"I don't know," said Natch. "She's dead, and I never got the opportunity to ask her. The only other person who might know is sitting in a Defense and Wellness Council prison somewhere."
The meeting ended shortly thereafter on a note of grim silence. Does MultiReal have any limits? the entrepreneur found himself wondering.
Even if they managed to work through the list of technical problems, a whole other set of legal and ethical questions awaited them. Natch was hesitant to even raise the subject. The fact of the matter was, catching another person in a collaborative MultiReal process was morally shady. It meant forcing someone to participate in a software interaction without his consent-or even his knowledge, since MultiReal erased putative memories as a matter of course. How long would the L-PRACGs stand for that?
Most troublesome of all was Natch's suspicion that there was nothing the law could do to stop it. Some of the programming hooks MultiReal used were buried so deep in the framework that changing them would upend fifty years of bio/logic progress. Natch had not even been aware that these hooks existed. They must have lain hidden in the standard OCHRE system for generations. How had Margaret known where to find them? Had Marcus Surina put them there? Or maybe even Prengal?
Natch kept the door to his room locked and barricaded at night. He made sure that MultiReal remained fully functional despite all their manipulations, and kept it at the ready. Just in case. Just in case.
In the end, it was the black code that caused Natch to renegotiate the terms of the agreement with his old hivemate.
The trembling that had been pillaging the nerves of his left arm began to make exploratory raids throughout his body. He would find his neck muscles twitching uncontrollably at certain times of the day. More than once, Natch opened his eyes only to realize that he had blacked out some indeterminate time before. He would immediately switch into paranoid mode, shut down the MindSpace bubble, and do a thorough review of every data strand the Thasselians had touched in the past hour. But as far as Natch could tell, Brone's devotees remained on the level.
He approached Brone in his backroom office.
"This black code cloaking program," said Natch, too exhausted to make any attempts at subtlety. "Does it have any side effects?"
The bodhisattva smiled. The prospect of seeing his enemy suffering physically seemed to give him cheer. "I was wondering when you were going to ask about that," he replied. "The shaking and the blackouts-don't think I haven't noticed."
"So it's your code that's causing them?"
"Maybe," said Brone, his smile curling into a smirk.
"Well, you need to do something about it," snapped Natch. "I can't work like this."
Natch folded his arms in an attempt to keep steady and eyed the room Brone had claimed as his personal headquarters. He didn't know how long Creed Thassel had been making modifications to this old hotel, but Brone seemed to have left the room exactly as he had found it. Yellowed photos of some long-forgotten Texan dynasty on the walls, a dilapidated metal desk, cracked brick on the floor, a prodigious leather sofa on which he was now reclining. A real window, with actual glass, though how it had survived the centuries since the Autonomous Revolt intact Natch couldn't guess.
The bodhisattva put his feet up on the splintered oak table in front of him and clasped his hands behind his head. "I could make some modifications," he said, affecting nonchalance. "We've been able to tweak that cloaking program for the rest of the crew. Billy has the occasional flutter, but everyone else is coping with the black code just fine."
"So then tweak it."
Brone sniffed. "And why should I?"
The two enemies stared each other down, Natch filling up with increasing rage and Brone sliding deeper into insouciance with every passing second. It was a peculiar game of bluffs. Natch knew that Horvil's so-called mind control trick wouldn't work here. Even if Natch could use MultiReal to find that one possibility in a thousand where Brone decided to do his bidding, he would need to repeat the same trick over and over again possibly for hours. As he had discovered with Khann Frejohr on his balcony, that was excruciatingly hard work. Natch simply didn't have the strength for it. But he couldn't admit that to Brone, could he?
"Fix it," said Natch between clenched teeth, "or I'll leave. Right now. I'll leave and take MultiReal with me, and your `Revolution of Selfishness' will be over before it even gets off the ground."
Brone shrugged. "Ah, but if you leave, that jittering is only going to get worse. Much worse. I've seen what that black code can do. The first volunteer ended up with the Prepared. I'd absolutely hate to see that happen to you."
"I'll take my chances. I can fix it myself."
"Really? Then why haven't you?"
