Multireal (21 page)

The door opened. Natch, overwhelmed, let out a gasp.

An enormous observation deck with space for perhaps sixty or
seventy people. Sofas and divans spread languorously about the room.
Several original Topes in all their psychedelic glory; the armless and
legless torso that was the last remaining piece of the Venus de Milo
perched precariously on a display table. Walls and ceiling made completely from flexible glass, giving the impression that the room floated
in the clouds.

"Is he gone?" came a timorous voice from the other side of the
room. "Is it safe?"

Margaret Surina.

Natch replayed their last encounter in his mind. It had been a
month ago, shortly after the first infoquake and shortly before his runin with the black-robed assailants. He remembered the bodhisattva of
Creed Surina as a nondescript woman with raven-black hair and fierce blue eyes. A bio/logic scion struggling to maintain her grace under
pressure. But now-

Now Margaret, inventor of MultiReal and heir to the Surina fortune, huddled in a cavernous chair with a dart-rifle in her trembling
hands. The gray that had been making slow inroads on her hair had
become the dominant color. Her preternaturally large eyes loomed
even larger through black rings of sleeplessness that tested the limits
of OCHRE technology.

"Is who gone?" said Quell gently, threading his way across the
room toward the bodhisattva.

Margaret double-checked that her rifle was cocked and loaded.
"Gorda," came her hoarse reply.

The fiefcorp master exploded. He could barely restrain himself from
kicking a meticulously crafted vase that might have been ancient even
in the days of the Autonomous Revolt. "Is he gone?" shouted Natch. "Len
Borda's been gone for a fucking month, Margaret. If you would answer my
messages, you'd know that. While you've been sitting up here doing
nothing, we've been putting on demos and planning expositions and
trying to appease everyone who's expecting a fully functioning product
next week." He gestured wildly out the window at the somnambulant
clouds. Their indolence seemed like part of a conspiracy against him. "Of
course, it's not going to be a fully functioning product, is it? No. Because
I've been dodging the Defense and Wellness Council for the past four
weeks, and you've been up here, refusing to help us."

Quell reached Margaret's side and slowly untwined the bodhisattva's
fingers from the rifle. The gun slipped to the floor and made a muffled
thump on the Persian rug. "Are you okay?" he said in a low voice.

Margaret twitched her nose and blinked in confusion, as if she had
been unaware of the Islander's presence until that exact moment. "Is
it-is he-is everything okay?" she said, desperation mounting with
every syllable. "Why did you come back? Tell me everything's fine.
Please, Quell. Tell me he's okay."

The Islander clasped one of her hands between his gargantuan
paws. Natch had never imagined that Quell was storing such tenderness inside that bricklike exterior. Once again, the fiefcorp master
found himself wondering exactly what kind of relationship the
Islander and the bodhisattva had shared for all those years. "Everything's fine," said Quell. "Everything's okay."

"You're-you're sure?"

"Yes." A pause. "Margaret ... have Jayze and Suheil been up here?"

Margaret gave a hesitant nod. "Yes, they're-they're helping out.
Just for a bit, until things ... calm down."

Quell fired a murderous look out the window at the Indian sky, and
Natch was very glad he wasn't Jayze or Suheil Surina at that moment.

But Natch had enough to worry about without getting ensnared in
Surina family politics. A half-operational product, the high executive
on his back, renegade MultiReal code in his head. He could spare no
pity for this cowering shell of a woman. Natch marched across the
room and grabbed a straight-backed chair. Then he dragged it in front
of the bodhisattva and sat down. Quell shot him a look of disapproval,
but Natch would not be deterred. He stared intently into Margaret's
face. "I need some answers," he rasped.

Lucidity sparked in Margaret's face. "Natch," she replied evenly.
"You're still-Borda hasn't taken control of MultiReal, has he?"

"No, of course not."

"He's going to put pressure on you. You know that, Natch, right?"
Margaret's words were slow, methodical, as if she were struggling to
remember how to use them. "He'll do to you what he did to my father.
Or worse. Borda, he's on some kind of crusade against my family and
everything we've touched ... But Natch, you need to know this-he
can't take MultiReal away from you. He can't. I've made sure of that."

Natch grabbed hold of himself, realizing that he was dangerously
close to the point where rage overcomes reason. He switched on
Soothelt 121.5 and waited a few seconds for the mild sedative to buff over his rough nerve endings. "I'm not afraid of Len Borda," he said. "I
can handle him. But I need to know why there's MultiReal code in my
head, Margaret. I need to know what you did to me. "

"That's what I'm trying to tell you." Margaret's hands were waving
in the air in ever-widening circles. Quell watched those hands like a bird
guarding its chick, ready to lash out the instant she got too close to the
rifle on the floor. "MultiReal is becoming a part of you. You're not just
its owner anymore, Natch-you're the guardian and the keeper."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

The Islander clasped both of the bodhisattva's hands to his own.
"You're afraid of something, Margaret. What is it?"

Margaret collapsed in on herself, despondent. "The nothingness at
the center of the universe," she muttered. "The decisions I need to
make. I-I'm afraid to make them."

The entrepreneur shot up and began pacing in tight concentric circles of his own, around the chair he had dragged across the room. Quell
let go of her hands and made his way to the nearest window, where he
glared at the outside world with scarcely concealed contempt. Every
few seconds, he would turn back in Margaret's direction to make sure
she hadn't picked up the rifle again.

