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