Silence. The sounds of clanking silverware from the devotees' dinner came wafting down the hallway.
Brone's face softened into something resembling capitulation. "Understand my position, Natch. I need you here. You and I are the only ones who are really capable of finishing the MultiReal project. Pierre and Billy are talented programmers, I grant you that-but they're two-dimensional thinkers, or Margaret Surina would have licensed the program to them in the first place. But admit it, you need me too. You can't make all those thousands of bio/logic connections by yourself, and in case you hadn't noticed, Old Chicago's not exactly teeming with assembly-line programming shops.
"So I'm in a bind, Natch. You can use MultiReal at any point to run out of here, and we can't stop you. This black code is the only bargaining chip I have. So let's be reasonable businesspeople. Let's follow the example of the diss, and let's barter. You give me something I want; I'll give you something you want."
Natch, muttering under his breath: "So what do you want?"
"Only what's fair," replied Brone, opening his arms with a gesture of welcome that had more than a hint of saccharine. "Give me access to MultiReal like you've given the rest of the devotees. I'm not asking for core access. I'll stick with the same subset of programming tools, I'll abide by the rest of your rules. Just let me do something instead of sitting back here killing time."
"That's all?"
"That's all."
The entrepreneur pursed his lips. He could feel the slightest decline of the road ahead into a long and slippery slope. Brone finding tool after tool to barter with. Natch granting more and more concessions.
But he held the final trump card, didn't he? Core access to MultiReal. That was all that mattered in the end. MultiReal couldn't give Natch the power to control someone else's life; but it could give him the ultimate power to control his own. Give Brone what he wants this time, Natch told himself. You're much too powerful for him to take MultiReal away, and he knows that.
"Fine," he said. "But I want Loget to tweak the black code. Not you. We might be working side by side here, but I still don't trust you."
The bodhisattva rose and gave an ingratiating bow. His prosthetic eye caught the light and twinkled. "I wouldn't expect anything less from you, Natch," he said. "I'll make sure Loget is on the case first thing tomorrow morning."
40
Natch was starting to remember why he had never sought out Pierre Loget's company. The man's brain ran on dandelion logic, scattering to the four corners of the Earth in the slightest breeze. Loget began the morning chattering about Hegelian dialectics, then flitted on to modern Patronellian dance and the thermodynamics of hoverbird flight without any discernible segue.
"The black code," insisted Natch after ninety minutes of this. "Have you finished tuning that fucking black code?" He was lying faceup on one of the icy crescent platforms, arms tied lightly at his sides so the shaking wouldn't knock him over the edge. Loget, meanwhile, was hauling chunk after chunk of Natch's OCHRE code into MindSpace while he babbled about nothing.
"Just be patient," replied Loget. "This takes time."
"How much time?"
The Thasselian giggled nervously. "I don't really know. You should have let Brone fix you up. I've never done this before."
Natch m
umbled a curse at the ceiling and shut his mouth.
At least he could finally see the code that had been tormenting him for these past weeks. It looked like a mutated treble clef, dappled with splotches of orange and purple. Natch had thought it would be a relief to put a definitive shape to his pain. Instead, the very ordinariness of the subroutine increased his depression.
After another hour, Natch started to grow suspicious. There was neither method nor madness to Loget's tinkering as far as he could see. Instead the man was fumbling around like a hive child given coursework beyond his grade level. Loget would stir blocks of code aimlessly with his bio/logic programming bars for ten minutes at a stretch without making a single connection. Natch knew that every fiefcorper had a unique methodology-three programmers, five programming styles, as Primo's liked to say-but this was ridiculous.
"You're delaying," barked the entrepreneur.
"No, I'm not. I swear I'm not," said Loget. "But-"
"But what?"
"You've got MultiReal code in your head, Natch. How did that get there?" The man seemed apprehensive, unsure, maybe a little awestruck. Natch didn't answer.
Loget noodled around for another hour (covering avant-garde sculpture and the lesser-known dramas of Juan Nguyen in the process) before he finally admitted that he would need to consult with Brone. Natch let him go.
