"And now the Council is in a state of disarray. Within Len Borda's own organization, we hear, a rebellion may be brewing. A rebellion that could decide the fate of the world.
"Yes, the world! I'm not exaggerating. Because now the ultimate weapon has been thrown into the mix, and it's called MultiReal." Frejohr stopped, gave a particularly intense stare at the daisy patch in the middle of the room. "I assume you all heard about Natch's little ... demonstration yesterday?"
The politicians turned toward Natch with something resembling awe, as if he himself were the weapon Borda was seeking. Natch thought he could detect a few trembling knees in the group, and he wondered if the politicos were going to demand their own demonstration. Thankfully, no one did. I'd rather jump off the balcony than do that again, he thought.
"MultiReal," continued Frejohr. "A weapon that can warp the will and control realities. A weapon that the Council could use to reduce the Islands and the Pharisee Territories to rubble.
"Now the creator of this weapon is dead. Its principal engineer's been dragged off to prison. And its owner"-he made a gesture toward Natch-"its owner has been stripped unlawfully of his property. All that stands between the Council and this deadly technology? A single fiefcorp analyst.
"So I've called a meeting with you, the power brokers of the libertarian movement. The forces on the street, the ones who were there during the troubles in Melbourne in 318." Natch saw a few nods from the group, including the bodhisattva and the labor leader. "The ones who did their part then, and the ones who will do their part when the next opportunity arises.
"My friends, the time for delay is over. The time has come to act."
The speaker stepped into the corner and bowed his head with what was less an ending to his oration than an indefinite pause. It was a good speech, Natch decided; short on substance, long on passion. The libertarians sat for a full three minutes staring at the carpet.
"So this fiefcorp analyst," said the labor boss, breaking the uneasy silence. He had perhaps the widest head Natch had ever seen. "What's her name again?"
"Jara," said Frejohr.
"This Jara-where is she? Shouldn't we go get her and hide her away somewhere?"
"Not as easy as it sounds," replied the speaker. "She's still holed up at that estate in West London, and the place is surrounded by drudges. There are a hundred Council officers right around the corner, just waiting for someone to make a move."
The Islander clasped her head in her hands. "So what's stopping them? The Council could raid that estate right now. They could torture her and force her to hand over MultiReal while we're sitting here."
"She's being watched," said the bodhisattva of Creed Libertas, stroking her hair like a cat grooming its fur. "We have devotees inside the estate keeping an eye on her twenty-four hours a day. If the Council tries anything-either faction, Borda's or Lee's-then we'll have some notice. We'll be ready."
Natch remembered the spontaneous protest on the tube that had saved him from those Council officers a couple of weeks ago. Antigovernment activists couldn't stand up to the officers of the Council in an open fight, of course. But if there were indeed sympathizers among the staff at Berilla's estate, they had a chance of spiriting Jara away from such a confrontation. They could keep her and MultiReal safe, for a little while.
"This is all moot," put in Frejohr. "With all the chaos surrounding Margaret's death and the infoquakes, the Council won't risk another raid. They'd have open rebellion on their hands."
"It's going to come to that anyway," said the Islander, with a mysterious glint in her eye.
"Maybe," grunted the speaker, reticent. "Maybe not." It seemed to Natch that Frejohr was very purposefully not looking in his direction.
"If the Council doesn't release Quell soon, you know exactly what's going to happen," said the Islander. "You know how Josiah is."
Natch had no idea who Josiah was or what he was threatening, but this insiders' conversation was growing tiresome. "You're both missing something obvious," he said with a scowl. Heads swiveled around, as if the politicians had forgotten all about him. "Why would the Council want to conduct another raid? They put Jara in this position. Magan Kai Lee did, at least. If he plays his cards right, Jara will just hand it over to him."
"How do you know?" asked one of the L-PRACG representatives. "What if-"
"What if what?" Natch barked. "Jara doesn't want the responsibility. She doesn't want MultiReal, and the Council knows that. Don't you understand? Lee and Borda are going to convince her that it's in her best interest to work with them. They'll grease the way so that giving the databases over is the easiest and most logical thing for her to do. She's very easy to manipulate."
