Multireal

by David Louis Edelman

  "Too trusting?" said Natch with a guffaw. "Too trusting? Talk about false pretenses-you never intended to fix that black code. You planned on leaving me like this all along, didn't you?" He held up his right arm, now twitching as frequently and painfully as the left.

  "No," insisted Brone, placing his good hand over his heart in a show of sincerity. "I'm being on the level with you. I swear, Pierre has been trying to figure out what's wrong."

  Natch felt a sudden rush of nausea, though whether it was precipitated by the black code or Brone's lies he didn't know. "You haven't been on the level since the beginning," he sneered. "If you wanted to work with me, then why didn't you just approach me upfront? Why the deceit? Why the-"

  "Oh, please!" The bodhisattva waved away Natch's objections with a swipe of his prosthetic hand. "I did approach you. Have you forgotten that I gave you money? It was only after you turned up your nose at me-only after you made it clear you were planning to walk straight into Len Borda's clutches with MultiReal in hand-only then that I took the recourse of black code. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, Natch! And did you deserve it? You're the man who lied and cheated his way up the Primo's charts, after all. The man without moral scruples, the man known for his inability to work with anyone. And you say I should have just taken your word? You think I should have just come to you without taking any precautions?"

  Natch didn't know why he was still standing in his old hivemate's office taking such abuse. Better to leave now, better to run out that door into the Chicago winter while his anger was fresh. What could Brone do besides heap scorn upon him as he walked away? Yet Natch's feet felt rooted to the spot; he could not leave, not quite yet. "If you had so little faith in me," he said, "then why did you bother? I wasn't the only one who had core access to MultiReal. You could have gone to-" Natch stopped short as he felt a horrible truth stab him in the gut. His legs gave way, and he collapsed into a chair near the door. "For process' preservation," he said under his breath. "You-you murdered Margaret."

  The room grew deathly quiet. Brone stood up from his chair and turned his back on Natch. Then he walked slowly to the window and folded his arms across his chest. Outside, a flotilla of dark clouds was threatening to blanket the city with more snow. A few of the devotees ambled by, muttering angry and unintelligible words at one another.

  "I admit I wanted to murder her," said Brone after a long and tense silence. "I even admit that I threatened her. But it's not so easy to kill someone in cold blood, Natch. You should try it sometime. Would I have gone through with it? I honestly don't know."

  "What do you mean? If you didn't kill her, then who did?"

  "Nobody," replied the bodhisattva, his voice ashen. "Margaret Surina committed suicide."

  Something vile wriggled its way inside Natch's belly. He remembered his last conversation with Margaret atop the Revelation Spire. She'd been in the last stages of paranoia, clutching a dartgun, barely able to recognize Natch. Barely able to recognize Quell. "You expect me to believe that?" said Natch in a hollow croak. "After all the lies you've told?"

  Brone shrugged, conceding the point. "I'm sorry you don't believe me. But the truth is, your business partner killed herself. I watched her do it. I sat in that wretched Spire of hers and laid out my vision for Possibilities 2.0, one bodhisattva to another. I told her of my plans for the Revolution of Selfishness, just like I told you." The bodhisattva slumped forward with his palms on the windowsill. "I don't know if she even understood what I was saying. You saw how she was behaving toward the end. You were in her office right before me. I offered Margaret Surina a chance to join the Revolution, and instead she chose suicide, with her own black code. It was ... horrible. It wasn't a quick death." He shuddered. "Undoubtedly Len Borda has already figured this out, and is just trying to decide who to pin the blame on.

  "But I already had a backup plan, Natch, and that was you. So I waited. Because I knew it was only a matter of time before you alienated everyone and exhausted every resource. Regardless of what the Prime Committee decided, I knew you'd never hand them MultiReal. I knew that eventually you would wind up alone with Council dartguns bearing down on you, with nowhere else to turn. So when the infoquake struck at the Tul Jabbor Complex, I was ready. I swooped down, and I saved you.

  "Not only did I save you, Natch-I brought you here to Old Chicago, and I gave you everything you'd always wanted. Unlimited resources. A partnership. The greatest technological challenge in the history of programming, and all the time in the world to master it." Brone took a deep breath, looking miserable and defeated. "I'm not sure what else you expect me to do."

  "I already told you," said Natch. "Fix that black code. Fix it, or get rid of it."

  There was no noise but the creaking of the old hotel for several minutes. Natch could see Brone's reflection in the window. The bodhisattva's eyes were dead, hollow, unmanned.

  Finally, Brone spoke. "My black code isn't causing those tremors and blackouts, Natch," he said. "I don't know what is. And that's the truth."

  Natch snorted. "I don't believe you."

  Another pause. The storm clouds that had been threatening snow began to deliver on their promise.

  "Why should I help you, Natch?" said Brone, tired. "You're already planning to leave. This is Chicago, the city of barter. And yet you offer me nothing in exchange."

