Quell did not miss a beat. "And maybe you can see why I insist on shaking anyway."
All at once, comprehension came flooding into Horvil's head. He caught sight of the plain tan breeches and the thin copper collar suspended from the man's neck. The breeches were cinched tightly around his waist with a snakeskin belt that looked like it was actually made out of snakeskin. "Y-you're an unconnectible!" the engineer exclaimed in surprise.
"Yeah," replied Quell, "although I think the term you're looking for is Islander."
Horvil was so fascinated with the man's collar that he completely missed the faux pas. He had seen plenty of Islanders at a distance, of course-they did sometimes venture beyond the borders of their little demesne in the South Pacific-but actually meeting one in person was a different matter altogether. Horvil tried to picture what this room would look like to Quell if he removed that collar. No SeeNaRee, no Jara, no multi projections of any kind.
"I thought you were a bio/logic engineer," he said, thoroughly baffled. "Weren't you supposed to bring us the MultiReal code?" Horvil peeked around the Islander as if he expected to see a string of MindSpace blueprints bobbing behind him on a string.
"I am an engineer," said Quell with scarcely masked impatience. "And don't worry, I have the access to the code."
Horvil peered up and down the big man doubtfully. "If you're an engineer, where's your bio/logic programming bars?" He patted his own neatly folded knapsack and felt the reassuring heft of the metal inside.
The Islander let out a breath. He had obviously dealt with such skepticism many times before. "Let's just get this over with," he groused in a dangerous tone of voice. "We don't have time to fuck around. Follow me." He pivoted on one heel and stomped towards the metal doorframe standing incongruously in the middle of the veldt. Horvil and Jara looked at one another, shrugged, and set off in pursuit. All at once, the African SeeNaRee was replaced by the blue stretchedstone walls of the Surina Enterprise Facility.
Quell strode through the halls as if the Facility had been constructed solely for his benefit. None of the Surina security guards seemed eager to contradict this impression. They parted dutifully for the Islander with deep, respectful bows, while casting suspicious glances at Jara and Horvil. Throngs of businesspeople hustling to and from meetings stepped aside because of the Islander's intimidating presence. Finally, Quell led them to a door surrounded by Surina security people and walked into the most gorgeous workspace Horvil had ever seen.
The room's four walls bore no SeeNaRee or decorations of any kind, not even one of those extendable programming bar holsters that Horvil had seen in so many offices lately. Quell's workbench, however, was anything but shabby: a four-sided metal monstrosity with a sliding panel that allowed access to its center. The Islander snapped his fingers and conjured up a gigantic MindSpace bubble, large enough to hold three or four of Horvil's programs simultaneously. A serpentine block of bio/logic code wended partway around the bubble in hues of gray, brown and violet.
"Watch this," commanded Quell. And then he plunged his bare hands straight into the middle of the holograph.
Horvil gasped as connection strands rose like snakes charmed from a basket and wiggled their way to the Islander's fingers. Soon, Quell had amassed a bundle of data fibers in each hand, which he proceeded to weave in and out of the code blocks with astonishing alacrity. The connections looked just as well seated as if they had been stuck there with a pricey set of programming bars.
"I didn't even know you could do it that way," said Horvil. He thought of the clunky silver slabs roosted against his side and felt a rush of inferiority.
"How do you think people made code before bio/logic programming bars?" replied Quell. His noodling did not seem to have any purpose other than demonstration; he was tying and untying the same collection of strands over and over again. "With their bare hands, that's how. On the Islands, we remember such things."
"But-the connection strands-they're floating to your fingertips
The big man's eyes twinkled with a craftsman's pride. Suddenly, he clenched his hands into fists, and the snakes drooped limply back to the desk. "The rings," he said, twitching his fingers in the air. "They each broadcast a unique signature, just like a programming bar."
Jara had been watching Quell's display with characteristic skepticism. "So what is this thing?" she said, gesturing at the roller coaster structure of the program. "That was a nice demonstration, but how do we know it even works?"
