"Perfection," replied Natch, his anxiety now well under control. "What can I do for you?"
"You can tell me what your relationship is with this man." The Cooperative official held out her hand and flashed the same obnoxious picture of Bolbund that Horvil had been using in his charades.
Natch rolled his eyes. "Captain Bolbund," he moaned with distaste. "We've been scrapping over ROD customers for months now. He just can't accept that I'm beating him."
"Well, apparently he has gone over the line." The woman nodded towards the nearest viewscreen and began playing back a heated discussion between one of Natch's new customers and an ugly man with large ears. The video was obviously captured on the sly. Natch couldn't make out the words passing between the two, but they nearly came to blows before the encounter was over. "Do you know this man?" said the Cooperative woman, freezing the display and tapping one of the interrogator's floppy ears.
"No," Natch replied truthfully.
"This man has been passing himself off as a Meme Cooperative official," she said. Natch looked closer at the display and noticed that the imposter's uniform was nearly identical to that of the woman standing in his apartment. "He's been telling people that he's conducting an official investigation into `unethical ROD coding practices.' When we caught up with him, he told us that this Captain Bolbund has been paying him to put on this charade."
Natch was by now the very model of unconcern. "So what does this have to do with me?"
"Apparently, Bolbund specifically requested that his accomplice tell people that you were the one under investigation."
Natch masked his laughter by burying his face in his mug of nitro. You fumbling idiot! he chided Bolbund in his head. The key to the whole scam was to not mention any specific names or organizations whatsoever. After all, who could accuse Horvil of misrepresenting himself if he never made any representations in the first place?
"I don't know anything about it," Natch said at length to the Cooperative official.
The woman nodded perfunctorily. She had already made the mental leap to the next case. "The Cooperative will be in touch with you if we need any further information." She added another litany of bureaucratic language and was about to cut the multi connection when she had a sudden thought. "This Bolbund-what is he a `captain' of anyway?"
Natch shrugged. "I have no idea."
And that was that.
Natch never heard another word back from the Meme Cooperative about the investigation, but was pleased to discover via the drudges that Captain Bolbund had received a stiff fine and a ninety-day suspension of his license to sell programming code on the Data Sea. Ninety days was an aeon in this business. Natch breathed a sigh of relief, and not only because he had vanquished his competitor; now Horvil could drop his silly role-playing and Natch could do business in earnest. For months afterward, Natch kept waiting for a reprisal to come his way from the Cooperative or some other legislative body, but none ever appeared.
The final chapter of the Bolbund saga occurred the night of the Meme Cooperative visit, when Horvil took Natch on a whirlwind tour of the London bars to celebrate. Natch was still earning less in a month than the top fiefcorps paid their apprentices as a daily wage. But he had halted his downward slide. He had proven that, by sheer force of will, he could bring the world in line with the visions in his mind's eye. Natch never drank or used alcohol simulation programs, but was content to watch Horvil get pleasantly sauced. At the end of the night, Natch fired off a parting message to Captain Bolbund with Horvil's enthusiastic backing:
Please don't think I'm rude If I tell you YOU GOT SCREWED. Guess you finally met your match From now on, look out for NATCH.
15
Natch's challenges did not end there. When Bolbund spread the word about what had happened to him, the ROD coding community took it as a personal affront. ROD coders followed a loose, bohemian ethos where nothing was taken too seriously and thievery was allowed for sport but not for money. Natch's ruse-or at least Bolbund's version of it-violated those principles.
And so Natch had to endure several blatant attempts by third-rate programmers to sabotage his products, steal his customers, and savage his reputation. But this did not faze him. Natch quickly developed a reputation on the Data Sea for his humorless determination and his inability to accept defeat. Beat him once, and he would not stop until he had humiliated you three or four times in return-and fired a few warning shots at your friends and associates to boot.
Captain Bolbund returned to the business after his ninety-day suspension. But by this point, the ROD coding community had come to the consensus that the best way to deal with Natch was to leave him alone and grease his path up and out of the business altogether. An enterprising young woman in Sudafrica even made a profit out of it by selling a program called NatchWatch that kept other coders abreast of Natch's activities.
Bolbund decided to steer clear of the angry young programmer.
Natch spent another two years honing his skills in the ROD game. By the time Primo's took notice and tagged him as a rising star, Natch's services were in high demand among the elites. He had also acquired a long list of enemies, which was an even greater indicator of success as far as Natch was concerned. Nobody likes success but the successful, the ruthless financier Kordez Thassel had once said.
Eventually, Natch decided to move out of his cramped Angelos apartment and settle somewhere else. He chose the city of Shenandoah, whose coffers were overflowing with fiefcorp revenues and whose local L-PRACGs were among the most libertarian in the world. With another financial boost from Horvil, he could even afford a place that included its own private multi stream and a small garden of daisies off the living room.
But the money was still abysmal compared to the sums the capitalmen were tossing into the bio/logic fiefcorp sector every day. The ranks of the diss were thinning, and those of the fiefcorps were inflating. There was talk on the Data Sea of another Great Boom like the one that had preceded Marcus Surina's death.
Natch spent another year freelancing, taking on the occasional ROD but concentrating more on neurological software. As his profile rose, so did his prospects. Natch received multi requests and lunch invitations every week from capitalmen and channelers trying to get a sense of his future plans. They seemed to be competing with one another to see who could slip in the most dismissive reference to the Shortest Initiation. Many of the same fiefcorp masters who had tried to shanghai Natch into worthless apprenticeships a few years ago were now sugaring him with promises of large signing bonuses.
He even heard from a few groups in the bio/logics underground who promised him a fortune writing black code off the grid. The future lay not with fiefcorps and memecorps, they said, but with clandestine teams of programmers sponsored by rich creed organizations and lunar tycoons, programmers who were being paid to circumvent the restrictive laws of central government and stretch the boundaries of bio/logics.
Natch got into the habit of taking the tube out to the great sequoia forests and zigzagging from station to station for hours while he stared up at the trees and tried on alternative career paths like gloves.
"You've done really well with RODs," said Jara during one of her frequent consultations. "But isn't it time you set your sights a little higher?"
Horvil agreed. "I never thought I would be the one telling you to get some ambition," he said mockingly. "There's bigger targets out there, and a fuck of a lot more money!"