"Practical things, now things." The boy leaned back against the window and traced a finger over the fiefcorp industry pie charts he had put there. "I'm seventeen, Vigal. I should be looking at apartments and shopping for a bio/logic workbench. Picking out L-PRACGs. But instead, I've got no future, no prospects, nothing. I'm the most hated person in the world right now, and all because ... because ..." He couldn't find the words to finish his sentence, and bashed his fist against the window.

Serr Vigal pursed his lips into a frown. "Surely it can't be that bad. What about all those recruiters who were hounding you before initiation?"

"Nothing," Natch sighed bitterly. "The capitalmen won't even acknowledge my existence. Oh, a few of the fiefcorp masters will talk to me, but their offers are just laughable. People want me to apprentice for them on spec, not even for room and board. Everyone else just prives me out the instant they find out who I am."

"The whole incident is still in the news, Natch. Maybe you need to give the fiefcorps some time."

"It won't matter."

"You know, you can do so many things other than bio/logics. Maybe-"

"No." Natch pressed his forehead against the window, covering a histogram of fiefcorp share prices. "It has to be bio/logics. There's nothing else out there for me."

The neural programmer cleared his throat and began to say something, then stopped. A statement was slowly coalescing in his mind. At one time, Natch would have lacked the patience to listen to what his guardian had to say, but after nine months in the wilderness surrounded by the impetuosity of teenage boys, Serr Vigal's deliberate manner no longer seemed so irritating. "Do you remember," Vigal stammered, "what I told you before initiation about taking an apprenticeship somewhere close by?"

The boy nodded yes.

"Well, it seems I have some s.p.a.ce-I mean, there is an openingat my memecorp. Brainstem programming. The pay isn't much. But, well, I just thought ..." He let the sentence waft away.

What a difference nine months can make, Natch thought. Before initiation, his main concern had been finding an appropriate excuse to take an apprenticeship over Vigal's objections. Even after the debacle with Figaro Fi, Natch had never seriously considered taking an apprenticeship with the neural programmer. But after all that had happened with Brone and the Shortest Initiation, did he have any choice?

Vigal smiled. "I can see the struggle in your face, Natch. You don't want to apprentice with me because you think the work will be dull and unchallenging. Even worse, you're afraid I'm going to lecture you about what happened at initiation. You think I'll try to guilt you into signing up with my memecorp."

Natch's silence indicated his agreement.

"You also know that one day you will be beyond my tutelage," continued Vigal. "Yet you worry that I might try to keep you around by reminding you how I lent a helping hand when n.o.body else would. Plus-and this may be the most crucial thing-you doubt that you'll be able to find a decent woman in a company like mine to save your life."

The young outcast tried hard not to crack a smile, but he failed.

Vigal chuckled and rose from his chair. He took a seat on the bed next to the boy and put his hand on Natch's shoulder. A rare and yet not unwelcome moment of physical contact between them. "You know that life in the memecorps is much different than life in the fiefcorps, don't you?"

Natch nodded. " Fiefcorps make money," he quoted slyly. "Memecorps cost money."

The neural programmer snorted. "Well, that's what those fools at Creed Tha.s.sel say. Maybe that was true back when Kordez Tha.s.sel and Lucco Primo were alive. But today.... Today, I think even a hard-core libertarian would be surprised at how much of our funding comes from the marketplace. If you ask me, every bio/logic programmer could use a grounding in the fundamentals of the memecorp world."

The two silently watched the undulations in the Primo's histogram for a few minutes. Vigal's hand communicated an unspoken message of comfort and understanding. Natch could briefly see a widening of vistas, a broadening of horizons.

He tried to picture what life in Vigal's memecorp would be like. Heated debates over brainstem engineering techniques, collaborations with faceless co-workers, long hours fine-tuning bio/logic programs. There were worse ways to spend two years of his life. The money would be a pittance compared to the sums he had been discussing with the capitalmen nine months ago. But all the same, he would be working in bio/logics. And once he had proven his ability in the memecorp world, wouldn't the fiefcorps become that much more attainable?

"So what are your terms?" Natch asked.

Vigal couldn't hold back his delight. He named the terms: Room and board in Omaha. A modest stipend, with the promise of a bonus after two years. Access to the run-of-the-mill bio/logic programming equipment.

"And what about ... all the bad publicity?" said Natch.

His guardian shrugged his shoulders dismissively. "The publicity will pa.s.s. You will discover that one of the benefits of working in the memecorp sector is that we are well-protected from that sort of nonsense."

