Multireal

by David Louis Edelman

  "Towards Perfection yourself," Jara replied, standing on tiptoes to give Geronimo a hungry hello kiss. The kiss quickly evolved into a fullon tongue-dueling affair until the pain in her toes made her withdraw.

  "So you get us a room?" grunted the youth, almost shattering the illusion. "How 'bout one-a those leather ones?"

  The fiefcorp analyst winced. Jara didn't know whether this idiot was really dissident, philosopher, or poet, but one thing was certainhe definitely was not Natch. She hid her disappointment behind a coy smile. "Of course I got us a room. What, you think I'm some kind of amateur?"

  Geronimo chuckled and brushed his knuckles across the side of her breast, an act that didn't require the slightest apology or explanation to the crowd. Not on this channel, at least. Jara could feel the knife twisting inside her, uncontrollable, setting everything it touched aflame. "Awright," mumbled Geronimo. "Let's get moving."

  Please shut up, she thought. Please, please, please.

  Jara and the boy walked arm in arm across the lounge, past columns of wriggling goldfish and green cushions nestled on the backs of porpoises. They saw twosomes and threesomes and moresomes of all genders and orientations flirting away the time between encounters. Jara noticed a trio of four-breasted mermaids rubbing fins. Geronimo goggled appreciatively at a woman who must have been three meters tall, locked in a passionate kiss with a man whose dangling equipment looked equal to the task. There were no fewer than three Len Bordas in the room. One of them had two heads.

  They followed the data beacon around a long curved corridor, threading their way through gossiping bystanders. Geronimo was humming one of his atonal Dregs of Nitro songs. Finally, they reached a nondescript door and opened it to find an even more nondescript room. A low queen bed, a nightstand. Mirrors.

  "What, you want this?" said the youth with a sneer.

  "I thought I'd let you pick," said Jara.

  "Oh," replied Geronimo, grinning goofily. "I get it. Well, lemme think for a minute...."

  Don't think too hard, Jara glowered silently. You might damage something.

  Geronimo flipped through a number of exotic environments Amazonian jungle, Arabian harem, something called "The Twelve Rings of Zarquatt"-and finally settled on a pleasure den whose every surface was coated with black leather. Jara let out a small noise of exasperation. This was exactly the same motif Geronimo had selected for their last two encounters. Jara could already tell that this afternoon's tryst would solve nothing. That knife was wedged much too deep for a neophyte like Geronimo to reach.

  The Natch look-alike was hopping on one foot, struggling to remove his pants. Jara thought about cutting her connection to the network right then and there, but decided to stay. She had paid good Vault credits for this room.

  Jara had figured that three weeks away from Natch would cool her passion. She was wrong.

  It's the eternal paradox of love, the drudge Kristella Krodor had written recently. When he's at arm's length he's too far, but when he's in your arms he's too near. Jara was ashamed to admit she read such tripe.

  But the idea of using the Sigh as a therapeutic tool hadn't come from Kristella Krodor. It had come from an unexpected source: Bonneth, companion to her fellow apprentice Merri.

  Jara had decided to open up to Merri a few nights after the demo at Andra Pradesh. As the fiefcorp's channel manager and resident truthteller, Merri spent hours every day in Natch's presence too, and sexual orientation was no barrier to the entrepreneur's charms. She would have to understand what Jara was going through, on some level. But Jara never got the chance to find out. Moments after Jara multied to her apartment, Merri rushed off to resolve some unexpected emergency with her beloved Creed Objectivv, leaving Jara and Bonneth alone.

  The analyst felt as if she barely knew Merri, much less her quiet companion. But suddenly Jara found everything spilling out in one long, torturous flood. The proctor who took advantage of her, the two decades of professional frustration, the gullible years as Lucas Sentinel's apprentice, the stabbing desire for Natch that would not go away.

  Bonneth listened intently from her well-padded chair. I think I know how you feel, she said. Wanting something you just can't have, not being able to let go. She raised her arms feebly and made a gesture at her brittle frame, twisted in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. Bonneth had Mai-Lo Syndrome, one of those rare instances of genetic engineering gone awry. The bones in her arms and legs were fragile as eggshells, beyond even the skill of bio/logics to repair.

