Geosynchron

  "There are surreptitious targets which must be ascertained," said Magan. Natch must have had enough time to take Brone down by now.

  Jorge Monck was idling in the hallway near the room Natch had entered, pretending to hold an impromptu business meeting with three of his colleagues, also Council operatives. Time's not really a factor in there, Lieutenant Executive, he said. And Magan realized that he was correct. Whatever the outcome of Natch's and Brone's duel, it should have been instantaneous. Unless Brone was not actually in that room after all ... in which case, shouldn't Natch have emerged and taken up the search in another location?

  "I'm mystified by the increasingly cloudy skies," he told Jara. Two more minutes, and we're going in.

  The fiefcorp master sounded supportive from the war room in Manila. I think you're right. We can't just sit here forever.

  A hundred and twenty seconds stretched out as if time had become elastic. Monck and his operatives were casually making their way towards the double doors Natch had snaked through a good twenty minutes earlier. Magan called up the view from Monck's battle suit and was pleased to note that the Council operatives looked exactly like any other random group of fiefcorpers loitering the hallways between meetings. The sun peeked through a skylight overhead in plump, jovial defiance of the circumstances.

  Go.

  In the space of an instant, Monck's operatives metamorphosed from nonchalant executives and bureaucrats to hardnosed agents of the Defense and Wellness Council. Weapons came sliding out of hidden gunbelts as they lined up on either side of the double doors in standard formation. Close-range dartgun shooters low and inside, officers with crackling multi disruptors in a flanking position, sharpshooters at a distance ready for anything that flew through that opening. Two operatives covered the approaching hallways in case one of the figures in black robes decided to come investigate.

  Jorge Monck gave the slightest of nods.

  The doors slammed open. The Defense and Wellness Council burst through, fingers tense on triggers.

  Magan could already tell something was wrong before he could even make out the scene in the room. Nobody was firing weapons, nor were they lowering them. Instead there was just a general confusion.

  The room was arranged like a small theater, with a stage at one end and a dozen rows of chairs facing it. The stage could have conceivably held half a dozen people, but right now there were only two: Brone, wearing the black robe with red trim that had become his trademark; and Natch, glassy-eyed, unconscious, and propped up on a chair facing the audience.

  Audience? Yes, there was an audience, and they were familiar faces. Sen Sivv Sor, John Ridglee, Mah Lo Vertiginous, V. T. Vel Osbiq, other pundits both libertarian and governmentalist. The last time Magan had fallen into this particular trap, the drudges' faces had radiated perverse glee at his predicament. Today they were somber and reflective to the last. Perhaps it was the sight of Natch, hollow and lifeless as a marionette. Or perhaps they recognized that this was no longer just sportive amusement; the fate of the world was on the table, and both Brone and the Defense and Wellness Council had anted up.

  Ringing the perimeter of the room were a dozen armed Thasselians in their black robes, though they seemed to have taken no notice of the invading Council operatives. Pierre Loget was among them, beaming like an idiot.

  "Perceptive interested parties?" muttered Jorge Monck. Shoot him?

  Magan felt an animal urge from some primal sector of consciousness telling him to shoot first and deal with consequences later. But then he saw the arrogant, once-handsome stare of the bodhisattva of Creed Thassel, and Magan knew that Natch had been correct. Brone had already planned for that contingency. Hold off, he replied.

  Brone cleared his throat, and for the first time Magan noticed that he was propping himself up with some kind of pipe that might have been salvaged from the wreckage of Chicago. The bodhisattva looked frail, exhausted, just footsteps away from death. And yet on his ruined, prematurely wrinkled face there sat a macabre smile of satisfaction. Brone hobbled downstage, stabbing the pipe onto the stage with each step-clank! clank!-only pulling himself up to meet it with great effort.

