Multireal

by David Louis Edelman

  "So tell me, Magan," said the high executive, voice devolving into a sneer. "You're the one with all the elaborate plans. Short-term plans, long-term problems, isn't that right? Well, you've led us to this state of affairs. Use your wisdom and tell me what you have in store for the Council now."

  Magan pulled out a chair at Borda's ornately carved planning table, setting aside yellowed maps and letters of marque before taking a seat. "I'm not the man who ordered two assassinations on the floor of the Tul Jabbor Complex. My plans will depend on his."

  "Spare me your soliloquies," muttered Borda. "I gave you a chance to prove yourself. You failed. You brought riots and chaos. You reminded the world that the Defense and Wellness Council is subject to the whims of the Prime Committee." Borda looked down and noticed that he was repeatedly thumping one bony fist against the cabin wall. He stopped, perhaps a second too soon to persuade Magan it had been intentional. "We should have brought Natch to the bargaining table, by force. That would have ended it."

  The lieutenant executive's face was impassive. "You would have coerced him into handing over MultiReal. You would have tortured him."

  "It wouldn't have come to that. The fiefcorp master's not stupidhe would have made a deal."

  "And if he hadn't ..." Magan sliced his hand through the air with an almost irreverent manner. "You would have done to him what you did to Marcus Surina."

  "I told you, it wouldn't have come to that!" thundered Borda. Outside, the winds surged to hurricane strength. From the corner of his eye, the high executive could see the ship's boatswain dangling over the railing by a frayed rope. None of the other virtual sailors were rushing to his aid.

  But Magan Kai Lee was not intimidated by his master's wrath. He sat and watched the high executive with that same inscrutable look on his face. If controlling one's emotions were the only skill necessary to lead the world's security and military forces, then Magan would make a fine high executive indeed. But that's not all it takes, thought Borda. You need to be able to think on your feet. You need to be able to win votes on the Prime Committee, and sometimes to manipulate them. You need to be able to sign the order to terminate a life-even if that life is a Surina's.

  "I didn't come here to discuss Marcus Surina," said the lieutenant, shattering the high executive's moment of reflection. "I came because I have something to show you."

  "What?" Borda scowled.

  Magan gestured at the side of the cabin. The water-worn planks of the SeeNaRee wall dissolved to reveal one of several office windows. During the evenings, these windows provided Borda a peerless view of the cloud-covered globe he had taken an oath to protect. The high executive folded his arms across his chest and retreated back to the porthole as his lieutenant gave the window a silent command.

  The prerecorded footage that appeared on the screen might have been taken at any of a hundred anonymous outposts lurking on the edge of Pharisee Territory. The fort was dome-shaped and sandcolored, a camouflaged wart that kept watch on the enemies of civilization. Borda sent a quick ping to the Data Sea and verified that the rivers flowing in the background were indeed the White Nile and the Blue Nile. Which made the rubble-strewn city in the distance Khartoum-or what remained of it.

  Corpses lay sprawled around the outpost. Council officers, for the most part, with a few rustically garbed Pharisees thrown into the mix. An ambush.

  "Where did you find this?" demanded the high executive.

  "You'll see it come across the transom shortly," said Magan. "My officers stumbled across it first, that's all. We believe that the Pharisees made at least a dozen such attacks this morning."

  The anonymous Council soldier whose eyes were recording the video stepped closer to the carnage and focused on the wheezing body of an officer who looked hardly a day over nineteen. A knife with a wicked serrated edge had made rough work of the boy's face, while black code did the rest. OCHREs could do little here but buy him some time and nullify the pain. Several triage teams were working this side of the battlefield, but whether they would make it back to this soldier in time was unclear.

  Hot fury pulsed through the vein in Borda's forehead as the videographer walked slowly along the line of the fallen. Not only had these savages dared to openly attack a Council outpost, but the timing suggested that the Pharisees had done so under cover of the last major infoquake. The videographer approached one of the enemy corpses and used the tip of his boot to turn the woman over on her back. The woman's face was obscured by blood, but beneath her scraggly black hair a glint of copper was visible. The soldier reached down and plucked a small, coin-shaped object off the dead woman's lapel.

