up his resources, marshaling his abilities. He wanted to plan his next move carefully so he would not fail again.

One cold winter night at three a.m., he sent a Confidential Whisper to Serr Vigal.

The neural programmer didn't mind at all being woken up; in fact, he was overjoyed to hear from his former protege. Ten minutes later, Natch hopped on an Omaha-bound tube. Within an hour, he was standing in Vigal's foyer. Natch was surprised to find their friendly hug metamorphosing into a real flesh-and-blood embrace.

True to form, Serr Vigal had changed little in the past few years. Memecorp business had risen with the tide of the economy, but this had also caused his fundraising duties to swell to epic proportions. Vigal had just returned from a meeting with some of the minor bodhisattvas at Creed Surina and was due at the sybaritic resort of 49th Heaven in two days to speak about newly proposed OCHRE standards.

"So what causes the prodigal son to visit his old guardian in the middle of the night?" asked Vigal between sips of green tea.