Multireal

by David Louis Edelman

  And then dashed back down the stairs in search of more adventure.

  Horvil had never had the time to just mess around with multiple realities before. When he was on deadline, every activation had a narrow and targeted purpose, to test this or that modification. Even when he wasn't on deadline, every activation was a calculated move to understand the product better. There was never any opportunity to gleefully splash in the program like a child in a wading pool. Has it really only been a month since I first laid eyes on this thing? he thought.

  After a few hours, Horvil began to feel pangs of hunger, which were never that far away to begin with. He was rounding Centurion Market Square when he spotted a row of street vendors selling exotic foods. Horvil walked up to one at random and found an appetizing enough plate of rice and lentils. The proprietress, a girl scarcely old enough to qualify for an L-PRACG vending license, scanned the engineer up and down with the eye of a trained haggler. Then Horvil had a sudden inspiration.

  Flash.

  "How much?" he asked the girl.

  "Thirty-two," she replied.

  Flash.

  "How much?" said Horvil.

  "Thirty-two."

  Flash.

  "How much?"

  "Thirty-two."

  The exchange was not a vocal one. Instead it felt like a mighty abacus of alternate realities suspended in time. Horvil's questions, phrased in an infinite number of different inflections and intonations, served as the x-axis; the girl's responses, straight from her own unwitting subconscious, became the y-axis. Absurd and improbable realities branched off in new directions, realities where Horvil said something else entirely or gave her a rude gesture or flapped his arms like a madman. It was all one vast grid that stretched to eternity in every direction until it encompassed every action and response possible.

  And Horvil was traversing that grid one node at a time, expending a small amount of willpower with each hop. Even in this state of null consciousness, the possibilities were sliding by as quickly as cards in a shuffled deck. Horvil could get a taste of each one as he passed, as if he were performing the same interaction over and over again; but at the same time, the memory of each alternate reality vanished almost as soon as Horvil passed it.

  Finally, the engineer found the junction he was looking for.

  Flash.

  "How much?" said Horvil, back in real time.

  "Thirty," replied the girl.

  The engineer stuttered something unintelligible, paid the girl an even forty credits, and grabbed the plate she offered him. He felt dizzy. Aside from the slight crease of confusion on her forehead, she seemed completely ignorant of what had just transpired.

  A conversation replayed itself in Horvil's head. Quell, standing on home plate of a SeeNaRee baseball diamond, explaining why Benyamin had such a hard time catching his pop flies. For every missed catch, there were dozens of alternate reality scenarios played out inside our minds before they ever actually "happened." The whole sequence looped over and over again-dozens of my possible swings mapped out against dozens of possible catches-dozens of choice cycles-until I found a result I liked.

  Ben, sullen, defiant: But I don't remember any of that happening.

  No. You wouldn't. Not without MultiReal.

  The girl was now giving Horvil a strange look, and the engineer realized he hadn't moved since their transaction was completed. Horvil made an exaggerated smile, shoveled down a few spoonfuls of the gloppy mixture, and hustled away.

  He should have realized this all along. If MultiReal worked on physical interactions-if it could cause an outfielder to live out that improbable reality where he dropped the ball every time-why wouldn't the same thing work on mental interactions? It made perfect sense. MultiReal trapped cognitive processes and applied computing logic to them before the body translated them into concrete action. And what was concrete action if not a cognitive process made flesh? Every word, every emotion, every breath you took was the product of a decision-and decisions could be altered.

  Certainly if you try the same transaction a thousand times, thought Horvil, you'll catch a time when the merchant sizes you up a different way and charges a lower price.

  He discarded the tepid plate of mush a few blocks away.

  Later, Horvil wondered if that was the precise moment when the experience of constant Possibilities turned into a nightmare.

  He continued to meander around London for hours, but the high was gone. In its place he felt the gambler's compulsion to ratchet things up further, to extend his lucky streak just One More Time. He found life unspooling behind a constant two-second mental buffer as he analyzed and reanalyzed the movements of those around him. It became a craving, a hunger: the desire to avoid stepping on that broken piece of pavement, to dodge insects like bullets, to find the sweet spot in every crowd where the wind's bite wasn't quite so sharp.

