Free Infoquake by David Louis Edelman Page B

Town. Cities that yearned for the greatness of antiquity, cities whose local governments could be easily bought.

    This change in the political landscape did not escape the attention
of the old nation-states. The old governments might have been dilapidated and their halls of power decaying, but they still had plenty of
resources at their disposal to fight this territorial encroachment. They
vested much of their power in a centralized Prime Committee. The
Committee turned around and bestowed ultimate martial authority on
a single Defense and Wellness Council. Crusading high executives of
the Council like Tul Jabbor and Par Padron made reining in the
excesses of the bio/logic entrepreneurs their top priority.
    Thus the battle was joined. Society split along ideological fault
lines: governmentalists who favored central authority versus libertarians who sought power for local civic groups. By the time Natch's fiefcorp ascended to number one on Primo's, this dichotomy had come to
seem like the natural order of things.
    Hundible's descendants grew fiercely protective of their fortunes.
Not only were they fending off the Committee and the Council, but
they were also under siege by the greatest enemy of all: time. The
bio/logic entrepreneurs knew that theirs was not the immutable
wealth of the lunar land tycoons. Their money was not a tangible thing
like terraformed soil that they could stick their hands into. No, for
better or worse, the fates of the bio/logic entrepreneurs were tied to the
bio/logic markets.
    And markets, like all living things, are mortal.

    Natch's mother Lora was fourteen when the Economic Plunge of the
310s hit.
    Lora was schooled in the best hives, with the children of important
diplomats and capitalmen. Her proctors were crisp, disciplined citizens who saw the hive as a Petri dish in which to experiment with the latest academic fashions. Lora and her hivemates yo-yoed between pedagogical theories, learning much about politics but very little about
government, finance, engineering or programming.

    But what did it matter? When Lora looked into the future, she saw
nothing but the comfortable track her parents had laid out for her,
with scheduled stops at initiation, loss of virginity, career, companionship and motherhood. There would be plenty of time along the way to
pick up any other skills she needed.
    In the meantime, Lora worked diligently to become a Person of
Quality. She developed a keen fashion sense and an eye for good
beauty-enhancement programming. She sharpened her social skills at
the regular charity balls held in the Creed Elan manors. She dipped her
toes in the Sigh, that virtual network of sensuality, and learned a thing
or two about the pleasures of the flesh. And when holidays rolled
around, she retreated to her cavernous family mansion to dally with
servants whose parents had not been blessed with the money for a hive
education.
    Then, one gloomy spring day, Lora and her hivemates awoke to
find all the proctors riveted to news feeds off the Data Sea. Marcus
Surina has died, they said. An accident in the orbital colonies. A few of the
proctors wept openly.
    For a while, Surina's death seemed like a distant event that had
little connection to the girl's carefully structured hive existence: a
supernova in a remote galaxy, visible only through powerful refractive
lenses. Surina had been the master of TeleCo, a big and powerful company. He was a direct descendant of Sheldon Surina, the inventor of
bio/logics. His death had been a terrible tragedy. What else was there
to say?
    But from that day forward, everything changed.
    Lora's friends began checking out of the hive and disappearing,
nobody knew where. One by one, Lora's parents cut back on subscriptions to the programs that gave her eyes that china-doll sparkle and her hair that reflective luster. The servants were let go. Nameless fears
escaped from the demesne of adulthood and roamed the hive at night