A rote conversation ensued. Was BizWorks 139.5f listed as an acceptable expense in the Natch Fiefcorp data stores? Yes, it was. Did the unique identifying code stored in the newt's memory correspond to the one expected by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp? Yes, it did. Was the price quoted by PulCorp agreeable to its customer? Yes, it was.

The answer triggered an innate response in the data newt. The newt replicated itself, stamped its clone with a subset of the required tools, and waited patiently as the newcomer sped off to the Vault. Billions of newts had already queued up at the nearby Vault processing center to retrieve and deposit payments large and small, but there was no disagreement or jockeying for position in a world of indelible, unalterable rules. The data representative of the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp slid into line in its prescribed position. After a few nanoseconds, the newt reached the front of the queue and presented the Vault agent with its transaction: Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, 0.03 credits. The Vault agent made all the appropriate inquiries and finally responded with a credit authorization. What happened to the credit authorization after that was of no concern to the cloned newt; it reported a transaction summary back to its master and returned to the mother station.

With a credit authorization in its databanks, the data newt at the Natch Fiefcorp data stores determined it was ready to proceed. It consulted the fore table to look for its Defense and Wellness Council-sanctioned processing precedence, and lined up behind OCHRE transmissions, geosynchrons, Prime Committee statistical algorithms, and agents of L-PRACG taxation. Finally, the newt arrived at the front of the line and completed the task for which it had been born: the recording of an order by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp for a replacement part on one of Horvil's bio/logic programming bars.

All that remained was housecleaning. The newt sp.a.w.ned another clone to relay the order back to the mother station. Meanwhile, the newt consulted its own aft table for special instructions on completing a business transaction. The L-PRACG with jurisdiction over the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp dictated that all programs must log a record of their activities in the fiefcorp's data stores. This task done, the newt performed a quick self-examination to see if it had lost data integrity or left any stray bits of information in the fiefcorp's holdings or needed to do any unusual acts of maintenance. All indications were that the newt had conducted a clean transaction.

And so the data structure left the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp holdings to perform a sweep of the remaining 4,293 fiefcorps on Pierre Loget's subscription list.

Several thousand nanoseconds later, the newt returned to the mother processing station-the prodigal son back home at last. The data structure reported a summary of its activities for the statistical programs to compile and then reported back to the Meme Cooperative energy stores. There the newt uncomplainingly self-destructed, having successfully fulfilled its mission of existence.

A few billion oscillations of hydrogen later, another second pa.s.sed.

More than twenty-four hours had gone by since Margaret's speech, and Jara had slept for none of them. Had she not been propping herself awake with Doze-B-Gone 91 and AntiSleepStim 124.7 and two cups of nitro, the a.n.a.lyst might have taken more notice of her surroundings. Instead, Jara sleepwalked past the guards at Andra Pradesh and up three stories of the blue Surina Enterprise Facility with hardly a glance in any direction.

She opened the conference room door and found herself standing in a corporate boardroom from antiquity.

Jara blinked hard, twice, wondering if the opulent surroundings were the hallucinations of a sleep-deprived mind. The oval-shaped room sported a faux mahogany table that could have seated twenty, gla.s.s windows that overlooked a panoply of phallic skysc.r.a.pers, and a wet bar complete with Waterford crystal and Kentucky bourbon. But Jara was in no mood to start tapping things to figure out whether they were real or SeeNaRee. She approached the table and slumped onto a chair, which automatically scooted in and adjusted to the contours of her body. This one, at least, was virtual.

The a.n.a.lyst, consulting the time, realized she had arrived fifteen minutes early for their fiefcorp meeting. Jara scowled an order to the building for another cup of nitro, and then called up the morning drudge reports on a nearby window.

n.o.body could quite recall who had coined the term infoquake, but within hours it had become common currency throughout the civilized world. Infoquake: a mysterious computational disturbance of unknown origin and awesome destructive power. Even the handful of residents living at remote experimental colonies beyond Jupiter were now bandying the word around like they had been speaking it for years.