  When you've got multi and SeeNaRee and powered exoskeletons, it's not such a handicap, continued Bonneth. But I'll admit ... sometimes I just have to know. Late at night, after I've repeated all those Dr. Plugenpatch statistics to myself a million times ... I just need to know what it's like, even for a couple of hours, and then I can go on again.

  So how do you do that? Jara asked.

  That's easy, said Bonneth, with an impish smile. The Sigh.

  Jara hardly knew where to start. She had taken plenty of practice laps around the shallow end of the Sigh when she was a teenager. But back then her options were limited by the boundaries of her parents' L-PRACG: no partners over eighteen, no extreme stuff. Now suddenly she was free to explore the three hundred thousand channels running on Sigh protocols-free to dive deep and explore the crevices and trenches, the scabrous surfaces, free to coax the hidden pearls from their shells. Most channels simply connected people of similar interests. There were other channels that specialized in every perversion humanity had dreamt up in the last hundred thousand years. Adventurous souls could dally with automated pleasure bots that had survived the long Darwinian slog through the competitive market of sexual programming. When the pleasure bots grew tiresome, there were channels that circumvented bodily mechanics altogether and delivered massive unadulterated doses of endorphins.

  But how to exorcise this obsession with Natch? It wasn't as easy as it sounded.

  The Sigh was not restrained by the same limits as the multi network, so it was simple enough to plaster someone else's face on your partner and be done with it. But while this subterfuge might suffice for the man living down the street or the faintly glimpsed woman on the tube, the illusion simply didn't work for an intimate acquaintance. Call it a failure of technology or psychology; virtual simulacra just could not fool the discerning human brain.

  Enter the Doppelganger channel.

  Jara found a series of intriguing promos featuring celebrity impostors of stars like Juan Nguyen and Jeannie Q. Christina, all with ridiculously mundane names and occupations. I'm Lester James, hoverbird repair technician, said an Angel Palmero look-alike. And I've been searching for you on Doppelganger.

  It was a simple system. Point the interface to the Data Sea profile of your lust object. Doppelganger proceeds to track down his unwitting twins spread throughout human space. Each twin is presented with an invitation to meet. Given a pool of sixty billion people to choose from, the odds were high that someone would accept the invitation. Frequently that someone was looking for a person just like you, which gave the arrangement a nice symmetry. The closer the match, the higher the fee.

  Jara had fired off a Vault credit authorization to Doppelganger, along with a video of Natch at his most beautiful and solipsistic. Two days later, Doppelganger had led her to Geronimo.

  The relationship worked very nicely for a week or so. Geronimo tried to fulfill Jara's fantasy of bedding her boss, and Jara tried to fulfill Geronimo's fantasy of bedding ... who? A neighbor, a co-worker, some woman who had caught his eye in a Beijing night club? Jara didn't know and didn't care. This was the Sigh, after all, where mutual fulfillment was the decorum and questions were bad form.

  Then that week turned into two and rounded the corner heading for three. Now, here she lay, thirty-seven minutes after her arrival in this leather SeeNaRee, and Geronimo was gone. Jara still had twenty minutes left on the account, and an additional two hours until the next fiefcorp meeting. She decided to loaf for a while.


  Jara hated to chastise Bonneth for bad advice, but it was becoming pretty clear that this form of therapy just wasn't working. There was something intensely sexual about Natch. Yet he kept that virility under such iron control that Jara could not even tap into it through fantasy. What would Natch be like if he vented his passions in the bedroom? What if there were no bio/logic fiefcorps, no Primo's ratings, no MultiReal to distract him? Easier to imagine a bird without wings or a fish that could not swim.

  The closer Jara got to possessing the fiefcorp master, the more he seemed to edge away. Achieving his lifetime goal of topping the Primo's bio/logic investment guide should have loosened him up a little, given him a sense of accomplishment. But instead, the entrepreneur was retreating farther and farther inside his shell.

  How long would his sanity last?

