Geosynchron (56 page)

"Even if the lieutenant executive manages to crush Borda's armies,
you know that he won't keep his promises. As soon as Borda has shuffled off to the Prepared and the central government has made peace
with the unconnectibles, things are going to look different. High
Executive Lee's going to wonder why he made an agreement with a
crooked businessman like you in the first place. The years will pass,
and MultiReal will never make it into the open market. You'll see.

"And even if Magan Kai Lee remains true to his word to the end
of his days ... do you trust his subordinates? Do you trust Rey
Gonerev? Do you trust that shifty chief engineer of his? I'm not sure
they'll wait for Magan to die. What happens when one of them gets a
notion to put a dart in the back of the high executive's head? What
happens when one of them decides to revive the glory days of the
Council?

"I'm sorry, Natch. I know how that story ends. We've only got one
chance to make this right. MultiReal needs to be bequeathed to the
entire world. Immediately. Irreversibly. It may be painful, but it needs
to be done."

They stand and glare at one another at the top of the hill. Natch
rubs his finger up and down the trigger of his weapon; Brone flexes his
own fingers like a prestidigitator preparing to cast an exceedingly
complicated spell.

"You never answered my question," says Natch. "You knew I was
coming. Why didn't you have a trap prepared for me?"

Brone laughs quietly, humorlessly. "You know the answer to that,
Natch. I'll get no satisfaction out of shooting you in the back. I've been
waiting for this opportunity since the Shortest Initiation. To confront
you, face-to-face. To pit my will against yours." He shakes his head. "I already know how this is going to end. I fight for the freedom of
humanity. I fight for the noblest cause there is. Who do you fight for?"

Natch thinks for a moment. "Rodrigo," he says.

It begins.

Natch grips the dartgun and takes aim at his old enemy, the bodhisattva of Creed Thassel. He thumbs the selector on the side of the
pommel just as Jorge Monck instructed him to do and swivels the
barrel slightly so it aims directly at Brone's torso. Click. The trigger is
pulled, the dart is fired. Brone's eyes widen slightly as the dart hits
home. He clutches feebly at his chest and slumps to the floor.

Flash.

Brone has never been trained in the martial arts as far as Natch
knows. And yet as he pirouettes into the air with arms and legs
whirling, his movements are precise and calculated. Natch makes a
feeble effort at warding off the confluence of limbs, but he's unable. A
foot comes rocketing towards Natch's face, meets the bridge of his
nose, crunches bone. There's the briefest flare of agony as shards of bone
slice into Natch's brain. Then blackness.

Flash.

Natch looks at the blade folded inside his utility belt. A thought
is all it takes to transfer the poisoned OCHREs on the tips of his black
code darts into the blade's receptors and onto its serrated edge. The
look on Brone's face is pure surprise as Natch draws the knife and
slashes it across the bodhisattva's chest. A line of crimson appears on
his robe as he collapses to the ground, clawing at the wound in agony.

Flash.

Natch fires the dartgun, but Brone ducks and the dart misses,
spearing his left shoulder by centimeters. He tucks and rolls athletically under the next two darts and springs to his feet right in front of Natch. Brone uses his artificial hand to retract the cover of Natch's
utility belt, then grabs the miniature flamethrower. There's barely
enough time for Natch to flinch as the bodhisattva holds the
flamethrower at eye level and pulls the trigger. A sudden scorching
heat, then void.

Flash.

Brone is expecting Natch to fire his weapon, but he leaps forward
and catches his enemy in a chokehold instead, taking the bodhisattva
by surprise. Brone's legs go kicking in the air as Natch squeezes his
windpipe. For a good minute and a half, there is no sound in the room
but the hoarse accordion wheeze of lungs struggling for oxygen.
Finally, Brone falls facefirst onto the floor. Natch calmly reaches down,
grabs the dartgun, and fires a dart into the chest of his unconscious
enemy.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

Brone and Natch stand in the clearing and stare at one another. No
one moves.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

Natch can see the possibilities, numerous as leaves, grains of rice,
stars. They extend to the ends of the universe in every direction. Every
direction: not just north, south, east, and west, but all degrees on the
circle, all points on the sphere. Branching out from each point is
another set of possibilities, just as infinite, and then another, and then
another. For the briefest instance here in the purgatory of mental
stopgap, the possibilities are the universe. There is nothing but Everything, every conceivable response and nonresponse, the sum total of
human imagination laid out on virtual latticework.

And Brone is traversing that latticework, stopping at nodes with strange and improbable realities in the hopes that their peculiarity
might cause Natch to make a mistake.

Brone bursts into song.

Brone howls like a monkey and begins scaling a tree.

Brone falls onto the ground and writhes like a seizure victim.

Brone grabs Natch's blade and begins carving bloody lines in his
own palms.

Brone kneels down and begins gnawing on the tree stump.

Flash.