"Listen," said Natch to the bodhisattva. "Let me explain something to you. I can't have mystery code hiding in MultiReal. If the program's interacting with something in my head, I need to know that.
This is a scientific discipline, Margaret-we need to have the ground
rules. You can't expect my engineers to ignore all these questions."

"But you'll have answers. You'll have access to all the answers,
when you need them."

"What answers?"

Margaret's eyes were whirlpools spiraling down to an immeasurable depth. "Answers to help you make the crucial decisions."

Natch found a velvet couch nearby and folded himself into its welcoming embrace. Quell was right; this entire trip was a pointless exer cise. Perhaps Serr Vigal could sift through Margaret's gibberish, if
indeed there were any nuggets of sanity left to be panned from that
muddy psyche, but Natch could make no sense of it. He resolved to
simply collect her words and keep them handy for later analysis.

As for Quell, he seemed to have abandoned the mission of discovery he had undertaken the other day. His eyes were tinged with a
peculiar mixture of concern, compassion, and incandescent rage. He
retreated back to the bodhisattva's chair and sat on its arm. Margaret
immediately collapsed against him like a mannequin.

But the bodhisattva had not finished her rambling. There was a
struggle going on behind her eyes, a final wrenching effort at clarity.
"Listen to me, Natch," she said. "You still have options. Don't let them
tell you otherwise. The Council, your fiefcorp, anybody. MultiReal is
yours now, Natch.

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

"Natch, I picked you for a reason-because you'll resist Len Borda
to your dying breath. You will resist the winter and the void. Understand this-something my father was trying to tell me. 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. I know this. I know it."

There would be no more elucidation coming from Margaret Surina
that afternoon, for as she finished the last word she slipped into a sudden
fitful sleep. Quell cradled her in his arms, saying nothing. The fiefcorp
master could see that the Islander comprehended no more than he did.

Natch stood once more and walked to the closest window. Far
down below through the mist, he could see Andra Pradesh laid out
before him like a chaotic playground of the gods, but from that quarter
there were no answers forthcoming either.

15

The trouble began with a message in the early hours of the morningearly hours for Horvil, at least, who was still exhausted from yesterday's drudge onslaught and who even in the most lax of times would
cross multiple time zones and hotel it to justify a few extra hours of
sleep.

The engineer pulled his face from a cool crevice of the sofa and fluttered his eyelids to dispel the pixie dust. Bulky letters were hopping
up and down impatiently on their serifs before Horvil's face.

Horvil rolled onto his back, dropped his head into a net of interwoven fingers, and checked the signature. The message had come from
... Prosteev Serly?

As an engineer in a highly visible fiefcorp, Horvil had met just
about everyone in the Primo's top fifty. The entrepreneur Serly had
bought him a few drinks last week on the pretext of fostering good
relations among the competition. Never mind that Horvil no longer
was the competition since MultiReal had come along. It soon became
apparent that Serly was really after technical assistance with NiteFocus
51, which he had bought at auction when Natch liquidated the company's old programs. Horvil suspected that Natch wouldn't approve of
such generosity to a former competitor, especially with the exposition
looming so close. But free booze was free booze. Horvil and Serly spent
a few hours in a Turkish bar discussing iterative functions and
quantum dynamics and the conductive properties of the optic nerve.
Prosteev took lots of notes and, more importantly, poured lots of
drinks. The two had parted friends.

Horvil zapped off a ConfidentialWhisper. "How ya doing, Prosteev?"

Prosteev, panicked, teetering on the edge of violence: "What kind
of shit did you put in that NiteFocus code, Horv? What's Natch trying
to pull? I thought he was getting out of bio/logics, and now he does
this to me-"

"Hold it, hold it, hold it," interrupted the engineer. "Start from
the beginning. I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about massive failures with NiteFocus. I'm talking
about twelve thousand complaints in the past three hours, and more
every minute. Now I've got the Meme Cooperative breathing down my
neck, people demanding refunds, my analyst threatening to quit-"

Horvil calmed the man down the best he could and asked for temporary access to the MindSpace blueprints. He threw on a robe and
shuffled to his workbench. Crumbs from yesterday's sandwich made
lazy backflips off his sleeve. (Read the contract, he could hear his inner
Natch griping. You don't have to help Prosteev Serly. That sale was final the
instant those credits changed hands.)

Sifting through the soft blues and purples of the NiteFocus code was
like catching up with an old friend. Horvil remembered the nimble
swing of the programming bar that had created that parabola, the deft
touch that had closed those loopholes. He briefly relived the evening
when Natch had tested the program on his balcony and declared it unfit
for public consumption. Soon Horvil was back in hyperfocus as he sifted
through error reports and Plugenpatch specifications.

An hour and a half later, Horvil found the mistake: an improperly
defined variable in one of the program's isolated ghettos. He swept
through the logs and verified that the error was, in fact, his responsibility and not something tacked on later by Serly's engineers. It was a
trivial mistake from those frantic nights before the NiteFocus 48
launch. Under normal conditions, such a flaw might go unnoticed for
years without causing any trouble. Half the bio/logic programs on the
Data Sea had failings like this that would only crop up in the most bizarre situations. Not even Primo's and Dr. Plugenpatch could find
them all.