Multireal

by David Louis Edelman

  Magan could feel the randomness algorithm hijack his thoughts and twist them into unrecognizable shapes designed to sow confusion among any eavesdropping enemy. "Keep pushing for higher ground, regardless of any spiking temperatures," he said. "It's a tribute to your preparedness that we have a robust strategy at all." He could imagine the same process at work in reverse in each of the soldiers' heads, realigning and reassembling his gibberish into something more comprehensible. Remember that the subject is expected to be unarmed, and lethal force will not be required. If we encounter his apprentices, they are to be taken alive.

  Silence ensued. Magan watched the drifting snowflakes and tried to clear his mind. He could see the officers through the window of the next hoverbird polishing their dartguns, choosing which canisters of black code-laden needles to load. Rey Gonerev was making small talk with the pilot in plain speech, as if deliberately flaunting her defiance of military convention.

  A little more than a month ago, Magan had never heard of this man, this fiefcorper who was the object of their mission. He had come from nowhere, really, a shameless entrepreneur who had clawed his way out of the bear pit of bio/logic programming. Nobody was quite sure how he had wormed his way into Margaret Surina's good graces, or how he had gained control of her MultiReal technology so quickly. Then he had showed up in Len Borda's chambers, mere hours ahead of a major product demo, looking to make a deal: the Council's protection from some group of assassins in black robes that had ambushed him on the streets of Shenandoah-protection from the black code swarming through his bloodstream even now like barracudas. In exchange: access to MultiReal.

  The high executive had kept his word. He had raised his hand and sent three legions of his best troops scrambling for Andra Pradesh. The fiefcorper's product demo had gone off as planned.* _link_

  And what had the entrepreneur delivered in return? Nothing.

  He had failed to show up for half a dozen scheduled meetings over the next week, leaving Magan and his underlings to sit alone in a series of conference rooms feeling foolish. Urgent messages and ConfidentialWhispers had disappeared into the void, unacknowledged and unanswered. Threats had gone unheeded.

  Borda had responded to this charade with the subtlety of someone conducting an orchestra in a suit of armor. He had sent white-robed Council officers to shadow the man twenty-four hours a day, then had those officers parade before the man's windows with dartguns drawn. When that had failed to apply the appropriate pressure, he had ordered the troops to accept no excuses and firmly escort the man to the Council's administrative offices in Melbourne. Still the fiefcorp master managed to elude them. He would disappear for days at a time right under the officers' noses-nobody knew where or how.

  Two days ago, Len Borda's patience had reached its limit. He had called Magan Kai Lee to his chambers in the middle of the night, telling him to drop everything and bring the intractable fiefcorper back to the negotiating table, by force if necessary.

  "In handcuffs?" Magan had asked.

  "In chains," Borda had replied.

  Lieutenant Lee had looked at that weathered face, that bald capstone of a head. The high executive had stared back at him with a gaze of acid. Magan felt his fingertips flex involuntarily, yearning to take hold of the dartgun holstered at his side and aim it at that caustic, lichlike countenance. Borda had merely sat there, defenseless but utterly without fear. He knew that Magan would not break their agreement.

  And Borda was right. In the end, Magan Kai Lee had done what he was told. He had retreated back to his quarters, filing the impatience away in yet another mental side room that was full dangerously close to bursting. He had called up Papizon, and the two of them had sketched out this endeavor, with occasional input from the Blade. The next forty-eight hours had been a haze of architectural blueprints, supply requisitions, and scouting reports.

  An incoming blip snapped Magan back to the now. It was time.

  Go.

  All at once, the Defense and Wellness Council hoverbirds blasted into motion. They quickly shifted into single file as they sped toward Shenandoah like a poison arrow, with Ridgello's hoverbird the barb and Magan's VIP ship the fletchings.

  Magan took a parting glance at the crossing of the two rivers. He thought of the flow of illicit advertising and wondered what kind of societal parasite would resort to such a scheme.

  Natch, he thought, you brought this on yourself.

  Five hoverbirds darted out from behind the Blue Ridge Mountains, skirting close to the ground, where they blended in with the snow. Traffic was a farce this early in the morning. The sun hung close to the horizon, unsure of itself.

