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.'
3. THE PHOENIX PROJECT
16
Merri sat on Natch's chair-and-a-half and watched the fiefcorp master make frantic circles through the garden. When he started, he was treading on turf, but as their conversation absorbed more of his attention, he gradually strayed into the patch of daisies. Soon he was carelessly stepping on flower petals and tracking dirt onto the carpet.
'So in another eighteen months, it'll be ...' Natch stopped and squinted, as if the future were a distant object hovering outside the window.
'May,' replied Merri.
'It'll be May,' continued Natch. 'That's right. So if we extend your contract until then and your shares stay on target, then I expect they'll be worth-this....' He waved his hand at the viewscreen, mutating the psychedelic Tope painting into a more prosaic spreadsheet. A sizable boldfaced number sat in the bottom-right corner of the screen. 'And that's a conservative estimate. Now that we've hit number one on Primo's, it's only going to go up. So how's this figure suit you?'
Merri gave a slight nod, but Natch could see she had some reservations. Not over money, he was fairly certain; even in this economy, she was not likely to get a better compensation package anywhere else. No, it probably had something to do with the swirled black-and-white logo prominently displayed on her breast pocket, the insignia of a Creed Objectivv truthteller.
Natch gave the woman a long appraising stare while she read over the apprenticeship contract one more time. Merri might have been Jara's diametric opposite. Her large frame dwarfed Jara's, though it did not quite reach Horvil-sized proportions. She had blonde features that spoke of Nordic ancestry and a demeanor both easy and reserved. Over the past six months, there had been times when Natch felt like slap ping that pious look right off Merri's face-but for process' preservation, one could get only so angry at a woman who possessed such an encyclopedic knowledge of the bio/logics world.
'You're concerned about the workload,' said a voice on the opposite side of the room. Merri turned to face Serr Vigal, who had been hovering quietly in the shadows like a spook. Natch hadn't been quite sure whether the neural programmer was even paying attention.
'Well, partly,' conceded Merri with a sidelong glance at Natch. 'But I'm also not sure how comfortable I feel being a channel manager. I was trained for bio/logic analysis, you know.'
Natch faced the window and scowled. He was not about to give up such a precious asset as a channel manager who had taken the Objective truthtelling oath. Whatever the reality was, people believed that honest salespeople sold better products. 'This is a small fiefcorp, Merri. Everyone gets to do a little bit of everything around here. Shit, you can even grab a pair of programming bars and take on some of Horvil's workload, for all I
