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.'
14
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