"This thing is EnviroSelect 14," retorted the Islander. "And you know it works because it's been choosing the SeeNaRee for you every time you've stepped into a Surina conference room."
Jara pursed her lips, embarrassed. "Oh."
When they arrived back at the conference room, Benyamin was waiting for them. He didn't show the least bit of surprise at Quell's traditional Islander handshake, causing Horvil to wonder how his younger cousin could be so much more worldly than he. There was no sign of Merri yet, but that was to be expected; teleportation was challenging enough without the additional complications caused by 380,000 kilometers of space. She would not be here for a few more hours yet. Jara took one last look at her notes, muttered something unintelligible but definitely not pleasant, and then cut her multi connection.
Horvil and Ben dutifully followed Quell back through the hallways to the workroom where the engineering would begin. The Islander seemed inclined to walk several meters ahead of the two cousins, but Horvil managed to hustle to the big man's side.
"I was hoping you could explain something," said the engineer. "Obviously, you can make bio/logic programs with those funky rings there, but how do you test 'em?"
Quell eyed his counterpart with scarcely concealed suspicion. "What do you mean?"
"I thought Islanders didn't run bio/logic programs because bio/logics is unholy, or something like that."
"You're thinking of the Pharisees. That's not us at all. We run bio/logic programs in the Islands every once in a while; people there install some of the basic OCHREs. Our Technology Board just discriminates a lot more carefully than your connectible governments."
"We discriminate pretty carefully," said Horvil in a wounded tone of voice.
Quell shook his head, and for a second the engineer thought he was going to burst out laughing. "How much code do you have floating around your system right now, Horvil?" he said.
Horvil thought carefully, trying to account for all the programs he activated willy-nilly every minute, the background code created by his L-PRACG and the Prime Committee, the constant hum of molecular activity instigated by his OCHREs. Processes whose names he didn't know, routines that had been installed by hive technicians before birth and running constantly since then. "I don't know," he said. "Thousands, probably."
"And do you know who wrote them all? How do you know they're all going to work together flawlessly?"
"That's why we have governments. That's why there's Primo's and the Council."
"Governments. Primo's. The Defense and Wellness Council." The Islander spat out the words as if they were the names of particularly odious criminals. "Do you trust them?"
"Not entirely. But I'm not gonna sit around all day and weed through bio/logic programs either."
Benyamin, who had been listening a few paces behind, now came trotting up on Quell's right side. "But we have a system for opting out of these standard bio/logic programs," he said. "The Islander Tolerance Act of 146. High Executive Toradicus signed it."
"Spoken like a true governmentalist," said Quell, though his tone of voice was not unkind. "Create an opt-out provision, and put the onus on our taxpayers, on our governments. The Technology Board has a huge team that does nothing but register these `Dogmatic Oppositions' twenty-four hours a day to keep your bots and data agents out of the South Pacific. And who do you think pays their salaries? Do you think your Prime Committee has ever sent a bloody credit our way to fund their Tolerance Act?"
Horvil blushed furiously. He had heard of Do
gmatic Oppositions, of course, but to him the term had just been verbal dressing tossed around in Khann Frejohr's speeches. He had never met anyone to whom these things actually mattered. "Politics," muttered Horvil. "I hate politics."
At that, the Islander let out a titan-sized laugh of such gusto that all the security guards in the hallway instantly felt for their dartrifles. "If you hate politics," said Quell, "you're in the wrong fiefcorp."
"So how many programs do you have running in your system?" snapped Horvil.
The Islander looked at Horvil with an expression that hinted at fondness or amusement. "Twelve. And seven of them are for my asthma."
Horvil had started to drift into an interior monologue about the evils of politics when he was jarred back to reality by their arrival at Quell's workroom. The Islander made an obscure hand signal to a unit of blueand-green Surina security officers, and a dozen of them instantly marched up to the workroom door and formed a protective ring around it. This was no loose formation like the one Horvil saw here half an hour ago; these troops had their fingers on the triggers of their guns and were clearly ready to use them. "Thank you," said Horvil inanely as he stepped into the room with Ben and Quell and closed the door behind him.