  The bodhisattva stopped at the foot of the stage and swept a hand at the audience of drudges. "What do you think?" he said. His voice gargled as through blood, but somehow still managed to resonate with cruel pride. "I got the idea from our friend over here. Quite a showman, that one." He hitched his prosthetic thumb over his shoulder to indicate Natch. Then he addressed Monck, whom he had ascertained to be the group's leader. "So is it Magan Kai Lee who you're reporting to or Len Borda?"

  Tell him, said the lieutenant executive.

  "Lee," replied Monck, his voice emotionless, his gun still centered on Brone's forehead.

  "Ah, I underestimated you once again, Lieutenant Executive Lee," said Brone, offering a slight and yet entirely serious bow. "I figured that the old bastard would get the best of you. But despite what I told Merri and Petrucio, I'm glad to see that I was wrong on that score."

  Monck was having none of the bodhisattva's mocking dignity. "Tell me why we shouldn't shoot you right now."

  Brone nodded. "A reasonable question. There are two answers. First, because we possess MultiReal, and you do not. You don't have the power. The second reason, as I'm sure Magan has guessed by now, is that Possibilities 2.0 is rigged to automatically launch on the Data Sea on the instant of my death.

  "So if I were you, Lieutenant Executive-or is that High Executive now?-I would hear me out for just a few more minutes."

  "Is Natch dead?" asked Monck.

  Brone turned and gave a pitying look at the entrepreneur. "Dead? No, he's perfectly fine in there. And he'll be perfectly fine until I've launched Possibilities 2.0 on the Data Sea and I release him. I wouldn't have Natch miss that for the world."

  Tense silence. Sixty seconds passed, during which Monck and his team silently took up positions around the room, keeping their dartguns trained on the bodhisattva.

  "I know that Natch has depicted me as some kind of monster," continued Brone. "He's got you thinking that I'm looking to slaughter millions of people for my own amusement. Not true.

  "My Revolution of Selfishness is about providing options, not taking them away. And so even though I have the power to release Possibilities 2.0 to the world right now, with no hesitations ... I stand here and hesitate. I don't presume to choose for you. Instead I have assembled here a cross section of the world's most renowned drudges from across the political spectrum. Governmentalist, libertarian, connectible, unconnectible, rich, poor. I think you will agree that this is not a stacked deck."

  The bodhisattva turned to the pundits and addressed them directly. "I leave the decision of whether to release Possibilities 2.0 to the world in your more than capable hands. You've heard the arguments in the court of public opinion over the past several months. You know the stakes; you know the options. So now you'll be the ones to decide. No more intermediaries, no more phony opinions of compro mised elected officials standing in the way. No more bribes from the rich or excuses from the well connected. There is just you, the drudges, whom I have selected to stand for the collective will of the human race.

  "Do you want the power of Possibilities? Or do you want the rigid rules and restrictions of the Defense and Wellness Council? Do you want the ultimate freedom and the ultimate empowerment that Margaret Surina promised you? Or do you want a shackled world of two dimensions, the faux freedom of our ancestors?

  "The fate of the world is in your hands."

  6

  THE GUARDIAN

  AND THE KEEPER

  37

  Smaller than air, they dance between the molecules of oxygen that drape the Earth; they tango with the granules of salt that permeate the sea; they gambol on the caterpillar's back and the butterfly's wings.

  You will swallow dozens of them every day without noticing or complaining. Yawn, sniff, gulp, lick your lips-odds are you will imbibe a few of them. And why shou
ld they complain? As far as they're concerned, tissue is tissue and matter is matter. Some will slowly worm their way through layers of your blood and fiber until they are excreted from pores and sweat glands; free at last, they will eventually find their way back into the machinery of the world's weather system. Others will be press-ganged into service by the OCHREs in your body and converted into their component amino acids. Still others will huddle in the lining of your intestines until you walk through the gates of the Prepared, then hitch a ride with you into the grave and soak into the bedrock of the Earth for a million yearsquiet, dormant, waiting. The spare change of the universe.