  Natch picked himself up from the chair and thrust his hands in his pockets. "Why should I barter?" he said. "I've got core access to MultiReal. I don't have to offer anything in return. You've got one more day. Fix the black code, or get rid of it-and then I'll decide if I'm going to stay. It's the only chance you've got."

  Brone did not turn around. "So be it," he said.

  The graveyard of midnight. Complete silence throughout the hotel.

  Natch bolted out of bed and threw on his clothes. He dashed through the hallway and down the stairs. There were no revelers in the atrium tonight, no wandering insomniacs, nobody picking over leftovers from the kitchen. Through the windows, Old Chicago had nothing to offer but the wind and the sepulchral snow. Natch picked a devotee's platform at random, lowered it, and hopped on.

  He knew what he had to do.

  Natch stood at the 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 reached into his pocket and pulled out the black felt bag he had been carting with him for weeks now. He yanked open the drawstring and shook out the bag's hidden treasure on the workbench: ten glimmering circlets of gold, the bio/logic programming rings Quell had lent him. Natch slid them whisper-quiet onto his fingers. As soon as the rings passed the borders of MindSpace, strings of programming code leapt to his fingertips and formed an intricate pattern in the air.

  The entrepreneur raised his left hand again and spread his fingers wide. The MindSpace bubble quickly filled with the swollen treble clef, the black code that had been afflicting him since that fateful night on the streets of Shenandoah.

  Natch attacked.

  The treble clef buzzed and whirred while the minutes passed. Mindful of what had happened the last time he tried to bombard a subroutine too quickly, Natch took absolute care with Brone's black code, only making tentative sorties at first to test the program's defenses. The rings felt more comfortable now than when he had tried them in Shenandoah. They had adapted to his movements, his pace, his style. He could have sworn they had even shrunk a size or two. Gradually, minute by minute, he began to make more complex maneuvers.

  Finally, one of his attacks penetrated the program's surface, and the treble clef exploded into a thousand pieces with a deafening crash. Natch stepped back, surveyed the jagged guts of the black code.

  And realized that this was definitely n
ot a cloaking program.

  Natch had never actually built a cloaking routine before, but he had spent long hours studying their ilk in dark corners of the Data Sea. He knew the shapes and contours to expect, and he had an idea of where the hooks should be. But this program, this black code, didn't match the profile. Links in the treble clef pointed to obscure OCHRE subsystems that would be of little use if the program did what Brone claimed. Natch wished he had paid more attention to Serr Vigal's neural programming lectures all those years ago, because most of the treble clef's nodes appeared to be tied to machines along the brain stem.

  Natch stood on the lowest platform of the atrium, gazing at the stalks that jutted into the air around him like stalagmites. He felt the internal fury boil over. His suspicions had been justified; Brone had lied to him, and now he had proof.

  Do you know why we're not dodging Council missiles right now? the bodhisattva had said. Because that black code floating in your bloodstream renders you invisible to Len Border's tracking mechanisms. Do you understand me? The Council has no way to find you.

  If the black code was not a cloaking mechanism to keep him hidden from the Defense and Wellness Council, then what was it? Why was Brone so adamant about refusing to disable it? Had Pierre Loget been faking all his efforts to tune out the code's insidious side effects? And if Brone was lying to him about the black code software, what else was he lying about?

  Natch combed frantically through the MindSpace schematic looking for a way to disable the software, but it was too well crafted for the simplistic tricks that would cripple most works of black code. He remembered how skillful a programmer Brone had been even years ago at the Proud Eagle; now he was witnessing the end product of that ruthless and cunning intellect. No, even with the program's innards splayed open in MindSpace, it would take Natch hours, possibly days, to dislodge it from his skull. Could he afford to call Brone's bluff? Could he even afford to wait for Brone to discover that he had found a way inside?

  Natch shut off the workbench, pocketed the felt bag with the programming rings, and ran out the front door without a backward glance.

  41

  I can't let you leave, Natch. Certainly you must realize that.

  Faces stare from the windows of Old Chicago as Natch runs pellmell through the streets. Past the four-wheeled fossils that were stripped to the bone hundreds of years ago. Past the untidy rubble of a tower that might have dwarfed even the Revelation Spire before it was struck down by the Autonomous Minds. To the very banks of the Great Diss Lake itself, still silted with the metal droppings of ancient warplanes.

  He has been running for at least an hour when he notices that the diss have come out of their ruined towers to look for him. It's not quite dawn. Electric lights strung along the debris are still illuminating the streets. Yet there's a palpable presence, a stirring through the city as the echoes of shuffling feet fly through the alleyways. Whispered voices. He can't see anybody, not yet, but every few blocks he turns a corner and sees fresh footprints in the snow.

  Somehow Brone has already discovered that he's left the old hotel. He's put the word out among the diss that Natch is a wanted man. Natch remembers Brone's overblown gesture of throwing his synthetic arm on the table in that underground cafe, and now he realizes that that was more than just a gesture. It was a signal. Natch has been marked.