  Papizon, what's your status? said Ridgello.

  Even scrambled, the tactician's voice sounded serene and unhurried. Security is under Council control, he said. We're decompressing the building now. Target apartment will be just inside the northwest entrance in ninety seconds.

  And Natch? asked the team leader.

  We saw him enter the building last night at approximately ten o'clock local time. He's been active in MindSpace ever since. There are human and data agents watching every exit.

  Magan and Gonerev exchanged looks of cautious optimism. So far, so good. Let the Blade call the plan overkill; once they had the fiefcorp master safely onboard a Council hoverbird en route to Melbourne, this whole operation would be yesterday's lessons learned.

  Rey Gonerev Joined Magan at the command console. The yellow triangles were rapidly converging on a blinking red star. A sixth triangle hunkered down beneath the building in the pipes of the city's underground transfer system. That would be Papizon and his technical crew.

  Magan switched the rear windows of the hoverbird to battlefield display, blocking out the rapidly receding December landscape. Perspectives from six different soldiers filled the screens: here a man rubbing the barrel of his multi disruptor with a soft cloth, there a woman stretching her calves and muttering about the cold. Following regulations, Magan flipped through each of the twenty-five officers in turn to verify the connections. He found Ridgello calm and collected and not the least bit nervous; operations like this were his gruel.

  The hoverbirds zipped over a large hill and went into a steep, nosebleed descent behind a copse of trees. The pilot cut the inertial cush- ioners to stifle the noise. Rey Gonerev grunted as her head bounced against the low hoverbird ceiling, but Magan remained composed. He thanked a thousand generations of Chinese heritage for making him too short to worry about such obstructions.

  They touched down in the snow with a soft thud. All five yellow triangles were now clustered on a slope next to the blinking red star.

  Seconds later, the doors whooshed open and the Defense and Wellness Council was on the move.

  A disciplined sprint up a snow-covered slope, dartguns drawn. A building that curved atop the next hill like a natural extension of the landscape. Two dozen figures in white fatigues with muted yellow stars edging through a small huddle of fir trees. The fog of heavy breath.

  About ten meters up, a door opened and spat forth a middle-aged woman holding a mug of steaming nitro. A black platform slid beneath her feet in the blink of an eye to serve as balcony. She yawned, stretched, cracked her knuckles.

  Take her down, snapped the team leader.

  Six pinpricks of light slid across the woman's torso. The dart-rifles sang. The woman collapsed, ceramic mug of nitro tumbling after.

  Magan watched from his ship as Ridgello's team zipped across the snow and dashed through the building's northwest entrance. Rey flipped a window to focus on one of the three soldiers ascending the unconscious woman's balcony via magnetic cable. One of the officers glanced back over his shoulder at the copse of fir trees, which looked perfectly undisturbed. Ridgello was good. Magan felt confident that nobody inside the building had noticed anything unusual.

  The interior hallway was brightly lit. Ridgello's team flew down the corridor, swift as ghosts, until they reached the first door on the left. Two officers lined
up on either side of the door, dartguns drawn and needles loaded. Ridgello blasted the apartment security with a Defense and Wellness Council priority override, and the door slid open. A dozen troops swarmed into Natch's apartment.

  Rey Gonerev let out a gasp.

  The apartment was empty.

  A half-eaten sandwich lay on the kitchen counter alongside a cold mug of nitro that had obviously been untouched for hours, perhaps days. One of the viewscreens was broadcasting a spirited melee from a fencing tournament on 49th Heaven. A triangular blob of code rotated inside a MindSpace bubble in Natch's office with no hand there to rotate it. Even more telling, however, was the absence of the ubiquitous shoulder pack of bio/logic programming bars that fiefcorpers always kept within reach.

  "You said he was here, Papizon," barked the Blade. "Where is he?"

  A puzzled stammer came over the connection. "You mean, hehe's not there?"

  "No, he fucking isn't."

  "But the scope says ... There's still ... If Natch isn't there, then who's working in MindSpace?"