  They are the level I geosynchrons, and they have one function: to sit at the threshold of the nothing and wait for the world to speak.

  The world speaks.

  The thing happens.

  Stasis shatters and change charges into being and there is no reason why except because this is the way the universe has been constructed.

  The duty of the level I geosynchrons is merely to listen and report the raw data of the world. Changes in ionization, movements of subatomic particles, fluctuations of wave and cosmic force-all the level I geosynchrons can do is observe and flip the rotation of a qubit, thereby transcribing these events in the language of mathematics. Exactly what it is they are recording is of no import to them. Electrons spin and whirl and shift orbit; information is recorded; the purpose of the level I geosynchrons is fulfilled.

  It's not up to the level II geosynchrons to comprehend this data either, for they are the worker bees of the weather system. Their job is to uncomplainingly carry out the orders of their superiors higher up in the chain, whether those orders are to gather information or to impede the velocity of the wind, to bump the atmospheric temperature of their minuscule domains up a fraction of a degree or to tamp it down. Of all the quintillions of microscopic geosynchrons in the system, it is the level Its who are the most numerous. Ask someone to describe the word geosynchron, and most likely that person will describe to you the frenzied activity of the level II. Rushing to and fro, vaulting from place to place, the domain of the level II is a world of tasks accomplished, of weather directives made actual and three dimensional.

  So it's up to the level III geosynchrons to take notice of the gathering atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic Ocean. They're the lords of pattern recognition, the level Ills. They can scan through voluminous amounts of data, compare them to the hundred years of uninterrupted weather information in their memory banks, and detect emerging trends in their first picoseconds of existence. The level III geosynchrons have seen every point on the curve from tropical calm to raging inferno, and every gradation in between.

  Today, as battle rages in Melbourne and Natch attempts to weave his way through the Kordez Thassel Complex unseen, the level Ills see atmospheric pressure dropping as off a sheer cliff. They see mounting winds and increased turbulence.

  They see a weather event that is truly unprecedented.

  It's the ultimate outlier of weather events. It's the once-in-tenthousand-year hurricane. It's the storm that humanity has talked about, planned for, and prayed against since History first yawned and rubbed the stardust from its eyes. The storm that every civilization must either muscle through or collapse under the weight of, like a thousand flourishing ecosystems before that perished utterly from the Earth.

  The level III geosynchrons have learned how to ameliorate an uncounted number of weather events to ensure not only the continuing survival but the continuing comfort of the human race. Working in tandem, they have shunted aside or lessened the severity of storms, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and drastic shifts of tectonic plates. They are the reason the champion Delhi Chakras have never missed a single game in their outdoor stadium even during the heaviest of the monsoon season. They are the reason why tens of thousands of hoverbirds can lace the skies with ribbons of vapor exhaust simultaneously and barely have to factor turbulence into their flight plans. But even level III geosynchrons must occasionally consult their superiors.

  If the level Ills are the lords of pattern recognition, then the level IV geosynchrons are the sovereigns of resolution. They sit isolated in their protected data havens and chart a course through the choppy seas ahead. There has not been a lightning strike fatality in fifty years, yet even now they are analyzing the data, measuring the performance of past actions, working through the possibilities handed to them by their subordinates, teasing out ever-better weather directives. Their goals are more efficiency, less inconvenience, more predictability, and less chance of that one infinitesimal possibility slipping through the cracks and wreaking havoc. Should the Earth suffer a devastating nuclear apocalypse or asteroid strike, it is believed that the level III geosynchrons will be able to restore the planet's complete habitability within twenty years.

  But the coming storm will test the level IV geosynchrons in a way they've never been tested before. Routines will be interrupted. Helper programs will be called in as reinforcements. Other projects heretofore considered crucial will be shoved aside in an all-out effort to deal with this, the storm of storms, the eventuality of eventualities.

  What to do?

