2

THE SHORTEST
INITIATION

Natch's forefather Hundible was an acquaintance of Sheldon Surina and one of the earliest investors in bio/logics. He was a gambler, a teller of tall tales, a drifter of unknown origin and unsavory character.

But above all else, Hundible was a poor financial planner. His getrich-quick schemes sank like leaky boats, leaving him constantly floundering in a sea of fathomless debt. Where he found the money to invest in bio/logics, no one knew. Human biological programming seemed an unlikely venture for Hundible; Surina himself, with his prudish ways and supercilious attitude, seemed an unlikely partner. Naturally, everyone assumed this new discipline was destined to fail.

Yet it was Hundible who had the last laugh. His partner, the skinny Indian tinkerer with the big nose, went on to revitalize science and revolutionize history. The gambler's modest investment ballooned a thousandfold and generated a large fortune. Hundible retired at the seasoned age of thirty-three, took a high-society companion, and slid contentedly out of history. If he had any interest in the great flowering of science that his investment helped bring to fruition, there was no record of it.

Hundible eventually passed on. His wealth endured, for a while.

Natch's ancestor was not the only one to stumble serendipitously onto Surina riches. A host of rogues, early adopters, and cutting-edge investors were handsomely rewarded for their early backing of bio/logics. Lavish mansions and villas sprouted up around the globe to serve their owners' whims-places where they could escape the harsh moral strictures that had kept order since the Autonomous Revolt. The bio/logic entrepreneurs deliberately sought cities that had largely escaped the havoc of the Revolt: Omaha, Melbourne, Shenandoah, Madrid, Cape Town. Cities that yearned for the greatness of antiquity, cities whose local governments could be easily bought.

This change in the political landscape did not escape the attention of the old nation-states. The old governments might have been dilapidated and their halls of power decaying, but they still had plenty of resources at their disposal to fight this territorial encroachment. They vested much of their power in a centralized Prime Committee. The Committee turned around and bestowed ultimate martial authority on a single Defense and Wellness Council. Crusading high executives of the Council like Tul Jabbor and Par Padron made reining in the excesses of the bio/logic entrepreneurs their top priority.

Thus the battle was joined. Society split along ideological fault lines: governmentalists who favored central authority versus libertarians who sought power for local civic groups. By the time Natch's fiefcorp ascended to number one on Primo's, this dichotomy had come to seem like the natural order of things.

Hundible's descendants grew fiercely protective of their fortunes. Not only were they fending off the Committee and the Council, but they were also under siege by the greatest enemy of all: time. The bio/logic entrepreneurs knew that theirs was not the immutable wealth of the lunar land tycoons. Their money was not a tangible thing like terraformed soil that they could stick their hands into. No, for better or worse, the fates of the bio/logic entrepreneurs were tied to the bio/logic markets.

And markets, like all living things, are mortal.

Natch's mother Lora was fourteen when the Economic Plunge of the 310s hit.

Lora was schooled in the best hives, with the children of important diplomats and capitalmen. Her proctors were crisp, disciplined citizens who saw the hive as a Petri dish in which to experiment with the latest academic fashions. Lora and her hivemates yo-yoed between pedagogical theories, learning much about politics but very little about government, finance, engineering or programming.

But what did it matter? When Lora looked into the future, she saw nothing but the comfortable track her parents had laid out for her, with scheduled stops at initiation, loss of virginity, career, companionship and motherhood. There would be plenty of time along the way to pick up any other skills she needed.

In the meantime, Lora worked diligently to become a Person of Quality. She developed a keen fashion sense and an eye for good beauty-enhancement programming. She sharpened her social skills at the regular charity balls held in the Creed Elan manors. She dipped her toes in the Sigh, that virtual network of sensuality, and learned a thing or two about the pleasures of the flesh. And when holidays rolled around, she retreated to her cavernous family mansion to dally with servants whose parents had not been blessed with the money for a hive education.

Then, one gloomy spring day, Lora and her hivemates awoke to find all the proctors riveted to news feeds off the Data Sea. Marcus Surina has died, they said. An accident in the orbital colonies. A few of the proctors wept openly.

For a while, Surina's death seemed like a distant event that had little connection to the girl's carefully structured hive existence: a supernova in a remote galaxy, visible only through powerful refractive lenses. Surina had been the master of TeleCo, a big and powerful company. He was a direct descendant of Sheldon Surina, the inventor of bio/logics. His death had been a terrible tragedy. What else was there to say?

But from that day forward, everything changed.

Lora's friends began checking out of the hive and disappearing, nobody knew where. One by one, Lora's parents cut back on subscriptions to the programs that gave her eyes that china-doll sparkle and her hair that reflective luster. The servants were let go. Nameless fears escaped from the demesne of adulthood and roamed the hive at night with impunity, whispering words the children did not understand.

Six months after Marcus Surina's death, Lora's parents unexpectedly showed up at the hive and told her to pack her things. They gave her a single valise and told her to take as many of the precious knickknacks and gewgaws lining her shelves as she could carry.

Where are we going? she asked.

To Creed Elan, they replied.

The last time Lora had seen the great ballroom at the Elan manor, its railings had been festooned with purple flowers, and its marble floors lined with elegant revelers in formal robes. Now the ballroom was a shantytown of clustered cots and frightened children. Lora's parents deposited her on an empty bunk and kissed her goodbye.

There's an opportunity in the orbital colonies that we can't pass up, but it's much too dangerous for children, they said. Don't worry, Creed Elan will take good care of you, and the family will be back on its feet in no time. Just wait here and we'll send for you.

They never did.

During the next few months, Lora managed to string together what had happened from scraps of overheard conversation and bits of news footage on the Data Sea. Her parents had invested heavily in TeleCo, as had all of the absentee parents of the boys and girls moping the hallways at Creed Elan. It had seemed like a safe bet. No less an authority than Primo's had heralded teleportation as the Next Big Thing. And why wouldn't it be? The master of TeleCo was a Surina. Sheldon Surina's invention of bio/logics had propelled the entire world from chaos to a new era of prosperity and innovation. The emerging science of teleportation would surely do the same, with a handsome and brilliant and urbane pitchman like Marcus Surina at the helm. Yes, the economics were fuzzy and the technical challenges daunting, but TeleCo would figure it all out in time.

And that might have happened, if Marcus and his top officers had not been charred to ash by a ruptured shuttle fuel tank.

Marcus Surina's successors at TeleCo tried to pick up the pieces of his work, but it was a Herculean task. They soon discovered that the economics of teleportation weren't merely fuzzy; they were disastrous. The company quickly scaled back its ambitions from Marcus Surina's pie-in-the-sky dreams to more sober and subdued goals. TeleCo supplicated the Prime Committee for protection from its creditors, and soon all the manufacturers and distributors that had anticipated a teleportation boom went belly-up. The ripples spread far and wide, leaving dead companies floating in their wake. Eventually, the ripples touched even Creed Elan, that last bastion of noblesse oblige.

Years later, Lora wondered how much of a fight the rank-and-file put up when the bodhisattvas of Creed Elan decided to let the children go. The girl found herself shunted off to a small, private institution that was obviously destined for bankruptcy.

Within the space of two years, Lora had gone from a promising young debutante to a penniless member of the diss. Her quest to become a Person of Quality would have to be put on hold.

After exhausting the generosity of her family's remaining acquaintances and selling all her trinkets, Lora found shelter on the thirtyfourth floor of a decaying Chicago office tower. The furniture had long ago been stripped away, and the windows had no glass. Every few years, one of these buildings falls down and kills everyone inside, cackled one of the neighboring women, a wretched old hag who had never experienced high society and resented Lora for her all-too-brief tenure there. Maybe this one will be next.

Lora learned to do the Diss Shuffle, that ungainly two-step that had her feigning malnutrition on the bread lines one day and faking job experience during interviews the next. Employment was almost impossible to come by for a woman with no marketable skills, no work experience, and no references. She tried the sacred totems that had opened doors for her in the past-the name of her hive, the names of her parents, the name of the fashionista who had designed her ball gowns. But in this new world, those names had lost their magic.

And so several years slipped by in slow motion. Down in the realm of the diss, nothing changed. The same expressionless faces meandered down the street, day after day, neither angry nor frightened nor scared nor hurt, but just there: zombies of the eternal now chewing synthetic meats grown in tanks. The beneficent forces of government sent bio/logic programming code raining down from the skies, containing chemical nourishment and protection from disease and hygiene. Black code sprouted up from the lower realms, programs to stir the sludge of neural chemicals in their skulls and relieve the boredom.

Sometimes she had real flesh sex with strangers in trashed-out buildings. Other times, she and her roommates embarked on errands of violence against the crumbling city. Bio/logics had made it very difficult to seriously injure someone with a pipe or a rock. But buildings ... buildings followed the natural laws of entropy, and could eventually be beaten down into dust.

And then one day, the rumors began. Len Borda, the young high executive of the Defense and Wellness Council, was giving out money to the bio/logic fiefcorps. It's a massive program of military and intelligence spending designed to end the Economic Plunge, they said. Jobs will be returning soon.

Lora had not hunted for work in nearly two years. She had rarely even made it around the block in that time. But the rumors stirred memories of her old life, of the comfortable track that prescribed career, companionship and motherhood. Lora left the Chicago slums and tubed to the metropolis of Omaha in search of work.

Within a few weeks, Lora's search brought her to the attention of Serr Vigal.

Vigal had matriculated in one of the great lunar universities and discovered an innate passion for neural programming. He settled in Omaha the same week that High Executive Borda defied the Prime Committee and began handing out massive defense subsidies. Vigal founded a company devoted to the study of the brainstem, and went to the Defense and Wellness Council for funding. They approved his request almost without question.

The young neural programmer decided to incorporate as a memecorp instead of a fiefcorp. Vigal had to spend much of his time pleading for public funding from a patchwork of government agencies, but he felt this was time well spent if his employees were insulated from the pressures of the marketplace.

His choice of company structure also allowed him to make unconventional hiring decisions.

Lora was his first such decision. Vigal could see her qualifications were slim, yet her scores on the logic quizzes he routinely gave to applicants were astronomical, far higher than most of his pedigreed apprentices. Clearly the woman was full of untapped potential, and Vigal was intrigued. The field of neuroscience had moved far beyond the basic mechanics of forming neurons and positioning dendrites. If he was to succeed in this field, Vigal knew he would need creative thinkers to help decipher the hidden electrical order in the brain. He hired Lora.

Unfortunately, Vigal's first controversial decision sparked his first major conflict. Lora was a quick learner, but the work was difficult and the rest of the team unforgiving. Mistake piled on top of mistake while the apprentices were crunching to hit major deadlines. Once the project was completed, a group of Lora's fellow apprentices approached Vigal and demanded her dismissal. It's impossible to work under these con ditions, they said. We have friends with much better credentials who are still out there in the ranks of the disc.

Vigal refused to terminate her contract, but he had selfish reasons.

He had fallen in love with her.

Over the next year, Lora found a place in the company as Vigal's muse. The very sight of her fierce blue eyes inspired flights of fancy, flights that glided Vigal over distant mathematical lands few had seen. And yet, one touch of her hand on his shoulder was enough to ground him and bring a sense of direction to his wandering intellect.

The memecorp began to experience great success. Soon, Serr Vigal had become one of the world's pre-eminent neural programmers, a fixture on the scientific lecture circuit, and a much-sought-after expert on brainstem issues. The other apprentices in the company suspected that Vigal and Lora were lovers, but they looked at the company's accomplishments and decided to give their master some leeway.

Lora frequently accompanied Vigal to scientific conferences and fundraising pitches. One month, Vigal sent her to the remote colony of Furtoid to prepare for such a conference. Two days later, the entire colony was quarantined with a sudden epidemic. Whether the virus was deliberately engineered or simply an evolutionary fluke was never determined.

Portions of Furtoid remained quarantined for months. Four hundred forty-seven people died in those sections of the colony.

Including Lora.

