The simulation vanished. Margaret was once again alone onstage.
"We may never know what caused the Minds and their Keepers to strike the first blow in the Autonomous Revolt," she said. "Were the Minds acting in collusion to exterminate the human race, as some have suggested? Or was the sabotage of Yu a power grab by the Ecumenical Council of New Alamo? Did the cloned soldiers of the Allahu Akbar Emirates have an agenda of their own?
"The ultimate truth lay buried beneath the rubble of eight continuous years of war, along with the empty burned-out husks of the Autonomous Minds.
"Humanity's cult of the god had ended.
"The consequences of our ancestors' folly? Nearly two billion dead and the great nation-states of antiquity left in ruins.
"During the Big Divide which followed, the elaborate technologies of our ancestors were gradually forgotten-forgotten, or sabotaged by Luddite mobs intent on destroying all that the Minds had touched. The triumphant engineering works of our ancestors gradually fell into disrepair. New Alamo descended into murderous fundamentalism, the Allahu Akbar Emirates disintegrated, the Chinese Territories and the Democratic American Collective vanished into irrelevance."
A panoply of still pictures now floating about the auditorium, portraits of an age. Skeletal cities. Haggard mobs with makeshift uniforms marching through city streets. Smoke rising from pyres fueled by the gnarled carcasses of inventors and scientists. Demagoguery, fanaticism, starvation. The corpse of a child.
Margaret continued: "And so the surviving nations bowed down before the whims of the mob. Strict anti-technology laws appeared around the globe. The innovators of the age had to present their discoveries on bended knee to the moralists and functionaries and politicians who used the fears of the masses to cling to power. Works of the ancient programmers and physicists moldered in decaying books and unreadable discs written on dead machines.
"Science was on the cusp of extinction. Humanity had fallen into its own death spiral.
"My ancestor Sheldon Surina changed all that."
As Margaret paused for breath, Jara surveyed the crowd. The attendance had settled at 738 million multi projections, if the auditorium figures were to be believed, and who knew how many billions more were watching or listening remotely. Whatever the number, Jara had never seen such a mass of people so mesmerized before. The only sound to be heard throughout the arena was the quiet susurration of shifting fabric and shuffling feet.
Jara looked around and noticed that the Defense and Wellness Council troops remained aloof. No hint of purpose crossed their placid brows.
"Sheldon Surina," intoned Margaret. "The man whom we honor here tonight. The man who would have been four hundred years old today." The Father of Bio/Logics himself floated over her head, a scrawny man with a big nose standing in mid-speech with his arm extended. "My ancestor stood before the proctors at the Gandhi University here in Andra Pradesh-just across the courtyard, in fact-and declared, There is no problem that we cannot solve through scientific innovation. Moments later, he turned this statement into a mission for humanity: There is no problem that we should not solve through scientific innovation.
"Think of the courage that required! Think of telling a world decimated by technology and hobbled by superstition-a world ruled by the draconian edicts of the Ecumenical Council and the crazed prophecies of the New Jesuses-think of telling that world that science could solve all its problems!
"Sheldon Surina did.
"Had he stopped there, the man we have come to know as the Father of Bio/Logics might have ended up just another martyr to the ideals of science. But Sheldon Surina did not just say we should look to science-he came down into the real world and showed us how. He invented the discipline of bio/logics. He designed the first programs to automate the care of the human body. He created the industry that conquered the virus, the industry that tamed the brain, the industry that prolonged life and reengineered birth. All without MindSpace, without bio/logic programming bars, without the Data Sea as we know it today.
"Most of all, Sheldon Surina renewed our faith in the powers of humanity. He taught us that scientific enlightenment does not descend to us from without, but grows from within. He showed us we did not have to forfeit our intellects to Autonomous Minds or suffer from the ignorance of Luddism-instead, we could use technology to empower ourselves. Sheldon Surina's words and ideals were the beginning of the Reawakening, that great age of progress and prosperity which continues to this day.
"Of course, progress did not come without peril. The founder of this house spent many years of his life in hiding from the Texan governments that had sworn to destroy him. He watched his friend and colleague Henry Osterman, founder of the OCHRE Corporation, slowly succumb to bitterness and paranoia. He spent his own latter days combating the forces of tyranny which sought to dominate the world with their ruthless and narrow-minded oppression. A fight that continues to this day."
Margaret's allusion to the Defense and Wellness Council did not go over the audience's head. A low murmur snaked through the crowd. Jara saw one of the white-robed men near her break into a wry grin.
"All things come to an end, and Sheldon Surina's life was no exception. But after Sheldon's death, the Surinas did not shirk their duty to humanity. Through the Center for Historic Appreciation here in Andra Pradesh, through Creed Surina and through the Surina family investments in bio/logics, we have continued to serve humanity's quest for progress and enlightenment.
"And Sheldon Surina was not the last visionary to emerge from Andra Pradesh.
"Six years after his death, Prengal Surina published the Universal Law of Physics, which unlocked the potential of every rock, tree, and blade of grass to serve as a quantum energy source. His work freed us from the dictates of our surroundings, the limitations of our resources, the oppression of ancient Einsteinian physics. Without Prengal Surina and his Universal Law, an event like this one today would not be possible. Multi projections would be a pipe dream, and subaether communication would be an arcane tool of academics.
