Geosynchron

by David Louis Edelman

  These are words of despair, but I speak them from a very peculiar place.

  Right now, I am standing at the top of the Revelation Spire, tallest structure in the world, and I am staring at all the preparations below for the imminent unveiling of MultiReal to the world. Tomorrow will be the four hundredth birthday of my ancestor Sheldon, and there are celebrations happening all over Andra Pradesh. Creed Surina is indulging in a very rare occurrence of jubilation-I can see the devotees in the courtyard right now shooting fireworks into the sky.

  I feel hope stirring within me, Natch. Hope that this unveiling of MultiReal will go off as planned, hope that the soldiers of Len Borda will not march on the compound, hope that the trust I have laid on you has not been misplaced.

  And yet, if you are listening to these words, then that hope has failed and I am surely dead.

  As I said, a very peculiar place.

  How will I die? It is not an easy or a comfortable thing to contemplate one's own death. But if I must swim in the Null Current so soon, it will likely be because of a Council black code dart in my back. Or maybe a shuttle explosion, like the one that took the life of my father. The authorities will probably present my death to the public as an "unfortunate accident."

  But even with the most powerful prognostication engine in the history of the world, one cannot see all possibilities. I'm sure you've discovered that by now, Natch. I imagine you listening to these words in your apartment, awaiting the troops of the Defense and Wellness Council. You have exhausted all resources, you have explored all avenues, and now it is simply a question of hours before Borda arrives at your doorstep and demands MultiRealfor his own use. Or perhaps you maintained hope even past that point. And now you have been thrown into one of Borda's orbital prisons where you await the torturer's bite, and you know the fight is truly over...

  Enough. Do you see how even in my hopeful moments I drift off into melancholy? Do you see why my lover constantly threatens to leave me?

  She lets out a quiet and morbid laugh.

  Let me get back to the subject at hand, Margaret continues. Sheldon Surina believed that the only path to Perfection is continual progress, without exceptions, without limits. He would say that the world wanted biollogics and the universal law of physics and teleportation to come into existence, just as it wants MultiReal today. In his eyes, there is nothing that can be done to alter this-and if humanity must suffer through a thousand years of Defense and Wellness Council tyranny because of it, well, then that too is necessary. Even if our hubris should bring us to another Autonomous Revolt, Sheldon Surina would insist we stick to the path of progress. He would insist we pass MultiReal out far and wide without fear of consequences.

  You may be surprised to hear it, but Sheldon Surina did not despise the Autonomous Revolt. He did not hate or fear the Autonomous Minds of Tobi Jae Witt. He saw what they did as a much-needed cleansing and strengthening of the species.

  Not a nice man, Sheldon Surina. We tend to forget that.

  Nonetheless, my ancestor charted a course for us towards Perfection three hundred and fifty years ago. Freedom from the tyranny of Biology. Freedom from the tyranny of Nature. Freedom from the tyranny of Distance. Freedom from the tyranny of Time. And finally, freedom from the tyranny of Cause and Effect. He taught his children and his successors undeviating adherence to this course, as did Prengal, as did Marcus. Though I did not know it at the time, this is what I was taught and raised to believe from the day I was born.

  But I have decided not to pass these values on to the next generation. Why? I think it is for the same reason that I slip into morbidity when everyone around me engages in celebration. The same reason that I make this recording and try to convince myself it will never be heard.

  I stopped believing in the dream of the Surinas, Natch. And it was an Islander who showed me why.

  Margaret pauses. It is difficult for Natch to tell for certain, but he senses that there are tears gathering in her eyes. She abruptly shakes her head, dispelling the mistiness, and shifts topics.

  My pessimism notwithstanding, Sheldon Surina's dream has nearly come to fruition. We have only to overcome the tyranny of Time and the tyranny of Cause and Effect.

  And this puts me in a position unique among all the inventors in the history of the world. The nascent technology left to me by my father was a program to create alternate realities, a program that is designed by its very nature to warp the law of cause and effect. So with this law irretrievably bent, with the tyrant overthrown-who is to say that the very existence of this technology can't lie in one of those fungible realities?