Vigal went into a deep depression when he heard the news. The future had seemed so bright and his own ambitions so limitless. He was just starting to notice the void in his heart that men often discover in their thirties, a void that neither career nor accomplishment can fill. Lora had filled that void for Vigal. Now that she was gone, life seemed bleak and purposeless.

But when Vigal arrived at distant Furtoid to claim her body, he had a surprise waiting for him. Lora had left behind a child, ex utero, at the colony's hiving and birthing facility. The child had been there in the gestation chambers since soon after conception. Rumors abounded that Lora had taken a lover, but the hive had been unable to locate a father.

Suddenly, Vigal found himself standing on Lora's track, looking straight ahead at that long stretch of open country after the scheduled stop at career and before the end of the line. The distance seemed unimaginably vast. To Vigal, it did not seem to be part of the natural order of things for a man to travel such a long distance alone.

When the boy emerged from gestation, the neural programmer had himself appointed legal guardian. Then he transferred the child to a hive facility back on Earth, in Omaha.

He named the child Natch.

Many years later, Natch would say that his greatest skill was his knack for acquiring enemies. He was only half joking.

Natch made his first enemies before the age of five. He had not learned to speak until he was almost three-an eternity in an age of bio/logics-and this set him apart from the other children. The hive's larger boys took notice of his solitude and quiet demeanor, his propensity for sitting alone in corners. They decided to examine this odd child the only way they knew how: with their fists.

One morning, Natch emerged from his room and found five of his hivemates waiting. They were older boys, uglier than he, and sullen since birth. Natch instinctively knew what was about to happen and felt a split-second of astonishment. What did I do wrong? he thought. Then the boys jumped him. The next few minutes were a tumult of kicks, punches and scratches that left Natch reeling on the floor in pain.

He limped back into his room, having learned a valuable lesson: Always be on your guard, because the universe needs no reasons to inflict punishment.

Perhaps the boys were merely looking for a cringe or a whimper of fear, something that would validate their nascent theories of power and weakness. But Natch refused to give them this satisfaction. The next morning, he emerged from his room as always and marched without hesitation towards the waiting band of thugs. They gave him plenty of opportunity to flee, but the stubborn child refused to veer off his determined path. Instead, he waited silently while the bullies had their way with him. The beatings continued the next day, and the next, and the next.

The proctors were not blind. Natch's floor in the hive could barely contain four dozen children; no space remained for privacy. But bio/logic technology did not work in Natch's favor. The OCHREs floating in his bloodstream had been battle-tested for generations in much more rigorous environments than a suburban hive; they could heal minor cuts and bruises within minutes. The bullies could inflict little real damage on him until they were old enough to pull black code off the Data Sea.

The proctors decided to let the conflict play itself out.

But how can we just sit there and watch the boy suffer like that? argued one of the proctors in a staff meeting. We can't just let this go on forever.

Her superior was unsympathetic. We're not here to coddle these children. There are sixty billion people out there waiting to chew them up and spit them out. The headmaster nodded towards the flexible glass window, as if this thin membrane could ward off the world's suffering. Outside, tree branches scraped greedily against the window like claws. These children need to be tough in order to thrive.

So we're trying to create a generation of martyrs. Is that it?

Long pause. Have faith in the boy, Petaar. He's not getting hurt, is he? We won't let this go on forever, but let's give him a few more days to figure things out for himself before we intervene.

Nobody ever explained this decision to Natch, however, and to him the proctors' inaction felt like indifference. This was a greater blow than any the young bullies could deliver. Didn't the proctors drill into the children's heads every day that the world was run by logical, impartial laws? Everything happened for a reason, they said. Every effect was traceable to a root cause. But this daily punishment had no rational basis that Natch could see, and though the proctors could see him suffering, they remained mum. The boy pondered his dilemma for days on end, and spent his nights wrestling with cognitive dissonance.

One night, Natch awoke before dawn with his mind on fire.

The world around him dimmed and blanked out until all he could see were his hands in front of his face. And then the room exploded with colors. A frenzy of lights burned far away up over his head, while strange hollow voices began speaking to him of things he didn't understand. Random phrases in imaginary languages. The names of dead kings. Algorithms and encrypted messages. Natch lay quietly in the dark, consumed by fear, and let the vision wash over him.

When dawn arrived, he knew what he had to do.

Natch missed roll call that morning. The proctor Petaar scrambled to his room, fearing the worst. She found the boy on the floor, trapped beneath a heavy bureau and struggling to breathe.

The hive descended into pandemonium. After tending to Natch, the proctors quickly rounded up the thugs who had been tormenting him. They grilled the boys behind locked doors for two hours and extracted a number of tearful confessions. But the bullies were unanimous in insisting they had nothing to do with burying Natch under the bureau. And the toys missing from Natch's room? thundered Petaar. Did they run off by themselves? The boys had no explanation. The proctors weighed the evidence against the five bullies for much of the afternoon, and then summarily expelled them.

When he heard the news, Natch felt a cold thrill run up his spine. It was his first taste of victory, and he found it an intoxicating brew.

The boys had actually been innocent of their crime; the entire incident was a setup. Natch had contrived to trap himself beneath the bureau by propping it up with blocks and then slowly removing the supports. He had sketched out the details of his plan in the early morning hours with the zeal of a master draftsman, until no flaws were visible to the naked eye. He had long since forgotten the source of his inspiration.

But Natch's ploy succeeded in totally unexpected dimensions as well. The proctors who had ignored his plight now walked around with looks of guilt etched on their faces. Petaar went out of her way to accommodate Natch's every whim. Word of the episode even leaked out to his hivemates' parents and caused the institution no end of grief. Natch was astounded. He had vanquished his enemies and exposed his proctors' fallibility with a single blow.

The incident drove home another valuable lesson: With patience, cunning and foresight, anything is possible.

This was not the last hurdle Natch had to clear in the hive. Other children rushed to fill the void left by the departure of the bullies, and they were not so easily fooled. They tried to sabotage his homework, steal his belongings, and blame him for all their own mischief. Natch quickly realized he had made a tactical error hiding behind the proctors; by not dealing with his opponents directly, he had only reinforced the perception that he was weak.

He wondered if this would be a never-ending cycle. Was he doomed to spend the remainder of his life fighting battle after battle with a succession of enemies, each more capable than the last, until he finally met his match?

At the age of six, Natch decided that escape was his only option. He ran away.

Serr Vigal received a panicked Confidential Whisper from Natch's proctors that morning. They wondered whether the boy had hopped the tube and found his way to Vigal's apartment, but the neural programmer had not seen his charge in weeks. He cancelled the morning's staff meeting and set out for the nearest tube station. The tube whisked him across metropolitan Omaha to a squat semi-circular building that did, in fact, look like a beehive.

What do you mean, he's missing? asked Vigal, perplexed, when he caught up to the anxious proctors. I thought you monitored the children here twenty-four hours a day.

The headmaster bowed his head. We do.

Vigal was not an excitable man by nature. Are you sure he didn't just wander onto another floor? he said, scratching the few lonely hairs on his head. You have security programs, don't you? Certainly he couldn't have gotten out of the building without you knowing it.

Theoretically, no, said the headmaster. But it appears he did.

Omaha was no place for an unattended boy. A curious soul like Natch could easily disappear in a cosmopolitan city of 22 million and never be heard from again. Broken families had been commonplace in the depths of the Economic Plunge, but even a recovering economy could not totally stem the trickle of missing children.

Natch was not oblivious to the dangers of the city, but he had already learned to discount fear as an unreliable emotion. Omaha seemed like a zoo to him; everywhere he turned, there were tantalizing new sights arrayed for his amusement. Buildings expanded and collapsed like breathing animals, often causing entire city blocks to shift a few meters this way and that. Tube trains criss-crossed the city like veins. And the streets were filled with millions of people holding silent conversations with acquaintances thousands of kilometers away.

Natch spent hours trying to figure out which of the pedestrians were real and which were multi projections. The proctors had taught the children about multi, of course; some of the proctors multied to the hive themselves from as far away as Luna. But children under eight were not allowed to project on the network, and thus they had very little first-hand knowledge of the subject. So Natch spent hours pivoting 360 degrees in the crowd, looking for people on the periphery of his vision who seemed fuzzy and indistinct until he focused on them. Then he would run up and toss a pebble. Those that the pebble bounced off were real (and sometimes irritated); those that the pebble passed through were multi projections. Natch discovered to his astonishment that he could not tell the difference at all.

Once the initial fascination of the city wore off, Natch's experiences in the hive began to infect everything he saw. The belligerent street vendor shouting down his customer's haggling ... the timid woman walking two steps behind her companion like a housepet ... the down-and-out businessman being pressed out of his apartment by white-robed Council officers ... every interaction he saw was a substantiation of the eternal struggle between the Pushers and the Pushed.

Natch found a quiet corner in a public square and sat facing the wall. A viewscreen above him repeatedly screeched a popular footwear slogan every ten seconds. No matter where you go, there will be bullies and victims, Natch told himself. Which do you want to be?

Back at the hive, the proctors made a poor show of mobilizing to find Natch. The boy had been gone for most of the afternoon, and yet the headmaster had only just managed to circulate his name and description to the local L-PRACG security forces. Serr Vigal, for his part, was absorbed in solving the riddle of how Natch had made it through hive security. All simply gaped with astonishment when the boy appeared back in the hive that evening, seemingly out of nowhere. On his return, he had managed to elude their security apparatus as effortlessly as he had on his departure.

That was a nice trick you pulled, said the neural programmer with a hint of pride. And then, mindful of the proctors' angry stares: Is there anything you'd like to talk to us about?

Natch frowned, shook his head, and vanished into his room without a word.

The next day, a tangible change had come over the boy. He met the taunts and jeers of his hivemates with a cruel smile that made them uneasy. And then his enemies began to suffer from a series of unfortunate accidents.

One boy who had constantly maligned Natch for his good looks found himself tripping down a long flight of stairs. A girl who liked to capsize Natch's lunch tray found herself locked in a spare pantry for an entire evening. And so on.

Each humiliation was carefully crafted to reach maximum exposure among the hive children. Natch instinctively knew that the punish ments he imposed should be both brutal and disproportionate to their crimes. This new brand of psychological warfare terrified the other children, who had not yet learned the art of subtlety, who still expressed their emotions with curled fists and running feet. Eventually, even the dullest child in the hive saw a pattern: if you bother Natch, you will pay for it.

Natch got his wish. The other children left him alone. He had learned another valuable lesson: Perception is everything.

Natch quickly outgrew his hive. Even the absent-minded Serr Vigal could see that, although it took an eye-opening conversation with the proctor Petaar for him to recognize it.

Children like Natch need something to focus on, she said. You'd better make sure he's pointed in the right direction, or he'll focus on the wrong things.

Vigal furrowed his brow. A man who spent his day working with the quadratics of neural science had little time for binary terms like "right" and "wrong". This new hive you suggest-they'll give him something to focus on?

Petaar nodded knowingly. And then some. Natch will get ten years of study-hard study and then a one-year initiation.

Initiation? The hives still do that?

This one does.

The neural programmer scrolled bewilderedly through page upon page of starchy marketing material. The tuition seems rather large ... and I'm afraid my Vault account is rather small at the moment ...

Which is why he can apply for a Prime Committee scholarship.

Days later, after an awkward farewell sermon from Petaar (and an even more awkward farewell embrace), Natch was shepherded off to the Proud Eagle hive in Cape Town. The Proud Eagle had a reputation for doing things differently. Unlike most other hives, they had no ges tation and birthing facilities, no counseling staff, and no social programs of any kind. Children came to the Proud Eagle because they had stretched beyond the boundaries of the traditional hive system and needed a challenge. The proctors delivered it to them in the form of ten-hour classes, six days a week. This left very little time for idleness, boredom or mischief.

Natch did not miss the infantile games and simplistic moral lessons that had taken up his time at the old hive. Initiation lurked somewhere in his future, but he would deal with that challenge when it came. He took to his new surroundings like a fish to water and spent the next several years gulping down knowledge.

