Multireal (6 page)

Once aware of this undercurrent of libertarian sympathy, he began
to see signs of it everywhere he went. Natch found posts of support on
the Data Sea, speeches by L-PRACG activists, drudgic calls for embargoes against the central government. Suddenly he realized he had
underestimated the number of his supporters by several orders of magnitude. A minority, perhaps, and still skulking in the shadows, but
gaining strength every day.

And now the Council's raid on Natch's apartment building had
altered the dynamics of the situation altogether. He called up Sen Sivv
Sor's reportage on the window.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Nobody is worse at bungling public
relations than High Executive Len Borda.

In the three weeks since Natch's MultiReal demonstration at Andra
Pradesh, the Fefcorp master has disappeared from the public eye. This
morning, we found out why. Because Borda, in his supreme wisdom, has
already decided to renege on his assurances of safety, and to seize MultiReal from its rightful owners without provocation.

What else can we conclude from the dazzling display of stupidity executed by one of Borda's lieutenant executives, Magan Kai Lee, this
morning? You all saw it right here, dear readers. If not for an anonymous
tip-off to the drudge community early this morning, the Surina/Natch
MultiReal Fiefcorp might have already been dissolved by now. And its fiefcorp master might be rotting away in some orbital Council prison.

It's astounding the lengths some will go to in order to preserve the
vaunted status quo. Which is why-

Natch had read enough. He banished the potpourri of Data Sea ramblings from the window and let the redwoods show through once
more.

Yes, Natch's clever MindSpace tricks had enabled him to reverse
the tide of public opinion, if only for a day or two. Even the staunch
governmentalist Mah Lo Vertiginous was grudgingly admitting that
the Council had blundered today. Borda and Lee would not dare pull
another stunt like that anytime soon.

Natch caught his reflection in the window. So why are you still sitting on a tube train heading in the wrong direction? he asked himself. Why
didn't you get off at the last stop and make your way home?

He conjured a picture of the city of Shenandoah in his head. Home.
But when he saw those undulating streets and shifting buildings, all
he could think about was the mercenary precision of the black-robed
figures who had ambushed him there. He could still feel the pinpricks
of their black code darts and the icy rush of poisonous OCHREs suffusing his bloodstream. The void, the nothingness.

Natch stumbled upon an unexpected realization: he was afraid.

You find yourself capable of strange things when you run out of choices,
Margaret Surina had told him last month.

Now Natch understood what the bodhisattva meant. For three
weeks, he had been fleeing from the Council, catching the occasional
update from Horvil or Serr Vigal over ConfidentialWhisper, taking
quick glimpses at the evolving Possibilities program whenever he
found a rented MindSpace workbench he could trust. Nobody had
heard a syllable from Margaret in all that time. Nor had the Patel
Brothers stirred from their lair to stop Lucas Sentinel and Bolliwar
Tuban from thrashing them in the Primo's ratings.

And what about Brone? Natch blacked out the window and
displayed the message he had received the other day in small, precise
lettering.

Why is the vaunted master of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp running away? What does he think he will gain by fleeing from tube train to
tube train? Does he think his enemies are just going to up and disappear?

How long before he realizes he needs additional allies to complete the
MultiReal programming and bring the program to market? When will he
finally accept the helping hand that an old enemy has held out to him?
When will his need for funding, equipment, privacy, and security outweigh
the irrational hatred he carries around his neck?

There was no trace of a sender or signature. Natch supposed he
could use some arcane tools of the trade to track down the message's
origin, but of course there was only one person who could have sent it.

A snippet of dream floated through Natch's head: a bear, screams,
the bloody stump of an arm. Where was Brone? What was he doing?
Certainly after all that had happened during the Shortest Initiation,
after all the machinations Brone had gone through to put Natch in his
debt, he wasn't planning to just sit on the sidelines. After all, he was
the head of a major creed organization, the Thasselians, with vast
stockpiles of credits and half a million anonymous devotees at his disposal. Opportunities for mischief were plentiful.

It was a time of suspended animation, of delayed choices. And now
Natch's ruse against Magan Kai Lee had set things in motion once
again.

You've faced challenges before, Natch told himself. Brone, Captain Bolbund, the ROD coders, Figaro Fi, the Patels. What's different? What are you
so afraid of now?

It was the black code swimming through his veins. Somehow it
had aged him in a way that none of his adversaries had managed to do
before. He could practically feel it tinkering away inside of him,
deconstructing his innards, disassembling his mind. Every day, Natch
sensed that he was losing a small piece of this inner turf to the
encroaching void, to the winter, to the nothingness.

The nothingness was coming to claim him. And Natch knew that
all the battles he had fought before were merely the opening skirmishes of a much larger campaign against this nothingness. It was a
campaign he could not afford to lose.