"But can't you prevent that?" said a Lunar tycoon. "Just use MultiReal against her. She won't be able to hand the program over."
Natch flung a withering look in the tycoon's direction. "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. What if Jara's using MultiReal too? Besides-just because I can stop her from giving it away once doesn't mean I can stop her from trying again. Do you want me to stand guard over her for the rest of my life?" He remembered his mental tug-of-war with Khann Frejohr out on the balcony. The thought of another protracted neural battle so soon after the last one made his knees weak. "Listen, this thing isn't hypnotism. It's not magic. You can't just use MultiReal to permanently change someone's mind. If that was the case, don't you think I would've used it on Len Borda already? Don't you think I would have ... have ..." The sentence wandered off, seemingly of its own volition.
The conversation lost its momentum at that point, leaving the libertarians to stare gloomily at the Tope paintings on the windows. Natch felt an irrational urge to just abandon them there and sneak out the front door. No, it's too late for that, he told himself. Get ahold of yourself. You set this up, and now you need to see it through.
Frejohr spoke. "Then I think it's clear what needs to be done," he said, his voice muscular with purpose. The speaker crossed his arms in front of his chest. "If it's inevitable that Jara's going to hand MultiReal over to the Council, we need to do it first."
Everyone gaped at the speaker, Natch included. "Have you gone completely offline?" sputtered the bodhisattva of Creed Libertas.
Khann Frejohr appeared to be enjoying the surprise in his colleagues' faces, and Natch recognized the glee of a fellow showman in midperformance. "This is what it all comes down to, isn't it?" he said. "This is what it's always come down to, since the beginning. You still have access to the MultiReal code, don't you, Natch?"
"Of course I do. She said ... she said it couldn't be taken away from me."
"Jara said that?" asked the labor leader, perplexed.
"No, not Jara. Margaret. " Nach felt his emotions rear up at the thought of the bodhisattva, at the thought of the MultiReal code inside his head and the crisis she had brought upon him. He closed his eyes for a moment, temporarily overwhelmed, and tried to mold his emotions into sentences. "She said I was the guardian and the keeper. It can't be taken away. The nothingness at the center of the universe. Why don't you understand?"
He opened his eyes and saw the labor leader swallow and sit back, obviously understanding nothing.
Frejohr was unmoved. "We need to let Len Borda have MultiReal. Let Magan Kai Lee have MultiReal. Let the creeds have it, the fiefcorps, the drudges, the Meme Cooperative." The speaker stretched his arm out to the balcony, which was facing the snow-engulfed eastern courtyard at the moment. "Release the code and the specs onto the Data Sea, Natch. Everything. Give everyone in the world access."
The room was starting to spin, and Natch could feel himself sliding down into the mental quicksand once more. No, not now, not now! He gave himself a bio/logic boost of adrenaline and assaulted the nothingness until it released its grip on him. His eyes shot open, and he noticed that the L-PRACG politicians who were standing nearby had quietly scooted farther away. "Let me get this straight. You're telling me I should take the most revolutionary product of our
timemaybe the most revolutionary product in history-and just give it away?"
Frejohr was unrepentant. His silver hair glistened in the reflected sunlight from the window. "That's exactly what I'm saying."
"Why the fuck would I do that?"
"Studies show that free bio/logics products are more functional and secure," insisted one of the Lunar tycoons, sliding into lecture mode with one finger in the air.
"Plus free bio/logics creates demand," the other tycoon chimed in. "In fact, that's actually how I made my first-"
"I'm not an idiot," yelled Natch, causing the tycoons to shut up instantly. "Don't try to teach me hive-level economics. I know it backward and forward. Why would I open up the MultiReal code? To create demand? To speed adoption? Ridiculous. My product's got one hundred percent demand. Everyone in the solar system is going to be using MultiReal a month after we release it. You think opening up the program will make it more functional and secure? That's laughable. There's subroutines in this program that could kill you in a second if they're mishandled. People can't deal with that kind of freedom."
