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.
