Part 21 (2/2)

”But we can track all those electrical pulses, right? We can reduce them to mathematical equations. Isn't that how multi works? OCHREs in the brainstem intercept these pulses and transmit them onto the multi network instead of into your own body.

”So what happens if you take these electrical commands from the brain and plot out the results? You get a simulation of what's going to happen. You can see if the swing of the bat is going to turn out the way you want.

”Now, let's go a step further. Once you have a mathematical model in place, what's to stop you from trying out different scenarios? If I had twitched my right arm like this instead of like that, what would have happened? What if I had gripped the bat a little harder, swung a little faster? You make thousands of tiny unconscious decisions like that every instant. Why not just loop the whole process in your mind and compute it over and over again with different variables until you find a result you're satisfied with? Keep swinging until you hit one out of the park.

”Then-and only then-you choose the reality you want to happen, the pre-determined reality. Your mind now has an optimized set of instructions to send into the nervous system. The brain outputs those electrical pulses to your body-what we call closing the choice cycle-and it happens.”

Horvil was making incoherent burbling sounds of delight. But Jara was not convinced. ”That's all well and good if you're just trying to hit an inanimate object,” she said, hands planted belligerently on her hips. ”But what if you've got an outfielder out there trying to catch it first? People aren't mathematical models. You can't just use algebra to predict what they're going to do. What then?”

Quell was unruffled. ”Ben,” he called out across the field. ”Go ahead. Try to catch it.” The young apprentice nodded, summoned a SeeNaRee baseball glove, and a.s.sumed the crouch of a seasoned right fielder in front of the ChaiQuoke target.

Thwak! The Islander knocked the first ball over Benyamin's shoulder, a perfect hit.

Thwak! The second ball flew inches past his face.

Thwak! Another hit.

The charade went on for another dozen swings, with Ben failing to catch the ball each time. Even seemingly easy pop flies slipped through his fingers and smacked unerringly into the wall. The irritation was beginning to show on the young apprentice's face when Quell raised his hand and signaled that the demonstration was through.

”That program has to be pretty good,” said Horvil, eyebrows aloft. ”Ben's no Angel Palmero, but he's caught a few fly b.a.l.l.s in his day.”

”It wouldn't have mattered,” replied Quell dismissively. ”Angel Palmero wouldn't have done any better.” He stood the Kyushu Clubfoot on its end like a mercenary displaying his weapon. ”MultiReal is a collaborative process.”

Horvil's cousin came trotting over from the outfield, clearly perturbed at his poor defensive performance. ”Wait a minute-I didn't collaborate with anything.”

”You don't think you did. But for every missed catch, there were dozens of alternative 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 your possible catches-dozens of choice cycles-until I found a result I liked.”

”But I don't remember any of that happening.”

”No. You wouldn't. Not without MultiReal.”

Benyamin and Jara sank down into the gra.s.s with Horvil, overcome by the dizzying spiral of probabilities and possibilities. Horvil wasn't doing much better. Questions were clambering to the forefront of the engineer's head, but no answers accompanied them. No bio/logic program could conceivably turn the concept of cause-and-effect on its head like that-and yet, somehow, MultiReal just did.

Horvil heard the echo of Margaret Surina's words, spoken three and a half days ago, an incomprehensible lifetime in the past: The everchanging flux of MultiReal will become reality. MultiReal will free us from the tyranny of cause and effect itself.

He thought of the crack team of security guards standing guard just outside, and the mult.i.tudes of armed troops patrolling the premises. It seemed like a pitifully small amount of protection. Who knew what MultiReal was really capable of? Who knew what lengths the Defense and Wellness Council would go to in order to possess it? Horvil tried to imagine working under this pressure every day: furtive looks over your shoulder, armed backup whenever you flipped on your workbench. He felt claustrophobic from working in Andra Pradesh for a single evening. Quell and Margaret Surina had been doing this for sixteen years.

Merri's tired voice echoed from the dugout. ”I think we've found our demonstration.” Jara whipped her head around hawklike towards the channel manager, thought for a moment, and then nodded with mute agreement.

Suddenly, Benyamin perked up. ”Wait a minute!” he cried. ”If we already have the demonstration we're going to use on Tuesday, then we don't have to worry about the a.s.sembly-line shop, do we?”

Quell shook his head, causing the young apprentice's demeanor to cloud over once again. ”It's a collaborative process, remember? The MultiReal engine Margaret and I put together won't work in front of a big crowd-at least not yet. We need a good predictive engine like Horvil's Probabilities ROD to sort through all the permutations.”

Ben s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably. ”A collaborative process running among hundreds of millions of people-that's gonna take a heck of a lot of computing power, isn't it?”

”Oh f.u.c.k,” moaned Jara, burying her head in her hands. ”Infoquakes.”

Rivers of fear coursed through Horvil's skull. He thought back to the disturbance at Margaret Surina's speech, those sickening few minutes of paralysis and vertigo. Computational vortexes, communication breakdowns.

The Islander's countenance turned predatory. ”That's exactly what Len Borda wants you to think,” he said.

”And what ... what if he's right?” said Merri quietly from her alcove in the dugout. The trembling had started up in her arms again, but Horvil wasn't sure if it was a lingering effect of the teleportation or a new surge of fear.

