Geosynchron

by David Louis Edelman

"I'm not the only one with an opportunity here, Da. You'll have that opportunity too. You don't have to flit back and forth between Manila and Andra Pradesh anymore. You can start over."

  "At my age, Josiah, you don't start over. Especially if you've been through what I've been through. You just keep on going and try to make peace with where you've been.... Don't worry about me. I'll survive. I always do."

  Romping on the Sigh for half an hour seemed like a monumentally irresponsible thing to do at a time like this. But Jara didn't take too much convincing. She knew as well as Horvil did that this could literally be their last moment of intimacy before Margaret's failsafe snatched the entire relationship from their memories. They might wake up tomorrow bickering at one another as if the intervening five months had never happened.

  Love is stronger than memory, Kristella Krodor had once written. Love is the greatest certainty.

  It was a pretty sentiment, but Jara didn't really want to entrust her romantic life to the treacly platitudes of a third-rate drudge, and one whose column featured a weekly roundup of popular lipstick colors at that. No, as far as Jara was concerned, love was fragile, something that needed to be nurtured and protected from the cruel vicissitudes of the world. Something that needed to be fought for, tooth and claw.

  So they made love slowly, tenderly, with a minimum of accoutrements and virtual embellishments. Horvil was Horvil, complete with massive belly and a propensity for excessive sweat. Jara was Jara, complete with narrow hips and untamed thicket of hair that liked to snarl stray fingers and creep into nostrils at the wrong moments.

  As soon as they had logged off the Sigh and returned to their Earthbound selves, panic set in.

  "What if we forget the whole relationship?" inquired Horvil, lying on the bed and twisting the ends of the hotel comforter. "What if you hate me all over again?"

  "Come on, Horvil, I never hated you," replied Jara. "It just took a while for me to appreciate you properly. But I learned eventually. If I learned once, I'm sure I'll learn again."

  "But what if you don't? Jara, the only reason I had the courage to admit my feelings for you in the first place was because we got thrown into a crisis together. Two crises, in fact. The Council marching on Andra Pradesh, and the chaos at the Tul Jabbor Complex. What if nothing like that happens to us again? What if I never get the courage to talk to you about my feelings again?"

  "Those weren't accidents. Put the two of us together again and we'll end up the same way."

  Horvil propped himself up on one elbow and took one of Jara's hands in his. "Are you kidding? After all we've seen? For process' preservation, don't you remember that MultiReal experiment I did in London? All I had to do was twitch my nose a different way, and that street vendor was giving me a big discount on my lunch. No, I'm sorry, but the world we live in isn't preordained. It's just one of a trillion equally likely possibilities."

  Jara frowned. The engineer was right, and she knew it. There were alternate realities out there where Horvil and Jara ended up bitter enemies, where Jara ended up with Natch, where she never recovered from the molestation by her childhood proctor and wound up in a selfdestructive pattern. "So what can we do to prevent this from going away?" said Jara quietly. "Can we just summarize the whole relationship in a message and send it to each other?"

  Horvil shook his head. "No, I don't think so. If the failsafe knows how to wipe out our memories about MultiReal, it's going to know how to wipe out our messages too."

  "So we'll post it on the Data Sea somewhere. A public message board."

  "No good. It'll get wiped there as well."

  "This really shouldn't be that hard, Horv ... We'll write the messages in code. We'll use some kind of cipher that we can decode after the failsafe has run its course."

  The engineer was starting to get intrigued by the challenge, in spite of himself. "I don't think you appreciate the problem here. If I'm understanding what Natch told me about the failsafe correctly-and I think I do-the failsafe code is already tracking our memories and keeping a list of what might need to be deleted later. So before we encode the message, the failsafe already has tagged it as something that needs to be deleted."

  Jara pulled herself up from the bed and began clutching frizzy strands of hair in frustration. "We don't have time for this," she moaned. "We need to figure this out now. In the next twenty minutes. Brone is releasing the program, as we speak."

