Part 21 (1/2)
As the day ebbed away and night fell, Benyamin began to grow impatient. He kept sidling up to Horvil and slipping him urgent Con- fidentialWhispers about the time. ”I told the a.s.sembly-line manager I'd get this to her by midnight,” he said.
”What do you want me to do?” 'Whispered Horvil in return. ”It's just not done.”
”If the shop doesn't get it by midnight, they can't guarantee they'll finish by Tuesday.”
”And if we rush to get it to them by midnight, I can't guarantee it will work on Tuesday.” Benyamin quieted down.
Midnight pa.s.sed, but Quell and Horvil labored on. Ben began popping in and out of the room to make use of the multi facility down the hall.
Once the basic blueprint had been constructed and Probabilities sat loosely tethered to the MultiReal engine, another job awaited the fiefcorpers: security. Sending an a.s.sembly-line coding shop the full Possibilities program in all its manifold glory would be an invitation to disaster. Horvil wouldn't take such a risk with even an ordinary bio/logic program; there were too many thieves, cutthroat compet.i.tors and black coders who would love to get their hands on commercial source code. So Quell and Horvil spent the early morning hours fastidiously cordoning off enormous chunks of programming, locking out sensitive areas and encrypting the sections that would have to remain open.
By the time they finished, the program would look like any other large-scale project that pa.s.sed through an a.s.sembly-line floor. An economic modeling program, perhaps, or the basic subsystem for an internal organ. No one would be able to tell they were really working on Margaret Surina's famous MultiReal engine.
Quell turned out to be an ideal co-worker. He didn't clog up the grinding gears of Horvil's concentration with a lot of chatter, and what he did say was always concise and to the point. After a few hours, the two dropped nouns and verbs altogether and stuck to the lingua franca of mathematics. The engineer had to admit he was starting to like this Islander. And he could swear the feeling was mutual.
Horvil finally tossed aside the bio/logic programming bars a few minutes shy of six in the morning. They had worked through the night without a single break. He gazed at their handiwork, and then exchanged a silent glance with the Islander. The look was unambiguous. MultiReal isn't ready. It's not going to work. But now they were b.u.mping up against the unstretchable limitations of time, and Benyamin was positively apoplectic. The two engineers sighed and nodded as one; it would have to do. ”You ready to take the baton, Ben?” said Horvil, stretching his sore arms above his head.
Benyamin's raven-black hair was in complete disarray from the action of nervous fingers. ”I've been keeping the shop up-to-date on our progress,” he said. ”They're all ready to go. Just give me the word, and I'll get them started.”
”Do you think they can do all that barwork in time? That's a big mound of coding, and Natch'11 be onstage in less than forty-eight hours.”
”I don't know. I've never had to put them on such a tight deadline.”
The engineer's eyes narrowed. ”No, Ben, don't tell me you're taking it-there. You can't, are you insane?”
Benyamin cast his eyes to the floor and stuck his hands in his pockets, mirroring one of Horvil's standard poses. ”We don't have a choice anymore. I had a couple of a.s.sembly-line shops willing to take on the job last night, but now this is the only one. And I had to call in a few favors even to get them on board.”
Quell watched the cousins' conversation from the opposite corner of the room, where he had stretched out on the floor. ”What's going on?”
Horvil let out a tsk. ”He's going to bring MultiReal to my Aunt Berilla's shop-his mother's company.”
”One of her companies,” corrected Ben. ”One of her many companies.”
”They do good work, I'll give them that-but it's not like they actually have to compete against anybody. Creed Elan throws them all kinds of softball projects without even soliciting bids. Which isn't any real surprise because Berilla is like this with all the Elan bodhisattvas.” He held two chunky fingers together like Siamese twins attached at the hip.
”Don't you get it, Horvil?” Ben replied defensively. ”n.o.body else'll take on the project this late. We have to use them now.”
The Islander shook his head in confusion. ”So what's the problem?”
”The problem is that Aunt Berilla absolutely hates Natch with a pa.s.sion. Don't ask me why. She doesn't want anything to do with him. She doesn't want us to have anything to do with him. If she realizes this is Natch's coding job-if she thinks it'll help Natch in any way-she'll yank it right off the floor. No, even worse, she might actually sabotage the f.u.c.king thing.”
”She won't find out,” Ben insisted. ”Really, Horv, this is all under control.”
Horvil sighed. ”Let's hope so.”
They returned to the conference room to find Jara and Merri in the midst of a heated debate. Jara had been up all night weeding through marketing theories for a model to use in the presentation until, desperate, she had asked Merri for help. Since the moment she stepped off the teleportation platform, the channel manager had been slingshotting around the globe to sales meetings with Robby Robby. She hadn't even found the opportunity to change out of the horribly unfas.h.i.+onable gray robe TeleCo made its customers wear during the transfer process. Yet, she had readily agreed to help, a decision she now appeared to regret.
A pack of SeeNaRee hyenas studiously watched the back-and-forth from a safe distance in the brush.
”Tell her we need something simple,” said Jara, turning to Horvil as if looking for an ally.