  If MultiReal can free us from cause and effect, certainly MultiReal itself is not bound by those same chains.

  My doubts about Sheldon's path to Perfection are nothing new; they have been in the making for decades. But as my doubts grew, so too did my confidence that the very nature of this technology afforded me a unique solution. A way to take that leap into the unknown while at the same time retaining the option of returning to the precipice. I decided to create a failsafe for the MultiReal program. A way back.

  Certainly you have discovered that just as there is no copying the MultiReal databases, there is no destroying them either. Even with all of the secret archives of the Surina family at my disposal, I'm unclear how my father managed this eldritch feat. Perhaps the complete destruction of the solar system could do the trick, but there is no craft currently known to humanity that can accomplish it. If you were to try to destroy the original code for teleportation, you would discover the same thing.

  But why should I seek to destroy when I can simply isolate?

  The Data Sea, with its quintillions and quintillions of petabytes, is too immense for anyone to simply stumble upon information that has not been properly mapped and cataloged. Cutting off all known routes to a set of databases is the functional equivalent of erasure. No matter how large the program, it would be like trying to find one particular shell in the vastness of all the world's oceans. And so I decided that this would be the mechanism of the MultiReal failsafe.

  You were implanted with specialized OCHREs during our dinner here in Andra Pradesh the other week. These OCHREs grant you the ability to locate the MultiReal databases no matter where they reside. Now that I am confident you are the right steward for the MultiReal program, I will command these OCHREs to attach themselves to your biollogic systems such that they cannot be removed. No amount of torture or coercion by the Council can transfer or remove this indelible access.

  You can see the dilemma this causes, however. As long as these OCHREs remain operational, MultiReal will be accessible. And so, if you choose to activate the failsafe I have created, Natch, the specialized OCHREs which give you access to the program must be destroyed.

  You would not survive such a destruction.

  Yet is cutting off access to the program sufficient? Given all the parties aware of MultiReal's existence even today, before it has been unveiled to the world, it is inevitable that someone will figure out how to reverse-engineer the program. The Patels have probably already given the Council enough information to reconstitute the program within a generation.

  And so the failsafe I have designed will not only cut off access to MultiReal on the Data Sea; it will destroy the very memory of the program itself throughout human space. You are aware that the program accesses neural memory through undocumented back channels in the biollogic system. And it is through these back channels that the failsafe will eradicate all knowledge of the program.

  MultiReal will not only effectively cease to exist, but it will never have been.

  After all this exposition, I still have not answered the question that undoubtedly you have been asking yourself for the past fifteen minutes: why you?

  I have cousins who share the same bloodline as I do, if not quite in the same undiluted quantities. I have a son, though the world does not know it. Yet I choose to give sole responsibility for the program to you instead, in effect robbing
my son of his birthright.

  Why? It's simple, Natch. I have watched you ever since your misfortunes with the Shortest Initiation. Though you were unaware, I watched you pick yourself up from defeat at the hands of the ROD coders. I watched you shoulder your way through your competitors on Primo's. I saw through the ruse that helped you gain number one on the Primo's biollogic investment guide.

  Yours is a single-minded intensity of purpose that the world has rarely seen. You will not be beaten down, you will not surrender. Not to High Executive Borda, not to Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee, not to anyone. Part of me admires this about you; you are the son Marcus Surina would have loved to have had. In many ways, you are the very embodiment of the qualities Sheldon Surina sought to accentuate in the human race: continuous struggle, continuous improvement, continuous lust for Perfection, regardless of costs or consequences.

  And so I have come to this conclusion. If you, the paragon of all that Sheldon Surina stood for, believe that the time has come to wipe MultiReal off the face of the Earth, then the time has come. If you, the epitome of selfishness, are willing to sacrifice your own life to do so, then the time has come.

  Undoubtedly you will feel anger at being put in this position of terrible responsibility. Believe me, I understand, since I myself have felt the same way many times.