  "What we need is a low-tech solution," said Horvil, perking up. "How did the ancients keep permanent records?"

  "With ink and treepaper," replied Jara without thinking.

  "Exactly!"

  They began frantically tearing the hotel room apart in search of paper and ink. Drawers, tables, cubbyholes, dressers-no sign of paper and ink in any of them. I thought these people were Luddites! thought Jara. Isn't there supposed to be stationery sitting on the desks of old-fashioned hotels?

  Finally Horvil had an inspiration and dashed into the hallway of the hotel. Funny how quickly the plump engineer could move when he was motivated. He reemerged in the doorway seconds later bearing an antique book that Jara had seen sitting on the hall table near the elevator. A kitschy bit of decoration that some interior designer decided would lend the establishment some cachet. Jara flipped through it. The print was indecipherable Chinese script, the topic was unknown, and the middle contained a number of full-color plates that must have been glossy at some point in time. Ancient Chinese seascapes, verdant pastures with placid peasants tending the land. She turned the book to its blank inside cover.

  "We've got a problem," said Jara.

  "What?"

  "How do we write in it?"

  Horvil scratched his head. "You don't have a pen?"

  "Horv, I don't think I've ever even seen a pen before. Not outside of a viewscreen. Have you?"

  "Not since initiation. But this is ridiculous. We're in the Islands. The city of Manila's been around since ancient times. There's got to be somewhere that we can buy ink and treepaper around here. An ink and paper store."

  Jara flung her mind wildly across the Data Sea. "There is-but it's on the other side of the city. We'd never make it in time."

  They tore through the hotel room once more in search of some kind of writing utensil, momentarily swept away by the tide of fear. Horvil scurried down to the hotel lobby and returned back five minutes later empty-handed. Jara had resorted to getting down on hands and knees to see if some writing implement might have rolled under the bed at some point. No luck.

  Then the engineer came up with a brilliant solution: they would write in blood. Jara doubted they'd be able to scrawl more than a dozen words or two by this method, but even a dozen words would be better than nothing. They wasted several minutes trying to prick their fingers and come up with a usable bead of blood to write with, only to find themselves thwarted by the miracles of modern medical technology. The OCHREs in their bio/logic systems would stanch the flow of blood within seconds, leaving them with only a few half-formed smears on the pulped wood fiber.

  "This is pathetic," lamented Jara. "I can't believe we can project a virtual body millions of kilometers through space to Mars, but we can't figure out how to write something down on a piece of paper."

  But Horvil was persistent. He grabbed the kitchen knife Jara had used to prick their fingertips and tried to carve a message onto the walls. But the flexible stone was almost completely impervious to their blade. Horvil and Jara threw away another five minutes experimenting on a wide variety of building materials, but floor, carpet, furniture, and dishes were all immune to permanent scarring by any method they possessed.

  Dejected, they came close to giving up when Horvil was struck by a sudden remembrance. "I can't believe I forgot about this!" he shouted. "Aunt Berilla has an old quill pen sitting on her desk with a big pot of ink."

  "What on Earth would she have something like that for?" asked Jara.

  Horvil shrugged. "If I understood anything about Aunt Berilla, the world would be a much d
ifferent place. I think she dabbles in calligraphy."

  "Well, don't just stand there. Send her a Confidential Whisper already."

  It took some convincing to persuade Berilla to leave the gathering of Creed Elan functionaries who had gathered in her estate to discuss philanthropic endeavors for striking TubeCo workers. But after a minute of increasingly alarming and unrealistic promises on Horvil's behalf, Berilla apparently decided that her nephew was in a serious enough bind to pay attention to. The engineer quickly brought Jara into the conversation.

  "Horvil, I don't even know if that old quill pen still works," said the matriarch in a final effort to keep her afternoon intact.

  "Don't try to pull that," said Horvil, head tilted back and fingers pinching a gumdrop of flesh between creased eyebrows until it turned cherry red. "I've seen you use it for that dumb calligraphy you do with your friends."