Unfortunately, the terminology was just about the only thing the pundits could agree upon.

"Once again, the Data Sea has exhibited its juvenile tendency to turn everything into a conspiracy," wrote the drudge Mah Lo Vertiginous.

According to the preliminary a.n.a.lysis from Creed Conscientious, the infoquake was a simple bottleneck of information; nothing more, nothing less. An unheard-of concentration of multi projections in a single s.p.a.ce, vying for access to the same facts and figures on the Data Sea. Is it so hard to imagine that a series of overloaded data agents could cause OCHREs to fail?

But Vertiginous' opinion was by no means the majority along the drudge circuit. Sen Sivv Sor had a considerably darker view of the previous night's events: Some governmentalist cretins would have you believe we suffered from a simple bottleneck of information last night. Unfortunately, dear readers, nothing could be further from the truth.

Since when does a simple bottleneck of information stop several hundred weak hearts from beating? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information cause a generator malfunction on Furtoid and send two hundred people to an icy death? Since when does a simple bottleneck of information wreak havoc with the gravity control on 49th Heaven and fling three dozen people into freefall?

Mark my words: Disasters like the infoquake are not natural occurrences. Wherever you find such poisonous medicine, there's a human hand nearby administering the dose.

"Let me guess," said a voice. "Tokyo circa the Second American Revolution."

Jara whipped her head around to find Horvil surveying the room. The elaborate SeeNaRee only seemed to heighten the engineer's already high spirits. As soon as he spotted the wet bar, Horvil bounded across the room on some undefined errand of mischief. His movement revealed a nervous-looking youth who had been standing in the engineer's shadow.

"It's not Tokyo," said Jara. "It's New York City, before the orbital colony hit. See, that's the Hudson River over there." She regarded the young man with a cynical eye, noticed his inky black hair and five o'clock shadow, and decided he must be a relative of Horvil. His face had the same air of bonhomie, but Jara could also see an undercurrent of piety that could only have been a genetic gift from the infamous Aunt Berilla. "You must be Benyamin."

The youth nodded and gave a polite bow in Jara's direction. "Towards Perfection," he said. "I guess you're Jara. Horvil's told me a lot about you."

Jara shot a suspicious glance at the engineer, who had begun to juggle the Waterford crystal. Over his head, patterns of reflected sunlight danced crazily on the ceiling. "Oh, has he?"

"Don't worry," said Horvil. "I really only told him a tiny bit. Just the good things."

Benyamin sensed the tension and immediately a.s.sumed the role of diplomat. "Ah, the drudges," he said, nodding at the chaotic display of fully justified type on the window. "You know, Khann Frejohr thinks High Executive Borda caused it."

"Caused what?"

"Well, the infoquake."

Horvil had moved from three pieces of stemware to four, and their arcs of flight were growing longer by the second. "Yeah, I saw that speech he gave last night," he said. "The evil work of the Defense and Wellness Council. Len Borda's last-ditch effort to muzzle the Sarinas once and for all. You gotta love that Khann Frejohr."

"What a load of s.h.i.t," said Jara with a grimace. "Come on, Horvil. Borda pulled his troops out of Andra Pradesh almost as soon as the infoquake was over. If he wanted Margaret dead, she'd be dead by now." She waved her hand, banishing the news coverage from the window screen. "So how did Borda react to Khann's speech? He must have gone completely offline."

Benyamin nodded. "That's putting it mildly. He shut down the Sigh and the Jamm and all other 'resource-intensive pleasure networks' until further notice."

"He shut down-?"

"Len Borda isn't our problem right now." The three fiefcorp apprentices swiveled around to find Natch standing in the doorway. Jara saw that he had come with wolf's grin and invisible audience in tow, not to mention an impeccable pin-striped suit that would have been at home in ancient New York. "So let's get down to business already."

