Geosynchron (63 page)

"This failsafe could cause massive memory lapses. Blacked-out
memories. Personality shifts. Who knows what could happen? Everything I've worked for in the past six months, everything I've accomplished-everything Horvil and I have accomplished-it could all get
wiped away in a millisecond. Are you prepared to carry that around
your neck too?"

Pause. "Only if it's better than the alternative."

"Then it seems that you've made your decision, haven't you?"

41

Merri's voice, plaintive, footsteps away from panic. "Natch," she says.
"I don't know what to do."

Once Natch would have inwardly scorned the channel manager's
helplessness, if he didn't scorn it outwardly for all to see. But now he
feels an inexplicable urge to embrace her neediness and her constant
inability to stay on steady ground. He wonders if by elevating Merri's
weakness, he is subconsciously seeking to validate his own actions on
49th Heaven. Enough, he tells himself, pushing such speculation to the
side. You don't have the luxury of playing psychologist anymore. "What's the
problem?" he says.

"What's the problem? You know what the problem is. She's always
the problem. Bonneth."

"The failsafe."

"Yes. It's-she'll ... Natch, this is going to kill her." He's never
heard Merri so distressed before, and that's saying a lot. "Ten times as
bad as an infoquake, Quell says. Prepare for the worst. Bonneth, she's frail.
If Dr. Plugenpatch goes down, or the GravCo services on Luna fail,
or-or-or anything like that ... she won't make it! She won't make it
through this."

Natch considers Bonneth's predicament: as frail and helpless physically as Merri is emotionally. Yes, her situation is as dire as her companion is making it out to be. There are literally thousands of ways in
which the failsafe might claim Bonneth's life. OCHREs misfiring or
not firing at all, starvation or oxygen depletion due to lack of supplies
from Earth, violence from the chaos of too many people and too few
resources.

Merri's tears are evident in the shakiness of her voice. "You can't do
this, Natch. You can't. How could you do something that could kill my companion? It's wrong. It's murder. If you activate this failsafe, you're
a murderer."

"Merri-"

"Yes, I ... I know. I'm sorry," she says, abruptly switching into
apologetic mode. "I know how hard this decision is for you. And yesyou're right, I suppose that if you activate the failsafe it'll save lives in
the end. Bonneth probably doesn't have a much better chance if Brone
gets his way. But she's my companion, Natch. She's the woman I love.
What do you want me to say?"

"Can you get the Council to help?"

"No. I-I already asked Rey Gonerev. She said they're going to
need every single officer they have to deal with the failsafe. But I can't
get in to see Magan Kai Lee. Do you think you could ... talk to him
for me?"

Magan is in a surprisingly contemplative mood and willing to discuss
the ethics of the situation.

"The Blade is right," says the lieutenant executive. "I can't spare
any officers. Especially not for a single woman on the moon."

"I suspected as much," replies Natch.

"And even if I could spare an officer ... I'm not sure that I would.
Merri's companion is a convenient reminder, in a way. Even if you can
save one disabled woman with Mai-Lo Syndrome, there are going to be
thousands of people you can't save. Maybe even millions. You need to
know that before you make this decision."

Natch thinks of Rodrigo on 49th Heaven. The last he heard from
Molloy, the boy had found a taste for Chill Polly and was sliding down
the greased slope towards addiction once more. Rodrigo's odds of surviving the year are slim enough as it is; Natch wouldn't give him much
chance of making it through the apocalypse to come if Brone releases Possibilities 2.0 to the world. The entire orbital colony faces an uncertain future, in fact. Even if the boy can make it through the initial
crush, can he weather the days of malfunctioning OCHREs, of dwindling supplies, of cold and darkness and hunger? The toughened ascetics of Allowell might stand a chance, but the prospects for the
sybarites on 49th Heaven are grim.

"Bonneth's odds of survival aren't good if I activate Margaret's failsafe," says Natch wearily. "But I have to believe she's got a better
chance than if Possibilities 2.0 gets out there. At least Margaret's failsafe will likely affect everyone equally."

"So you are confident in your decision?"

"Confident? No. Are you kidding? I'm supposed to make one of
the most important decisions the world has ever seen-but I have no
data to base it on. I'm getting conflicting pieces of information. All I
have are estimates and hypotheticals. The word of my friends and advisors. No precedents whatsoever. How am I supposed to be confident in
my decision?"

A slightly rueful laugh. "Now you have some idea what it's like to
be the high executive of the Defense and Wellness Council," says
Magan. "In the real world, there are no failsafes or rollbacks."

"I suppose. At least ... at least I have the consolation that this
crisis will be over soon."

There is a long pause, and not for the first time Natch wishes that
the calculating mind of Magan Kai Lee was not so airtight in its emotions. "I don't care what you say to your friends and your colleagues,"
says Magan tersely, "but your lies won't work with me."

If Natch had a face in this blackness, it would be flushing crimson
right now. "What do you mean?"