  It needed to last a while. Jara no longer had the consolation that this would all be over in eleven months when her apprenticeship expired. She had chosen to sign on to another apprenticeship, serving a brand-new company in a wholly untested market. Another few years wrestling with this peculiar crossbreed of loathing and lust.

  Meanwhile, Horvil was out there somewhere. Sweet, innocent Horvil, who had opened up his heart on the floor of the Surina Center for Historic Appreciation while a thousand Council troops marched through the courtyard. They had managed to avoid being confined alone ever since. Jara could honestly say she had never thought of Horvil in a romantic light, and had no idea what to do. Her feelings were as easy to decipher as cuneiform.

  Confused, emotionally knotted, exhausted, Jara finally logged off the Sigh and waited for the mediocrity of the real world to seep in again. There was a name for the haze of a mind switching between multi connections; why wasn't there a word for the postcoital letdown of logging off the Sigh?

  Jara sat up in bed and looked at her still-white walls. In the living room sat the pitiful arrangement of daisies she had blown an inappropriately large chunk of her fiefcorp stipend on. She arose, walked into the breakfast nook, and had the building brew her up some hot nitro.

  When did you lose yourself? the analyst asked her reflection in the window.

  Was it at Andra Pradesh, when Len Borda's troops were swooping all around her? Or further back, when she had threatened to quit the fiefcorp after Natch's little black code stunt? Maybe there wasn't a single moment. Maybe it was a gradual eroding of self, a twenty-year process that had started long before she ever heard of Natch or Horvil. Everything that had happened in her adult life felt like one attenuated chain reaction to that moment in the hive when her proctor had settled his hand on her thigh, a few centimeters higher than propriety dictated, and Jara had tried to convince herself that she liked it there.

  7

  The familiar sight of his tenement curving around a Shenandoah hilltop put a smile on Natch's face that not even black code could dim. Natch had never felt a sentimental attachment to any of the places he had called home; he remembered walking out of the hive for initiation with barely a backward glance. But he had never savored the unique flavor of returning to a place he had fought to defend either.

  The front doors swished open to greet him. Natch stepped into the atrium and nearly collided with Horvil.

  The engineer's chubby face instantly sparked into a grin. "You're back!" he cried, folding the fiefcorp master into a bear hug. Natch could feel a turgid programming bar pressed against his back. The distinct smell of peanut butter drifted through the air.

  "I'm back," agreed the entrepreneur.

  "For real this time, right?" The engineer poked him in the collarbone with one grubby finger. "Not just another five-minute stop-by in multi?"

  "For real."

  "About time," grumbled a voice from the back of the atrium. Horvil shuffled aside to reveal his cousin Benyamin, who was rising from one of the stiff-backed chairs that lined the building's front hall. "Your apartment won't let us in," he said, stretching his arms up in the air with fingertips clasped.

  "Well, that's not completely true," said Horvil with a frown. "Vigal, Jara, and me, we can all override the security just fine. But you never approved everyone else for emergency access."

  "So we've been stuck working out here," continued Ben.

  "At least the building management was nice about it," said Horvil. "They could've kicked us out. But they didn't. They even let us drag the workbench out here once or twice."

  "You can thank her for that." The young apprentice tilted his head slightly to the left, indicating another roomier chair where the channel manager, Merri, had taken up residence. Merri struggled to stand, suppressed a yawn, then switched on a stim program to suffuse her with some energy.

  Natch took in the blonde woman's disheveled dress and the backpack propped slantwise against the leg of an end table. Suddenly he realized that, unlike Benyamin, Merri was here in the flesh and probably hadn't been home since the demo at Andra Pradesh. "Why are you still here?" Natch asked incredulously. "Why didn't you go back home?"

  Merri shrugged with embarrassment. "I know how expensive it is to teleport to Luna," she said. "It's just not worth wasting the company's money. And I'm not up to one of those long shuttle rides right now."

  "Someone else would've put you up. Horvil's Aunt Berilla has a fancy estate in London. They must have a thousand spare bedrooms."

  "It's not a big deal, Natch. The local Creed Objectivv hostel works just fine."

