Geosynchron

by David Louis Edelman

  Natch narrows his eyes. Such was the type of logic he might have steered by during his ascent through the bio/logic fiefcorps to number one on Primo's, but now the idea of revenge seems shockingly pointless and primitive. "No, nothing like that," he tells Molloy evenly. "I'm going to help him."

  The thug sniffs bemusedly. "Why?"

  The entrepreneur doesn't respond. Why indeed?

  They've turned to the next row of patients, and Natch can see that Rodrigo is back to his sightless stare once more. He looks over at the boy and sees himself. Himself as he might have ended up had he failed in the ROD coding game all those years ago, had he run out of money and finally exhausted Horvil's good graces. Himself as he was not too long ago in Old Chicago, lost inside his own desires, ringed by enemies with nowhere to go.

  He thinks of his actions in the OrbiCo ship Practical. Creating something from nothing.

  Natch looks at Rodrigo again, and he wonders if his engineering achievements on the Practical can be replicated in human beings. Can he take this wretched, nonfunctioning boy, so caught up in want for black code that he will pursue it to incoherence, can he take this boy and create something new? Can he somehow take a life running dangerously in the red and somehow eke out a life in the black?

  And what of this orbital colony, 49th Heaven? Natch looks around at the concentrated misery, at the decay and decadence. It's a place that swallows and digests human beings, a parasitic structure that feeds off desire. Perhaps completely reshaping the place is a foolish ambition. But is it possible that Natch-a ghost, a man who doesn't exist-can nudge an entire colony out of its inevitable death spiral into the nothingness at the center of the universe? He knows how to move the levers of the world; he proved that in his climb to number one on Primo's and his drive to get a hearing from the Prime Committee on MultiReal. Now he wonders if he's found a place to move the levers to.

  Molloy has taken Natch's silence for a challenge. "Let me offer you a little unsolicited advice," he says, hand squeezing the entrepreneur's shoulder almost hard enough to bruise. "You can't help this kid. He's too stupid. He's pissed off too many people-no, it's not just me. Rodrigo knew that sooner or later someone was gonna catch up to him in a dark alley. He knew the consequences, but he played the game anyway."

  The ruffian's obtuseness is starting to irritate Natch. "What happens if I try to stop you?" he says.

  Again the smile, the licking of the lips. "I don't know what your angle is, but I seen this all a thousand times. You want to know what's going to happen? Fine. We start with threats. We find your weaknesses. You come out with a few broken bones. Aw, nothing your OCHREs can't patch up, but it's gonna hurt." The bully tightens his grip on Natch's collarbone to emphasize his point. "After that, if you still haven't gotten the message, I give you a nice little batch of credits-yeah, real Vault credits-and you go away." Another painful squeeze. "If after that, you still haven't got the message ..." Molloy stops and turns to face Natch, then brusquely turns Natch to face him. The grin abruptly turns into a rictus of pure cruelty. "How about you save me some legwork, man. I ping you some Vault credits, right now. You turn and walk out the door. So what's it going to be then, eh?"

  Natch listens to the thug's patter and watches his hypnotically spiky eyebrows, and he thinks: I've met this man before.

  This man threatened him in the hive when he was a child and beat him senseless for the crime of being peculiar. He confronted Natch during initiation. He took on Natch in the ROD coding game and tried to sabotage his business. When Natch was on the rise in the Primo's rankings, this man tried to steal his customers. And when the opportunity of a lifetime fell into Natch's lap, this man was there, wearing the white robe and yellow star.

  Natch knows every scabrous centimeter of this man Molloy's flesh. He knows the inner workings of his mind. Threats? Broken bones? Payoffs? It barely even rises to the level of laughability. Natch can eviscerate this man.

  Once the entrepreneur might have felt a swell of fiery anger at the man's arrogance and his supposition that he can get the better of Natch. Now he feels only an icy sense of purpose and, alongside that, pity. Does this idiot have any idea who he's threatening? Does he know that I've outsmarted Len Borda? Does he know that I've had a whole auditorium full of Defense and Wellness Council dartguns pointed at my head, and emerged unscathed? Does he know that I've faced Khann Frejohr, Magan Kai Lee, the Patel Brothers, and Brone-and I've beaten them all?

