Part 10 (1/2)
”Wait a minute,” said the a.n.a.lyst. ”I understand now. The Patel Brothers. They were trying to tel us something with that demo.”
Benyamin's mouth curled into a sal ow frown. ”Like what?”
”They're trying to tel us that there's another way,” Jara continued. ”A more egalitarian way. What if we give everyone, say, ten thousand choice cycles a month? Or fifty thousand? Whether you're a Lunar tyc.o.o.n on Feynman or just some L-PRACG bureaucrat in Beijingwhether you bought Possibilities 1.0 from Surina/Natch or SafeSh.o.r.es 1.0 from the Patels-you get the same number of alternate realities as everyone else. And you can't buy any more, under any circ.u.mstances.”
Ben wasn't mol ified in the slightest. ”So you're saying we should handicap our product so the Patels can compete with us?”
”I'm saying we should prevent MultiReal from turning into an endless arms race of who can stockpile the most choice cycles.” Jara stubbornly folded her arms across her chest. ”I suppose it works to Frederic and Petrucio's advantage. But that's not why we would do it.”
”Natch isn't going to like this at al ,” said Ben, walking around the a.n.a.lyst to confront her face to face. ”I don't like it. You're putting an artificial cap on a system that doesn't need one. That won't work. It never works.”
Jara shook her head. ”This isn't sociology cla.s.s, Ben. MultiReal is dangerous. Haven't you figured that out yet? We can't afford to make a reckless decision here. People's lives could be at stake.”
”Don't be so melodramatic,” interrupted Ben, throwing up his hands. ”I get the point already. But these things have a way of working themselves out.
They always do. The Lunar tyc.o.o.ns would waste al their choice cycles trying to one-up each other. They wouldn't care what goes on down here.”
Merri climbed to her feet and eyed the conflict between the two apprentices with unease.
Ben and Jara were standing toe to toe now, glaring at one another with a hostility that the Patels had only pantomimed this morning. The SeeNaRee noticed the discord and hurled a strong wind along the sh.o.r.eline, kicking up bits of sand and shel to nip at their ankles.
”This is just wrong,” said Benyamin, a contentious frown on his face. ”Crippling MultiReal won't help anyone. It'l only help Frederic and Petrucio drive us out of business. Once we're gone, the Patels wil own the program outright and start sel ing unlimited choice cycles anyway.”
”I don't think so,” replied Jara. ”You didn't see that presentation at the Kordez Tha.s.sel Complex. Frederic and Petrucio agree with me.”
”What if the Patels only want you to think they agree? How do you know Magan Kai Lee didn't put them up to this?”
Jara's brow furrowed. The very mention of that name was enough to spike her blood pressure and make her sweat. ”Why would he do that?”
Benyamin put a hand on her shoulder. ”Because once we bring our version of MultiReal down to their level, the Council can use the Patels' version to get to us-and we won't be able to stop them.”
Jara opened her mouth, nonplussed, but the pat response she was waiting for to leap to her rescue did not come. She was ashamed to admit that such a tactic had never even occurred to her. Everything always came back to the Council in the end, didn't it? ”I guess that's just a chance we'l have to take,” she said under her breath.
13.
January 2: the day the fiefcorp was scheduled to unveil the winners of the MultiReal exposition lottery. The day that twenty-three lucky citizens would be given an appointment to experience the wonders of multiple realities firsthand.
The morning dawned bl.u.s.tery and brutish, with a fresh a.s.sault of hail in Shenandoah, a barrage of rain in London-and news of another infoquake in central Asia.
The Defense and Wel ness Council managed to suppress the news for forty-eight hours.
But even Len Borda's agents couldn't keep such a scoop hidden from the drudges forever. By midmorning, details were splashed across the headlines of every gossipmonger on the Data Sea. This infoquake was not nearly as severe as the last one, which had left hundreds dead and thousands wounded from Earth to the orbital colonies. The computational blizzard was centered in Tibet, though flurries were observed as far away as Andra Pradesh and Vladivostok. The death tol hovered at a mere two dozenbut the details of their demise were almost gruesome enough to eclipse the MultiReal exposition lottery. Drudges pounded the Council with questions about the cause of the infoquakes, but al the Council flaks could do was utter bureaucratic euphemisms for we don't know.
Forty thousand drudges, channelers, and capitalmen wedged themselves into a sunny Sao Paulo soccer stadium that morning to witness the lottery drawing. It was the same venue Natch had rented for the exposition itself, and with its newly reupholstered seats and dizzying array of giant viewscreens, the stadium made quite a spectacle. Merri worked the crowd with the help of Robby Robby's merry band of channelers, salting the cognoscenti with a heavy coating of marketing buzzwords. By midday, chatter about the latest infoquake had died down to a whisper, and the drudges were ready for Natch.
