Geosynchron

  "I can imagine," replies Natch. "Who rigged it up for you?"

  "Your former apprentice Benyamin accomplished this for me. He claims it was not particularly difficult-it was simply a matter of locating an apparatus that could synthesize voices through a speaker, and from there channeling your words was rather easy. I suppose I can grasp that aspect of the conversation. But how he can translate my words from sound waves into brain waves-well, I'm satisfied to let that remain beyond my comprehension."

  The entrepreneur smiles. At first, he wondered if his inexplicable fondness for the Pharisee was simply condescension-amusement at the man's ignorance. But the more words he exchanges with Richard Taylor, the more Natch realizes that he has a genuine fascination with the Pharisee's outsider perspective, with his boundless curiosity, with his occasional timidity and self-doubt. It would be very intriguing to see this man on his home turf. "Does the voice sound like me?" he asks.

  Taylor laughs. "The voice sounds like the drama actor Juan Nguyen."

  "Fitting."

  "So Benyamin claims that you wish to ask me an important question."

  "I do." Natch tries to formulate the best method of segueing into it, but he can think of nothing better than directness. He provides as basic an explanation of Margaret's failsafe and Quell's modification as he can. Taylor listens with complete silence, and somehow even through the strangely modulated voice of the sound wave conversion Natch can tell that the man is giving him his full attention. "My question is this," concludes the entrepreneur. "Can the Faithful Order of the Children Unshackled grant me asylum?"

  Taylor is taken aback. "You wish to live ... in the Pharisee Territories?"

  "Yes."

  "Ordinarily I would beg off answering such a question without consulting the leadership of my order. But in this circumstance, I believe I can answer you promptly and without qualification. Yes, Natch, we would consider it a great honor to host you in the Pharisee Territories, in Khartoum, for as long as you wish to stay."

  "I wouldn't want to mislead you," says Natch. "I'll be a great burden. I won't be able to contribute to your society. I'll probably have to be fed and clothed."

  "Nonetheless, we will welcome you with open arms."

  "You'll have to figure out how to get to me too. I'm outside the Twin Cities right now, surrounded by drudges and Thasselians. Once I activate the failsafe, this place could get real chaotic real fast. Of course, you'll have an advantage-you'll be one of the few people around with absolutely no memory loss. You might be able to just swoop in there during the confusion and grab me before anyone notices."

  "I don't think we'll have to worry too much about getting hold of you."

  "Why?"

  "Because I have discovered where my missing brethren from 49th Heaven are. Just today I received a message via Data Sea terminal that they were directed to the Twin Cities. They are already camped in a hotel not too far from the Kordez Thassel Complex, where they were told to await your arrival. That is why I was surprised to hear your request."

  Natch pauses. "The Children Unshackled told them to go there?"

  "That is my assumption."

  "I assumed-I assumed they would be furious at me. For choosing to activate Margaret Surina's failsafe. Your message to me, it instructed me not to, I think."

  "Never presume to know what the Children are thinking, Natch. Don't forget that they exist outside of time, space, and causality. I suspect they already knew the choice you would make and are comfortable with it."

  "I'm never going to see rain again," says Natch.

  His guardian hums in curiosity. "I didn't realize you liked rain," says Serr Vigal.

  "I don't. That is ... I suppose I've never really thought about it before. But I think once something is about to get taken away from you, it develops great significance. You start to wonder if-if you missed something important about it. If you failed to appreciate what was in front of you the whole time."

  The laughter comes bubbling out of the neural programmer like water from a boiling kettle. "I do believe we'll make a philosopher of you yet, Natch."

  A long pause.

  "We didn't talk enough," Natch blurts out.

  "I don't feel that way," replies Vigal after some thought. "It seems to me like we've talked about almost everything that's worth talking about."

  "That's not true! There are a million things we never talked about. Furniture ... music ... literature ... rain. We never talked about rain."

  "We may still get the chance someday," says the neural programmer, his voice tentative.