Two dozen guards at the gates to the Surina complex, thought Horvil. And then more guards blocking the way into the Surina Enterprise Facility ... and now even more right outside the door ... You'd need an army to get past all those dartguns.
Then he remembered that Len Borda did have an army. Several armies, in fact. He shivered.
Quell was obviously used to the pressure. He marched into the center of the workbench and waved his hand around the table. Ben and Horvil jumped back in awe as a dozen interlocking modules of pink and blue appeared in the MindSpace bubble. Horvil now understood the need for the large workspace; the program took up every square centimeter and extended halfway to the ceiling like a Gothic castle. Connection strands stretched from module to module in startling and intricate patterns, some circumnavigating the whole mass several times. Even an observer who knew nothing about bio/logic coding could lose himself for hours studying the beautiful detail, the interplay of colors, the endless number of aesthetic themes that replicated across the surface of the program. Horvil had seen entire nervous system simulators that were less complex.
"So this is MultiReal," he gulped. Next to the Byzantine topography of the MultiReal program, Probabilities 4.9 would look like a pastel-colored pimple.
"That-that's amazing," stuttered Ben.
Quell's face showed a mixture of pride and sadness, the palimpsest of some epic experience that Horvil could hardly begin to imagine. "After sixteen years of work," he said, "it ought to be."
"Sixteen years?" said Horvil, his jaw hanging low. He couldn't imagine working on the same program for sixteen months.
"And that's just Margaret's part of it. Half of this code was passed down by her father when he died-and she contracted out a lot of bits and pieces." Horvil nodded as if Quell's statement were self-evident. "Now are we ready to start coding?"
The two cousins nodded in sync, and they got to work.
Probabilities 4.9 did indeed look quite puny beside the gargantuan MultiReal engine. Its double helix shape was a child's trick in comparison, a second-rate sleight of hand. Horvil found the sight of the two programs side-by-side a big metaphor for the entire situation Natch had gotten them into. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp? thought the engineer, wishing he could just erase the Probabilities ROD and pretend it had never existed. This is the Margaret Surina MultiReal Fiefcorp, plain and simple. We don't belong here. We're completely out of our league.
Quell spent the first half-hour pointing out the MultiReal program's basic hooks to his fellow apprentices. There wasn't enough time for a more in-depth explanation. When the Islander wrapped up his brief overview, Horvil still had no idea what an alternate reality was or why you would want to create one. But now he felt confident he could at least steer this MultiReal vessel, even if the workings of its engine room remained a mystery.
Horvil was gratified to see that his original estimate of the work involved was accurate. Clearly, it would be madness for Quell, Horvil and Benyamin to attempt to make all those thousands of connections in less than seventy-two hours; even Natch would have to admit that. So the two senior engineers spent the next few hours making detailed blueprints for the assembly-line shop and marking up their code on templates even the greenest programmer could follow. There wasn't enough room inside the workbench for Ben to squeeze in, not alongside two men of such bulk. So he kept to the corner of the room, where he took notes on a holographic tablet and stared intently at Quell's finger-weaving technique. Horvil felt like an ancient relic swinging around his clunky bars of metal, but there was nothing he could do about it.
As the day ebbed away and night fell, Benyamin began to grow impatient. He kept sidling up to Horvil and slipping him urgent Con- fidentialWhispers about the time. "I told the assembly-line manager I'd get this to her by midnight," he said.
"What do you want me to do?" 'Whispered Horvil in return. "It's just not done."
"If the shop doesn't get it by midnight, they can't guarantee they'll finish by Tuesday."
"And if we rush to get it to them by midnight, I can't guarantee it will work on Tuesday." Benyamin quieted down.
Midnight passed, but Quell and Horvil labored on. Ben began popping in and out of the room to make use of the multi facility down the hall.