Horvil caught three pieces of stemware but accidentally let the fourth slip through his fingers. The virtual Waterford landed on the marble floor with a clang but did not break. "What about Vigal? And Merri?" asked Horvil.

"Vigal's off to another one of his seminars in Beijing," said Natch. "Effects of Orbital Colony Gravitational Fields on Neural Pathways, or something like that."

"Nothing stops a scientific conference," muttered Jara.

"And I'm right here," said Merri. The blonde channel manager had apparently snuck in while n.o.body was paying attention. Merri had taken a seat near Natch's side of the table and projected a set of notes visible on the dark wood in front of her. Her penmanship was crisp and perfect, something that gave Jara an inexplicable pang of jealousy.

"So what's everyone waiting for?" cried Natch in a sudden fit of pique. "Sit the f.u.c.k down."

Natch planted himself in the cushioned leather chair at the head of the table and surveyed his four apprentices with a barely suppressed smirk. A snapshot of the Council troops tromping through the Surina courtyard loomed large on the window behind him; Jara realized she must have accidentally left open one of her morning news stories. The four apprentices gazed expectantly back and forth between the photo and their fiefcorp master. Margaret Surina, the Defense and Wellness Council, investor meetings, infoquakes, MultiReal-hadn't the time finally come for Natch to let them know what was going on?

The entrepreneur turned to Jara with p.r.o.nounced matter-of-factness, his face a riddle. "Why don't you start us off with an a.n.a.lysis of the latest sales figures," he said.

Jara shrugged. Sales figures? Who can think of sales at a time like this? But she knew Natch, and had prepared a brief a.n.a.lysis this morning anyway. She snapped her fingers briskly, causing a three-dimensional chart to hover over the surface of the conference table. Lines in primary colors raced one another to see which could climb to the top right corner the quickest.

The a.n.a.lyst indicated an uncharacteristic dip at the end of a green line labeled MENTAL INDEXX 39. "Looks like one of our programs took a hit yesterday," she said. "An 18 percent drop in the last twentyfour hours. It must have suffered a few glitches during the infoquake." She gave Horvil the evil eye. "Billy Sterno's DataReorg 55c had a 43 percent jump in sales during the same period."

Horvil sat back confidently, measuring the table as a possible resting spot for his feet. "Glitches happen. Mental Indexx 40'11 bring 'em back into the fold."

As she crunched the numbers, Merri plucked at the chart lines like guitar strings. "I see there's a silver lining here as well."

Jara smiled. "Yeah, I see it too.... It looks like the Patel Brothers had a few glitches of their own, and Primo's took note." The chart shifted from sales figures to Primo's scores. If anything, the incline of the race became even steeper. "So even though we lost market share to Billy Sterno, we gained ground against the Patels on Primo's. Looks like we're back up to number three!"

Horvil broke out in a spirited cheer, which Merri and Benyamin echoed with a pair of quiet grins. Natch seemed oddly oblivious, a mystery that Jara did not feel like pursuing. Maybe this info quake was the end of the whole thing, she thought. Maybe all this ha.s.sle will just go away, and my last ten months will be business as usual.

"Okay, so if we look at the big picture, what've we got?" said Horvil.

"82.4 percent gross increase in revenues so far this year," stated Jara, "most of that after we hit number one on Primo's. And only a 17 percent increase in expenditures." She banished the bar chart to datalimbo with a wave of her hand. "I'd say we're doing pretty well."

A look of concern slowly rippled across Merri's face. "Only a 17 percent increase in spending-how is that possible?" The soft-spoken channel manager began counting on her fingers. "In the last week alone, we've bought new bio/logic programming bars ... a.n.a.lysis algorithms ... these conference rooms ... not to mention hiring a new apprentice ..." She nodded her head towards Benyamin, who merely sat with a bland smile on his face. Merri took a deep breath. "I was hoping, Natch, that you might be able to explain some of this."

Natch raised one eyebrow. A private in-joke with his invisible audience. "What do you want me to explain?"