  Horvil finally staggered back to his apartment building many hours later and shut off Possibilities. His head felt like a weatherbeaten old shoe, and his muscles felt like they had been stretched on a rack. Zipping through all those choice cycles did indeed take its toll after a while. On the way up, Horvil purposefully stomped through the rainwater puddle at the bottom of the steps. The moisture seeping through his socks felt good.

  He stumbled into his apartment, flopped down onto the bed. He could barely move. Then he waved his hand at the nearest window and summoned the article he had been putting off reading all afternoon.

  IS IT LOVE OR INFATUATION?

  Our Foolproof Guide to Figuring Out How He Feels

  I I

  Fractal patterns pirouetted across the ceiling over Natch with schizophrenic logic, darting this way and then that, expanding and then contracting. The colors spanned the entire rainbow and ventured briefly outside the bounds of the visible spectrum.

  "Too deep," said a familiar voice. Quell? "Can't see a fucking thing."

  "Maybe you're just not used to looking at the mind of a genius."

  "Quiet, Horvil."

  Gradually Natch's senses reasserted themselves, and he began to comprehend his surroundings once more. This is my apartment. That's my ceiling. The cushion underneath me is my couch. And the thing in my hand is-is-Natch looked sideways to find an unfamiliar object creeping through the fingers of his clenched fist. It was something soft, something paper-thin and feather-light. He could feel his mind's engine turning over but not catching.

  A hand gently pressed his head back onto the couch. "You need to relax," said a voice he recognized as Serr Vigal's. "We're going to readjust the OCHRE probe and pull back the focus. Are you sure you don't want to be sedated for this?"

  "No," said the entrepreneur at once. "Absolutely not."

  "It's gonna feel weirrrrd," warned the engineer in a child's singsong voice.

  "Try living with black code in your veins for a month," growled Natch. The identity of the thing in his hand was dancing just beyond the tip of his tongue....

  Vigal emitted an exasperated sigh. "Please, Horvil, can we put the sarcastic remarks on hiatus for a few minutes? Quell's in enough of a hurry as it is."

  The Islander made some kind of phlegmy noise that might have been either an expression of amusement or one of dismissal. "Andra Pradesh'll still be standing in another few hours," he said. His face and bleached ponytail came into view directly over the fiefcorp master's head. He made some signal in the direction of the office. "Okay, Natch, hold on, you're about to feel a-"

  Natch finally realized that the thing dribbling through his fingers was a crushed daisy from the garden. Then everything blanked out.

  Time ceased to exist.

  The feeling wasn't much different from the mental caesura of multivoid. Natch's senses had not diminished, but he could find no order in them. A flurry of lights, a jumble of glottal sounds, a softness pressing against his back-but what did it all mean? Patterned noise. Raw electrical activity without context.

  Natch could not tell if he had lain there for two mi
nutes or two years when full consciousness snapped back with the suddenness of a cartridge being loaded into a gun.

  He sat up and took a swig from the water bottle on the table. Natch could feel a little bit of normalcy returning with every drop. He summoned a mental calendar and verified that he had indeed slid back into the normal groove of elapsing time. It was January 1, New Year's Day, and in forty-eight hours the fiefcorp would be announcing the winners of the MultiReal lottery. Five days after that was the exposition itself. He glanced at the ceiling, at the holographic fractal patterns that had been tormenting him, and realized he was looking at the standard OCHRE schematic of the human brain.

  Vigal, Horvil, and Quell occupied three corners of the room, looking solemn and exhausted. It didn't escape Natch's attention that the Shenandoah sun was at a much different place in the sky than it had been before the probe began.

  "Well?" asked Natch, brimming with impatience.

  "We didn't find your black code," said Horvil hesitantly. All traces of the engineer's levity had slipped away while Natch was off in the netherworld of the OCHRE probe. "But-"

  "But what?"

