Multireal

by David Louis Edelman

  The last ConfidentialWhisper arrived from Robby Robby. "Bad news for ya, Natchster," said the channeler. He paused, waiting for some interjection from Natch that did not come. "Just tried to bring my team out to Sao Paulo for a look around the soccer stadium, and they wouldn't let us in. Told me the exposition's been canceled. Can you beat that? Jara's orders, they said. I tried to set them straight, but they-"

  Robby's sentence was sliced off abruptly in midsyllable. But it wasn't just Robby-all of Natch's ConfidentialWhisper threads with his employees had been cut. He turned to the window, wondering if there was some kind of malfunction with the hoverbird, and discovered his connection to the MindSpace workbench in Shenandoah was gone too. In place of the yellow jacket was a Defense and Wellness Council hoverbird matching their course. Natch looked out the other window to find a second vehicle bracketing him in.

  Raw and bloody anger. "What the fuck is going on?" he barked at the pilot.

  The woman seemed unconcerned. She rapped her knuckles against the side of the hoverbird. "Don't bother trying to access the Data Sea," she said. "Nothing's getting through this hull unless we want it to get through."

  "Where are you taking me?"

  "The Twin Cities," she said, turning back to the weather reports and traffic chatter on the window. "Might as well get some sleep while you can. You're not going anywhere."

  16

  Natch didn't sleep for an instant.

  The Council could have taken him just about anywhere in human space. He was powerless to stop them. Rumor posited the existence of hundreds of anonymous government compounds far from the civilized world that would be ideal places for interrogation and coercion.

  So when the pilot began a familiar flight pattern toward the foggy lowlands of the Twin Cities, Natch couldn't help but expel a breath of relief. The Kordez Thassel Complex below was many thingslibertarian gathering place, corporate Mecca, architectural perditionbut it certainly was not a Defense and Wellness Council stronghold. The Thasselians prided themselves on running a facility that was open and anonymous to all. This meant that Len Borda's lackeys had to go through the mundane process of filing a room request and shelling out a deposit, like the rest of the ants Natch could see milling around below. Somehow that comforted him.

  Then Natch was ambushed by a brutal thought. Why wouldn't the Council take him to one of those secretive compounds, unless they had nothing to fear from him?

  Natch thought it best to project an image of confidence. "You know the minute I leave this hoverbird, I'm going to summon John Ridglee and Sen Sivv Sor," he announced.

  "Save your bandwidth," replied the pilot, yawning. "They've already been summoned. In two hours, this place is going to be crawling with drudges."

  Natch let her finish her landing sequence in silence. At least he could console himself that the pilot was not setting down at the normal hoverbird dock across the creek, but at a more exclusive parking space in the rear of the building.

  He expected to see an intimidating squad of armed Council officers when the hoverbird hatch opened. Instead, there stood a woman with wild braids of ebony hair. Natch felt a shock of cognitive dissonance as he recognized the face of Len Borda's chief solicitor, a face that should rightly be hugging the margins of some gossip column. The Blade. Standing behind her was a blond mercenary with the shoulders of an ogre and the demeanor to match.

  "Towards Perfection," said Rey Gonerev, bowing smartly. "On behalf of High Executive Len B-"

  Natch cut her off. "Jara," he said. "Where the fuck is Jara?"

  Gonerev fluttered her eyelids rapidly. How long had it been since anyone had treated her like a petty obstacle? "She's inside with the rest of the fiefcorp," said the Blade, after a moment's hesitation.

  "Good," said the entrepreneur. "Now move." The solicitor barely managed to scoot out of the way before Natch came barreling past.

  Gonerev and the other Council officer struggled to keep up as he strode toward the closest door of the Thassel Complex. I hate this place, thought Natch as he walked through the doors and took in the deliberately crooked floors and the unevenly cut stone walls. He headed for a door at the far end of the hallway that was being guarded by a handful of men in white robes and yellow stars. Nobody made any move to correct his course.

  Natch tried to think of some valiant act that could get him out of this predicament. Should he run? Should he call the Council's bluff and contact the drudges? But every path led to the same endpoint: he needed to see Jara. He needed to know what was going on. Indeed, as much as it chagrined him, Natch knew his best option at this point was to proceed as Rey Gonerev directed.

