Multireal (73 page)

Tul Jabbor (served 107-117), a well-respected military man, was the
Prime Committee's first choice for the post of high executive. He
served as head of the Council from its founding in 107 until his assassination in 117. Since the Committee did a poor job of defining
boundaries in the Council's charter, Jabbor's aggressive, crusading style
ended up defining the organization more than anything else. Jabbor's
major accomplishments include the building of the Tul Jabbor Complex in Melbourne, the organization of the first central government
army, the successful breakup of OCHRE's stranglehold on nanotechnology, and the setting up of governmental oversight for Dr. Plugenpatch.

Toradicus (138-147) continued the expansion of central government power begun under the reign of Tul Jabbor. He was largely
responsible for persuading the L-PRACGs to accept Council and
Prime Committee oversight. Along with Prengal Surina, he also convinced the L-PRACGs to form an umbrella organization (the Congress) that could deal with the Prime Committee as an equal.
Toradicus's other major accomplishment was the Islander Tolerance
Act of 146, which legitimized the Islanders' withdrawal from technological society and established the principle of the Dogmatic
Opposition.

Par Padron (153-209) oversaw one of the world's major periods of
technological change. During Padron's term, multi technology made
the leap from theory to reality; practical gravity control allowed the
colonization of Luna and the building of orbital population centers;
and the bio/logics industry scaled to exorbitant new heights. Padron
became known as "the people's executive" because of his decisive
actions to limit the powers of the business community. The bio/logics
industry, seeking to head off prosecution by Padron, formed the Meme
Cooperative as a self-policing entity. Not satisfied, High Executive
Padron cemented legislation decreeing that the Congress of
L-PRACGs would henceforth always hold a one-member majority over
the industry-appointed representatives of the Prime Committee.
Unsurprisingly, Padron's actions led to great civil unrest and one of
recent history's most vehement rebellions.

Zetarysis (229-232) was notable mainly for the excesses of her
reign. Appointed by a deeply divided Prime Committee, she spent her
three and a half short years in office conducting a pogrom against the
diss and intimidating her enemies. It was not for nothing she was
known as "Zetarysis the Mad." Her assassination by a member of the
diss in 232 ended her tenure.

Len Borda (302-present) brought power back to the high executive's chair after a long series of lackluster officeholders. Given Borda's
squabbles with Marcus Surina over teleportation early in his career,
many felt that Borda would be a vehement antitechnologist. But after
Marcus Surina's death and the subsequent Economic Plunge of the
310s, Borda became a champion of the bio/logics industry in general,
and the fiefcorps in particular. His massive programming subsidies
have been credited by many for lifting the world out of the Economic
Plunge. Critics point to the stifling of civil liberties and dangerous
expansion of the Council's military presence under Borda's rule, as
well as the exponential increase in hostilities with the Islanders and
Pharisees.

A number of political entities exist that claim no fealty to the central
government and do not follow its edicts. Among these are the Luddite
government in the Pacific Islands, the numerous tribes and clans in the
Pharisee Territories, the uncounted numbers of the diss, and certain
orbital colonies and remote outposts beyond the reach of the Council's
military forces.

Still, the Committee and the L-PRACGs do treat with these outside governments fairly regularly (see Dogmatic Oppositions and the
Diss L-PRACG movement).

The Sigh is the colloquial name for a group of autonomous networks
devoted to sexual pleasure. Its usage rate among connectible citizens is
paralleled only by the multi network.

The impact on society of such a system has been enormous. Sexually transmitted disease has become a thing of the past (though
OCHREs and bio/logic programming had largely eliminated those
threats anyway). Unplanned pregnancy is almost unheard of, and abortion has become exceedingly rare.

While the channels on the Sigh all rely on a common set of protocols and guidelines to function, each channel is a private and independent entity. Quality and user experience vary widely from channel
to channel, and competition for innovative features rivals the competition among the bio/logic fiefcorps.

In theory, the Sigh works the same way as the multi network. The user
remains in a stationary location while sensations are broadcast directly
into the mind via bio/logic neural manipulation.

In practice, however, the two networks work much differently. The
Sigh is an entirely virtual environment that does not intersect with
"real" space at all. Therefore its users are not subject to the strict rules
of physics and mechanics that control the multi network. Users can
project any type of body on the Sigh they desire, and rules of interaction are as varied as the imaginations (and Vault accounts) of its users.

Because the engineers behind the Sigh compete with one another
and are not prone to sharing trade programming secrets, virtual sex is
not nearly as "seamless" an experience as projecting onto the multi network. It's a rare channel that can claim complete verisimilitude in the
act of sex.

Many, of course, see the separation between the real and virtual
experiences to be the Sigh's greatest asset. Billions of users are content
to trade realism for the benefits that only a virtual environment can
provide. The uncomfortable aspects of sexual intercourse can be safely
avoided in a world entirely governed by computational rules. The existence of a virtual environment for sensuality has also allowed certain
relationships to blossom that might not otherwise have been possible,
because of the constraints of nature, distance, or physiology.

So enamored are some of the Sigh's users of their virtual playground that hundreds of millions of couples choose to never have physical intercourse in the "real" world at all. Since sex is no longer a prerequisite for procreation, many couples decide to keep their love lives
strictly online.

Any environment used by billions of customers is bound to produce a
wide array of legal, technological, and psychological challenges to
society. The Sigh is no exception. Some examples follow.

Law. Long-held definitions of terms such as rape and harassment
have undergone significant revision as a result of the Sigh. Is it possible
for rape to occur in a virtual environment where the victim cannot be
physically harmed and can log off the network at any point? Most
L-PRACG courts say yes, but some claim no. Neither the Prime Committee nor the Congress of L-PRACGs has passed any definitive legislation on the issue.