  He looks over Molloy's shoulder and catches a glimpse of the boy Rodrigo, stupid and helpless. The thug is right; in the end there's no saving this boy. There is no uplifting of the downtrodden. There's only restoring of balance.

  Natch turns his attention back to Molloy. "You've said your piece," he announces coldly. "Now let me tell you what's going to happen."

  Three days later.

  Molloy kneels on the dingy floor of a small hotel in the Second Ring of 49th Heaven. Head bowed low, hands fidgeting, he's cowed. Humiliated. Beaten and afraid. "What do you want?" he says, his insolent voice of command now reduced to a whimper. "Fine, you got the best of me. But I'm just one guy. There's a network out there, a whole fucking conglomerate. Once they find out about this, they're gonna come after you."

  Natch stands by the window with hands clasped behind his back and head bowed forward. "Yes, they are."

  "So ... so ..."

  "So what am I going to do about it?" Natch stares out the window into the darkness, full of death and fear and vitriol. He stares at it all with scythelike purpose in his eyes. "I'm going to hire you. And you're going to help me track down every last fucking Chomp dealer in this colony. Then I'm going to scour 49th Heaven clean of them."

  Molloy, aghast: "But ... why?"

  "Let's just say I'm curious."

  25

  The black code kingpins of 49th Heaven have a new nemesis, but he is a nemesis without a name. All they have to go on is the absurdly flimsy pseudonym of "Nohwan."

  Nohwan has come at them with furious and humorless determination, gyroscoping allegiances at will, overturning business arrangements of long standing, slaughtering entire organizations at a clip. Molloy is the first to go down, followed in short order by the Lacey cartel, Chim Chavez, and the Syndicate of Deviant Exuberance. Vazor the Gimp watches his entire street force defect to a rival, causing him to quickly flee 49th Heaven lest his creditors catch up with him. The Shits inexplicably start losing money on every petabyte of Chomp they sell, and quickly decide to move out of black code and into knockoff tourist memorabilia. Geena the Weasel overdoses on her own tainted supply and has to suffer through an agonizingly painful rehabilitation.

  Weeks become months, and still the bloodbath continues.

  It quickly becomes apparent that Nohwan is not acting alone. He has deduced that the black code dealerships of 49th Heaven are a tightly interwoven, if not incestuous, bunch. The cartels share information, personnel, client lists, even product. While this spirit of cooperation might have strengthened them all immeasurably during the upswing of the trade, turns out it's a major liability on the downturn. Nohwan's particular genius is in recruiting (or sometimes blackmailing) the defeated into turning on their rivals. Once he has found a weak strand in the web, he has weakened them all; and with every new defeat, his knowledge of the remaining kingpins and leverage to defeat them only grows.

  The black code cartels have no intention of simply rolling over and admitting defeat. But they cannot fight what they do not understand.

  And this Nohwan is completely beyond their comprehension. He is not an agent of the orbital colony L-PRACGs, the Defense and Wellness Council, or any known body of government; in fact, he shuns their assistance and even hinders their operations when they get in his way. He makes no demands. He is immune to offers of bribery and attempts at compromise. He has no known weaknesses, no family, no friends or close associates who can be threatened. He has no business interests of his own that can be targeted for retaliation.

  At first, the ki
ngpins suspect that Nohwan might be a widower or grieving relative of one of the cartels' victims; a revenge seeker. But he operates with impersonal and passionless persistence, excising black code dealers from the colony like a surgeon might excise tumors with a scalpel. He does not kill. He does not use violence. His main weapons are the inherent greed of the system and the inexorable laws of supply and demand.

  And he only targets the dealers of Chomp.

  This is the most baffling element of all. If Nohwan is a crusader for justice, why does he ignore those that specialize in Chill Polly, Big Black Thunder, and Suffr-N? Don't those specimens of black code inflict an equal amount of misery? But no, for some reason the kingpins cannot fathom, Nohwan passes over their organizations-though he has no compunction about going after those dealers who choose to actively support and assist the Chompers. Many organizations refuse on principle to bow down to Nohwan's wrath. But there are plenty of dealers who decide that the easiest way of dealing with the problem is to migrate to a different product line. Face Nohwan and perish; bow to his wishes and survive to deal another day. Within two months of Molloy's fall, Chomp has become a scarce commodity on 49th Heaven.