Natch stood back and let the phantom letters of Vigal's contract replace the histogram on the window. He called up Shyster 95.3c to help him negotiate the details. Within minutes, the two were sitting across the small round table in the corner of the room d.i.c.kering over minor contractual differences. By the end of the hour, they had worked out an agreement. Natch affirmed it without hesitation.

He was now officially Serr Vigal's apprentice.

After a few moments of relaxed celebration, Vigal once again struck a serious note.

"I know you worry about your future, Natch," said the neural programmer in a low voice. "And I am sorry I have always been so preoccupied with all these ... distractions." He wiggled his fingers up towards the ceiling and let them linger there a moment, as if he could only keep them from drifting into the stratosphere by a colossal act of willpower. "But-but when you came to me, I promised myself I would always be there for you. And I intend to keep that promise no matter what the future brings."

Natch ducked his head under the protective helmet of his clasped fingers. Ordinarily, he would have scoffed at Vigal's sentimentality, but he was not in an ordinary frame of mind. "And what if I have no future?"

His guardian leaned forward and put his hand on his apprentice's arm. "Of course you have a future. And do you know what it is?"

"What?"

"Your future is what you choose to do tomorrow. And the direction you're searching for?"

Natch shook his head.

"Your direction is where you choose to go."

Natch took a week to get oriented in his new surroundings. There was a lot to do. He needed to find an apartment whose rent fit the narrow boundaries of a memecorp salary; he needed to arrange for a shuttle to carry his belongings out from Cape Town; and most daunting of all, he needed to enroll himself in an L-PRACG.

The apartment was no ha.s.sle. Omaha had an abundance of memecorp-friendly housing. Natch picked a modest building about as far away from the Missouri River as you could get and still be inside the city limits. Even in this drab setting, he could not afford exterior walls with real windows and had to settle for a handful of viewscreens instead. There were, of course, no private outgoing multi streams.

Choosing an L-PRACG proved to be a more difficult ch.o.r.e. Legislatures large and small had been bombarding Natch with ads for days now, since the very instant he reconnected to the Data Sea. He found himself in the midst of an ideological battle fought with one-line enticements: NO TAXES, NO FEES: A Libertarian Paradise Full Compliance With All Prime Committee Details The ULTIMATE in PRIVACY PROTECTION GOVERNMENTALISM at its Finest Natch spent a day trying to sort through all the solicitations and pick a government that suited him. But his confusion increased the longer he worked at it; questions nibbled away at the back of his mind like rodents, and only seemed to multiply when he wasn't looking. What basic services did the L-PRACG provide? What kinds of taxes and fees were involved? Did the L-PRACG contract out security or provide its own? How long was the subscription term? How exclusive was the membership?

Finally, Natch threw up his hands and settled on a libertarianleaning L-PRACG that offered a nice package of bio/logic programs as a membership incentive. If he decided he didn't like his government's policies, he could always let the subscription lapse or supplement it with other complementary L-PRACGs. Natch immediately received a vast dossier of regulations and bylaws, which he promptly filed away and never looked at again.

He awoke the following Monday with a sense of determination he had not felt since before initiation. By 6:40 that morning, Natch was wading through the Omaha traffic towards the tube stations. He was no longer a curious bystander tossing pebbles at multi projections; now he had become part of the flow, a fish swimming upstream with the rest of the workforce. Natch caught a cross-town tube and found himself standing in Serr Vigal's foyer with three minutes to spare.

Vigal emerged from his bedroom fifteen minutes late, ushered Natch inside, and then spent another twenty-two minutes clucking around the kitchen making tea. The young programmer scanned the living room in vain for an extra workbench or a set of bio/logic programming bars. Where does he expect me to work? Natch thought.

Finally, he and his guardian sat on opposing couches and got down to business.

"The human brain," said Serr Vigal solemnly. A holograph of the bulbous organ appeared in the air between them. With an una.s.suming wave of his hand, Vigal enlarged the projection until it nearly filled the room, then set it rotating slowly in place. "And here"-his finger indicated the long trunk that extended out the bottom-"here is the area we specialize in: the brainstem.

"What is the brainstem? The brainstem is the key to understanding humanity. Learn how the brainstem works, and you learn how people work."

Vigal stood and began walking slowly around the hologram. His words had the flavor of a carefully scripted lecture.