"In recent years, my father Marcus took up the family's mantle of service. Marcus Surina had spent many years denying his heritage. But when he finally took his rightful place as the heir to the Surina family, he pioneered bold new approaches to teleportation technology. Many believe that, had he not suffered a tragic death in the orbital colonieshad he been given the opportunity to fulfill his mission-Marcus would have brought cheap and efficient teleportation to the world, and we would live in a better place."
Above Margaret's head, the stern visage of Prengal Surina shifted to that of Marcus in all his Adonic beauty. Jara stared at the dead man and felt the same tangled knot of emotions his face always stirred up. Few had inspired so much hope. Few had left so much devastation.
"And so, what have we, the Surinas, contributed to the world?" Margaret continued.
"I believe Sheldon Surina and his descendants have remained true to the highest ideals of humanity. We have used scientific advancement to improve the human condition. We have provided choices and expanded opportunities. We have enlightened the mind instead of constricting it. And it is in that spirit that I stand before you today."
Margaret paused and took a few dramatic steps forward. "Citizens of earth, Luna, Mars and the colonies-Islanders and Pharisees-I stand here on the occasion of Sheldon Surina's four hundredth birthday to announce the ultimate fulfillment of his ambitions."
All at once, several hundred million spectators took a sharp intake of breath. Inside herself, Jara could feel a gathering hurricane of emotion, wrath and hope that threatened to sweep out of control. She could feel the clouds gathering throughout the arena, and for a moment it seemed as if the hopes and dreams of humanity had suddenly coalesced around one blue-eyed woman in Andra Pradesh.
The Council officers began to shift nervously on their feet. Dozens of dartguns and disruptors surreptitiously crept off the floor and into the soldiers' hands.
Margaret Surina continued, her
face devoid of emotion.
"The Surina Perfection Memecorp is preparing to unveil one of the most important scientific breakthroughs since the dawn of the Reawakening-possibly the most important advance in the history of humanity.
"It is the ultimate freedom.
"It is the ultimate empowerment.
"It is the path to complete control over our destinies.
"The Surina Perfection Memecorp has discovered a technology to create multiple realities, and we call this technology MultiReal."
And with that, the storm broke.
It began with a low rumbling of information, a mental thunder the likes of which Jara had never experienced. She could actually sense, somewhere off in the distance, a disturbance in the Data Sea's flow. Data agents converging on some far-away point in the informational topography.
Then there was a sudden eruption.
Jara could hear random soundbites echoing through her head, echoes of Margaret's words spoken in a thousand different voices: Ultimate freedom. Complete control over our destinies. Fulfillment of the Sarinas' ambitions. MultiReal. This split-second of chaos was nearly enough to make her lose her balance. The analyst quickly fired up UnDizzify 93 and, by instinct, reached for something to steady herself against-only to discover that the entire crowd was swaying with vertigo. Everywhere Jara looked, spectators were blinking in confusion at the sudden blast of cerebral white noise.
Black code, she thought.
Jara instantly shot off a request to check the security of her possessions. Her Vault accounts, her dismal apartment, the databanks holding all her programming and personal information. Everything seemed fine, but with the deluge of incoming messages and Confiden- tialWhispers washing in from every side, it was hard to tell. The Vault was spouting off warnings and informational bulletins by the dozens, followed in close succession by scores of redundant updates from the Meme Cooperative, the Prime Committee, her L-PRACG. Horvil, Merri, Vigal and her sister sent her two messages apiece asking if she was okay.
Jara closed her eyes and tried to screen out the chaos. She could only imagine the computational mayhem caused by half a billion multi projections spraying billions of simultaneous requests at the Data Sea.
Things were no better when she opened her eyes.
The Council officers were on the move. Men and women in white robes advanced on the stage with grim looks on their faces, dart rifles drawn. A handful of disruptor blasts sent multi projections flickering out into nothingness, clearing a path to the front of the arena. The rest of the crowd began scattering this way and that in confusion. Meanwhile, the Surina security forces had drawn their rifles as well and had formed a rapidly tightening circle around the stage. Several dozen guards on both sides lay twitching on the ground with black code darts jutting from their torsos.
Unbelievably, Margaret was still speaking. Either none of the darts was flying in her direction, or none of them had managed to hit her yet. Her face was ghosted over with panic, yet she stood firm and tried to make herself heard over the tumult.
"The creation of multiple realities," she said. "It sounds like a tale we tell children in the hive. But soon we will consider multiple realities as common as OCHREs, as practical as bio/logic programs, and as necessary as oxygen.
"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.
"The ever-changing flux of MultiReal will become reality.
"Just as bio/logics freed us from the tyranny of the body ... just as the Universal Law of Physics freed us from the tyranny of nature ... just as teleportation freed us from the tyranny of distance ... so MultiReal will free us from the tyranny of cause and effect itself.
"Throughout human history, we have been striving towards greater freedom. Freedom is our destiny and our birthright. And in the age to come-in the Age of MultiReal-we will all be empowered to pursue our individual freedoms however we choose.