The lieutenant executive does not sound angry so much as weary
of games and half-truths. "You know full well that this memory rollback isn't going to work. Erase every memory of MultiReal since Margaret unveiled it to the public? Wipe out every trace of every discus sion, every discourse, every poem and song and Data Sea posting?
Every private message? No. Even if the failsafe finds every qubit of data
on the Sea, there's still treepaper in the world that's not connected to
the grid. It may be difficult to find, but it exists. There are still
Islanders without connectible coins. There are Pharisees like your
friend Richard Taylor who have no OCHREs and still know something
about MultiReal. It's a testament to the genius of the Surina family
that your friends believe this story at all. No, Margaret's goal of wiping
the idea from the world forever-it's utter foolishness. And what's
more-you have known this all along."

Natch takes a moment to corral his wayward thoughts. If he has
known from the beginning that Margaret's memory rollback is destined
for failure, some part of him has also known that Magan Kai Lee would
share his doubts. "I think Margaret's failsafe will be much more effective
than you give her credit for," he says. "Despite what the drudges say, the
program has really only affected most people's lives in a very superficial
way. I think the vast majority of the public-the billions who have only
followed the MultiReal debate from a distance-they'll forget. Their
minds will patch right over the gap as if it's not there."

"But it won't be one hundred percent effective."

The entrepreneur sighs. "No. Of course not. If nothing else, Brone
will still be out there. You, Horvil, Jara, and the Patels will still be out
there. MultiReal has taught everyone that memory is volatile. You'll
know right away that something's wrong. I'm willing to bet that
Brone has already foreseen that something like this might happen and
laid down a stack of treepaper just for this purpose."

"He would not be the only one."

"You?"

"Papizon has a team that's fanatically transcribing everything they
see with ink, in longhand." Magan sniffs in amusement. "He has been
trying to reconstruct one of the ancient machines that automatically
print ink on treepaper, but it's more difficult than he anticipated."

Natch chuckles. The thought of Magan's peculiar engineer tinkering with antediluvian computer printers was amusing indeed. "I
suspected as much."

"So you are not actually planning on activating Margaret's failsafe
then?"

"Oh no. I will."

Something in Natch's assured tone has finally broken through the
lieutenant executive's wall of equanimity. He can hear a strange note of
emotion in Magan's voice that he can't quite identify. Fear? Misgiving?
Doubt? "For process' preservation ... why? You'll be sacrificing your
life, and all for nothing."

"Nothing?" Natch snorts through nonexistent nostrils. "You've
never seen the MultiReal code, have you? It's thousands of times more
complex than any other bio/logic program on the market. It took the
Surinas hundreds of years to get to this point, even if they had the
assistance of the Autonomous Minds."

"The Autonomous Minds? What are you talking about?"

Natch tells him about Richard Taylor's message and his theory of
what this "path to Perfection" might be.

Magan does not seem to give the story much credence. "Do you
really believe this Taylor?"

"Regardless. Whether the Surinas were transcribing ideas from
some advanced machine intelligence or whether they built it all themselves-the code is massive. I'm confident that Margaret's failsafe will
cut off all access to those databases, if nothing else. They'll be gone.
How long do you think it would take to rebuild all of that? Even if you
had seen the MultiReal code in action and studied it in MindSpace-
like Brone or I have-it would take at least fifty years to reengineer it.
And you wouldn't be able to use the secret back doors and programming hooks that Sheldon Surina put into the bio/logic system either.
You'd need to do extensive testing. There would be a million regulatory hurdles in your way. It would take a long, long time."

"But still," says Magan, insistently. "Krone is a young man, and
he's determined. In fifty years, he'll rebuild MultiReal and we'll be in
the same situation."

"Not Brone," says Natch. "He'll be sitting in an orbital prison cell
for the rest of his life, for murder."

"Whose murder?"

"Mine."

There is another pause. Natch gets the impression that Magan has
actually turned his attention elsewhere for a minute. That impression
is confirmed when the lieutenant executive returns and announces that
he has instructed Papizon's team to begin collecting evidence of
Brone's culpability and writing it down in their treepaper notes. It
won't be a simple case, and Brone will have the money to hire some
very capable defense attorneys. But Magan is certain they'll be able to
convict him one way or another after he no longer has MultiReal at his
disposal.

"So we have the means of dealing with Brone," says Magan. "But
there will be others. Certainly the drudges will not rest until they've
gotten to the bottom of the sudden memory erasure that's swept the
world. It might take years, but they'll eventually rediscover the idea
behind MultiReal, and they'll publicize it."

"Precisely. Don't you see? The next time, MultiReal won't be
developed in secret and unleashed on an ignorant and unprepared
public. You'll have fifty years to prepare. You'll have fifty years to discuss and debate and think up countermeasures and laws and social
structures to contain it. Fifty years to beef up the computational infrastructure. Next time, MultiReal will launch on the Data Sea when
humanity's ready for it-not on Brone's timetable. Not on the fucking
Autonomous Minds' timetable."