Geosynchron (45 page)

"So noted," said Gonerev with a sidelong glance of surprise at
Magan. "But the fact that you're here with us in the Pacific Islandsand the fact that the public knows you're here-that weighs heavily in
our favor. As far as the drudges are concerned, your presence here is as
good as an endorsement."

Frejohr did not look pleased by her assertion, but he did not dispute it either.

"I'm afraid that's where the good news ends," continued the Blade.
"Len Borda's troops may have low morale-but they've got us outnumbered nearly three to one. If we assume that Magan has many supporters in the ranks who are afraid to declare open rebellion, we're still
badly outnumbered. Even if we include the Islander troops under General Cheronna's command, that makes up some ground-but not
nearly enough."

"And you should not include us in your ranks," put in Cheronna
tersely. "The Islander parliament has allowed you a military base. They
have not approved any joint military actions."

Gonerev gave a solemn nod, acknowledging the point. "That leads
me to the governmental front," she said. "As the general mentioned,
Representative Triggendala is holding up any military alliance
between Magan and the Free Republic through parliamentary procedures. She's organizing protests across the Islands, and some of them
are proving to be quite heated.

"As for the connectible government-well, you all heard Speaker
Frejohr's statement about where the Congress stands. But at least
they're lending Magan some small amount of public support. The
Prime Committee has completely rebuffed our efforts to present arti- Iles of impeachment against Len Borda for the scene at the Tul Jabbor
Complex. There's too much confusion about what actually happened
there and why. The libertarian side of the Committee has been making
noises about a motion of support similar to the one that the Congress
passed, but we don't think they have the votes.

"So we're badly outnumbered ... we have inferior equipment ...
we have little in the way of government support ... and to top things
off, Borda has the Defense and Wellness Council Root. An orbital
fortress that is, for all intents and purposes, impregnable."

"Isn't DWCR invisible to the multi network too?" asked
Cheronna. "Couldn't Borda use his fortress the same way you're using
the Islands-as a base to send out multi projections?"

"No," said Magan. "DWCR is not invisible to the network. It's
just well concealed. Regardless, there aren't enough outgoing multi
streams on the Root to allow Borda to send out an effective virtual
force from there."

Khann Frejohr leaned forward and addressed the lieutenant executive. Of all the questioning faces around the table, his seemed the most
dubious and the most impatient. "The rebellion appears to be gaining
ground, but you admit that you're in no shape to take on Len Borda
right now," he said. "So why are we here? Time is on your side, Magan.
You're well protected from preemptive attack behind the curtain.
Public opinion is slowly turning in your favor, and you're still getting
new defectors every day. As soon as word gets out that you're in possession of MultiReal, that trickle should turn into a flood. Why not
wait and let things play out for a few more weeks? Why the urgency
of this meeting?"

"There lies our other, and possibly more serious, dilemma," replied
the lieutenant executive somberly. "Rey?"

The Blade slid one hand under the table and began tapping on the
recessed row of buttons there. Seconds later, the holograph of a taciturn
individual appeared over the middle of the table. A younger man with
prematurely graying hair, a stern expression on his face, and eyes of
mismatched color. Magan could see Natch's face darken across the
table.

"The bodhisattva of Creed Thassel," said Gonerev. `Krone. Once a
promising young programmer and disciple of the capitalman Figaro
Fi. Fi helped him gain his fortune, which he used to buy his way into
the leadership of the creed and build up its membership.

"And now he has core access to MultiReal.

`Krone appears to have gained access to the program when Natch
was in Old Chicago. He's using a clever piece of black code which he
implanted in Natch during an attack in Shenandoah. For the past six
weeks, he and his Thasselian devotees have been working frantically on
the MultiReal databases right under Natch's nose. We believe that
Brone is preparing to release an enhanced version of MultiReal called
Possibilities 2.0 on the Data Sea any day now.

"Dealing with the standard Possibilities 1.0 out on the Data Sea
was worrisome enough. But if Papizon's projections are correct, the
consequences of having Possibilities 2.0 loose on the Data Sea will be
catastrophic."

The Blade gestured to Papizon. The engineer's fingers danced
beneath the tabletop along the row of recessed buttons, replacing the
photo of Brone with a chart that showed a sharply rising curve. "Projected number of people downloading and activating Possibilities 2.0,"
said Papizon, running his index finger up and down the y-axis.
"Elapsed time from launch on the Data Sea," he continued, indicating
the digits on the x-axis. "Critical mass-the point at which the program overwhelms the computational system and starts causing massive
infoquakes." Papizon pointed to an ominous blue line slicing across the
entire diagram about a third of the way up. "As you can see," he con cluded, "that's not a very high bar to jump. And there are a lotta
people who are going to keep activating after that point."

"So we'll have six days to curb the spread of MultiReal after Brone
releases it?" said Benyamin, squinting at the chart. "Guess that
explains the urgency."

"Ohhhh no," replied Papizon with a child's singsong dread. "Those
numbers running across the bottom aren't days. Those are hours."

Stunned silence.