"The body is a sensory machine," continued Vigal. "A machine that takes careful measurements of what is going on all around us. Sights, smells, sounds, tastes, touches: these are nothing more than dispatches from the outside world. The body transfers this information to the brain through a series of neural networks. And what does the brain receive? Meaningless pulses of electrical activity. Echoes of the world around us. How is the mind to make any sense of it at all? That is where the brainstem comes in.

"The brainstem is the connection between mind and body.

"The brainstem is the mechanism that translates impulse to thought, and then thought to action. It is the body's jumping-off point to higher intelligence. The brainstem pa.s.ses information to the central processing units of our minds, the cerebrum and cerebellum. It translates this data into a format the higher brain can understand. And when the central processor has determined a course of action, it then routes electrical impulses back into the body through the brainstem.

"What would we be without the brainstem? Without the brainstem, the body would be a useless ma.s.s of tissue and bone. Our senses would be reduced to electrical impulses without context-mere random noise. And our minds? Our minds would be isolated from the real world. We would be free to postulate and theorize and deduce, but be forever unable to translate these lofty thoughts into action. We would each be remote stars in the center of a meaningless void.

"All the questions humanity has been asking itself since the dawn of time have their root in the brainstem. Are we creatures of pa.s.sion, or are we creatures of forethought? How do we balance the needs of the mind with the needs of the body? Should Hamlet follow his heart and avenge the death of his father, or should he follow his head and, through careful reason, devise another course of action?

"These are brainstem questions, Natch. This is what you will be studying here in my memecorp over the next two years."

Natch's eyes began to glaze over halfway through Vigal's speech, and he wondered if this was part of the memecorp's standard fundraising pitch. Natch didn't want to be a philosopher; he wanted to be a programmer. He wanted to feel the grooved handle of a bio/logic programming bar in his hand as he stood in Minds.p.a.ce making logical connections. He wanted to make things work.

But, over the next few months, Natch obediently buried himself in the lore of the brainstem. He read about the cell composition in the thalamus and hypothalamus, about the mysteries of the medulla oblongata, about the fiber pathways that ran through the limbic system like cranial tube tracks. He studied humanity's slow progress in mastering the brainstem through bio/logics. The early neural programmers began with simple programs to monitor the electrical pulses pa.s.sing through the nervous system, and then later crafted programs to control them. Soon their successors were using bio/logics to broaden the bandwidth of the spinal cord, to shorten the refractory period a neural cell must wait between transmissions, to intercept and edit and mimic the electric messages pa.s.sing through the nervous system. They learned how to plug straight into the message stream and project sensations of their own that were indistinguishable from their "real" counterparts.

During these first few months of his apprenticeship, Natch also learned the ins and outs of the memecorp business. He accompanied his guardian on a round of fundraising and speeches that took them from Omaha to Beijing to Melbourne and even out to the orbital colonies of Allowell and Nova Ceti. Vigal would begin with the same speech he had given Natch on his first day of apprenticeship, and then segue into lofty promises of future achievements. Accurate recording and playback of mental processes. Cl.u.s.tered brainpower. Group consciousness.

After the speeches, there would be private discussions with the men and women who ran the local programming services departments. Vigal would nod and listen earnestly to their ideas for hours on end, and more often than not end the day receiving a pledge of capital or the offer of a group subscription contract. Natch had always thought most bio/logic programs were sold directly to consumers on the Data Sea; now he discovered three-quarters of the code that ran human systems was "channeled" silently through deals with L-PRACGs and creeds and other organizations.

As Natch learned all this, he also learned about Serr Vigal.

Vigal's professional life had always been an enigma to Natch. He had spent more than thirty years right here at the same memecorp, doing the same work. His products often didn't even have names; instead, they were identified by long, dreary strings of numbers. He had the respect of his colleagues and apprentices, but virtually no social life. If he had ever taken a companion or a lover in the years since Lora's death, he kept it well hidden.

The more Natch learned about Vigal, the more of a mystery the man became. Natch had always dreamed about creating the kinds of programs that inspired raves from Primo's, programs that sparked social revolutions like Sheldon Surina's had. He would have never guessed that his own legal guardian had been doing that for years. In their own quiet way, Vigal's programs had probably influenced the world more than all of Figaro Fi's clientele put together.

But eventually, Natch grew restless. He wanted to stop a.n.a.lyzing and start doing.

Month after month, he buried himself in his studies. He had barely met his fellow apprentices at the memecorp and never even been given a workbench. While Vigal had him cooped up in his apartment studying the intricacies of the limbic system, Horvil and the rest of the boys returned from initiation. Soon Horvil had set up shop near his family's London manor and started building a reputation as a topnotch ROD coder. Other acquaintances from the hive were savoring their first mentions in Primo's.

