Part 36 (1/2)

The Tha.s.selian giggled nervously. ”I don't real y know. You should have let Brone fix you up. I've never done this before.”

Natch mumbled a curse at the ceiling and shut his mouth.

At least he could final y see the code that had been tormenting him for these past weeks.

It looked like a mutated treble clef, dappled with splotches of orange and purple. Natch had thought it would be a relief to put a definitive shape to his pain. Instead, the very ordinariness of the subroutine increased his depression.

After another hour, Natch started to grow suspicious. There was neither method nor madness to Loget's tinkering as far as he could see. Instead the man was fumbling around like a hive child given coursework beyond his grade level.

Loget would stir blocks of code aimlessly with his bio/logic programming bars for ten minutes at a stretch without making a single connection. Natch knew that every fiefcorper had a unique methodology-three programmers, five programming styles, as Primo's liked to say-but this was ridiculous.

”You're delaying,” barked the entrepreneur.

”No, I'm not. I swear I'm not,” said Loget. ”But-”

”But what?”

”You've got MultiReal code in your head, Natch. How did that get there?” The man seemed apprehensive, unsure, maybe a little awestruck. Natch didn't answer.

Loget noodled around for another hour (covering avant-garde sculpture and the lesser-known dramas of Juan Nguyen in the process) before he final y admitted that he would need to consult with Brone. Natch let him go.

This charade continued for two days. Brone stayed on the periphery of the programming floor the whole second day, and every time Natch looked in his direction he saw nothing but puzzlement on the bodhisattva's face. Natch couldn't figure out what was going on. Was Loget unwil ing or incapable of accomplis.h.i.+ng the task? Was the renegade MultiReal code in his head complicating matters? Or was this al just a masquerade to cover something else?

Meanwhile, progress on MultiReal slowed to a crawl as Natch's pains and blackout episodes grew in severity. An epic rage had been sputtering in his gut for weeks; now he could feel it picking up strength and roaring to new heights.

Frustrated, Natch cut off access to the program early the second night and stormed to his room. Sleep seduced him.

He was awakened in the middle of the night by Margaret Surina.

The bodhisattva made no noise that might explain her presence. In fact, she seemed to be at the center of an inexplicable absence of noise, a lacuna in the world, as if the universe ceased to exist at the bottom of her toes and miraculously resubstantiated at the frayed ends of her hair.

You're dead, Natch told her. Somehow he knew that the apparition would understand him even if he didn't use his vocal cords.

But the bodhisattva did not answer. She merely stood in the center of the room and stared at Natch. She looked as she had before al the trouble started, when MultiReal was but a pseudonymous project bobbing bal oonlike in the distance. Her black hair was flecked with gray; her fingers were long and precise; her eyes were ghost luminous. Her feet, he noticed, did not quite touch the ground.

What do you want? insisted the entrepreneur. What are you doing here?

No response.

Natch clawed at his scalp through his sandy hair. Was the Council right about him? He was sitting in bed talking to a dead woman, and he couldn't even get the dead woman to talk back. Madness. In a panic, Natch lobbed a pil ow at the apparition; it pa.s.sed straight through her torso and landed on the floor with a feathery fwump. The bodhisattva of Creed Surina did not react.

He was about to tear out of the room when Margaret began to speak. The voice was faint, nearly inaudible, and it did not emanate from her lips so much as it floated down from the ceiling.

You are the guardian and the keeper of MultiReal, Natch. Remember that. The guardian and the keeper.

And then she was gone.

Natch pondered the bodhisattva's words for a moment, accompanied by the pianissimo sounds of a decaying hotel. Squeaking floorboards, archaic climate-control machinery. Bats somewhere in the courtyard.

The guardian and the keeper. Margaret had used that phrase on top of the Revelation Spire, the last time Natch saw her alive. What did it mean? He thought of the original order of the Keepers, vilified by history, who had let the reins of the Autonomous Minds slip through their fingers. The resulting stampede had caused a global apocalypse. Was this a warning that similar things awaited if he let go of MultiReal? And why should he listen to the warning of a phantom anyway?

Enough. Enough with riddles. Enough with lies and manipulation.

Natch threw himself out of bed and grabbed a dressing gown from the hook on the door.

The three paral el bars of the Creed Tha.s.sel insignia saluted him in gold thread from the breast pocket. He picked up the satchel of bio/logic programming bars Brone had lent him, bolted through the hal , and took the stairs down to the atrium three at a time.