  "No, I told you. I've made my decision. I'm going to activate Margaret's failsafe ... soon. You said that Brone released Possibilities 2.0 on the Data Sea. I'll need to activate the failsafe in the next few minutes. And after that ..." The words drift off into the nothingness.

  Natch doesn't need eyes and ears to know what Serr Vigal is doing in the moment of silence that follows. Vigal is tugging at his salt-andpepper goatee, giving the ideas in his head a dress rehearsal before letting them out on the main stage. "Are you absolutely sure you know what's going to happen when you activate the failsafe?"

  Pause. "What are you suggesting?"

  "I'm thinking ... Please, Natch, hear me out. MultiReal is a technology that allows one to explore alternate realities. Separate paths. Petrucio has already demonstrated how to use the technology to effectively live sixty seconds in the future. What if ... what if ..

  Natch cuts his guardian off with a weary sigh. "I know exactly what you're going to suggest. This could be one of those alternate realities. We could all be living in a virtual future right now."

  "And?"

  "Ridiculous," scoffs the entrepreneur.

  "Come now, Natch! This isn't idle woolgathering. This isn't just one of Serr Vigal's silly far-flung ideas. Margaret Surina has destroyed the boundaries between the possible and the actual. If a choice cycle can be kept open for sixty seconds, why not an hour? And if you can live hours in the future, why not days? Weeks? Months!

  "Imagine this, Natch," continues Vigal, his voice growing more feverish and flustered by the second. "Margaret is sitting at the top of the Revelation Spire preparing to activate the first phase of her failsafe-the phase where the code infiltrates everyone's bio/logic systems and begins tracking memories. She has doubts about whether the world is ready for MultiReal. But what if she also has doubts in the failsafe? What if she decides to take an extra layer of precaution-and introduces the failsafe itself in a potential alternate reality?"

  "So you believe we're in a potential alternate reality inside another potential alternate reality?"

  "I believe it's possible, that's all. The technology is out there to do this, Natch. Margaret has demonstrated it. Petrucio Patel has demonstrated it. You've lived it. Just-just admit that it's plausible, that's all. Just admit that much."

  Natch can hear the desperation mounting in Vigal's words, and he figures it's time to put a stop to it. "Sure, I'll admit it's plausible-in the same way it's plausible that we could all be living inside a dream. In the same way that everything you experience might be a hallucination produced by some mad scientist stimulating your neural cells."

  Willful silence.

  "Vigal, this game doesn't lead anywhere. It's interesting to speculate about, I suppose. But regardless of whether I'm living in `reality' or some kind of ... simulation of reality, or hybrid reality, or whatever you want to call it ... the choices don't change. So yes, I suppose it's possible that after I activate the failsafe, we'll all get snapped back to December of 359 again, before any of us had even heard of MultiReal. But in terms of this reality, nothing has changed. I still need to activate Margaret Surina's failsafe in order to save millions of lives ... and you still need to prepare yourself for the fact that I'll be gone."

  In the silence that follows, Natch realizes that the neural programmer has made up his mind, and no amount of logic or persuasive argumentation is going to change it. Which makes him feel more fu
tile than he has felt since Brone put him in this darkness. Ever since that moment, he's been trying to spare his friends the agony of worrying about him, of worrying about the state of the world. Better they believe he will die than they believe he will spend his remaining years a stunted human being wandering the Pharisee Territories. Better they believe the world will forget all about MultiReal than they realize that this struggle will continue for generations to come. But if Serr Vigal and Horvil and Jara and Magan Kai Lee are going to believe what they're going to believe regardless of the evidence ... then perhaps this is all just wasted energy.

  Once Natch activates the failsafe, it won't matter. The Pharisees will take him away, and he'll disappear from civilization for good. Those around him will forget these conversations. They will assume that he has disappeared inside his shell and vanished into his own selfishness. The world at large will eventually piece together what happened and likely come to the conclusion that Natch is to blame.

  Which is perfectly fine with him.