  And still, the black code kingpins are baffled. It's as if this Nohwan is sweeping the orbital colony of Chomp solely for the sake of ... experimentation.

  If the black code cartels find Nohwan impossible to reach, the indigent and destitute of 49th Heaven have no such difficulties. As soon as Rodrigo has recovered from his coma and returned to the rings, word about his savior passes through the junkie community with the speed of electric current.

  Before long, Natch has a long list of supplicants from the margins of society. By challenging the Chomp establishment and tearing a hole in the social fabric, he now has to contend with all the world's misery that comes pouring through. Not just black code addicts, but outcasts, orphans, followers of outre philosophies, and victims of malfeasance both corporate and governmental-all come to Natch seeking help.

  They share only one characteristic: they are the powerless. The helpless. The pushed.

  It is not compassion that drives him to hear their stories and dissect their lives. It's curiosity. Natch sits in the darkened corner of a bodega, listening to the tales of the trampled while Molloy keeps watch over the door for signs of trouble. He never goes to the same bodega twice, if he can help it.

  As Natch listens, in his mind he deconstructs the choices they have made. There are victims aplenty who have fallen afoul of the black code cartels through no fault of their own. But most of the miserable have found themselves on dark paths through their own willful misguidance. They have made poor choices. They have overlooked obvious choices. They have passed over good choices because they are simply too stupid or too stubborn to recognize them.

  Rodrigo sends a woman to him who has sunken into Chomp addiction and sexual servitude, and Natch listens to her story. True, there is a feckless companion who has egged her on and taken advantage of her weaknesses. But Natch can see what drives her miserable companion without even meeting him or seeing his face. He knows this man's tender spots and vulnerabilities. He can pinpoint the exact moment when the Chomp-addicted woman could have disemboweled this man and liberated herself from his confines. But instead she did nothing, choosing to sink further into her black code lethargy.

  But is it in fact a choice? Can she be blamed for her ignorance? Is it her fault that a lifetime of abuse has deadened her to the sunnier possibilities? Where does the victim end and the person begin?

  Such ontological questions are beyond Natch. All he cares about is the practical. What can be done to reverse her victimhood, and is there anything that can be done to empower her? He thinks instantly of MultiReal: a tool to give her mastery over the fork in the road. But he soon realizes that while MultiReal might open up more avenues for her to choose from, it is no help in telling her which path to pursue. Give this woman the power of Possibilities, and Natch knows to an absolute certainty that she will end up in the same ditch over and over again. Technology will only enable her to get there faster.

  Natch decides there's nothing he can do for the woman, and she disappears into the bottomless mire of Grub Town. What her fate is, he never discovers.

  Ignorance is not the problem of the former black code pusher and friend of Molloy's who drifts into Natch's orbit. The man is canny and clever, and up to a point his choices seem unobjectionable at worst, inspired at best. For a time, he was the top Chomp dealer in the colony. And then luck began to turn on him.

  Every gambler must face the possibility that he will be stuck with the low card in the deck; Einstein notwithstanding, the universe does indeed throw dice. Molloy's friend has found himself the victim of every outlier of possibility from sudden illness to random targeting by the authorities, from accidental overdose to unpredictable behavior by his subordinates. Soon, through no real fault of his own, the gambler has become deeply in debt to other Chomp dealers in Second Ring. And the other dealers are now calling in their loans.

  Natch manages to extract the man from his troubles not by raising him up, but by drawing his debtors down into the sinkhole with him. In two weeks' time, the black code pushers who had been threatening Molloy's friend's life come crumbling down-and help Natch cripple their debtors as well.

  It's a reminder to Natch that the world seeks balance. For every random touch of good fortune it bestows, it inflicts an indiscriminate bit of misery as well.

