Geosynchron (28 page)

Margaret had been sheltered her entire life by handlers. These Surina
family protectors had kept her isolated from her father's battles with
the Defense and Wellness Council, and then took it upon themselves
to keep her cloistered from the world after his sudden death. And now,
like an answered prayer, a young man had come into her life who was
free from the taint of Andra Pradesh. A man of strength, wisdom, and
character who was not afraid to tell her the truth, who could show her the crooked and unseemly things, the blemished facts, the rusted
people, the corroded emotions-everything her power and position
had isolated her from.

As the relationship had matured and trust had deepened, Quell
had begun to suspect that Margaret was in possession of a terrible
secret. She had had her sights not on the world around her, but on
some extradimensional place that was closed off to mere mortals. The
Islander had vowed not to press her, figuring she would tell him in her
own time. And he had been correct.

I need to show you something, she had told Quell one day. Can I trust
you?

Of course, the Islander had replied.

Margaret had led him to the top of the Revelation Spire again, the
place she had appropriated as her office. She had turned on the MindSpace workbench that lay there, the one that Marcus Surina had constructed. The largest bio/logic workbench ever built. And Margaret
had showed Quell the databases her father had left behind on his death.

In MindSpace, they had looked like an immense valley, bounded
on all sides by peakless mountains, sharp and terrible. Tall spikes
shaped like fir trees had dotted the landscape, while great rivers had
curved across vast distances. Rotating the mass on its three axes had
led to even more startling discoveries. Caves and crenellations that
were only visible from certain angles. Strange formations that changed
shape depending on how you approached them, and others that metamorphosed into something else entirely when you touched them with
a bio/logic programming bar.

And in the center of it all, enveloped by the hills and tucked
between two small lagoons of information, there had sat a perfect,
gleaming castle.

I have a responsibility, Quell, she had told him.

Quell had gaped at the structure, both amazed and aghast at the
same time. He had far outpaced his classmates in the study of bio/logic engineering, but still he had never seen anything like it. A responsibility
to whom?

To humanity, Margaret had replied, her voice utterly bereft of irony.

From that day onward, that responsibility had been all. And Quell,
lovestruck fool that he was, had taken on the burden of that responsibility
too. He had let his own five-year course of study at the Gandhi University
turn into a six-year degree, then a seven-year degree-and finally, his education had slipped into a dark ravine and never emerged. He had subsumed his own dreams, inchoate and immature as they were, to Margaret's.

What was Margaret's dream? What had Marcus been working on
at the time of his sudden demise? What was the purpose of this vast
digital edifice that had begun to consume her?

Had she not known, or had she simply been unable to express it?

Perfection, she had told Quell.

He had not understood what she meant. But if there was any virtual structure large and complex enough to contain Perfection, it was
the one Marcus Surina had left behind. Clearly the code was not all
Marcus's doing; the structure was too enormous for any one human
being to have constructed alone. Marcus Surina had squandered decades
on his frivolous jaunts around the solar system before finally settling
down in Andra Pradesh; Quell had calculated that if Margaret's father
had spent every waking moment the rest of his life in MindSpace, he
could not have completed a tenth of the required programming.

Inside the structure, Quell and Margaret had found the core programming for teleportation. It wasn't a one-for-one match. You couldn't
pluck the code out of the virtual forest and expect to be transmigrating
molecules the next day. But there had been too many similarities
between the two programs to call it coincidence. The same corkscrew
shape, the same dappled greens and yellows woven through the center,
the same hooklike protrusion at the base. It was as if someone had taken
the original teleportation code and riffed on it, improvising the junctures to fit into a larger and more cohesive framework.

Had Marcus Surina plugged his teleportation code into some massive multigenerational monolith of data-or had he extracted the code
out? Had he really been the engineering genius the drudges had
claimed, or merely a clever transcriptionist?

And if the latter ... whose blueprints had he been transcribing?

And why were the achievements of all Margaret's ancestors honeycombed within this MindSpace colossus? Why did the colossus contain
not just teleportation, but key subroutines that powered the Data Sea,
MindSpace, the multi network-so many of the joints of the modern
programming scaffolding?

Margaret threw all other commitments aside in her quest to understand this titanic thing her father had bequeathed to her. Creed ceremonies, academic conferences, financial summits: all hastily shoved
away. Her relationship with Quell: sidelined.