  The level IV geosynchrons bombard the statistical models with all manner of possible interventions in search of a way out. An avoidance strategy. But it quickly becomes apparent that there can be no avoiding this storm. There can be no delaying it or bartering with it. The test must come, and humanity must face it.

  And so the level IV geosynchrons ask the questions: If the storm cannot be avoided, can it perhaps be distributed? Can the brute force of the storm be divvied up through the globe so all suffer equally? Maybe the fury of the universe can be channeled towards the strongest and most capable elements of society, the ones with the most abundant resources that will be quicker to recover. Or perhaps the weakest struts of society should be sacrificed, the deadwood of humanity, on the theory that humanity will emerge the stronger for it-assuming it emerges at all.

  It is not the place of the level IV geosynchrons to make these decisions. They are not equipped to handle such far-reaching ethical quandaries. Their job is to prepare the eventualities, to calculate all the pathways to the desired endpoint. No, the decision must rest with the final arbiter: the level V geosynchron.

  To say there is only one level V geosynchron would be incorrect, but neither would it be accurate to speak of many level V geosynchrons. There are many, and there is only one. And it is with these machines that the Makers have laid out the priorities of the human race.

  There is a spark in the nothingness at the center of the universe. It has come from nothingness and will eventually return to nothingness. Just as the world has given birth to this spark and encouraged it to grow, the world is also constantly working to snuff out that spark, to bring back stasis and equilibrium to the void, to bring the nothingness back to nothingness.

  The level V geosynchron has a single priority above all others: keep that spark burning as long and as brightly as possible.

  And the only way that can be achieved is through balance.

  The geosynchrons have the numbers at their virtual fingertips. They can see the eventualities, the possibilities, the probabilities. They can measure the sheer monstrous immensity of that void and the ridiculous insignificance of the spark that continues to burn in its midst. The geosynchrons know that in ninety-nine of a hundred possible universes, that spark will be overwhelmed, defeated, crushed, forgotten. If not this storm, then the next one.

  The odds for survival are infinitesimal, a sliver of a sliver of hope.

  But haven't they always been?

  38

  Margaret Surina is rejuvenated.

  She hovers wraithlike in the thin membrane between existence and nothingness. Skin the olive tinge of the Indian subcontinent, robe a billowing tent of blue and green, fingers long and precise as praying mantises. Hair tar black but streaked with white, manifestation of the paradox behind those sapphire eyes.


  That Natch can see her at all is miracle enough. In this place he has no eyes, no face, no corporeal presence whatsoever. It is a cocoon of pure mind, where there are no points on the compass and where even Time loops upon itself and disappears in a dizzying spiral of infinite improbability. Here in this place, Margaret is merely a perception of a perception, like an awareness or a manufactured memory.

  Towards Perfection, Natch, the bodhisattva begins in a voice that is not audible. A voice that is, in many respects, Natch's own.

  If you are listening to these words, then I can safely assume that you have an understanding now of what that phrase really means. It was not idly or randomly chosen. The man who coined that phrase believed in Perfection. He believed it was attainable by human beings, and he believed it was the destiny of the human spirit to strive for that summit.

  Onwards and upwards. That was the dream of Sheldon Surina, my ancestor and the father of biollogics. Towards Perfection, no matter what the cost. But it was not Sheldon Surina's fate to pay that cost, any more than it was Marcus Surina's-any more than it is mine.

  Now that fate has fallen to you and you alone, Natch. You are the geosynchron of the human race.

  If you are listening to these words, then we have failed Sheldon Surina's acid test you, me, perhaps everyone from here to Furtoid. If you are listening to this recording implanted in your OCHREs, then you have reached the point of no return. Either you have concluded that the human race cannot hike the steep path to Perfection that Sheldon staked out for us-or it has become abundantly clear that Sheldon's path will only lead to tyranny and madness. You have become convinced that there is no hope.

  Should that come to pass and should you be listening to these words, Natch, then you and you alone will have the power to rid the human race of Sheldon Surina's monomania. You alone will have the option to stake out a new path.