  The Sarinas have played their part on the world stage. We have sacrificed much over the centuries-too much-and I have finally decided that I will heed my lover's advice. I do not wish the life of a Surina for my son. I do not wish for him to have to carry the burden that Sheldon Surina laid on us generations ago. I intend to return to the life that Sheldon discarded. I intend to finally make my lover my bonded companion, and for us to live the family life he has always craved.

  Now the time has come for me to leave you and make the final preparations for tomorrow's unveiling of MultiReal to the world. It is my fervent hope that this recording will never be heard, that it will stay dormant in your neural systems until you find your way into the compounds of the Prepared. Unlistened to, unheeded. For now, I put the responsibility for this technology wholly into your hands, like my father did to me.

  You are the guardian of MultiReal. You are its keeper.

  You can choose to eradicate MultiReal at the cost of your own life. Or you can choose to set it loose and unchain humanity from the bonds of cause and effect, forever.

  Do what you think is right.

  39

  "Testing, testing, testing. Blah blah blah."

  The unexpected sound of Horvil's voice causes Natch to suddenly well up in tears. He can't say exactly how long he's lain here in the blackness with his senses caught in eternal loopback, mulling over the preposterous, inexplicable, confounding words of Margaret Surina. Hours? Days? Weeks? Long enough for Natch to feel the cracks in his sanity deepen and spread. Long enough for him to know that the freedom from Time that Margaret espoused is not something to ask for lightly.

  "Natch. Hey ... can you hear me?"

  He can't quite believe the voice is real, but it echoes in his skull with the clarity and immediacy of a ConfidentialWhisper. Not a mental holograph, not an appendage to his own thought processes, but an independent outside presence. A human intelligence.

  Natch stretches out with his own mind and discovers he can answer. He makes a valiant and not-entirely-successful effort to mask the desperation in his voice. "Horvil? Yes. Yes. I'm here. I can hear you."

  "Shit, I didn't think this was going to work." Horvil sounds quite pleased with himself. It occurs to Natch that the engineer has probably been at this for some time. He starts to speak again, then pauses. "Brone's not in there with you, is he?"

  "No."

  "Listen, I hate to be so paranoid ... but I gotta confirm that this is really you. Tell me something nobody else would know. Tell me ... tell me one of the poems Captain Bolbund sent to you when he beat you in the ROD coding business."

  Natch feels an instant of panic. Given his cratered memory, what if Horvil has picked an incident that's been swallowed by the void? It takes him a moment, but luckily the memory is still accessible and intact. Natch takes a breath-or tries to, at any rate-and recites:

  You gave it your all I hope you had fun 'Cause you got your ass kicked

  By CAPTAIN BOLBUND.

  "All right," says Horvil, laughing. "Guess it really is you. Man, I had forgotten what a crappy poet that guy was. But we can't get too cocky. I have no idea how long we're gonna be able to keep this channel open."

  "What channel? What's going on?"

  "Quell figured out how to break into Brone's black code. All I have to say is that Brone's good-but Quell's better. He used that Islander finger-weaving programming technique and had us pump a ton of code through your battle suit. Only took him a few minutes to figure out how to dig this back tunnel. Kind of like a 'Whisper, I guess. We should be able to talk with you one at a time, at least until Brone gets suspicious."

  Now that he's established communication with the outside world, Natch isn't quite sure what to say, what to ask. After Margaret's little speech, it feels like the whole universe is an unknown variable. He wants to ask ... everything. "Where am I?" he begins.

  "You're still at the Kordez Thassel Complex. Propped up on a chair in front of all those weaselly drudges while Brone holds his little debate."

  "Wait, you can see me? Are you in the audience?"

  "No, no, no. I'm still back in Manila with Jara and everyone else. I'm watching you on the Data Sea. Brone's been broadcasting the whole thing since the Council tried to storm the place. There's supposedly almost two billion people watching. I have to say-if this whole Revolution of Selfishness idiocy doesn't work out, Brone's got a future in the dramas. This is pretty riveting stuff."