Once the basic blueprint had been constructed and Probabilities sat loosely tethered to the MultiReal engine, another job awaited the fiefcorpers: security. Sending an assembly-line coding shop the full Possibilities program in all its manifold glory would be an invitation to disaster. Horvil wouldn't take such a risk with even an ordinary bio/logic program; there were too many thieves, cutthroat competitors and black coders who would love to get their hands on commercial source code. So Quell and Horvil spent the early morning hours fastidiously cordoning off enormous chunks of programming, locking out sensitive areas and encrypting the sections that would have to remain open.
By the time they finished, the program would look like any other large-scale project that passed through an assembly-line floor. An economic modeling program, perhaps, or the basic subsystem for an internal organ. No one would be able to tell they were really working on Margaret Surina's famous MultiReal engine.
Quell turned out to be an ideal co-worker. He didn't clog up the grinding gears of Horvil's concentration with a lot of chatter, and what he did say was always concise and to the point. After a few hours, the two dropped nouns and verbs altogether and stuck to the lingua franca of mathematics. The engineer had to admit he was starting to like this Islander. And he could swear the feeling was mutual.
Horvil finally tossed aside the bio/logic programming bars a few minutes shy of six in the morning. They had worked through the night without a single break. He gazed at their handiwork, and then exchanged a silent glance with the Islander. The look was unambiguous. MultiReal isn't ready. It's not going to work. But now they were bumping up against the unstretchable limitations of time, and Benyamin was positively apoplectic. The two engineers sighed and nodded as one; it would have to do. "You ready to take the baton, Ben?" said Horvil, stretching his sore arms above his head.
Benyamin's raven-black hair was in complete disarray from the action of nervous fingers. "I've been keeping the shop up-to-date on our progress," he said. "They're all ready to go. Just give me the word, and I'll get them started."
"Do you think they can do all that barwork in time? That's a big mound of coding, and Natch'11 be onstage in less than forty-eight hours."
"I don't know. I've never had to put them on such a tight deadline."
The engineer's eyes narrowed. "No, Ben, don't tell me you're taking it-there. You can't, are you insane?"
Benyamin cast his eyes to the floor and stuck his hands in his pockets, mirroring one of Horvil's standard poses. "We don't have
a choice anymore. I had a couple of assembly-line shops willing to take on the job last night, but now this is the only one. And I had to call in a few favors even to get them on board."
Quell watched the cousins' conversation from the opposite corner of the room, where he had stretched out on the floor. "What's going on?"
Horvil let out a tsk. "He's going to bring MultiReal to my Aunt Berilla's shop-his mother's company."
"One of her companies," corrected Ben. "One of her many companies."
"They do good work, I'll give them that-but it's not like they actually have to compete against anybody. Creed Elan throws them all kinds of softball projects without even soliciting bids. Which isn't any real surprise because Berilla is like this with all the Elan bodhisattvas." He held two chunky fingers together like Siamese twins attached at the hip.
"Don't you get it, Horvil?" Ben replied defensively. "Nobody else'll take on the project this late. We have to use them now."
The Islander shook his head in confusion. "So what's the problem?"
"The problem is that Aunt Berilla absolutely hates Natch with a passion. Don't ask me why. She doesn't want anything to do with him. She doesn't want us to have anything to do with him. If she realizes this is Natch's coding job-if she thinks it'll help Natch in any way-she'll yank it right off the floor. No, even worse, she might actually sabotage the fucking thing."
"She won't find out," Ben insisted. "Really, Horv, this is all under control."
Horvil sighed. "Let's hope so."
They returned to the conference room to find Jara and Merri in the midst of a heated debate. Jara had been up all night weeding through marketing theories for a model to use in the presentation until, desperate, she had asked Merri for help. Since the moment she stepped off the teleportation platform, the channel manager had been slingshotting around the globe to sales meetings with Robby Robby. She hadn't even found the opportunity to change out of the horribly unfashionable gray robe TeleCo made its customers wear during the transfer process. Yet, she had readily agreed to help, a decision she now appeared to regret.
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