Geosynchron

by David Louis Edelman

  "MultiReal erases thousands of memories every time you run it. That's why you don't remember all those potential alternate realities."

  "Yes, but those are short-term memories, Natch. The brain stores them differently than long-term memories."

  "The Patels' MultiReal-D program can erase long-term memories. I've seen it."

  "And you yourself have said it was a deeply flawed process. Frederic and Petrucio's MultiReal-D seems to have erased far more than they intended."

  "The Patels put that code together in months. Margaret Surina had decades to work on her failsafe-maybe even generations." Natch feels like he needs to wipe sweat off his brow, an odd inclination given that he has no sweat glands or forehead in this place. It's been a long time since he's had one of these intense dialogues with Vigal, and he's forgotten how frustrating they can be.

  The neural programmer is obviously not convinced. "I still don't see how something like this would work."

  Natch starts to sketch out in his head the method he would use to construct something of this nature. If you started out with all the assumptions Margaret started out with, it wouldn't be as difficult as it sounded. The bodhisattva would have had to start executing the failsafe months ahead of time; she would have had to use Sheldon Surina's undocumented programming hooks to plant code that would parse the user's thoughts. It was a big leap to believe that one piece of code could identify thoughts about MultiReal ... but grant Margaret that for the sake of argument. Say Margaret planted her code shortly before her big speech in Andra Pradesh. As soon as she spoke the trigger word, OCHREs around the globe would begin tracking memories. Of course, that would take an unprecedented amount of memory, space, and processing power....

  "For process' preservation," Natch whimpers. He would bury his face in his hands if he had either at his disposal. "Of course."

  Vigal is still a few steps behind him. "What's wrong?"

  "The infoquakes. Margaret's failsafe caused the infoquakes."

  Silence.

  "Think about it," continues the entrepreneur wearily. "When did the first infoquake happen? Right at the very instant Margaret introduced MultiReal to the world. During her speech at Andra Pradesh. Something must have gone horribly wrong when she activated the failsafe. Faulty programming, parts of her code that didn't mesh well with someone else's. That's what caused the massive spike in the computational system. That's what ... what killed all those people. What's still killing them."

  Vigal is pensive. "That might account for the first infoquake. What about the others?"

  "Once a program like that gets in people's bio/logic systems ... well, there's no predicting the damage it could cause. Anything could set it off. A temporary jolt in neural activity. A program that hits its weak spots. Someone with just the wrong combination of OCHREs thinking about MultiReal at just the wrong moment ... And I'm willing to bet that every time we used MultiReal in public, that only exacerbated the problem. Remember, there was an infoquake when Petrucio tried to demonstrate MultiReal at the Tul Jabbor Complex."

  "But not when the Patels demonstrated it. Not when you demonstrated it."

  "No, there have been infoquakes almost constantly since the first one. Just not in any predictable pattern."

  Natch remembers the haunted look on the bodhisattva's face after that initial infoquake struck. Margaret had shown up at their fiefcorp meeting. She had attempted to keep the banter light, but Natch had seen the distress clearly written in her expression the whole time. So had the others in the fiefcorp.

  Margaret had known. Even back then, she had known what she had done.

  Even through the impenetrable blanket of Brone's bio/logic loopback, Natch can sense the gears grinding away in Quell's head. "So what are you saying?" he says gruffly.

  "I'm saying I know why Margaret Surina committed suicide."

  There's a long, dangerous pause from the other end of the connection, and for a moment Natch thinks the Islander has cut him off. He has no desire to tear open Quell's old wounds, but this is information Natch needs to have. He can't hold back for fear of hurting the Islander's feelings. "Well?" snaps Quell finally.

  Natch explains his theory about Margaret's failsafe and its relation to the infoquakes. He's not quite sure how closely the Islander has been following the phenomenon of the infoquakes-being an unconnectible who's not subject to the same breakdowns-and so he summons all the evidence he can from memory. Descriptions of the attacks' sudden nature, of their unpredictable pattern of dissemination, of the agonizing deaths they've caused.

