Multireal

by David Louis Edelman

  I was foolish to have held on to it for so long, she had told him. I am not my father. I'm not strong enough to make these decisions. But you ...

  The world is new each day, every sunrise a spring and every sunset a winter. I know you'll understand this. You will stand alone in the end, and you will make the decisions that the world demands. The decisions I can't make.

  "Any sign of a dart, Papizon?" Magan asked the ungainly Council officer.

  Papizon scuttled to the desk and leaned over to scrutinize Margaret's pale face. He seemed to either not notice Quell's anguish or not understand it. "No," he replied. "Not that I can see." He might well have been studying bacteria under a microscope.

  "Dissolving dart?" one of the government officials chimed in.

  Papizon narrowed his eyes and sniffed gingerly in the air. "Usually leaves a faint trace of sulfur. Could be, but I don't smell anything. The forensic team can verify when they get here."

  "Everything locked down until then?" said Magan.

  Natch had read something once about a special polymer the Council used to keep forensic evidence in place. It was supposed to be only molecules thick and practically invisible, some kind of miracle coating that kept every hair and dust mote from drifting off. That would explain why nobody was protesting Quell's handling of the body. "All locked down," confirmed Papizon, eyeing the Islander with suspicion.

  Unsure what to do, the fiefcorp master took a seat next to the limbless Venus de Milo. Council officers fanned around the room with their noses to the ground, looking for evidence, but what they were hoping to find Natch didn't know. The Surina troops, meanwhile, had gathered near the window, where they were muttering to themselves.

  Quell's tears continued unabated for several minutes, but despite Papizon's obvious concern for the sanctity of the evidence, nobody made any move to pry him away. Natch watched the Islander with amazement. Ever since that first tour of the Surina compound several weeks ago, he had known that Margaret and Quell were more than just master and apprentice. But he had never expected a display like this.

  Magan Kai Lee clasped his hands behind his back and stepped to the window, where he confronted the enormity of Andra Pradesh laid out before him. From where he was sitting, Natch could see the lieutenant executive's face reflected in the glass. His expression was aggressively neutral, a study in forced calm.

  "Don't worry," he said quietly. "We'll find out who did this." It was unclear who he was speaking to.

  "Find out?" whispered Quell, raising his head slowly, dangerously. "We don't need to find anything out. We already know who murdered her." He gingerly laid the bodhisattva back down on the desk and got to his feet. Natch noticed that the shock baton had not left his grip. "Who had the most to gain by Margaret's death?" said Quell, voice steadily rising. "Len Borda. The man who'll stop at nothing to get his hands on MultiReal."

  Lieutenant Executive Lee raised an eyebrow but said nothing. The other government officials began to slowly back toward the Council troops and their dartguns. Someone quickly escorted the serving woman to the elevator and sent her on her way.

  "Don't give me that look," said Quell. He was addressing Natch, though Natch wasn't quite sure what look he was supposed to have given. "Do you really think Borda would hesitate to murder a Surina? Then you don't know your history." The Islander began swishing the bar back and forth, like a buccaneer testing the tensile strength of his blade. "Didn't you know? Len Borda killed Marcus Surina"-swish- "because Marcus refused to let the Council take control of teleportation." Swish swish. "You think a ruptured fuel tank blew up his shuttle? No." He came to a halt in front of Margaret's desk, brandishing the crackling baton before him with both hands. "That was Council sabotage. It was fucking Len Borda. And now ... and now ..."

  The Islander slipped into a pause as Magan turned from the window to face him. Officers on both sides of the room were tensing up, sliding fingers uneasily into the triggers of their guns. Electricity from the baton flared up to the glass ceiling like a bolt of lightning in reverse.

  It happened in an instant.

  One of the bureaucrats backed up and stumbled into a vase. The vase shattered. A finger tensed, a muscle twitched, a Council dart came whizzing across the room.

  Quell charged.

  Natch saw a blur of motion streak past him, knocking over the Venus de Milo in the process. The entrepreneur reached out instinctively to catch the hunk of stone before it hit the ground. He watched as the sculpture passed through his virtual hands and landed on the Persian rug with a thunk.

  The Islander was quick, but not quick enough. Magan Kai Lee dropped into a street fighter's crouch and lunged out of the way just as Quell came rushing in. The lieutenant executive did a clumsy roll on the ground and pulled himself up to his feet by the lip of an end table.

  A canopy of dart fire covered the room. Natch ducked to the floor, forgetting momentarily that he was here in multi and these darts could not hurt him. Council officers slid into textbook military formations, while Surina troops huddled behind furniture with guerrilla instinct.

  Quell and Magan Kai Lee were circling around each other in the center of the room, where the furniture was not so dense. By all rights, Magan should have been terrified. The Islander towered over him by more than half a meter. But Natch took one look at the cool detachment in Magan's face and the ferocious desperation in Quell's, and he knew this would not end well.

  The rest of the guards quickly reached a detente. A handful of troops from each side lay paralyzed and twitching on the ground with needles protruding from their torsos. But the rest stood stock-still, eyes riveted on the confrontation in progress. Papizon had one finger suspended in the air, as if gesturing to some invisible third combatant, while the unarmed bureaucrats had fled to the safety of the elevators. Natch was on the floor behind the downed (yet intact) statue.