”Margaret Surina is not an imbecile. In all the time she worked on MultiReal, don't you think this problem occurred to her?” Quell's face had turned blood-red with rage, and Horvil could see his fists clenching on the bat until it vanished. ”People have been talking about computational resource limitations for years now, long before anybody ever heard of infoquakes. This is not new. Are there risks with MultiReal? Of course. But give us a few more years to optimize the code, and we can limit the risks. In a rational and responsible society, there's no reason why this program shouldn't see the light of day.”

A cold wind blew through the bleachers and made a whistling sound off the metal railings. Suddenly, his tirade over, the Islander seemed to have aged a dozen years. ”You think you see all the possibilities now?” said Quell. ”Think again. There are possibilities that will scare the living wits out of you. Possibilities you haven't even dreamed of.”

Robby Robby's grin began just below one ear and undertook an impossibly long journey down his chin to reach the other. Merri could find no evidence a single granule of stubble had ever blemished that slick face.

”You're looking particularly good this morning, Merri,” said the channeler, his voice lightly greased.

The fiefcorp apprentice held back a smirk. She didn't take Robby's Casanova act seriously; she had seen enough of the man's tactics to know it was just part of his sales patter. Robby Robby never walked down any path unless he was convinced a pile of credits awaited him at the end. Still, Merri wondered if her fiercely protective companion-her fiercely protective female companion-would regard his charade quite so casually. ”So we're here to discuss the market survey,” she said in a no-nonsense tone.

”The market survey, yes.” Robby bobbed his head, which Barb-urShop 125k had coifed with a perfect cube of hair. Behind him sat his entire troupe of two dozen channelers, fresh young faces either untouched by experience or polished smooth by it. All had adapted the same ridiculous cube-haired 'do as Robby. ”The folks we're contacting are confused, Merri. They've all heard of the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp-we've got huge amounts of name recognition. And of course, after that mess with the infoquake, who hasn't heard about MultiReal by now?” Robby's channelers gave sanctimonious nods of agreement up and down the conference table.

Merri smiled. ”So is there a problem?” she asked. Of course there was a problem.

”Well, when our pollsters started asking folks if they were interested in MultiReal, almost 95 percent said yes. Great numbers across the spectrum! But when we asked people whether they thought MultiReal was something they might actually buy ... What was that number again, Friz?”

”17.3 percent,” replied Frizitz Quo, a perky Asian channeler sitting to Robby's right.

The grin on Robby's face narrowed a few microns. ”17.3 percent interested in buying MultiReal. I don't need to tell ya, Merri-that's not an encouraging number! n.o.body knows what this MultiReal stuff is for.”

Merri gave a rueful sigh and placed her hands palm up on the table in a gesture of sincerity. During the past few months, she had learned that body language was crucial in the channeling business. ”This is a brand-new industry, Robby,” she said. ”The sky's the limit. We've barely even started counting the possibilities.” She thought back to Quell's demonstration yesterday and tried to use deductive reasoning to figure out more practical uses for MultiReal. But as usual, her mind came up blank. ”Baseball, for one.”

”Yes, baseball.” Robby nodded slowly in an unconvincing imitation of agreement. To a pathological yes-man like Robby, the only way to express a differing opinion was to agree less vehemently. ”So that leads us to your script. This baseball thing-is Natch going to be able to do that at the demonstration? Is it possible?”

”It is,” said Merri firmly. ”I've seen it.”

Robby scratched his head as he pored over the latest draft of Jara's speech, which he had projected onto a viewscreen at one end of the table. Even with the font size b.u.mped up to drudge-headline proportions, the entire script still fit easily within two screenlengths. Robby made a show of flipping through the presentation again, pretending to read it carefully when Merri knew he was really holding a ConfidentialWhisper conversation with his staff - and it was a heated conversation, if the worried grooves on the channelers' foreheads were any indication.

”You know, Merri, I've been working with Natch for a few years now,” said Robby. ”I know this guy pretty well. I've heard what he has to say about the Surinas and their creed babble, and it ain't pretty.”

Creed babble? Merri bristled at the slick channeler's characterization, and immediately began rallying a pa.s.sionate defense of creedism inside her head. Then she imagined how the Bodhisattva of Creed Objectivv would respond-we often calla thing babble that we cannot ourselves understand, he would say with a good-natured shrug-and she simmered down.

”The point is,” Robby was saying, ”our man Natch is cynical to the core. Are you sure he's okay with this?”

”I've given you access to a whole library of detailed a.n.a.lysis, Robby. You've got an entire history of the Surina name, a list of the Surina clan's accomplishments and inventions, and all those stellar Primo's ratings Natch has been acc.u.mulating over the past few years. Robby, this is going to be one of the biggest technological advances the world has ever seen, and Natch wants you with us on the ground floor! Trust me, he can definitely do everything in that script.” Merri paused to take a deep breath. She couldn't remember the last time she had been so agitated.

”I'm curious, though,” Robby mused with a sly look. ”If Natch is so committed to this Surina stuff, how come he didn't show up for the meeting today?” He gestured ever so slightly towards the empty chair at the opposite end of the table.

Merri had been wondering precisely the same thing, but she was not about to tell Robby that. She felt the keen temptation to lie, to slip free from the bonds of her Objectivv oath, if only just this once. Natch had some last-minute coding to finish up. He's doing an interview with Mah Lo Vertiginous right now. He's meeting with Margaret across the courtyard in the Surina residence. Who would be the wiser?

The depths of this game had suddenly become unfathomable to Merri. Even with company allies in a private meeting, messages were being broadcast, challenges made, gauntlets thrown down. What place did Absolute Truth have in this cesspool?

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