The history proctors taught him about the thinking machines that had nearly decimated humanity during the great Autonomous Revolt, about the dark times that followed, and about the golden age of scientific reawakening that Sheldon Surina's discipline of bio/logics had brought into being. They taught him about the evaporation and consolidation of the ancient nation-states, the rise of the L-PRACGs, the establishment of the Prime Committee and the Council, the neverending quarrel between governmentalism and libertarianism.

The ethics proctors taught him about the early religions, how their influence waned after the dawn of the Reawakening, and how the violent fanaticism of Jesus Joshua Smith drove most of their remaining adherents into seclusion in the Pharisee Territories. They taught him about the Surinas' philosophy of spiritual enlightenment through technology, and about the creeds that had sprung up during the modern era to preach community and responsibility. They taught him the tenets of Creed Objectivv, Creed Elan, Creed Thassel, Creed Dao, and many others.

The data proctors taught him about Henry Osterman and the Osterman Company for Human Re-Engineering (OCHRE), about the microscopic machines carrying Osterman's name that swarmed through his blood and tissue. They taught him how to summon data agents with a thought, how to run bio/logic programs that interacted with the machines and supplemented his body's natural abilities. They introduced him to the vast corpus of human knowledge available on the Data Sea. They explained to him how Prengal Surina's Universal Law of Physics allowed scientists to turn grains of sand, droplets of water, and molecules of air into quantum computers of almost limitless strength.

The business proctors taught him the basics of bio/logic programming. They showed him the holographic method of programming, which had long ago supplanted language-based systems of logic. They discussed the difference between market-driven fiefcorps and publicly funded memecorps. They put a set of bio/logic programming bars in his hands and set him loose in MindSpace to demonstrate how to visualize and manipulate logical processes.

Given the grueling program of study, most of the children couldn't wait for long weekends and vacations to be with their families. But Natch had only Serr Vigal to go home to, and Vigal had never acted like family. The neural programmer treated him like a colleague instead of an adopted son. When they were not simply ignoring one another, they were having cordial conversations about current events. These conversations usually turned into Socratic discussions, with Vigal feeding him question after question as if skepticism were a form of dietary fiber.

I wish I knew something about children, Vigal would chuckle absentmindedly from time to time. But Natch was grateful he didn't. He looked forward to spending weekends alone at the hive, when all of the children were gone and Vigal was shuttling around the globe fundraising.

For a few years, the Proud Eagle seemed like paradise to Natch. He tore into his assignments with gusto and asked for more, afraid to take this opportunity for granted because he knew it would not last forever.

The families started arriving at noon the day before initiation, and continued streaming into the Proud Eagle until long past sundown. From a corner, Natch watched his hivemates go off for private chats with fathers and mothers and uncles and cousins to hear one last bit of wisdom they could take with them to initiation. He conjured up a picture of Lora, the mother he had never met, and wondered what kind of advice she would be giving him right now.

Natch felt a hand on his shoulder. He whirled around expectantly, but it was only Horvil. Horvil, the most anxiety-prone child in the hive, not to mention the sloppiest and the largest. Horvil, Natch's only friend. "So do you think it's gonna be painful?" he said.

Before Natch had a chance to respond, an older boy stepped in. He was ruggedly handsome and knew it, with a face that could have been the Platonic Form of symmetry. "Of course it's going to be painful," teased Brone as he advanced on Horvil. "What's initiation without pain? What's life without pain?" He called up a static electricity program and tapped the other two boys on the side. Horvil yelped and scooted out of the way, but Natch quickly activated a grounding program to deflect the charge.

"I really hope it's not too painful," whimpered Horvil to himself. He turned on Analgesic 232.5 to soothe his aching side. "I don't think I'll be able to stand a lot of pain." Brone and Natch stared at one another icily for a few moments without speaking.

Horvil and Brone's families arrived shortly thereafter, leaving Natch alone in the corner with his thoughts. Horvil disappeared into a gaggle of aunts and cousins who seemed determined to wedge their advice into him with a crowbar if necessary. Brone walked off with two picture-perfect parents, looking less like their progeny than a model from the same factory. He gave Natch one last evil grin before vanishing. "Horvil's not the only one who's going to feel pain," Brone fired off at him over Confidential Whisper.

Everyone knew what to expect from initiation, but the ramifications only seemed to multiply the closer the time came. The students would be separated by sex and put in the wilderness for a year, where the OCHREs in their bloodstreams would be deactivated. The bio/logic programs that regulated their heartbeats, kept their calendars, and maximized the storage space in their brains would be cut off. They would look at words without being able to instantly glean their meanings from the Data Sea. They would snuffle and sneeze and bruise and forget things. And the worst horror of all, they would wake up in the middle of the night with actual shit oozing through their intestines....

"Human beings are only subroutines of humanity," said a voice.

Natch must have drifted off, because he hadn't noticed the middleaged man approaching him. The man's sand-colored robe was decidedly unfashionable (and poorly tailored at that), but his face was friendly: the non-specific goodwill of the perpetual cloud dweller. His almond-shaped eyes betrayed a hint of the Orient. Natch smiled politely at the multi projection of Serr Vigal.

"Sheldon Surina said that," Vigal continued gently.

"What did he mean?"

"Well, if you believe your proctors, Surina meant that everyone should experience the struggle of humanity from darkness to light. They think that Surina would have wanted you to see what life was like before the Reawakening. Make you appreciate the modern world more."

"And what do you think?"

The man stared off into the distance and tugged at his peppery goatee. "I don't know. I think maybe Sheldon Surina just wanted everyone to keep an open mind and be nice to each other."

Natch tried to refrain from rolling his eyes. It was typical of the advice he received from Serr Vigal: pleasant, inoffensive, and mostly useless. "I thought you couldn't come," he said. "I thought you were speaking at a conference."

Vigal frowned. "Yes, that's right. But I convinced one of my apprentices to cover for me. At least, I think she said she would cover for me...." Vigal's eyes searched the ground as if he might find answers woven into the Aztec patterns on the carpet. Finally, he gave a self-deprecating shrug. "Well, there's nothing I can do about it now." Natch noticed the neural programmer's baffled expression and stifled a smile. It was impossible to get mad at Serr Vigal. He might be hopelessly out of touch, but at least he had a sense of humor about it.

"Come," said the older man, clapping a virtual hand on Natch's shoulder. "Let's take a walk in the garden, and I'll give you the last bit of sentimental nonsense you'll have to endure for the next twelve months."

The Proud Eagle's garden was the envy of metropolitan Cape Town. Gargantuan sunflowers sat alongside lush poppies and forbidding cacti, all growing in the shadows of redwoods, bonsai and elm. Natch had been training himself for initiation by trying to identify things that would not exist without Sheldon Surina's science of bio/logics, and this improbable congregation of plants was one of them. It was easy to forget that bio/logics dealt not only with the programming of the human body, but with other organic structures as well.

Serr Vigal kept his silence for several minutes. Natch could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention as his guardian gave him one of those world-weary stares. The boy put his hands in his pockets and did his best to ignore it.

Natch wondered for the millionth time what kind of relationship Vigal had really had with his mother. Had he loved her? Had they slept together? Would they be bonded companions now if Lora had not been infected by that epidemic in the orbital colonies? It was a pointless exercise. All Natch ever managed to pry out of Vigal was the skeletal structure of a life story. Sometimes Natch suspected the neural programmer was really his father, but Genealogy Sleuth 24.7 concluded that the differences in their DNA made such a relationship unlikely at best.

"I hear some of your hivemates are starting their own fiefcorps after initiation," said Vigal abruptly.

Natch nodded. "A few of them."

"Your friend Brone among them, I suppose."

A flurry of emotions washed through Natch's mind as he considered the visage of his hated rival. The two had spent most of their childhood warily circling one another like fencers, always testing and probing for weaknesses. Over the past year, Natch's competition with Brone had turned into full-scale war. "Krone is not my friend," he said through gritted teeth.

Natch's malice passed right over Vigal's head. "What about Horvil?"

"He doesn't know."

"And you? After the hive, after initiation, what then?"

There was a pause. "I've had ... a few meetings."

Vigal exhaled softly and pretended to study a hanging grapevine. "I see."

Another period of silence followed. Serr Vigal seemed to be marshaling the courage to say something. Meanwhile, Natch could see through the hothouse windows that the commotion in the hive building was dying down. Families were giving their sons and daughters one last virtual embrace before cutting their multi connections. Natch and his fellows would be on their way to initiation in just eighteen hours.

"Listen, Natch," said his guardian finally. "I'd like to give you some advice before you head out to initiation. It's just ... I'm not very good at this kind of thing. As you know, raising a child wasn't something I planned. It sort of fell in my lap by accident.... And now, after all this time, I'm not sure how to begin...." Vigal stopped and collected his thoughts, aware he had not exactly gotten off to an auspicious beginning. "Natch, I have tried to give you the education your mother would have wanted you to have. She believed her hive did not adequately prepare her for the world. And now I wonder if the same thing will prove to be the case with you, here at the Proud Eagle."

"That's ridiculous," snapped Natch, instantly on the defensive. "Everybody knows that this is one of the best hives in the world."

"And how does one measure that?"

"Well, the capitalmen seem to think so. Do you know how many programmers from last year's class got funding for their own fiefcorps?"

"Too many, if you ask me."

Natch shrugged. He would not be lured into one of these pedantic Vigalish dialogues today. "Things are different now. The economy is exploding, and there's too much opportunity out there to waste time on an apprenticeship. Two years ago-"

The neural programmer shushed him with a raised hand. His face bore a pained expression. "I hear that nonsense from the drudges every day. I'm surprised that you, of all people, don't know propaganda when you read it. But it's not just you-your hivemates, the proctors, Brone, Horvil-everyone is falling for this drivel." Vigal wrung his hands as if trying to cleanse them of a foul and noxious liquid.

Natch searched his mental catalog of conversations with the neural programmer, but this outburst of emotion from Vigal was unprecedented. Natch never imagined that Vigal had given much thought to his education, much less had any passionate convictions about it.

"Krone believes he is ready to start his own business," Vigal con tinued firmly. "Let him. He is a vicious person headed for a vacuous career, and he will be sorry he turned down a few extra years of study without the pressures of the marketplace. But you, Natch, you're better than that. You are not ready to run your own company. If you jump into the fiefcorp world too quickly, you will regret it."

Natch reeled back, stunned, and sat on the edge of a stone planter. He had never received a reprimand from Serr Vigal, and now it stung like a jolt from Brone's static electricity program. "So, what would you have me do?" he spat out bitterly.

"Natch, I can't have you do anything," said Vigal. Already his concentration was beginning to dissipate, to fade into everyday melancholy. "Once you return from initiation, you'll be old enough to make your own choices. You can subscribe to your own L-PRACGs, pledge to whatever creeds you choose. You can solicit capitalmen for funds and start your own fiefcorp, if you want. But ... if I could wish anything for you, it would be that you would take an apprenticeship somewhere close ... somewhere I can keep an eye on you." His face turned an embarrassed red.

So that's what this is all about, thought Natch. He hadn't expected a sermon from his legal guardian-in fact, he hadn't expected Vigal to show up today at all. But now that the sermon had become a referendum on his parenting skills, things were starting to make sense.

Serr Vigal exhaled deeply and stretched his arms out behind his back, as if he had just removed a heavy weight from his back. Natch realized his guardian had been rehearsing this speech for some time. "I can see the look in your face," said his guardian softly. "I've seen your scores on the bio/logics exams, Natch. Best in your class."

"Second best," the boy whispered venomously. Brone's smug face leered at him from the corners of his mind.

"It doesn't matter. The point is, I know you are expecting lots of offers from the capitalmen. No, you don't have to tell me about your meetings-I already know. I'm not asking you to make any decisions right now. We'll talk about it again in twelve months. All I ask for now is that you keep your eyes and ears open, and consider the idea of taking an apprenticeship-any apprenticeship-after initiation. And be careful out there."

