Geosynchron (60 page)

"Well, out there we probably only have an hour or so. But in here,
we've got all the time we need."

"What do you mean?"

"This is virtual conversation, mind to mind. It's like the MultiReal
choice cycles-happening much faster than real time. Virtual time, in
fact. It might feel like hours in here, but it'll all be instantaneous from
the outside. Petrucio explained the whole thing to me."

"What happened with Borda? The attack on Melbourne?"

The engineer seems to have almost forgotten about the larger context too. "Oh! Yeah, General Cheronna's plan, it worked great. The
battle was over almost as soon as it began. Len Borda has officially
given his resignation to the Prime Committee, but they're sitting on
the news until we've got MultiReal back under our control." He sighs.
"Which means I should get back to work. We've got to get you the
fuck out of there."

"Don't!" Natch can suddenly feel the weight of Margaret Surina's
words pressing down on his shoulders. You are the guardian of MultiReal. You are its keeper Do what you think is right. Once Horvil leaves,
who's to say how long he will have to wait here in the darkness for
another voice, another presence? "Can you-can you get Vigal for me?"

"I think he went with Merri to the cafeteria for a-"

"Please, hurry. Get him. I-I need to talk to him. I don't want to
be alone anymore."

Serr Vigal falls into a long and uncomfortable silence when he hears
what Natch has to say about Margaret Surina, the path to Perfection,
and the failsafe built into MultiReal. Yet somehow a lifetime of experience with Vigal's conversational style tells Natch that the neural
programmer has not closed the channel of communication.

After all the years of Natch playing the skeptic while Vigal tries to
broaden his horizons, suddenly the entrepreneur finds their roles
reversed. "Are you sure Margaret wasn't being ... metaphoric?" asks
the neural programmer, his voice troubled. "Did she really believe she
could wipe out sixty billion people's memories?"

"Why not?"

"If she had tried to pull this off a few hours after her speech in
Andra Pradesh, well, maybe.... But so much has happened since
then. The drudges have written literally millions of words about
MultiReal in the past few months. L-PRACGs have cast votes on it,
money has changed hands. How can all that be reversed?"

"It's just a question of scale, Vigal. You know as well as I do that
historical records can be altered. Vault transactions can flow backwards. Posts on the Data Sea can be erased."

"Memories too?" says Vigal. "The memories of billions of people?"

"If this really has been a multigenerational plan on the part of the
Surinas ... then I don't see why not. Sheldon Surina invented
bio/logics. The underpinnings of the whole system, the Data Sea,
MindSpace-he had a hand in all of it. We already know that he put
computational hooks into the system that only the Surinas knew
about. How else could Margaret have created that back door to MultiReal that skips right over the standard Data Sea access controls? How else can MultiReal tap into other people's systems without their permission? If he could do all that, why couldn't Margaret take advantage
of those same undocumented hooks for her failsafe?"

Vigal's hum of rumination comes across the channel. Clearly he's
beginning to enjoy the Socratic nature of their dialogue in spite of the
situation. "I suppose that's not what's bothering me. Even allowing
that such a secret back door exists ... dealing with memories is a complicated process, Natch. You know full well that the brain doesn't have
a binary storage system; memories aren't arranged in discrete blocks of
ones and zeros. You couldn't just search the brain for the term Multi-
Real-and even if that were possible, you couldn't press a button and
cleanly erase those memories."

"MultiReal erases thousands of memories every time you run it.
That's why you don't remember all those potential alternate realities."

"Yes, but those are short-term memories, Natch. The brain stores
them differently than long-term memories."

"The Patels' MultiReal-D program can erase long-term memories.
I've seen it."

"And you yourself have said it was a deeply flawed process. Frederic and Petrucio's MultiReal-D seems to have erased far more than
they intended."

"The Patels put that code together in months. Margaret Surina had
decades to work on her failsafe-maybe even generations." Natch feels
like he needs to wipe sweat off his brow, an odd inclination given that
he has no sweat glands or forehead in this place. It's been a long time
since he's had one of these intense dialogues with Vigal, and he's forgotten how frustrating they can be.

The neural programmer is obviously not convinced. "I still don't
see how something like this would work."

Natch starts to sketch out in his head the method he would use to
construct something of this nature. If you started out with all the assumptions Margaret started out with, it wouldn't be as difficult as it sounded. The bodhisattva would have had to start executing the failsafe months
ahead of time; she would have had to use Sheldon Surina's undocumented
programming hooks to plant code that would parse the user's thoughts.
It was a big leap to believe that one piece of code could identify thoughts
about MultiReal ... but grant Margaret that for the sake of argument.
Say Margaret planted her code shortly before her big speech in Andra
Pradesh. As soon as she spoke the trigger word, OCHREs around the
globe would begin tracking memories. Of course, that would take an
unprecedented amount of memory, space, and processing power....

"For process' preservation," Natch whimpers. He would bury his
face in his hands if he had either at his disposal. "Of course."

Vigal is still a few steps behind him. "What's wrong?"

"The infoquakes. Margaret's failsafe caused the infoquakes."

Silence.

