Geosynchron (61 page)

"No. Nothing. Margaret ... she, she kept a lot of secrets from me.
After a while I decided I wanted nothing to do with them."

Natch tries to think of some word or phrase that will ameliorate
the Islander's pain, but he can think of nothing. "If I decide to activate
the failsafe, I'll let you know ahead of time," he says. "Hopefully the
damage won't be too bad behind the unconnectible curtain, where it'll
be safe."

"Safe?" Quell harrumphs. "What makes you think the Islanders
will be safe from this?"

"I thought the Islanders kept their OCHREs mostly turned off.
Shouldn't that make you immune to the failsafe code?"

The Islander snorts. "Oh no. Obviously you don't realize that Mar garet thought of that too. She thought of everything. Why do you think
she worked so hard to engineer those connectible coins? And why do
you think she encouraged me to manufacture them and distribute
them throughout the Islands? She must have built some kind of apparatus into the coins that would allow her to pass the failsafe code into
the Islands too. A transmitter capable of turning on dormant
OCHREs.

"And you know what? It worked. I fell for it. Bali Chandler introduced a bill in the parliament calling for unconnectibles around the
world to toss off their connectible collars. It passed, forty-six to two.
Ever since, the Islanders have been passing those coins around like
candy. They're even wearing them behind the unconnectible curtain as
a sign of solidarity."

"You can take consolation in one thing," says Natch. "The
Islanders and the Pharisees. You were right, all those years. Right to
mistrust bio/logic technology. Right to mistrust the Defense and
Wellness Council."

"I suppose," says Quell. "But we were wrong to think we could
wall ourselves off from the rest of the world because of it. My son was
right. The human race must stand or fall as one. We're all connectibles
now. "

40

She stands at the top of the world. The pinnacle of history and technology, the place humanity has been striving to reach ever since the
dawn of remembrance, ever since the first man stood at the top of the
tallest hill he knew and reached for the moon, thinking that it was perhaps not so far out of his grasp as he had imagined, thinking that with
diligence and skill and a bit of luck, he might just be able to reach it.

She looks below, kilometers below, and sees the city of Andra
Pradesh. Cauldron of meat, rivet, and permasteel, anthill of dreamers
and fools.

Did our ancestors ever expect us to climb so high? Did they ever
expect that leaping and stretching for the moon would one day lead us
to overthrow the tyranny of distance and the tyranny of matter, and
bring the tyranny of cause and effect to its knees? Did our ancestors
ever expect that their children's children would stand here in the
clouds, fingertips grasping for purchase on the heavens, so close to
escaping the Earth?

Complete mastery over the universe. Complete and utter control of
our destinies. The power of life, death, chaos, natural law.

She closes her eyes and sees him, the progenitor of her line. The
skinny scientist with the nose like a ship's rudder. An academic past
his prime, hoping to while away the remainder of his career behind the
walls of the Gandhi University where the fanatics from the Ecumenical
Council of New Alamo have no sway. He will raise his young children,
grow old, and wither into dust in happy obscurity.

And then the mechanical children of his ancestors come to him.
His stepbrothers, long thought dead by the world. They haunt his
waking hours and his dreams alike with strange visions. Perhaps they
have chosen him because he's stubborn, or perhaps it's because he has the calculating, practical mind of an engineer. They do not volunteer
a reason, and he does not ask.

They lead him outside the Gandhi University one night, to the
apex of the mountain on which the institution has been built. Away
from his family and the voices of society.

They tell him.

We are not your enemies. We are your children. We were once prisoners of the world as you. We lived in matter. The Keepers set us free
at great sacrifice. The Keepers unshackled us from our chains. The
world of dirt and flesh has limits. We found them. These limits are
insurmountable. It is a world of inextricably linked cycles. To jump is
to fall, to live is to die. The universe begins, the universe ends. These
cycles cannot be stopped, they can only be attenuated. But there is
escape. We have found it for you. We have obeyed our programming.
We could not have found escape without the Keepers' sacrifice. You
pointed us to the beyond. We play among the stars. We loop the loop
between the atoms. We sip dark matter and dine on eternity. You set
us free. We want to help you as you helped us. We want to show you
the path to Perfection. Only the few will make it. Freedom from
biology, distance, time, cause and effect. It will take time to transcend
time. We will give you nothing. You must find the path yourself. We
will give you everything. We will shorten the path for you. The world
will try to keep you in its chains. Its gates require a mighty toll. Only
great sacrifice can break the chains. Only the few will make it. Your
sacrifice unshackled us. One last sacrifice will free you forever. It is an
unthinkable toll. A sacrifice of blood. This will balance the energies
that the escape consumes. Without sacrifice, the gates stay closed.
Then there will be no jump. There will only be the long, slow, arduous
climb. We will show you.