  Natch feels a sudden urge to just activate the failsafe and get it over with. True, he's in virtual time now, and he could potentially dally away hours in here without having wasted more than a minute or two in real time. But what does he gain by it? He was ready to activate the failsafe when he knew it would kill him. He's just as ready to activate it now. He takes inventory of his emotions, trying to think of things left unfinished, questions left unanswered. He knows he will never get another chance to tie up loose ends.

  And then he thinks of one question he needs to ask. "Vigal, are you my father?" Natch blurts out.

  A pause. "I'm surprised that you'd ask me that," mumbles the neural programmer hesitantly.

  "Why?"

  "I always took your silence to mean that you already knew the answer to that question. So all these years you simply didn't know? Did you think I was trying to ... hide something from you? Or ... did you ..." Vigal slips into confusion, backtracks, starts again. "I suppose this is my fault, Natch. I really should have discussed this with you. Putting the burden of such a question on you, that wasn't fair of me, and I'm sorry."

  "So you are my father?"

  "Let me ask you ... does it really matter? Would anything have been different if I had called you my son all these years instead of my charge? I admit I was never particularly good at parenting ... but you know it's not something I ever asked for. It sort of ... fell into my lap, you might say. But I felt like a father. I certainly sacrificed like a father. I've, I've loved you like a father. So, I ask again ... does it matter?"

  Natch sits for a moment in the nothingness. "No, I suppose it doesn't."

  Serr Vigal exhales as if he has just put down a heavy weight. "Then I'll answer you. No, Natch, I'm not your father. Your mother and I never-we didn't-let's just say that despite what everyone thought, it was a platonic relationship."

  Natch says nothing.

  "I tried to figure out who your father was. When I arrived at Furtold to pick you up all those years ago, I spent a month combing through records, asking questions, playing detective. But I think ... I think I was asking for the wrong reasons. I found out nothing. The records were a disaster in those times. Don't forget, Natch, this was shortly after the Economic Plunge-and Furtoid has always been drastically underfunded, even in the best of times. There were wanderers and mercenaries passing through every day, and the colony had been paying genetic donors for decades. I think they were desperate to build up a population any way they could. They didn't have the manpower to keep track of it all ... I suppose your father must have been one of those men, one of the ones who wandered through. But there's no way to prove that, after all these years."

  Natch smiles. "How appropriate."

  There is another long pause as the entrepreneur begins preparing himself for the failsafe. The blindness. The confusion and pain.

  "So I suppose this is good-bye?" says Natch.

  He can hear that Serr Vigal is weeping.

  "What's wrong, Vigal?" he asks gently.

  "I-I won't have you forgotten, Natch. I won't have you castigated and blamed for all the death and destruction that's to come when the fact of the matter is that you're saving billions of lives. And no, don't tell me it's inevitable you'll be hated. It's not. I need ... I need to know what to tell the world. If they ask me why you did this, why you activated the failsafe. Tell me what to say, and I swear I'll remember it somehow."

  Natch thinks for a moment.

  And suddenly, as he thinks about what to tell Vigal, Natch can see more clearly than he has seen before. He can see through the blackness, past the barricade of nothingness that separates him from the rest of the world.

  He sees a world picking itself up from destruction and despair, from the twin ravages of large-scale computational chaos and the greatest tsunami civilization has ever seen. A world where the estimates of the number of dead range from several hundred thousand to several million, where several of the major computational systems have crashed spectacularly but are now slowly being resuscitated....

  He sees a man in a black robe being dragged away from a long, low complex of buildings near the Twin Cities by a group of Defense and Wellness Council officers. The man is screaming with impotent rage, cursing Natch, cursing the high executive, cursing the world, cursing the narrow cell in an orbital prison that is to be his for decades to come....

  He sees two women embracing at the hoverbird docks of London in front of a battered but intact OrbiCo medical freighter....

  He sees a Surina standing on the floor of the Tul Jabbor Complex with twenty-three skeptical members of the Prime Committee looking on. The audience is composed in equal parts of connectible and Islander, and while they are still segregated in their separate sections of the auditorium, they are listening to one another and respectful....

