Multireal (60 page)

The entrepreneur's head felt bloated, too clogged with contradictions to respond properly. "But what good is it? Why would you want
to live multiple lives like that?"

"What good is it? What good is any technology?" Brone was getting too agitated for the chair to contain him, so he stood and leaned on
its back like a lectern. "Technology expands choice," he said. "It liberates us from cause and effect, just like Margaret promised. Don't you
remember her speech a couple of months ago? I remember every word
of it. What would our lives be like if we had made different choices? In the Age
of MultiReal, we will wonder no more-because we will be able to make many
choices. We will be able to look back at checkpoints in our lives and take alternate paths. We will wander between alternate realities as our desires lead us.

"Just imagine it! Two roads diverge in a wood. Why choose
between them when you can take both? You can spawn separate multi
projections to travel them and give each one a separate consciousness to
experience them. Who's to say you can't choose two different jobs, two
different companions, two different Vault accounts? And if one of these
lives leads to bad consequences-well, then wipe it out! MultiReal can
erase your memories, Natch, and the memories of those around you!
Don't tell me you've lived your entire life without regrets."

"Of course not," said Natch, "but-"

Brone abruptly yanked off his prosthetic arm and slammed it on
the table. All conversation in the cafe ceased. "Don't tell me you've never made a choice you wanted to take back," he snarled, his voice
brimming with sudden rage.

Awkward and embarrassed silence held sway in the room as
everyone watched the pale limb sitting on the wrought-iron table.
Natch took a sidelong glance at the middle-aged card players, who
were staring at him with open contempt. He doubted that the diss
knew the story of the Shortest Initiation, but clearly they understood
the inference of Brone's gesture. Natch cursed the bodhisattva silently.
How funny that his handicaps only seem to be an inconvenience when it suits
him, he thought. He remembered how Brone had used the limb to similar effect during their meeting last month.

The silence continued for another minute, and then finally
everyone turned back to their mugs of coffee as if by unspoken consensus. The bodhisattva reached over and quietly reattached his
appendage without a word.

"Listen," hissed Natch. "I see what you're trying to do, but this
Possibilities 2.0 would never work. You'd have to get governments to
rewrite laws. The Vault and the Data Sea engineers and Dr. Plugenpatch and who knows who else would have to buy into it."

"I never said it would be easy," replied Brone blithely, taking his
seat once more. His anger seemed to have dissolved as quickly as it had
appeared. "I never said it would happen overnight."

"But even if you do get everyone to agree," said Natch, "there's
something else you're not taking into account. Once one person uses
MultiReal to do two things at the same time, everyone else has to keep
track of those alternate realities too."

Brone shrugged. "So?"

"For process' preservation-think about the baseball example. Hit
a baseball two different ways, you've just doubled the number of alternate realities. Then for every hit, you've got an outfielder making two
different catches. Quadrupled. The umpire makes two different calls
for each catch. The guy on base runs or doesn't run.... This whole thing would spiral out of control in an instant. Sixty billion people creating alternate realities at the drop of a hat and banging them up
against each other? Fuck, where would you store all that data? How
would the computational system handle it? You give everyone the
ability to permanently double or triple realities-we'd get pummeled
all day long until our OCHREs gave out. We're getting bombarded
with infoquakes as it is."

The bodhisattva of Creed Thassel took a long, loud slurp of coffee.
He leaned back and hung his good arm over the back of his chair,
staring at Natch with eyes narrowed. "And do you think that's a coincidence?"

Natch felt a sudden fear grip his sternum. "You mean-"

Brone shook his head in befuddlement. "I can't believe I need to
explain this to you, after everything you've learned about Len Borda.
Borda knows that Possibilities 2.0 is within our grasp, Natch.
Remember, he's the one who funded the project in the first place. He
knows better than anyone what this program can do. He knows the
Data Sea can handle the load. So what better way to keep us from pursuing it than to frighten us?"

Natch remembered the explosion of darts at the Tul Jabbor Complex, the ferocious precision of the Defense and Wellness Council officers. Hundreds of darts striking him within his mind, hundreds of
merciless public executions, averted only through the magic of MultiReal. He remembered the shrewd visage of the high executive before
the demo at Andra Pradesh. Len Borda was a man who knew what he
was doing.

"After the first infoquake, what did Borda do?" said Brone, his
voice lowering in volume even as it increased in intensity. "He pressured the Prime Committee into giving him the authority to shut
down any bio/logic program on the Data Sea that crosses his path. Do
you think he wants to lose that power?

"He will. And soon.

"Because we can take down the Defense and Wellness Council,
Natch! We can bring government back into the hands of people's freely
chosen L-PRACGs, where it belongs. With a fully functioning MultiReal network in the hands of every man, woman, and child, the
Council will instantly become irrelevant. How could you possibly tyrannize people armed with multiple realities?

"Think of all the revolutions throughout history. Bloody, wasteful,
expensive, full of needless suffering. We can avoid all that, Natch!
With MultiReal, we can change the world without firing a single shot. A
perfect, bloodless revolution. An instant, irreversible gift of freedom to
humanity!"