  Neither stupidity nor hard luck seems to be the problem with the group of Pharisees that seek out Natch's assistance. Rather they suffer from an inability to see past their own narrow circumstances.

  Natch is surprised to discover that the Pharisees have found 49th Heaven fertile ground for proselytizing. You can walk the outer rings any time of day or night and see recruiters on makeshift platforms espousing the benefits of Sufi Mysticism, the Church of the First Jesus, Cabbala, and the Hindi path of enlightenment to anyone who will listen-virtually every ancient philosophy humanity has dreamt up in its five thousand years of history. The creeds that have sprung up in the modern era of the Reawakening are even more bizarre. There are cults devoted to the Demons of the Aether, worshippers of the Surinas, fortune-tellers who speak of a mystical and omniscient energy embedded in the circuitry of the Data Sea.

  The Faithful Order of the Children Unshackled is as strange as they come. The order claims to study mystical patterns in the world for coded messages and portents left behind by the gods. Apparently it's not financial advice that these gods are dispensing, because the order has managed to get deeply in hock to the Chomp dealer Chim Chavez.

  Chavez is easy enough to deal with; Molloy tells Natch that the man is sleeping with another dealer's companion behind his back. Natch uses this information as leverage to get Chavez to drastically lower the Pharisees' debts and to force him to stop dealing Chomp in the colony altogether. But no sooner is the order clear of Chavez than the brethren begin searching for new sources of funding.

  The local head of the order insists on treating Natch to a sumptuous dinner to thank him, during which they discuss the issues that continue to lead the organization into financial disaster. The group seems to have surrendered itself to the fatalism that the world will be ending soon and so there's no use in looking to the future. "We rely on the charity of our followers, but every year we lose more of them," gripes the chapter head, a trim and bejeweled man of perhaps sixty. "And every year the expenses go up. It doesn't really matter what we do. The order has no future."

  "I thought I had no future once," says Natch. "Within a few years of that, I was the top bio/logic programmer in the world."

  The Pharisee is curious. "And how did you find your future?"

  Natch shakes his head. Too long and complex a tale to tell here. He sums it up the best he can. "My guardian once told me, Your future is what you choose to do tomorrow. And the direction you're searching for? Your direction is where you choose to go. "

  Finally there
comes a time, a few months after Natch's arrival in the colony, when he sits back and takes stock of his experiment.

  He chose to focus on the Chomp cartels because it seemed like a goal within reach. Even if it is possible to completely rid the orbital colony of all the black code dealers, such a feat would be years in the making. Instead he sought to target a narrow area where he could definitively change the course of the colony, to find one place where he could shift a culture running in the red to one running in the black. He wanted to see if it could be done.

  And now Natch has indeed rid the colony of all but one of the major suppliers of Chomp. Yet what has changed?

  The junkies that haunt the corridors in between bodegas trading sex for black code have not dissipated; they've just moved from Chomp to other equally toxic varieties. He certainly did not expect all the retailers in 49th Heaven to begin accepting Vault credits overnight, but he had hoped to have some effect on the currency situation. Instead he has merely driven the value of Chomp canisters to stratospheric levels. Grub Town still exists and is still as heavily trafficked as ever. The drudges insist that, despite the perplexing drop in the Chomp trade, the incidence of missing persons in the colony has not changed. Even the boy Rodrigo, whom Natch saved from the clutches of Molloy, has recently been seen frequenting the bodegas on the lookout for Suffr-G.

  Has Natch's crusade against the Chomp dealers had any impact on the quality of life in 49th Heaven? Has he stoppered the flow of misery through one pipeline, only to see it reemerge just as strong somewhere else?

  He sits in his hotel room night after night, lights extinguished, meditating on the interlocking strands of causality between the different schemes he's running. He studies the leading economic indicators of 49th Heaven published on the Data Sea: stock and commodity prices, tourism numbers, numbers of arrests and convictions, murder rates. He walks up and down the colony's central corridor from Seventh Ring clear through to First Ring, studying the faces of those he passes. He sits in dark corners of the bodegas with Molloy eyeing the door, and he listens to the gossip of the OrbiCo workers who stop in for a drink.