But Natch was not there.
Jara couldn't believe the entrepreneur would put everyone through this c.r.a.p yet again. It had to be foul play, a clandestine strike by the Council, a mugging, black code. Then a fl.u.s.tered Serr Vigal rushed in at the last minute with news from Natch. He was on a tube train with Quel heading for Andra Pradesh and would not attend the drawing. A stunned Horvil spattered the freshly painted wal s of the stadium's locker room with a mouthful of ChaiQuoke.
Panic had yet to set in when the apprentices received another surprise guest. Robby Robby oozed into the locker room, leading by the hand the worldrenowned soccer star Wilson Refaris Ko. The man was rugged and handsome, with trol -sized hands and a chin the size of a graveyard shovel. ”So where do I pick 'em?” grinned Ko.
”Pick them?” said Jara, feeling like her head was ful of yarn. ”Pick what?”
Ko, confused, scratching his a.s.s: ”There's usual y a barrel with little plastic tags in it.”
Horvil laughed. ”You got a barrel that holds three bil ion plastic tags?”
”We've already got a program to pick the lottery winners,” explained Jara. ”Al you need to do is read the names. Right?” She looked to the other fiefcorpers for backup, but n.o.body else had any idea what Ko was supposed to do. Jara shrugged. ”Right. I'l go out there and introduce you, and you just read the names.”
”Oh.” The man was crestfal en.
Ko might not have had the keenest intel ect, but what he lacked in brainpower he made up for in star kinetics. His panther strut caused men and women of al s.e.xual orientations to drop their jaws, and his husky reed of a voice could mesmerize even the sourest drudge. Jara never knew for certain whether Natch had hired him directly or if his appearance was the work of Robby Robby, but it didn't real y matter. When Ko walked onto the field, there was not a murmur to be heard from the crowd.
The soccer player cleared his throat and prepared to recite the names fed to him by Horvil's algorithms. Jara could sense a bil ion necks arching forward in front of viewscreens across the world. ”And the winners of the Surina/Natch MultiReal lottery are ...”
A leukocyte specialist from Dr. Plugenpatch. A mother of four pledged to Creed Bus.h.i.+do.
An OrbiCo technician who spent most of his time jetting between the colonies of Al owel and Nova Ceti. A bio/logic programmer in Beijing ...
The names rol ed on. Jara breathed a sigh of relief, although she couldn't say why. You could tel precious little about someone from a name and job description; any one of those lottery winners could easily be on Len Borda's payrol . Or Khann Frejohr's, or Creed Tha.s.sel's, for that matter. But the names were out there now, and it was time to sit back and let the Data Sea journalists do their detective work.
His task completed, Wilson Refaris Ko cut his multi connection and vanished back to the Neverland of self-important celebrities. Merri took his place on the platform at the end of the field, smiling, her boldest Creed Objectivv pin riding high on her chest.
Ben tried to convince his cousin not to go out there, to wait until they had gotten Natch's explicit approval before announcing the exposition rules.
”You're real y upset about this, aren't you?” said Horvil.
The young apprentice shoved his hands in his pockets and gave a sal ow nod. ”I'm not upset because I don't agree with the decision,” he said. ”If Natch decides we should give MultiReal users limited choice cycles, that's fine. It's just Jara hasn't even talked to him about it. She made up her mind without consulting anybody.”
”She consulted Merri and Vigal. They both agree.”
”Do you?”
The engineer bobbed his head back and forth slowly like the pendulum of a fat grandfather clock. Did he believe that MultiReal should be released with limited or unlimited choice cycles? He didn't know. Usual y Horvil was content to wal ow in the numerology and let Natch make the policy decisions.
But like a black hole, MultiReal warped the very moral and ethical dimensions around it.
Horvil could feel the program's infinite density tugging at strings inside him that he had never realized he possessed. This program demanded that he abandon his neutrality and pick a side.
But not quite yet. ”I dunno if I agree or not,” Horvil said at length. ”I think I do. But I haven't real y given it enough thought.”
Ben was clearly disappointed. ”Wel , Natch's opinion is the only one that counts, unless Margaret decides to come down from that tower. I wish he'd answer his f.u.c.king Confidential Whisper requests.” The apprentice kicked an empty bottle on the locker room floor and watched it ricochet off the concrete wal . ”Come on, Horvil. You know what Natch would say. You know what he's going to say when he hears about this. He'l agree that the market should set the number of choice cycles.”
”Wel , think of it this way. These rules are just for the exposition. We stil have plenty of time to change our minds before we launch Possibilities on the Data Sea.”