Rey Gonerev picked up the conversation in a low tone, her
demeanor grave. "Because of all the publicity about MultiReal, the
latest polling numbers show the program with a name recognition in
the mid-ninetieth percentile. Almost every single person from here to
Furtoid is aware of it. The percentage of people who are actually planning to download the program is significantly lower. But even if we
assume an extremely low adoption rate-say, five percent-that's still
close to three billion people.

"And if Natch's assumptions about Brone's Revolution of Selfishness are correct, then there's no reason why everyone who's curious
won't give MultiReal a try. Natch proposed a price tag of eighty thousand Vault credits a few months ago, which would have slowed the
adoption rate considerably. But Brone intends to release the program
for free, with complete and unrestricted access to the underlying MindSpace code.

"If even five percent of those who've heard about MultiReal decide
to activate it, and if the centralized government manages to block as
much as ninety-five percent of the program's distribution on the Data
Sea-which I can tell you, is quite beyond our abilities-that's still
one hundred and forty million people. A hundred forty million people
creating multiple realities. Given the most optimistic scenario we can
project, we reach that blue line in ten hours rather than six."

Papizon dutifully snapped his fingers, flattening the exponential
growth curve on the chart by an insignificant degree.

"So what happens when we reach that blue line?" asked Petrucio
Patel, trying unsuccessfully to smooth the worry lines on his forehead.

"Our best guess is that we'll have infoquakes to start, or something
like them," said Gonerev. "Spontaneous and unexplained death
throughout the civilized world. Random system failures. The collapse
of certain pieces of infrastructure ..." Gonerev's eyes were beginning
to glaze over with dread, and moreover, so were the eyes of her audience. "Look, I have plenty of academic papers discussing how exactly a
catastrophic failure of the computational system would occur. We have
teams of people in the Council who've tried to predict exactly how
something like this might happen so we can get ahead of it. We've got
contingency plans that get revised and reformulated every couple of
years.

"But the bottom line is that nobody knows.

"The one thing that the infrastructure experts are in agreement
about is that there's a point of no return." She gestured at the chart,
causing a red line to appear about two-thirds of the way up the growth
curve. "Below that threshold, the computational system will eventually heal itself. The holes will be patched up. Once we cross that
threshold, however, interdependent systems will begin crashing each
other. Faults in Dr. Plugenpatch might cause OCHRE failures, which
might cause the messaging system to overload, which might bring
down the multi network. It's all theoretical at this point.

"You've seen the damage infoquakes can do. If we cross that red
line, we could experience infoquakes without end. The destruction
could approach the level caused by the Autonomous Revolt. We're
talking about tens of millions or even billions dead within a few weeks.

"That's not just a crisis. That's a potentially civilization-ending
crisis."

A collective shiver passed through the room. The Band of Twelve
looked on with intense interest.

Magan found himself playing a horror slideshow in his head of the
iconic images from the Big Divide that followed the end of the
Autonomous Revolt. According to the authoritative histories, most of
the carnage and death were not a direct result of the Revolt-they were
caused by the decades of starvation, disease, radiation poisoning, mass
rioting, and chaos the Revolt produced. As one historian deftly put it,
If the Autonomous Revolt was the nativity of a new world, then the Big Divide
was the bloody afterbirth.

Jara spoke.

"I know I'm not exactly a bio/logic engineer," she said. "I don't
have any great insight into the architecture of the computational
system. But how do you know any of this will happen?"

"Statistical modeling," piped up Papizon. "Logarithmic increases
in bandwidth utilization based on prior patterns of adoption."

"But how can you create an accurate statistical model when you
don't even have a reliable baseline?" continued the fiefcorp master with
a dubious face.

"She's got a point," added Horvil. "I can't see where you're getting
these numbers from. Nobody in the Council has actually used Possibilities 1.0 before, much less Possibilities 2.0. You haven't taken it apart
and put it back together in MindSpace. You haven't tested it to see
how much processing power it uses."

Jara nodded and clasped the engineer's hand briefly on the
tabletop. "The fact of the matter is, you're just making glorified
guesses. For all we know, MultiReal might only cause a brief hiccup in
the system. It might just stop working. Brone could be right about
this.

"And your estimates of the entire computational system collapsing? Again, forgive my ignorance here-but aren't there safeguards built in to these networks? You can't just create a program that sucks up all of the world's processing cycles and crashes everything to
the ground, or the black coders would be doing it every week. There
are basic principles of computational design here. Redundancy. Isolation. Compartmentalization." She ticked the principles off on her fingers. "Even if Dr. Plugenpatch implodes tomorrow, that shouldn't
cause tube trains to crash and gravitational systems to go haywire."

Everyone turned back to Rey Gonerev for a response.

But it was Quell the Islander who spoke up from farther down the
table. "You're absolutely right, in theory," he said, his voice quiet,
introspective. "It should be impossible for one program to crash the
whole system. But don't forget that MultiReal already does the impossible. It shouldn't be able to circumvent the Data Sea access controlsbut it does. It shouldn't be able to hook into other people's neural systems and start zapping memories without their permission-but it
does. By all logical and rational programming standards, MultiReal
shouldn't exist.