The boy frowned and kicked at the moss growing between the flagstones. "You don't have to baby me. I know how to take care of myself."

"Yes," sighed Vigal under his breath, "and sometimes I am afraid that is all you know."

Natch was used to prowling the hallways of the Proud Eagle alone at night. He had learned to move in total silence, not out of any fear of punishment, but so he could concentrate on the staccato language of settling floorboards and restless insects. The kinds of noises only heard in places built prior to the invention of self-compressing buildings.

On the night before initiation, the halls were packed. Teenagers roamed from room to room in blatant violation of curfew, saying tearful goodbyes, pledging their undying love, settling old scores. Natch saw at least a dozen couples sneak behind closed doors for one last romp on the Sigh. Nervous giggles abounded. He took a furtive glance down the hallway to the proctors' wing. They were following the time-honored tradition of looking the other way and getting drunk.

Over the past week, Natch had been studiously reading the drudge forecasts of the bio/logic market. This year, the demand for fresh programming talent had reached a critical mass. The Meme Cooperative's rules forbid fiefcorps and memecorps from signing on apprentices or providing start-up capital before graduation from the hive. But Len Borda's post-Plunge economy was churning out opportunity much quicker than warm bodies, and so many companies were willing to risk the Cooperative's tepid penalties.

Natch had studied the laws of supply and demand. What better time to raise money for a fiefcorp than the night before initiation?

Downstairs, he stretched out on a sofa in the atrium to await the arrival of the capitalman Figaro Fi. It was the fifth late-night rendezvous Natch had arranged this week with the power brokers in the fiefcorp world, and the most important yet. The rich and eccentric Fi had bankrolled some of the most spectacular successes on Primo's. Lucas Sentinel and the Deuteron Fiefcorp both owed their laurels to Figaro's generous assistance, as did the Patel Brothers, the rising young stars of the bio/logic scene. Natch was surprised to get a meeting with the capitalman at all, and readily agreed to his conditions-a meeting in the middle of the night, when Figaro was halfway through his working day in Beijing. Natch explained that the network was offlimits to students so late. He took it as a good omen that Fi agreed to multi to Omaha instead.

At three minutes after midnight, when the ruckus from the upper floors had settled to a low rumble, a multi projection materialized in the atrium.

The person who had coined the phrase Don't judge a book by its cover might have had someone like Figaro Fi in mind. The great capitalman stood almost a head shorter than any of the proctors on staff-shorter, even, than many of the boys-and he was almost as wide as he was tall. His robe, of vivid gold, silver, and copper, made a bold proclamation of idiosyncrasy. Each stubby finger was adorned with a ring; some boasted three or four. Figaro endured the boy's respectful bow and gave a feeble nod in return.

Natch looked the capitalman straight in the eye. "I invited you here tonight," he said, "because I'm interested in your money."

Fi appraised him coolly, like a rancher surveying his lands. "Is that so?" His voice was a low rasp, rich with irony.

"If you're not prepared to open your Vault account, then you'd better cut your multi connection right now and not waste any more of my time. Otherwise, follow me." And with that, Natch wheeled around and headed down the hallway.

Natch did not look back until he had reached one of the plush dens that the Proud Eagle had set up for entertaining guests. It was the kind of dusky room that might have once been lined with leather books. Natch wasn't sure whether or not the capitalman would still be there when he turned around, and he barely managed to restrain a grin of triumph when he saw that the little man had indeed followed him.

Figaro Fi planted himself in one of the overstuffed chairs. "You've got balls, and I like that," said the capitalman sardonically. He pulled a beefy cigar from his coat pocket and chomped on one end. "Go ahead," he grunted.

Natch launched into the presentation he had already given a hundred times in his own mind. It was short and to the point. There were holographs of Natch's programming work, a brief list of the accolades he had won in academic competitions, and the outlines of a fiefcorp marketing strategy. When he finished, he made no attempt at idle chitchat, but rather waited patiently for a reaction from his audience.

Figaro wore an almost lecherous grin. "I like this," he said. "You've been planning this whole thing for weeks, haven't you? Waiting until the last minute. The little scene in the hallway out there. Clever, boy, clever! "

Natch stood politely with his hands clasped behind his back and said nothing.

"Of course, you know what I came here to see," continued Fi. He apparently had no intention of lighting his cigar-a pointless act in multispace anyway preferring instead to swing it between two fingers for emphasis. "You know I'm not here to see your test scores again. I'm not here to see you perform your programming tricks like some monkey or hear your little prepared speech about how you can benefit society." The capitalman leaned back and let out a hearty laugh, as if he had just told an extraordinary joke. The gold sequins on his belly jingled sympathetically.

"I'm really here to see how you comport yourself," continued Figaro. "To see if you really have that killer instinct I've heard so much about. So tell me, Natch, what makes you think I'm going to put up a single credit tonight?"

"Because if you don't," replied the boy, "someone else will."

"And you think I'm going to ruin my good name with the Meme Cooperative by giving fiefcorp money to a hive boy before initiation?"

"Oh, please. You have enough money to pay them off ten times over."

"True, true." Figaro seemed quite satisfied with himself, and Natch wondered if he was about to dispense a few nuggets of gossip about what it was like to live a life of privilege. Parties with the lunar land tycoons, programmers catering to your every whim, teleportation on command.

But the capitalman was on a different tack. He wedged the cigar back between his molars and gave Natch a sly look. "I'm surprised you even asked me here today," said Fi. "If you'd really done your homework, you would know that I like to spread my investments around. It's not like me to risk my neck for two boys from the same hive."

Natch instantly felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. There was only one other boy at the Proud Eagle who could have possibly caught the attention of someone with Figaro Fi's clout. In his mind's eye, Natch saw the last horrible smirk Brone had given him earlier that evening. Horvil's not the only one that's going to be feelingpain. He clenched his fists behind his back until his fingernails carved bloody crescent moons into his palms.

"So why did you come here?" the boy snarled.

Figaro broke into a full-fledged smile. "Because it amuses me, of course."

Wild thoughts scurried through Natch's head, baring their claws with fiendish fury. If Figaro had been sitting here in the flesh, Natch might well have buried his fingers in the fat man's throat by now. He could feel the growling in his gut and summoned an antacid program, but it did nothing. The visions pranced around his mind. Brone's smug face and Adonic figure, sipping fancy wine in a lunar villa. Brone sitting at the head of a very long conference table lined with adoring apprentices. Brone laughing at Natch's expense.

"And will it amuse you if I go to the Meme Cooperative and tell them you're giving money to a hive boy?" hissed Natch. The words came out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying. He let them vent. "Not just any hive boy-a spoiled rich one whose parents probably paid you off. Or what if I go to the drudges? CAPITALMAN ADMITS TO BRIBING MEME COOPERATIVE OFFICIALS-that sounds like a good headline for Sen Sivv Sor."

Figaro Fi did not seem angry or surprised at Natch's sudden outburst. If anything, he became more serene, which enraged the boy even further. "So now you're threatening me," said the capitalman matter- of-factly.

Years later, Natch would cringe when he thought of that evening, and wonder how he had fallen for such obvious bait. But caught in the moment, he found himself hurling all his adolescent rage at the capitalman until he hardly knew what he was saying. "It's your choice. You can invest in him and I'll turn you in to the Meme Cooperative and the Defense and Wellness Council. I'll tell the drudges. You'll be sorry you ever came here. Or you can invest in me."

The little capitalman actually seemed to be enjoying the boy's discomfort. His face bore the look of a mischievous child poking a frog with a stick. "All right, all right, sit down, boy," he said abruptly. His chubby hand delivered backhanded slaps through the air in Natch's direction. "You can keep your threats to yourself."

"And why's that?"

"Because you have nothing on me. Yes, I already decided to give your friend funding. But I'm not foolish enough to do it before he returns from initiation."

Natch could feel nausea swelling inside him and beating a tattoo on the inside of his skull. He wondered if this was what it felt like to throw up. In a daze, he reached for the armchair behind him and collapsed into the waiting cushion.

"The recruiters all told me about you," said Figaro Fi, plopping his virtual feet onto an ottoman. "Brilliant but narrow-minded, they said. Volatile. Unstable. But I just had to see it myself. Those bio/logics scores of yours were too good to ignore.

"Now here's the good news, Natch. I like you. You've got that same look in your eyes that I did forty years ago. Hungry! Vicious! Uncompromising! And by the way, much better scores than I ever got, even in economics.

"No, I haven't changed my mind. I'm not giving you a single credit from my Vault account. But I'm going to give you something even more valuable.

"I'm going to tell you why."

The pudgy capitalman pulled his feet off the ottoman. He leaned forward intently and stuck his elbows on his knees until he had nearly curled himself up like a pill bug.

"Listen: all of us in the bio/logics industry, all the capitalmen, the programmers, the channelers, the drudges, the fiefcorpers and memecorpers and engineers and analysts ... we're slaves, Natch. We're all slaves to want.

"Want. It drives the world! It moves mountains, it swallows cultures!

"You see it, don't you, Natch? Want is everywhere. It's in people. It's in programming. In politics. In nature. The universe just won't stay still. It wants to move; even its smallest particles want to be in motion. Take bio/logics. Aren't bio/logic programs in a natural state of incompleteness? We release version 1.0 of a program, and inevitably it is imperfect. Version 1.0s want a version 2.0, don't they? They practically beg for it. You toil for months on version 2.0, and you've still barely tapped into its bottomless reservoir of want. Version 2.0 wants a version 3, version 3.0 wants a version 4, and so on and on and on and on and on-forever!"

The antacid program wasn't helping. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Natch realized he would not follow through on his implied threat to Figaro. He would not spend his last few hours at the Proud Eagle shuttling desperately between second-rate capitalmen and seeking illegal handouts. If only this interview could be over. If only I could shrivel up inside my shell like a snail and never see Figaro Fi or Brone or Vigal again.

But the capitalman continued on mercilessly. "You ever heard that story about the Bodhisattva of Creed Objectivv and Lucco Primo? The Bodhisattva asks Primo what the key to success is. Primo says, Three things. Ability, energy, and direction. You have the ability, Natch, and you definitely have the energy-maybe more ability and energy than I've ever seen.

"But where's your direction? I don't need forty-five minutes to see you haven't got any. You have endless wants, Natch! But want without purpose destroys a person. Those who can't master their wants are loose cannons. They bring companies down. They ruin lives. They may flare brightly for a while, oh yes! But in the end, Natch, loose cannons fail. They lose money.

"Now your friend Brone-"

"Please don't call him that," Natch croaked.

"Your friend Brone is a real sharp programmer, but I've seen better. He's got a way with people, and he's a handsome kid, which never hurts. But he's got one thing you don't. He knows exactly where he's going, and what he's doing.

"I've seen it all before. You'll get to the top quicker than Brone, but then you'll just get pulled down by some other kid who's hungrier and angrier than you are. That's just the way it works."

Figaro arose, looking well pleased with his little sermon. He put the chewed cigar in his coat pocket, leaving Natch to wonder why he had drawn it out in the first place. Just before cutting his multi connection, he turned back to the boy with an arched eyebrow.

"Now, about that story with Lucco Primo.... A couple years later, this drudge asks Primo, So what's the most important element of success? Ability, energy, or direction? Primo sits back and thinks about it for a minute. Direction, he tells the drudge. Ability and energy you can buy. "

Figaro started chortling obscenely and prepared to cut his multi connection.

"Good luck at initiation," said Fi. "You're going to need it."

Some of the boys heard their initiation would take place in the South Pacific, on the edge of Islander territory. There were hundreds of islands in the area that remained pristine and untouched by modern technology. Other boys countered that an island wasn't remote enough. No, they would be shuttled off to some orbital colony specially designed for this purpose, or maybe one of the lawless quadrants of Mars.