  Horvil and Vigal's eyes swung instantly toward each other as if attracted by magnetic force. Quell folded his arms across his chest in consternation and turned to face the wall. "We found MultiReal," said Vigal under his breath.

  "MultiReal? In my head?"

  "Yes. It was ... everywhere. All over your neural system."

  "Not the whole program," said Horvil quickly. "Just bits and pieces. But they're definitely bits and pieces of MultiReal. I think I saw one of those structures in Possibilities just the other day."

  "How do you know it's the same thing?" said Natch, delicately probing his skull with both hands as if it were a precious vase he might crack.

  "We took a few samples from your head and plunked 'em into MindSpace. Then we did a side-by-side comparison with some of the structures from Possibilities. An exact match."

  Natch could feel his hands trembling. "Show me."

  They all walked into Natch's office and stood next to the workbench, over which Possibilities floated in a translucent bubble. The program looked ridiculous crammed in such a small space. "There," said his old hivemate. "Look at that right there." He dipped the end of a bio/logic programming bar into MindSpace, causing a beam of light to sweep across the bubble. Masses of MultiReal code turned transparent as the beam hit them. The light stopped on a yellow-and-blackstriped module that looked like a mutant insect of some kind. A yellow jacket, maybe. "Now here's a copy of the same thing in your neural system...." With a flick of the wrist, Horvil switched the display to a small chunk of Natch's OCHRE schematic. The resemblance was unmistakable.

  The entrepreneur studied the two blocks of programming logic carefully. He switched back and forth several times. Horvil and Vigal had been correct; the chances of such a structure appearing in two disparate programs by accident were dangerously close to nil.

  "So what is it?" asked Natch.

  Vigal shrugged. "We're not entirely sure," he said. "It's a pretty obscure subroutine, buried quite a ways beneath the surface of the program. We can't seem to get inside. It's locked up somehow. I'm guessing this is just a library of logarithmic functions. I don't think it does anything important-Horvil just happened to recognize it, that's all."

  "But if Horvil recognized this subroutine, there might be hundreds more in there that he didn't."

  "I think the question we need to ask is how long that yellow jacket's been in your head," said a frustrated Horvil. "Was it there before those goons hit you with black code? Did it come from the black code darts? Or did it show up later?"

  Natch noticed that he hadn't heard a peep from the Islander since he had woken up. He turned his focus on Quell, wishing he had a function that could see through people as easily as code. The Islander had removed himself to the doorway, where he was staring at the yellow jacket with arms folded and eyebrows furrowed.

  Natch eyed him with sudden suspicion. "Is there anything you want to tell me?" he snarled.

  Quell emitted a gruff tssk and shook his head. "Like what?"

  "Were you behind that group in the black robes? Did you attack me in that alleyway and put MultiReal in my system?"

  The Islander burst into laughter. "Don't be ridiculous! Why would I go to all that trouble when I could plug you right here in your apartment? And why would I do something like that in the first place?"

  The fiefcorp master did not back down. "Margaret said the Patels sold out to the Defense and Wellness Council." He aimed one accusatory finger at the Islander. "Maybe you did too."

  Quell clenched his fists and lowered them to his sides. All traces of humor were swept aside by a red rage swirling in his eyes. "You think I'm working for Len Borda?" he growled. "Me working for Len Borda." The Islander flexed his biceps again and studied Natch as if trying to determine the best way to eviscerate him. Horvil and Vigal backed slowly to opposite sides of the room, nervous, unsure what to do.

  But the moment was brief. Quell soon bottled up his fury and stuck his hands in his pockets. "Do you want to know how my father died, Natch?" he said, his voice simmering down to a mumble. "The Council shot him. Len Borda's people shot him. The war of '34, skirmishes near Manila. I watched my father fall facedown in the sand with a pair of black code darts poking through his eyeball. Couldn't even-couldn't even get his connectible collar off before the Null Current took him." Quell let loose a few snorts, his thoughts directed inward. "I know you're under a lot of stress right now, Natch. But if you ever suggest I'm on the Council's payroll again, I'll crush your fucking windpipe."