  It was a relatively deserted wing of the complex, but still swarming with self-important businesspeople buzzing from meeting to meeting. One of the insects did not see him coming-a Vault employee, if the double balanced pyramids on his belt were any indi cation. Natch collided with the man, sending the two of them reeling in opposite directions. Enraged at everything and nothing at once, the fiefcorp master thrust his palms forward and shoved the bureaucrat flat onto his back. When the universe pushes me, I push back!

  And then Natch was standing, immobilized, trying to calibrate a cerebral compass that was spinning wildly out of control. He lost sight of his whereabouts for a few seconds and felt himself slip into an extradi- mensional space between moments. The blankness of multivoid, the empty husk of the OCHRE probe in his apartment the other day.

  The nothingness at the center of the universe.

  Suddenly Natch caught sight of the Vault official sprawled on the floor, frozen as if caught in a basilisk's stare, and something inside him curdled. The blond mercenary was helping the man to his feet with the assistance of another Council officer, while Gonerev was staring at Natch with surprise and perhaps a little trepidation. He didn't stick around to apologize.

  The white-robed men and women parted to let him through to the door. Natch paused, remembering the time he had come to the Thassel Complex to meet with his old hivemate Brone. The meeting had begun with an electrical shock from the door handle, followed by Brone's ghoulish laughter. Could this entire thing be a setup? Natch was fairly certain that the Council hoverbirds outside were real Council hoverbirds, and the Council officers here were real Council officers. But this facility was owned and operated by Creed Thassel, the creed Brone had purchased with his riches. The organization's membership rolls were secret. Who was to say these people couldn't be Council officers and Thasselian devotees?

  He opened the door and walked inside.

  Natch found himself standing on a stone slab atop a mist-shrouded alp, the Mount Olympus of some long-dead cultural imagination. The SeeNaRee was littered with broken columns and armless stone maidens that might once have held up the ceiling. Above him, impos sibly muscular clouds were girding for battle against an otherwise gorgeous blue sky.

  Sitting in the midst of the slab was an ordinary rectangular conference table. Benyamin, Jara, Horvil, Merri, and Serr Vigal lined the sides of the table looking alternately scared and defiant. There was no sign of Quell. Sitting at the head of the table was Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee, flanked by a dozen Council guards with stony faces.

  The fiefcorp master turned to Jara. "So I leave you alone for a couple of days, and you go to the Council?" cried Natch. "What were you thinking?"

  Jara writhed uncomfortably in her seat for a few seconds, refusing to meet the entrepreneur's gaze. Her face reflected a troubled and selfloathing soul. "Fuck you," she growled. A miserable-looking Merri put her hand on Jara's shoulder, and the analyst fell back into an uneasy silence.

  Magan's face was the very archetype of calm. He was wearing his formal uniform, complete with the gray smock that was the sign of his office. "Have a seat," he said on seeing the fiefcorp master. "Ridgello, make sure he doesn't leave my sight until this is finished." The fairhaired barbarian who had accompanied the Blade pulled out a chair at the table's foot and extended his hand in Natch's direction. Four of the offic
ers behind Magan marched across the stone and made a confining semicircle around the chair.

  Natch bottled up his rage and took a seat in the chair Ridgello had proffered him.

  Magan Kai Lee sat up straight and folded his hands together calmly on the table. "Four weeks ago today, this company made a promise to the Defense and Wellness Council," he began, his voice matter-of-fact. "You promised High Executive Borda access to MultiReal in exchange for protection at your sales demo. The Council held up its end of the bargain. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp did not."

  Natch found the lieutenant's declaration amusing. "So what are you going to do, arrest all of us? Throw us in your orbital prisons? Go right ahead, we're unarmed. Have fun explaining it to the drudges. Len Borda can't be that contemptuous of public opinion-especially now that the libertarians run the Congress of L-PRACGs."

  "I have no intention of arresting you," said Magan.