The entrepreneur found himself alone on the other side of the garden, though he didn't remember walking there. Khann Frejohr stood across the room with his libertarian posse clustered in their chairs behind him. Suddenly Natch scanned the eyes of the Lunar tycoons and realized that Frejohr had planned this. He had brought the libertarians to Natch's apartment for the specific purpose of convincing him to release MultiReal on the Data Sea. The thought gave Natch a perverse sort of amusement. Some of them had obviously known the agenda ahead of time, while others, like the bodhisattva, were just now coming around to the idea.
Speaker Frejohr stepped slowly around the daisies and put his hand on Natch's shoulder with another one of those Vigalish touches. "We need to release MultiReal so people can defend themselves," he said, voice low and sinuous. "With all that manpower at the Defense and Wellness Council-Natch, once they get ahold of it, this might be our only chance."
Natch sniffed. "Don't worry, they won't get ahold of it. Not once we've executed my plan."
"What plan?" said Frejohr suspiciously.
A grin spread across Natch's face like a malignant creeper. "I'm glad you asked."
The program hung in MindSpace, a spiky pyramid the color of a poisoned apple. Natch dimmed the lights in his office, causing a greenish hue to suffuse the room and reflect off every forehead.
"Black code," somebody whispered.
The entrepreneur didn't respond. Of course it was black code. Form didn't necessarily follow function in the bio/logics world-Natch had worked on plenty of innocuous routines that looked like fairy tale horrors in MindSpace-but the fact that this program exhibited no name or pedigree was indicator enough.
One of the L-PRACG politicians scratched her head. "So what does it do?" she asked. The rest of the politicians hung back near the door and peered over her shoulder, afraid to get any closer.
"It communicates," replied Natch.
"With whom?"
"With everyone. Every single person from here to Furtoid, if you want. If the Council lets it run that long." The entrepreneur reached inside the MindSpace bubble with a bio/logic programming bar, hooked the nameless black code on its tip, and swirled it around like a magician trying to summon something verminous from his hat. "But the ability to send a message to anyone isn't that special. It's the ability to send a message from anyone-individual, business, government."
"A forgery machine," said the speaker pensively, nudging the L-PRACG politician to the side so he could get a closer look.
"The forgery machine," said Natch. "The best one there is. It's not foolproof, of course-it's next to impossible to get foolproof forgery on the Data Sea anymore-but this is about as close as you can get." He spun the program around with the bar until it was nothing but a rotating blur.
"You've used this program before," said the bodhisattva.
Natch parsed his words carefully. "Let's just say I've seen it in action."
"So could we forge a message from the Council with this?" said the Islander with a little too much eagerness. "Could we report false troop movements, or-or-"
Natch cut the woman off before she short-circuited. "No. The program's not that good. The Council doesn't use normal Data Sea communications protocols."
Speaker Frejohr walked up to the gyrating blob and scrutinized it as the virtual friction of MindSpace began to slow its spin. How much the speaker knew about the intricacies of bio/logics, Natch had no idea. But at the very least, he was staring at the program's important junctures and not at its distracting ornamentations. "So you've got the ultimate forgery machine," he said in a dubious tone of voice. "What do you propose to do with it?"
"Let's start at the beginning," said Natch coyly, stepping back from MindSpace. He tossed his programming bar on the side table and began circumnavigating the workbench. "All those tens of thousands of people at the Defense and Wellness Council. All those officers in that hidden fortress of theirs. What do you think they do all day?"
No one answered. Natch could feel the impatience radiating off them like heat waves.
"They analyze," he continued. "They plot, they strategize. They conduct war games. Right?
"So somewhere in the Council databases, there has to be a whole collection of memos about the MultiReal situation. Plans for how the Council can take hold of MultiReal. Plans for what the Council should do after they've taken hold of MultiReal. Far-fetched scenarios. Hardline scenarios. Apocalyptic scenarios. What would these memos say?
