Then Natch heard the screaming.
Stop! Wait, stop! Don't! Don't! Don't! And then a long shriek of anguish and pain, underlined by the snarling of a confused and angry bear. The distant tumult of rushing feet through the leaves. The wet sound of human flesh ripping.
Natch could not move. The light from the torch sputtered and went out. In the split second before the dark enveloped him once again, Natch looked up and discovered he was no longer holding a torch-it was the bloody stump of a boy's arm.
Then he awoke.
Natch slowly lifted his eyelids and let the world soak into his consciousness one millimeter at a time.
He took inventory of his surroundings. It was a familiar setting. His hands lay palms-down on faux ivory armrests, and he could feel faux leather at his back. Sunlight tapped a staccato message on his face from behind a latticework of redwoods passing by at superhuman speed. Natch had practically memorized every twist and turn of this Seattle express tube over the years.
The entrepreneur took a closer look at the window. Something floated there in boldface awaiting his arousal from sleep.
COUNCIL STORMS NATCH'S APARTMENT IN PLOYTO SEIZE MULTIREAL
Natch gave a tired nod. So those fools took the bait after all.
He skimmed through a few dozen drudge clippings, stacking them on the window like bricks. There was video from fifteen different angles, and some anonymous wit had given the whole thing a symphonic score. Natch summoned the baffled face of Magan Kai Lee and watched his entire walk of shame back to the hoverbird four times.
At last you have some breathing room, the fiefcorp master told himself. Now you can stop running and go home again.
Natch had woken up on a tube train every day this week. He had traveled the entire world over the past few weeks in an effort to skirt the Defense and Wellness Council. Yesterday he had seen the desert sands of old Texas territory, pausing for a brief multi foray to Shenandoah to set his trap; the night before, he had skimmed the surface of the Indian Ocean.
But there were a number of close calls. Natch could find only so much anonymity when his face had been burned into the public consciousness through a hundred interviews and drudge reports. A group of teenagers in Sao Paulo had seen right through his false public directory profile, and Natch had had to pawn off one of his new bio/logic programming bars just to keep them quiet. Counting the one he had flung at his black-robed pursuers in Shenandoah a few weeks ago, he was now two bars short of a complete set.
Then there was the disturbing incident with the crazy woman in central Europe. She had worn the bright blue uniform of a healer, but had reached the age when many abandoned curative treatments and sent in their applications to join the Prepared. The woman had walked up to him in plain view of three white-robed Council officers, indignant, demanding that Natch explain the "dirty tricks" he had performed at the demo in Andra Pradesh. Natch's mind had been gliding through some remote place, and he had nearly panicked. But suddenly people had stood up to defend him with voices raised and fists clenched. Soon a handful of L-PRACG security officers had gotten involved, and the Council officers had scurried over to investigate. A small-scale brawl had erupted between Natch's supporters and his detractors. Libertarians shouting Down with Len Borda, governmentalists bellowing Respect the law. Natch, dumbfounded, had offered no resistance when two libertarians calmly tugged him out the door and thrust him onto a tube running in the opposite direction. He had managed to escape before Len Borda's people realized exactly what was going on.
In a world of sixty billion people, simple mathematics dictated that Natch must have millions of sympathizers on the libertarian side of the political spectrum. A hundred million people probably sup ported his fight to keep MultiReal out of the Council's hands from sheer spite for Len Borda. But to discover that people had coalesced on this issue, that they were willing to stand up to armed Council officers ... Natch simply didn't know how to process it.
Once aware of this undercurrent of libertarian sympathy, he began to see signs of it everywhere he went. Natch found posts of support on the Data Sea, speeches by L-PRACG activists, drudgic calls for embargoes against the central government. Suddenly he realized he had underestimated the number of his supporters by several orders of magnitude. A minority, perhaps, and still skulking in the shadows, but gaining strength every day.
And now the Council's raid on Natch's apartment building had altered the dynamics of the situation altogether. He called up Sen Sivv Sor's reportage on the window.
COUNCIL STORMS NATCH'S APARTMENT IN PLOYTO SEIZE MULTIREAL
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Nobody is worse at bungling public relations than High Executive Len Borda.
In the three weeks since Natch's MultiReal demonstration at Andra Pradesh, the Fefcorp master has disappeared from the public eye. This morning, we found out why. Because Borda, in his supreme wisdom, has already decided to renege on his assurances of safety, and to seize MultiReal from its rightful owners without provocation.
What else can we conclude from the dazzling display of stupidity executed by one of Borda's lieutenant executives, Magan Kai Lee, this morning? You all saw it right here, dear readers. If not for an anonymous tip-off to the drudge community early this morning, the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp might have already been dissolved by now. And its fiefcorp master might be rotting away in some orbital Council prison.
It's astounding the lengths some will go to in order to preserve the vaunted status quo. Which is why-
Natch had read enough. He banished the potpourri of Data Sea ramblings from the window and let the redwoods show through once more.