  "So why go after my apprentices' business licenses? Do you really think we care what the Meme Cooperative does to us? You might have slowed us down a little, but you aren't any closer to getting access to MultiReal."

  Magan let out an almost-imperceptible sigh, as if Natch were hardly worth the effort of a response. "Go ahead, Rey," he said. "Let's just get this over with."

  The Blade strode out from behind the fiefcorp master; Natch had forgotten that she was even back there. He felt an internal ping informing him that he had received a message of high importance. "What's this?" he sneered.

  "That," said Gonerev, "is the brief my office filed yesterday charging you with a hundred and twenty violations of Meme Cooperative bylaws."

  Natch opened the document and tried to skim its murky surface, but it was clouded with administrative doublespeak and he could make no sense of it. He fired up the Ripley Group's DeLegalese 235 and waited a few seconds for the program to filter out the unnecessary clauses and redundancies.

  But Gonerev had already begun delivering a precis of her own as she strode around the edge of the stone slab like a prosecutor grandstanding before a particularly susceptible jury. "Failure to pay the Prime Committee tax to fund diss access to Dr. Plugenpatch," she announced. "Breach of contract against three different channeling firms in 356 and 357 ... False advertising of a glare-reduction program marketed to three thousand different L-PRACGs in 358 ... Failure to file proper work permits in Omaha ..." The litany of Natch's sins both great and small continued for several minutes, filling the SeeNaRee with a haze of regulatory vocabulary.

  Natch let out a loud and ostentatious yawn. He didn't doubt that he was guilty of these complaints, and dozens more besides, but not even a niggling entity like the Meme Cooperative would waste its time on such trivia. The entrepreneur waved his hand and broadcast the document in large block capitals across the deep blue sky for all to read. "Please don't tell me you dragged us out here for this," he said. "I've been in front of the Cooperative arbitration boards a million times for shit like this. They never do anything."

  "Oh, but they have this time." Rey Gonerev's voice was one big gloat as she leaned over the table next to Jara and placed her hands flat on the table. "Not only has the Meme Cooperative filed charges against you, but they've voted to suspend your license to operate a fiefcorp."

  "Here," said the lieutenant executive, giving the slightest of nods, is the notification you will be receiving from the Cooperative any moment now."

  The entrepreneur opened Magan's message in private this timethough judging by the worried frowns percolating from the fiefcorpers' faces, they had all received copies anyway.

  NOTIFICATION

  In accordance with the bylaws and regulations of the MEME COOPERATIVE, incorporated in Year 177 of the Reawakening and given jurisdiction by the collective fiefcorps and memecorps to govern intra-business affairs, and which has been recognized as a lawful entity and given license by the PRIME COMMITTEE and the CONGRESS OF L-PRACGS, as ofTuesday, the 3rd of January in the 360thYear of the Reawakening, this body hereby suspends the business license for NATCH of the SURINA/NATCH MULTIREAL FIEFCORP for a period of no less than 30 days, pending review by the Cooperative's executive board, at which point further action may be undertaken.

  This was a slightly more worrisome development. Natch should have figured that if the Council could find enough to soil his apprentices' reputations-if they could even dig something up on Merri and Serr Vigal-surely they could find the buried skeletons of the Meme Cooperative board too. A little push here and there, and a slap on the wrist becomes a bash with a shovel.

  Natch leaned back in his chair and threw his arms behind his head, causing Ridgello to back up a step. "So you suspended our licenses," said the entrepreneur breezily. "That just puts MultiReal back where it started. On top of that spire in Andra Pradesh. Good luck getting in there."

  "Maybe you've been too preoccupied to hear the news," replied the Blade, walking around the table once more. "Margaret has been declared mentally unfit. Procedures are under way to remove her as the head of Creed Surina, and the Meme Cooperative has acted to suspend her business license as well."

  Natch hadn't realized how dire the situation in Andra Pradesh was; now he understood Quell's apprehension. Those slippery cousins of Margaret's must have finally tired of chafing under her mercurial leadership and taken action. With the Council's support, of course. It was barely worth mentioning that Islanders were nonentities to the Meme Cooperative; Quell could earn an apprentice's wages but was legally unable to make any binding decisions for the company.