  He sees a new fiefcorp celebrating its recent victory in climbing to the top of the Primo's bio/logic investment guide, a victory spearheaded by the efforts of a small woman with dark curly hair and a tall man with a thin mustache and a black-and-white swirled pin on his jacket. Their young chief analyst looks on with overt cynicism while their portly chief engineer keeps one nervous eye on his boss, constantly on the lookout for a sign of recognition that is yet to appear....

  He sees the new high executive presiding over an open government commission to study the new technology that has come to light in the wake of the recent mysterious Memory Event. The high executive calls for the formation of a memecorp to oversee the development and eventual commercialization of this new technology. He calls for the heir to the Surinas to have an honorary seat on the board. But who better to lead this new memecorp than the fiefcorp master of the new number one on Primo's? ...

  And finally he sees a caravan slowly making its way across an arid land uncluttered by the zigzagging flight paths of hoverbird traffic, untrammeled by the tracks of tube trains. The caravan turns off the gravel road it has been traveling down and camps on the roadside. Children hop out and scurry from car to car, playing games with ball and stick. There's a man there, a large mirthful figure with grizzly hair and beard, who emerges from one vehicle leading by the hand his charge, his friend and his responsibility.

  It's a man in his early thirties. Blind as if he had never known light, deaf to the world around him. To him there is no memory and there is no time; there is only the deathless and undifferentiated now. Yesterday is the same as today is the same as tomorrow, but all is well because he has seen the nothingness at the center of the universe and he is at peace.

  Natch speaks. "If anyone asks, you tell them that I'm moving towards perfection. But I'll get there at my own damn speed."

  APPENDIXES

  APPENDIX A

  A SYNOPSIS OF

  INFOQUAKE AND

  MULTIREAL

  Natch is an entrepreneur with a burning ambition. He simply can't define what it is.

  The world he lives in is a ripe place for ambition. Having suffered a cataclysmic Al revo
lt hundreds of years ago, the world embraced Sheldon Surina and his science of bio/logics. Now, 359 years later, thousands of small software companies-fiefcorps- compete ruthlessly to sell programs that run the human body. Order is maintained by a patchwork of subscription-based governments called L-PRACGs. Overseeing these governments is the Prime Committee, which uses the Defense and Wellness Council as its police force.

  As an orphaned boy in the care of the neural programmer Serr Vigal, Natch is plagued by strange and hallucinatory visions. He learns to use his wits to best his childhood enemies and achieve top scores in his class. His only obstacle is Brone, a boy with an equally cunning intellect and a more charismatic way with people. But Brone is soon dispatched during the boys' initiation by a bear attack that is partly accident, partly fate, and partly Natch's dark vengeance.

  With his prospects for financial success dimmed by the scandal of initiation, Natch turns to a series of low-paying jobs at the bottom of the programming world. Only gradually, after much Machiavellian scheming, does Natch climb to the top of his profession. But he hasn't achieved this alone. He's had the aid of his childhood friend, Horvil; his mentor, Serr Vigal; and his market analyst, Jara.

  With Horvil's and Jara's help, Natch achieves one final coup. He arranges a complicated con involving a fake black code attack on the Vault banking system. This con allows Natch's fiefcorp to replace his bitter rivals, the Patel Brothers, at the top of the Primo's bio/logic investment guide rankings. Where Natch was once an outcast, now he is a celebrity.

  Furthermore, the scheme brings Natch to the attention of Margaret Surina, heir to her ancestor Sheldon's fortune. She's been working for decades on a mysterious technology called MultiReal that creates "alternate realities." But now she fears that Len Borda, the high executive of the Defense and Wellness Council, is preparing to take this technology away from her-and possibly kill her in the process. Borda sees MultiReal as a weapon of potentially apocalyptic proportions, one too dangerous to remain in private hands. It's the same conflict Margaret's father, Marcus, went through with his teleportation technology many years ago, a conflict that ended in a fiery hoverbird accident.