Geosynchron (59 page)

Margaret pauses. It is difficult for Natch to tell for certain, but he
senses that there are tears gathering in her eyes. She abruptly shakes
her head, dispelling the mistiness, and shifts topics.

My pessimism notwithstanding, Sheldon Surina's dream has nearly come
to fruition. We have only to overcome the tyranny of Time and the tyranny of
Cause and Effect.

And this puts me in a position unique among all the inventors in the history of the world. The nascent technology left to me by my father was a program
to create alternate realities, a program that is designed by its very nature to
warp the law of cause and effect. So with this law irretrievably bent, with the
tyrant overthrown-who is to say that the very existence of this technology
can't lie in one of those fungible realities?

If MultiReal can free us from cause and effect, certainly MultiReal itself
is not bound by those same chains.

My doubts about Sheldon's path to Perfection are nothing new; they have
been in the making for decades. But as my doubts grew, so too did my confidence
that the very nature of this technology afforded me a unique solution. A way to
take that leap into the unknown while at the same time retaining the option of
returning to the precipice. I decided to create a failsafe for the MultiReal program. A way back.

Certainly you have discovered that just as there is no copying the MultiReal databases, there is no destroying them either. Even with all of the secret
archives of the Surina family at my disposal, I'm unclear how my father managed this eldritch feat. Perhaps the complete destruction of the solar system could do the trick, but there is no craft currently known to humanity that can accomplish it. If you were to try to destroy the original code for teleportation, you
would discover the same thing.

But why should I seek to destroy when I can simply isolate?

The Data Sea, with its quintillions and quintillions of petabytes, is too
immense for anyone to simply stumble upon information that has not been properly mapped and cataloged. Cutting off all known routes to a set of databases
is the functional equivalent of erasure. No matter how large the program, it
would be like trying to find one particular shell in the vastness of all the world's
oceans. And so I decided that this would be the mechanism of the MultiReal
failsafe.

You were implanted with specialized OCHREs during our dinner here in
Andra Pradesh the other week. These OCHREs grant you the ability to locate
the MultiReal databases no matter where they reside. Now that I am confident
you are the right steward for the MultiReal program, I will command these
OCHREs to attach themselves to your biollogic systems such that they cannot be
removed. No amount of torture or coercion by the Council can transfer or remove
this indelible access.

You can see the dilemma this causes, however. As long as these OCHREs
remain operational, MultiReal will be accessible. And so, if you choose to activate the failsafe I have created, Natch, the specialized OCHREs which give you
access to the program must be destroyed.

You would not survive such a destruction.

Yet is cutting off access to the program sufficient? Given all the parties
aware of MultiReal's existence even today, before it has been unveiled to the
world, it is inevitable that someone will figure out how to reverse-engineer the
program. The Patels have probably already given the Council enough information to reconstitute the program within a generation.

And so the failsafe I have designed will not only cut off access to MultiReal on the Data Sea; it will destroy the very memory of the program itself
throughout human space. You are aware that the program accesses neural
memory through undocumented back channels in the biollogic system. And it is through these back channels that the failsafe will eradicate all knowledge of the
program.

MultiReal will not only effectively cease to exist, but it will never have
been.

After all this exposition, I still have not answered the question that undoubtedly you have been asking yourself for the past fifteen minutes: why you?

I have cousins who share the same bloodline as I do, if not quite in the same
undiluted quantities. I have a son, though the world does not know it. Yet I
choose to give sole responsibility for the program to you instead, in effect robbing
my son of his birthright.

Why? It's simple, Natch. I have watched you ever since your misfortunes
with the Shortest Initiation. Though you were unaware, I watched you pick
yourself up from defeat at the hands of the ROD coders. I watched you shoulder
your way through your competitors on Primo's. I saw through the ruse that
helped you gain number one on the Primo's biollogic investment guide.

Yours is a single-minded intensity of purpose that the world has rarely seen.
You will not be beaten down, you will not surrender. Not to High Executive
Borda, not to Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee, not to anyone. Part of me
admires this about you; you are the son Marcus Surina would have loved to have
had. In many ways, you are the very embodiment of the qualities Sheldon Surina
sought to accentuate in the human race: continuous struggle, continuous improvement, continuous lust for Perfection, regardless of costs or consequences.

And so I have come to this conclusion. If you, the paragon of all that
Sheldon Surina stood for, believe that the time has come to wipe MultiReal off
the face of the Earth, then the time has come. If you, the epitome of selfishness,
are willing to sacrifice your own life to do so, then the time has come.

Undoubtedly you will feel anger at being put in this position of terrible
responsibility. Believe me, I understand, since I myself have felt the same way
many times.