Horvil decided (based on no evidence whatsoever) they were headed to the bottom of the ocean to live in one of the bubble colonies that the real estate developers tried to revive every twenty years or so. "I knew I should have studied up on hydroponics," he fretted to Natch as they filed out of the hive for the last time. "And I'm a terrible swimmer. Can't even hold my breath for a minute. You'll take care of me, right, Natch? You won't let me drown, will you?"

Natch hadn't spoken a word all morning. He found it pointless to speculate about their destination. Countless initiation compounds littered the civilized world, from Earth to Luna to the asteroid belt, and he never heard that any one was better than another. Besides, Natch knew from long and painful experience that isolation has no geographic boundaries. Even if the proctors arranged to shuttle them out to the remotest orbital colony-like one of those experimental stations beyond Jupiter-that still wouldn't erase the shame he had suffered last night with Figaro Fi. And Brone would still be there with his insufferable smirk and the knowledge that he had bested Natch.

Horvil and Natch marched solemnly with the rest of the boys towards the sleek hoverbird that would carry them to their destination. The Falcon 4730 was the standard workhorse of the aerospace industry, used for everything from cross-city transportation to inter-continental cargo hops. This craft could get them anywhere on Earth, or maybe even to a low-hanging orbital colony-but not underwater, Horvil was relieved to note.

Sixty-four boys boarded the hoverbird and settled into their seats with little conversation. Some pressed their faces up against the glass for a last wistful look at the beehive-shaped building they called home. The hive windows were lined with the small noses of children curious for a glimpse at their future.

"Goodbye, fucked-up childhood," sighed Horvil, waving manically at the children. "Hello, fucked-up adulthood!"

Natch wasn't listening. He was thinking about Figaro Fi's accusation: Where is your direction? The boy winced at the irony as the hoverbird levitated over the courtyard and winged away towards the unknown. Wherever Natch was going, he was headed there fast.

From liftoff to touchdown, the trip took only a few hours. They were not headed to some remote orbital colony after all, but to a nature preserve southwest of the Twin Cities. The initiation compound sat on a few hundred square kilometers of undeveloped country, completely walled off from the outside world. The hoverbird landed on a makeshift platform atop a dusty, windswept hill.

Natch saw the dust and instinctively reached out with his mind for a sinus-clearing program. He discovered that there was nothing to reach for.

They had been cut off from the Data Sea.

Most of the other boys had already realized this fact. They disembarked with grim looks on their faces, shouldering their packs and wondering what would happen next. The lone proctor who accompanied them on the hoverbird trudged behind a large boulder that served as a podium and began to speak. His words had the air of a speech honed and refined over many years of repetition.

"Two billion people died in the Autonomous Revolt," thundered the proctor, thumping his fist on the boulder. "Two billion! Approximately one-fifth of the world's population at the time. Entire cities and cultures and ethnicities wiped out forever."

He paused for dramatic effect. None of the boys so much as breathed.

"Why? They died because they had forgotten about this." The proctor swept his arm expansively at their surroundings. A thousand trees waved in the breeze like some rapturous congregation, while a small encampment down the hill served as the lone Doubting Thomas on the horizon.

"What you see around you is nature as your ancestors once lived it," continued the proctor. "Your ancestors did not have access to the Data Sea. They could not activate bio/logic programs to keep themselves warm in the winter, or fetch ten different weather forecasts with a thought. They did not have OCHRE machines working inside their bodies to shield them from injury and disease. Your ancestors learned to live this way during a hundred thousand years of trial and error.

"But when humanity decided to ignore its heritage-to place its trust in living machines instead of in themselves-the race nearly perished. And because humanity had forgotten the lessons of its ancestors, billions more were doomed to starve in the horrible decades that followed.

"We must never forget our heritage again.

"And so, during the next year, you will become acquainted with nature in a way you never have before. You will experience pain and frustration and injury. The things you see as entitlements will become hard-earned luxuries. Because of this, some of you will decide that nature is your enemy. Others will see nature as an impersonal and uncaring force.

"But if you lose hope, remember this: Our bodies were built to sur vive the harshest punishments nature can give. Over a hundred thousand years, we conquered nature. So will you again.

"You have many advantages over your ancestors. You have generations of genetic engineering that has broadened your minds and strengthened your bodies. You have all the accumulated knowledge fifteen years of hive education has given you. You have your comrades. And when all else fails, you have the certainty that a hoverbird pilot will be back on this very spot in twelve months to take you back to civilization.

"So when someone asks why your parents sent you to initiation, why you spent a year of your life out in the woods instead of practicing your bio/logic programming skills, you tell them this: I came to initiation to fulfill my responsibility to humanity. I came here to ensure the continuation of the human race.

"The Proud Eagle wishes to thank you for your many years with us. When you emerge from this last test, you will no longer be hive boys. You will be young men.

"As Sheldon Surina liked to say, May you always move towards perfection. "

The proctor gave a polite bow to the assembled boys, who were too overwhelmed to do anything but respond in kind. Then he tramped onboard his vehicle and gave a nod to the hoverbird pilot. Within minutes, the ship was noiselessly whizzing southwards, back towards Cape Town.

Sixty-four boys stood at the top of the hill, looking sheepishly at one another and the encampment below. Then, moving as one, they began the hike towards their home for the next twelve months.

The accommodations were not as primitive as everyone had expected. Four rows of wood cabins lined four dusty streets, watched over by a large metal sign labeled CAMP 11. Of course, these houses didn't behave like the ones they were used to-they couldn't prepare food or obey mental commands or compress themselves to save space-but they were a far cry from the hovels the boys had feared.

The initiates split off into groups of four and chose cabins. Brone and Natch drifted to opposite corners of the camp like enemy kings of chess. Horvil stayed by Natch.

The proctors had provided plenty of clothing, reasonably comfortable beds, and even a rudimentary form of indoor plumbing. Few of the boys had ever seen a real toilet before, and they spent hours flushing them in a symphony of adolescent glee. A scouting party quickly discovered large and well-tended gardens on the east side of the camp, with enough food for all. There were storage rooms stocked with old-fashioned pens and stacks of treepaper, gardening tools, parkas, and pocket knives. It seemed like the only hardship the boys would face out here was boredom.

For the first few weeks, it was all a wonderful adventure. The microscopic OCHREs clinging to their insides stopped working. Hair and pimples sprouted without provocation. Digestive systems resumed their ancient dance with food as if the past two hundred years of gastric engineering had never happened. The boys learned how to clean themselves in the nearby stream, how to groom themselves with knives and scissors, how to use spades to dig tubers from the rock-hard ground.

Everyone experienced at least one morning of disorientation when he groggily tried to summon the morning news or his favorite channel off the Jamm. But all in all, the boys did not have enough time to miss the civilized world. Their days were filled with chores that needed to be done by hand, without the aid of bio/logics or modern machinery. Often, they found themselves without the necessary tools to accomplish a task and had to improvise. All of this took time, and it was not unusual for a boy to look up from the field he had started weeding that morning, only to discover a setting sun.

"It's amazing that our ancestors got anything done," Horvil groused to Natch one night. They both lay prostrate on their beds, sweaty and exhausted from a day fending off gophers in the fields. "After gardening, bathing, grooming, shitting and cleaning, I'm too tired to do anything else."

The pressure on the boys was most intense during the first month; they knew that any missteps now would have drastic repercussions come wintertime. The Twin Cities soil was hard and unforgiving, but the hive had provided efficient tools for prying into its skin and tending the perennial crops. Even more useful were the gardening manuals the proctors had left behind. The tips on plowing and crop rotation were nice, but the comments previous initiates had scribbled in the margins proved invaluable. Over the years, tenants of CAMP 11 had covered every blank centimeter of treepaper with hints about the best places to forage for wild game, what to do in case of rain, dirty stories, impenetrable in-jokes, and gossip many years gone stale. One book had a list on the inside cover titled

THINGS WE FUCKED UP (AND YOU SHOULDN'T)

Another contained a treatise on

WHAT THE PROCTORS DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT INITIATION

to which some anonymous wag had added

(THOSE BASTARDS)

During the first few weeks, cooperation ran high among the boys. Even the most odious task was a novelty, and everyone was eager to take his turn pulling weeds and washing clothes. Many of the boys eyed Natch and Brone warily and took bets as to when the fighting would break out between them. But the two retreated to their wary fencers' dance, keeping their distance, looking out for sudden movements.

Spring passed into summer without incident. The boys spent their leisure time improvising rustic versions of soccer and baseball and trying to guess how their favorite teams were performing right now in the civilized world. Horvil slimmed down and lost his irrational fear of the outdoors.

Natch began to take long walks in the woods by himself. He grew fond of the trees, especially the tall ones that stretched up to the edge of his vision. While he walked, Natch mentally played back the conversations with Serr Vigal and Figaro Fi, dissecting them like an occultist looking for clues to the future.

Brone is a vicious person headed for a vacuous career, Vigal had said. But you, Natch, you're better than that. You are not ready to run your own company. If you jump into the fiefcorp world too quickly, you will regret it.

Where is your direction? Figaro Fi had asked him. You have endless wants. But want without purpose destroys a person. Those who can't master their wants are loose cannons.

It was all a matter of direction, wasn't it? Natch spent days looking around the spare plains for hints. Which direction should he choose? And how would he know when he arrived at the right one? As far as he could see, the four points on the compass were featureless and drab. It seemed like he could wander the entire earth following one of those paths and not see a single distinguishing characteristic.

But the trees-the trees pointed majestically upward into the sky. Their leafy arms reached for the sun without shame or compromise. Even the little death of winter could only delay their aims, and it was only a matter of time before they were reaching upward once again.

Marcus Surina came to visit Natch one night towards the end of autumn. He drifted in the cabin door, tiptoed around a slumbering Horvil, and came to rest barely half a meter from Natch's face. In this ghostly apparition, the great scientist looked just as ruggedly handsome as he did in all the pictures and videos the boy had seen. Except the eyes, which had been wide and luminescent in life, were now cold and dim and utterly devoid of light.

Watch, said Surina.

Natch huddled into the corner of his bed with chattering teeth as dozens of specters paraded through the room, figures from history and legend frozen in grotesque positions of death: Julius Caesar, Tobi Jae Witt, Abraham Lincoln, Joan d'Arc, Tul Jabbor, his mother. Each figure wafted over to the boy in turn, mouth open as if to speak some horrible truth from beyond the tomb. Yet the ghostly figures remained stubbornly silent. Were they all withholding their secrets from him by tacit agreement? Or did they simply exhaust all their words in life, and now have nothing to say?

The parade continued for an eternity of midnight-time, despite multiple attempts by Natch to cover his eyes and will away his tormentors. He tried screaming, burying himself under the blankets, ignoring them, but the ghosts would not be denied. His efforts only succeeded in summoning more, until the room was thick with their gray, misty effluence.

Finally, after what must have been many hours, the shade of Marcus Surina floated up to Natch and hovered there, centimeters away.

Now, run! said Surina.

Too frightened to disobey, Natch arose and fled for the door. He stumbled outside into the deepening autumn and discovered that the entire camp was enveloped in the same stinging mist. Mist curling over his feet, wrapped around the wooden posts of the cabins, thick and sharp as smoke ... and full of voices.... The voices of his fellow initiates, yelling in confusion....

"Over here!" came a familiar nasal twang. Horvil. Natch felt a fleshy hand grab his shoulder and drag him outside the boundaries of CAMP 11 and up a nearby hill. Most of the hivemates had already assembled at a safe spot in the lee of the wind.

"What's happening?" said Natch sleepily. "What's that smell?"

"Smoke," replied Horvil with a groan. "The smell of initiation going up in flames."

The cabins themselves were not the worst casualty of the fire. Even frightened boys who had never spent a winter outdoors knew that trees could be chopped down and cabins could be rebuilt. Only six of sixteen cabins had burned down completely, while three had suffered minor damage. There was still plenty of room for all to find space indoors.

No, the real calamity was the destruction to their tool sheds and food supply.