Yes, Natch's clever MindSpace tricks had enabled him to reverse the tide of public opinion, if only for a day or two. Even the staunch governmentalist Mah Lo Vertiginous was grudgingly admitting that the Council had blundered today. Borda and Lee would not dare pull another stunt like that anytime soon.
Natch caught his reflection in the window. So why are you still sitting on a tube train heading in the wrong direction? he asked himself. Why didn't you get off at the last stop and make your way home?
He conjured a picture of the city of Shenandoah in his head. Home. But when he saw those undulating streets and shifting buildings, all he could think about was the mercenary precision of the black-robed figures who had ambushed him there. He could still feel the pinpricks of their black code darts and the icy rush of poisonous OCHREs suffusing his bloodstream. The void, the nothingness.
Natch stumbled upon an unexpected realization: he was afraid.
You find yourself capable of strange things when you run out of choices, Margaret Surina had told him last month.
Now Natch understood what the bodhisattva meant. For three weeks, he had been fleeing from the Council, catching the occasional update from Horvil or Serr Vigal over ConfidentialWhisper, taking quick glimpses at the evolving Possibilities program whenever he found a rented MindSpace workbench he could trust. Nobody had heard a syllable from Margaret in all that time. Nor had the Patel Brothers stirred from their lair to stop Lucas Sentinel and Bolliwar Tuban from thrashing them in the Primo's ratings.
And what about Brone? Natch blacked out the window and displayed the message he had received the other day in small, precise lettering.
Why is the vaunted master of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp running away? What does he think he will gain by fleeing from tube train to tube train? Does he think his enemies are just going to up and disappear?
How long before he realizes he needs additional allies to complete the MultiReal programming and bring the program to market? When will he finally accept the helping hand that an old enemy has held out to him? When will his need for funding, equipment, privacy, and security outweigh the irrational hatred he carries around his neck?
There was no trace of a sender or signature. Natch supposed he could use some arcane tools of the trade to track down the message's origin, but of course there was only one person who could h
ave sent it.
A snippet of dream floated through Natch's head: a bear, screams, the bloody stump of an arm. Where was Brone? What was he doing? Certainly after all that had happened during the Shortest Initiation, after all the machinations Brone had gone through to put Natch in his debt, he wasn't planning to just sit on the sidelines. After all, he was the head of a major creed organization, the Thasselians, with vast stockpiles of credits and half a million anonymous devotees at his disposal. Opportunities for mischief were plentiful.
It was a time of suspended animation, of delayed choices. And now Natch's ruse against Magan Kai Lee had set things in motion once again.
You've faced challenges before, Natch told himself. Brone, Captain Bolbund, the ROD coders, Figaro Fi, the Patels. What's different? What are you so afraid of now?
It was the black code swimming through his veins. Somehow it had aged him in a way that none of his adversaries had managed to do before. He could practically feel it tinkering away inside of him, deconstructing his innards, disassembling his mind. Every day, Natch sensed that he was losing a small piece of this inner turf to the encroaching void, to the winter, to the nothingness.
The nothingness was coming to claim him. And Natch knew that all the battles he had fought before were merely the opening skirmishes of a much larger campaign against this nothingness. It was a campaign he could not afford to lose.
4
Magan spent the next four hours on three different hoverbirds, watching time and space drift by the window.
"Towards Perfection, Lieutenant Lee," chirped a voice from the cockpit as Magan stepped aboard the last hoverbird. Obviously the pilot had been too absorbed in the complex trigonometry of space flight preparation to catch the news. "Anything I can get you before we lift off? Commissary's got a nice batch of weedtea, straight from-"
Magan cut her off. "Nothing, Panja, thank you."
"How about-"
"To DWCR, please."
Panja quieted down. She had flown Magan to DWCR hundreds of times in the past few years-only a small number of pilots had clearance to fly there-so she had learned to read his emotions well. Something must have gone terribly wrong.
Magan took a seat in the back row of the hoverbird and strapped on his harness. The pilot conducted the ship's mechanical tests without a word, then set them on their way. Magan watched the clouds approach and fell into a light sleep until the ship alerted him that they were making the final approach into DWCR.
To those in the know, DWCR was the Defense and Wellness Council Root, Len Borda's center of operations-and those who could not define the acronym weren't aware of its existence anyway. But even most of those privileged enough to work at DWCR couldn't pinpoint it on a map. The location was highly classified, and officers like Panja had to withstand a battery of loyalty tests before they were admitted to the inner circle.
Magan himself had spent several years stepping on a red multi tile without knowing exactly where he was being projected. But he never minded such obfuscation, even when it served to block something in his path. A system with a hidden solution remained a system with a solution, after all; a welcome change from the centerless anarchy his life had been before enlisting in the Council twenty-five years ago. Magan knew that, with scrupulous planning, he could master any system that confronted him. He knew that time and chance were the only obstacles between him and the pinnacle of the Council hierarchy. Eventually the secrets of DWCR would be his.