He could feel the tiny pinp.r.i.c.k in the back of his thigh ache as he stood before a bio/logic workbench and flipped on Minds.p.a.ce. The castle zoomed out of the void until it fil ed the bubble.

Now that Margaret was gone and Quel had been taken away, who could he trust with MultiReal? Jara would trade it to the Council for the peace of mind, and Horvil would blindly fol ow her. Khann Frejohr would use it to further his narrow political agenda. Petrucio and Frederic Patel would sel it to the highest bidder without a second thought. The Council would use it as a weapon of domination and submission. And Brone? Brone would hand it out to everyone in the universe to satisfy his bizarre notions of selfishness.

But MultiReal was not some commodity to be rationed out, and n.o.body would bul y him into giving it away. Natch could see the route he must take. The bends and curves ahead were stil murky, unclear; even the ultimate destination remained hazy and indistinct. Stil , he would not submit to someone else's path for MultiReal, whether that path was Khann Frejohr's, Magan Kai Lee's, or Brone's.

Or Margaret's, for that matter. He would not give up.

It took Natch almost two hours to weave through al the roadblocks Horvil had put in his path. But he could afford no more delays, no more sidetracks.

Every hour that Jara had administrative control of MultiReal was an hour when Natch was vulnerable. Sooner or later, the Defense and Wel ness Council would realize that Natch had complied with the Meme Cooperative's order and given Jara core access after al . As soon as that happened, it was only a matter of time before they coerced the program out of her hands-and then he real y would be irrelevant, just as Magan Kai Lee had said.

Natch found the selectors in the program that Quel had described on the soccer field in Harper. Horvil's already demonstrated how easy it is to select the options, he had said. The hard part is deciding which ones to choose. But there was no more need for ambiguity, because Natch had made his selection. No more sudden cutoffs or artificial limitations.

He made the switch. Unlimited choice cycles for al .

There was stil one more step he needed to take, however. He would not get caught in an endless loop of reprisal with Jara, her erecting barriers one day, him disabling them the next. He would not be forced to find detours around Horvil's roadblocks. Natch leaned over the workbench and cast his mind out to the Data Sea. There were a tril ion caches of encrypted data out there, a tril ion places to hide programming code among al the connectible quarks in the world. Natch picked a suitable cove almost at random. And then, trembling al the while, he proceeded to transfer the MultiReal databases to the new hidden location, petabyte by petabyte.

Jara had tried to hide the program from Natch, but Margaret had a.s.sured him it could not be done. MultiReal is becoming apart of you, she had said.

And it was true: Natch could feel its presence now whenever he closed his eyes. He could reach out and interface with the program even outside of Minds.p.a.ce. He could find MultiReal no matter where it resided on the Data Sea.

But Jara couldn't.

The first rays of the dawning sun crept through the windows. Somewhere in the kitchen, machinery began to whir. Natch, fiefcorp master, entrepreneur, outcast, stood in the atrium, bloated with possibilities. He was the guardian and the keeper of MultiReal. And thanks to the ghost of Margaret Surina, he was now the only person in the universe who could access it.

”I can't stay here,” said Natch.

Brone regarded the entrepreneur behind a cold mask of wariness and resignation.

Something had changed in that prematurely aged face over the past few days, ever since Loget began his fumbling attempts at tuning the black code.

The endgame was approaching, and they both knew it, though Natch couldn't tel if Brone was expecting to win or lose this contest.

Meanwhile, progress on MultiReal had final y ground to a halt. The Tha.s.selians had not even bothered to gather in the atrium that morning for a status report; instead most of them had bundled up and gone outside to enjoy the freshly fal en snow. Al except for Pierre Loget and Bil y Sterno, who were sitting at the conference table down the hal , trying to solve the black code dilemma. And Brone, of course, who preferred to observe the winter alone in his backroom office.

Natch pressed on. ”What you're trying to do-multiple lives for everybody. It's unworkable. I had my doubts about Possibilities 1.0, but this ... The system can't handle it. I don't care how little bandwidth consciousness takes up, the Data Sea won't be able to deal with that much information. You'l crash the whole computational infrastructure.”

”I don't believe that,” said Brone. ”I'm confident in my calculations.”

”Then go ahead,” said Natch, throwing his hands up in the air. ”Launch Possibilities 2.0, and see what happens. It'l be worse than the Autonomous Revolt.”

The bodhisattva's voice turned unctuous. ”So you'd prefer to let Len Borda get his claws on it and see what unending tyranny looks like?”