Infoquake by David Louis Edelman Page B

company as Vigal's
muse. The very sight of her fierce blue eyes inspired flights of fancy,
flights that glided Vigal over distant mathematical lands few had seen.
And yet, one touch of her hand on his shoulder was enough to ground
him and bring a sense of direction to his wandering intellect.
    The memecorp began to experience great success. Soon, Serr Vigal
had become one of the world's pre-eminent neural programmers, a fixture on the scientific lecture circuit, and a much-sought-after expert on
brainstem issues. The other apprentices in the company suspected that
Vigal and Lora were lovers, but they looked at the company's accomplishments and decided to give their master some leeway.
    Lora frequently accompanied Vigal to scientific conferences and
fundraising pitches. One month, Vigal sent her to the remote colony
of Furtoid to prepare for such a conference. Two days later, the entire
colony was quarantined with a sudden epidemic. Whether the virus
was deliberately engineered or simply an evolutionary fluke was never
determined.
    Portions of Furtoid remained quarantined for months. Four hundred forty-seven people died in those sections of the colony.
    Including Lora.

    Vigal went into a deep depression when he heard the news. The future
had seemed so bright and his own ambitions so limitless. He was just
starting to notice the void in his heart that men often discover in their
thirties, a void that neither career nor accomplishment can fill. Lora
had filled that void for Vigal. Now that she was gone, life seemed bleak and purposeless.

    But when Vigal arrived at distant Furtoid to claim her body, he
had a surprise waiting for him. Lora had left behind a child, ex utero,
at the colony's hiving and birthing facility. The child had been there
in the gestation chambers since soon after conception. Rumors
abounded that Lora had taken a lover, but the hive had been unable to
locate a father.
    Suddenly, Vigal found himself standing on Lora's track, looking
straight ahead at that long stretch of open country after the scheduled
stop at career and before the end of the line. The distance seemed
unimaginably vast. To Vigal, it did not seem to be part of the natural
order of things for a man to travel such a long distance alone.
    When the boy emerged from gestation, the neural programmer
had himself appointed legal guardian. Then he transferred the child to
a hive facility back on Earth, in Omaha.
    He named the child Natch.

    Many years later, Natch would say that his greatest skill was his knack
for acquiring enemies. He was only half joking.
    Natch made his first enemies before the age of five. He had not
learned to speak until he was almost three-an eternity in an age of
bio/logics-and this set him apart from the other children. The hive's
larger boys took notice of his solitude and quiet demeanor, his propensity for sitting alone in corners. They decided to examine this odd
child the only way they knew how: with their fists.
    One morning, Natch emerged from his room and found five of his
hivemates waiting. They were older boys, uglier than he, and sullen
since birth. Natch instinctively knew what was about to happen and
felt a split-second of astonishment. What did I do wrong? he thought.
Then the boys jumped him. The next few minutes were a tumult of
kicks, punches and scratches that left Natch reeling on the floor in
pain.
    He limped back into his room, having learned a valuable lesson:
Always be on your guard, because the universe needs no reasons to
inflict punishment.
    Perhaps the boys were merely looking for a cringe or a whimper of
fear, something that would validate their nascent theories of power and
weakness. But Natch refused to give them this satisfaction. The next
morning, he emerged from his room as always and marched without
hesitation towards the waiting band of thugs. They gave him plenty of
opportunity to flee, but the stubborn child refused to veer off his determined