One by one, the boys limped out to the fields, where most of their perennial crops now lay under a shroud of ash. Somehow, they had always known there was something unnatural about the variety of nutritious grains and vegetables that sprouted every spring, despite the harsh winters of the midwest and generations of inept teenage farming. Their ancestors had never had such a bounty of genetically engineered supercrops to sustain them. But now, staring at the remains of their harvest-not to mention the twisted ruins of two of the tool sheds and the charred silo containing most of their stored grain-the initiates knew that this game was no longer tilted in their favor.

The origins of the fire were a mystery. Most likely it had been the product of carelessness, someone forgetting to smother the dying embers of a torch. Perhaps back in the civilized world they could have scavenged for evidence and mounted an investigation, but here all they had was vague conjecture. Before long, whispers passed through Brone's side of the camp laying the blame on Natch's shoulders.

"Why would he do something like that?" exclaimed Horvil the first time he heard the rumor. "Do you even have the slightest bit of evidence?"

"The fire started near Brone's side of the camp," one of the boys told him. "Everyone knows those two hate each other. Natch was one of the last ones out, and his cabin is fine."

"That's totally ridiculous. That's not evidence at all."

The other boy admitted his theory had little in the way of factual support. "But come on, Horv-you're his best friend, right? Doesn't he scare you?"

Horvil bristled. "All I know is that Natch's test scores were higher than half the class combined. That means he's smarter than you. And that means he knows setting fire to the camp would hurt him just as much as Brone." The conversation came to an abrupt halt soon after.

There was much to do. The boys went to work right away, picking every edible seed, berry and root on the horizon, repairing and filling the well, making defensive preparations against unknown enemies. The boys of CAMP 11 spent their spare time in an engineering frenzy, attempting to coax the last bit of practicality out of the everyday items around them. A frayed rope strand and several bottles could be converted into a makeshift dumbwaiter. Broken glass could be spread along the roads as an early intruder alert system. Spare rolls of plastic could be conscripted to channel excess rainwater to the well.

After a week of trying to pick up the pieces and shore up the damaged cabins, it became clear to the initiates that all their preparations might not be sufficient for them to survive the winter. An argument sprang up about how closely the proctors were monitoring their situation here in the wilderness. If the situation grew too precarious, would the proctors come and rescue them? The Proud Eagle wouldn't just let dozens of its pupils starve to death out here, would it?

And then, without warning, winter descended upon them.

The snow marched into CAMP 11 under an imperious wind, eager to pound and break any human habitation in its path. Within days of the winter solstice, the boys had abandoned all non-essential duties to concentrate on the snow. But there was much more snow than hands to shovel it. Milky precipitation smothered the plants and killed off the remaining vegetation. The initiates soon discovered that, unlike the geosynchron-regulated snow to which they were accustomed, natural snow could sting and burn. Insulation against the cold became their biggest worry.

A debilitating flu hopped from boy to boy and gave the initiates their first taste of real illness. Back in the civilized world, OCHREs diagnosed all their ailments, and bio/logic programs automatically dealt with them by consulting the Dr. Plugenpatch databases. No more. "I remember reading that you're supposed to blow your nose when it gets clogged up like this," Horvil announced earnestly one day. "Does anybody know how to do that?" No one did.

The boys were startled to discover that even without OCHREs and bio/logic programming and Dr. Plugenpatch, the human body had a remarkable ability to heal itself. They came to realize that all the bio/logic technology society relied on for its survival had not been constructed out of whole cloth; it was patterned after cruder motifs passed down through millions of years of genetic heritage. Natch, Horvil and most of the other boys quickly bounced back from the flu and resumed their duties.

But a few of the boys lingered on in their illnesses, their bodies unable to fully repel the alien microbes wreaking havoc in their systems. The argument about proctor intervention flared up again. But if anyone expected the proctors to suddenly swoop down from the clouds and rescue them from their misery, they were disappointed.

And so, under a chill wind, the initiates all huddled in the center of the camp one afternoon and tried to hammer out a strategy.

Now, under the pressure of starvation and with the added encouragement of the arson rumors, the much-discussed antagonism between Brone and Natch surfaced with a vengeance. Natch declared that CAMP 11 was ruined, and their only chance for survival lay in finding one of the other encampments out in the wilderness. Some of these other camps had to have some stored food available, he argued, as theirs had upon their arrival. But Brone immediately raised objections to this strategy, his opposition all the more intense because Natch proposed it.

"We can salvage what's left," stated Brone. His voice boomed with the strong and vibrant tones of a born politician. "We can survive here. But if we leave, there's no telling what we're going to find out in the wilderness."

"And what are we going to live on?" yelled Natch. His voice was a crow's squawk, the sound of metal grating on metal. "The stores we have are almost gone."

"There are deer running around. We can hunt."

Natch let out a dismissive snort. "You're saying we should start eating real meat? Those aren't synthetic deer out there. We'll all get sick again, right when we can't afford to lose any time."

"But we'll survive."

The conflict raged through the afternoon, and gradually the boys began to polarize into two separate groups. Occasionally, someone would manage to insert a fact or an opinion into the discussion, but by and large it remained a conflict between Natch and Brone, the two stubborn boys at the top of their class. When the sun finally slunk down over the horizon, someone suggested the question be put to a vote. Should they abandon their adopted home and search for other encampments, or soldier on here at CAMP 11 and hunt for food?

Natch lost.

The boy sat in the center of the ruined camp for several hours, oblivious to the whispers of the rest. All his frustration and humiliation from the Figaro Fi episode rushed over him in a black rage that clouded over his senses. Eventually, the rest of the boys abandoned the convocation and went off to find sleep.

Natch sat and sulked, his mind whirling. The stench of death lay over Brone's plan, as obvious to Natch as the wind or the rain. He couldn't just follow Brone to his grave, could he?

Horvil put a hand on his shoulder. "You know what Sheldon Surina said?" he remarked to Natch quietly. "He said, The man who doesn't know how to compromise only has himself to blame. "

"I'd rather think about what Lucco Primo said," rasped Natch in reply.

"What's that?"

"Never bet on the optimist. "

The boys had seen little of the local wildlife during their eight months at CAMP 11, but that didn't mean the predators weren't out there. Generations of black bears and wolves prowled the woods nearby, living out their own dramas of survival with nary a thought to the humans in their midst. They were not prone to violence, but the Autonomous Revolt had decimated their natural habitats and taught them to be less forgiving. The miserable winter drew them closer and closer to the human encampments in search of food.

Horvil was the first boy to run afoul of the black bears. He was tromping purposefully through the snow gathering firewood when he stumbled on one of the larger specimens. Two hundred-fifty kilograms of ursine horror lunged at Horvil with no warning, sending the boy darting back to the camp at a speed he wouldn't have believed himself capable of.

"Bear!" he yelped as he stumbled down the hillside, shedding sticks of firewood the whole way. "Bear! Help! Bear!"

The camp instantly descended into chaos. Before anyone could propose a coherent strategy, Brone rounded up a small contingent of boys and armed them with torches. Horvil and a number of others scampered into their cabins and barricaded the doors, assuming the bear would wander off on its own accord. Natch, meanwhile, was out on one of his aimless peregrinations around the woods.

The initiates would debate what happened next for many years afterward.

Brone and his comrades located the beast soon enough. He had headed straight for the storage silo containing their hard-earned stockpile of fruit. But the boys' bravado was quickly snuffed by the sight of a cornered bear rising up on hind legs with claws extended. Brone made a feint with his torch, which only succeeded in frightening the bear into a rage. He charged at one of Brone's companions, sliced him neatly across the chest, then tripped and fell directly onto another boy. A few of the remaining initiates managed to toss their bleeding comrades over their shoulders and make a break for the cabins, while the rest scattered in confusion.

Natch, returning from his walk, observed all this from a distance. Fools, he thought. You can't accomplish anything without a strategy. He realized that if the camp were to survive this latest incursion, he would have to take control. It was a strange feeling, to be responsible for others and not just oneself. He tried to pretend that he was not accountable, that he could just run off and let the rest of the initiates fend for themselves. Then the image of poor hapless Horvil came unbidden to his head, Horvil standing and pleading with him, You'll take care of me, won't you, Natch? He cursed his friend's name and quickly devised a plan.

Seeing that the bear was now pursuing the firebrands that had taunted him moments earlier, Natch rushed into the fray and ripped a torch from the hand of a campmate. The boy, stunned, put up no resistance. Natch instantly reversed course, waving his torch at the beast and leading him in the opposite direction, away from the camp.

Natch's thoughts were jumbled, incoherent. Primal reflex took over and dispelled any more complex emotion. He could feel the pulse of blood rushing through his legs, the lash and sting of the branches across his face. The bear was constantly a few steps behind, growling, ready to pounce and devour him. Yet he knew these woods like nobody else in the camp did. He knew exactly where he was going.

Until, as chance would have it, he spotted Brone.

Natch whipped around and headed in his direction.

Brone had made his way to a clearing on top of a low hill, hoping to gather his wits there. His torch had snuffed out in the snow somewhere during the frantic escape from the bear, and Brone was now busy scanning the area for a suitable branch to use as a cudgel.

He had only a split-second to react when Natch came sprinting by at top speed, and then the black bear was upon him.

The carnage that followed haunted Natch for many years to come. You should have listened to me, he would say to Brone during these midnight pantomimes. You should have realized we couldn't have made it in that camp. You should have recognized you were wrong. Then he would turn to the other initiates and uncage his fury on them. Why didn't you ask better questions? Why did you submit to Brone's leadership and not mine? He reserved the bulk of his wrath for himself. If only you had been a better politician. If only you had known how to cultivate friendships among the boys. If only you hadn't been so weak.

Natch had to stare at him for several hours in the cramped cabin of a Falcon four-seater under the watchful eyes of a fat irritable pilot and a steely-eyed paramedic. Every few minutes, the paramedic would get up from her seat to examine the gnarled stump that had once been Brone's arm. She would bend down to his chest and listen for the faint wheezing sounds, then she would turn to Natch with a murderous look that seemed quite inappropriate for a healer. Natch was beyond emotion; he simply looked back, expressionless. Don't they have to take an oath of non-violence or something? he wondered.

"Maybe we should just take him straight to a Preparation compound," suggested the pilot. "Cape Town's a long way away, and they got a Preparation compound right near here. I run back and forth to that place all the time."

The paramedic nodded absently. "That won't be necessary."

"You sure? He's suffering, I can see that. They'll take care of him down there, make sure he goes easy-"

"I know what happens in those compounds, Clar," the woman said with a tone of finality. "This one doesn't need to join the ranks of the Prepared-not yet, anyway. He's going to pull through."

For the first time, Natch noticed that the pilot and the paramedic both wore dartguns. He gazed at the cartridges of OCHRE-tipped darts hanging low on the guns' underbellies and tried to imagine what kind of code they contained. A paralysis program, maybe, or a routine to cause temporary blindness? He couldn't quite figure out why the two were armed in the first place. Were they looking after his safety, or Brone's?

Eventually, Natch decided it was pointless to search for routine in a trip that was anything but. Nobody had given him a chance to gather his belongings or say goodbye to Horvil; they did not even tell him whether he would be returning to finish his last few months of initiation. The pilot had simply yanked him out of his cabin and thrown him into the Falcon next to the bloody, twitching Brone without a word of explanation. The whole operation smelled of sweat and desperate improvisation.

As they began their descent into Cape Town, Natch craned his neck to catch a glimpse out the front windows. He could see a small squad of Defense and Wellness Council officers in crisp white robes standing at attention on the runway. Their presence kept a crowd of fifty at bay while the Falcon completed its vertical landing sequence. Natch could see a pack of drudges and Brone's anxious parents among the throng and was suddenly glad the hive had enlisted the Council's protection. The mob might or might not be daunted by the shuttle crew's dartguns, but nobody would dare assault him in plain view of Len Borda's troops. The code in a Council officer's darts could very well be lethal.

Only after Natch had been hustled indoors did he realize that the Council squad was not there to ensure his safety. No, they were still out on the runway waiting for the second Falcon, which had been following close behind.