4

Magan spent the next four hours on three different hoverbirds,
watching time and space drift by the window.

"Towards Perfection, Lieutenant Lee," chirped a voice from the
cockpit as Magan stepped aboard the last hoverbird. Obviously the
pilot had been too absorbed in the complex trigonometry of space flight
preparation to catch the news. "Anything I can get you before we lift
off? Commissary's got a nice batch of weedtea, straight from-"

Magan cut her off. "Nothing, Panja, thank you."

"How about-"

"To DWCR, please."

Panja quieted down. She had flown Magan to DWCR hundreds of
times in the past few years-only a small number of pilots had clearance to fly there-so she had learned to read his emotions well. Something must have gone terribly wrong.

Magan took a seat in the back row of the hoverbird and strapped
on his harness. The pilot conducted the ship's mechanical tests without
a word, then set them on their way. Magan watched the clouds
approach and fell into a light sleep until the ship alerted him that they
were making the final approach into DWCR.

To those in the know, DWCR was the Defense and Wellness
Council Root, Len Borda's center of operations-and those who could
not define the acronym weren't aware of its existence anyway. But even
most of those privileged enough to work at DWCR couldn't pinpoint
it on a map. The location was highly classified, and officers like Panja
had to withstand a battery of loyalty tests before they were admitted
to the inner circle.

Magan himself had spent several years stepping on a red multi tile
without knowing exactly where he was being projected. But he never minded such obfuscation, even when it served to block something in
his path. A system with a hidden solution remained a system with a
solution, after all; a welcome change from the centerless anarchy his
life had been before enlisting in the Council twenty-five years ago.
Magan knew that, with scrupulous planning, he could master any
system that confronted him. He knew that time and chance were the
only obstacles between him and the pinnacle of the Council hierarchy.
Eventually the secrets of DWCR would be his.

Nearly ten thousand Council employees were not so confident.
Magan saw them huddled in their offices week after week wasting
hours in useless conjecture. Some believed the Root sat in one of the
many unexplored crevices of Luna. Others favored the Pacific Islands
or the Antarctic or the uninhabitable sectors of Furtoid as more likely
candidates. But so far Len Borda's engineers had succeeded in keeping
the Root impervious to any known positioning or tracing program,
and prodigious sums of money were expended to ensure that the mystification would continue for years to come.

Nonetheless, Magan knew the secrecy could not last indefinitely.
Secrets had a gravity of their own that sucked in the curious and the
determined. Had the high executive planned for that contingency, or
was he relying on the secrecy to last forever? The bodhisattva of Creed
Bushido had the perfect aphorism to describe such closed-mindedness:
Short-term plans, long-term problems.

In actuality, DWCR was a disk-shaped platter in orbit at the outermost reach of Earth's gravitational pull, only a slight rocket thrust
away from either floating off into the aether or spiraling planetward to
a fiery, cataclysmic doom. Lieutenant Lee watched out the port window
now as the platter slid into view. A single observation tower jutted
from the bottom with priapic majesty, as if waiting for something to
impale.

Panja docked the hoverbird without a sound, and Magan stepped
through the airlock as soon as DWCR had given them the all-clear.

Generals and military planners filed curt nods with Magan as he
strode the Root's maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Without
proper clearance, he could wander these shifting corridors of gunmetal
gray for days. Someone had made an attempt to inject some color on
the walls, but the smattering of pretentious landscapes and portraits of
executives past did little to lighten the atmosphere.

Magan made his way to the observation tower and kept his ears
open for the hallway gossip. He heard rumors of military deployments,
complaints about research budgets, details of appropriations bills
before the Prime Committee ... but not a single comment about the
failed raid early this morning. Magan frowned. The only thing worse
than listening to officers chatter about the Council's failure was not
hearing them chatter about it at all. He sighed as he reached the central elevator and cleared his mind.

The elevator did not head upward. Instead it dropped, leading
Magan to a floor on the tip of the observation tower. Borda's private
chambers.

When he emerged from the elevator, the Council lieutenant found
himself standing on the deck of an ancient sloop-of-war. The ship
swayed tipsily in the waves, sending the occasional spittle of SeeNaRee
brine splashing on Magan's face. Still-smoking cannons on the deck
spoke of a recent battle against some enemy hovering just out of sight
in the fog.

Standing at the prow of the ship was High Executive Len Borda.

Borda listened to his lieutenant's version of events with rising ire, his
back to the mast and his nose pointed out to sea. "Bloody drudges," he
said in a rumbling basso that not even the waves could drown out. "If
I wanted their opinion, trust me, they'd know it."