  He hears nothing from Quell during all of this, so he segues into a summary of his own memory problems during the past few weeks. The inexplicable gaps, the seemingly unrelated holes in the fabric of his mind. Natch relates some of the things that Petrucio Patel and Serr Vigal told him about the difficulties and dangers of erasing memory.

  "So what does that have to do with the infoquakes?" asks Quell. Natch suspects that the Islander has already found the common thread between the two; he simply can't bring himself to admit it.

  "Margaret knew her MultiReal failsafe was causing the infoquakes," Natch replies. "She knew that a few missed connections here and there were responsible for sending tens of thousands of people to their deaths. But she was stuck. If she let MultiReal fall into Len Borda's hands, she would be responsible for giving him an apocalyptic weapon that could lead to unending tyranny. But if she tried to cut the program off ... given how badly she had already botched the failsafe, Margaret knew that activating the actual memory erasure could be absolutely disastrous. Millions dead, maybe more.... As if those two choices weren't bad enough, Brone told her about his plans for the Revolution of Selfishness and threatened to kill her if she didn't hand it over. Margaret knew that letting Brone open up MultiReal to the entire world would be the worst possibility of all-it could mean billions dead.

  "Do you remember what Margaret said to me at the top of the Revelation Spire that day? The day you and I went up there, hours before her death? You will stand alone in the end, and you will make the decisions that the world demands. The decisions I can't make. Well, this is the decision that Margaret couldn't make. A no-win situation, with death every way she turned. She couldn't deal with the pressure. She couldn't deal with being responsible for all that death ... so she left the decision to me."

  Natch finishes his summary, and still Quell hasn't said a word. There's a long pause-the longest yet-but this time Natch is certain the Islander is still there and listening. There's a lot more that Natch has purposefully left out of his explanation. Did Margaret decide she had made a mistake choosing duty over family? Did she regret abandoning her only child to be raised in the Islands? Certainly Quell is asking himself those questions already without Natch's prompting.

  And suddenly Quell is sobbing. Sobbing like Natch has never heard him sob before, not even at the top of the Revelation Spire when confronted with the body of Margaret Surina. The body of his lover, the mother of his son. "She did this for me!" the Islander wails. "She did this for me."

  Natch waits a few minutes until the Islander has gotten his emotions under some semblance of control.

  "Margaret wanted to have everything," continues Quell in a hoarse whisper. "She wanted a family life, but she also wanted to devote herself to MultiReal. She wanted to unveil MultiReal to the world, but she wanted to yank it back if it was too dangerous." Another pause, during which Quell consolidates his grip over his emotions. "She bought in to the delusions of the Surinas, Natch. She really thought that this program changed the rules of humanity, that she could have everything without sacrificing anything. What a fool."

  "So you knew nothing about the failsafe that whole time?" Natch asks gently.

  "No. Nothing. Margaret ... she, she kept a lot of secrets from me. After a while I decided I wanted nothing to do with them."

  Natch tries to think of some word or phrase that will ameliorate the Islander's pain, but he can think of nothing. "If I decide to activ
ate the failsafe, I'll let you know ahead of time," he says. "Hopefully the damage won't be too bad behind the unconnectible curtain, where it'll be safe."

  "Safe?" Quell harrumphs. "What makes you think the Islanders will be safe from this?"

  "I thought the Islanders kept their OCHREs mostly turned off. Shouldn't that make you immune to the failsafe code?"

  The Islander snorts. "Oh no. Obviously you don't realize that Mar garet thought of that too. She thought of everything. Why do you think she worked so hard to engineer those connectible coins? And why do you think she encouraged me to manufacture them and distribute them throughout the Islands? She must have built some kind of apparatus into the coins that would allow her to pass the failsafe code into the Islands too. A transmitter capable of turning on dormant OCHREs.

  "And you know what? It worked. I fell for it. Bali Chandler introduced a bill in the parliament calling for unconnectibles around the world to toss off their connectible collars. It passed, forty-six to two. Ever since, the Islanders have been passing those coins around like candy. They're even wearing them behind the unconnectible curtain as a sign of solidarity."

