Infoquake by David Louis Edelman

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