"How long until I start programming?" Natch snapped to Vigal one day, a little over a year into his apprenticeship. "I haven't set foot into Minds.p.a.ce since I got here. If you expect me to learn the whole discipline of neurophysics before I pick up a programming bar, that could take years."

Vigal simply smiled that maddening smile of his and shook his head. "I've been studying the brainstem for almost forty years, Natch, and I'm not even close to understanding the whole discipline of neurophysics. You are learning no more than the essentials you need to do your job."

"And what is my job?"

"You know exactly what your a.s.signment is. You're to update the OCHRE software that monitors oculomotor signals to the third cranial nerve."

"But I know the third cranial nerve backwards and forwards!"

The neural programmer let out a heavy sigh and plucked at the white hairs sprouting from his chin. "I'm no fool," he said quietly. "I see that I'm not going to keep you here much longer under these conditions. Perhaps you're right. Let's get started in Minds.p.a.ce tomorrow. But keep in mind that we are going to proceed very slowly."

Natch had spent plenty of time in the hive tooling around with bio/logic programming bars, but he had never coded anything of importance. One could only do so much testing among a group of upper-cla.s.s hive children.

The 9971.6a software, by contrast, had a paying subscriber base of thirty million. Its logic fueled one of the molecule-sized OCHREs clinging to the cranial nerves. Natch's work here could conceivably affect the vision of an entire city the size of Omaha. To have such influence, such power ... he was nearly shivering with antic.i.p.ation.

Natch stood at his workbench-a hand-me-down that Vigal had finally procured for him from a departing apprentice-and summoned a Minds.p.a.ce bubble. The bubble was nothing more than a translucent shimmer, a void yearning to be filled. Natch called up 9971.6a. The diagram that appeared was a constellation of purplish blocks held together by thin strands of green.

It was obvious why Serr Vigal had slated this program for revision. Even someone as inexperienced as Natch could see that the code was several years out of date. Many of the green strands were looped around each other in a figure-eight formation that had been officially deprecated by Dr. Plugenpatch, and the program pa.s.sed off information in a format that was incompatible with newer standards. But more than that, the program, for some indefinable reason, just looked wrong. Natch could practically feel it crying out in pain like an animal trapped in a thicket.

Natch reached for the satchel hanging off the side of the workbench and withdrew a plain metal rod from its sheath. Then he extended his arm into Minds.p.a.ce and got to work.

Bio/logic programming bars looked like plain metal in ordinary s.p.a.ce. Hollow tubes of silver labeled with Roman letters, the forearms of some mythical robot. But inside Minds.p.a.ce, the bars blossomed into their true forms. Some looked like pincers, others pliers, others lariats or hammers or gloves. Each tool represented a specific logical operation that could be applied to a virtual structure. For instance, where a programmer of old might have written: If color = blue Then ChangeEyeColor(blue) Else If color = red Then ChangeEyeColor(red) End If -a bio/logic programmer could achieve the same effect by grabbing the red and blue strands in Minds.p.a.ce and hooking them up to a ChangeEyeColor connector with a pincer-shaped programming bar.

Bio/logics was a science, but it was also an art form. One had to create the right number of connections in the right places. Too few connections would leave gaping holes in the program that could be exploited by malicious black coders; too many might produce unwanted side effects, or sap the body's computational system of precious resources.

Natch tore into the OCHRE software with the zealotry of the newly initiated. He completed his first round of modifications in three days, but spotted so many imperfections and inefficiencies along the way that he couldn't leave the program alone. Every connection he rea.s.signed contained a logical flaw somewhere if he traced back far enough. And each of those flaws would lead to still other flaws.

For a week, Vigal left his apprentice to his own devices while he attended to other memecorp business. During that week, Natch barely ate or slept.

The neural programmer was completely unprepared for the sight that awaited him when he showed up the next week to inspect Natch's work. He was expecting to see a more polished version of 9971.6a, a purple constellation seen on a clear night. Instead, he saw a formation that might have come from another galaxy altogether. 9971.7 was arrayed in Minds.p.a.ce with an almost military precision, each block tied to its fellows with a tight net of green strands. The offending figure-eights were nowhere to be seen.

"I suppose you were ready, after all," mumbled Serr Vigal, flabbergasted. "This is ... this is ..."