Natch can feel the MultiReal exhaustion beginning to take hold of
him. It takes all of his willpower to resist the temptation to lie down,
to stop fighting. His limbs are starting to quiver and his knees are
knocking. Sweat is pouring down his forehead, and his OCHREs are
thrumming crazily to keep his heart from accelerating out of control.
He can't stop now. He can't.

Flash.

The bodhisattva doesn't see a kick or a punch or a feint in the next
node of the MultiReal latticework. Instead he sees the future of the
human race avalanching down as a consequence of his victory over
Natch. Suddenly he is no longer in a SeeNaRee clearing in the Kordez
Thassel Complex; he's standing in a mass of ruins the severity of which
dwarfs those of Old Chicago. Uprooted buildings. Smoldering husks
of hoverbirds and tube trains lying atop twisted skeletons that once
propped up human beings. Survivors wander and shuffle through the
wreckage; the diss for a new age. But it is not a future of complete
despair, for around them the survivors can see traces of the Lunar
tycoons, secure in hermetically sealed compounds and raptured into a
universe of eternal, limitless possibilities. A universe where cause and
effect are untangled and reentwined willy-nilly for the delectation of
the few, a universe where the suffering of the many is drowned out and
overwhelmed by the joy of the economically privileged.

Flash.

Natch stands and watches as figures in white robes and yellow stars
strut through the streets, unafraid, dartrifles on brazen display. For
who would dare assault an officer of the Defense and Wellness Council
armed with the power of MultiReal? From the streets of Shenandoah
to the exurbs of Beijing to the halls of Patronell, it's all the same.
Docile citizens shuffling along, getting by, going through the motions
of their lives from birth to death. The unpredictable vacillations of
political unrest and dissent have been ground down to smooth, regulated lines. Drudges no longer struggle among themselves to dig up
truth so much as they struggle to flatter the high executive, to praise
his wisdom and forethought. Crime has surprisingly not gone downit's on the rise, due to the corruption of the authorities and their disinterest in policing the petty crimes of the masses.

Flash.

You'll cause immeasurable death and destruction. It could be as devastating as the Autonomous Revolt.

The Council's estimation. You trust the words of a tyrant?

You've known me since I was a boy. I don't cave to pressure. I don't bow to
tyrants. But if they offer me the truth, then I'll listen.

Do you think I want death? Do you think I want destruction? Of course
I don't. I wouldn't take this path unless there was no other choice. This may be
humanity's last hope for a thousand years or more.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

Choice cycle against choice cycle against choice cycle against
choice cycle.

Hundreds, thousands.

Surely the world must be crumbling down all around them by
now; surely the computational infrastructure must be buckling, near
to collapse. It feels like Natch has been here for hours, for days, for
weeks. He can feel his own bio/logic systems cracking under the strain.

Perhaps the Natch who lusted for number one on Primo's could
have clashed wills with Brone and come out victorious. Maybe the
Natch who sat in the center of his own universe and saw nothing but
himself could have triumphed. But he has been through too much in
the past few months. He has seen a universe outside of himself, a universe that is vast beyond imagination, and chimerical and stubborn
and resurgent. One man can't shoulder the burden of all that and live.
Natch has seen his own death, not once but tens of thousands of times;
he has experienced it over and over and over. He has climbed from the
lowest depths to the highest pinnacle and then watched himself
tumble back down again.

Natch feels his grip on the MultiReal interface slipping. He feels
his will weakening. He can't compete against Brone's narrow monomania. Brone senses impending victory and redoubles his efforts.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

Brone leaps forward with his prosthetic arm pulled back for the
killing blow. Natch tries to muster the energy to resist this one last
time, fails. A blade extends from the palm of the bodhisattva's
mechanical hand. The entrepreneur stares as the knife stabs through
the air to spear his forehead. Half a second until death-

Flash.

MultiReal-D. Natch silently thanks Papizon for finding him a
bio/logic workbench back in Manila. He thanks Petrucio Patel for the
instructions to turn the code back on.

The bodhisattva and the entrepreneur are standing in the clearing.
Brone leaps forward, extends knife, goes for the kill.

Flash.

Clearing. Leap, knife, kill.

Flash.

Over and over and over.

Until-

The Null Current.

The nothingness at the center of the universe.

No way forward.

Flash.

The SeeNaRee vanishes, leaving Natch standing on a stage next to a
purple curtain. The curtain parts, and Natch catches a brief glimpse of
faces watching. There's a collective gasp as Natch lets his dartgun go
clattering to the floor.

Brone reaches very calmly into the right-hand pocket of his black
robe and withdraws a syringe. He's not going for the kill this time; MultiReal-D stays silent. Natch watches helplessly as the bodhisattva bridges
the few steps between them. Then he stabs the syringe into the entrepreneur's arm with a slow and deliberate motion. Brone presses down on the
plunger and sends Natch clawing, shrieking into nothingness.

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