Geosynchron

  They tell me a lot of things, Margaret had said. I ... I never know what's true and what's not.

  Well, then I guess it's my job to make sure you know the truth.

  Quell had been surprised to discover he meant that too.

  That was the day he began to lose himself, Quell realized now as he watched the languid Pacific Ocean pass by out the window of the Council hoverbird. It had been on that day that the two of them had fallen in love, and Quell had found himself drawn to something larger than himself. He had told himself time after time that Margaret's heritage meant nothing; that he was her equal; that his wishes counted as much as hers. But when put to the test, Quell with his stubborn individualism was no match for four hundred years of history.

  Margaret had been sheltered her entire life by handlers. These Surina family protectors had kept her isolated from her father's battles with the Defense and Wellness Council, and then took it upon themselves to keep her cloistered from the world after his sudden death. And now, like an answered prayer, a young man had come into her life who was free from the taint of Andra Pradesh. A man of strength, wisdom, and character who was not afraid to tell her the truth, who could show her the crooked and unseemly things, the blemished facts, the rusted people, the corroded emotions-everything her power and position had isolated her from.

  As the relationship had matured and trust had deepened, Quell had begun to suspect that Margaret was in possession of a terrible secret. She had had her sights not on the world around her, but on some extradimensional place that was closed off to mere mortals. The Islander had vowed not to press her, figuring she would tell him in her own time. And he had been correct.

  I need to show you something, she had told Quell one day. Can I trust you?

  Of course, the Islander had replied.

  Margaret had led him to the top of the Revelation Spire again, the place she had appropriated as her office. She had turned on the MindSpace workbench that lay there, the one that Marcus Surina had constructed. The largest bio/logic workbench ever built. And Margaret had showed Quell the databases her father had left behind on his death.

  In MindSpace, they had looked like an immense valley, bounded on all sides by peakless mountains, sharp and terrible. Tall spikes shaped like fir trees had dotted the landscape, while great rivers had curved across vast distances. Rotating the mass on its three axes had led to even more startling discoveries. Caves and crenellations that were only visible from certain angles. Strange formations that changed shape depending on how you approached them, and others that metamorphosed into something else entirely when you touched them with a bio/logic programming bar.

  And in the center of it all, enveloped by the hills and tucked between two small lagoons of information, there had sat a perfect, gleaming castle.

  I have a responsibility, Quell, she had told him.

  Quell had gaped at the structure, both amazed and aghast at the same time. He had far outpaced his classmates in the study of bio/logic engineering, but still he had never seen anything like it. A responsibility to whom?

  To humanity, Margaret had replied, her voice utterly bereft of irony.

  From that day onward, that responsibility had been all. And Quell, lovestruck fool that he was, had taken on the burden of that responsibility too. He had let his own five-year course of study at the Gandhi University turn into a six-year degree, then a seven-year degree-and finally, his education had slipped into a dark ravine and never emerged. He had subsumed his own dreams, inchoate and immature as they were, to Margaret's.

  What was Margaret's dream? What had Marcus been working on at the time of his sudden demise? What was the purpose of this vast digital edifice that had begun to consume her?

  Had she not known, or had she simply been unable to express it?

  Perfection, she had told Quell.

  He had not understood what she meant. But if there was any virtual structure large and complex enough to contain Perfection, it was the one Marcus Surina had left behind. Clearly the code was not all Marcus's doing; the structure was too enormous for any one human being to have constructed alone. Marcus Surina had squandered decades on his frivolous jaunts around the solar system before finally settling down in Andra Pradesh; Quell had calculated that if Margaret's father had spent every waking moment the rest of his life in MindSpace, he could not have completed a tenth of the required programming.

  Inside the structure, Quell and Margaret had found the core programming for teleportation. It wasn't a one-for-one match. You couldn't pluck the code out of the virtual forest and expect to be transmigrating molecules the next day. But there had been too many similarities between the two programs to call it coincidence. The same corkscrew shape, the same dappled greens and yellows woven through the center, the same hooklike protrusion at the base. It was as if someone had taken the original teleportation code and riffed on it, improvising the junctures to fit into a larger and more cohesive framework.

  Had Marcus Surina plugged his teleportation code into some massive multigenerational monolith of data-or had he extracted the code out? Had he really been the engineering genius the drudges had claimed, or merely a clever transcriptionist?

  And if the latter ... whose blueprints had he been transcribing?

  And why were the achievements of all Margaret's ancestors honeycombed within this MindSpace colossus? Why did the colossus contain not just teleportation, but key subroutines that powered the Data Sea, MindSpace, the multi network-so many of the joints of the modern programming scaffolding?

  Margaret threw all other commitments aside in her quest to understand this titanic thing her father had bequeathed to her. Creed ceremonies, academic conferences, financial summits: all hastily shoved away. Her relationship with Quell: sidelined.

  Quell himself had taken to reactivating neural OCHREs in his bid to keep up with Margaret. Only certain OCHREs, only the necessary ones-but enough to make him a heretic to some in his family. But though he had felt intellectual curiosity to understand the Surina legacy, his heart wasn't in it.