"Well, for one thing, I don't see any of this showing up on the books...."

"Jara does the books, not you."

"Yes, I know, but still-"

Jara had had enough. Her longed-for ten months of peace and quiet suddenly imploded. She lodged her left elbow firmly on the table and used it as a base to launch an accusing finger at the fiefcorp master. "Come on, Natch! First you start fundraising for a product we don't make, and then out of the blue you start spending money we don't have. You totally ignore the Primo's ratings. And now you've gotten us involved in this whole mess with Margaret and the infoquake. You've put us off long enough, Natch! What the f.u.c.k is going on?"

She had unleashed enough verbal thunder to send any of the other apprentices scampering for cover, but Natch remained unmoved. He gave a sidelong glance to Horvil, but the engineer was gazing at Jara with dumb awe.

"All right then." Natch's eyes glittered. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head, as if he needed a cradle for all that excess brainpower. "In a little over twelve hours, I will officially dissolve the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. We are getting out of the regular bio/logic programming business. Tomorrow, you will all be apprentices in a new fiefcorp devoted exclusively to MultiReal."

His announcement was greeted by a stunned silence. Jara had a protest half-formed in her mouth but strangled it when she remembered the portability clause in their contracts, a clause which essentially gave Natch the right to pa.s.s off their apprenticeships to whomever he chose. She looked at Merri and Horvil and saw their faces meld into bland expressions of unconcern, a telltale sign that they had both flipped on PokerFace 83.4b. Benyamin closed his eyes and ducked his head as if he had just been punched in the gut.

"When did you decide all this?" said Jara weakly.

"Yesterday."

The silence remained. A pigeon fluttered by the window with a loud broo.

"Now, I know you're all getting impatient with just room and board," Natch continued, touching his fingertips in front of his face. "Your shares all mature this year, and some of you are thinking of cashing out. So I'm prepared to sweeten the deal. Yes, that includes you, Ben. Cash out your shares today and I'll release you from your apprenticeship with no penalty ... or sign on to a two-year contract with the new fiefcorp for ten times the compensation, plus bonuses. The offer stands until midnight tonight, Shenandoah time."

Jara felt a wave of emotion crash over her. A week ago, she had wanted nothing more than to be set free from Natch's shackles, to run as far as possible and not look back. She remembered that carefree Meme Cooperative official in Melbourne, sitting at his desk all day, his mind adrift in some SeeNaRee fantasyland. For process' preservation, I could use a job like that, she thought. A nice, dull desk job of looking at datamaps and bar charts sounds perfect right about now.

But then suddenly Jara thought of her old proctor from the hive, the one who had stimulated the governmentalist ideals of her youth and negotiated the surrender of her virginity while he was at it. Had he been somewhere in that crowd last night, as spellbound by Margaret's lilting voice as the rest of them? Would the bodhisattva's words have filled him with hope, or would he have some cynical counterpoint to make?

And what would he think of Jara now, almost twenty years down the road, ready to throw aside the remainder of her ambitions and slip into a SeeNaRee stupor?

Horvil interrupted her reverie with a loud clearing of the throat. "So what's gonna happen to all those programs we've been slaving over?" he said. "NiteFocus and EyeMorph and Mental Indexx and the rest of them?"

The engineer might as well have asked about the fate of an obsolete set of bio/logic programming bars. "They'll be sold off," Natch replied with a shrug. "You didn't think we were going to upgrade them forever, did you? We won't have time to maintain those old programs, and the money they generate is nothing compared to what MultiReal is going to pull in."

Across the table, Jara could see a little piece of Horvil die at Natch's p.r.o.nouncement. The programs he had weaned and nurtured from RODs and hive projects into Primo's powerhouses would soon belong to the graveyard of history. Qubits of information stranded on some forgotten atoll on the backwaters of the Data Sea.

"Natch, let me be honest here," said Horvil, a tinge of anger clouding the engineer's voice. "I really had no idea what Margaret was talking about yesterday."

