Multireal (15 page)

But such appearances could be deceptive. Each contingency the
program laid out was the product of Horvil's own probability engine,
the old ROD they had hastily tacked on to the program like a postscript. And Horvil found out the hard way that his probability engine
was not omniscient. He was making another preposterous leap over a
metal railing when his hand lost its grip and he found himself tumbling
head-first down a flight of stairs. Luckily the engineer was able to activate MultiReal again several times on the way down, and he came out
of the tumble unbruised. When he climbed back up the stairs to investigate, Horvil noticed that the railing was slick with rainwater and
almost completely covered in shadow. Of course, he thought. MultiReal
can only make calculations using the factors you give it. If you can't see that the
railing's wet, MultiReal won't factor it in. He thought back to his crazy
leap across the tube tracks a few minutes ago. What if the train had suddenly picked up speed after he jumped? What if there had been a wire
running across the gap that he hadn't been able to see? He shuddered.

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.

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 minutes 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."