  Quell considered leaving many times over the next few years, but Margaret would always convince him to stay. I need you, she would say. I love you. Don't you see? We can pursue this dream together We can unite the world. We can fulfill the destiny of the Surinas and achieve Perfection. Quell was more concerned with his own broken destiny. Time was rapidly running out for him to choose an alternate course for his life. Already he had spent a decade here in Andra Pradesh with the connectibles, among them yet not one of them. The Islands were no longer his home, but neither was Andra Pradesh. If he were to leave Margaret-where would he go?

  Years passed. The arguments between them only grew more vociferous, and Margaret's declarations of love only grew more wild and desperate. Quell gave her an ultimatum.

  Josiah was born the following year.

  Quell had thought he had won the argument; he had considered Margaret's decision to have a child the first step in a path towards greater intimacy. Instead, Josiah only drove them apart. Margaret delegated more and more of the child's care to Quell as she slowly disappeared inside the Surina legacy. Once the Islander had been an equal on the project. By the time Josiah reached his fifth birthday, however, Quell had been relegated to a subordinate role. How could it be otherwise with Quell spending so much time in the Pacific Islands playing father? His was the job of keeping the various wings of the Surina family business functioning; his was the job of keeping investors happy, which meant keeping his relationship with Margaret and the existence of Josiah tightly under wraps; his was the job of finding funds for the project that were untethered to the Surina family, and that meant supplicating Len Borda.

  As for the mass of code Marcus Surina had left behind, for Quell the mystery only grew more mysterious. He had a solid, practical understanding about the portion of code Margaret had been working on all these years, the portion she had christened MultiReal. But the larger purpose of the scaffold remained, to Quell, unknown.
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br />   Again he tried to ask her what its purpose was.

  Perfection, she had whispered, the two of them embracing atop the Revelation Spire, eyes closed, the rest of the world far below.

  But what does that mean? Quell had asked. We don't need Perfection. We have Josiah. Our son! Our son is Perfection.

  No. He is-we are-only the guardians and the keepers.

  Quell-frantic inside at the possibility that Margaret had utterly slipped away from him, slipped away from coherence, and in agony that he had gambled his life on the legacy of the Surinas and still, as he approached middle age, had nothing to show for it-said, When will MultiReal be done? When will this be over?

  Margaret had answered, Soon.

  And after MultiReal is running on every biollogic system from here to Fur toid, after you've fulfilled the destiny of the Surinas, after you've spread "Perfection" through the universe ... then, then can we be together? Then can you be my bonded companion and Josiah your son for the whole world to see?

  Yes, Margaret had said. After the destiny of the Surina family has been fulfilled, it will be a different world. Anything will be possible.

  Quell's heart had leapt. Anything would be possible. Even renewing a life wasted, a life lived on perimeters, a life in between things. He now had a goal. To help Margaret finish MultiReal, to get the program safely launched on the Data Sea so Quell could reclaim her love, so Quell could redeem himself.

  And then came Len Borda's impatience.

  Margaret's sudden, blind, panicked fear.

  The desperate attempts to put MultiReal in the hands of a fiefcorp and stave off Borda's iron hand.

  The Patel Brothers' treachery.

  Natch.

  The infoquakes.

  Madness.

  The Null Current.

  And finally, finally, it came down to what Quell had always feared it would come down to: himself, half-Islander and half-connectible, resident of nowhere, man of edges, sitting in the belly of a Defense and Wellness Council hoverbird, little hope of rescue, MultiReal gone, his son half-estranged, the Islands on the brink of annihilation, him teetering on the border between existence and nothingness and no longer caring in which direction he fell.

  A hand shook his shoulder.

  Quell awoke with a start, groaning at the crick in his neck that had developed from falling asleep in an uncomfortable position. He opened his eyes and found himself staring at a pair of hazel pupils hovering right over his face.

  Papizon.

  The Islander took a startled look around him. The four Borda lackeys who had been watching over him had vanished. Outside the open hoverbird door, Quell could see nothing but white-the shining white paint of Magan Kai Lee's hoverbirds. Quell had not been woken by the sounds of battle because there had been no battle; Magan's force here so vastly outnumbered Borda's that they had surrendered without a struggle.

  "We have got to stop meeting like this," said Papizon with a lopsided grin.

  19

  The hotel Chandler had booked the fiefcorpers in was appropriately opulent and, better yet, completely paid for. The postprandial coffee brewing when Jara arrived in her room was vibrant, and the view of the City Center was spectacular. She regretted wasting such fine accommodations, but there would simply be no time for rest in the next fortyeight hours. So Jara found herself wandering the streets of Manila at midnight with a small security detail by her side, holding a ConfidentialWhisper chat with Horvil.

  "The world's falling apart," she lamented.

  "If the world's falling apart," replied the engineer from his room many kilometers in the sky, "then you and I are at the hinges."

  "That bad up there in 49th Heaven?"

  "That bad. Richard Taylor refused to get on the hoverbird for an hour. And then when we arrived here, there were so many things blinking and flashing and beeping he refused to get off the hoverbird for three. He's on total sensory overload."