They were waiting to unload the bodies.

It wasn't the first time Serr Vigal had to duck out of a fundraising pitch at a moment's notice because of Natch. It wouldn't be the last. When the news arrived this time, he was talking to a consortium of LPRACGs a hundred million kilometers away on Mars about spinal cord bandwidth. Vigal thought about hopping on the next Earthbound shuttle, but decided he couldn't afford the delay and headed for the public multi facilities instead. Two days later, he was still waiting for a long-distance multi connection to open up. Finally, he grew impatient and decided to blow his entire Vault account on a teleportation instead.

By the time Serr Vigal arrived at the Cape Town TeleCo station, groggy and ill-tempered from the four-and-a-half-hour transfer process, Natch's name had permeated the Data Sea like a foul odor.

His experience became known to the public as "the Shortest Initiation." The term came from the drudges, whose coverage of the affair showcased their ability to reduce a complex set of human events to the common denominators of Good and Evil. Vigal was saddened to discover that Natch had been assigned the latter role. GREED AND SOLIPSISM: THE LAST LESSONS OF THE HIVE? read one of the story headlines. OUR ANCESTORS MAY NOT HAVE HAD OCHRES, BUT THEY HAD ETHICS, opined another. CIVILITY IS DEAD, claimed a third. The Proud Eagle tried to convince the public that accidental deaths happened every year during initiation, but the people were not placated. Yes, occasionally there were mishapsbrawls and knife fights, flu outbreaks, once even an avalanche-but three boys from one hive mauled by a bear? Unprecedented. Inexcusable. Governmentalists and libertarians alike took to the floors of their L-PRACGs to denounce Natch and the Proud Eagle.

The headmaster and three of the senior proctors met Serr Vigal at the foot of the TeleCo station platform. They bowed before him in a very poor impression of humility.

"So Natch knows I'm on my way to get him?" said the neural programmer.

"I'm afraid we can't permit him to go anywhere yet," replied the headmaster gravely. "Natch is still fighting off the infections he contracted in the wild. I'm sorry, but rules are rules."

Vigal was in no mood for games. "Nonsense," he sighed. "Show me these medical reports that say he's still infected." The proctors exchanged surreptitious looks as the headmaster's charade quickly col lapsed. She forwarded the documents to Vigal, who projected them at arm's length for anybody to see. "It's quite obvious the boy doesn't have anything," he said at length, pointing to the array of charts floating in the air between them. "Blood pressure, heart rate, OCHRE functions-all normal. I'm afraid you have no legal right to keep the boy isolated here any longer."

The headmaster slumped visibly. Her eyes darted sidewise at the proctors with a silent accusation: You said he wouldn't give us any trouble. "Please understand-we can't let Natch go until the hive finishes its official inquiry. The board of directors might still decide to prosecute him."

"Prosecute him?" said Vigal with furrowed brow. "What would they prosecute him for?"

"Believe me, there are things they can do. Most of the other boys say that Natch led that bear right towards them, that he knew what he was doing the whole time.... Now we've got angry parents threatening all kinds of legal action. Natch should count himself lucky that the initiation compound falls under the jurisdiction of our L-PRACG and not one of theirs." The headmaster combed her stringy gray hair with the fingers on one hand and peered nervously at the pedestrians surging past on the platform. Who knew which of them would turn out to be a disgruntled investor or a muckraking drudge?

"Between you and me," she continued over Confidential Whisper, "I think we'll be able to come to some agreement with the parents and make this whole thing go away. We really are doing the best we can. But until we can get everything straightened out, Natch is better off at the hive. There are lunatics making death threats against him, drudges sending multi requests at all hours, politicians calling on him to testify ..

"But no capitalmen."

"No," the headmaster replied with distaste. "No capitalmen or fiefcorp masters or recruiters at all, thankfully."

Vigal had changed little since Natch had last seen him. He still wore the same impeccable gray goatee and the unostentatious ocher robe that signaled a hopeless lack of fashion. Vigal was a monument against time, like the cabins in the initiation compound-something that stood unchanged through the vicissitudes of the seasons.

He had certainly not lost his gift for understatement. "Things are not going so well for you, it seems," said the neural programmer.

Natch sat on his bed and sulked in silence. The hive dorm, which had been unimaginably vast when he was eight, now felt small and constricting.

"Do you want to talk about what happened out there?" prodded Vigal gently.

"No," said Natch. He had spent the past few days staring at the ceiling, trying to recount those panicked few minutes in the woods, trying to decide what had happened. Had he purposefully led that bear into Brone's path? Or had it just been a gut instinct, a subconscious split-second decision? Could he have yelled out some warning, waved his arms, something? "I don't want to talk about it. Not while so many things are unsettled."

"What things?"

"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 space-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 nobody 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 Thassel say. Maybe that was true back when Kordez Thassel 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 pass. 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 dickering 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 hassle. 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 chore. 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 unassuming 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 passes 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 mass 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 passion, 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 MindSpace 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 passing 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 passing 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. Clustered 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 analyzing 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 MindSpace 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 assignment 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 MindSpace 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-class 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 anticipation.

Natch stood at his workbench-a hand-me-down that Vigal had finally procured for him from a departing apprentice-and summoned a MindSpace 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 passed 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 MindSpace and got to work.

Bio/logic programming bars looked like plain metal in ordinary space. Hollow tubes of silver labeled with Roman letters, the forearms of some mythical robot. But inside MindSpace, 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 MindSpace 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 reassigned 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 MindSpace 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 MindSpace. 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 encompassed 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 cluster 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 cluster.

"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 pinpricks 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 massive brain hemorrhage. And that is an unacceptable result. That's why we have to work slowly and with careful coordination."

"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 MindSpace. "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 apprenticeship with Serr Vigal, and wondered if he would make it through the rest of his apprenticeship 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 (Tit-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 fuck of it. Or you're sabotaged by the competition. There are assholes 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 skyscrapers 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, space 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 MindSpace, 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 parse 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 assign 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 grasshopper, 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 MindSpace 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 MindSpace for hours, yet solid enough to withstand thousands of accidental bashes against a workbench. Natch took a deep breath and attacked the empty MindSpace 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 mass came to resemble the mutated grasshopper 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 entities 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 advertisements 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 analysis.

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

Version: 1.0

Programmer: Natch

Yet he felt no sense of triumph. EyeMorph 1.0 may have slipped past the gates of Dr. Plugenpatch, but Natch knew the program was still riddled with inconsistencies-the kind of inconsistencies that Primo's would certainly notice when they dredged the Data Sea for their bimonthly summation of the ROD coding world. Not only that, but because Natch had used Weagel's Eye Wizard to perform some of the heavy lifting, part of his profits would be swallowed up by licensing fees. He would be lucky to break even on the project.

Natch was shambling towards the bed for a long-overdue slumber when a message arrived.

You gave it your all I hope you had fun 'Cause you got your ass kicked

By CAPTAIN BOLBUND.

Horvil was at a loss to explain Natch's failure. He wriggled his head free of the blankets and stared drowsily at the ROD listings scrolling up and down his bedroom viewscreen.

"How does he program so fast?" griped Natch from across the room, where he was wearing tracks into the carpet. "Who is this guy? `Captain Bolbund'? He beat me by an entire day on EyeMorph, Horv! What's he doing that I'm not?"

The engineer flopped around to face the wall. "Maybe it was a fluke," he said. "Maybe he just got lucky. It happens."

"It's not a fluke. This Bolbund has beaten me four times in a row now. "

"Four times? How the fuck d'you run into the same guy four times in a row in this business? That's no accident."

Natch shook his head. "Of course it isn't an accident. I keep taking him on, and he keeps massacring me. Even worse, he always sends me this awful poetry when he wins." The young entrepreneur forwarded some of Captain Bolbund's doggerel to Horvil.

Horvil read silently for a minute. "This is terrible," he mumbled. "Ten thousand spell checking programs out there, and this asshole still spells slaughter with a `w'." He sat up in bed, stretched, and shot Natch a worried look. "Listen, Natch, I don't think you get it. When you're a ROD coder, you gotta keep moving or you'll get in a rut. Didn't your mother ever tell you that you win some and you lose some, but life goes on?"

"No," said Natch with a menacing growl.

Horvil winced, causing his pudgy face to shrivel up like a prune. "Oh, fuck, Natch ... I forgot ... I didn't mean-"

"Never mind." Natch gazed at the photos lining Horvil's wall, where dozens of fat, happy Horvil look-alikes with inky black hair frolicked in an assortment of lavish London manors. If Horvil were ever to fail, his family would absorb him back into its bosom at a moment's notice. But where would Natch go if his money ran out, especially now that he had spurned Vigal?

"Why don't you hire an analyst, Natch?" offered Horvil. "Business strategy is what these people do. They can figure out how to get you through this."

"I don't trust them," Natch muttered under his breath. He didn't want to mention the real reason he wouldn't seek professional advice: his Vault account was running low. In the past two weeks, he had made only one sale, to a doddering old L-PRACG politician whose mistress had been complaining about too much sweat on his upper lip.

But after another few weeks of getting thrashed on the ROD circuit, Natch decided that Horvil was right. He needed professional advice, and he needed it quickly. It pained him to admit he was incapable of defeating Bolbund on his own, but he took solace in a saying by the great Lucco Primo: There are a thousand roads to success, and nine hundred of them begin with failure. So Natch swallowed his pride and began hunting around the Data Sea for an analyst he could afford.

One analyst in Natch's price range instantly stood out from the rest. She was a woman named Jara, who lived on the other side of London from Horvil. Natch set the InfoGather 77 program loose on the Data Sea and instructed it to follow her scent. What InfoGather discovered surprised him: stellar notices from Primo's, five years' expe rience with the rising star Lucas Sentinel, a smattering of praise from the drudges. But then the trail abruptly vanished from the Data Sea, only to reemerge six months later with Jara a free agent and her prices far below market level. Natch fired off a message to the woman:

Why is Lucas Sentinel spreading rumors about you? What did you do to piss him off? And why should I give you any work?

The reply was almost instantaneous:

I told Lucas he needed to grow a set of testicles. He decided to blacklist me instead. Don't bother hiring me unless you have a pair.

Natch laughed out loud. If there was one thing he valued after his Shortest Initiation experience, it was nonconformity.

Jara arrived at Natch's apartment in multi, a scant five seconds shy of their appointed meeting time. Natch found himself facing a tiny woman with Sephardic features and a massive thicket of curly hair. She was almost twenty years his senior. "You asked for a ninety-minute consultation," said Jara by way of greeting. "You realize that my standard consultation is forty-five minutes."

"Anything worth doing is worth perfecting," said Natch, quoting Sheldon Surina.

He could sense this woman Jara sizing him up with one eagle eye. Her piercing look said that she already knew about the Shortest Initiation, that she had already reconstructed his story and needed only the one look to confirm it. Natch stood tall and did not flinch. He had nothing to hide.

"All right," said Jara. "Let's get to it."

Natch brought her over to his workbench and summoned the EyeMorph program and several others in MindSpace, along with a passel of Captain Bolbund's competing brands. "Tell me why this asshole keeps beating me," he said simply.

As she stepped inside the MindSpace bubble, Jara didn't pause for any social niceties. She eyed the herd of programs like an angry bull. "Give me twenty minutes," she said gruffly, and then reached up and began spinning the logical structures around with her virtual hands. Natch took a seat in a chair, activated a QuasiSuspension program, and let her work. As he drifted off into a light nap, he could sense her making thousands of queries on his files and wondered what kind of analysis routines she had developed to churn through all that data.

Precisely twenty minutes later, Natch awoke from QuasiSuspension and joined Jara at the workbench. "So what is this clown doing that I'm not?" he asked.

"The problem," replied Jara tersely, "is that Bolbund isn't doing anything you're not doing."

Natch sat back down in his chair, puzzled. "Huh?"

"His programs don't hold a candle to yours. They're sloppy, they're inadequate, and they'll probably fall apart in a pinch. But he's done a real mind job on you. He's got you convinced that you need to work harder and harder until you drop from exhaustion."

