He stared at the canopy of leaves many kilometers up in the sky. It looked impossibly distant. But then he thought about the jump program, the way it swirled and swooped in MindSpace with impossible grace. The sheer number of its tendrils, its connections. The geometric shapes that formed mathematical constellations beyond human perception.
Natch was confident. He started the jump program, felt programming instructions flowing off the Data Sea and into the data recepta- Iles built into his very bones. Felt the tingling of OCHRE systems interpreting the code and routing commands to the proper leg muscles.
He Jumped.
Natch propelled himself right-foot-forward in an elegant arc towards the sky. The code was grounded in one of the classic moves of natural law: the jump, a movement humanity had worked out through a hundred thousand years of constant iteration. Yet the program bore the indelible signatures of an artificial product: the curl of the toes at mid-leap, the triumphant arching of the back, the pleasing whistle where no whistle would otherwise exist. The sky drew nearer and nearer, the ground now but a distant memory. Breaking free of the redwoods was already a foregone conclusion, and Natch had set his sights on still loftier goals. Jump 225 would take him not only above the redwoods, but up into the clouds and out of natural law altogether. He would achieve freedom from the tedious rules that had governed human existence since the beginning of time. Down would no longer follow up. Autumn would no longer follow summer. Death would no longer follow life. The jump 225 program would accomplish all this, and more.
Then, just when his straining fingertips struggled for purchase on the twigs hanging off the highest branches-when he could feel the feathery touch of the leaves-when he had just gotten his first whiff of pure, clean, unspoiled sky-the inevitable descent began.
Natch could see himself falling in slow motion, as if he were looking down from the pinnacle of the tallest redwood. He could see his arms flailing and feel his lungs bursting every second of the way down. The whistle of the jump had become the screech of gravity's avenging angel. What mere seconds ago had been a triumphant jump now turned into a horrible, agonizing Fall. How could he have been so blind? How could he not have seen this?
This was worse than not having jumped in the first place: the force of the impact would surely crush him, flatten him, destroy him. And still he accelerated. Falling so fast now that he would actually crash through the ground, down through the pulverizing rock, down to the center of the earth, where nothing could ever rise again. He yelled his defiance. He shook his fists. He railed at the trees, reaching out in a vain effort to pull them down with him.
A split-second before impact, Natch awoke.
2. THE SHORTEST INITIATION
8
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.