  "And Vigal?"

  "Almost as useless. He just gawks at everything like a tourist. But at least his heart's in the right place. I still have no idea what Taylor really wants."

  Jara's nerves were in a similarly frayed state, but this walk was doing its part to soothe them. The streets were still loaded with pedestrians, despite the late hour, and everyone seemed to be luxuriating in the mellow tropical warmth. Jara tried to return the smiles of the passersby, but all she could think when she saw some carefree youth strutting down the sidewalk was that he might be lying in a ditch covered in blood in less than forty-eight hours. Chandler's statements about the city crawling with spies and diplomats caused her to give a suspicious second look to everyone who passed.

  Don't let yourself get distracted, Jara told herself. You've got a job to do.

  She didn't feel comfortable providing Horvil with too many details about Chandler's briefing. Nobody had ever successfully cracked the security of a ConfidentialWhisper, as far as Jara knew, but this was simply too important for her to make such blithe assumptions. So she kept things vague. Horvil, to his credit, understood perfectly and did not press for details.

  "I can't believe how much responsibility I've got on my shoulders," Jara complained. "It's not just the success or failure of a little fiefcorp at stake anymore. The well-being of several hundred million people could depend on whether we give a complete stranger good advice. No, it's more than that-this could determine the outcome of world history."

  "That's rough," said Horvil sympathetically.

  "I know what advice Quell wanted us to give-but honestly, I'm not sure it's the right advice. He's already made up his mind about which side he wants to support. But I have no idea how or why he came to that conclusion."

  The engineer was clearly flailing for supportive words to help guide Jara through this ocean of vagueness. "Well, you've got a good team with you there, right? That helps."

  "It does," said Jara. She had half expected Benyamin and Robby Robby to shrug off the pressure and slink to their rooms at the first opportunity. But clearly the sinister flicker of those Council hoverbirds drifting off the coastline had affected them too. Ben was busy speedreading through every drudge editorial and policy speech he could find in an attempt to give himself a crash course on Islander politics; Robby had taken it upon himself to start glad-handing people on the streets in an attempt to ferret out the real, unfiltered opinions of the Islanders. Merri's shuttle was due to arrive in two hours, and Jara knew that she would be equally diligent as soon as she stepped off the dock.

  "I wish I could say that I didn't sign up for this crap," grumbled Jara. "But the truth is, I did. I complained that I was feeling irrelevant-and now I'm too relevant."

  "You know what they say," answered Horvil. "Don't wish for horses unless you want the whole farm. "

  Merri arrived an hour ahead of schedule, looking dazed and somewhat claustrophobic from being crammed in a small metal cabin for almost two days. But the exhaustion went deeper than that. Jara suspected that the stress of dealing with her perpetually ill companion, Bonneth, was starting to back up on her, though true to form, Merri refused to talk about it. Jara felt like taking her aside as a friend and telling her that she was in no condition to travel several hundred thousand kilometers to play consultant here in the Pacific Islands.

  But she couldn't afford to be Merri's friend at the moment. Not with two Defense and Wellness Council fleets offshore waiting to pounce on Manila. And so Merri was no sooner off the hoverbird than Jara was hustling her into a quiet room with Bali Chandler, who had agreed to give her an abbreviated version of the briefing he had given the others.

  At ten a.m. that morning, Jara gathered the fiefcorpers together to discuss the situation. She went around the table asking everyone in turn to summarize their thoughts and the findings of their research. As each person spoke, Jara called up Envisage 24.8 and began transcribing.

  Benyamin stared with skepticism at the jumble of holographic words and connections floating over the conference table like a cat's
cradle. "Do you really think that's going to help?" he said.

  "Absolutely," replied Jara with conviction. "This is the best macroanalysis program on the market right now. Works on the same principle as Zeitgeist, but it doesn't start with any preconceived notions of how to organize your data. And it only uses the information you give it."

  "I can vouch for Envisage," said Robby Robby. "Former clients."

  "But there's no real intelligence behind those diagrams," retorted Ben. "You know the law-no Al, no smart software. What kind of answers do you expect that thing to come up with?"

  "None."

  The young apprentice was taken aback. "None?"

  "Correct," said Jara. "The point isn't to determine the right answers. The point is to determine the right questions."

  "What I worry about," said Merri, "is that we're trying to advise our client without having all the relevant facts. I mean, none of us has more than seventy-two hours of experience in the Islands. I haven't even been here an entire morning yet. And here we are trying to help determine their future." She nervously fingered the Creed Objective emblem on her lapel as if it might ward off the taint of half-truth.

  "One hundred percent correct, Merri," said Robby brightly. "Haven't you ever heard of intervention consulting?"

  Merri shook her head, as did Benyamin. Jara gestured for Robby to continue.

  "The goal is to shake up established thinking. To shatter hardened positions. And one way to do that is to swoop down on a situation without knowing the facts. You jump in and reestablish first impressions, reconsider points of view that might have gotten shoved aside prematurely. Think around taboos. Trust me, it's great stuff."

  "But aren't you just going to end up with uninformed opinions?" asked Merri, not sold by Robby's description.