  Brone chose well when he picked Old Chicago as the launchpad for his Revolution of Selfishness. The diss are good trackers: too fiercely independent to band together for an organized pursuit, and therefore almost impossible to predict. This is the city of barter, and with Brone the diss have struck the mother lode of bargains. Keep the Thasselians safe; keep them hidden and protected; do the occasional odd job. And in return, Brone will deliver them their Shangri-la. The ability to eliminate all social boundaries, the ability to bring themselves up to the connectibles' level-or bring the connectibles down to theirs.

  I didn't want it to come to this. But you've forced my hand. I can't risk Borda finding you and taking MultiReal away.

  The words float through his consciousness like a memory of something he once said, yet Natch is fairly certain that he never said them. Yet it's his own voice he's hearing, his own interior monologue. What's going on?

  He makes a quick left at the next intersection and goes looking for cover, only to find himself at a dead end. An impassable cul-de-sac of rusted metal and petrified wood that might once have served as a barricade during the Autonomous Revolt. He scrambles into the corner, thinking he sees a way through the morass, but it turns out to be only a deceit of the night. Natch knows that he can't continue running like this with no direction, but he's still too addled by rage and black code and exhaustion to keep track of where he's going.

  Sprinting through the city at top speed temporarily distracted him from the pain and the quivering, but now both are returning with a vengeance. And the cold ... It's frigid as death out here. Even the winter of initiation wasn't this bad, and he didn't have the artificial insulation of bio/logics back then either.

  Natch backtracks, finds a deserted storefront, and stops to catch his breath. He huddles inside the empty store next to rusted metal racks that might once have contained household products. He needs to figure out some strategy for how to proceed. Where is he going? Where can he go? Connectible territory is off-limits with the Defense and Wellness Council on the hunt for him; and now unconnectible territory is as well. What does that leave?

  He summons a map of the city from the Data Sea and tries to get his bearings. But apparently no one has made a systematic effort to scope out Old Chicago in decades. The schematics he finds hail from a more idyllic time when the streets weren't as cluttered with detritus and more of the old landmarks were still standing. He looks at the most recent map and tries to figure out which building his mother lived in. Vigal once told him that Lora lived on the thirty-fourth story of a rotting skyscraper, and even an hour ago Natch had been naive enough to think he might locate the building on that description alone. But there are a dozen such structures within walking distance, and more dot the horizon to the south and east.

  A pair of young men come jogging by, leading a vicious-looking mongrel on a chain. They're peering into the shadows. Any second now they'll notice his footprints in the snow, which he's stupidly forgotten to cover up. Natch flips on MultiReal, wondering if he can use Horvil's mind control trick to divert their attention without alerting them to his presence. Thankfully, he doesn't have to worry about it, because at that moment something metal crashes to the ground a few blocks away, and the diss trackers go tearing off to investigate.

  MultiReal isn't going to do you any good. You might as well save yourself the effort.

  Natch leaps out from his hiding place, taking care to step in the footprints of his pursuers as much as possible. He can't last much longer out here. He's worn out, not just from the cold, not just from the incident at the Tul Jabbor Complex, but from weeks of ceaseless wandering, from years of pressing on through the maze of fiefcorpery.

  He finds himself in an empty intersection and surveys the crossroads before him. North, south, east, west-which way should he turn?

  But his feet will not obey him. The prospect of taking a step in any direction seems like the most difficult thing in the world. He tries to peer into the future, but he can't see beyond the next five minutes. Running, and then running, and then-

  I'm sorry, Natch.

  The sun finally climbs over the horizon and showers Natch with its cold light. Before he can react, the blackness is upon him.

  Unmoving, unspeaking.

  It is a completely desolate and dimensionless universe, a blackness without blackness. There is no more Old Chicago, no more snow, and no more diss. The very Earth and sky have dissipated away. Corporeality of any kind is nothing but an abstraction, and the constant chatter of the five senses is nothing but a memory.

  And yet Natch is here.

  He feels that he is present, even if there's noth
ing to be present in. But the central core of his being, the identity, the I that fills the pronoun, is there. Natch. His existence may actually be the only thing possible in this place.

  He stretches his nonexistent arms and tries to reach for somethingbut there is only Nothing within reach. His legs: he kicks out with them too, expecting to find ground, or a bed, or at the very least air. But those things, too, are gone. In fact, he can only take it as an article of faith that he himself is still here, since he can't see anything. Natch pats where his torso should be: nothing.

  MultiReal. Even in this place, so far removed from everything, he is aware that the program is out there somewhere. He remembers the sense of limitless potential, the flush of power. But as he stretches his mind out like he has done a million times since he was a child in the hive, he knows it's useless; the Data Sea, MindSpace, even his own OCHRE systems lie in a different continuum altogether. And even if he could somehow reach and activate MultiReal, were there any possibilities for him to choose from in this nonspace?

  A voice speaks. This isn't how I wanted things to end.

  The entrepreneur spins around, or at least tries to, which is impossible in a world without exterior referents. No actual sound has pierced the veil of this ultracompacted universe, but it seems like a sound. It seems like a voice. It is, in fact, the only voice that is conceivable here.