  "What's that?" snapped Len Borda, hesitant to reveal his ignorance but also afraid of missing something crucial.

  "They allow the unconnectibles to interact with the Data Sea," replied Magan.

  "A connectible collar without the connectible collar," grumbled Borda.

  He was about to ask Magan who this woman was to have engi neered something so clever, when another Council officer stepped up to the videographer with an upside-down field soldier's helmet in his hand. There were perhaps two dozen of the connectible coins piled there, along with a single copper collar.

  "Islanders," said the high executive.

  So it appeared that the Islanders and the Pharisees had temporarily put aside their differences for a common goal. And why wouldn't they? The Defense and Wellness Council was being rocked by internal strife, the centralized government was suffering from labor unrest, and all of connectible society was reeling from the infoquakes. It was the perfect storm both groups had been awaiting for years.

  But how had the Islanders managed to slip troops into Pharisee Territory without the Council noticing? Borda pondered the question silently for a moment until his gaze drifted off to the river. Of course: underwater. From the Pacific Islands along the equator ... with a detour provided by friendly dissidents in Andra Pradesh ... down through the deserted bubble colonies on the base of the Arabian Sea, which had once been the height of luxury for vacationing Indians ... and then to Khartoum. Borda frowned. Such tactics displayed a degree of sophistication unheard of in this part of the world. He supposed there must be plenty of information on submarine warfare in the Council archives, but no one had practiced it in modern times.

  Magan remained seated in his chair, impossibly unemotional. "It gets worse," he said. "We suspect the Islanders are getting logistical support from the libertarians. Maybe even black code."

  Borda's head snapped around. "Khann Frejohr?"

  Lee didn't answer. Instead, he waved his hand at the window and summoned another scene just as the anonymous Council officer with the grisly face emitted one last gurgle and succumbed to the Null Current.

  This new video clip showed a factory assembly line-a real assembly line, not a throng of programmers swaying to their detestable Jamm music. Dozens of connectible coins were rolling off a series of mechanized conveyor belts. The group eagerly pawing through the pile of coins included several Islanders, a pair of what looked like Lunar tycoons-and a man with the symbol of the rising sun embroidered on his robe. Borda had seen that infernal logo too many times during the recent labor troubles to forget who it belonged to: Creed Libertas. Speaker Frejohr's puppets.

  "Rey Gonerev's not sure if Frejohr is involved in this or not," added Magan Kai Lee. "But whoever they are, they're setting up distribution channels throughout the Islands. Which means-"

  "I know what it means," snapped the high executive. It meant, in a best-case scenario, that the Islanders were preparing a massive act of civil disobedience by refusing to wear the standard connectible collars. Worst case, it could be the sign of a more sophisticated espionage operation or the prelude to another large-scale rebellion.

  He had seen enough. Incensed, Len Borda strode across the cabin in five long strides and threw open the door to the foredeck. He was immediately assaulted by the rage of the SeeNaRee storm, which lashed out at him like a demon with a whip of hailst
ones. There was a dark cloud out there with a terrible face at its center, howling Borda's name. But the high executive refused to turn away. He planted his feet firmly on the deck and stood his ground.

  He knew that face. He had seen it forty-seven years ago, staring up at him with deathless hatred even then. The body it belonged to had been little more than a charred lump, with lungs still clinging to a hoarse parody of breath through the stubbornness of OCHREs alone. As he watched, the man had slid into a long, incoherent monologue of babbles and moans, punctuated by the occasional scream. Please! Please, let me ... let me see my daughter one last time.... Anything! I'll give you ... anything ... all the money in the world, please.... And then, in one last moment of lucidity, the ruined man had turned his eyes to the soldier recording the video-through the soldier, to the high executive he must have known would be watching. And he had cursed Len Borda.

  But Marcus Surina hadn't cursed Borda to die. He'd cursed him to live. May you see many more decades, Surina had said, that stilted manner of his persisting to the very end. May you live long enough to see exactly what you've done to the world.

