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Berilla.

    Jara stood in the atrium of the Meme Cooperative's administrative
headquarters. All the other governmental and quasi-governmental
agencies built their offices in Melbourne, under the imposing shadows
of the Prime Committee and the Defense and Wellness Council complexes. Not so the Cooperative, which chose the lonely orbital colony
of Patronell as its base of operations for no reason Jara could discern.
    The building followed the same bland architectural recipe that all
bureaucratic buildings used these days. Start with a base of stretched
stone and flexible glass to provide that chic curved effect. Throw in a
clump of rice-paper walls to show solidarity with the past. Add impos sibly high ceilings. Coat every available surface with viewscreens, and
auction off the advertising space to defray construction costs. Mix in a
crowd of thousands. The result: instant nausea.

    But Jara was not there to study architecture. She was there to do
the right thing. She was there to report Natch to the Meme Cooperative and stop this insanity before someone got hurt.
    The very idea was absurd, and it grew more ridiculous with each
step she took. Who are you going to tell? And what are you going to tell
than?
    Jara didn't know; she just knew she had to tell someone. She tamped
down that tiny voice inside suggesting she use the information as
leverage to get out of her apprenticeship contract. No, I'm not just doing
this for myself I haven't sunk to Natch's level yet. Natch's plan wasn't just
dangerous to the capitalmen who had grown fat off the fiefcorp boom,
or the degenerate fiefcorpers like Natch and her old boss Lucas Sentinel, people Jara would just as soon see destitute. The plan also made
a mockery of the Primo's rating system that had served the public for
seventy years. People trusted Primo's to uncover shoddy programsprograms that did not obey Plugenpatch specifications, programs that
could theoretically overload bio/logic systems and cause fatalities.
Primo's was not perfect by any means. Its interpreters could be petty
and inaccurate and just plain spiteful. But who else was there to turn
to, really?
    If Primo's can be undermined, thought Jara, then what in the world can
you depend on?
    The fiefcorp analyst wasn't sure where her feet were taking her, but
now she discovered they were heading towards a department called the
Fraudulent Fiefcorp Practices Division. She could see the office now,
just past the viewscreen hawking a program called Feminine Mystique
242.37a. Natch's fiefcorp had received its share of warnings from this
office before, and Jara had walked these halls more than once to plead
the company's case before an arbitration board. She could have filed a complaint from home, of course, but this was the only way if she
wanted to remain anonymous. Without proof that the petitioners were
real people, the office would be flooded with data agents from dishonest fiefcorps.

    Judging by the long line of multi projections, there were plenty of
disgruntled consumers willing to put in the extra effort. Jara scanned
the queue and discovered a dozen people who had carefully scrubbed
their public profiles to protect their anonymity. She herself had taken
this prudent step before opening the multi connection to Patronell;
anyone who pinged the public directories with Jara's image would see
her name as Cassandra and her locality as Agamemnon's Palace. She
doubted anyone here would get the joke.
    A fine dust of boredom settled on the petitioners. Every minute or
two, the line would shuffle forward. The silence of strangers, the doldrums of public spaces.
    Forty minutes later, Jara reached the head of the line. An incoming
message welcomed her to the Meme Cooperative and offered a map to
guide her through the office to her designated inspector. She took a
deep breath and dove into the labyrinth of cubicles.
    "Come in, come in," urged the caseworker when she finally reached
his cube.