The Sarinas have played their part on the world stage. We have sacrificed
much over the centuries-too much-and I have finally decided that I will heed
my lover's advice. I do not wish the life of a Surina for my son. I do not wish
for him to have to carry the burden that Sheldon Surina laid on us generations
ago. I intend to return to the life that Sheldon discarded. I intend to finally
make my lover my bonded companion, and for us to live the family life he has
always craved.

Now the time has come for me to leave you and make the final preparations
for tomorrow's unveiling of MultiReal to the world. It is my fervent hope that
this recording will never be heard, that it will stay dormant in your neural systems until you find your way into the compounds of the Prepared. Unlistened
to, unheeded. For now, I put the responsibility for this technology wholly into
your hands, like my father did to me.

You are the guardian of MultiReal. You are its keeper.

You can choose to eradicate MultiReal at the cost of your own life. Or you
can choose to set it loose and unchain humanity from the bonds of cause and
effect, forever.

Do what you think is right.

39

"Testing, testing, testing. Blah blah blah."

The unexpected sound of Horvil's voice causes Natch to suddenly
well up in tears. He can't say exactly how long he's lain here in the
blackness with his senses caught in eternal loopback, mulling over the
preposterous, inexplicable, confounding words of Margaret Surina.
Hours? Days? Weeks? Long enough for Natch to feel the cracks in his
sanity deepen and spread. Long enough for him to know that the
freedom from Time that Margaret espoused is not something to ask for
lightly.

"Natch. Hey ... can you hear me?"

He can't quite believe the voice is real, but it echoes in his skull
with the clarity and immediacy of a ConfidentialWhisper. Not a
mental holograph, not an appendage to his own thought processes, but
an independent outside presence. A human intelligence.

Natch stretches out with his own mind and discovers he can answer.
He makes a valiant and not-entirely-successful effort to mask the desperation in his voice. "Horvil? Yes. Yes. I'm here. I can hear you."

"Shit, I didn't think this was going to work." Horvil sounds quite
pleased with himself. It occurs to Natch that the engineer has probably
been at this for some time. He starts to speak again, then pauses.
"Brone's not in there with you, is he?"

"No."

"Listen, I hate to be so paranoid ... but I gotta confirm that this
is really you. Tell me something nobody else would know. Tell me ...
tell me one of the poems Captain Bolbund sent to you when he beat
you in the ROD coding business."

Natch feels an instant of panic. Given his cratered memory, what
if Horvil has picked an incident that's been swallowed by the void? It takes him a moment, but luckily the memory is still accessible and
intact. Natch takes a breath-or tries to, at any rate-and recites:

You gave it your all
I hope you had fun
'Cause you got your ass kicked

By CAPTAIN BOLBUND.

"All right," says Horvil, laughing. "Guess it really is you. Man, I had
forgotten what a crappy poet that guy was. But we can't get too cocky. I
have no idea how long we're gonna be able to keep this channel open."

"What channel? What's going on?"

"Quell figured out how to break into Brone's black code. All I have
to say is that Brone's good-but Quell's better. He used that Islander
finger-weaving programming technique and had us pump a ton of code
through your battle suit. Only took him a few minutes to figure out how
to dig this back tunnel. Kind of like a 'Whisper, I guess. We should be
able to talk with you one at a time, at least until Brone gets suspicious."

Now that he's established communication with the outside world,
Natch isn't quite sure what to say, what to ask. After Margaret's little
speech, it feels like the whole universe is an unknown variable. He
wants to ask ... everything. "Where am I?" he begins.

"You're still at the Kordez Thassel Complex. Propped up on a chair
in front of all those weaselly drudges while Brone holds his little
debate."

"Wait, you can see me? Are you in the audience?"

"No, no, no. I'm still back in Manila with Jara and everyone else.
I'm watching you on the Data Sea. Brone's been broadcasting the
whole thing since the Council tried to storm the place. There's supposedly almost two billion people watching. I have to say-if this whole
Revolution of Selfishness idiocy doesn't work out, Brone's got a future
in the dramas. This is pretty riveting stuff."

It makes a perverse kind of sense to Natch, like the universe
playing an elaborate practical joke. He's spent the past several months
lurking in the shadows, avoiding the public eye at all costs. And now
he has an audience of billions, and they're all completely invisible.
Natch knows this is simply a neural trick; the only thing separating
him from the rest of the world is Brone's bio/logic loopback. Yet
already he's struggling to remember what it felt like on the other side,
interacting with people using his five senses. It all seems so alien now.

Still, he must remember the reason he came here to the Thassel
Complex in the first place. Brone. His mission. "So how long do we
have before Brone launches Possibilities 2.0?" he asks Horvil.