  And Len Borda did. No sane person believed in curses, of course, but Borda had survived longer than any other high executive in the history of the Council. For decades, Borda thought he had the last laugh. He survived the Economic Plunge of the 310s that was the direct result of his actions against the TeleCo board. More than survived, he fixed it, wielding the power of the free market as both hammer and nails. Then came many years of economic prosperity that rivaled even the Great Boom he had witnessed in his youth. During those heady times, entire months would go by when Borda didn't feel the need to replay that video, to stare into the horrid, defiant face of his enemy, the man who would not yield.

  But one of the planks in Borda's economic recovery was Margaret Surina, daughter of the man who had thwarted him. Why had he funded the resurgence of the Surinas when he could have let the family languish into obscurity? Why had he paid for Margaret to develop MultiReal? Yes, she had been useful at the time-but was it also an attempt to appease the ghost that tormented him?

  May you live long enough to see exactly what you've done to the world, he had said. It was hardly an exaggeration to state that everything happening today was a direct result of Borda's actions. Everything: the libertarian unrest, Magan's rebellion, the Pharisee and Islander attacks, the debacle at the Tul Jabbor Complex, the deranged fiefcorp master hiding somewhere in the wild with an apocalyptic weapon in his hands.

  Was the curse of Marcus Surina claiming its retribution?

  Borda opened his eyes. Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee had come to stand beside him when he was not paying attention. He too had his feet planted firmly on the ship's deck, despite the maelstrom. His hands were clasped behind his back and his expression was calm, even thoughtful.

  "This is no time for a government in conflict," said Magan. "This is no time for a divided Defense and Wellness Council. Abide by the agreements we made. You know it's the right thing to do. Step down from the high executive's seat while you still can."

  Len Borda turned back to face the clouds, to that burned and twisted visage still staring at him from beyond the grave.

  You think you've won? he howled at the shade of Marcus Surina. You think I've reached the breaking point? You underestimated me once, and now you're making the same mistake again. There will be no bargains. There will be no accommodations. I swear that I'll live to see MultiReal destroyed or under the Council's control. I won't bow down to you. Not now, not ever.

  The high executive closed his eyes again and drew himself up to his full height, which was considerable. He inhaled the mist and rain for a moment and tried to clear his head.

  "Magan Kai Lee," said Borda, "I hereby relieve you of your duties as an officer of the Defense and Wellness Council. You and your subordinates will be given twenty-four hours to surrender to the authorities and submit to the judgment of the Prime Committee on the charge of treason. Should you fail to turn yourself in, you will be declared a traitor and pursued with all the strength and vigor of the centralized government. Do I make myself clear?"

  He waited a full ten seconds before opening his eyes, but Magan Kai Lee was gone.

  High Executive Len Borda walked slowly back into his cabin and shut the door behind him. Then he lowered himself gingerly into his chair and glowered at his hands for a few moments. He yelled for the first mate. A SeeNaRee sailor stepped through the cabin door, saluted crisply, and informed Borda that the first mate had been lost overboard during the last sortie with the French.

  Borda nodded and ordered the sailor to set a new course. Due east, full speed ahead.

  44

  There was some talk about arriving separately at the fiefcorp meeting to allay suspicions, but Jara and Horvil both nixed it in the end. As Horvil succinctly summed up the issue: "Who the fuck cares?"

  They showed up at the Surina Enterprise Facility at five minutes before ten. Jara stepped through the meeting room door and was surprised to find the place devoid of SeeNaRee. She had a moment of whiteknuckled panic. Had the infoquakes undermined so much of the computational infrastructure that even SeeNaRee wasn't safe? Then the analyst took a closer look and realized that this unimaginative committeedesigned conference room was SeeNaRee. Even worse, since Jara had been the first one in the door, it was her mood that had summoned it.

  Vigal, Merri, and Benyamin stumbled in over the next fifteen minutes, glum as witnesses to an execution. Jara called the meeting to order.