  It makes a perverse kind of sense to Natch, like the universe playing an elaborate practical joke. He's spent the past several months lurking in the shadows, avoiding the public eye at all costs. And now he has an audience of billions, and they're all completely invisible. Natch knows this is simply a neural trick; the only thing separating him from the rest of the world is Brone's bio/logic loopback. Yet already he's struggling to remember what it felt like on the other side, interacting with people using his five senses. It all seems so alien now.

  Still, he must remember the reason he came here to the Thassel Complex in the first place. Brone. His mission. "So how long do we have before Brone launches Possibilities 2.0?" he asks Horvil.

  "Well, out there we probably only have an hour or so. But in here, we've got all the time we need."

  "What do you mean?"

  "This is virtual conversation, mind to mind. It's like the MultiReal choice cycles-happening much faster than real time. Virtual time, in fact. It might feel like hours in here, but it'll all be instantaneous from the outside. Petrucio explained the whole thing to me."

  "What happened with Borda? The attack on Melbourne?"

  The engineer seems to have almost forgotten about the larger context too. "Oh! Yeah, General Cheronna's plan, it worked great. The battle was over almost as soon as it began. Len Borda has officially given his resignation to the Prime Committee, but they're sitting on the news until we've got MultiReal back under our control." He sighs. "Which means I should get back to work. We've got to get you the fuck out of there."

  "Don't!" Natch can suddenly feel the weight of Margaret Surina's words pressing down on his shoulders. You are the guardian of MultiReal. You are its keeper Do what you think is right. Once Horvil leaves, who's to say how long he will have to wait here in the darkness for another voice, another presence? "Can you-can you get Vigal for me?"

  "I think he went with Merri to the cafeteria for a-"

  "Please, hurry. Get him. I-I need to talk to him. I don't want to be alone anymore."

  Serr Vigal falls into a long and uncomfortable silence when he hears what Natch has to say about Margaret Surina, the path to Perfection, and the failsafe built into MultiReal. Yet somehow a lifetime of experi
ence with Vigal's conversational style tells Natch that the neural programmer has not closed the channel of communication.

  After all the years of Natch playing the skeptic while Vigal tries to broaden his horizons, suddenly the entrepreneur finds their roles reversed. "Are you sure Margaret wasn't being ... metaphoric?" asks the neural programmer, his voice troubled. "Did she really believe she could wipe out sixty billion people's memories?"

  "Why not?"

  "If she had tried to pull this off a few hours after her speech in Andra Pradesh, well, maybe.... But so much has happened since then. The drudges have written literally millions of words about MultiReal in the past few months. L-PRACGs have cast votes on it, money has changed hands. How can all that be reversed?"

  "It's just a question of scale, Vigal. You know as well as I do that historical records can be altered. Vault transactions can flow backwards. Posts on the Data Sea can be erased."

  "Memories too?" says Vigal. "The memories of billions of people?"

  "If this really has been a multigenerational plan on the part of the Surinas ... then I don't see why not. Sheldon Surina invented bio/logics. The underpinnings of the whole system, the Data Sea, MindSpace-he had a hand in all of it. We already know that he put computational hooks into the system that only the Surinas knew about. How else could Margaret have created that back door to MultiReal that skips right over the standard Data Sea access controls? How else can MultiReal tap into other people's systems without their permission? If he could do all that, why couldn't Margaret take advantage of those same undocumented hooks for her failsafe?"

  Vigal's hum of rumination comes across the channel. Clearly he's beginning to enjoy the Socratic nature of their dialogue in spite of the situation. "I suppose that's not what's bothering me. Even allowing that such a secret back door exists ... dealing with memories is a complicated process, Natch. You know full well that the brain doesn't have a binary storage system; memories aren't arranged in discrete blocks of ones and zeros. You couldn't just search the brain for the term Multi- Real-and even if that were possible, you couldn't press a button and cleanly erase those memories."