  Ridgello, the only one still using battle language: No sign of him, Lieutenant.

  The troops had relaxed their guard by now and were all casting dazed looks at one another. One of them scratched his beefy head with the barrel of his disruptor gun, against all weapons protocol. Officers were poking through closets and peeking under tables on the off chance that Natch might be cowering in some undiscovered corner. A woman standing behind the workbench in Natch's office turned to face one of the interior windows and was startled to read the text printed there in bold letters:

  A PRIVATE MESSAGE FOR MAGAN KAI LEE

  Back in the hoverbird, Magan blanched. Rey Gonerev's face showed some amalgam of disgust and amusement. The snake knew we were coming, thought Magan. How could he possibly have known that? Magan counted the people who had known the details of this operation ahead of time on three fingers: the Blade, Papizon, himself. Not even Ridgello had known what was going down until late last night.

  The team leader had seen the text by now. Do you want to read this, Lieutenant? he said.

  Magan felt his mind downshifting, looking for a more acceptable gear. The smart thing to do would be to ignore the message and get his people out of there as fast as possible. But wasn't that what Natch was expecting him to do? The message on the window was such a transparent ploy to get Magan into the apartment that the fiefcorp master must be counting on him to not take the bait. In which case ... shouldn't he do the opposite? The lieutenant cursed silently. How difficult it was to use logic on a creature whose entire nature rejected the concept.

  Magan opened the supply chest at his knee, grabbed a canister of black code darts, and snapped it onto the barrel of his dartgun. "You're not going in there, are you?" said the Blade incredulously.

  "Shit," replied the Council lieutenant, striding for the door of the hoverbird. "I guess I am."

  Within two minutes, he had made it up the hill to the tenement building's northwest entrance. Magan was approaching middle age and no longer possessed the feline agility of his younger troops, but he still doubted that any of the building's occupants had seen him. Magan glanced up at the balcony of the third-floor apartment, where the officer standing guard confirmed his assessment with the okay signal. Two other guards were escorting the unconscious woman back to her bed, where she would wake up in a few hours with a splitting headache. Even the dropped mug of nitro had disappeared back inside.

  The yellow-starred officers in the apartment saw the look in Magan's eyes and gave him a wide berth. He walked into Natch's office, ushered the massive Nordic team leader out the door, and opened the message on the viewscreen with a gesture.

  SMILE FORTHE CAMERAS.

  Magan frowned. What kind of message was this?

  Suddenly his eyes widened. "Out! Everybody out!" he snapped, unencrypted, startling the Council officers into a pell-mell gallop for the exit. "No, he knows we're here-southeast exit!" The group skidded to a halt and reversed directions. Rey Gonerev was yelling something in his ear, but Magan couldn't process it quickly enough. He managed to decipher the solicitor's words just as they burst into the southeast courtyard: "No, stay inside. The drudges, the drudges!"

  Standing in the snow outside Natch's building was a pack of men and women whose eyes were lit with predatory glee. Magan recognized many of their faces on sight: the craggy visage of Sen Sivv Sor, the dandyish face of John Ridglee, the weasel smirk of V. T. Vel Osbiq.

  The drudges.

  Ridgello, clearly irritated, gave his troops the signal to sheathe their weapons. The Council lieutenant summoned PokerFace 85a to mask his own roiling emotions as the drudges formed a receiving line and began peppering the retreating officers with questions for their readers.

  "Lieutenant, why has Len Borda decided to seize MultiReal by force?"

  "Who approved this mission?"

  "Has the Council consulted the Prime Committee about this?"

  "What charges are you planning to bring against Natch?"

  "Is this legal?"

  Magan Kai Lee trudged through the courtyard, saying nothing, trying to figure out the exchange rate of this new situation. He could practically taste the bile in the back of his throat. "You see, Rey?" he said over ConfidentialWhisper. "This snake has fangs."

  3

  Natch stood at his workbench and waved his left hand. A shimmering bubble the size of a coin appeared in the air before him. The bubble quickly expanded until it encompassed most of the workbench, until it enveloped him entirely and blanketed the rest of the world in a translucent film.