"Think about it," continues the entrepreneur wearily. "When did
the first infoquake happen? Right at the very instant Margaret introduced MultiReal to the world. During her speech at Andra Pradesh.
Something must have gone horribly wrong when she activated the failsafe. Faulty programming, parts of her code that didn't mesh well with
someone else's. That's what caused the massive spike in the computational system. That's what ... what killed all those people. What's
still killing them."

Vigal is pensive. "That might account for the first infoquake.
What about the others?"

"Once a program like that gets in people's bio/logic systems ...
well, there's no predicting the damage it could cause. Anything could
set it off. A temporary jolt in neural activity. A program that hits its
weak spots. Someone with just the wrong combination of OCHREs
thinking about MultiReal at just the wrong moment ... And I'm
willing to bet that every time we used MultiReal in public, that only
exacerbated the problem. Remember, there was an infoquake when
Petrucio tried to demonstrate MultiReal at the Tul Jabbor Complex."

"But not when the Patels demonstrated it. Not when you demonstrated it."

"No, there have been infoquakes almost constantly since the first
one. Just not in any predictable pattern."

Natch remembers the haunted look on the bodhisattva's face after
that initial infoquake struck. Margaret had shown up at their fiefcorp
meeting. She had attempted to keep the banter light, but Natch had
seen the distress clearly written in her expression the whole time. So
had the others in the fiefcorp.

Margaret had known. Even back then, she had known what she had
done.

Even through the impenetrable blanket of Brone's bio/logic loopback,
Natch can sense the gears grinding away in Quell's head. "So what are
you saying?" he says gruffly.

"I'm saying I know why Margaret Surina committed suicide."

There's a long, dangerous pause from the other end of the connection, and for a moment Natch thinks the Islander has cut him off. He
has no desire to tear open Quell's old wounds, but this is information
Natch needs to have. He can't hold back for fear of hurting the
Islander's feelings. "Well?" snaps Quell finally.

Natch explains his theory about Margaret's failsafe and its relation
to the infoquakes. He's not quite sure how closely the Islander has been
following the phenomenon of the infoquakes-being an unconnectible
who's not subject to the same breakdowns-and so he summons all the
evidence he can from memory. Descriptions of the attacks' sudden
nature, of their unpredictable pattern of dissemination, of the agonizing deaths they've caused.

He hears nothing from Quell during all of this, so he segues into a
summary of his own memory problems during the past few weeks. The inexplicable gaps, the seemingly unrelated holes in the fabric of his
mind. Natch relates some of the things that Petrucio Patel and Serr
Vigal told him about the difficulties and dangers of erasing memory.

"So what does that have to do with the infoquakes?" asks Quell.
Natch suspects that the Islander has already found the common thread
between the two; he simply can't bring himself to admit it.

"Margaret knew her MultiReal failsafe was causing the infoquakes," Natch replies. "She knew that a few missed connections here
and there were responsible for sending tens of thousands of people to
their deaths. But she was stuck. If she let MultiReal fall into Len
Borda's hands, she would be responsible for giving him an apocalyptic
weapon that could lead to unending tyranny. But if she tried to cut the
program off ... given how badly she had already botched the failsafe,
Margaret knew that activating the actual memory erasure could be
absolutely disastrous. Millions dead, maybe more.... As if those two
choices weren't bad enough, Brone told her about his plans for the
Revolution of Selfishness and threatened to kill her if she didn't hand
it over. Margaret knew that letting Brone open up MultiReal to the
entire world would be the worst possibility of all-it could mean billions dead.

"Do you remember what Margaret said to me at the top of the Revelation Spire that day? The day you and I went up there, hours before
her death? You will stand alone in the end, and you will make the decisions
that the world demands. The decisions I can't make. Well, this is the decision that Margaret couldn't make. A no-win situation, with death
every way she turned. She couldn't deal with the pressure. She couldn't
deal with being responsible for all that death ... so she left the decision to me."

Natch finishes his summary, and still Quell hasn't said a word.
There's a long pause-the longest yet-but this time Natch is certain
the Islander is still there and listening. There's a lot more that Natch
has purposefully left out of his explanation. Did Margaret decide she had made a mistake choosing duty over family? Did she regret abandoning her only child to be raised in the Islands? Certainly Quell is
asking himself those questions already without Natch's prompting.

And suddenly Quell is sobbing. Sobbing like Natch has never
heard him sob before, not even at the top of the Revelation Spire when
confronted with the body of Margaret Surina. The body of his lover,
the mother of his son. "She did this for me!" the Islander wails. "She did
this for me."

Natch waits a few minutes until the Islander has gotten his emotions under some semblance of control.

"Margaret wanted to have everything," continues Quell in a hoarse
whisper. "She wanted a family life, but she also wanted to devote herself to MultiReal. She wanted to unveil MultiReal to the world, but
she wanted to yank it back if it was too dangerous." Another pause,
during which Quell consolidates his grip over his emotions. "She
bought in to the delusions of the Surinas, Natch. She really thought
that this program changed the rules of humanity, that she could have
everything without sacrificing anything. What a fool."

"So you knew nothing about the failsafe that whole time?" Natch
asks gently.