This charade continued for two days. Brone stayed on the periphery of the programming floor the whole second day, and every time Natch looked in his direction he saw nothing but puzzlement on the bodhisattva's face. Natch couldn't figure out what was going on. Was Loget unwilling or incapable of accomplishing the task? Was the renegade MultiReal code in his head complicating matters? Or was this all just a masquerade to cover something else?
Meanwhile, progress on MultiReal slowed to a crawl as Natch's pains and blackout episodes grew in severity. An epic rage had been sputtering in his gut for weeks; now he could feel it picking up strength and roaring to new heights. Frustrated, Natch cut off access to the program early the second night and stormed to his room. Sleep seduced him.
He was awakened in the middle of the night by Margaret Surina.
The bodhisattva made no noise that might explain her presence. In fact, she seemed to be at the center of an inexplicable absence of noise, a lacuna in the world, as if the universe ceased to exist at the bottom of her toes and miraculously resubstantiated at the frayed ends of her hair.
You're dead, Natch told her. Somehow he knew that the apparition would understand him even if he didn't use his vocal cords.
But the bodhisattva did not answer. She merely stood in the center of the room and stared at Natch. She looked as she had before all the trouble started, when MultiReal was but a pseudonymous project bobbing balloonlike in the distance. Her black hair was flecked with gray; her fingers were long and precise; her eyes were ghost luminous. Her feet, he noticed, did not quite touch the ground.
What do you want? insisted the entrepreneur. What are you doing here?
No response.
Natch clawed at his scalp through his sandy hair. Was the Council right about him? He was sitting in bed talking to a dead woman, and he couldn't even get the dead woman to talk back. Madness. In a panic, Natch lobbed a pillow at the apparition; it passed straight through her torso and landed on the floor with a feathery fwump. The bodhisattva of Creed Surina did not react.
He was about to tear out of the room when Margaret began to speak. The voice was faint, nearly inaudible, and it did not emanate from her lips so much as it floated down from the ceiling.
You are the guardian and the keeper of MultiReal, Natch. Remember that. The guardian and the keeper.
And then she was gone.
Natch pondered the bodhisattva's words for a moment, accompanied by the pianissimo sounds of a decaying hotel. Squeaking floorboards, archaic climate-control machinery. Bats somewhere in the courtyard.
The guardian and the keeper. Margaret had used that phrase on top of the Revelation Spire, the last time Natch saw her alive. What did it mean? He thought of the original order of the Keepers, vilified by history, who had let the reins of the Autonomous Minds slip through their fingers. The resulting stampede had caused a global apocalypse. Was this a warning that similar things awaited if he let go of MultiReal? And why should he listen to the warning of a phantom anyway?
Enough. Enough with riddles. Enough with lies and manipulation.
Natch threw himself out of bed and grabbed a dressing gown from the hook on the door. The three parallel bars of the Creed Thassel insignia saluted him in gold thread from the breast pocket. He picked up the satchel of bio/logic programming bars Brone had lent him, bolted through the hall, and took the stairs down to the atrium three at a time.
He could feel the tiny pinprick in the back of his thigh ache as he stood before a bio/logic workbench and flipped on MindSpace. The castle zoomed out of the void until it filled the bubble.
Now that Margaret was gone and Quell had been taken away, who could he trust with MultiReal? Jara would trade it to the Council for the peace of mind, and Horvil would blindly follow her. Khann Frejohr would use it to further his narrow political agenda. Petrucio and Frederic Patel would sell it to the highest bidder without a second thought. The Council would use it as a weapon of domination and submission. And Brone? Brone would hand it out to everyone in the universe to satisfy his bizarre notions of selfishness.
But MultiReal was not some commodity to be rationed out, and nobody would bully him into giving it away. Natch could see the route he must take. The bends and curves ahead were still murky, unclear; even the ultimate destination remained hazy and indistinct. Still, he would not submit to someone else's path for MultiReal, whether that path was Khann Frejohr's, Magan Kai Lee's, or Brone's. Or Margaret's, for that matter. He would not give up.