Brone had begun to raise his voice again, to metamorphose into the
same zealot who had set the Thasselian devotees aflame last night. By
the time he finished his little speech, the bodhisattva was standing
once more and pounding his fist on the tabletop. The diss watched
with guarded expressions on their faces, but Natch would not make
the mistake of calling them indifferent again. These people were clearly
vested in Brone's success. They believed in the Revolution of Selfishness, and they were ready to fight for it.

"Look around you, Natch!" said the bodhisattva, sweeping his arm
in an arc at the makeshift cafe. "Multi connections are weak out here
in the diss cities. Council surveillance is a farce. The Meme Cooperative, the Prime Committee, and the drudges don't exist out here.

"We have everything we've ever dreamed of in Chicago! The flexibility to do whatever we want, to follow our ideas to their ultimate
conclusion, and fuck the rules! We have some of the best bio/logic engineers in the business at our disposal, and a network of anonymous
devotees spread throughout the world. And virtually unlimited
funding, courtesy of the creed.

"You'll have to disappear for a while, Natch. We'll wait until the
whole affair at the Tul Jabbor Complex has died down, until Len
Borda's infoquakes have gone into remission. Meanwhile, we'll be out here, carefully perfecting our code. And then, just when the world is
convinced you're dead and buried-when even Borda believes that
you've vanished for good-we'll strike! We'll release Possibilities 2.0
onto the Data Sea and bring humanity to the next stage of evolution."

Natch's head spun like a whirligig from one incoherent thought to
the next. Was this really what Margaret Surina had envisioned, really
what she had planned for? How did this differ from what Khann Frejohr had proposed? What would Serr Vigal say about this? Reeling
with ethical vertigo, he slumped down in his chair, ducked his head,
and clasped his hands behind his neck.

"So what if you're wrong?" he managed faintly. "What if Margaret
was wrong? What if those infoquakes aren't coming from Len Borda,
and MultiReal totally floods the computational system? Possibilities
1.0 was resource-intensive enough-Possibilities 2.0 is on a whole different scale altogether. Everything could break down. Billions of
people could die."

Brone sat back and folded his hands in his lap. The entrepreneur
looked at him only to find himself staring at the nacreous green
mechanical eye.

"Now you see the dilemma," he said. "If we don't act-if we
deliver MultiReal into the hands of the Defense and Wellness Council
-the carnage would be incalculable. The consequences? A totalitarian
regime without end. A regime that cannot be overthrown. And then
how many billions would die?"

39

Natch worked out a complicated system for collaborating on the
MultiReal code that evening. The Revolution of Selfishness notwithstanding, his stores of trust were still much too low for him to give
Brone unfettered access.

And so Natch spent most of the night studying the virtual castle
in MindSpace and partitioning it into logical subdivisions. It was a
fiendishly difficult task, considering there were so many alcoves of the
castle-no, entire wings-that Natch did not understand. He found
buried structures constructed with a queer logic that defied all conventional wisdom. The further Natch delved, the more surreal it became.
There were strange trapezoidal shapes and whimsical loop-de-loops
programmed with methods dating back to Par Padron's time, if not
further. There were subroutines that looked like the sloppy work of a
hive child and yet accomplished the impossible nonetheless. There
were repeating patterns, optical illusions, meta-referents to metareferents, echoes of genius or madness.

By the time the first devotee reeled down the stairs for the day,
Natch had put together a rudimentary system of collaboration. He
explained the whole thing to the group at their morning meeting.

The Thasselians would be allowed to work on MultiReal in teams
of three for no more than two hours at a time. Each team would be
given access to a different, mutually exclusive section of the castle.
Natch would supervise everyone's activities at all times. There would
be no discussing work with colleagues. The Thasselians would be
restricted to a limited set of bio/logic programming bars and hand gestures. And when Natch closed up the program for any reason whatsoever, all activity would cease immediately.

"If anybody violates any of these rules, I'm gone," announced the entrepreneur. "Permanently. No appeals, no arguments, no warnings.
Are we clear?"

A garden of PokerFaces bloomed on the devotees' faces to cover
their irritation. Billy Sterne, gave a supplicating look at Brone, which
the bodhisattva quickly stifled with an imperious look of his own

Natch knew perfectly well this was a ludicrous way to work. The
Thasselians could only make so much progress in such confined spaces,
and Natch could only accomplish so much himself without a fully
cooperative team. But it would have to suffice until Brone and his disciples had earned Natch's trust.

Brone didn't put up a jot of resistance. Instead he hopped onto one
of the nearby platforms and held his synthetic hand out palm down,
like a preacher blessing his congregation. "You heard the man," he
said. "Those are the rules of operation, and we're going to abide by
them in letter and spirit. I'm counting on all of you. Keep on your toes,
and keep each other compliant. Any questions?"

The devotees stood there mute, the very portrait of obedience.

"All right, Natch," said the bodhisattva, withdrawing a programming bar from his shoulder satchel and hefting it in his real hand.
"When do we start?"

Natch eyed his old hivemate coldly. Brone's forced cheerfulness
was really starting to burn him, and he relished the opportunity to
douse it altogether. "You don't start at all," said the entrepreneur. "I
still don't trust you. All you get to do is watch."