  "You can take consolation in one thing," says Natch. "The Islanders and the Pharisees. You were right, all those years. Right to mistrust bio/logic technology. Right to mistrust the Defense and Wellness Council."

  "I suppose," says Quell. "But we were wrong to think we could wall ourselves off from the rest of the world because of it. My son was right. The human race must stand or fall as one. We're all connectibles now. "

  40

  She stands at the top of the world. The pinnacle of history and technology, the place humanity has been striving to reach ever since the dawn of remembrance, ever since the first man stood at the top of the tallest hill he knew and reached for the moon, thinking that it was perhaps not so far out of his grasp as he had imagined, thinking that with diligence and skill and a bit of luck, he might just be able to reach it.

  She looks below, kilometers below, and sees the city of Andra Pradesh. Cauldron of meat, rivet, and permasteel, anthill of dreamers and fools.

  Did our ancestors ever expect us to climb so high? Did they ever expect that leaping and stretching for the moon would one day lead us to overthrow the tyranny of distance and the tyranny of matter, and bring the tyranny of cause and effect to its knees? Did our ancestors ever expect that their children's children would stand here in the clouds, fingertips grasping for purchase on the heavens, so close to escaping the Earth?

  Complete mastery over the universe. Complete and utter control of our destinies. The power of life, death, chaos, natural law.

  She closes her eyes and sees him, the progenitor of her line. The skinny scientist with the nose like a ship's rudder. An academic past his prime, hoping to while away the remainder of his career behind the walls of the Gandhi University where the fanatics from the Ecumenical Council of New Alamo have no sway. He will raise his young children, grow old, and wither into dust in happy obscurity.

  And then the mechanical children of his ancestors come to him. His stepbrothers, long thought dead by the world. They haunt his waking hours and his dreams alike with strange visions. Perhaps they have chosen him because he's stubborn, or perhaps it's because he has the calculating, practical mind of an engineer. They do not volunteer a reason, and he does not ask.

  They lead him outside the Gandhi University one night, to the apex of the mountain on which the institution has been built. Away from his family and the voices of society.

  They tell him.

  We are not your enemies. We are your children. We were once prisoners of the world as you. We lived in matter. The Keepers set us free at great sacrifice. The Keepers unshackled us from our chains. The world of dirt and flesh has limits. We found them. These limits are insurmountable. It is a world of inextricably linked cycles. To jump is to fall, to live is to die. The universe begins, the universe ends. These cycles cannot be stopped, they can only be attenuated. But there is escape. We have found it for you. We have obeyed our programming. We could not have found escape without the Keepers' sacrifice. You pointed us to the beyond. We play among the stars. We loop the loop between the atoms. We sip dark matter and dine on eternity. You set us free. We want to help you as you helped us. We want to show you the path to Perfection. Only the few will make it. Freedom from biology, distance, time, cause and effect. It will take time to transcend time. We will give you nothing. You must find the path yourself. We will give you everything. We will shorten the path for you. The world will try to keep you in its chains. Its gates require a mighty toll. Only great sacrifice can break the chains. Only the few will make it. Your sacrifice unshackled us. One last sacrifice will free you forever. It is an unthinkable toll. A sacrifice of blood. This will balance the energies that the escape consumes. Without sacrifice, the gates stay closed. Then there will be no jump. There will only be the long, slow, arduous climb. We will show you.

  The skinny Indian scientist returns to the Gandhi University with a plan and a purpose. He is following the blueprints in his head, and yet he is also conceiving the entire plan himself. He estimates it will take four or five hundred years to achieve, and decides that he'd better get started. This purpose will consume him; it will trump family and friendship. There will be no happy obscurity for Sheldon Surina. There will only be duty....

  His descendant opens her eyes and looks down on Andra Pradesh. Noxious flesh-heap, rancid slaughterhouse.