Companionship. Because of the highly impersonal experience that certain channels on the Sigh provide, some users consider virtual sex to
be closer to masturbation than intercourse. As a result, in many
modern relationships it is not considered a violation of monogamy
vows to have virtual sex.

Gender roles. The Sigh has brought the concept of alternative sexuality to new levels. In a world bounded only by the imagination, some
choose to be neither male nor female, but some mixture or blend
between the two. The artist Pullix Homer recently caused a stir by creating new and fanciful Sigh genders that interact in strange and sometimes startling ways.

Pleasure. Some scholars have decided that human sexuality is an
unneeded intermediary step in the goal of achieving pleasure and have
abandoned physical interaction altogether. Instead they have founded
a new wave of bodiless "endorphin blast" channels, which many see as
a future battleground between governmentalists and libertarians.

When the Sigh first moved from the laboratory into wide public usage
(around the 280s YOR), many pundits predicted that virtual sex
would be devastating to society. They imagined a world of users constantly plugging in to the network for a sensual fix, to the detriment
of work, law, and creed.

Although the Sigh has created its share of addicts, it is apparent
that the fears of the doomsayers never materialized. The economics of
the Sigh prohibit users from spending too much time logged in; those
for whom economics is not an issue often find moderation through
strict creed and L-PRACG rules that strongly penalize addiction.

However, on the other end of the spectrum were those who
declared the Sigh would bring about an end to social ills such as prostitution, sexual slavery, and rape. Unfortunately, these utopian predictions have not proven accurate either. While the Sigh might provide some would-be sexual predators with a place to vent their behaviors, it
has undoubtedly inspired others in the real world to new heights of
deviancy.

In the waning days of Earth's fossil fuels, many predicted that the lack
of combustible fuel would cripple the world's transportation systems
and bankrupt the world's economies. The truth of that prediction
would never be tested, however, as the Autonomous Revolt occurred at
roughly the same time as the last of the big oil wells ran dry.

Human transportation was not nearly as much of a challenge after
the Revolt as the transportation of cargo. The civilizations of antiquity
relied on intricate shipping, trucking, and airborne networks to keep
goods and services moving. Without fossil fuels, these networks
proved impossible to reconstruct.

The Reawakening (and Prengal Surina's universal law of physics)
brought with it nearly inexhaustible sources of clean, renewable
energy. This in turn gave rise to a number of transportation systems
that greatly expanded humanity's options of getting from place to
place.

For the greater part of the Reawakening, the tube has been the dominant
form of Terran transportation. Its tracks are ubiquitous throughout the
civilized world, allowing travel to almost any spot on Earth at a fair
price. In many cities, local tube trains cover almost as much ground as the ancient asphalt roads once did. Longer express routes run underground in dedicated tunnels that allow for faster speeds.

The tube's success is mostly the product of two technological
advances: the development of so-called unbreakable steel, which allows
for unobtrusive tracks that are extremely cheap to install and maintain;
and the ability to control inertia, thereby enabling rapid starts and
stops.

For many years, TubeCo was the darling of the financial world. Its
influence was so pervasive in government that the company was given
a seat on the Prime Committee itself.

Since the advent of affordable multi technology, however, TubeCo's
fortunes have been on the wane. Local tube routes still have heavy ridership, but most fail to see the necessity of traveling long distances
when they can multi instead. Expansion to Luna and Mars has not lifted
the company's fortunes either, due to poor offworld planning and the
exorbitant cost of shipping. (The ineptitude of the Martian tube system
has even given rise to the popular phrase "as slow as a Martian train.")

The recent stripping of TubeCo's seat on the Prime Committee has
lessened the company's prospects even further and led to chronic labor
disputes. Many predict an imminent collapse.

Air travel has long been a staple of modern society, and the class of vehicles known as hoverbirds provides this service. Private hoverbird fleets
run through and between all the major cities on Earth, Luna, and Mars.
Specially outfitted vehicles make runs up to the orbital colonies as well.

Personal air travel has never really caught on among the masses.
Given the fact that the tube is cheaper, safer, and almost as quick, hoverbirds have long had a reputation as a vehicle for the business class.
Private ownership of hoverbirds is considered an extravagance that few
but the wealthy would need or afford.

Hoverbirds do have an important advantage over the tube, however, in that they're not constrained to traveling where the tracks are.
The typical hoverbird both takes off and lands vertically, allowing
direct transport to all but the most crowded and confined locations. So
businesses have relegated many of their shipping and transport needs
to the hoverbird sector.

The Defense and Wellness Council has also made a heavy investment in hoverbirds, for obvious reasons.

Faced with limited resources, the civil planners in the early years of the
Reawakening struck on a pragmatic solution to their transportation
issues. They would use the ancient sewers and data cable pipes to move
cargo from place to place. Early underground transfer systems were
rudimentary, often dependent on wind power, water power, and even
manual labor.

But as technology progressed, so did the global underground
transfer system. Heavy infrastructure investments during the time of
Par Padron (late 100s YOR) brought the underground transfer system
to the entire globe, where it has become one of the central government's strongest success stories.

In modern times, underground transfer has become a nearly seamless method of shuttling goods from place to place. The system is generally only used for local cargo traffic, given that there are much faster
methods for transporting goods over large distances.

Interplanetary shipping has proven consistently resistant to economization, despite the best efforts of generations of entrepreneurs. As a
result, the quasi-governmental agency OrbiCo has been given a virtual monopoly on transporting goods through space. (Transport of personnel remains a viable-though not wildly profitable-business, and
OrbiCo competes against a number of smaller rivals in that market.)
The agency is heavily subsidized by the Prime Committee and has
never come close to turning a profit since its inception in 315.