  "Don't do it," said Magan. "It's not worth it."

  "Worth it to me," roared Quell. And then he was in motion once again.

  Darts streaked across the room from the Council officers' gun barrels, heading straight for the Islander's chest. Natch gaped in astonishment as Quell made an elegant pirouette and swatted the darts aside with two rapid swings of his truncheon. It looked as slick and effortless as a choreographed dance maneuver.

  MultiReal.

  For the second time in their brief acquaintance, Natch saw some distant relative of fear and uncertainty behind the Council executive's eyes. Magan scurried backward as fast as he could, tearing down pottery and knocking over chairs in an attempt to flee. Surina guards, meanwhile, started methodically taking out the Council troops, who were wasting their ammunition on the Islander. Poison needles littered the floor. One ricocheted off the Islander's club and passed straight through Natch's insubstantial forehead.

  "Quell!" cried Natch, not sure if he was trying to encourage the big man or dissuade him.

  The Islander pounced with a yell and struck Magan full in the chest with the baton. Sparks sparked through the air. The lieutenant went flying back against the window, where his head thumped against the glass. But Natch's cry must have penetrated the Islander's cloak of rage, because he had pulled the blow at the last possible instant.

  In spite of the blood trickling from his nose and the visible indenture in his chest, Magan Kai Lee clearly realized he should be dead right now. "Fool," he croaked between ragged breaths, "don't you realize I'm the only one standing between you and Borda?"

  The Islander hesitated. His eyes swiveled back and forth from Magan to the corpse of Margaret Surina, still lying on the desk where he had left it. He seemed to reach some decision. His shoulders quivered, then slackened. The shock baton slid from his fingers and hit the carpet.

  And just at that moment, the elevator doors opened and two dozen officers in white robes and yellow stars swept into the room. They quickly formed a perimeter and relieved the remaining Surina officers of their weapons. Natch caught a movement from the corner of his eye, and whippe
d his head around to see a pair of military hoverbirds levitating right outside the window. He could only guess what their cannons were loaded with, but they were aimed right at him.

  Magan Kai Lee slumped to the floor. He coughed, then spat blood. "Invest your forces in ultimate sacrifice," he said in the timbre of command, motioning toward Quell. "Make sure you've covered all reasonable supply requisitions." The lieutenant executive was obviously speaking in some kind of Defense and Wellness Council code, and he didn't appear to be in any mood for translations.

  Natch climbed shakily to his feet, trying his best to ignore all the concentrated pandemonium in the room. The remaining Surina guards were dragging their limp comrades one by one to the elevator under the Council's watchful eyes. The officer named Papizon, meanwhile, was staring at the remnants of the battle with horror. Natch supposed that the destruction of priceless art meant less to him than the despoiling of precious evidence. Not even high-tech polymers could insulate from this kind of havoc.

  Half a dozen Council officers wrestled the Islander to his knees, even though he was only offering token resistance. The MultiReal program had obviously sapped his strength to some degree, but more than that, he seemed to have lost the will to resist. One of the officers brutally wrenched the Islander's thin metal collar off his neck, leaving a shallow tributary of blood.

  "I don't care," shouted Quell. "I'm never wearing one of those fucking things again. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?"

  Magan Kai Lee simply shook his head. His breathing had already resumed something close to its normal rhythm, and the patch of blood on his chest was beginning to evanesce into the air. But this was one injury that would need more than OCHREs to heal. Magan gave Quell one last angry look and swiped an arm wildly toward the elevators. The Council officers dragged him away.

  Natch stood as straight as his trembling knees allowed. He looked around and realized that all of the friendly forces were now gone. "So what are you going to do with me?" he said.

  "You?" The question only seemed to irritate the lieutenant executive. "You are irrelevant. Go home."

  And then Natch consulted the messages that had been piling up in his mental inbox. The citation from the Meme Cooperative suspending his business license was there, and it had taken effect a scant four minutes ago. Also present was the court order demanding that Natch transfer MultiReal core access to Jara.

  Magan Kai Lee had delivered on his promises. The Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp was no longer under Natch's control.

  3

  VARIABLES I N FLUX

  18

  The World Economic Oversight Board sensed a disturbance in the marketplace.

  And so the powers that moved the financial levers of the world sent their agents to a secure location to make some decisions. Everyone with a stake in the process was represented: the Congress of L-PRACGs, the big businesses, the Defense and Wellness Council, the labor organizations, the Meme Cooperative, the administrators of the Data Sea, the Prime Committee, all the thousands of institutions running Vault protocols.

  It might have made for a cramped meeting had its participants been made of flesh and blood. But these were virtual entities, data agents stored as quark color changes on the Data Sea. One could find no purer representatives of organizational will, for strictly speaking these were not representatives at all but the things themselves, the essence as expressed in formulas and business logic.

  The administrator of the World Economic Oversight Board gaveled the meeting to order, after a fashion. Roll was taken. Preliminary exchanges of information were made, micro-negotiations to determine place and order.