  Natch ran his hand over his forehead and rubbed a spot on the bridge of his nose. "You're stupider than I thought," he said, shaking his head. "Didn't you think this through? You can temporarily decapitate the fiefcorp.... You can convince those inbreeds at Andra Pradesh to push Margaret out of the way.... You can bribe my analyst to go along with a fat sheaf of credits." Jara leaned forward to make an objection, her expression confused and angry, but Natch didn't give her the chance to speak. "But you still don't have access to MultiReal. Don't you of all people know the law? Even if you throw us in prison, the Possibilities program stays in receivership. It just floats out there on the Data Sea for years until the courts have had their say. You can't touch it. Len Borda can't touch it. Meantime, the rest of us pay a twothousand-credit fine to the Meme Cooperative, and we get our licenses back in thirty days."

  Magan seemed utterly unfazed. Natch got the impression that he was still following the Council's preprepared script. "It's you who doesn't understand," said the lieutenant executive. "The Defense and Wellness Council has no intention of seizing MultiReal. The program rightfully belongs to the new master of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp-and there it will stay."

  "New master?"

  "The only member of the company whose business license hasn't been suspended. The Meme Cooperative has handed control of the fiefcorp to your analyst, Jara."

  Natch could feel the black code creeping across his flesh, biting, gnawing, envenoming him with each breath. He remembered feeling this way when he had discovered that Margaret had kept the Patels' MultiReal license secret from him. He had felt this way during the horror of the Shortest Initiation. But now, his emotions were amplified somehow by the black code inside him, or the MultiReal code inside him, or both.

  Magan's face reflected a look of workmanlike satisfaction, like someone who had just completed a vexing puzzle. "You will be receiving an official notification from the Meme Cooperative at any moment," he said. "The Cooperative is compelling you to hand over core access to the MultiReal code to Jara."

  "And if I refuse?" said Natch.

  The lieutenant executive gestured at the troops surrounding Natch's chair, who were suddenly placing their hands on their dartgun holsters. "We are authorized to take you to an orbital Council prison until you comply," said Magan.

  Along the sides of the table, the fiefcorpers were subtly recoiling from Jara. Horvil had a look of concentration as if he were factoring polynomials in his head. Had J
ara really made a deal with the Council to seize control of the fiefcorp? Or was this just part of Magan Kai Lee's vicious game against them? Jara's emotions were hunkering down behind a perfect PokerFace, but her nervous fidgeting told Natch that she was tremendously conflicted.

  Natch admitted that the Council's plot against him was indeed an elegant one. Rope off MultiReal, keep it in an isolated area where he could touch all he wanted but was unable to make a profit from it. Put the company in the hands of Jara, who was certainly much more pliable than Natch and predictable to a fault. Summon the drudges to a press conference and get the ball rolling right away.

  And what could Natch do about it? He supposed he could use MultiReal to escape from the Kordez Thassel Complex. Would even MultiReal be enough to evade the dartguns of all the guards standing around here? But after that, he would be a fugitive. And escaping the Council's notice this time would be much more trying, since the Meme Cooperative had given them the legislative cover to freeze his Vault account, seize his apartment, even put a price on his head.

  Yet there was something missing. If Magan was looking for an empty suit that Len Borda could intimidate into handing over MultiReal, wouldn't Merri or Vigal have been better choices? He gazed across the table into the eyes of the Council lieutenant, chestnutcolored and mysterious. Natch knew the look of a man who had something to hide.

  Within the cusp of an instant, Natch felt himself looking at the world from Magan Kai Lee's perspective. And in that moment he knew where Magan had made his crucial mistake.

  The entrepreneur grinned, leaned farther back in his chair, and propped his feet up on the table. "Horvil," said Natch with a mad glint in his eye, "have you cleaned out the dock lately?"

  The engineer looked around the mountaintop as if he expected to find another Horvil who would understand why his boss had abruptly switched gears. The fiefcorp dock? he mouthed silently. Benyamin offered him a perplexed shrug. So Horvil pursed his lips as he cast his mind out to the Data Sea and scanned the company's program launch space. "All clean now," he said.