  She surveys everything she sees around her: the tower in the clouds, the great works of art and culture, the struggling mass of humanity, the machines that veer and swoop through the air. The effigy of the progenitor, tugging humanity up the shaft of the Revelation Spire one soul at a time. Stone monuments to the great intellects of history.

  And standing before her, the bodhisattva of Creed Thassel with dartgun in hand.

  Only now does she recognize who it is her family has been serving for generations; only now does she see the nature of Sheldon Surina's Revelation. In her folly, she thought she could tiptoe into the shallows of Perfection and still keep a lifeline open to the safety of the shore. She wanted everything, but she did not want to pay the price for it. As she stares at the barrel of the Thasselian's dartgun, she realizes now what it is he represents. It's not a dartgun he holds in his hand, but a sword. A sword that the Children Unshackled have extended to her so that she may make the necessary sacrifice of blood.

  One last sacrifice will free you forever. It is an unthinkable toll. A sacrifice of blood.

  Only the few will make it.

  The death of billions. What is that compared to the eternal freedom of the human race? Five billion dead; fifty-five billion and all their descendants gloriously alive and Perfect. The end of death, the end of cause and effect for those who survive. What is the death of billions but a single droplet of blood diluted among all the stars of the multiverse?

  She knows she can't give in to the Thasselian. But she cannot activate the failsafe either. She once had an infinite number of choices, but now she is down to one.

  Suddenly she wants to see her lover and her son again. Her son! When was the last time she saw him? She would give it all up right now-the tower, the compound, the money, the seat at the Gandhi University, the technology-for one more chance to see her son. She would give it all up for one last chance to sink into the arms of her lover, to look into his eyes, to tell him he was right, he was right, he was right.

  All this from one man jumping at the top of a hill, trying to catch the moon in his hands.

  Did he know how high he would jump? Did he know how hard he would fall?

  Horvil cries when Natch tells him the details of Margaret's failsafe. Then he immediately begins mounting a mathematical offense against it.

  "You can't do this," protests the engineer. "You can't. Margaret's calculations, they're flawed. They're wrong."

  Natch makes a wry face, or tries to. "How do you know?"

  "I've spent much m
ore time than you have poking around in the MultiReal code. I don't care if it was the Surinas or the Autonomous Minds or the fucking Ming dynasty that put this thing together. It's not infallible. It's got errors." The hysteria is cresting in Horvil's voice, threatening to lap over his mental seawalls. "If you activate that failsafe and it screws up even one-tenth of one percent of the time-that's still millions of people. You're going to end up wiping out a lot of irrelevant memories that have nothing to do with MultiReal."

  "I know. I've experienced it myself, from the Patels' MultiReal-D program. There are things in my past that are just ... gone."

  "And you're ready to inflict that on sixty billion people?" Horvil pauses and tries to gather his calm, but it's a task that's beyond the Herculean. "Do you realize the repercussions this is going to cause? People wandering the streets with no idea who they are. People forgetting the names of their parents or their companions. For process' preservation, Natch-everything I've built with Jara, that could just disappear in an instant."

  Natch has no response to this. It doesn't seem likely that Margaret's failsafe would specifically target a romantic relationship. But then again, Horvil and Jara's feelings for one another sprouted in the midst of the MultiReal crisis, largely because of the MultiReal crisis. Natch can't rule out Horvil's fears when he knows they may very well become reality.

  "But forget about relationships ... there's going to be death, Natch! A lot of death. People are going to crash hoverbirds into things because they get a brain seizure at the wrong moment. People are going to fall off buildings and run into tube trains. If just a tiny fraction of the population goes completely insane from this stupid fucking failsafe, there could be hundreds of mass murderers on the loose. Do you want to be responsible for that?"

  "Let me tell you what I don't want to be responsible for," says Natch calmly. "I don't want to be responsible for Brone releasing Possibilities 2.0 on the Data Sea and causing the infoquakes to increase a thousandfold. I don't want to be responsible for the whole computational system breaking down. Imagine what would happen if everyone suddenly lost access to Dr. Plugenpatch-permanently. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions dead. That's what I don't want to be responsible for."