Nearly ten thousand Council employees were not so confident. Magan saw them huddled in their offices week after week wasting hours in useless conjecture. Some believed the Root sat in one of the many unexplored crevices of Luna. Others favored the Pacific Islands or the Antarctic or the uninhabitable sectors of Furtoid as more likely candidates. But so far Len Borda's engineers had succeeded in keeping the Root impervious to any known positioning or tracing program, and prodigious sums of money were expended to ensure that the mystification would continue for years to come.
Nonetheless, Magan knew the secrecy could not last indefinitely. Secrets had a gravity of their own that sucked in the curious and the determined. Had the high executive planned for that contingency, or was he relying on the secrecy to last forever? The bodhisattva of Creed Bushido had the perfect aphorism to describe such closed-mindedness: Short-term plans, long-term problems.
In actuality, DWCR was a disk-shaped platter in orbit at the outermost reach of Earth's gravitational pull, only a slight rocket thrust away from either floating off into the aether or spiraling planetward to a fiery, cataclysmic doom. Lieutenant Lee watched out the port window now as the platter slid into view. A single observation tower jutted from the bottom with priapic majesty, as if waiting for something to impale.
Panja docked the hoverbird without a sound, and Magan stepped through the airlock as soon as DWCR had given them the all-clear.
Generals and military planners filed curt nods with Magan as he strode the Root's maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Without proper clearance, he could wander these shifting corridors of gunmetal gray for days. Someone had made an attempt to inject some color on the walls, but the smattering of pretentious landscapes and portraits of executives past did little to lighten the atmosphere.
Magan made his way to the observation tower and kept his ears open for the hallway gossip. He heard rumors of military deployments, complaints about research budgets, details of appropriations bills before the Prime Committee ... but not a single comment about the failed raid early this morning. Magan frowned. The only thing worse than listening to officers chatter about the Council's failure was not hearing them chatter about it at all. He sighed as he reached the central elevator and cleared his mind.
The elevator did not head upward. Instead it dropped, leading Magan to a floor on the tip of the observation tower. Borda's private chambers.
When he emerged from the elevator, the Council lieutenant found himself standing on the deck of an ancient sloop-of-war. The ship swayed tipsily in the waves, sending the occasional spittle of SeeNaRee brine splashing on Magan's face. Still-smoking cannons on the deck spoke of a recent battle against some enemy hovering just out of sight in the fog.
Standing at the prow of the ship was High Executive Len Borda.
Borda listened to his lieutenant's version of events with rising ire, his back to the mast and his nose pointed out to sea. "Bloody drudges," he said in a rumbling basso that not even the waves could drown out. "If I wanted their opinion, trust me, they'd know it."
Some called the high executive arrogant, but that word seemed beside the point. After nearly sixty years running the world's military and intelligence affairs, Borda needed no tone of intimidation. He spoke with the timbre of a man who had been the final arbiter for so long that he had forgotten any other reality.
Magan watched Len Borda move to the railing and run his hand over the intricately carved wood. He seemed to be scanning the murky horizon for a sign of the enemy, which would be the French, if memory served. Why Borda devoted so much attention to this virtual playground, Magan could not fathom. He admitted that the SeeNaRee programmers had a terrific eye for detail and historical accuracy. But Borda was spending more time here than in the world of flesh and blood lately, and that was not a good sign.
"Today is December twenty-seventh," said the lieutenant after a long and uneasy silence.
Borda shrugged. "What of it?"
"The new year comes in four days. After what happened this morning, do you really think you can gain control of MultiReal in four days?"
One stony eyebrow lifted itself on Borda's forehead and then subsided, like a breaker on the SeeNaRee ocean. "Four days is a lifetime," he said. "I was willing to deal with Natch behind closed doors. He's the one who decided to bring this fight into the public eye." Borda scowled. "Let's see how he handles a full onslaught."
Magan clenched his fists into a tight ball behind his back, then slowly forced himself to stop, take a breath, unwind. Could Len Borda
really be so foolish as to try the same thing again? Had his mind become so entrenched that he could do nothing but continuously loop through the same routine? "And what if this onslaught of yours fails?"
Borda was not nearly so successful at hiding his emotions, and he didn't bother with PokerFace programs either. The gritted teeth and the trembling jaw told Magan everything he needed to know.
The high executive was planning to break their agreement.
"Forget about the fiefcorp master for a moment," said Borda. "I need your help with something else." The high executive waved his hand and summoned a block of text to float against the gauzy gray sky. Magan pushed the anger aside and read the letter with a growing crease on his brow.
Congress of L-PRACGs
Office of the Speaker
Melbourne
In accordance with my duties as speaker, I am writing to inform the Defense and Wellness Council that the Congress has officially opened an inquiry into the causes of the computational anomalies known as "infoqual
Four such disruptions have occurred in the past month, leaving thousands dead and wounded. According to the sworn testimony of Congressional engineers, the severity of these disruptions is growing. It is my belief that the Council's measures to limit bandwidth on the Data Sea are no longer sufficient to contain this threat.
The Congress hereby charges all employees of the Defense and Wellness Council to answer any forthcoming subpoenas promptly and with the utmost discretion.
May you always move towards perfection, Khann Frejohr, Speaker
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