"Let's pretend there's a memo that says, We need to use MultiReal quickly to subdue our enemies.
"Who are the Council's enemies? The libertarian L-PRACGs. The Islanders. The Lunar tycoons who've been chafing against central government regulation. The creed that's been stirring public sentiment against the Council." Natch looked over each political representative in turn, fixing them with a stare that was almost accusatory. "Once Len Borda gets his hands on MultiReal, he's going to go after each and every one of you. Or so the memo says."
The Islander frowned and shook her head, clearly disappointed that Natch didn't have anything more substantial up his sleeve. "So we leak this memo to the drudges, and the public goes berserk," she said. "Isn't the Council going to deny it?"
Natch smiled. "Of course they're going to deny it. Of course they'll call it a forgery. But isn't that exactly what they'd do if it were a real memo in the first place? Their denials are meaningless. Besides, the brave soul who risks his life to leak this memo isn't going to just use his own signature, is he? He absolutely won't pass it on through traceable communications protocols. No, he'll do his best to anonymize the memo.
"So we've got a memo of dubious authenticity. Nobody's going to believe the Council. The Prime Committee gives Borda his marching orders-in theory-so they'll stay out of it. Who's left? Guess who the public will look to for validation?"
Everyone turned to Khann Frejohr, who had stepped to the office window with a faraway look, as if reading small type on a distant viewscreen. His posture signaled his irritation that the meeting had taken such a detour. "And you expect the Congress of L-PRACGs to authenticate this message for you?" he asked with a sigh.
"Absolutely not," said Natch. "Come on, don't you know how this works? You tell the drudges you don't know the first thing about this memo. Who can tell if it's real. All you know is that nobody's seen any plan from the Council about what they intend to do with MultiReal once they get their claws on it. If this isn't the real memo ... then where the fuck is it? Why hasn't Len Borda told anyone what he intends to do with MultiReal? What does he have to hide?
"As for the rest-well, that's easy. The public's primed and ready. They're waiting for someone to stand up to Len Borda. So you all fan the flames, stir up your constituencies, call for boycotts. The reaction to this memo is going to be explosive. With the public in a frenzy, and the Congress of L-PRACGs locked in a battle of words with the Defense and Well
ness Council, who's going to step in to calm things down? Who's got to step in eventually?"
"The Prime Committee," offered the Islander.
The entrepreneur gave the most pedantic nod in his repertoire. "Exactly. The Prime Committee will intervene. Hopefully they'll call for some kind of special session to deal with the MultiReal issue. But we can't coerce them. They need to come up with the idea on their own, or it won't happen."
The bodhisattva of Creed Libertas was shaking her head in vehement objection. "You're jumping to too many conclusions. How do you know what the public's going to think? You have no idea how people will react to that memo."
"Sure I do," said Natch. "It's going to be an explosive reaction because we have a catalyst."
"Which is?"
"Margaret Surina's funeral, about eighteen hours from now."
Silence engulfed the apartment.
Natch looked around his office at the politicos who had multied to his foyer so smug and self-satisfied. Now they all looked defensive, unsure if Natch's plan would work and unsure if it would be a good thing if it did. Funeral ceremonies for the unexpectedly deceased-the unPrepared-were melancholy affairs and exceptionally rare. The funeral ceremony for the richest and most revered woman in the world would be even more so. Natch could see the mental calculations going on around the room: was it right to hijack such an event for political purposes?
Frejohr's reaction was really the only one that mattered. Behind those eyes, Natch could see a wrestling match going on between predilection and pragmatism. He didn't know what had really happened during those Melbourne riots back in 318. He didn't know if the speaker was actually responsible for those atrocities or not. What Natch did know was that Frejohr had not felt the full impact of the MultiReal situation until just a few minutes ago; even Natch's mind control trick on the balcony yesterday hadn't jolted him so hard. This was a crisis every bit as portentous as the Melbourne riots, and what he decided here today would have just as much impact on the libertarian movement-not to mention on his career.
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