  MindSpace. An empty canvas, a barren universe. Anything was possible here.

  With his right hand, Natch undid the clasps to the weather-beaten satchel that sat on the side table. The satchel flopped open to reveal its hidden treasure: twenty-six thin metal bars, branded with the letters of the Roman alphabet. Natch's fingers wandered blindly to the bar labeled F and slid it whisper-quiet from its sheath. As soon as the bio/logic programming bar passed the borders of MindSpace, spikes and finials burst from its sides like a butterfly's wings emerging from the cocoon. Natch swished the bar back and forth in front of him, and the butterfly took flight.

  The fiefcorp master raised his left hand again and spread his fingers wide. The MindSpace bubble exploded with a sinuous curve of interlocking spheres, a virtual centipede in hues of purple and brown. The canvas was covered down to the last square centimeter, and yet still the shapes multiplied.

  Too close in. Natch hitched his thumb back, zooming out to a better vantage point. The spheres only grew in density as they receded, until they became atomic particles in a solid block of gray. Farther out, the block was now merely one of thousands, a brick in the wall of an ominous castle of programming code. Natch, impatient, continued jabbing his thumb backward. Now even the castle was just one small portion of an immense oval-shaped structure. Parapets and walkways in aqua and silver swirled through the whole and made daring forays across the central void. A MindSpace megalopolis.

  At last the entire structure lay visible before him. Natch could pan out no farther. He extended his left index finger and rotated his hand ninety degrees counterclockwise, causing a legend to appear atop the block of code.

  POSSIBILITIES

  Version: 0.76

  Programmer: The Surina/Natch Multi Real Fiefcorp

  Possibilities was the fiefcorp's brand name for MultiReal. MultiReal: the product of sixteen years' isolation by one of the world's most brilliant scientists, with virtually unlimited resources at her disposal. MultiReal: the crowning achievement of an entire line of Surinas stretching back for generations.

  And now the program belonged to Natch.

  The entrepreneur hefted the spiky programming tool in his hand, testing its mass. He rotated the castle around and around, looking for just the right spot.... There. A soft place, a weakness in the virtual masonry. All at once, Natch raised the bar over his head and struck at the castle wall with
furious strength.

  Clang. The bar bounced off the castle and set his right hand vibrating.

  Natch grabbed the bar again with both hands, wielding it like a crazed samurai. He began delivering savage blows to the structure before him. Again and again he struck, snarling with rage. Finally one of the blows smashed through the brick, and the castle wall shattered into a thousand pieces with a deafening crash.

  Natch peered at the interior of the vanquished castle, expecting to see a skeleton of virtual boards, planks, and girders. But the structure was completely hollow and had no visible means of support. This was no mere emptiness, no simple absence-of-something-else; it was a yawning chasm of nothingness, a force of void that seemed to pull at him with intense gravity.

  As the fiefcorp master stood, paralyzed with fear, the program began to crumble all around him. Blocks that had been anchored and secured by a thousand connections were buckling under the strain, pulling loose, succumbing to the Null Current. Soon objects across the room were sliding toward him; programming bars were making kamikaze leaps from his satchel; even dishes were somersaulting in from the kitchen to get swallowed by the growing darkness.

  Natch felt the tug in his knees first. He struggled to get to the office door, thinking that if he could just shut out the nothingness, he would be all right. But soon the void was pulling at his entire body. He managed to hook his fingers around the doorjamb just as he lost his feet. For a minute, maybe two, he hung there with his heels in the air and his fingernails clawing for a handhold on the door. And then a chair slid in from the living room and bashed his knuckles. Natch lost his grip. He began tumbling end over end into the chill of the darkest night.

  Nothingness.

  He came to in a wintry patch of forest, a torch in his hand. A sickening smell that Natch identified as burning flesh wafted through the air.

  Natch dashed through the trees. He was in a hurry, but he couldn't say why. Paths crisscrossed on the forest floor below his feet, but he didn't know where they had come from or where they were going; better to trust his instincts. And right now his instincts said to head west, toward the rapidly falling sun. He ran through the foliage as quickly as he could. Thorns and sharp branches lashed his face.