  "But you've got a companion on Luna," Benyamin retorted. "Bonneth needs you, you said. She can barely get across the apartment by herself-"

  "Bonneth," said Merri with an air of tired finality, "will be fine." Natch sensed undercurrents of tension between the two fiefcorpers, but decided this was something he could deal with another time. He shook his head, stepped around the pleasantly befuddled Horvil, and strode down the hall to his apartment with three apprentices in tow.

  Jara seemed to have anticipated Natch's arrival before he even made it in the door. The tiny fiefcorp analyst was perched on the arm of Natch's sofa, contemplating an ornate holographic calendar floating in midair. "We need to talk scheduling, Natch," she announced without even looking up, as if continuing a conversation already in progress.

  The fiefcorp master paused a moment and let the comfortable trappings of home flood his senses: the windows showing bar charts of the bio/logic markets, the workbench in his office with a trapezoidal structure bobbing above it in MindSpace, the sprightly patch of daisies in the apartment's precise geometric center. A cup of tea on the kitchen counter gave mute testimony to Serr Vigal's presence. "Where's Vigal?" asked Natch.

  "Here I am," came the voice of the neural programmer as he wandered in from the balcony. Natch thought he spotted a few more gray hairs in his old guardian's goatee and an unusual amount of concern written on his wrinkled forehead. Serr Vigal surprised the both of them by taking Natch into a tight embrace.

  "I'm glad you're back," mumbled Vigal.

  "Me too," said Natch.

  The moment was brief. There would be plenty of time later for sentimentality; right now Natch had business to attend to. He stepped free of the neural programmer's arms and began his normal hectic pace around the living room. Benyamin and Horvil hustled to find seats. "Everybody here? Someone's missing. Where's Quell?"

  Merri settled into a quiet corner on the floor next to the balcony and sat with her legs crossed. "Quell went to get a bite to eat," she said. "He kept complaining about the food in your building, so we found him an Indian restaurant down the street. He should be back in a few minutes."

  "Where's he been sleeping?"

  The channel manager shrugged her shoulders. "I think he rented a room somewhere."

  "Fine," said Natch with a flip of his hand. "Okay, Jara. Scheduling. Go."

  "This was the day of our presentation at Andra Pradesh," said Jara, pointing to the holographic calendar. The square marked Tuesday, December 6 popped off the calendar like a kernel of corn on the flame. "And here's today." December
28 leapt up, causing the previous three weeks to cascade off the surface of the holograph. "The public hasn't heard a peep out of us in three weeks. No press releases, no timetables, no demos, nothing."

  "Natch's been a little busy," snorted Horvil, who had appropriated the chair-and-a-half for his ass and the matching ottoman for his feet.

  "Granted," said Jara. "But the public doesn't know that. Three weeks is an eternity in bio/logics. It's a good thing the Council pulled that little stunt yesterday, because people were wondering if he was still alive."

  "Don't even joke about that," muttered Vigal, balancing his cup of tea on one palm as he found a place on the couch between Ben and Jara.

  "Magan Kai Lee swoops down here with dartguns blazing, and you call that a little stunt?" said Horvil. "If Natch hadn't warned us to stay clear, we could've all been killed."

  Jara did not back down. "Come on, Horv," said the analyst. "The Council just wanted to scare him. They weren't planning on killing him."

  Ben let out a harrumph. "How do you know that?"

  "Because," replied the analyst as calmly as a proctor explaining arithmetic to a hive child. "Natch can't hand MultiReal over to the Council if he's dead, now can he?"

  Benyamin's mouth clamped shut. Silence enveloped the apartment.

  Jara continued. "Listen, Ben. We're talking about basic Data Sea networking principles. Len Borda can't just steal the MultiReal code from Natch. He needs core access, or Natch could just lock him out of the program whenever he felt like it. And core access on the Data Sea isn't something the Council can fake. They'd need the matching signatures tied up in Natch's OCHRE system. It's practically impossible to crack."

  Serr Vigal nodded sagely. "She's right," he said. "Even the Defense and Wellness Council can't circumvent Data Sea access controls."