'Vigal's off to another one of his seminars in Beijing,' said Natch. 'Effects of Orbital Colony Gravitational Fields on Neural Pathways, or something like that.'
'Nothing stops a scientific conference,' muttered Jara.
'And I'm right here,' said Merri. The blonde channel manager had apparently snuck in while nobody was paying attention. Merri had taken a seat near Natch's side of the table and projected a set of notes visible on the dark wood in front of her. Her penmanship was crisp and perfect, something that gave Jara an inexplicable pang of jealousy.
'So what's everyone waiting for?' cried Natch in a sudden fit of pique. 'Sit the fuck down.'
Natch planted himself in the cushioned leather chair at the head of the table and surveyed his four apprentices with a barely suppressed smirk. A snapshot of the Council troops tromping through the Surina courtyard loomed large on the window behind him; Jara realized she must have accidentally left open one of her morning news stories. The four apprentices gazed expectantly back and forth between the photo and their fiefcorp master. Margaret Surina, the Defense and Wellness Council, investor meetings, infoquakes, MultiReal-hadn't the time finally come for Natch to let them know what was going on?
The entrepreneur turned to Jara with pronounced matter-of-factness, his face a riddle. 'Why don't you start us off with an analysis of the latest sales figures,' he said.
Jara shrugged. Sales figures? Who can think of sales at a time like this? But she knew Natch, and had prepared a brief analysis this morning anyway. She snapped her fingers briskly, causing a three-dimensional chart to hover over the surface of the conference table. Lines in primary colors raced one another to see which could climb to the top right corner the quickest.
The analyst indicated an uncharacteristic dip at the end of a green line labeled MENTAL INDEXX 39. 'Looks like one of our programs took a hit yesterday,' she said. 'An 18 percent drop in the last twentyfour hours. It must have suffered a few glitches during the infoquake.' She gave Horvil the evil eye. 'Billy Sterno's DataReorg 55c had a 43 percent jump in sales during the same period.'
Horvil sat back confidently, measuring the table as a possible resting spot for his feet. 'Glitches happen. Mental Indexx 40'11 bring 'em back into the fold.'
As she crunched the numbers, Merri plucked at the chart lines like guitar strings. 'I see there's a silver lining here as well.'
Jara smiled. 'Yeah, I see it too.... It looks like the Patel Brothers had a few glitches of their own, and Primo's took note.' The chart shifted from sales figures to Primo's scores. If anything, the incline of the race became even steeper. 'So even though we lost market share to Billy Sterno, we gained ground against the Patels on Primo's. Looks like we're back up to number three!'
Horvil broke out in a spirited cheer, which Merri and Benyamin echoed with a pair of quiet grins. Natch seemed oddly oblivious, a mystery that Jara did not feel like pursuing. Maybe this info quake was the end of the whole thing, she thought. Maybe all this hassle will just go away, and my last ten months will be business as usual.
'Okay, so if we look at the big picture, what've we got?' said Horvil.
'82.4 percent gross increase in revenues so far this year,' stated Jara, 'most of that after we hit number one on Primo's. And only a 17 percent increase in expenditures.' She banished the bar chart to datalimbo with a wave of her hand. 'I'd say we're doing pretty well.'
A look of concern slowly rippled across Merri's face. 'Only a 17 percent increase in spending-how is that possible?' The soft-spoken channel manager began counting on her fingers. 'In the last week alone, we've bought new bio/logic programming bars ... analysis algorithms ... these conference rooms ... not to mention hiring a new apprentice ...' She nodded her head towards Benyamin, who merely sat with a bland smile on his face. Merri took a deep breath. 'I was hoping, Natch, that you might be able to explain some of this.'
Natch raised one eyebrow. A private in-joke with his invisible audience. 'What do you want me to explain?'
'Well, for one thing, I don't see any of this showing up on the books....'
'Jara does the books, not you.'
'Yes, I know, but still-'
Jara had had enough. Her longed-for ten months of peace and quiet suddenly imploded. She lodged her left elbow firmly on the table and used it as a base to launch an accusing finger at the fiefcorp master. 'Come on, Natch! First you start fundraising for a product we don't make, and then out of the blue you start spending money we don't have. You totally ignore the Primo's ratings. And now you've gotten us involved in this whole mess with Margaret and the infoquake. You've put us off long enough, Natch! What the fuck is going on?'
She had unleashed enough verbal thunder to send any of the other apprentices scampering for cover, but Natch remained unmoved. He gave a sidelong glance to Horvil, but the engineer was gazing at Jara with dumb awe.
'All right then.' Natch's eyes glittered. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head, as if he needed a cradle for all that excess brainpower. 'In a little over twelve hours, I will officially dissolve the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. We are getting out of the regular bio/logic programming business. Tomorrow, you will all be apprentices in a new fiefcorp devoted exclusively to MultiReal.'
His announcement was greeted by a stunned silence. Jara had a protest half-formed in her mouth but strangled it when she remembered the portability clause in their contracts, a clause which essentially gave Natch the right to pass off their apprenticeships to whomever he chose. She looked at Merri and Horvil and saw their faces meld into bland expressions of unconcern, a telltale sign that they had both flipped on PokerFace 83.4b. Benyamin closed his eyes and ducked his head as if he had just been punched in the gut.
'When did you decide all this?' said Jara weakly.
'Yesterday.'
The silence remained. A pigeon fluttered by the window with a loud broo.
'Now, I know you're all getting impatient with just room and board,' Natch continued, touching his fingertips in front of his face. 'Your shares all mature this year, and some of you are thinking of cashing out. So I'm prepared to sweeten the deal. Yes, that includes you, Ben. Cash out your shares today and I'll release you from your apprenticeship with no penalty ... or sign on to a two-year contract with the new fiefcorp for ten times the compensation, plus bonuses. The offer stands until midnight tonight, Shenandoah time.'
Jara felt a wave of emotion crash over her. A week ago, she had wanted nothing more than to be set free from Natch's shackles, to run as far as possible and not look back. She remembered that carefree Meme Cooperative official in Melbourne, sitting at his desk all day, his mind adrift in some SeeNaRee fantasyland. For process' preservation, I could use a job like that, she thought. A nice, dull desk job of looking at datamaps and bar charts sounds perfect right about now.
But then suddenly Jara thought of her old proctor from the hive, the one who had stimulated the governmentalist ideals of her youth and negotiated the surrender of her virginity while he was at it. Had he been somewhere in that crowd last night, as spellbound by Margaret's lilting voice as the rest of them? Would the bodhisattva's words have filled him with hope, or would he have some cynical counterpoint to make?
And what would he think of Jara now, almost twenty years down the road, ready to throw aside the remainder of her ambitions and slip into a SeeNaRee stupor?
Horvil interrupted her reverie with a loud clearing of the throat. 'So what's gonna happen to all those programs we've been slaving over?' he said. 'NiteFocus and EyeMorph and Mental Indexx and the rest of them?'
The engineer might as well have asked about the fate of an obsolete set of bio/logic programming bars. 'They'll be sold off,' Natch replied with a shrug. 'You didn't think we were going to upgrade them forever, did you? We won't have time to maintain those old programs, and the money they generate is nothing compared to what MultiReal is going to pull in.'
Across the table, Jara could see a little piece of Horvil die at Natch's pronouncement. The programs he had weaned and nurtured from RODs and hive projects into Primo's powerhouses would soon belong to the graveyard of history. Qubits of information stranded on some forgotten atoll on the backwaters of the Data Sea.
'Natch, let me be honest here,' said Horvil, a tinge of anger clouding the engineer's voice. 'I really had no idea what Margaret was talking about yesterday.'