Natch stood in the opposite corner of the room with a grim smile on his face. This is extraordinary? This is exceptional? This is aweinspiring?

"This is-too much," stuttered Vigal.

Natch let out an explosive snort. "What do you mean, too much?"

The neural programmer turned as if he had just noticed his apprentice in the room. Twitching cheekbones bore evidence to the struggle going on in his head between the memecorp master and the parent. "Perhaps you are right," he said slowly, parental instincts in control. "I don't want to be critical, but at the same time ...

"You don't want me getting too far ahead of the other apprentices."

"Don't be a fool!" Vigal snapped with the tone of the memecorp master. "I was going to say, I want you to actually launch something while you are here in my apprenticeship."

Natch couldn't think of anything pertinent to say. In Vigal's countenance, the battle of responsibilities began anew, and he quickly found some excuse to sever his multi connection.

The next month was one of the most intense times in Natch's life. Vigal did not repeat his earlier criticism; instead, he encouraged Natch to submit 9971.7 to Dr. Plugenpatch at the earliest opportunity.

Plugenpatch approval was an absolute necessity to get the program listed on the bio/logics exchanges, and most OCHRE systems would refuse to obey any program that didn't carry at least a preliminary clearance from the public health agency. But just as importantly, the approval process provided an objective yardstick he could use to measure his progress. Vigal's motivations were transparent: he wanted to both get his point across and avoid confrontation.

Natch worked confidently towards Plugenpatch submission. He stood at his workbench for days on end, and the bio/logic programming bars just seemed to leap into his hands. The pain of the incomplete program was a visceral thing to Natch, a burning sensation that began in the tips of his toes and shot through his calves, sending his legs to pacing and his hands to searching for the cool balm of a bio/logic programming bar. But he was making progress. Little by little, he was liberating this mathematical beast from its confinement.

He finally submitted the program to Dr. Plugenpatch on a dry June afternoon.

The medical programming review system rejected it without comment.

Vigal took a cross-town tube over to Natch's flat that evening. He bore on his face the nervous look that foretold an approaching speech as surely as dark clouds foretold rain. Natch immediately started to lead his mentor towards his workbench, where 9971.7 hung in Minds.p.a.ce. But Vigal called him back and had him sit down on the couch facing the living room viewscreen.

"Let us talk a little bit about change in a memecorp," he began slowly, eyes focused on the carpet. "Natch, no bio/logic program is an island. It has complex interdependencies, relationships to other programs." Vigal waved his hand at the viewscreen, causing it to broadcast a holographic blueprint of white, red and green squares that filled the room. Natch recognized this vast three-dimensional abacus on sight; it was the standard OCHRE engineering map of the human brain. Yet it represented only one small portion of the whole human programming schematic, which might have encompa.s.sed two or three square kilometers at this level of detail. "You will notice that these relationships are particularly dense in this area, the area of brainstem software." He pointed to a cl.u.s.ter of beads near the center of the diagram.

"I suppose the one you've highlighted is the cranial nerve software," mumbled Natch, tilting his head towards a blinking circle in the center of the cl.u.s.ter.

"Precisely," replied Vigal. "Now let me show you the programs with a direct relationship to 9971.7-programs that will explicitly rely on the information from your work." The neural programmer pulled back the focus and let a whole new level of the blueprint slide into the room. A disparate group of perhaps twenty beads began to blink. "Now, if we add in the components of the system that rely on information from those programs ..." The focus pulled back even farther. Hundreds of beads were now flashing in perfect synchronization. "And so on and so on," concluded Vigal, waving a jittery hand at the exponential explosion of blinking beads.

Natch could feel the impatience swelling within him. He began drumming his fingers on the side table. "All right, I get it. There's a lot riding on this program."

"Any neural program."

"Fine. But I don't see what you're worried about. My code meets all the standards. It produces consistent results."

"I have no doubt of that," replied Vigal somberly. "If I ever had any doubts about your programming abilities, Natch, this has certainly dispelled them. It's not you I worry about-it's the companies working on all these other programs whose skills I question." He flipped the back of his hand at the pinp.r.i.c.ks of light that had replicated throughout the room like a cancer.

"Why should I care?" said Natch through gritted teeth. "That's their problem."

"But Natch, you must understand ... you're not working with skin moisturizers or, or, breath fresheners. This is neural software. One major discrepancy between any two of these programs could cause a ma.s.sive brain hemorrhage. And that is an unacceptable result. That's why we have to work slowly and with careful coordination."