Quell himself had taken to reactivating neural OCHREs in his bid
to keep up with Margaret. Only certain OCHREs, only the necessary
ones-but enough to make him a heretic to some in his family. But
though he had felt intellectual curiosity to understand the Surina
legacy, his heart wasn't in it.

Quell considered leaving many times over the next few years, but
Margaret would always convince him to stay. I need you, she would say. I
love you. Don't you see? We can pursue this dream together We can unite the world.
We can fulfill the destiny of the Surinas and achieve Perfection. Quell was more
concerned with his own broken destiny. Time was rapidly running out for
him to choose an alternate course for his life. Already he had spent a
decade here in Andra Pradesh with the connectibles, among them yet not
one of them. The Islands were no longer his home, but neither was Andra
Pradesh. If he were to leave Margaret-where would he go?

Years passed. The arguments between them only grew more vociferous, and Margaret's declarations of love only grew more wild and
desperate. Quell gave her an ultimatum.

Josiah was born the following year.

Quell had thought he had won the argument; he had considered
Margaret's decision to have a child the first step in a path towards
greater intimacy. Instead, Josiah only drove them apart. Margaret delegated more and more of the child's care to Quell as she slowly disappeared inside the Surina legacy. Once the Islander had been an equal
on the project. By the time Josiah reached his fifth birthday, however,
Quell had been relegated to a subordinate role. How could it be otherwise with Quell spending so much time in the Pacific Islands
playing father? His was the job of keeping the various wings of the
Surina family business functioning; his was the job of keeping
investors happy, which meant keeping his relationship with Margaret
and the existence of Josiah tightly under wraps; his was the job of
finding funds for the project that were untethered to the Surina family,
and that meant supplicating Len Borda.

As for the mass of code Marcus Surina had left behind, for Quell
the mystery only grew more mysterious. He had a solid, practical
understanding about the portion of code Margaret had been working
on all these years, the portion she had christened MultiReal. But the
larger purpose of the scaffold remained, to Quell, unknown.

Again he tried to ask her what its purpose was.

Perfection, she had whispered, the two of them embracing atop the
Revelation Spire, eyes closed, the rest of the world far below.

But what does that mean? Quell had asked. We don't need Perfection.
We have Josiah. Our son! Our son is Perfection.

No. He is-we are-only the guardians and the keepers.

Quell-frantic inside at the possibility that Margaret had utterly
slipped away from him, slipped away from coherence, and in agony
that he had gambled his life on the legacy of the Surinas and still, as
he approached middle age, had nothing to show for it-said, When will
MultiReal be done? When will this be over?

Margaret had answered, Soon.

And after MultiReal is running on every biollogic system from here to Fur toid, after you've fulfilled the destiny of the Surinas, after you've spread "Perfection" through the universe ... then, then can we be together? Then can you
be my bonded companion and Josiah your son for the whole world to see?

Yes, Margaret had said. After the destiny of the Surina family has been
fulfilled, it will be a different world. Anything will be possible.

Quell's heart had leapt. Anything would be possible. Even renewing a life wasted, a life lived on perimeters, a life in between things.
He now had a goal. To help Margaret finish MultiReal, to get the program safely launched on the Data Sea so Quell could reclaim her love,
so Quell could redeem himself.

And then came Len Borda's impatience.

Margaret's sudden, blind, panicked fear.

The desperate attempts to put MultiReal in the hands of a fiefcorp
and stave off Borda's iron hand.

The Patel Brothers' treachery.

Natch.

The infoquakes.

Madness.

The Null Current.

And finally, finally, it came down to what Quell had always feared
it would come down to: himself, half-Islander and half-connectible,
resident of nowhere, man of edges, sitting in the belly of a Defense and
Wellness Council hoverbird, little hope of rescue, MultiReal gone, his
son half-estranged, the Islands on the brink of annihilation, him teetering on the border between existence and nothingness and no longer
caring in which direction he fell.

A hand shook his shoulder.

Quell awoke with a start, groaning at the crick in his neck that had
developed from falling asleep in an uncomfortable position. He opened his eyes and found himself staring at a pair of hazel pupils hovering
right over his face.

Papizon.

The Islander took a startled look around him. The four Borda
lackeys who had been watching over him had vanished. Outside the
open hoverbird door, Quell could see nothing but white-the shining
white paint of Magan Kai Lee's hoverbirds. Quell had not been woken
by the sounds of battle because there had been no battle; Magan's force
here so vastly outnumbered Borda's that they had surrendered without
a struggle.

"We have got to stop meeting like this," said Papizon with a lopsided grin.

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