  "So it seems like we're in a depressingly familiar situation," she said. "Natch has vanished. The drudges are calling for his head. We've got the Meme Cooperative and the Defense and Wellness Council riding on our backs. One of our chief engineers is rotting in an orbital prison somewhere, and the founder of the company is dead."

  "I don't understand why the Council hasn't said anything about Margaret's murder," said Horvil. "I thought they were doing an investigation. They must have figured out something by now."

  Jara frowned and bit her bottom lip, hard. She was ashamed to admit it, but she had barely thought about Margaret Surina's mysterious death during the tumult of the past two weeks.

  "Doesn't surprise me they're not saying anything," Benyamin remarked. "With all this going on"-he twirled his index finger in the air-"Len Borda would have to be pretty stupid to bring it up now."

  "What about Quell?" asked Horvil. "The Council can't just hold him indefinitely, can they? They must have figured out by now that he didn't kill her. Isn't there something we can do to help him?"

  "I already tried," said Merri. Four surprised heads swiveled in her direction. "I convinced Khann Frejohr's people to make some inquiries. But the Council's keeping mum. They've got him in an orbital prison somewhere. That's all I can find out."

  "Do you know which one?" asked Serr Vigal. "I toured a few of them back in '35 or '36. The good ones aren't so bad. But the bad ones ..." The neural programmer waved his arms helplessly for a moment, but no words arrived to bail him out.

  Ben tapped his fingers on the table, impatient. "We can't be the only ones looking for him, can we? Doesn't Quell have a family at home? Close friends? The Islanders don't take these kinds of things lightly. There's got to be some committee petitioning the Council for his release."

  "Well, that's the interesting part," replied Merri. "There is a group of Islanders working with the libertarians to try to secure Quell's release. They're making all kinds of threats. And one of them is Quell's son."

  Horvil's jaw flipped open as if on springs. "Quell has a kid?"

  "Apparently he does."

  "I wonder if that's why he's staying in prison," said Jara, contemplative. Everyone gave her blank stares. "Well, why doesn't he use MultiReal to overpower the guards and escape?"

  "They regulate all transmissions in and out of those prisons," offered Ben. "He wouldn't be able to access MultiReal in there."

  "Fine-but why did Quell let them take
him to prison in the first place?"

  No one knew.

  The conversation seemed to lose its legs at that point. The fiefcorpers looked around at one another, each expecting somebody else to prolong the conversation. Three minutes passed. The SeeNaRee generated some background hallway noise to fill the silence.

  "Okay," said Jara finally. "We can't just avoid the obvious question all morning, can we? We need to figure out what happens to the fiefcorp. We need to figure out what to do, now that we've got no product."

  Benyamin frowned. "What do you mean, no product?"

  "Ben," said Merri gently, "you know that the Prime Committee is likely to-"

  "Yes, yes, of course," snapped Ben, cutting her off. "They'll probably vote to take control of MultiReal and hand it over to the Council. But does that mean we're just going to ... give up? I don't care what the Committee decides. We could always appeal the ruling, right? We could talk to Khann Frejohr, get him to stir up public sentiment again. Or-or, we could try to work out another deal with Len Borda. A real deal this time."

  Jara shook her head. "It's a moot point, Ben. Even if we could persuade the centralized government to change their minds ... we don't have MultiReal anymore. Natch moved the databases. He used that ... back door in his head, or whatever it is to lock up all the code and squirrel it away somewhere on the Data Sea where no one can find it."

  "You mean-"

  "Yes. It doesn't matter what the Prime Committee decides, because MultiReal's gone."

  Serr Vigal stroked his goatee, pensive. "What about the Patel Brothers? If Natch took the MultiReal code with him, do they still have access to it?"

  Jara shrugged. "I'm not sure. I assume that if we don't know how to find it, they don't know either." And once the Patels figure out I don't have MultiReal, she thought sourly, that probably spells the end of the deal I arranged with them to get the fiefcorp's business licenses back.

  "But it's not like MultiReal's permanently gone," said Benyamin, unwilling to let go. "Natch still has access to it. And he's going to come back eventually. He hasn't just disappeared for good ... has he?"