  Natch lowered his chin to his chest, conceding the argument. He still knew much too little about the Islander for his comfort, but he felt confident now that Quell was not working for Borda. Besides, the Islander had had ample opportunity to plant Natch with black code, or even slit his throat.

  But if Quell hadn't put that yellow jacket inside him, then who had? Outside of the fiefcorp, the only ones who had access to MultiReal were Quell, Margaret Surina, and the Patels. Pierre Loget had briefly been involved with the project before Frederic and Petrucio, but Margaret hadn't made it clear whether he had even actually seen the code. Still, why would Loget ambush him in the street like that? Or Margaret, for that matter? The Patels had plenty of motive, but Petrucio had disclaimed any knowledge of a black code attack while under the Objectivv truth-telling oath. That left Frederic Patelthough Natch's gut told him that an ambush wasn't quite Frederic's style.

  "So what the fuck is going on?" said Natch, throwing his hands up at the ceiling.

  More uneasy silence.

  "All right," grunted the fiefcorp master after a few moments. "I'm not going to just sit here and let this MultiReal code run rampant. Start that OCHRE probe again. Get that fucking thing out of there."

  Quell shook his head. "Natch, that yellow jacket is everywhere. See?" He walked over to the workbench and stuck his hand in the MindSpace bubble. Natch noticed for the first time that Quell's fingers were adorned with his Islander programming rings, allowing him to manipulate the virtual blueprint without metal bars. He panned the schematic to a few key intersections where globules of code hung unobtrusively like parasites. "We could spend a year hunting those snippets down and still not find them all," said Quell. "And if we try to just yank everything out without taking precautions-serious precautions-it could be catastrophic."

  "Maybe and maybe not," said Natch, eyeing the black-and-yellow blob. "We need to crack that son of a bitch open."

  "I've tried," moaned Horvil. "Believe me."

  "Yeah, but did he try it?" Natch reached out, grabbed the Islander's wrist, and held his hand up in the air. The programming rings twinkled. "With these?"

  Horvil merely shrugged. He extended his open palm toward the workbench as if to say, Be my guest.

  The Islander eyed the bubble warily and removed himself from Natch's grasp. Then he plunged his hands into the bub
ble and began weaving a peculiar cat's cradle with the diffuse strands of data. His face flushed with concentration.

  Natch gritted his teeth and clutched the windowsill, expecting another blackout at any moment. He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Maybe you should ... sit down?" said Serr Vigal. Natch shook his head.

  He watched Quell's fingers with a vulture eye, trying to translate the Islander's finger phrases into the programming bar idioms he knew so intimately. Some of the moves looked familiar, but others were completely alien. Natch reminded himself that Sheldon Surina and the original bio/logic programmers had coded this way-though they had used a much smaller set of rings and a rudimentary form of MindSpace that hardly deserved the name. Surina had built the foundations of bio/logics using such primitive tools. Certainly, it seemed to Natch, the best way to break into code locked by the Surinas was to use the same methods they had used to seal it.

  The diagram panned out, swiveled, and changed colors many times. Yet despite Quell's best efforts, the mutant yellow jacket remained sealed.

  "Maybe we should try to find a different subroutine from MultiReal to crack into," offered Horvil, who had crept closer to the workbench to watch Quell's performance. "We might have better luck." No one answered.

  Natch could feel his mind revving up, blasting pistons at a phenomenal rate. Something was hovering just beyond his perception. An arcane destination, off the main road-something peculiar-

  "Quell," he snapped. "Give me those rings."

  The Islander stepped back. "My rings? What-"

  "Just do it."

  Quell looked to his fellow engineer, dumbfounded, but Horvil didn't have any better idea what Natch was up to. Finally Quell shrugged, slid the gold bands off one by one, and handed them to the fiefcorp master.