  And then the administrator laid out the situation. A handful of unorthodox transactions had spiked the stock exchanges, causing ripples to flow far and wide across the economic spectrum, amplified in no small measure by sudden troop movements from the Islanders and the Defense and Wellness Council. VIP travel itineraries were fluctuating by the second. Information requests across the Data Sea were multiplying exponentially. Strange patterns abounded.

  There was a flurry of conversation from the assembled crowd. Newly spawned data agents dashed across the Sea to fetch follow-up information and make detailed queries against private data stores. More micro-negotiations.

  The administrator called for a status report. Like ants piling grain before their queen, agents of the world's financial institutions began depositing data points before the Oversight Board. Balance vacillations in key Vault accounts. Interest rates being charged by various lending institutions. The values of certain commodities in the global marketplace. Primo's ratings for a representative sample of bio/logic fiefcorps. The status of bellwether legislation wending through the various L-PRACGs. Each datum gave form and shape to the pile-a form that stretched through dimensions invisible to the human eye. Derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, probabilities and possibilities, vectors of analysis that stretched from the universe's putative beginning to its predicted end.

  The administrator contemplated the shape arrayed before the assembly. The number of patterns stored in the Oversight Board's catalog was in the trillions of trillions, but this particular pattern fell into the sparse category of unknowns.

  More information, commanded the administrator.

  A second wave of data began accumulating on the pile, refining its shape. The presence of certain buzzwords and warning signs on public financial boards. The heart rates and blood pressures of the Prime Committee's voting members. Rainfall reports from the Environmental Control Board. OrbiCo shipping schedules, hoverbird flight patterns, TubeCo ridership figures. Membership and cancellation numbers from the Jamm and the Sigh. The throughput of quantum channels between the orbital colonies. Len Borda's cholesterol level and platelet count. The reported whereabouts of the bodhisattvas of the major creeds.

  If the administrator knew anything about Margaret Surina, it knew her as a convergence point of data on the eternal sea of information. A confluence of trends both macro- and microeconomic.

  If the administrator knew anything about death, it knew that death was a transformation, a final resolution of variables that had heretofore been in flux.

  The general economic pattern might not have been comprehensible to the administrator, but certainly there were scattered fragments it could grasp. The sudden and unexpected death of a highly influential figure. Anger and distrust at governmental authority. Fear, agitation, change. The administrator took these fragments as it had been designed to do, analyzed them, cobbled them together like some mad virtual Frankenstein.

  And now, what to do about it?

  The administrator checked its core tables, the baseline values engraved in its memory by the Makers themselves. The goals were clear and succinct: preserve existing assets; encourage stasis; smooth the jagged edges of human activity into manageable probability curves.

  The administrator began to put together a plan. Hurricanes could be ameliorated and tides could be manipulated. But so could human behavior, given enough time and sufficient data points.

  Decision after decision flowed from the administrator to the full body of the Oversight Board, and each decision required the okay of the full board. Haggling erupted among the assembly as data agents darted from member to member, carrying proposals and counterproposals, modifications and amendments and official objections. Conflicting agendas laid themselves out like stones on a Go board, with the administrator holding the final token.

  A few billionths of a second later, the plan was ratified.

  Make it so, the administrator commanded.

  And so the agents of the World Economic Oversight Board streamed across the Data Sea, where things were not so simple. Billions of pro grams sailed out there, many with aims in direct contradiction to those of the World Economic Oversight Board.

  But the Board's agents were government troops on a sacrosanct mission. At every crossroads, priority credentials were presented and emergency overrides were given. In most cases, lesser progra
ms stood down and gave the Board's emissaries the right of way. But there were countless holdouts and instances of stubborn resistance. Maverick programs eager to waylay the centralized government. Rebels. Spies. Proxies of monomaniacal self-interest. And at every juncture, the Board's emissaries had to decide where to fight and where to make exception. Where to call reinforcements. Where to brutally stamp out dissent.

  The Board's edicts were quickly implemented across informational space. Banking programs that had been aggressively raising interest rates and trading shares were overridden by the implacable agents of the Vault. Transactions were actually reversed in a few isolated locations; other strategic crossroads were lined with transactional roadblocks to slow down the rate of exchange.

  All was proceeding according to the administrator's plans. And then something unexpected happened: delays.

  The trouble began on the Vault. They were only small delays at first, microscopic stutters in the fluid dialogue of economics-a picosecond of blank time where action did not meet with reaction. Soon there were phantom authorizations arising from nonexistent accounts and credits moving to places where logic dictated they could not go. In the deeper waters of the Data Sea outside of the Vault's shoals, such things could be dealt with. Messages could be recalled; contingency plans could be executed; holds could be placed. But the world of the Vault was a world without creative alternatives, a world where a must follow b without fail.

  Delays snowballed into an avalanche of inefficiency.

  Bio/logic systems that depended on a smoothly functioning financial engine queried the Vault for payment and received no response. The appointed digital guardians of hearts and lungs were suddenly stranded, unable to obtain authorizations for their services. Without payment, dependent subroutines could not be invoked; third-party functions would not accept commands. One by one, the strands on the network of the bio/logic system began to fray.