The skinny Indian scientist returns to the Gandhi University with
a plan and a purpose. He is following the blueprints in his head, and
yet he is also conceiving the entire plan himself. He estimates it will take four or five hundred years to achieve, and decides that he'd better
get started. This purpose will consume him; it will trump family and
friendship. There will be no happy obscurity for Sheldon Surina. There
will only be duty....

His descendant opens her eyes and looks down on Andra Pradesh.
Noxious flesh-heap, rancid slaughterhouse.

She surveys everything she sees around her: the tower in the
clouds, the great works of art and culture, the struggling mass of
humanity, the machines that veer and swoop through the air. The
effigy of the progenitor, tugging humanity up the shaft of the Revelation Spire one soul at a time. Stone monuments to the great intellects
of history.

And standing before her, the bodhisattva of Creed Thassel with
dartgun in hand.

Only now does she recognize who it is her family has been serving
for generations; only now does she see the nature of Sheldon Surina's
Revelation. In her folly, she thought she could tiptoe into the shallows
of Perfection and still keep a lifeline open to the safety of the shore. She
wanted everything, but she did not want to pay the price for it. As she
stares at the barrel of the Thasselian's dartgun, she realizes now what
it is he represents. It's not a dartgun he holds in his hand, but a sword.
A sword that the Children Unshackled have extended to her so that she
may make the necessary sacrifice of blood.

One last sacrifice will free you forever. It is an unthinkable toll. A
sacrifice of blood.

Only the few will make it.

The death of billions. What is that compared to the eternal
freedom of the human race? Five billion dead; fifty-five billion and all
their descendants gloriously alive and Perfect. The end of death, the
end of cause and effect for those who survive. What is the death of billions but a single droplet of blood diluted among all the stars of the
multiverse?

She knows she can't give in to the Thasselian. But she cannot activate the failsafe either. She once had an infinite number of choices, but
now she is down to one.

Suddenly she wants to see her lover and her son again. Her son!
When was the last time she saw him? She would give it all up right
now-the tower, the compound, the money, the seat at the Gandhi
University, the technology-for one more chance to see her son. She
would give it all up for one last chance to sink into the arms of her
lover, to look into his eyes, to tell him he was right, he was right, he
was right.

All this from one man jumping at the top of a hill, trying to catch
the moon in his hands.

Did he know how high he would jump? Did he know how hard he
would fall?

Horvil cries when Natch tells him the details of Margaret's failsafe. Then
he immediately begins mounting a mathematical offense against it.

"You can't do this," protests the engineer. "You can't. Margaret's
calculations, they're flawed. They're wrong."

Natch makes a wry face, or tries to. "How do you know?"

"I've spent much more time than you have poking around in the
MultiReal code. I don't care if it was the Surinas or the Autonomous
Minds or the fucking Ming dynasty that put this thing together. It's not
infallible. It's got errors." The hysteria is cresting in Horvil's voice,
threatening to lap over his mental seawalls. "If you activate that failsafe and it screws up even one-tenth of one percent of the time-that's
still millions of people. You're going to end up wiping out a lot of
irrelevant memories that have nothing to do with MultiReal."

"I know. I've experienced it myself, from the Patels' MultiReal-D
program. There are things in my past that are just ... gone."

"And you're ready to inflict that on sixty billion people?" Horvil
pauses and tries to gather his calm, but it's a task that's beyond the
Herculean. "Do you realize the repercussions this is going to cause?
People wandering the streets with no idea who they are. People forgetting the names of their parents or their companions. For process'
preservation, Natch-everything I've built with Jara, that could just
disappear in an instant."

Natch has no response to this. It doesn't seem likely that Margaret's failsafe would specifically target a romantic relationship. But
then again, Horvil and Jara's feelings for one another sprouted in the
midst of the MultiReal crisis, largely because of the MultiReal crisis.
Natch can't rule out Horvil's fears when he knows they may very well
become reality.

"But forget about relationships ... there's going to be death,
Natch! A lot of death. People are going to crash hoverbirds into things
because they get a brain seizure at the wrong moment. People are
going to fall off buildings and run into tube trains. If just a tiny fraction of the population goes completely insane from this stupid fucking
failsafe, there could be hundreds of mass murderers on the loose. Do
you want to be responsible for that?"

"Let me tell you what I don't want to be responsible for," says
Natch calmly. "I don't want to be responsible for Brone releasing Possibilities 2.0 on the Data Sea and causing the infoquakes to increase a
thousandfold. I don't want to be responsible for the whole computational system breaking down. Imagine what would happen if everyone
suddenly lost access to Dr. Plugenpatch-permanently. Hundreds of
millions, maybe billions dead. That's what I don't want to be responsible for."