  "Well, if you're going to behave that way ..."

  After another agonizing couple minutes of cajoling, they managed to persuade Berilla to retreat to her office and get out her quill pen and parchment. Horvil began dictating a long series of nonsensical letters and numbers that must have had his aunt pounding the table in irritation. He made Berilla repeat them back to him several times in a row to make sure she had transcribed his words correctly. "It's a rotating cipher," Horvil told Jara. "When I decode it, I'll get a few keywords to assure myself that it was genuinely me who sent the message."

  "Yeah, but what does it say?"

  "Pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell. You and me, the memory erasure, the relationship, a few private things about you so I can assure you that this all happened."

  Jara didn't want to know what those few private things were, and she hoped she never had to find out. She felt an inexplicable tug from someplace inside of her, a desire to just let everything that had happened in the past few months get sucked down the drain of vanished memory and never come back. How many times had she yearned for the ability to just up and walk away from her life and start anew? She wondered how many people out there would use this memory apocalypse as a convenient excuse to abscond from their responsibilities.

  Berilla's impatient harrutnph interrupted her from her reverie. "What did you say?" asked Jara.

  "I said, what do you want me to write down?"

  And then it hit Jara: what did she want Berilla to write down?

  Somehow the thought of writing a straightforward account of her relationship with Horvil and the lessons she had learned over the past few months seemed utterly inadequate, even if she could get over the embarrassment of dictating the entire thing to Horvil's Aunt Berilla. If Margaret's failsafe really did wipe out crucial parts of her memory, was there anything she could say to convince herself that her relationship with Horvil was real? She imagined a future Jara pursing her lips, skeptical of the whole business, wondering if somebody was playing her for a fool. Or worse-maybe she herself had willingly leapt into the jaws of an emotional trap, just like she had done so many times before.

  Jara asked herself: what obligation did she have to force herself to accept the reality of a romantic relationship with Horvil? Who knew what circumstances Jara would find herself in, what emotional baggage the failsafe would leave her with? Who was to say that Horvil would survive it unscathed? Perhaps he would emerge from the whole experience with some crucial part of his personality emasculated from the tumult. Perhaps they would no longer be compatible people after this business was over with.

  Besides which-did it really matter in the grand scope of things whether her relationship with Horvil survived intact? There were an infinite number of tracks her life could have taken in the past few months; why should she shackle herself to one particular track and stubbornly declare that one to be the best of all possible tracks? Jara had the power now to navigate among those different tracks, to choose her own. Whether she ended up happy with Horvil or not was precisely beside the point. No matter what happened today, this was a decision she would need to make again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and every sun and moon from now until she walked through the gates of the Prepared. Every day was a new choice and a new opportunity.

  "Well?" said Berilla testily. "I've got a letter here addressed to you. What do you want it to say?"

  Jara shook her head, landed back in the present. "Here's what I want you to write down. It's only one sentence. Ready?"

  A sigh. "Yes."

  "`You are yourself, and you are whole."'

  43

  "You're in luck," says Quell. "You're not going to die. At least, not today."

  Natch doesn't realize how much the fear has taken hold of him until he hears the Islander's words of reprieve. It feels like an enormous fist has loosened its grip on his chest. But if Quell has indeed figured out a way to neutralize the lethality of Margaret's failsafe code, then why does he still sound so weary, so defeated? "What's wrong?" asks Natch.

  "You might want to die after this is all over."

  The entrepreneur searches his feelings and still finds the will to live as strong as it was when Frederic Patel's sword almost sliced off his head. No, in spite of everything he has learned and lost in the past few months, Natch no longer wants to succumb to the Null Current. "Tell me," he says.

  "I'll give you the short version because Brone's about to release MultiReal on the Data Sea," explains Quell. "Margaret's failsafe calls up a subroutine that blows out your neural OCHREs. It's like a lethal burst of electricity that just fries all the circuitry running through your brain. But I found a loophole. The failsafe doesn't actually check to make sure there's no neural activity after the subroutine runs. It just checks to make sure your OCHREs aren't functioning. The program assumes that if the OCHREs are dead, then the subroutine has done its job and destroyed the host. But I think I've figured out another way to destroy your neural OCHREs without killing you. If we run that first, then we can fake the failsafe out. It'll see that the OCHREs have gone dead and skip right over the lethal jolt of electricity."