"It was a vague speech," agreed Benyamin with a sigh.

"I mean, what is this MultiReal? What does it look like? What does it do? Did Margaret ever sit down and do a-a needs a.n.a.lysis or a survey or something to figure out if an ybody wants multiple realities? I've tackled a lot of tough problems in my life, but I can't remember a single time I said to myself, You could fix this if you just had a few alternate realities."

Jara found herself nodding her head vigorously in agreement. "Listen, Natch, even if Margaret is on the right track, what makes you think this, this, daydream of hers will work? We have no idea how good an engineer this woman is. That licensing agreement you made with her might be totally worthless."

"The licensing agreement is dead," said Natch. "I'm a co-owner now. "

"What?"

"Hold on, everybody. Act confident. Pretend you know what's going on.... Towards Perfection, Margaret. How are you?"

Jara whipped her head around, only to see Margaret Surina herself watching from the doorway. Part of the SeeNaRee? No, this woman was real. Of course she's real, you idiot, Jara chided herself. She lives right across the courtyard. The a.n.a.lyst slammed on PokerFace 83.4b as quickly as she could, and the rest of the staff followed suit.

"Perfection, Natch," said Margaret, with a slight bow. "What a great environment." She rapped her knuckles on the illusory table, and gave a wan smile at the SeeNaRee-generated knocking sound.

"We're just wrapping up a few details here," said Natch, his voice laced with SmoothTalker 142. "Why don't you go ahead and take a seat? I'm sure a few of these chairs are real."

Margaret shook her head quietly. On closer inspection, Jara realized that this was not the same serene woman who had confidently faced down legions of Defense and Wellness Council troops last night in front of 700 million people. The bodhisattva looked as if she had been eviscerated. She had not changed clothes since the speech, and from the diminished sparkle of her eyes, it looked as if she had not slept either. "I'm afraid I can't," she sighed, making a noticeable effort at nonchalance. "There's so much going on. All that trouble out in the orbital colonies ..." Margaret's voice cracked, and for a minute Jara could have sworn she was fighting back tears. "Len Borda is furious."

Natch chuckled. "He'd be even more furious if he knew you were here with me."

"That's a chance I'll have to take. I ... just came to tell you that, if you're ready, my people will be sending out a release to the drudges."

"Ready as I'll ever be."

"Outstanding." Margaret exhaled loudly. She looked as if she might melt into the ground right then and there. "We can iron out the details over the next few weeks."

"So you've spoken to Quell then?"

"Yes. He has decided to stay with the MultiReal project. He's busy getting everything prepared; he'll be here Sat.u.r.day at noon."

"With access to the program, I a.s.sume."

"Naturally."

Jara was growing irritated at this light exchange. So many pleasantries, so little content. Natch and Margaret Surina could very well be reciting memorized lines.

"Then Perfection to you, Margaret," said Natch, rising and giving a deep bow. "It's a pleasure doing business with you, as always."

"And you, Natch. Sheldon Surina once said, There are no ends, only means. So here's to a long and fruitful partnership."

And with that, she turned and walked away.

"A partnership," said Merri, as her PokerFace morphed into a look of concerned perplexity.

Natch nodded and made a motion like someone stifling a yawn. He had replaced his inscrutable mask as soon as Margaret had turned her back. "The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp," he said. "Surina/Natch with a slash. But don't worry, it's mostly a silent partnership. Margaret's handing over all the day-to-day operations to me."

"Suring/Natch!" Horvil bellowed with glee, then pounded out a drum fill on the table. "Surina/Natch! I can't wait to hear what Aunt Berilla thinks about that."

"So Margaret provides the product and the capital-" began Merri.

Natch cut her off. "Not the capital. Not all of it, anyway."

"Then where did that come from?" asked Jara, leaning forward to project her venom as close to Natch as possible.

"A third party."

"What third party? One of those loopy capitalmen you and Merri reeled in at your fundraising pitches last week?"