"But for process' preservation, Jara, he launched his eye color program a whole day earlier than me. A day! That's life or death in this business."

"You're still not getting it, Natch. What was the spec?"

"She wanted an eye-morphing program to complement the-"

Jara put up her hand. It was as tiny and delicate as a doll's. "That's your first mistake. You thought the customer knew what she wanted. She wanted an eye-morphing program to complement the colors of the flowers, right? No, what she wanted was a program to make her eyes match her flowers."

The agitation flowed down to Natch's feet and made him rise from the chair in a futile attempt to pace it off. "What's the difference?"

"Did you spend any time researching your client before you took on the project? Well, I did-just now, while you were dozing-and look what I found." She strode up to the room's lone viewscreen and gave an imperious nod.

A woman materialized on the screen, probably in her mid-eighties but possibly approaching a hundred, decked out in a lavish purple robe that was the hallmark of membership in Creed Elan. vellux, read the caption beneath her. The two watched silently for a moment as Vellux puttered around her greenhouse pointing out different specimens of flowers. Five minutes into her nauseating pitch, Natch froze the display. "Okay, she sells flowers. I've already seen this promo. I don't think I'd live through a second viewing."

Jara snorted, but the glimmer in her eyes was not unfriendly. "You may have seen it, but how closely were you watching? Did you notice this?" She stretched out her index finger to zoom in on a block of text in the corner of the screen: visit us at the creed elan annual convocation July 15-27. "Vellux probably didn't mention she was buying this ROD to use at a Creed Elan function, did she? If you were going to traffic flowers to the Elanners, Natch, what flowers would you sell? I'd pick bougainvilleas, lilacs, irises. Red, purple, and lavender, the official colors of the creed." Jara jerked her thumb to the left and focused on the flower vendor's face. "And here's another clue. Did you notice that her eyes are hazel?"

Natch stewed quietly in the opposite corner of the room. He could see the gestalt of the situation coming into focus.

"After five minutes, we've narrowed down the task considerably. Instead of creating a program to change anyone's eyes to match any color flower, we just need to create one that will change this woman's eyes to several shades of purple. Not only that, but we know which flowers to scan for in the retinal image. It's much easier to analyze an image for a specific genus of flower than to do the same for any flower; I'm willing to bet you can find dozens of sub-routines on the Data Sea that will do the trick.

"That's what they call a tell. The customer says they want one thing, but their actions tell you they want something else. Something simple and easy to deliver. I'm willing to bet this Captain Bolbund character saw that right away, and that's why he jumped on this spec.

"So not only did you take on the wrong task, but you went about it the wrong way. Why actually bother changing the color of her eyes? Why not just change other people's perceptions of them? That's a million times easier than all this shit you did with pigments and proteins. Good work, by the way, but who cares? Bolbund's ROD secretes a light pigment onto the lens of the eye through the tear ducts. Outside the eye, Natch, not inside of it. Clever. It's not a perfect solution, but nobody's going to notice in the middle of a creed convention. Best of all, Bolbund can skip the most intensive OCHRE programming and breeze right past hours of Plugenpatch validation."

Natch looked at his hands, absorbing her analysis and storing it for later use. He could see why Jara's curt manner might have irritated Lucas Sentinel and gotten the other big fiefcorps to boycott her services, why she had suddenly found herself unemployable in the fiefcorp world and desperate enough to advertise cheap consulting services to lowly ROD coders like him. But Natch had no use for flattery. Not in his personal life and certainly not in his business.

"So what if your analysis is wrong?" he said. "What if this Vellux woman isn't using the program at a Creed Elan function at all?"

"Then someone else wins the business and you move on," replied Jara coolly. "All you've lost is a day or two."

"EyeMorph is much better than that shit Bolbund threw together," he snapped.

"No doubt. But what does that matter if nobody buys it?"

"Vellux will figure it out. She'll see she bought a lousy product."

"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 competition, 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 assembly-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 crap?" 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 assemblyline."

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 spaces. 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 MindSpace, 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 repetition 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 spawn 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 assembly-line pittance by day, but he was hardly idle at night. He spent countless hours staring at intricate blocks of programming code in MindSpace, 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 passersby 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 MindSpace code. The city was becoming one vast bio/logic program. A compendium of data, numbers, named entities, 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 MindSpace bubble that was the world: his MindSpace, 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 mass hovering just beyond the horizon ... a terrible celestial mass 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.

Sex Stability Friendship
Power Greed Hunger
Money Guilt Lust
Love Desire Laziness
Vanity Novelty Suffering

On through the morning he wrote, brushing aside the urgent wake-up calls he had set for his assembly-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 passionflowers, 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 reassurances, 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 passionflowers. "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, buttercups, 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 MindSpace 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 pass 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 choreographed 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 accumulate 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 scrapping 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 passing 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 passing 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 competitor; 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 associates 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. Nobody likes success but the successful, the ruthless financier Kordez Thassel 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 tycoons, programmers who were being paid to circumvent 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 fuck 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.

"I need your advice," said Natch.

"Oh?"

"I'm ready to start my own fiefcorp."

Later that morning, Horvil and Jara agreed to come over to assist in the planning. Following standard etiquette, which said that crucial business decisions should be made in person, the two caught a hoverbird across the Atlantic from London. They met in the flesh for the first time on the runway and gave each other formal bows. By the time they arrived in Omaha, Horvil and Jara were already grumbling at each other like longtime companions.

Natch brought the first meeting of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp to order around Vigal's kitchen table at noon.

From the outset, cash flow was the primary issue. Natch couldn't realistically expect any revenue flowing into the company for at least sixty days, yet there were a number of capital investments that needed to be made in the beginning. Licensing fees to the Meme Cooperative, listing fees to Primo's and the L-PRACGs, bio/logic equipment, administrative programs. Natch's savings would go a long way towards covering these costs, and eventually he would recoup the rest through new-fiefcorp tax breaks. But in the meantime, he was short the credits for apprentices' room and board those first few months.

He turned expectantly towards Horvil, but the engineer surprised him by shaking his head. "Sorry," he said, "but if I'm gonna be your apprentice, Natch, I don't want to complicate things."

Natch's eyebrows creased in confusion. "You want to be my apprentice?"

"Sure, why not? You're gonna need a first-rate engineer on the team, aren't you? The way I figure it, the only place I'm safe from that competitive streak of yours is on your payroll."

"But-the pay ..."

"This ain't about the money, Natch," said Horvil jauntily, pleased to catch his friend off guard. "I've got enough of that. I just don't want to miss out on all the fun. And besides-someone has to keep you sane."

Serr Vigal beamed at the engineer in approval. "I don't think your credits will be necessary, Horvil," he said. "I can cover the payroll for the first few months."

This outpouring of faith and goodwill began to arouse Natch's suspicions. "And what do you want in return?"

"Do I have to want anything in return?" replied Vigal with a cozy smile.

Natch's face turned a flustered purple. "I'm serious, Vigal," he muttered. "What do you want?"

Vigal sighed and considered the question for a minute. "Okay, then how about a membership on the board, with a stake in the decisionmaking. A minority stake, of course," he added hastily. Natch nodded in mute satisfaction. Young fiefcorps often ended up with a concerned father or generous aunt on the board. "I can't promise I'll be available every day or even every week," continued the neural programmer, "but just remember, I'll always be there when you need help."

Embarrassed, Natch turned towards the last person at the table. He didn't know what to expect from Jara. Unlike his career, hers had not blossomed over the past few years. A gradual detente in her relations with Lucas Sentinel had resulted in the occasional piece of business, but Jara had come increasingly to rely on Natch's consulting fees to make a living.

The fiefcorp master summoned one of his simmering stares, the kind he had learned to use on Jara through trial and error. "I'm going to need a good bio/logic analyst too, Jara," he said.

The small businesswoman shifted uncomfortably in her chair as she tried, and failed, to meet Natch's stare head-on. Eventually, she lost the battle of wills and lowered her eyes to the table. "Count me in," she said finally, gritting her teeth. "But don't think you talked me into this, Natch. Everyone knows that fiefcorps are where the real money is these days. I've been waiting a long time for an opportunity like this to come along."

Natch gave his fellow fiefcorpers a predatory grin. So have I, he thought.

Despite all the careful planning and preparation that went into the formation of the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, success did not come easily for the company.

Bio/logic programming was a much different animal than Routine On Demand coding. The work was more labor-intensive, and required the skills of a hard-core nuts-and-bolts engineer like Horvil and the leadership of a generalist like Natch. Because of the difference in scale, the stakes for any one particular piece of code were much higher. Each revision took weeks to complete. You couldn't afford to take the shortcuts commonplace in the ROD coding world. Nor did you have the luxury of wasting time on unnecessary features; you needed an analyst like Jara who had her fingers on the pulse of the market and could pinpoint exactly what revisions would be the most lucrative.

During the first few weeks, Natch worked nearly non-stop. He bounced from Jara's flat to Horvil's flat to Vigal's flat so many times that he was constantly disoriented. But Natch knew he was finally on the right track and moving full steam ahead.

Still, the sales figures in those initial months were abysmal. Natch began each day by examining the upgrades and revisions waiting on the dock for a launch onto the Data Sea. After launch, Jara would sit back in nervous anticipation, senses tuned to the Sea's very molecular hum, waiting for the currents of trade to shift in their direction. And each day she felt the sting of disappointment when traffic failed to come. Besides the occasional sale to a curious browser or the random ping of a cataloging data agent, there was very little activity.

"What are we doing wrong?" Jara moaned to Natch one day.

"We're not doing anything wrong," he replied coolly. "We just need the mojo to accumulate. Give it time."

And then one day it happened.

DeMirage 24.5 was a pedestrian routine designed to reduce the effect of optical illusions. Natch had halfheartedly picked up the project hoping to capitalize on all the ocular research he had put over the years into programs like EyeMorph. Jara didn't have much of an opinion one way or the other about the program. Horvil gave it a cursory look and spent a few hours performing delicate surgery on the pro gram's innards in MindSpace. Natch barely paused to write a descriptive fore and aft for the product before launching it on the Data Sea. He assigned a BizWorks administrative agent to watch the traffic and sound a short ping for every sale, then went to sleep.

Natch's program hit the Data Sea right in the midst of a major turf war.

The Serly Fiefcorp had been involved in a fierce competition with a fast-rising company known as the Patel Brothers. Each company's partisans were launching a daily barrage of complaints to the Meme Cooperative, to Primo's, and to various L-PRACGs throughout the civilized world. Finally, the battle came to a head when Serly's databases were struck with a malicious piece of black code that temporarily put a small portion of the company catalog out of commission. One of the programs hit was Serly's TrueOptix 88. While Serly's people were assessing the damage to the catalog, they decided to pull TrueOptix from the Data Sea until they could determine if it had been infected. Prosteev Serly immediately brought a complaint before the Meme Cooperative blaming the Patels, but the evidence was thin and the case quickly vanished like one of the visual phantasms that TrueOptix was designed to prevent.

The Patel Brothers were not known for playing nice.

Prosteev Serly's loss, however, became Natch's gain. Serly had channeling deals in place and packaging agreements to fulfill. Data agents scurried around the Data Sea to find a suitable replacement for the optical program, and located Natch's DeMirage 24.5. Within minutes, Natch's program had become the de facto standard for ocular hallucination management on the Data Sea.

The pings began sounding at 8:32 a.m. Shenandoah time and continued throughout the day. Eventually, the noise became so deafening, Natch had to adjust the program to ping once every hundred sales. As the night wore on, the BizWorks administrative program slowed to pings every thousand sales, then every ten thousand. And still the pings kept coming.

Horvil was ecstatic. "Can I juggle a mean bio/logic programming bar or what?" he crowed.

"Beginner's luck," Jara corrected him with a smirk.

Natch shook his head. "Luck," he said, staring intensely at the Shenandoah cityscape, "had nothing to do with it."