  "So ... if all of the neural machinery is gone ..."

  "No more running bio/logic programs. Ever." Quell pauses and inhales sharply. "But that's not the worst part. There'll be collateral damage."

  "Collateral damage?"

  A pause. "You understand I'm simplifying this quite a bit."

  "Yes. Go on."

  "This alternate method of destroying the OCHREs ... it's not electrical, it's chemical. It's not acid, exactly, but it'll be like acid. Some of the machines in the brain are very tightly interwoven with the structures they regulate. Like the OCHREs on the optic nerve-they're literally coiled around it. So if you destroy those machines ..."

  "I'll be blind, is what you're saying," interrupts Natch.

  There's an uncomfortable silence as if Quell is trying to psyche himself up to say something. "Blind and deaf, I think," continues the Islander. "You'll be functional-you won't be in a vegetative state. Should be able to walk around, eat, pick up things. But you'll have ... cognitive problems."

  "What kind of cognitive problems?"

  "I have no fucking idea. You might lose your sense of time. Or be unable to reason linearly. You might lose your emotions. There's going to be a thousand microscopic pinholes in your brain. Absolutely no way to tell what they'll hit." A long, ragged exhalation of breath. "Butyou'll live. You'll survive. You'll function. Oh, and one more thing."

  Natch blanches. What else could there be?

  "It's going to hurt like a bitch. Like nothing you've ever felt before."

  Quell was right. The choice between this kind of half-existence and a clean death is not an easy one. Is his desire for life strong enough to accept it regardless of the consequences? It's entirely possible that once the decision's been made, he will be unable to change his mind. Will he have the ability to bring himself to the Prepared if life in this state proves unbearable? He's not sure.

  What would life be like without bio/logics? Natch tries to remember what a no
rmal day looks like, tries to take inventory of all the things he's losing.

  He wakes up-usually prompted by a gentle nudge from QuasiSuspension at a preset time. He stands and stretches-activating a quick burst from a common joint-soothing program by reflex. He walks into the shower room and takes a quick look at the mirror-with a half-conscious query to his bio/logic systems to check on the status of his teeth. He steps into the shower-and feels the hot spray of water automatically adjusting to his internal thermostat....

  Barely three minutes out of bed, Natch has already counted half a dozen ways in which he relies on bio/logics. Could he even count the number of programs he uses in an entire day? Hundreds, thousands? What about the routines he has tagged for quick access, programs that he can flick on and off with the twitch of a finger? He sprinkles NiceSpice 52 throughout his meals to liven up a dull scone or soothe the bite of a hot pepper.... He fires up Urban Botanist 18c to idly peruse databases of redwood trees when he takes his tube trips between Cisco and Seattle....

  Initiation taught Natch that most bio/logic programs are not necessities at all, but luxuries earned by the human race after a thousand generations of toil. But in a society that runs on bio/logics, that was built on bio/logics, some programs are not luxuries. How will he walk down the street, when he won't be able to sense the tube tracks in front of him? How can he read the news, when he has no way of accessing the Data Sea? How can he even access a Vault account to pay for anything?

  How can he program, when he can neither see nor interact with MindSpace?

  Without all of those things ... what's left?

  "Listen, I know this isn't what you were hoping for," says Quell dejectedly. "I haven't given up. Do you hear me? I haven't given up. I'm going to keep battering away on this thing until the very last second. I might still be able to find a breakthrough."

  "Can I ask you one favor?" says Natch.

  "What?"

  "Don't tell anyone about this, okay? Especially Horvil and Serr Vigal."

  "This is a most peculiar contraption," says Richard Taylor. "I don't believe I've seen anything like this before."