Merri frowned. In a futile effort to stop the trembling, a common side effect of teleportation, she was gripping her thighs hard enough to draw blood. ”The Four Phases of Technological Evolution are simple. They're not-”
”Creed propaganda.”
”They're not creed propaganda. Just because they're part of Objective doctrine doesn't mean they're not universal. Everyone knows the Four Phases-it's a part of the culture now.”
”I've heard people talk about them at Creed Elan,” said Benyamin.
”You see? It's really very simple. Observation: humanity distinguishes itself from nature. Exploitation: humanity establishes its dominance over nature. Synergy: humanity learns to become one with nature. Transcendence: humanity surmounts the rules of nature altogether. Take the example of teleportation ...”
Jara threw her hands up in the air. ”Natch wants simple. Fifteen minutes or less. Petrucio Patel kept crowing about 'safe sh.o.r.es' in his promo. We've got to be excitement and adventure on the high seas. I'm sorry, Merri, but the Four Phases will just put everybody to sleep. We need a sales pitch, not a sermon.”
Quell, who had been standing quietly, now poked his sizeable nose between the two bickering apprentices. ”Maybe a demonstration would help,” he said. Merri looked up in shock at the giant Islander, apparently noticing him for the first time. ”I can't show you the latest version until it's back from the shop, but I can show you one of the prototypes Margaret and I put together.”
Merri and Jara looked at one another and nodded simultaneously.
”Good,” said Quell. ”Horvil, help me change the SeeNaRee. Can't do a thing with this miserable collar.”
The Islander whispered in his ear as Horvil cast his mind out to the Facility databases. A succession of three-dimensional pictures flashed in his head. He chose one, and the African veldt disappeared with a flash.
The air around the apprentices suddenly filled with ba.s.s-thumping music, the kind of xpression board monotony that instinctively caused teenaged girls' hips to gyrate. Then came the smell of freshly cut gra.s.s. The apprentices found themselves standing at the nexus of two inter locking diamonds in the dirt. A smattering of white hexagonal bags lay at the corners.
A baseball stadium.
”No, no, Horvil. I want a cla.s.sic field,” said Quell. Horvil nodded and switched to the more traditional playing field endorsed by the cla.s.sic leagues. Soon, the fiefcorpers were standing in a stadium set up like those the ancients had played: a single diamond, four bases, an enormous outfield. Without prompting, the engineer called up a catalog of baseball bats containing everything from laser-polished aluminum to synthetic ash. Horvil selected a squat Kyushu Clubfoot, summoned a cart of cla.s.sic league baseb.a.l.l.s, and then handed the equipment to Quell. ”Smoke and f.u.c.king mirrors,” muttered the Islander as he fumbled with the virtual bat, trying to get a grip on it. Not an easy task without a sense of touch, Horvil realized.
”See that target?” Quell pointed to a bull's eye painted on the outfield wall captioned with the words BETCHA A BOTTLE OF CHAIQUOKE YOU CAN'T HIT ME. Then he flexed a muscular set of pectorals, tossed a ball up in the air, and knocked it towards right field. The ball hurtled into the wall at the precise center of the target.
”So you can hit a baseball into a bull's eye,” sneered Jara. ”What does that have to do with multiple realities?”
The Islander said nothing. Instead, he reached into the cart of baseb.a.l.l.s, threw them into the air one by one, and smacked them towards the ChaiQuoke promo. Bang bang bang bang. All twenty-four baseb.a.l.l.s plunked the bull's eye in the same exact spot. Quell threw his ponytail over his shoulder and made a low purring noise of satisfaction.
Jara gaped at the collection of virtual b.a.l.l.s lying under the bull's eye. Words escaped her.
A light went on in Horvil's head. He trotted around the infield, his jaw swaying this way and that with excitement. ”Don't you get it, Jara? The whole thing's just mathematics. The swing of the bat, the grip, the angle you're holding it, all those neurochemical reactions in your brain-you can describe it all with math. Possibilities just lets you try out different variables and choose the outcome you want.”
Quell nodded. ”An oversimplification-but yes.”
Horvil flopped down onto the gra.s.s and stretched out, snow angel style. ”So that's why we modified those dendrite modules ...”
Ben paced slowly towards the ChaiQuoke advertis.e.m.e.nt and rubbed the paint, as if he expected to feel some kind of magnetic generator in the wall. Meanwhile, Merri retreated into the visitors' dugout and watched the proceedings with hollow eyes as she tried to get a handle on her teleportation-induced trembling.
”Let me get this straight,” said Jara, seating herself delicately on the gra.s.s next to Horvil. ”Multi Real-Possibill ties-creates alternate realities inside your head?”
Quell strode onto the pitcher's mound. His voice took on the tone of a drill instructor. ”Let's start from the beginning.
”Forget about MultiReal for a minute. What happens when you throw a ball in the air and swing a bat? The mind takes in sensory input-the sight of the ball, the weight of the bat, the feel of the wind-and processes it. You decide on a course of action. Then the brain sends instructions down the spinal cord into your muscles, right? Electrical pulses tell your body what to do. You swing the bat. It all happens in a fraction of a second.