It took Natch almost two hours to weave through all the roadblocks Horvil had put in his path. But he could afford no more delays, no more sidetracks. Every hour that Jara had administrative control of MultiReal was an hour when Natch was vulnerable. Sooner or later, the Defense and Wellness Council would realize that Natch had complied with the Meme Cooperative's order and given Jara core access after all. As soon as that happened, it was only a matter of time before they coerced the program out of her hands-and then he really would be irrelevant, just as Magan Kai Lee had said.
Natch found the selectors in the program that Quell had described on the soccer field in Harper. Horvil's already demonstrated how easy it is to select the options, he had said. The hard part is deciding which ones to choose. But there was no more need for ambiguity, because Natch had made his selection. No more sudden cutoffs or artificial limitations.
He made the switch. Unlimited choice cycles for all.
There was still one more step he needed to take, however. He would not get caught in an endless loop of reprisal with Jara, her erecting barriers one day, him disabling them the next. He would not be forced to find detours around Horvil's roadblocks. Natch leaned over the workbench and cast his mind out to the Data Sea. There were a trillion caches of encrypted data out there, a trillion places to hide programming code among all the connectible quarks in the world. Natch picked a suitable cove almost at random. And then, trembling all the while, he proceeded to transfer the MultiReal databases to the new hidden location, petabyte by petabyte.
Jara had tried to hide the program from Natch, but Margaret had assured him it could not be done. MultiReal is becoming apart of you, she had said. And it was true: Natch could feel its presence now whenever he closed his eyes. He could reach out and interface with the program even outside of MindSpace. He could find MultiReal no matter where it resided on the Data Sea.
But Jara couldn't.
The first rays of the dawning sun crept through the windows. Somewhere in the kitchen, machinery began to whir. Natch, fiefcorp master, entrepreneur, outcast, stood in the atrium, bloated with possibilities. He was the guardian and the keeper of MultiReal. And thanks
to the ghost of Margaret Surina, he was now the only person in the universe who could access it.
"I can't stay here," said Natch.
Brone regarded the entrepreneur behind a cold mask of wariness and resignation. Something had changed in that prematurely aged face over the past few days, ever since Loget began his fumbling attempts at tuning the black code. The endgame was approaching, and they both knew it, though Natch couldn't tell if Brone was expecting to win or lose this contest.
Meanwhile, progress on MultiReal had finally ground to a halt. The Thasselians had not even bothered to gather in the atrium that morning for a status report; instead most of them had bundled up and gone outside to enjoy the freshly fallen snow. All except for Pierre Loget and Billy Sterno, who were sitting at the conference table down the hall, trying to solve the black code dilemma. And Brone, of course, who preferred to observe the winter alone in his backroom office.
Natch pressed on. "What you're trying to do-multiple lives for everybody. It's unworkable. I had my doubts about Possibilities 1.0, but this ... The system can't handle it. I don't care how little bandwidth consciousness takes up, the Data Sea won't be able to deal with that much information. You'll crash the whole computational infrastructure."
"I don't believe that," said Brone. "I'm confident in my calculations."
"Then go ahead," said Natch, throwing his hands up in the air. "Launch Possibilities 2.0, and see what happens. It'll be worse than the Autonomous Revolt."
The bodhisattva's voice turned unctuous. "So you'd prefer to let Len Borda get his claws on it and see what unending tyranny looks like?"
"You're trying to make this a black-and-white issue. It's not that simple."
"Not that simple?" said Brone, his voice rising in mock disbelief. He turned to the oddly dressed Texans on his office wall as if expecting them to say a few words of solidarity. "It wasn't that simple when all this started, Natch. You made it a black-and-white issue by stubbornly refusing to explore the options. No compromises! That's been your strategy since the very beginning. Well, now it's paid off, hasn't it? Here you are at last, no friends left, no allies, nowhere to turn! Tell me this much. You never had any intention of staying here and joining my Revolution of Selfishness, did you? You would have bolted the instant we finished tuning that black code. Or would you have taken advantage of our programming skills first, waited until Possibilities 2.0 was done, and then run away?" Brone leaned back in his chair, angrily opening and closing the middle desk drawer for no apparent reason. "Loget said this would happen. He told me you'd never cooperate with us, no matter how much was at stake. But I was too trusting."
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