"And I say this:
"Only when we can truly choose our own destinies will we be completely free."
Jara could not say for certain whether or not Margaret had finished her speech. Because at that moment the Surina security guards elbowed their way onstage, a mere two steps ahead of the Defense and Wellness Council troops. Jara watched with mouth agape as a whiterobed officer raised her dartgun at Margaret Surina and prepared to fire.
But then an enormous man with a blonde ponytail swooped out of nowhere and wrapped his arms around the bodhisattva, shielding her from harm. My goodness, thought Jara, is that an Islander? The Council officer aimed her weapon high and let off a warning shot. Within seconds, the man had whisked Margaret through the stage door. A number of Surina functionaries quickly scrambled after her.
Among those hustling backstage, Jara noted with slack-jawed amazement, was a certain lean fiefcorp master whose wolfish grin she would have recognized anywhere.
4
THE SURINA/NATCH
MULTIREAL
F I EECORP
Dozens of kilometers above the earth's surface, a cluster of hydrogen atoms danced in a copper tube. After several billion oscillations, the hydrogen maser clock declared that a second had passed.
It was midnight.
The news passed via subaether to a processing station run by the Meme Cooperative. The station-itself a small metallic box also floating in geostationary orbit-consulted its internal tables and determined that the time had come to spawn a data newt for the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp. The newt was born mere picoseconds after midnight.
A data newt did not need sixteen years of hive education to fathom its purpose. The mother station had stamped a destination into the newt's very atomic structure, a destiny to fulfill. But it was impossible to know what paths the data structure would need to take or what obstacles it would face along the way. And so the newt was endowed with a level of autonomy and given all the logical tools it would need to carry out its duties. Internal schedules, communication routines, self-replication instructions, maps of the quantum universe. Then the mother station ushered the newt out into the world.
The newt accessed its internal schedule and noted that its first stop was a set of spatial coordinates in a nearby processing station. Upon its arrival, the station challenged the newt to state its credentials and destination. The newt consulted its fore table and found the answers to these perplexing questions: Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, BizWorks 139.5f, Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp. Satisfied with the newt's response, the station directed its microscopic visitor towards a collection of static information belonging to the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp.
A rote conversation ensued. Was BizWorks 139.5f listed as an acceptable expense in the Natch Fiefcorp data stores? Yes, it was. Did the unique identifying code stored in the newt's memory correspond to the one expected by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp? Yes, it did. Was the price quoted by PulCorp agreeable to its customer? Yes, it was.
The answer triggered an innate response in the data newt. The newt replicated itself, stamped its clone with a subset of the required tools, and waited patiently as the newcomer sped off to the Vault. Billions of newts had already queued up at the nearby Vault processing center to retrieve and deposit payments large and small, but there was no disagreement or jockeying for position in a world of indelible, unalterable rules. The data representative of the Pierre Loget Fiefcorp slid into line in its prescribed position. After a few nanoseconds, the newt reached the front of the queue and presented the Vault agent with its transaction: Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, Pierre Ulyanich Loget Fiefcorp, 0.03 credits. The Vault agent made all the appropriate inquiries and finally responded with a credit authorization. What happened to the credit authorization after that was of no concern to the cloned newt; it reported a transaction summary back to its mast
er and returned to the mother station.
With a credit authorization in its databanks, the data newt at the Natch Fiefcorp data stores determined it was ready to proceed. It consulted the fore table to look for its Defense and Wellness Council-sanctioned processing precedence, and lined up behind OCHRE transmissions, geosynchrons, Prime Committee statistical algorithms, and agents of L-PRACG taxation. Finally, the newt arrived at the front of the line and completed the task for which it had been born: the recording of an order by the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp for a replacement part on one of Horvil's bio/logic programming bars.
All that remained was housecleaning. The newt spawned another clone to relay the order back to the mother station. Meanwhile, the newt consulted its own aft table for special instructions on completing a business transaction. The L-PRACG with jurisdiction over the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp dictated that all programs must log a record of their activities in the fiefcorp's data stores. This task done, the newt performed a quick self-examination to see if it had lost data integrity or left any stray bits of information in the fiefcorp's holdings or needed to do any unusual acts of maintenance. All indications were that the newt had conducted a clean transaction.
And so the data structure left the Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp holdings to perform a sweep of the remaining 4,293 fiefcorps on Pierre Loget's subscription list.
Several thousand nanoseconds later, the newt returned to the mother processing station-the prodigal son back home at last. The data structure reported a summary of its activities for the statistical programs to compile and then reported back to the Meme Cooperative energy stores. There the newt uncomplainingly self-destructed, having successfully fulfilled its mission of existence.
A few billion oscillations of hydrogen later, another second passed.
More than twenty-four hours had gone by since Margaret's speech, and Jara had slept for none of them. Had she not been propping herself awake with Doze-B-Gone 91 and AntiSleepStim 124.7 and two cups of nitro, the analyst might have taken more notice of her surroundings. Instead, Jara sleepwalked past the guards at Andra Pradesh and up three stories of the blue Surina Enterprise Facility with hardly a glance in any direction.
Infoquake Page 23